/ c CRUMBS SWEPT UP. k CI 1 I) E H 1 N n. 'fL^S- CRUMBS SWEPT UP BY T. DE WITT TALMAGE PHILADELPHIA EVANS, STODDART & CO. 740 Sansom Street BROOKLYN N. Y. 67 FULTON AVENUE 1870. Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1870, by EVANS, STODDART & CO., in the Office of tTie Librarian of Congress at Washington. STEREOTYPED BY J. PAGAN & SON. / ^ r A PREFACE S for explanation or apology. ^ Many of these articles have ap- peared in the periodicals, but some of the chapters for the first time now go into print. We think it unwise to apologize for what we have on our dining-table. If it be good,, all excuse is hypocrisy ; if it be poor, let us postpone the news of our failure as long as possible. We shall be glad if the book makes any one happy. Thinking it bad manners to keep friends standing long at the front door, we invite the reader to come in and help him- self. However plain the furniture may be, we bid him Welcome I Brooklyn, Sept. i6th, 1870. T. D. W. T. i CONTENTS ^^tsK^' PACK CUT BEHIND 13 ORANGE-BLOSSOMS FROSTED . . . . . 20 OUR SPECTACLES 28 THE KILKENNY CATS ....... 37 MINISTERS' SUNSHINE 46 OUR FIRST BOOTS 78 IN STIRRUPS . . . S3 GOOD CHEER . . . . 92 THE OLD CLOCK " . . .99 OUT-OF-DOORS 107 HOBBIES , . "9 STAR ENGAGEMENT .157 CHILDREN'S BOOKS .163 CLERICAL FARMING 169 MAKING THINGS GO 176 SATURDAY NIGHT .182 ix X CONTENTS. THE HATCHET BURIED i88 HOUSE OF DOGS I93 PRAYER -MEETING KILLERS 204 RIP— RAP . . • 211 THE RIGHT TRACK 220 RIDING THE HORSE TO BROOK .... 227 CHILLS AND FEVER VINDICATED . . . .234 GHOSTS . . 244 DEATH OF NEWSPAPERS 252 CITY FOOLS IN THE COUNTRY 257 SUBLIME WRETCHEDNESS OF WATERING-PLACES . 266 SWALLOWING A FLY 311 SPOILED CHILDREN 321 NIBBLINGS IN FOREIGN PASTURES. THE SMILE OF THE SEA ' 333 POWER OF A CHILD'S FACE 341 EDINBURGH AS A BRAIN -STIMULANT . . .351 FALLACIES ABOUT THE SEA 363 STAY WHERE YOU'RE HAPPY . . . . .370 WAR TO THE KNIFE 379 FRESH PAINT 385 BRUTES 396 CONTENTS, XI PAGB 407 4 NATION STUNNED ...... "N" ... 413 PICTURES FELT 420 CHAMPS ELYSEES 437 -^ ■■^<^^^:^^r7 CUT BEHIND. [CENE : — A crisp morning. Carriage with spinning wheels, whose spokes gHsten hke splinters of the sun. Roan horse, flecked with foam, bending into the bit, his polished feet drumming the pave- ment in challenge of any horse that thinks he can go as fast. Two boys running to get on the back of the carriage. One of them, with quick spring, succeeds. The other leaps, but fails, and falls on the part of the body where it is most appropriate to fall. No sooner has he struck the ground than he shouts to the driver of the carriage, " Cut behind ! " 2 13 14 CUT BEHIND. Human nature the same in boy as man. All running to gain the vehicle of success. Some are spry, and gain that for which they strive. Others are slow, and tumble down ; they who fall crying out against those who mount, " Cut behind ! " A political office rolls past. A multitude spring to their feet, and the race is in. Only one of all the number reaches that for which he runs. No sooner does he gain the prize, and begin to wipe the sweat from his brow, and think how erand a thinof it is to ride o o in popular preferment, than the disappointed candidates cry out : " Incompetency ! Stu- pidity! Fraud! Now let the newspapers and platforms of the country * cut behind ! ' " There is a golden chariot of wealth rolling down the street. A thousand people are trying to catch it. They run. They jostle. They tread on each other. Push, and pull, and \M;/ preach a sermon — you give a tract — you hand a flower — you sing a song — you give a crutch to a lame man — you teach die Sabbath class their A, B, C — you knit a pair of socks' for a foundling — you pick a splinter from a child's finder. Do somethino; I Do it now J We will be dead soon ! HOUSE OF DOGS. HERE is a great difference of opinion on the subject of dogs. By some people they are admired, and fondled, and petted, and have collars around their necks, and embroidered blankets for their backs, and they lie on the lady's pillow, and take their siestas on the lounge, and are members of the family, the first question in coming into the house after a ride being, "Where is Spot?" Others abhor dogs. The innocent canines, passing the threshold, are met with emphatic " Get out !'' They go with their head down all their days, once in a while lifting a timid eye to a passer-by ; but then, as if to atone for the outrage, giving a yelp of repentance and dart- ing; down the road. One-half the do 17 crs vou see bear the marks N 193 194 HOUSE OF DOGS. of humiliation. They never saw a bone till all the meat was picked off, and no sooner did they find the gill of a beheaded chicken, and had gone under the shed for a noonday repast, than they were howled away. They have had split sticks on their tail, and tin pails appended, the whole bevy of boys shouting as the miser- able cur went down the street, rattle- te- bang. He frisked up pleasantly to greet a sweet lady as she came in the gate, and the damsel shrieked as if she had been massacred, and threw herself into the arms of her friends as soon as the door was opened, crying, ''That horrid doo; ! " What chance have dos^s at respectability? Who wonders that they steal sheep ? Now there is, back of Hoboken, a kennel large enough to accommodate fifty dogs. One day a citizen, passing that way, was reading an account of a ereat international council to be called, and forthwith the great dog that in- habited the big kennel took the suggestion, and said, " I will make proclamation to all the kingdom of dogs, and they shall come to declare and avenge their wrongs." HOUSE OF DOGS. I95 Soon there was much barking, and it was found out that the clans were gathering. The amphitheatre of the kennel was crowded with hunters' dogs, and teamsters' dogs, and ladies' dogs, and rowdies' dogs. The great bull-dog, with one huge growl, called the meeting to order, himself taking the chair. He growled at the cruelty of men, and growled at the folly of women, and growled at the outrages of children, till his growl rose into a furious bark, in which the audience joined, rat-terriers snarling, greyhounds baying, spaniels yelping, so that the tumult was louder than a whole pack on the fox-chase when with full voice they burst away on the moors. All attempts at gaining order were ineffectual, till presiding bull-dog took rat-terrier by the neck, and shook him till the bones cracked, and all the poodles shrieked in sheer fright. Several watch-dogs seated themselves at the reporters' desk, and took notes of proceedings. A letter of regret, post - marked Switzerland, was read from a Saint Bernard dog, saying that he could not come, being busy in saving travellers from the snow in the Alpine passes, 196 HOUSE OF DOGS. but signified himself ready to accept any dogma that might be enacted by the " House of Dogs." A letter was also read from a descendant of Throckmorton's pointer. He scorned the Invi- tation to be present. He did not believe In Democratic assemblages, he having descended from the most aristocratic pointer of all history, and could not have anything to do with Ameri- can mongrels. One of his great-grandfathers had been on the chase with George the Third, and an ancestor on his mother's side had run under the carriage of the Lord Mayor of London. At this point a fiery blood-hound sprang to his back feet, and offered the following resolu- tions : Whereas, All dogs have by nature certain Inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness ; therefore, Resolved, is fly, That we express our indig- nation at the treatment received from the human race. Resolved, idly, That to extirpate the evil, all dogs hereafter be allowed to vote, white and black, male and female. HOUSE OF DOGS. I97 At this point the whole convention rose up into a riot. The more conservative declared that in this matter of suffrage everything depends on the color of the dog, and that as to the females, he thought it would be far more respectable if they staid at home and took care of the pups. The uproar bid fair to break up the conven- tion, had not a frisky canine mounted the stage, and in very witty style addressed the meeting. The crowd saw that something pleasant was coming, for he kept wagging his tail — indeed, he was a perfect wag. His speech was not printed, for the reporter was requested not to take it down," as he might want, at some other convention, to make the same speech. -Suffice it to say, the whole convention were thrown into good humor, and sat with the sides of their mouths drawn back, and their tongues out in perfect glee. Discussion of the resolutions being in order, butcher's dog took the stand. He complained that he had received nothing at the hands of man but cruelty and meanness. Surrounded as he had been always by porter-house steaks^ 17* 198 HOUSE OF DOGS. and calf's liver, and luscious shank-pieces, and lamb-chops, he had been kept on grisde and lights. In the peroration of his speech, he said : " Hear it, ye dogs ! Was it for this that we were spared in the Ark ? Better that our ancestors had perished in the Deluge. I care not what course others may take, but as for me, give me beefsteak, or give me death ! " At this point there was a scramble and a rush, and a very disagreeable lap - dog leaped upon the stand. His hair was white and curly, and his eyes red and watery, and his nose damp, and there was a blue ribbon about his neck. His voice was very weak, and could not be heard. An old mastiff shouted, " Louder ! " and a Newfoundland exclaimed, "Louder!'* And bull -dog, the presiding officer, seized lap - dog by the neck, and pitched him off the staee, for darine to come there with no orift at public speaking. A teamster's doof came forward. He had been for five years running under a Pennsyl- vania wagon. He hailed from Berks County, and his advantages had been limited. He was an anti - temperance dog, and complained that HOUSE OF DOGS. I99 there were not enough taverns, for his only time to rest was when his master was halting at the inn. He had travelled many thousand miles in his time, worried ninety -eight cats, and bitten a piece out of the legs of two hun- dred and sixty -three beggars. He cried, " Down with the temperance fanatics, and up with more taverns ! " An old house-dog rose and looked round, and said : " My children, I am sorry to hear so many complaints ! I have had a good time. I own all the place where I live. All the children of my master have ridden on my back. I used to eat with the baby off of the same plate with- out any spoon. When the boy came back from sea, I was the first to greet him home. What a jolly time I had at the weddings watching the horses, and eating crumbs of cake. When sad days came to my master I cheered him up. I was the first to hear his step, and the last to part with him at the lane. I fled not when the black-tasselled hearse came through the gate ; and when the cry in the house told me that hearts were broken, I tapped at the door and went in, and laid down on the mat, and tried 200 HOUSE OF DOGS. to divert my master from his woe. I am worth nothing now, but young and old speak kindly when they pass, and I have nothing to disturb me, save when I dream in my sleep that a hare is passing, and I start to take him, and a stiff- ness catches me in the joints." A erowl went throup^h the kennel. The speech was unpopular. They said old house- dog was getting childish, or they would have howled him down. The next speaker was a worn - out fighting doe. He had two slits in each ear, and one leg had been broken, and his two eyes had been partially dug out, and his tail abbreviated till it was nothing to speak of. He was covered with the wounds of battle, and staggered to the staee, and said : '' All the world seems to be against me. I am always getting into trouble. Every foot kicks me, every cudgel strikes me, every whif- fet annoys me, every tooth bites me. Pity the sorrows of a poor old dog ! In younger days I might have entered into the spirit of this convention, but the time is past. I shall soon join the dogs of Nimrod the mighty hunter. HOUSE OF DOGS. 20I This Is probably the last time I shall ever ad- dress the ' House of Dogs.' My hearing is gone, and though at this moment the applause of this audience may be risif!g, I hear it not. I go down to my grave unwept, unhonored, and unsung. Upon these dim eyes no vision of brightness shall dawn. Other tails may wag, but not mine. I have no tail ! It is gone forever ! " At this point the whole convention broke down into a whine and snuffle, and no one felt like lifting the spell till — A hunting - dog sprang to his feet, and broke in with a cheerful clangor of voice, which had in it the ring of hunters' horn, and call of the hawk, and gabble of wild geese, and the whirr of a grouse's wing, and the crack of the fowling-piece, and the stroke of a thunder- clap as it drops on the head of the Catskills on an August noon. He cried : "Why all this complaint? If you want good meat, why do you not hunt It down ? If you want sport, why do you not go where it is ? If you want to keep your tail, keep out of dog- fights ? If you would have your vision clear, 202 HOUSE OF DOGS. wash your eyes In mountain dew at daybreak. When I want it, my master hath for me a whis- tle, and a patting, and a caress, and a chunk of cheese cut clear across from his own luncheon. His boys are all mine. They race with me down the lane. They throw apples into the wave for me to swim in and catch. From the door of my kennel I hear the shout of the beaux teasing the damsels by the lamplight. What music it is — the sound of the knife striking my meal from the dinner-plate ! What beauty — the foam flung from a moose's lips, the wave dashed from an elk's flank, the shadow dropped from a pheasant's wing, the wrinkled nostril of the deer snufflng the air as the hounds come down the wind ! Oh, ye house-dogs ! This world is what you make it, desolate or glad ! I have free house, free fare, the earth for a play-ground, the sky for a fres- coed wall, the lake for a wash-basin, the moun- tain mosses for a rug on which to wipe my feet. A first-rate world for dogs ! " " Silence ! " cried presiding bull-dog, " we came here to curse and not to bless." *' Put him out ! " cried the mastiff. " Put him out ! " cried scores of voices. And blood -hound HOUSE OF DOGS. 203 plunged at hunting-dog's throat, and teamster rushed at the speaker with fiercer snarl than ever he started from under Pennsylvania wag- on at small boy trying to steal the lash-whip, and fighting - dog tumbled over the back of poodle in blind rage, and Tray, Blanchard, and Sweetheart, and Wolf, and Carlo, and Spot joined In the assault, till hunting-dog flew from the kennel, followed by a terrific volley of howls, roars, yelps, and bellows, that brought out the whole neighborhood of men with lanterns and torches, to find an empty kennel, save here and there a patch of hair, and a few broken teeth, and one dislocated eye, and a small piece of rat -terrier's ear, and a shred of blue ribbon from the poodle's neck, and the remaining inch of fighting-dog's tall which had been the only fragment left from previous encounters, even that small consolation henceforth denied him, and scraps of paper containing the resolutions which had not been passed In consequence of the sudden and precipitate adjournment of the ** House of Dogs." By this time it was day- break, and hunting-dog had cleared his pursu- ers, and back of the cliffs was breakfasting on wild pigeon. PRAYER-MEETING KILLERS. HERE is a class of barbarians who roam the land, making fearful havoc. Th^y swing no tomahawk. They sound no war-whoop. But their track is marked by devastation. I mean that class of persons who go from church to church, charged with the mission of talking religious meetings to death. They are a restless tribe, generally disaffected with their own church, for the rea- son that the church can no longer endure them ; and then they go about, like the roaring lion, seeking whom they may devour. Though never having seen them before, I can tell them as soon as they enter a meeting. They have a brassy face, a sanctimonious way of rolling up their eye, a solemn snuffle, and a 204 PR AVER- MEETING KILLERS. 205 pompous way of sitting down, as much as to say, " Here goes into the seat an awful amount of rehgion ! " They take off their overcoats, pull out the cuffs of their shirt-sleeves, give an impressive clearing of the throat, and wait for the time to seize their prey. The meeting is all aglow. Some old Chris- tian has related a melting experience, or a young man has asked for prayers, or a captive of evil habits has recounted his struggles and cried from the depth of an agonized heart, " God be merciful to me a sinner ! " Orton- ville has just started heavenward, taking all the meeting along with it. The exercises have come to a climax, and the minister is about to pronounce the benediction, or invite the seri- ous into an adjoining room for religious con- versation, when the Prayer - meeting Killer begins slowly to rise, his boots creaking, the seat in front groaning under the pressure of his right hand, and everything else seeming to give way. He confesses himself a stranger, but he loves prayer -meetings. He is aston- ished that there are not more present. He does not see how Christians can be so incon- 18 206 PRAYER- MEETING KILLERS. sistent. He has heard an incident diat he feels called upon to relate. He related it that noon at the Fulton Street Prayer-meeting. He re- lated it that afte^moon at an old people's meet- ing. He will relate it now in rehearsal for a meeting to-morrow, at which he expects to relate it. His voice is wooden. His eyes are dry as the bottom of a kettle that has been on a stove two hours without any water in it. The young people laugh, and go out one by one. The aged wipe the sweat ' from their foreheads. And the minister bemns within himself to recite an extemporized litany, " From fire, and plague, and tempest, and itinerant bores, deliver us ! " The interloper would hardly have lived through the night if he could not have given vent to this utterance. It was impossible for him to sit still. There was somewhere down in his clothes a spring which lifted him up inevitably. At the close of the meeting he waited to be congratulated on his happy re- marks, and went home feeling that he had given the world a mighty push toward the millennium. PRAYER-MEETING KILLERS, 20/ If such an one is notoriously inconsistent, he will talk chiefly on personal holiness. Perhaps \\^ failed rich, so that, unencumbered, he might give all his time to prayer-meetings. We knew a horse-jockey whose perpetual theme at such meetings was sanctification ; and he said he was speeding toward heaven, but on which of his old nags we had not time to ask him. One of the chiefs of this barbarian tribe of Prayer-meeting Killers is the expository man. He is very apt to rise with a New Testament in his hand, or there has been some passage that during the day has pressed heavily on his mind. It is probably the first chapter of Ro- mans, or some figurative passage from the Old Testament. He says, for instance : " My brethren, I call your attention to Hosea, 7th and 8th. ' Ephraim is a cake not turned.' You all know the history of Ephraim. Ephraim was — ah — well ! He was a man mentioned in the Bible. You all know who he was. Surely no intelligent audience like this need to be told who Ephraim was. Now the passage says that he was a cake not turned. There are a good many kinds of cake, my 208 PR AVER- MEETING KILLERS. brethren ! There is the Indian cake, and the flannel cake, and the buckwheat cake. Now Ephraim was a cake not turned. It is an aw- ful thing not to be turned. My friends, let us all turn ! " It sometimes happens that this religious pest confines himself to the meetings of his own church. Interesting talkers are sometimes de- tained at home by sickness ; but his health is always good. Others dare not venture out in the storm ; but all the elements combined could not keep him from his place. He has the same prayer now that he has used for the last twenty years. There is in it an allusion to the death of a prominent individual. You do not understand who he means. The fact is, he composed that prayer about the time that General Jackson died, and he has never been able to drop the allusion. He has a patron- izing way of talking to sinners, as much as to say : " Ho ! you poor, miserable scalawags, just look at me, and see what you might have been ! " Oh ! I wish some enterprising showman would gather all these Prayer-meeting Killers PRAYER- MEETING KILLERS. 209 from all our churches into a religious menage- rie, and let them all talk together. It would bring together more spectators than the Car- diff Giant. We will take five season tickets for the exhibition. Let 'these offenders be put by themselves, where, day in and day out, night in and night oyt, they may talk without interruption. Nothing short of an eternity of gab would satisfy them. What will they do in heaven, with nobody to exhort ? We imagine them now rising up in the angelic assemblage, proposing to make a few rejnarks. If they get there, you will never again hear of silence in heaven for the space of half an hour. Alas ! the land is strewn with the carcasses of prayer -meetings slain by these religious desperadoes. They have driven the young people from most of our devotional meetings. How to get rid of this affliction is the question with hundreds of churches. We advise your waiting on such persons, and telling them that, owing to the depraved state of public taste, their efforts are not appreciated. If they still persist, tell them they must positively stop or there will be trouble. If under all this they 18* o 2IO PRAYER- MEETING KILLERS. are incorrigible, collar them, and hand them over to the police as disturbers of religious assemblages. As you love the Church of God, put an end to their ravages. It is high time that the nuisance was abated. Among the Bornesian cannibals and Fejee Islanders I class this tribe of Prayer-Meeting Killers. RIP — RAP. MAN, like a book, must have an index. He is divided into chapters, sections, pages, preface, and appen- dix ; in size, quarto, octavo, or duodecimo, and bound in cloth, morocco antique, or half calf. The dress, the gait, the behavior are an index to the contents of this strange book, and give you the number of the page. But I think we may also estimate character by the way one knocks at the door of a house, or rines the bell. We have friends whose coming is characteristically indicated by the sound at the door. They think to surprise us, but their first touch of the door reveals the secret, and we rush out in the hall, crying : " I knew it was you ! " The greeting we receive at many a household is : "I knew the ring ! " 212 RIP— RAP! We look with veneration at the old door- knocker, which, black with the stain of ele- ments, and telling a story of many generations, hangs at the entrance of the homestead. It has none of the frivolous jingle of a modern door-bell. It never jokes, but speaks in tones monosyllabic, earnest, solemn, and always to the point. In olden times, the houses were wide apart, and people so busy it was not more than once or twice a week that the old iron clapper sounded at all, and then it would go off with such sudden bang that the whole family jumped, and wondered who was coming there. The long-promised visit from a neighbor was to take place that night. The hickory-nuts were cracked, the cider was already in the pitcher, the apples were wiped, and the doughnuts piled up in the closet. The children sat at the fire waltlnor for the arrival of the quests. It seemed as if the visitors would never come ; but at last, rousing up all the echoes of hall, and cellar, and garret, the long- silent knocker went Rip — 7'ap! and there was a shaking off of the snow, and running up stairs with hats, RIP— RAP. 213 and pulling up of chairs at the hearth, and snuffing of candles, and hauling out of the knitting-work, and loud clatter and guffaw of voices, some of which have for a good while been still. At the first clap of the knocker, silence fell dead. There is a very festoon of memories hanging on the old door. The sailor- boy far at sea wonders if it looks just as It used to when he played on the sill, and imagines himself standing with his hand on the knocker, and in his dream is startled to hear it go off, waking up to find that it is only an ice-glazed rope in the rigging, going " Rip — rap ! Rip — rap ! " The hearty, enthusiastic man always gives a characteristic ring. When he puts his hand on the knob, it seems as if the bell would go crazy. It flies up and down the house with racket, and after it seems to be about through, starts up again, as if it meant to apologize for stopping. The nurse runs down from the bedroom, and the cook comes up from the kitchen, and the children bend over the banisters, and the father, who was taking an afternoon nap, bounds to the floor, shouting: "What on earth Is the 214 RIP— RAP! matter?" And you look at the clapper of the bell, and find it swinging yet, as if it were getting ready for another volley. When our inanimate friend comes to see us, he makes no disturbance. His liver has for several years been on a strike, and his blood acts as if it would have stopped circulation entirely, but for its respect for William Harvey. In his ordinary walk, each step is so undecided that you know not whether he is going on, or is about to stop and spend the evening. As he pulls your bell, you hear the tongue creak in the socket, but no decided ring. You go out in the hall to see if the bell is in motion. You wait for a more decided demonstration, and in about five minutes there is just one, little, delicate tap that lets you know the gen- tleman at the door is still breathing. The door-bell imposes on such men, and hangs idly about, gossiping with bedroom and parlor bells, and deserves to have a good shaking. Beggars have a characteristic knock. This man with a printed certificate that he was blown up with Vesuvius, and drowned in the Mississippi, and afterward killed on the New I RIP— RAP! 215 Jersey Central, and considerably injured in other respects, comes against your basement- door with an emphasis indescribable. He feels that you have what belongs to him. His knuckles are hard by much practice. When he strikes your door, it means, " Stand and deliver ! " But some night, about ten o'clock, you hear something at the basement. It is a cold night, and you think it is only the wind rattling the shutters ; but after a while you hear it again — a faint tap, as though it were not made with the knuckle, but the nail of the little finger. You open the door, and before a word is returned, you read in her face : " No fire ! No bread for the children ! No coverlets to keep them warm ! No hope ! " She had been at a dozen doors before, but had knocked so softly there was no response. She did not dare to touch the bell lest it miorht with crarru- lous tongue tell all her woe. Is any one watch- ing that woman in the thin shawl ? Did any ear listen to the craunch of that woman's foot in the crisp snow? When she struck the nail of her little finger against the cold basement- door, was the stroke drowned by the night- 2l6 RIP— RAP! wind ? No ! It sounded fardier dian the heavy bang of the sturdy beggar — louder than the clang of forge, or pounding of gauntleted fist of warrior at casde - gate. Against the very door of heaven it struck, and sounded through the long, deep corridors of Infinite pity : " Rip — rap ! Rip — rap ! " Children luill wake up early in the morning. Perhaps you have been disturbed in the night, and gone wandering around the room in your somnolent state, as much confused as ourselves on one occasion, when, at midnight, we heard a croupy cough in the nursery, and gave the ipecac to the wrong baby. Just as you begin your last morning nap, you hear a stir in the adjoining room. The trundle-bed is evidently discharging a lot of bare feet on the floor. You hear suppressed laughter at the door, slipping out into an occasional shout as one of them applies the force of a tickle to the bottom of the other's feet. You are provoked to be interrupted at such unseasonable hours, and proclaim children a nuisance. You are glad that the door is locked. But they ratde the knob. They blow through the keyhole. They RIP— RAP! 217 push slips of paper under the door, and, getting more and more bold, they knock. Ten fingers, tipped with the rosy tints of the morn, are running races up and down the panel. Your indignation begins to cool, and your determi- nation not tO' admit is giving way. The noise of fingers is intermingled with the stroke of dimpled fists. At last you open the door, and there bursts in a snow-flurry of night-gowns, and they bound along, brunette and blonde, wild as young Arabs. The lock that would have confounded burglar, and the bolt that strongest hand could not have broken, flew open at the touch of the tip - end of a baby's finger. The roughest knock that ever strikes the door is a sheriff's knock as he comes to levy on the furniture. The gentlest knock is that of a comforter as she arrives to tell us of the good times coming. The gladdest, merriest ring of the door-bell is at the holiday festival, when six children, after long absence, come to the homestead, all talking at once, and asking questions, without waiting for answers before they ask more, and talking ov;er boyhood and 19 2l8 RIP— RAP! girlhood days, and bringing down the old cradle from the garret, and dressing up mother in her faded wedding-dress, and continuing to laugh, and cry, and kiss, and shout, and turn somer- saults, and cut up and cut down, till the door- bell is mad at the disturbance, and solemnly vows : " I will never ring again for such a com- pany as this !" And it keeps its word. Better each one take a leaf of the Christmas-tree, for it is the last one that shall ever grow in that house. The door - bell had told many a lie, pretending that some one worth seeing had come, but this time it told the truth. That was the last holiday scene in which the six mingled. Another bell took up the strain, but it was deep and slow, and the sound came down from the old church-belfry as though the door-bell of heaven had tapped at the going in of a soul. Not one of the six was compelled to stand, with weary rip - rap, banging at the celestial door, for the faces of their friends were pressed against the window, watching. And the table was already spread, and the pomegranates, piled up on the caskets, were so ripe that the rinds did burst at the first touch of the lip. RIP— RAP! 219 And with oldest wine of heaven, more than eighteen hundred years ago by two scarred hands pressed from grapes of Eshcol, they did rise up, chaUce gleaming to chalice, and drank: "To THE rescue!" THE RIGHT TRACK. HERE are thousands of persons In places where they do not belong. The bird's wing means air, the fish's fin means water, the horse's hoof means solid ground ; and what would happen if the bird tried the water, and the fish tried the air, happens when men get out of their naturg.1 element. In my watch, the spring cannot ex- change places with the wheels, nor the cogs with the pivots. " Stay where I put you ! " cries the watchmaker, "If you want to keep good time ! " Now, the world Is only a big watch that God wound up, and the seasons are the hands which tell how fast the time Is oolne. " Stay where I put you ! " says our great Crea- tor. Or, If you prefer, human society Is a ship. THE RIGHT TRACK. 221 Some are to go ahead ; they are the prow. Some are to stay behind and guide those who lead; they are the helm. Some are to be enthusiastic and carry the flag ; they are the masts. Some are to do nothing but act as a dead weight ; they are shovelled in as ballast. Some are to fume and fret and blow ; they are the valves. Our happiness and success depend on being where we belong. A scow may be admirable, and a seventy-four gun-ship may be admirable, but do not put the scow on the ocean, or the ship-of-the-line in a mill-pond. Fortune is spoken of as an old shrew, with hot water, shovel, and tongs, pursuing the innocent. But, though sometimes losing her temper, she mostly approves those who are in their sphere, and condemns those who are where they do not belong. How, then, account for the success of such persons as Elihu Burritt and Hugh Miller — the former a blacksmith, yet showing unbound- ed capacity for the acquisition of language ; the latter a stone-mason, and yet, as though he were one of the old buried Titans come to life, 19* 222 THE RIGHT TRACK. pressing up through rocks and mountains, un- til, shaking from his coat a world of red sand- stone, and washing off from his hands the dust of millions of years, he takes the professor's chair in a college ? We answer, different men want different kinds of colleees. The anvil was the best school-desk for Elihu Burritt, and quarry -stone for Hugh Miller. The former, among the cinders and horse -shoes, learned that patient toil which was the secret of his acquisition in the languages. The latter, from observations made while toiling with chisel and crowbar, laid the foundation of his wonderful attainments, one shelf of rock being worth to him more than the hundred shelves of a col- lege-library. Some men get into an occupation below that for which they are intended. They have their "seventy-four" in the mill-pond. They do not get along as well in that position as somebody with less brains. An elephant would make wretched work if you set it to hatch out goose- eggs, but no more wretched than a man of great attainments appointing himself to some insignificant office. THE RIGHT TRACK. 223 Men are often in a position a little above that for which they were intended. Now the old scow is out on the ocean. The weights of a clock said : " Come ! come ! This is dull work down here ! I want to be the pendu- lum ! " But the pendulum shouted upward: " I 'm tired of this work ! It does not seem that I make any progress going backward and forward ! Oh ! that I were the hands ! " Un- der this excitement, the old clock, which had been going ever since the Revolutionary War, stopped stock-still. " What is the matter now, my old friend ? " says the gray-haired patriarch. For very shame, not a word was said, until the old man set it a-going. Then the striking-bell spoke up and said : " Nothing ! only the weights wanted to be the pendulum, and the pendulum wanted to be the hands ! " " Well ! well ! " said o-randfather, *' this is e^eat work ! " and the old man, losing his patience, gave the clock a gentle slap In the face, and told the pendulum hereafter to hold its tongue, and said to the weights : '' You be hanged ! " But how may we know If we are in our right place — not an inch above, not an inch below? 224 THE RIGHT TRACK. If you can perform your work easily, without being cramped or exhausted, that is the right place. That man is in a horrible condition who is ever making prodigious effort to do more than he can do. It is just as easy for a star to swine in its orbit as for a mote to float in a sunbeam. Nature never sweats. The great law of gravitation holds the universe on its back as easily as a miller swings over his shoulder a bag of Genesee wheat. The winds never run themselves out of breath. The rivers do not weary in their course. The Mississippi and the Amazon are no more tired than the meadow -brook. Himalaya is not dizzy. Poets talk about the waters of Niagara being in an agony, but I think they like it. How they frolic and clap their hands miles above, as they come skipping on toward the great somersault, singing : " Over we go ! over we go ! " When the universe goes at such tremendous speed, and the least impediment might break one of the great wheels, is it not a wonder that we do not hear a prodigious crack, or thunderous bang, loud enough to THE RIGHT TRACK. 22$ make the world's knees knock together ? Yet a million worlds In their flight do not make as much noise as a honey-bee coquetting among the clover-tops. Every thing in nature Is just as easy. Now, if the position you occupy re- quire unnatural exertion, your only way out is either to take a step higher, or a step further down. Providence does not demand that you should break your back, or put your arm out of joint, or sprain your ankle. If you can only find out just what you are to do, you can do it perfectly easy. Let the young be sure to begin right. Not once in a thousand times does a man success- fully change occupations. The sea of life is so rough that you cannot cross over from one vessel to another except at great peril of falling between. Many have fallen down to nothing between the mason's trowel and the carpen- ter's saw ; between the lawyer's brief and the author's pen ; between the medicine-chest and the pulpit. It is no easy matter to switch off on another track this thundering express-train of life. A daffodil and a buttercup resolved to change places with each other, but in crossing 226 THE RIGHT TRACK. over from stem to stem, they fell at the feet of a heart's -ease. "Just as I expected!" said Heart's -ease. "You might better have staid in your places ! " RIDING r H K HORSE TO T! R O 1 h^^ RIDING THE HORSE TO BROOK. 'N these days, if a boy would go a horsebacking, he must have gay caparison— saddle of the best leather, stirrups silvered, martingales bestarred, hous- ing flamboyant, tasselled whip, jingling spurs, gauntleted hands, and crocodile boots able to swallow him to above the knee. But we are persuaded that is not the best way for a boy to ride. About seven o'clock in the morning, the farm - horses having had oats and currying, must be taken to the brook for the watering. The halter is caught into a half hitch around the horse's nose, and, bring- ing him to the fence, the boy leaps astride. It is no rare occurrence that, in his avidity to get aboard, the boy slides off on the other side of 227 228 RIDING THE H^RSE TO BROOK. the animal, and It is fortunate if the latter, taking advantage of the miscalculation, does not fly away with a wild snort, finding his way to the brook. But once thoroughly mounted, the rope- halter is helm and sail sufficient. It is very easy to guide a thirsty horse when you want to take him to water. A poke of your bare feet into his ribs, and a strong pull of the rope, are enough to bring him back from any slight divergencies. Passing through the bars, all you have to do is to gather up your feet on his warm, smooth back, and having passed the post, again drop anchor. Nothing looks more spirited or merry than a boy's feet bouncing against the sides of a glistening bay. The horse feels them, and the more briskly gallops down the lane. At his first plunge into the brook, his sudden stop would have sent the boy somersaulting Into the stream, but for a quick digging of the heels into the side, and a clutch of the scant lock of hair at the end of the mane. With lip and nostril in the stream, the horse cares nothine for what his young rider wills. There may be RIDING THE HORSE TO BROOK. 229 a clearer place below that the boy chooses for the watering, but the horse lifts not his head to the shout, or the jerk of halter, or stroke in the flanks. He wants to drink just there ; intent upon that are mouth, and gullet, and fetlock, and spot in the face. Sitting astride, the boy feels the jerk of each swallow, and sees the accompanying wag of the pony's ears. The horse lifts his head, takes a long breath, clashes his teeth, and rinsing his jaws, drops the tuft of hay that lingered in his mouth, with right foot paws up the gravel from beneath, giving notice that he is ready, if you are, throws himself back on his hind feet till his front lift from the mud, gives a quick turn, and starts for the barn. In a minute he has made the length of the lane, and stands neighing for the barn-door to open. This ride was the chief event of the day. Alas, if there are only two horses, when there are four boys ! for two of them are disap- pointed, and keep their grudge for the most of the day. You linger about the barn for hours, and pat Pompey on the nose, and get astride his back in the stable, and imagine 230 RIDING THE HORSE TO BROOK. how it would be if it were only time to ride him down again. We would like to have in our photograph- album a picture of the horses that in boyhood we rode to the watering. Sitting here, think- ing of all their excellencies, we forgive them for all the times they threw us off. The temp- tation was too great for them, and the mud where we fell was soft. The dear old pets ! One of them was sold, and as he was driven away we cried such large tears, and so many of them, that both coat-sleeves were insufficient to sop up the wretchedness. Another broke its leg, and it was taken to the woods and shot. We went into the house and held our ears, lest we should hear the cruel bang that announced the departure of our favorite sorrel. Another staid on the place, and was there when we left home. He was always driven slowly, had grown uncertain of foot, and ceased to prance at any sight or sound. You could no longer make him believe that a wheelbarrow was any- thing supernatural, nor startle him by shaking out a buffalo - skin. He had outlived all his contemporaries. Some had frisked out a RIDING THE HORSE TO BROOK. 23I frivolous life, and had passed away. Some had, after a life of kicking and balking, come to an ignomrnious end ; but old Billy had lived on in an earnest way, and every Sunday morn- ing stood at the door waiting for the family to get in the wagon and ride to church. Then he would jog along seriously, as if conscious that his church privileges would soon be gone. In the long line of tied horses beside the church, he would stand and listen to the songs inside. While others stamped, and beat the flies, and got their feet over the shafts, and slipped the halter, and bit the nag on the other side of the tongue, Billy had more regard for the day and place, and stood silent, meditative, and decorous. If there be any better place than this world for good horses, Billy has gone there. He never bolted ; he never kicked. In ploughing, he never put his foot over the trace ; he never balked ; he never put back his ears and squealed. A good, kind, faithful, honest, industrious horse was he. He gave us more joy than any ten-thousand-dollar courser could crive us now. No arched stallion career- ing on Central Park, or foam - dashed Long 232 RIDING THE HORSE TO BROOK. Island racer, could dirill us like die memory of diat family roadster. Alas, for boys in die city, who never ride a horse to brook ! An afternoon airing in ruffles, stiff and starched, and behind a costumed driver, cannot make up for this early disad- vantage. The best way to start life is astride a farm-horse, with a rope-halter. In that way you learn to rough it. You are prepared for hard bounces on the road of life ; you learn to hold on ; you get the habit of depending on your own heels, and not upon other people's stirrups ; you find how to climb on without anybody to give you a boost. It does not hurt you so much when you fall off And some day, far on in life, when you are in the midst of the hot and dusty city, and you are weary with the rush and din of the world, in your imagination you call back one of these nags of pleasant memory. You bring him up by the side of your study, or counting-room table, and from that you jump on, and away you canter through the old - time orchard, and by the old-time meeting-house, or down the lane in front of the barn, dashing into the cool, RIDING THE HORSE TO BROOK. 233 sparkling water of the meadow, where he stops to take his morning dram ; or you hitch him up to thfi rocking - chair in which you have for twenty years sat rheumatic and helpless, and he drags you back some Sunday morning to the old country church, where many years ago he stood tied to the post, while you, with father and mother at either end of the pew, was learn- ing of the land where there is no pain, and into which John looked, and said : " I saw a white horse!" 20* CHILLS AND FEVER VINDICATED. HERE has somehow arisen a strong prejudice against the above phase of country Hfe, and no one has ap- peared as its champion. It is slung down among diseases, and denounced as though nothing might be said in its favor. For some inexphcable reason, people say nothing of it till they have sold their place. We confess ourselves that while we owned our farm we had a tendency to call it a " bilious attack," or a " trouble of the liver," or an " intermittent." We estimate as amonor the most interestinor periods of our life the season when we were attacked with it. If there were any advantages to be derived, we certainly derived them. It was a matter of some doubt whether we had 234 CHILLS AND FEVER VINDICATED. 235 the chills or the chills had us ; but one warm summer afternoon it was decided in our favor. If the people who are longing for a new sensa- tion would only try this ! It is a different feel- ing from that which a man has on any other occasion. Is^ it not strange that there is so much practical ignorance on this subject when the chills may be so easily taken ? You need go no long journey to obtain them. Just wheel your arm-chair to the piazza some June night, or walk along the marsh at dusk, or ride out on a damp evening without an overcoat, and you have them as thoroughly as many a man who has gone to greater expense. Nay, some places are so well adapted to them that without any use of means at all you may win the prize. Chills and fever are entirely unselfish. If a man gets the quinsy sore-throat, or a boil on his back, he is apt to monopolize the entire entertainment ; but in the case of which I speak, your family may join you. If the one shakes, they may all shake. If the one looks blue around the finger-nails, they may all look blue around the fineer-nails. You begin without any apparent reason to 236 CHILLS AND FEVER VINDICATED, feel very tired, awfully tired. You become seriously aware that you have a great many bones, and are convinced that your limbs have a great superfluity of ossification. You begin to yawn till any chicken with the gapes would think you were caricaturing the diseases of the barn-yard You stretch, without any seeming idea as to what you are putting out your hands for. You button up one button of your coat. You walk round the house, and then fasten two buttons. You walk up stairs, and fasten all the buttons. You lie down on the clean white spread, boots and all. Your wife, after criticizing your taste in going to bed with boots on, puts on you all the blankets she can find ; and you shout, '' More cover ! " She hunts up all the shawls, and piles them up in woollen pyramid. She gets out two or three old dresses, and puts them on ; and you cry, " Give us more cover ! " Considerably frightened, she lays on the top of the pile her best dresses. She puts on the top of this the children's clothes, and then gives solidity to the mass by adding two pillows ; and through your chattering teeth you exclaim, " More cover ! " You feel that you CHILLS AND FEVER l^INDICATED. 237 are making the Arctic expedition in search of John Franklin, and that the friendly Esquimaux are rubbing you down with a couple of small icebergs. Your tongue is a hailstone, and your nose an icicle. . By this time the stomach becomes like the Stock Exchange, with all the breakfasts you ever ate trying each to bid the highest, after a while throwing all the securities flat on the market. You save a thousand dollars by get- ting seasick, without the experiences and perils of an ocean expedition. You feel as if you must have swallowed something that was going toward Tarshish, when it ought to have been going toward Nineveh. You wonder what has got into you ; and make up your mind that it must be more Esquimaux riding up and down behind ten dogs fastened to sledges. Suddenly the climate changes from Arctic to Torrid. Your wife lifts the two pillows ; but still you are too hot, and your wife takes off the layer of children's clothes. But by this time you are like a buried Titan, and away fly off from your struggling limbs the tertiary, cretaceous, carboniferous, and calciferous strata 238 CHILLS AND FEVER VINDICATED. of old dresses and new dresses, shawls and blankets. You wonder why a big blanket is called " a comfortable." You want air. You want fans. You have an oven In your head, three cooking-stoves under your diaphragm ; and if one earns bread by the sweat of his brow, you have shed enough perspiration to buy out several bakeries. You chew ice, and squeeze lemons, and dramatize the ague ; and then lie four hours in silence, meditating on the pleasures of life in the country, with fine river- prospect. The ague is not at all disquieting after you get sufficiently used to it. The trouble with us was, not that we had the ague, but that we did not keep the place long enough to get used to it. We have no patience with those plain, matter-of-fact people who can see no poetry in the ague. They have no appreciation of any great physical enterprise. They run for qui- nine, or Deshler's pills, or India Cholagogue, to get rid of that about which many have wondered, but died without the sight. We have it to boast that, while some of our neighbors beat us in the size of their turnips, CHILLS AND FEVER VINDICATED. 239 and the flavor of their strawberries, we beat them all in the shakes. Indeed, none of them had the chills ; they were only troubled with "bilious attack," or "intermittent symptoms." Indeed, we never saw in all that region any man who had a fair " out - and - out" attack of chills and fever, except ourselves. We went in to sympathize with our neighbor, afflicted just as we had been. He said nothing much, but looked cadaverous ; did not seem to have much animation ; gaped nine times during our visit; thought it was a remarkably healthy neighborhood, and got up and put on two over- coats, but said he did not feel chilly ; raised both hands as if to strike us to the floor, making us feel like crying out, " My dear sir, what have I done to offend you ?" but were re- lieved by finding that he was only stretching himself. It may be a recommendation for this physical luxury to those who like permanency and fixed- ness that this is not like many of the acquisi- tions of earth, transitory and evanescent. Once get it, and you need have no fear of losing it. It is like the widow's cruse of oil — 240 CHILLS AND FEVER VINDICATED. it never falls. We knew a Western pastor who had it for fifteen years, and we saw him sitting in ecclesiastical council one day taking a chill as naturally as the Heidelberg Catechism. He looked as if he were gnashing his teeth at heterodoxy ; but he was only chattering be- cause he was chilly. One of the or^and moral arguments in favor o o of the ague is the fact that it clothes one with the exquisite grace of humility. Nothing like the shakes to make a man abhor himself He would be willing to sell himself for a low price, and take his pay in parsley and onions. He sinks in his own estimation, till in the com- parison he considers the mouse to be a very noble animal, and sits down on the porch, not wanting to be spoken to, and hurls a brick at the cat for making fun of him. Another thing in favor of this institution is that when you have it you are insured for the time being against any disease. We should like to see a man try to get the croup or the mumps at the time this is on him. It monopo- lizes a man's entire attention. He has no time for anything else. He shakes off everything CHILLS AND FEVER VINDICATED. 24 1 irrelevant. Who will say that this concentra- tion of a man's attention on one thing is not a valuable mental discipline ? He can think of nothing else. It is equal in this respect to a regular course of mathematics. Indeed, the mere matter of counting the shakes gives him a sum in simple addition ; and, as he finds his strength being taken away, he goes into sub- traction, and tests the rule of three by calcu- latlne if he shakes as hard as this In one attack, how much he will shake in three. By this time he gets into algebra, and finds out that a chill plus a fever, plus quinine, plus India Chola- gogue, plus Ayer's Antidote, plus boneset tea, plus enlargement of the spleen, plus the doc- tor's bill, Is equal to ten fits. But the ague patient rises to still higher mathematics ; and, during one of the attacks on the bed, describes with his body an equilateral polygon, and sits up, taking hold his feet till he Is turned Into a hypotenuse, and gets his body so thoroughly mixed up and out of place that he proves that the rectangle contained by the diagonals of a quadrilateral Inscribed in a circle is equivalent to the sum of the rectangles of the opposite 242 CHILLS AND FEVER VINDICATED. sides ; and winds up his mathematical exercises hy pons asinorum, and a fever deHrium, in which he sees EucHd dancing about with an epicycloid around his neck, and a parallelopiped on his back, and a whole class of college freshmen hanging on to his coat- tail. Now, if there be such mathematical drill in chills and fever, why not have our colleges and young ladies' semi- naries removed from the inland regions, and set the buildings down where they shall have a river-front? But chills and fever would not be well vindi- cated did we not say that they always make business lively. Not only is the patient very active at times ; but there Is lively work for druggists, doctors, and after a while for enter- prising undertakers. For months we made daily pilgrimage to the apothecary. You want to begin with anti-bilious pills. Then you want a febrifuge. Then you want a tonic. All this falling, then you want a physician ; then, utterly depressed, you want a minister ; and after that you don't know what you want ; but before you have been long In the perplexity of not know- ing what you want, you have another chill, and CHILLS AND FEVER VINDICATED. 243 then the perplexity Is over, for you decide that your want is — more cover. All these wants make lively markets. When you have nothing else to take your attention, you have the buzzing in your ear that comes from large doses of quinine. This noise is like an oecumenical council of bees, and has a poetic and rhydimic effect in reminding you of that delightful refrain, " How doth the busy bee improve each shining hour!" Oh that all the world lived in the country, and that every house had a river- front ! GHOSTS. T is difficult to escape from early- superstitions. You reason against them, and are persuaded that they are unworthy of a man of common sense ; and yet you cannot shake them off. You heard fifty years ago that Friday was an unlucky day. You know better. You recollect that on Friday Luther and William Penn were born, and the Stamp Act was repealed, and the Hudson River discovered, and Jamestown settled, and the first book printed. Yet you have steered clear of Friday. You did not commence business on Friday. You did not get married on Friday. You would not like it if the Governor of the State proclaimed Thanks- giving for Friday. The owners of steamships 244 GHOSTS. 245 are intelligent men, but their vessels do not start on Friday. If early superstitions were implanted in your mind, you do not like to return to the house to get anything when you have once started on a journey. Perhaps you are careful how you count the carriages at a funeral. You prefer to see the new moon over the right shoulder. Though you know there is nothing in the story of ghosts which your nurse or some one about the old place used to tell you, yet you would a little rather not rent a house that has the repu- tation of being haunted ; and when called to go by a country grave-yard after twelve o'clock at night, you start an argument to prove that you are not afraid. We never met but one ghost in all our life. It was a very dark night, and we were seven years of age. There was a German cooper, who, on the outskirts of the village, had a shop. It was an interesting spot, and we frequented it. There was a congregation of barrels, kegs, casks, and firkins, that excited our boyish ad- miration. There the old man stood day after day, hammering away at his trade. He was 246 GHOSTS. fond of talk, and had his head full of all that was weird, mysterious, and tragic. During the course of his life he had seen almost as many ghosts as firkins ; had seen them in Germany, on the ocean, and in America. One summer afternoon, perhaps having made an unusually lucrative bargain in hoop- poles, the tide of his discourse bore everything before it. We hung on his lips entranced. We noticed not that the shadows of the even- ing were gathering, nor remembered that we were a mile from home. He had wrought up our boyish imagination to the tip - top pitch. He had told us how doors opened when there was no hand on the latch, and the eyes of a face in a picture winked one windy night ; and how intangible objects in white would glide across the room, and headless trunks rode past on phantom horses ; and how boys on the way home at night were met by a sheeted form, that picked them up and carried them off, so that they never were heard of, their mother going around as disconsolate as the woman in the "Lost Heir," crying, "Where's Billy?" This last story roused us up to our where- GHOSTS. 247 abouts, and we felt we must go home. Our hair, that usually stood on end, took the strictly perpendicular. Our flesh crept with horror of the expedition homeward. Our faith in everything solid had been shaken. We be- lieved only in the subtile and in the intangible. What could a boy of seven years old depend upon if one of these headless horsemen might any moment ride him down, or one of these sheeted creatures pick him up ? We started up the road. We were barefoot. We were not impeded by any useless apparel. It took us no time to get under way. We felt that if we must perish, it would be well to get as near the doorsill of home as possible. We vowed that, if we were only spared this once to get home, we would never again allow the night to catch us at the cooper's. The ground flew under our feet. No headless horseman could have kept up. Not a star was out. It was the blackness of darkness. We had made half the distance, and were in " the hollow " — the most lonely and dangerous part of the way — and felt that in a minute more we might abate our speed and take fuller breath. But, 248 GHOSTS. alas ! no such good fortune awaited us. Sud- denly our feet struck a monster — whether beastly, human, infernal, or supernal, witch, ghost, demon, or headless horseman, we could not immediately tell. We fell prostrate, our hands passing over a hairy creature ; and, as our head struck the ground, the monster rose up, throwing our feet into the air. To this day it would have been a mystery, had not a fearful bellow revealed it as a cow, which had lain down to peaceful slumber in the road, not anticipating the terrible collision. She wasted no time, but started up the road. We, having by experiment discovered which end of us was up, joined her in the race. We knew not but that it was the first instalment of disasters. And, therefore, away we went, cow and boy ; but the cow beat. She came into town a hun- dred yards ahead. I have not got over it yet, that I let that cow beat. That was the first and last ghost we ever met. We made up our minds for all time to come that the obstacles in life do not walk on the wind, but have either two legs or four. The only ghosts that glide across the room GHOSTS. 249 are those of the murdered hours of the past. When the door swings open without any hand, we send for the locksmith to put on a better latch. Sheeting has been so high since the war, that apparitions will never wear it again. Friday is an unlucky day only when on it we behave ill. If a salt-cellar upset, it means no misfortune, unless you have not paid for the salt. Spirits of the departed have enough employment in the next world to keep them from cutting up monkey-shines in this. Better look out for cows than for spooks. Here is a man who starts out in a good enterprise. He makes rapid strides. He will establish a school. He will reform inebriates. He will establish an asylum for the destitute. The enterprise is under splendid headway. But some lazy, stupid man, holding large place in community, defeats the project. With his wealth and influence he opposes the move- ment. He says the thing cannot be done. He does not want it done. He will trip it up; and so the great hulk of obesity lies down across the way. His stupidity and beastliness succeed. The cow beat I 250 GHOSTS. A church would start out on a grand career of usefulness. They are tired of husks, and chips, and fossils. The wasted hands of dis- tress are stretched up for help. The harvest begins to lodge for lack of a sickle. A pillar of fire with baton of lieht marshals the host. But some church official, priding himself on aristocratic association, and holding prominent pew, says : " Be careful ! preserve your dig- nity. I am opposed to such a democratic reli- gion ! Heaven save our patent - leathers ! " And, with mind stuffed with conceit and body stuffed with high living, he lies down across the road. The enterprise stumbles and falls over him. He chews the cud of satisfaction. The cow beat ! I know communities where there are scores and hundreds of enterprising men ; but some man in the neighborhood holds a large amount of land, and he will not sell. He has balked all progress for thirty years. The shriek of a steam-whistle cannot wake him up. The live- liest sound he wants to hear is a fisherman's horn coming round with lobsters and clams. His land is wanted for a school ; but he has GHOSTS. 251 always thrived without learning, and inwardly thinks education a bad thing. At his funeral the spirit of resignation will be amazing to tell of While he lives he will lie down across the path of all advancement. Public enter- prises, with light foot, will come bounding on, swift as a boy in the night with ghosts after him ; but only to turn ignominious somersault over his miserable carcass. The cow beat ! DEATH OF NEWSPAPERS. HERE is a fearful mortality among periodicals. An epidemic has broken out which has brouQ-ht to the last gasp many of the dailies, weeklies, and month- lies. During the last few weeks, scores of these have died of cholera infantum. Only a little while ago, they came forth with flaming prospectus and long list of eminent contrib- utors ; but the places that knew them once know them no more. Men succeeding- in nothine else have con- eluded it to be a providential indication that they should publish a paper. Many hundreds of thousands of dollars have been sunk, and every issue of the majority of the temperance, Sunday-school, religious, and political papers 252 DEATH OF NEWSPAPERS. 253 of the country is a plunge into debt from which they are hoping- some purchaser will lift them out. It is a constant question in the community where religious newspapers go to when they die ? We know where the basely partisan go to, without asking. The mania is fearful. Many of our literary friends are uneasy till they have invested their last five thousand dollars in printer's ink. Nine-tenths of them may whistle for their money ; but the dog will not come back, hav- ing found out some other master. Why all this giving up of the ghost among news- papers ? Some of them died for lack of being anath- ematized. Nothlnof ever succeeds in this country without being well cursed. If a man, or book, or periodical go forth unassaulted, ruin is nio-h. There is nothincr diat so de- cidedly lifts a thing up before the public gaze as the end of a bayonet. The neutral paper almost always fails, because It clears the scorn of parties and churches. Kicks and cuffs are an indispensable inheritance. The more val- uable the quarry, the more frequent the blast- 22 254 DEATH OF NEWSPAPERS. ing. You cannot make wine without the crushing of the clusters. The most success- ful periodicals of the day are those that have been most violently hounded. Some of these papers died for lack of brains. A man may plead law or preach the gospel with less intellect than is required for the con- duct of a paper. The editor must understand something of everything. He wants more than a scissors and a botde of mucilage. If he merely retail the ideas of others, the public will prefer to go up and get the thing at the wholesale establishment. He must be able, with strong and entertaining pen, to discuss governments, religions, educational enterprises, social changes, books, amusements, men, insti- tutions, everything. He must have strength to take a thought on the end of his pen and fling It a thousand miles, till It strikes within an inch of the point at which he aimed it. Lack of capital has thrown others. Ink, paper, press, type, printers, editorial salaries, contributors' fees, postal expenses, rent, ma- chinery, necessary repairs, are taking down many large fortunes. The literary enterprise DEATH OP NEWSPAPERS. 255 is often crushed under Its own cylinders, Is drowned in Its own Ink, is chewed up with Its own type, is shrouded In Its own paper, has its epitaph In Its own columns. The wider the circulation of the illy-managed newspaper, the more certain the doom. He who attempts to publish a paper without pockets full of ready cash, publishes his own discomfiture. Call on the witness-stand the hundreds of men who are now settling up the bills for their ex- tinct newspaper. Every mail brings to us the parting bow of retiring publishers, with pockets turned wrong-side out, from which hungry cred- itors are trying to milk out another shilling. Many of them have died of lack of room. At this very time we have so many good re- ligious papers on our table, we think we shall once in a while have to take up the London Punch to keep ourselves enough worldly to attend to our secular duties. We fear that some of these religious papers will eat each other up, so that there will be nothing left of them save a few remaining columns of adver- tised medicines and shaving-soap. New York city has ten evening papers; the number of 256 DEATH OF NEWSPAPERS. morning papers no one has had time to count. We wish them all success ; but it would cer- tainly be wise if the three hundred new pe- riodicals which are about to be started would look before they leap. We wonder not at the ambition that aims for the editorial chair. All other modes of affecting the public mind are narrow and weak compared with it. The pen is the lever that moves the world, and the ink-roller of the printing-press the battering-ram that smites into the dust the walls of ignorance and sin. But the press is a strong team to drive ; and one must be sure of the harness and the wheels, or, coming along a steep place, there will be a capsize, and a wreck from under which the literary adventurers w^ill not have strength to draw themselves. Phaeton's at- tempt to drive the chariot of the sun ended in a grand smash-up. CITY FOOLS IN THE COUNTRY. KECAUSE a man is wise in some places, we are not to conclude that he is wise everywhere. You find men grandly successful in the counting-room and at the board of trade, whose common- sense forsakes them as they cross the city limits. During the last few years, a multitude of men have left town for country life, with the idea that twenty thousand dollars, and a few books on agriculture, would make them suc- cessful farmers. They will take the prizes at the county fair. They will have the finest cattle, the most af^uent hens, the most reason- able ducks, and the most cleanly swine. Their receipts will far outrun their expenses. The 22* 257 258 CITY FOOLS IN THE COUNTRY. first year they are disappointed. The second year they collapse. The third year they tack to a post the sign, ''For Sale!'' They knew not that agriculture Is a science and a trade, and that a farmer miofht as well come In with his carpet-bag, set It down In the engineer's room of a Liverpool steamer, expecting In ten minutes to start the machinery, and success- fully guide the vessel across the Atlantic, as one, knowing nothing of country life, to under- take to engineer the intricate and outbranching affairs of a large farm. As well set the milk- maid to write a disquisition on metaphysics, a rag-picker to lecturing on aesthetics. The city fool hastens out at the first beck of pleasant weather. He wishes to sit in what poets call " the lap of spring." We have our- selves sat, several times, in her lap, and pro- nounce her the roug^hest nurse that ever had anything to do with us. Through March, April, and May, for the last few years, the maiden seems to have been out of patience, and she blows, and frets, and spits In your face with storm, till, seemingly exhausted with worri- ment, she lies down at the feet of June. CITY FOOLS IN THE COUNTRY. 259 The family of the city fool are, for the first ten days after going into the country, kept in the house by bad weather. It is the Paradise of mud. The soft ground, enraptured with the dainty feet of the city belle, takes their photo- graph all up and down the lane, and secures its pay by abstracting one of her overshoes up by the barn, and the other by the woods. Mud on the dress. Mud on the carriage -wheels. Mud on the door-step. A very carnival of mud ! The city fool has great contempt for ordinary stock, and talks only of " high bloods." His cattle are all Ayrshires, or Shorthorns, or Dev- ons. But for some reason, they do not give half as much milk as the awkward, unheraldic, mongrel breed that stand at nightfall looking through the neighbor's bars. The poultry of our hero are Golden Ham- burgs, and Buff Dorkings, and Bengaliers, and Cropple-crowns, and Black Polands and Chitta- prats. But they are stingy of laying, and not- withstanding all the inducements of expensive coop, and ingenious nests, and handsome sur- soundings, are averse to any practical or useful 26o CITY FOOLS IN THE COUNTRY. expression. They eat, and drink, and cackle, and do everything but lay. You feed them hot mush, and throw lime out of which they are to make the shell, and strew ashes to kill the lice, and call on them by all the glorious memory of a distinguished ancestry to do something worthy of their name, but all in vain. Here and there an ^g%, dropped in the mud in preference to the appointed place, gives you a specimen of what they might do if they only willed. We owned such a hen. We had given an outrageous price for her. We lav- ished on that creature every possible kindness. Though useless, she made more noise than all the other denizens of the barn -yard, and, as some faithful hen came from her nest, would join in the cackle, as much as to say, "Ain't we doinor well ? " We came to hate the sifjht of that hen. She knew it well, and as she saw us coming, would clear the fence with wild squawk, as if her conscience troubled her. We would not give one of our unpretending Domi- nies for three full-blooded Chittaprats. The city fool expects, with small outlay, to have bewitching shrubbery, and a very Fon- CITY FOOLS IN THE COUNTRY. 261 tainebleau of shade -trees, and pagodas, and summer-houses, and universal arborescence. He will be covered up widi clematis and weigelia. The paths, white-gravelled, innocent of weeds or grass, and round - banked, shall wind about the house, and twist themselves into all unexpectedness of beauty. If he cannot have a Chatsworth Park, nine miles in cir- cumference, he will have something that will make you think of it. And all this will be kept in order with a few strokes of scythe, hoe, and trimming-knife. The city fool selects his country place with- out reference to socialities. He will bring a pocket-full of papers from the store, which will be all his family will want to know of society and the world ; and then a healthy library, from which shall look down all the historians and poets, will give them a surfeit of intellectuali- ties. He does not know why his wife and daughters want to go back to town. What could be more gay ? Market- wagons passing the door, and farmers going with grist to the mill, and an occasional thunder-storm to keep things lively, and the bawling of the cow 262 CITY FOOLS IN THE COUNTRY. recently bereft of her calf. Coming home besweated from the store, at night, the father finds the females crying on the piazza. What better concert do they want than the robins ? What livelier beaux than the hedges of syrin- ga ? With a very wail of wo they cry out to the exasperating husband and father : " We want to see something ! " "Good gracious ! " he shouts, "go forth and look at the clouds, and the grass, and the Southdowns ! one breath of this evening air is worth all the perfumes of fashionable society! " There is apt to be disappointment in crops. Even a stupid turnip knows a city fool as soon as it sees him. Marrow -fat peas fairly rattle in their pods with derision as he passes. The fields are glad to impose upon the novice. Wandering too near the beehive with a book on honey-making, he got stung in three places. His cauliflowers turn out to be cabbages. The thunder spoils his milk. The grass-butter, that he dreamed of, is rancid. The taxes eat up his profits. The drought consumes his corn. The rust gets in his wheat. The peaches drop off before they ripen. The rot strikes the pota- CITY FOOLS IN THE COUNTRY. 263 toes. Expecting to surprise his benighted city- friends with a present of a few early vegetables,' he accidentally hears that they have had new potatoes, and green peas, and sweet corn for a fortnight. The bay mare runs away with the box-wagon. His rustic gate gets out of order. His shrubbery is perpetually needing the shears. It seems almost impossible to keep the grass out of the serpentine walks. A cow gets in and upsets the vase of flowers. The hogs destroy the watermelons, and the gar- dener runs off with the chamber-maid. Every- thing goes wrong, and farming is a failure. It always is 3. failure when a man knows nothing about it. If a man can afford to make a large outlay for his own amusement, and the health of his family, let him hasten to his country purchase. But no one, save a city fool, will think to keep a business in town, and make a farm financially profitable. There are only two conditions in which farm- ing pays. The first, v/hen a man makes agri- culture a lifetime business, not yielding to the fatal itch for town which is depopulating the country, and crowding the city with a multitude 264 CITY FOOLS IN THE COUNTRY. of men standing Idle widi dieir hands in their own or their neighbors' pockets. The other condition, is when a citizen with surplus of means, and weary of the excitements and confinements of city life, goes to the country, not expecting a return of dollars equal to the amount disbursed, but expects. In health, and recreation, and communion with nature, to find a wealth compared with which all bundles of scrip and packages of Government securities are w^orthless as the shreds of paper under the counting- room desk in the waste-basket. Only those who come out of the heats of the town, know the full enchantment of country life. Three years ago, on the prongs of a long fork, with which we tossed the hay Into the mow, we pitched away our last attack of " the blues." We can beat back any despondency we ever knew with a hoe -handle. Born and brought up in the country, we have, ever since we left it, been loneine to ^o back, though doomed for most of the time to stay In town. The most rapturous lay of poet about country life has never come up to our own experiences. Amonor the orrandest attractions about the o o CITY FOOLS IN THE COUNTRY. 265 Heavenly City are the trees, and the rivers, and the white horses. When we had a place in the country, the banquet lasted all summer, beginning with cups of crocus, and ending with glowing tankards of autumnal leaf. At Belshazzar's feast the knees trembled for the finger that wrote doom, but the hand-writing on our wall was that of honeysuckle and trumpet-creeper. 23 SUBLIME WRETCHEDNESS OF WATERING-PLACES. LL the world may be divided into two classes — those who g^o to waterincr- o o places, and those who wish they could. In summer, the unemployed trunks, valises, and carpet-bags up in the attic, swell with envy until they almost burst their straps, pry off their lids, or demolish their buckles, as the express- wagons rattle the street, piled up with baggage marked for Lake George, Newport, or Clifton Springs. If the " castle in the air " that many of our business-men are building should alight, it would probably come down on the Beach, or at the Springs. Give me fifteen glasses of fresh Congress water before breakfast, or I die ! For tens of thousands of our people the 266 SUBLIME WRETCHEDNESS, ETC. 26/ most delectable event in their home-life is their going away. Nothing must interfere with this. Papa's business may have been poor during the year, and every dollar may be necessary to keep the firm from a capsize, but walk the beach with the Hardings they ought, climb Mount Washington they must, sip sulphur water they will. There are three orders of American nobility. To the highest belong those who spend all the summer away. Give them full swing ! Feel honored if they tread on your corns. They hold in their hand letters patent of nobility, namely, a hotel bill for eight or ten weeks' board at Bedford Springs. The second order are those who stay two or three weeks. Let them be honored ! They were at six " hops," rode out twice to the races, and formed the acquaintance of the nephew of one of the staff officers of General Burnside. All hail ! Put down a strip of carpet from carriage to door- step as they come back. Make way for them on the church aisle. Here they come after three weeks at Ballston Spa. The lowest order are those who can only say that they were gone 268 SUBL IME IV R E TCHE D NE S S '* a few days." We would not by any means class them with those who stay at home, or merely go into the country, for they. are on the way up, and in a few years may compass a whole month away. Many who once had no better prospects than they, have lived to spend six weeks in an attic at five dollars a day. Many people, no doubt, gain great physical and mental advantages from their stay at watering-places. Toiling men and women find here a respite, make valuable acquaint- ance, and come home with stronger and stead- ier pulse. But there are a multitude that crowd these places, unhappy while they stay, and sick when they come home. What with small rooms, and tight clothes, and late hours, and slights, and heart-burnings, and nothing to do, it makes up what we call the sublime wi^etchedness of watering-places. The Simingtons lived in a perfect palace on Rittenhouse Square. There was not a stone, or nail, or panel, or banister in all the house that seemed to be in anywise related to the nails, stones, panels, or banisters of the houses of common people. There was an air of pride OF WATERING-PLACES. 269 and pomp in the mortar of the foundation — a very aristocracy of mud. The halls were wide, and ran straight through, ample enough to allow a military company to march and wheel. The stairs were mahogany, uncarpeted, but guarded by elaborately twisted rails, at every turn revealing a bust of marble looking at you from the niche in the w^all. The exact size of the rooms had been sent to Axminster, with an order that the loom must do its best. The walls blossomed and bloomed with master- pieces. Bronze, with wing of chandelier, shook down the light. The golden links that drooped about the burners, in a gust of evening air zig- zagged — the chain-lightning of uppertendom. There was a bewitching perfume w^hich filled the house, and made you think that the wreaths in the plush and on the silvered paper of the wall were living flowers that held in their urns the ashes of all past generations of posies. The curtains stooped about the window grace- ful as the veil of a bride. The sleeping apart- ments were adorned with canopy, and em- broidered pillow, and lounges, and books, and toilet -table of tinged marble, on which lay 23* 2/0 SUBLIME WRETCHEDNESS brushes and other apparatus with which heir- esses smoothed, or frizzled, or curled, or twisted, or knotted, or waved, or crimped, or coiled, or bunched, or flumixed their hair. In a word, it was a great house, and ordinary people seldom saw the inside of it, save when passing, as the door opened to let out a party to the flashing carriage that wheeled restlessly about the door. Indeed, on our small street we all tried to do as the Simingtons did. We saw how they wore their cravats, and that was the way we tied ours. They told us at the cane - store that Simington had just bought a peculiar handle, and we took one just like it. Our wives and daughters, instead of treading straieht on as once when we took them to o church, surprised us by a peculiar gait made up of teeter, swing, and waddle, which made us look down, and, in fear of their sudden paralysis, ask, "What is the matter?" but we instantly saw that they were only taking on the way of the Simingtons, and so we excused them. It was the first day of June, and the back room of the second story of that house looked OF WATERING-PLACES. 2/1 as if It had been tossed of a whirlwind. Two dress - makers of the first order were busy in preparing an outfit for the young ladies and their mother, who were soon to start for the watering - place. The floor, and table, and chairs, and divans were covered with patterns, and scissors, and fragments of silk, and flakes of cotton, and smoothing irons, and spools, and buttons, and tassels, and skeins of silk, and rolls of goods from which the wrapping had just been torn, riding-habits green and black and flamboyant, pearl pendants and pipings of satin glittering with steel, bugles, and beads, and rings, and ribbons, sky-blue, grass -green or fire - tipped, and chenille and coral for the hair, and fringes, and gimps, and pufls, and flutings, and braids, and bands, and bracelets, and necklets, and collars, and cuffs, and robes of mohair, and dresses adorned with Cluny lace and Chambery gauze, and grenadines, and organdines, and tarlatanes, and moreens, a package of Ivins's Patent Hair Crimper, and bandelets of straw bells, and a great variety of hats — shell hats, soup - plate hats, sailor hats, hats so small that they looked as if the 2/2 SUBLIME WRETCHEDNESS bird lodged in die trimming were carrying diem off, and hats that would not be taken for hats at all, a bottle of Upham's Freckle and Tan Banisher, and a vial of Swarthout's Pimple Extinguisher, and a box of Cruickshank's Wart Exterminator, and a hundred other things the use of which you could not Imagine, unless they were weapons with which to transfix hard- hearted bachelors, or lassos with which to haul In unmanageable coquettes. All these things were to be matched, made up, fixed, sewed together, cut apart, organized, and packed in trunks. Matilda, the elder daughter, and Blanche, were flushed with the excitement of the great undertakinor. Blanche had heard that Florence, the only daughter of the next - door neighbor, was going to make her first appearance that year at the Springs, and the idea of being sur- passed by that young snip, as Blanche called her, was a thing not to be borne. Every few moments the door -bell was rung by errand- boys from the stores on Chestnut Street, and while the servant was attending the door, Blanche would drop the patterns, and run up OF WATERING-PLACES. 2/3 and down the room In a state of nervousness that would have been unjustifiable were it not for the important preparations that were being made. Matilda was plainer, and more self- reliant. The fact was that her childhood had been schooled in some hardships. The Simingtons had not always lived on Rittenhouse Square. The father had belonged to that class of per- sons who have to work for a living, and Matilda had at one time been obliged to run of errands, scour the front steps, and wait on the door, while her mother did her own work. Now it is well known that while there may be romance about a maiden with sleeves rolled back from dimpled arms, wringing clothes in a mountain stream by the rude cabin of her father, there never has been and never will be any romance about a wash-tub In a city kitchen, the air hot and steamed, the apron soaked, the sweat run- ning to the tip of nose and chin, and the whole scene splashed with a magnitude of soapsuds, soda ash, and bags of bluing. Burns picked up poetry out of a mouse's nest, and Ralph Waldo Emerson can squeeze juice from a ,^BLIME WRETCHEDNESS oasket of chips, but no one has ever plucked up a canto from the depths of a wash-tub, or been able to measure poetic feet with a bar of soap. Who would think of rinsing clothes in the Aganippe ? To this day Mrs. Simington's knuckles are big, and there is an unseemly- healthiness about her cheek which three years of dissipation in very high life have been unable to conquer. Amid such uncomely circumstances, Matilda had nearly come to a practical, robust woman- hood, when her father, Jephthah Simington, was invited into an oil speculation. (Jephthah was the Christian name given him by an an- cestor who had a passion for Scripture names, although now he writes it simply J. Simington.) By an evening lamp six gentlemen met, made out a map of Venango County, located the oil- wells, ran creeks through wherever they ought to be, ag-reed on the number of shares, and appointed a committee to visit Elder String- ham of the Presbyterian church, and induce him to accept the presidency of the company, overcoming his scruples at entering an enter- prise of which he knew nothing, by offering OF WATERING-PLACES. 2/5 him a large number of shares ; and by the same process securing as directors Deacon Long of the Baptist church, trustee Wilkinson of the Methodist, and vestryman Powell of the Episcopal. The shares flew. At the door of the company's office, for several days, the peo- ple stood in rows, taking their chance, and one old gentleman had a rib broken by a woman of Celtic origin with iron elbows, who crashed into his side as the Merrimac into the Cum- berland, shouting: "You murtherin' wretch, git back. What do you mane by runnin' for- iiinst a poor woman "with five orphan chil- dren ? " In this, as in several other projects of the kind, Simington went in on the "ground floor," and came out through " the cellar." All the people on our street were outraged and dis- gusted, for nearly all belonged to some of the three thousand companies organized for the development of oil, and they all supposed that they had gone in on the' "ground floor," but found that they had only entered the garret. It always shocks people's moral sensibilities when they find others successfully doing that 2^6 SUBLIME WRETCHEDNESS which they failed in. But there were three or four Httle enterprises of this kind that both- ered Simington at night when he said his prayers. Indeed, one night, as he came to the sentence, " If I should die before I wake," he bounded up from his knees, and sat down at the table, and drew a check for a hundred dollars for the Missionary Society, that Bibles might be sent to Ethiopia to make all the col- ored people honest ; also a check for a hundred dollars for the printing of tracts on the sin of dancing ; and another for the same amount to the fund for the relief of 'the destitute, some of them having been the victims of " those who devour widows' houses." Whereupon he felt better, went immediately to sleep, and dreamed of a heaven in which the rivers rolled oil, and the rocks gushed oil, and the trees dripped oil, and the skies rained oil, and, on a throne made out of " Slippery Rock, " sat the prince of stock- auctioneers, crying: "And a half! and a 'alf! going ! gone ! " No wonder the Simingtons so soon moved o into a palace. But they had a world of trou- ble with their old acquaintances. It seemed OF WATERING-PLACES. 277 impossible to shake off the nuisance. Blanche could hardly pass down the steps with Antonio Grimshaw, on the way to the opera, without having some woman in ordinary apparel ask : " How do you do, Blanche ? " Whereupon she would frown, and stare, and almost look the offender down through the sidewalk ; and when Antonio said, ''Who was that?" Blanche would answer, " I don't know the horrid crea- ture ! It is probably our servant-girl's dress- maker ! " It seemed to the Simingtons as if their life would be extinguished with the impu- dence of people. Oh ! the disgrace of having a hack drive to the door, and a distant relative from the country dismount, holding a faded carpet-bag, the handles tied together by a rope ; to go down to the parlor and have a gawk of a niece come up with a hat all over her head, and give you a great smack, as though she had a right to kiss the Siming- tons ! But people have mostly learned to know their place by this time, and, unmolested by such untimely calls and disgusting remem- brances, the dresses are being fitted. Ma- 24 278 SUBLIME WRETCHEDNESS tilda's shape had, by early industries, been made too robust for present circumstances, and the dress - maker had an awful time with her. All the ingenuity of the house had been expended in trying to diminish her waist. The dress-maker pinched, and pulled, and twisted, and laced, and punched, and shook the stub- born Matilda, who, in the painful process of being fitted, looked red, and pale, and blue, once in a while giving an outcry of distress, which finally brought her mother to the rescue. " Matilda ! " cried Mrs. Simington, " how can you go on so ? You shall be left at home if you don't look out ! .You are a great awkward thing. Why, when I was your age I could completely span my waist with my two hands ! " " Oh, mother ! mother ! " answered Matilda, " it is not my fault. The trouble is, there is not strencrth enough in the corsets !'' The first day of July had come, and eleven trunks were lifted into the express-wagon: one for the father, three for the mother, one for Frank, the only son, a young man of twenty- one, and six for Blanche and Matilda. Added to this was a bundle belonging to Rose, the OF WATERING-PLACES. 279 black waitino;-maId. It was a hot mornlnor, the thermometer eighty-five In the shade. The cars were fi-ill of people, and the SImlngtons were obliged to sit on the sunny side. None were willing to give up their seats, although Mrs. SImlngton for some seconds looked daggers at a gentleman who, she thought, might be more polite, and, not making any Impression upon him, ran the point of her parasol accidentally into his eye, and with a sudden swing of her skirts upset his valise. "What horrid crea- tures!" said Blanche. "How pleasant It would be to find som.e real gentleman ! " It was the morning for an excursion. There were six ex- tra cars, and all of themi crowded. The rush- ing back and forward of such a herd of work- ing-people pained the sensibilities of the whole SImlngton family, Matilda excepted. She looked thoroughly placid, and said, " Other people have as good a right to travel as we ; and this hot weather. Instead of making you pout, my dear sister, ought to fill us with thanksgiving to God, for it will ripen the har- vest, and make bread cheap for the poor." " Hush up, Matilda!" said Mrs. SImlngton; 28o SUBLIME WRETCHEDNESS "you will never get over your early mixing with those Methodists. We are going out to have a good time, and I don't want to hear any more of your religious comments. Blanche was right. The weather is awful. Frank ! what has become of your shirt-collar ? Wilted out of sight, I declare ! " The dust flew with every revolution of the wheels. Frank had all the family by turns looking into his eye for a cinder, and was so outraged that he went out on the platform to have what he called " a good swear," felt somewhat relieved, and came back, and, pulling down the lower lid of his eye, had his mother blow into it. But no cin- der was to be found. Blanche said she did not believe there was anything the matter with It: whereupon Frank called her a name not at all eulogistic, and Blanche responded In terms more emphatic than complimentary. J. Simington sat quiet, for he felt thoroughly exhausted. His anxieties about the trunks, his misunderstanding with the porters, his con- fusion about the checks, and the purchase of five through tickets, had besweated him amaz- ingly. When the agent cried out, "Show OF WATERING-PLACES. 281 your tickets ! " the old gentleman missed one of them, felt In his coat-pocket, In his vest. In his duster, looked In his hat, looked under the seat, took out his pocket-book, had all the people rise and move their carpet-bags, and the ladles shake out their dresses, and repeated the whole process several times, till the agent lost his patience and made the perplexed trav- eller pay again. What with the heat, and the dust, and the cinders, and the bad breath of the common people, the annoyance would have been unbearable to the SImlngtons, had It not been for the self-control and Imperturbable demeanor of Matilda, and the assurance which every now and then came to their minds that they were off on the especial business of hav- ing a good time. After much fatigue our party reach the watering-place, and go from the cars to a first- class hotel. While the family are waiting in the reception-room, J. Simlngton, Esquire, Is at the clerk's desk reo^isterlnor the names. He writes them In full hand, supposing that a de- cided sensation will be produced among the guests and hotel officials : 24^ 282 SUBLIME WRETCHEDNESS J. Simington, Mrs. J. Simington, Frank Simington, Matilda Simington, Blanche Simington, And waiting -maid. Surely such signatures upon the register will secure princely accommodations. " Give me three capacious rooms adjoining each other, on the first floor, sufficiently distant from all house -bells, in a place where there will be no children passing the door, and free from all the odors of the dining-room, the windows com- manding a fine landscape ! " The clerk re- sponded, " We will do the best we can for you, and will put down your name on a private list for better apartments when there is a vacancy. It is our pride to make the guests comfortable. John ! show these people up to 397, 398, 399." The procession start for the centre of the building, and go up this flight of stairs, up another, higher, higher, through this hall, out on that porch, higher, higher, around this cor- ner, through that dark entry, higher, higher, the wrath of the Simingtons rising with every OF WATERING-PLACES. 283 Step of elevation, until, as the attendant opens the three doors and throws the shawls, um- brellas, and satchels on the bed, the guests are almost speechless with rage. Old Simington says : " This is outrageous ! They do not know who I am ! " His wife says nothing, for she is out of breath from the exertion of climbing. Blanche bursts into tears. Frank exclaimed, with several unsavory prefixes, " What a place to roost ! " Matilda sat down and said, "Well, this is funny! but I guess we can make out. We will be rambling in the fields all da.y, and at night we can up here sleep so much nearer heaven." " Hush ! you Methodist ! " cried Mrs. Simington with her first gasp of utterance; "you will kill me yet with your religion. The top of a mean, dirty hotel, with the thermometer at three hundred, and no place to turn, or sit, or lay, is no place for moralizing." At this she gave a tremendous pull to the bell, and shouted at the servant " What kind of a place do you call this ? Dirty pillow-cases ; damp sheets ; no soap ; thimble- ful of water; one towel, and no ice -water. Who would have thought I could ever come to 284 SUBLIME WRETCHEDNESS this ! J. Simlngton ! why did you bring me here ? " " My dear ! " interrupted the husband, as he began to make an explanation — "Be still ! " cried Mrs. Simlngton ; " you did it a-pur- pose ! How could you treat in this way the companion of your bosom ?" The fact was that the best roomxS had all been taken. They always have been. We have known a great many people who went to watering-places, and we never knew of but one man who had rooms that entirely suited him. We have his photograph. The clerk at the hotel had never heard of the Simingtons. There are a great many rich people in the world, and a man must have a pile of dollars like an Astor or the Barings to be greatly distinguished. You see that m.oney is a very uncertain thing, for many who have but little act as though they had m.uch, and the really affluent often make but little pretension, and people are worth so much more after they fail than before they fail. The hotel clerks had no idea of what kind of a house the Simingtons lived in, nor how many servants they kept, nor what mottled bays with silver bits moved in OF WATERING-PLACES. 23$ their flashing " turn-out." The hotel proprie- tors knew not but that, notwithstanding their ap- pearance, these guests might really be as poor as the storied turkey that belonged to the "man of Uz." It might be possible that the Siming- tons belonged to that class of people who, liv- ing at home in a small house, blacking their own boots, and doing the millinery of their own hats, and making their own dresses from patterns which they copy from a shop-window, come into hotels to order people about, and complain of their apartments, of the waiters, of the table-cloth — trying by their "air" to give everybody the idea that they are accus- tomed to having things better. Depend upon it those who at the public table insult the waiters, and send back the spring chicken three times before they get one of a proper shade of brown, and slash things around con- spicuously, at home their greatest luxury is hash, which they eat off of a table-cloth in need of soap, because they do their own washing ; and that they seldom see a spring chicken except in a cheap wood-cut, or at their frugal breakfast in a grocery egg which some 286. SUBLIME WRETCHEDNESS worthy hen had for three weeks tried to hatch out, but In grief had surrendered to the huck- ster, who wanted just one more to make a dozen. Those who in pubhc places never say " Thank you ! " to the waiters, at home you may be sure have no waiters to thank. Considering what they have to suffer, we had rather be anything on earth than a hotel- waiter, excepting always the position of a mule on a tow-path, drawing a second-class canal-boat. But the Simingtons really had it better at home. We wonder not that they noticed a contrast. From a house with fourteen spa- cious apartments, they had come to three about as large as the rooms of a travelling photographist, who on four wheels carries from village to village art -gallery, bed -room, parlor, kitchen, and a place to dry clothes. There was no canopy to the bed, no embroid- ery to the pillows, no gilt on the lips of the pitcher. The window-shades would not work. The slats of the blinds were disordered, the carpet was faded, the drawers would not open, the atmosphere was musty, the flies were mul- OP WATERING-PLACES. 287 titudlnous, and nodiing cooled die temper of die father, or regulated the respiration of the mother, or moderated the sarcastic ebullitions of Frank, or relieved Blanche's hysterics, but the potent consideration that they were, indi- vidually and collectively, having a good time. But never mind. Their names were down on the private list of those who had applied for better rooms when there were any vacated. We have all had our names down on that list. We have to-day the satisfaction of knowing that our names are down on several such lists at Long Branch, Cape May, Saratoga, Bellows Falls, Niagara, and the White Mountains. It is a roll of honor ever increasinor. We have for the last five years been liable any moment to hear that there was at last for us a capacious room on the first floor, sufficiently distant from all the house-bells, in a place where there would be no children passing the door, and free from all the odors of the dining-room, the windows commanding a fine landscape. We hereby advise all who go to these places to see to it immediately on arrival that their names are re- corded on this private register. 288 SUBLIME WRETCHEDNESS The fatigues of the day disposed the Shn- ingtons to sound sleep at night. But the heat was intolerable. Mrs. Simington got up, and sat by the window, and said she should die ; and Simington, disturbed by her frequent moonlight excursions about the room, declared he hoped she would. The previous occupants of the room had come thither on a sleeping- car, the beds of which had been infested by travellers who always take a free passage, and who often become so attached to people on a short acquaintance that they cannot consent to part. These little, innocent, previous occu- pants of the bed at the watering-place, were evidently provoked that their lodgings had been intruded upon by the Simlngtons, and the latter, in maintaining a war against these creatures, were ofttlmes put to the scratch. Mrs. Sim- ington at midnight compelled her husband to sit up on a chair, while she shook the sheets, and with weapons deadly as Mrs. Surratt's "shooting- irons " pursued the insectlferous Amalekites, and frorn a bottle found on the shelf anointed them with an excellent oil that broke their heads, and in a fit of terrible OF WATERING-PLACES. 289 humor, that was Hable to seize her on very untoward occasions, asked her husband why that bed was like a Hght carnage drawn by one horse ; and Simincrton for the first time in his Hfe guessed right, and answered, " Because it's buggy." At which Mrs. Simington gave a Satanic laugh, (she seldom laughed except at her own jokes,) and said she did not care so much for the discomfort produced by these litde things, but what she most thought of was her complexion. At last the morning dawned, and the whole family started to take a drink at the Springs before breakfast. The fountains were sur- rounded by a great crowd of people, and the test was who should drink the most. Now, J. Simington was physically almost as much in latitude as longitude, and therefore had unusual capacity. He unbuttoned his vest and threw back the lapels of his coat, and seemed to take down a whole glass at one swallow. Blanche made a wry face, and said such stuff as that would kill her, but Antonio Grimshaw had told her of the twenty -four glasses he took before breakfast, and so she resolved to do her best. 25 T 290 SUBLIME WRETCHEDNESS Out of glasses from which scores of scrofulous, bad - breathed, dropsical people had been re- freshing themselves, the Simingtons, who had not for the last two years been willing to drink out of anybody else's tumbler, took down the disagreeable beverage. Matilda drank two or three glasses, and said she thought there was reason in all things, and that she had enough. But the rest of the family took ten apiece before they began to discuss the question of stopping. Then they made several turns about the grass - plot, and came back able to take more. They sipped the liquid health. They poured it down. They plunged their face into the glass till their nose dripped with it. They drank for a while standing on one foot, then they resumed standing on the other. They quaffed the nectar of the hills till the dipping- boys were confounded. Others handed the glasses back, the contents only half taken, these drained the last drop at the bottom. They rolled the water under their tongue as though it were perfect sweetness. They took up the brimming cups carefully, so as not to spill the precious liquid. After most of the health- OF WATERING-PLACES. 29I seekers had left the fountain, Mrs. Simlngton cried out, " More ! more ! Here, boy ! attend to your business!" And when at last they wended their way toward the hotel, they feared they had not fully improved their privileges. For some reason they all day felt miserable, and had no appetite, felt faint, and chilly, and nauseated, so that before noon Blanche went to her bed and had a doctor. But that nieht was to come off the " hop " of the season, and sick or well she meant to eo to it. Durine the forenoon Matilda nursed her sister, and answered her fears by prophecy that she would soon feel better. As the hour for the " hop " drew near, the sick one recovered. Takinor only a short while for her own toilet, Matilda gave her chief time to the adornment of Blanche and her mother. All the trunks were opened, and out came all the splendor of the SImlngtons, the numberless items of which I have already named. Matilda selected for the evenine the tamer colors ; but Mrs. Slmineton exclaimed, " Matilda ! you shall not make a Methodist of your sister." The ornamentation went on until ten o'clock 292 SUBLIME WRETCHEDNESS The elder Simington had got himself Into a profuse perspiration in trying to tie Mrs. Simington's corsets, and in the effort to bring together the fastenings of Blanche's dress the energies of the whole family were taxed. But, the work done, they start for the ball - room. Such a cavalcade seldom descended at the watering - place. Blanche was in perpetual dread lest some one should tread on her dress, and her mother worried lest her own head- gear should not be appreciated. The music of the orchestra rose to their ears, and with a feeling of pride and jubilance that surpassed everything the Simingtons had felt, they march into the brilliant circle. The mother was well pleased to see Matilda take a chair in an in- conspicuous place, instead of joining the dance, for, notwithstanding all that maternal kindness could effect, Matilda would walk naturally, and took no pains to hide her unfashionable waist, and blushed so red on the least provocation that her cheek was as ruddy as a mountain lass who had never done anything to improve her complexion. But Frank, with Blanche on his arm, promenaded OF WATERING-PLACES. 293 the room that all mloht admire his sister's beauty. The rustle of silks, the tap of a hundred feet, the quick pulsations of flutes and horns, the magnificent burst of harmonies, the ringing voice of the manager, the blaze of diamonds on head and hand and neck, the bow, the whirl, the laughter, the transport, were beyond antici- pation. At the close of the first " set," Mrs. Simington, in manner naive as any girl, and with silk fan patting her lip, stood before a bashful young man, whom she had thoroughly cornered with her outspread immensity of skirts, engaged in conversation, chiefly con- ducted by herself, in which were most f)romi- nent the words, " Really," " Indeed," " Delight- ful," "So nice," ''Yes!" "My stars," and similar expressions, suggestive of affluence of thought and profundity of investigation. But it must be acknowledged that this lady pro- duced that night no pleasing impression. She was set down as one of that class of women who may always be seen in such places, and who, having outlived their youthfulness, have an idea that by extra lace, skirt, slipper, and 294 SUBLIME WRETCHEDNESS mincing they can make themselves perfectly killing. One of the worst - looking birds that we know of is a peacock after it has lost its feathers. The handsomest man on the floor was Dallas Clifford. His walk, his glance, his dress, his talk were a perpetual sensation. For several summers he made the tour of the watering- places, now stopping at the Falls, then at the Springs, and concluding at the sea-shore. He had long done as he pleased, his father from a princely purse furnishing him all he desired. His hands had never been hardened by toil, nor his brow paled with thought. He had been expelled the first year of his college course for indolence and occasional dissipation. He had no regard for God or man, but great admiration for the ladies. That night as he moved in the dance there were scores who exclaimed, " Such eyes ! " " Such lips ! " " Such gait!" "Who ever saw the equal?" During the day, Frank Simington, while taking a drink at the bar, had been introduced to this pet of the watering-places. They were immediately congenial, found they liked the OF WATERING-PLACES, 295 same kind of wines, the same kind of fast horses, and the same style of feminine beauty. So they drank each other's health, and before a week had passed, drank it in sulphur water at the Springs, drank it in Hock, drank it in Cognac, drank it in Burgundy, drank it in Madeira, drank it in Swan gin, drank it in Heidsieck, drank it in Champagne, drank it in Cliquot. Frank was resolved that at the " hop '' his sister Blanche should have the advantage of an acquaintance with Dallas Clifford. In the making up of the first " set " the introduction took place, and Clifford offered his arm, and accompanied Blanche in all the dances of the evening. Together they bounded in the "gallop," and bowed in " The Lancers," and stepped in "The Redowa," and whirled in the " waltz." If there really were darts in jealous eyes, Blanche would have been transfixed with a hundred. It seemed almost a unanimous opinion that she was not fit to dance with such a prodigy. There were many who would have been glad to hear her dress rip, or see her false hair tumble. An envious mamma, who had 296 SUBLIME WRETCHEDNESS for three hours been arranging her own daughter with especial reference to the cap- ture of Chfford, remarked in quite loud voice, hoping that Blanche would hear it, " I knew her father when he sold fish in the market ! " ''Yes," says another, "the Simingtons always were vulgar ! " But Blanche's mother looked on with an admiration she did not try to con- ceal. She thought : " How beautiful they look together ! Both young ; both handsome ; both rich. It would be just the thing." She looked at Simington, and Simington looked at her with a joy equal to that which he felt on the day when from the top of "Slippery Rock" he tumbled into a fortune. While the Simingtons returned to their rooms in a state of delectation, there were many who left the ball - room with hearts far from happy. Their splendor of dress had not been appreciated. They had not danced with those whose company they most desired. Others not half so attractive as themselves had carried off the spoils, and the "hop" had kindled more heart - burnings, jealousies, scan- dals, revenges, satires, and backbitings than OF WATERING-PLACES, ^ 297 will ever be told of. Some wished diey were home. Others wished they had been dressed differently. Still others wished they had gone to some other watering-place, where they would have been appreciated. They denounced the music, and the manager, and the ball - room. The men were all '' gawks," and the ladles all "flirts," and the whole evening a vexation. They never before saw such miserable head- dresses, or such ridiculous slippers, or so many paste diamonds. Some of the more tenderly nervous, as soon as they reached their rooms, sat down and cried. They had been neglected. They took such coldness on the part of gen- tlemen as a positive insult. They threw their satin slippers into the corner with a vengeance, and, in perfect recklessness as to consequences, tossed a two - pound ball of hair against the looking-glass, and vowed they would never go again. Not so with Blanche, for. she dreamed all night of castles, and parks of deer, and gal- leries of art, and music, and gobelin tapestry, and of gondolas putting out from golden sands, on sapphire waters, angel-beckoned. But the 298 SUBLIME WRETCHEDNESS next morning the whole Simington family gathered themselves together to attend to Matilda. The evening before, instead of whirl- ing In the dance, she had sat and looked on, much of the time talking to a long, lean, cadaverous gentleman, who had somehow ob- tained acquaintance with her. The gentleman, having just graduated from the law school, had come to recruit from exhaustion of protracted study, and was staying at "The Brodwell House," a cheap but respectable hotel, on one of the less prominent streets. He was plainly dressed, had neither diamond breast - pin, nor kid gloves, nor whisk cane, nor easy manners. He came in that evening to see what he could learn of the gay world, and sat studying char- acter while looking at the "hop." The Sim- ingtons felt outraged at Matilda's behavior. How could she sit there and talk with a man who was stopping at the Brodwell House ! He would never be. anything. He had actually appeared in bare hands, and they were big. How could she throw herself away, and forget her father's name, and her mother's entreaty, and her sister's prospects ! " But," said Ma- OF WATERING-PLACES. 299 tilda, *' he was intelligent, and the tones of his voice indicated a kind disposition, and the ideas he expressed were elevated, and positively Christian." " Dear me ! " said her mother ; " Matilda ! I expect you will pass your whole life in saying your prayers and talking religion. I despair of ever making you anything worthy of the Simingtons ! " " More than that," said Matilda, " his conversation was very improving, and we have engaged to walk to-day to Cedar Grove, and examine the peculiar flora which he says abound in that region. We are both very fond of botany." While Matilda and the law student were out on the floral excursion, and talking- of all the subjects kindred to flowers, Dallas Clifford and Blanche were arm - in - arm promenading the piazza, or at the piano ; while Miss Simington was making up for her lack of musical skill by great exuberance of racket, Clifford was turn- ing for her the leaves, and, between his favorite selections, uttering various sentimentalities, and interlarding his conversation with all the French phrases he knew — such as toit-t eiisemble, valet de chambi^e, hors du combat, a la belle etoile. 300 SUBLIME WRETCHEDNESS chateau en Espagne, till several persons stand- ing near felt so sick they had to leave the room and take a little soda to settle their stomachs. Meanwhile, from day to day, and from week to week, Mr. and Mrs. Simington wandered about, not knowing what to do with themselves. They had no taste for reading, although on Rittenhouse Square they had a costly library ; indeed they owned ten thousand dollars' worth of books. Through a literary friend em- powered to make selection, J. Simington had secured all the standard works of history, poe- try, romance, art, and ethics. Although ac- quainted with none of the dead languages, he owned ^schylus, Lucian, Sophocles, Strabo, Pindar, and Plautus. He rejoiced in possessing so many square feet of brains, and realized that Aristophanes ought to feel honored to stand on the shelf of the Simingtons. Several times he had looked at the pictures in Don Quixote, and took the engraving of the traveller in Pil- grim's Progress to be the sketch of some un- fortunate traveller in the oil regions, and sup- posed that Macaulay's History was merely a continuance of the wonderful escapes of OF WATERING-FLACKS. 3OI Robinson Crusoe, and that "Young's Night Thoughts " was the story of some dream which that worthy had experienced after a late supper of boiled crabs. Nevertheless, there were whole shelves of books in richest foreign bind- ings, printed on vellum, tipped with gold, set off with exquisite vignettes. Among these a copy of the Scriptures, upon which all the wealth of typology, etching, and book-bindery had displayed itself — a Bible so grandly gotten up, that if the inspired fishermen had come in, and, with their hands yet harS from the fishing- tackle, had attempted to touch it, they would have been kicked out. Mr. and Mrs. Simington had not brought with them any of these standard ^^orks, but for purposes of light reading had bought from the news - boy on the cars five volumes, entitled, " The Revenge," " The Bloody Tinge," •' Castles on Fire," " The Frightful Leap," and " The Murderess on Trial." But they had no taste even for such fascinating literature. Mrs. Simington, with ''The Frightful Leap" under her arm, walked from bedroom to parlor, and from parlor to hall, and from hall to piazza, 26 302 SUBLIME WRETCHEDNESS wonderi-ng when dinner would be ready. She tried to sleep in the daytime, but the bed was hard, and she felt restless. She met on the stairs a lady who like herself was afflicted with restlessness, and said that the day was hot, or dusty, or asked the other lady how many glasses of water she could take before break- fast, and then passed on. She sat down and groaned without any apparent cause. She walked in front of the long mirror to see how her shawl looked, and then walked back again, then stepped up face to face with the looking- glass, gave a twist to one of her curls, drew her face into a pucker, surveyed the room to see if any one was observing, and then sat down ag^n. She jogged her foot uneasily, and thumped her fingers on the table, and looked for the twentieth time at the pictures in "The Frightful Leap," and, without any especial feeling of hunger, longed for the doors of the dining-hall to open, that she might have something to do. She found no relief from this feeling in looking at others, for nine-tenths of all the ladies were wanderinor about in the same perplexity. They differed in many other OF WAT£ RING- PLACES. 303 things. Some had fans, and some were with- out fans. Some wore white, and some black. Some had curls, and some no curls. Some roomed in the third story, and some in the fourth. Some took soup, and some did not. But whatever might be their differences, they nearly all agreed in a feeling of unrest, longed for something to do, studied where they had better go next, agonized for something to see, and wondered when dinner would be ready. Mr. Simington exhibited in a different way the same feeling. At home he was a man of business. Thouo-h owning^ a lar^re estate, he had the peculiarity of wanting more. The change from the active commercial circles in which he was accustomed to mingle, to his present entire cessation from business, was unbearable. He walked about with the solem- nity, but without the resignation of a martyr. He bothered the clerk of the hotel by inces- sant asking, "Is the mail in?" He wondered whether gold was up or down. Wondered whether his firm had heard from that man out West. Wondered if they were working off that old stock of goods. He walked over to 304 SUBLIME WRETCHEDNESS the billiard saloon ; went down to the bowling- alley ; felt thankful as he met a little Indian boy with arrows wanting a penny put up to be shot at; walked round the block, came back and asked, " Is the mail in ?" But there was another form of amusement in which J. Simington frequently found relief, and that was in the examination of the hotel register. It was such a pleasant thing to go up and read the arrivals for the last month, and study the chirography of distinguished individ- uals. The only hindrance to this was the fact that a dozen other gentlemen with nothing else to do were wanting to examine the record at the same time, those standing in front some- what vexed at having so many people looking over their shoulder. Although possessing large means, he whiled away much of the time by denouncing the extortion of hotel -keepers, and the extortion of boot -blacks, and the extortion of porters, and the extortion of livery-men. As to the waiters, he said you were sure to get mac- caroni soup when you ordered mock -turtle, or blue "fish when you ordered sheep's-head. OF WATERING-PLACES. 305 What was worse for a nervous man, there were so many sick people who had gone there for their health. But this imposition, which J. Simington bore in silence, his wife openly condemned. " How can I stand it ? " she cried, " this everlasting wheezing of asthmatics, and hobbling of cripples, and dropsical swellings, and jaundiced complexions, and display of sores ! " She did not know why such people were allowed to come there. It was perfectly outrageous. The place for sick people was at home. Once she lay all night with two pillows and a shawl on her ear, so as not to hear the coughing in an adjoining apartment. At last the day for the long-expected horse- race arrived, and although J. Simington and his wife did not much approve of horse-racing, they hired a carriage at ten dollars an hour (vehicles were that day so much in demand) and went out to the course. The dust flew till Mrs. Simington's eyes and mouth and nose were full, and two fast gentlemen, with their horses at full run, dashed into the carriage of our friends, and almost upset them. But Mr. Simington soothed his wife's consternation, 26* u 306 SUBLIME WRETCHEDNESS and calmed her feelings, by bidding her re- member that they were having a good time. The platforms were crowded, sporting hats were numerous, all the adjplning stables crowded with fine horses, which were being rubbed down and blanketed. And to put themselves under the treatment of the elevat- ing influences of the race -course, there came in gamblers, pickpockets, thieves, horse -jock- eys, bloats, and libertines. It was high car- nival for rum, onions, tobacco -spit, long hair thick with bear s-grease and ox-marrow, strong cigars, poor cologne, banter, and blasphemy. You could no more doubt the high morality of the races if you looked at the horses, for they were well - dressed, drank nothing but water, and used no bad lano-uao^e. When the two favorite race-horses sped round the track, nostril to nostril, flank to flank, Mrs. Simington wanted to bet, and Mr. Simington threw up his hat, and she said, " Did you ever ? " and he an- sv/ered, " No ! I never did ! " That night, as they were about to retire, a loud rap was heard at their door. Frank, in a state of beastly intoxication was ushered in by OF WATERING-PLACES. 307 Dallas Clifford, himself only a few degrees less damaged. They had bodi been at die horse- race, and since dieir return had tarried at the bar. As Frank's hat fell off, there was seen across his forehead a long gash made by the glass of an enraged comrade, because Frank, having lost a bet, had refused to pay up. Some one had relieved him of his gold watch, and, splashed with mud and vomit, he fell over at the feet of his father and mother, the only son of the Simingtons. The truth was, that during all the weeks of their stay, Frank, in order to throw off e7i7iui and keep up his spirits, had made frequent visits to the bar-room, drinking with all his new acquaintances. Dallas Clifford drank even more, but had a constitution not so easily capsized. Indeed, after his fifth glass of old Otard he won a bet by successfully walking a crack in the floor. We have noticed around many of our water- ing-places a class of fast young men with faces flushed, and eyes bloodshot, and hair exces- sively oiled, and whiskers extremely curled, and handkerchief furiously perfumed, and breath that dashes the air with odors of mint- 308 SUBLIME WRETCHEDNESS julep and a destroyed stomach. They watch about the door for new-comers, make up their mind whether a young man has money, invite him to drink, coax him to throw dice, smite his ear with uncleanness, poison his imagination, undermine his health, and plunge their vultur- ous beak into the vitals of his soul. Frank, through expectation of heiring large property, had for some time been going down, and the six weeks passed at the fashionable watering- place fastened on him a chain which he was never to break. He was going with lightning speed on a down grade, spent the most of the next six months at saloons, and died of deliri- um tremens on Rittenhouse Square, his last moments haunted by such terrors, that to drown his shrieks, the neighbors for a block around held their ears, and prayed God that their own sons might be saved from the dissi- pations of fashionable watering-places. But I must not go so fast. You want to know whether the law -student and Matilda ever got back from their floral excursion ? No, never ; they are hunting flowers yet, and always finding them in pairs ; plucking them OF WATERING-PLACES. 309 in all the walks of life, by streams of gladness, on hills of joy, in shady nooks. They could find nettles, and wasps, and colopendra, if so they desired. They are not hunting for these. They are looking for flowers ; and so there is the breath of the evening primrose in their conversation, and the distillation of sweet-alys- sum in their demeanor, and the aroma of phlox in their disposition. They are hunting flowers to-day In the door-yard of a plain house on the outskirts of the village. Last night, he, who was a year ago a law-student, plead in the court-room for a man's life, and plead in such tones of surpassing tenderness and power, that this morning his table was covered with congratulatory notes from old members of the bar, saying that the like of it they had never heard, and prophesying topmost eminence In 'his profession ; and people who have wrongs to right, and estates to settle, and causes to plead, have been coming in all day to give him retainers. The young man is as modest now as on the evening when he wandered up with his big hands from the Brodwell House to witness the "hop." And Matilda talks so 3IC SUBLIME WRETCHEDNESS much of the kindness of God that her mother still calls her a Methodist. Indeed, when this young husband and wife go out to hunt flowers, they do not look for anything large or preten- tious, but, strolling along on the grass, are apt to come upon a nest of violets. Do you want to know the sequel of Dallas Clifford's demeanor ? At the Springs he never appeared before Blanche until his breath had been properly disguised, and the last mark of rowdyism was brushed off. At the close of the six weeks, and a few days before the Siming- tons took their departure, affairs between Dal- las and Blanche came to a settlement. Much of the talk about blushes, awful silences, and faintings at such a crisis is an invention of story -writers. The last time a sham lady would faint is at such a juncture, especially if it were a good offer. But one thing was certain : about two months afterward, the mansion on Ritten- house Square was lighted for a wedding. The carriages reached a block each way. Everybody said that Blanche looked beauti- ful. Dallas Clifford took her hand, and vowed OF WATERING-PLACES, 3II before Almighty God, and a great cloud of wit- nesses, that he would love, cherish, and pro- tect. The wine poured from the bottles, and foamed in the beakers, and glowed under the chandeliers. Dallas Clifford drank with all ; drank again and again. Drank with old and young. Drank with brothers and sisters. Drank until Blanche besought him to take no more. Drank till his tongue was thick, and his knees weakened, and the banquet swam away from his vision, and he was carried up stairs, struggling, hooping, and cursing. Oh ! there was an unseen Hand writing on that gilded wall terrible meanings. There was a serpent that put its tongue from that basket of grapes on the table. On the smoke of the costly viands an evil spirit floated. Instead of the ring in the bride's cake, there was an iron chain. Those red drops on the table were not so much spilled wine as blood. Louder than the guffaw of laughter arose the hiccough of despair. fTTf^ SWALLOWING A FLY. COUNTRY meeting-house. A mid- summer Sabbath. The air lazy and I warm. The grave-yard around about oppressively still, the white slabs here and there shining in the light like the drifted snows of death, and not a grass - blade rust- ling as though a sleeper had stirred in his dream. Clap -boards of the church weather-beaten, and very much boiled, either by bumble - bees, or long sermons, probably the former, as the puncture was on the outside, instead of the in. Farmers, worn out with harvesting, excessively soothed by the services into dreaming of the good time coming, when wheat shall be worth twice as much to the bushel, and a basket of 312 SWALLOW/iVG A FLY. 313 fresh - laid eggs will buy a Sunday jacket for a boy. We had come to the middle of our sermon, when a large fly, taking advantage of the opened mouth of the speaker, darted into our throat. The crisis was upon us. Shall we cough and eject this impertinent intruder, or let him silently have his way ? We had no precedent to guide us. We knew not what the fathers of the church did in like circum- stances, or the mothers either. We are not informed that Chrysostom ever turned himself into a fly-trap. We knew not what the Synod of Dort would have said to a minister's eating flies durincr reliofious services. We saw the unfairness of taking advantage of a fly in such straitened circumstances. It may have been a blind fly, and not have known where it was going. It may have been a scientific fly, and only experimenting with air currents. It may have been a reckless fly, doing what he soon would be sorry for, or a young fly, and gone a-sailing on Sunday with- out his mother's consent. Beside this, we are not fond of flies prepared 27 314 SWALLO WING A FL V. in that way. We have, no doubt, often taken them preserved in blackberry jam, or, in the poorly lighted eating - house, taken them done up in Stewart's sirup. But fly in the raw was a diet from which we recoiled. We would have preferred it roasted, or fried, or panned, or baked, and then to have chosen our favorite part, the upper joint, and a little of the breast, if you please, sir. But, no ; it was wings, pro- boscis, feet, poisers, and alimentary canal. There was no choice ; it was all, or none. We foresaw the excitement and disturbance we would make, and the probability of losing our thread of discourse, if we undertook a series of coughs, chokings, and expectorations, and that, after all our efforts, we might be unsuccessful, and end the affray with a fly's wing on our lip, and a leg in the windpipe, and the most unsavory part of it all under the toneue. We concluded to take down the nuisance. We rallied all our energies. It was the most animated passage in all our discourse. We were not at all hungry for anything, much less for such hastily prepared viands. We found SWALLOWING A FLY. 315 It no easy job. The fly evidently wanted to back out. "No!" we said within ourselves. "Too late to retreat. You are In for It now!" We addressed It In the words of Noah to the orang - outang, as It was about entering the Ark, and lingered too long at the door, " Go In, sir — go In !" And so we conquered, giving a warning to flies and men that it is easier to get into trouble than to get out again. We have never mentioned the above circumstance before ; we felt it a delicate subject. But all the fly's friends are dead, and we can slander It as much as we please, and there Is no danger now. We have had the thing on our mind ever since we had It on our stomach, and so we come to this con- fessional. You acknowledge that we did the wisest thing that could be done ; and yet how many people spend their time in elaborate, and long-continued, and convulsive ejection of flies which they ought to swallow and have done with. Your husband's thoughtlessness Is an ex- ceeding annoyance. He is a good man, no 3l6 SWALLOWING A FLY. better husband since Adam gave up a spare rib as a nucleus around which to gather a woman. But he is careless about where he throws his slippers. On the top of one of your best parlor books he has laid a plug of pig - tail tobacco. For fifteen years you have lectured him about leaving the newspaper on the floor. Do not let such little things inter- fere with your domestic peace. Better swallow the fly, and have done with it. Here is a critic, to you a perpetual annoy- ance. He has no great capacity himself, but he keeps up a constant buzzing. You write a book, he caricatures it. You make a speech, he sneers at it. You never open your mouth but he flies into it. You have used up a magazine of powder in trying to curtail the sphere of that insect. You chased him around the corner of a Quarterly Review. You hounded him out from the cellar of a news- paper. You stop the urgent work of life to catch one poor fly — the Cincinnati Express train stopping at midnight to send a brakeman ahead with flag and lantern to scare the mos- SWALLOWING A FLY. 317 quitos off the track ; a " Swamp - Angel " out a-gunning for rats. It never pays to hunt a fly. You clutch at him. You sweep your hand convulsively through the air. You wait till he alights on your face, and then give a fierce slap on the place where he was. You slyly wait till he crawls up your sleeve, and then give a violent crush to the folds of your coat, to find out that it was a different fly from the one you were searching after. That one sits laughing at your vexation from the tip of your nose. Apothecaries advertise insect-exterminators ; but if in summer-time we set a glass to catch flies, for every one we kill there are twelve coroners called to sit as jury of inquest ; and no sooner does one disappear under our fell pursuit, than all its brothers, sisters, nephews, nieces, and second cousins come out to see what in the world is the matter. So with the unclean critics that crawl over an author's head. You cannot destroy them with blud- geons. There is a time in a schoolboy's his- tory when a fine-tooth comb will give him more relief than a whole park of artillery. O man ! 27* 3l8 SWALLOWING A FLY. go on with your life - work ! If, opening your mouth to say the thing that ought to be said, a fly dart in, swallow it ! The current of your happiness is often choked up by trifles. Your chimney smokes. Through the thick vapor you see no blessing left. You feel that with the right kind of a chimney you could be happy. It would be worse if you had no chimney at all, and still worse if you had no fire. Household annoy- ances multiply the martyrs of the kitchen. The want of more pantry room, the need of an additional closet, the smallness of the bread- tray, the defectiveness of the range, the lack of draught in a furnace, a crack in the sauce- pan, are flies in the throat. Open your mouth, shut your eyes, and gulp down the annoy- ances. The aforesaid fly, of whose demise I spoke, was digested, and turned into muscle and bone, and went to preaching himself Vexations conquered become additional strength. We would all be rich in disposition, if we learned to tax for our benefit the things that stick and scratch. We ought to collect a tariff on SWALLOWING A FLY. 319 needles and pins. The flower struck of the tempest, catches the drop that made it tremble, and turns the water Into wine. The battle In, and the victory dependent on your next sabre- stroke, throw not your armor down to shake a gravel from your shoe. The blue fly oi des- pondency has choked to death many a giant. Had we stopped on the aforesaid day to kill the Insect, at the same time we would have killed our sermon. We could not waste our time on such a combat. Truth ouorht not to be wrecked on an Insect's proboscis. You are all ordained to some mission by the laying on of the hard hands of work, the white hands of joy, and the black hands of trouble. Whethei your pulpit be blacksmith's anvil, or carpenter's bench, or merchant's counter, do not stop for a fly. Our every life Is a sermon. Our birth Is the text from which we start. Youth is the Intro- duction to the discourse. Durinor our man- o hood we lay down a few propositions and prove them. Some of the passages are dull, and some sprightly. Then come Inferences and applications. At seventy years we say 320 SWALLOWING A FLY. " Fifthly and Lastly." The Doxology is sung. The Benediction is pronounced. The Book closed. It is getting cold. Frost on the window-pane. Audience gone. Shut up the church. Sexton goes home with the key on his shoulder. SPOILED CHILDREN. IJHE old adage that a girl is worth a thousand dollars, and a boy worth fifteen hundred, is a depreciation of values. I warrant that the man who invented the theory was a bachelor, or he would not have set down the youngsters so far below cost. When the poorest child is born, a star of joy points down to the manger. We are tired of hearing of the duty that children owe to their parents. Let some one write a disquisition on what parents owe to their children. What though they do upset things, and chase the cats, and eat themselves into colic with green apples, and empty the castor of sweet-oil into the gravy, and bedaub their hands with tar? Grown people have the V 321 322 SPOILED CHILDREN. privilege of larger difficulties, and will you not let the children have a few smaller predica- ments ? How can we ever pay them for the prattle that drives our cares away, and the shower of soft flaxen curls on our hot cheek, and the flowers with which they have strewn our way, plucking them from the margin of their cradles, and the opening with little hands of doors into new dispensations of love ? A well-regulated home is a millennium on a small scale — the lion and leopard nature by infantile stroke subdued — and "a little child shall lead them." Blessed the pillow of the trundle-bed on which rests the young head that never ached ! Blessed the day whose morning is wakened by the patter of little feet! Blessed the heart from which all the soreness is drawn out by the soft hand of a babe ! But there are children which have been so thoroughly spoiled they are a terror to the community. As you are about to enter your neighbor's door, his turbulent boy will come at you with the plunge of a buffalo, pitching his head into your diaphragm. He will in the night stretch a rope from tree to tree to dislo- SPOILED CHILDREN. 323 cate your hat, or give some passing citizen a sudden halt as the rope catches at the throat, and he is hung before his time. They can, in a day, break more toys, sHt more kites, lose more marbles than all the fathers and mothers of the neighborhood could restore in a week. They talk roughly, make old people stop to let them pass, upset the little girl's school-basket, and make themselves universally disagreeable. You feel as if you would like to get hold of them just for once, or in their behalf call on the firm of Birch & Spank. It is easy enough to spoil a child. No great art is demanded. Only three or four things are requisite to complete the work. Make all the nurses wait on him and fly at his bidding. Let him learn never to go for a drink, but always have it brought to him. At ten years of age have Bridoret tie his shoe-strines. Let him Strike auntie because she will not get him a sugar -plum. He will soon learn that the house is his realm, and he is to rule it. He will come up into manhood one of those pre- cious spirits that demand obeisance and ser- vice, and with the theory that the world is 324 SPOILED CHILDREN. his oyster, which with knife he will proceed to open. If that does not spoil him, buy him a horse. It is exhilarating and enlarging for a man to own such an animal. A good horseback ride shakes up the liver and helps the man to be virtuous, for it is almost impossible to be good, with too much bile, an enlarged spleen, or a stomach off duty. We congratulate any man who can afford to own a horse ; but if a boy own one, he will probably ride on it to destruc- tion. He will stop at the tavern for drinks. He will bet at the races. There will be room enouofh in the same saddle for idleness and dissipation to ride, one of them before, and one of them behind. The bit will not be strong enough to rein in. at the right place. There are men who all their lives have been going down hill, and the reason is that in boy- hood they sprang astride a horse, and got going so fast that they have never been able to stop. But if the child be insensible to all such efforts to spoil him, try the plan of never say- ing anything encouraging to him. If he do SPOILED CHILDREN. 325 wrong, thrash him soundly ; but if he do well, keep on reading the newspaper, pretending not to see him. There are excellent people, who, through fear of producing childish vanity, are unresponsive to the very best endeavor. When a child earns parental applause he ought to have it. If he get up head at school, give him a book or an apple. If he saw a bully on the play-ground trampling on a sickly boy, and your son took the bully by the throat so tightly that he became a little variegated in color, praise your boy, and let him know that you love to have him the champion of the weak. Perhaps you would not do right a day, if you had no more prospect of reward than that which you have given him. If on com- mencement-day he make the best speech, or read the best essay, tell him of it. Truth is always harmless, and the more you use of it the better. If your daughter at the conserva- tory take the palm, give her a new piece of music, a ring, a kiss, or a blessing. But if you have a child invulnerable to all other influences, and he cannot be spoiled by any means already recommended, give him 28 326 SPOILED CHILDREN. plenty of money, without any questions as to what he does with it. The fare is cheap on the road between here and Smashupton. I have known boys with five dollars to pay their way clear through, and make all the connec- tions on the " Grand Trunk " route to per- dition. We know not why loose cash in a boy's pocket Is called pin money, unless be- cause it often sticks a hole into his habits. First he will buy raisins, then almonds, then a whisk cane, then a breast-pin, then cigars, then a keg of "lager," then a ticket for a drunken excursion, and there may possibly be money enough left for the father to buy for his boy a coffin. Let children know something of the worth of money, by earning it. Over-pay them If you will, but let them get some idea of equivalents. If they get distorted notions of values at the start, they will never be righted. Daniel Web- ster knew everything except how to use money. From boyhood he had things mixed up. His mother gave him and Ezekiel ijioney for Fourth of July. As the boys came back from the vil- lage, the mother said, " Daniel, what did you SPOILED CHILDREN. 32/ buy with your money ? " and he answered : " I bought a cake and a candy, and some beer, and some fire -crackers." Then turning to Ezeklel she said, "What did you buy with your money?.." "Oh," said Ezekiel, ''Daniel borrowed mine." On the other hand, it is a ruinous poHcy to be parsimonious with children. If a boy find that a parent has plenty of money, and he, the boy, has none, the temptation will be to steal the first cent he can lay his hand on. Oh, the joy that five pennies can buy for a boy ! They seem to open before him a Paradise of liquor- ice-drops and cream - candy. You cannot in after-life buy so much superb satisfaction with ^^^ thousand dollars as you bought with your first five cents. Children need enough money, but not a superfluity. Freshets wash away more cornfields than they culture. Boys and girls are often spoiled by parental gloom. The father never unbends. The mo- ther's rheumatism hurts so, she does not see how little Maggie can ever laugh. Childish curiosity is denounced as impertinence. The parlor is a Parliament, and everything in ever- 328 SPOILED CHILDREN. lasting order. Balls and tops in that house are a nuisance, and the pap that the boy is expected most to relish is Geometry, a little sweetened with the chalk of blackboards. For cheerful reading the father would recom- mend "Young's Night Thoughts" and Her- vey's " Meditations among the Tombs." At the first chance the boy will break loose. With one grand leap he will clear the cate- chisms. He will burst away into all riotous living. He will be so glad to get out of Egypt that he will jump into the Red Sea. The hardest colts to catch are those that have a long while been locked up. Restraints are necessary, but there must be some outlet. Too high a dam will overflow all the meadows. A sure way of spoiling children is by sur- feiting them with food. Many of them have been stuffed to death. The mother spoke of it as a grand achievement that her boy ate ten eggs at Easter. He waddles across the room under burdens of porter-house steak and plum-pudding enough to swamp a day-laborer. He runs his arm up to the elbow in the jar of blackberry jam, and pulls it out amid the roar SPOILED CHILDREN. 329 of the whole household thrown Into hysterics with the witticism. After a while he has a pain, then he gets " the dumps," soon he will be troubled with Indigestion, occasionally he will have a fit, and last of all he gets a fever, and dies. The parents have no Idea that they are to blame. Beautiful verses are cut on the tombstone, when, If the truth had been told, the epitaph would have read — Killed by Apple Dumplings ! 28* .130 NIBBLINGS IN FOREIGN PASTURES. 33^ THE SMILE OF THE SEA. THE SMILE OF THE SEA. E had built up all the stones of sea- faring men into one tremendous imagining of the ocean. We went on board, ready for typhoons and euroclydons. We thought the sea a monster, with ships in its maw, and hurricanes in its mane. In our ten days' voyage, we have seen it in various moods, but have been impressed with nothing so much as the smile of the sea. While we have not found the poetic " cradle of the deep," we have concluded that the sea is only a vigor- ous old nurse that jolts the child up and down on a hard knee, without much reference to how much it can endure. We cannot forget the briohtness of the morning in which we came down the bay, fol- 333 334 THE SMILE OF THE SEA. lowed to Sandy Hook by five hundred friends, lashing us out to sea with waving pocket- handkerchiefs, and pelting us with their huzzas. The sun set, and the moon took the veil of a nun and went into the dark turrets of midnio^ht cloud, and the stars dropped their flakes of light into the water, and melted into the black- ness ; but the sunlight of the cheery faces at the starting has shone on three thousand miles of water. So many friendly hands helped steady the ship, and the breath of so many voices filled the sails, which, by the help of the great screw, are bearing us onward. Though a gentleman has pronounced the sea one vast dose of ipecac, and though it may betray us in the future, we set down the sea as one of our best friends. We never were treated so well in all our life. We have had, since we started, some wild tossing, but the waves are swarthy giants, and you must expect that their play will not be that of kittens, but of a lioness with her cubs, or a leviathan with its young. When Titans play ball, they throw rocks. The heavy surge which rolls the ship while I write is probably only the effort of the THE SMILE OF THE SEA. 335 sea to stop laughing. It has been In a grand gale, and Its sides are heaving yet with the uproarious mirthfulness. There are physical constitutions that will not harmonize with the water ; but one - half the things that writers record against the sea Is the result of their ow^n intemperance. The sea-air rouses a wolf of an appetite, and nine- tenths of the passengers turn Into meat-stuffers. From morn till night, down go the avalanches of provender. Invalids, on their way to Europe for the cure of dyspepsia, are seen gorging themselves at nine o'clock, at twelve, at four, at seven, and at ten. I hear men who, at eleven o'clock last night, took pigeons, and chickens, and claret, and Hock, and Burgundy, and Old Tom, and Cheshire cheese, and sar- dines, and anchovies, and grouse, and gravies, complaining that they feel miserable this morn- ing. Much of the sea-sickness is an Insurrec- tion of the stomach against too great Instal- ments of salmon, and raisins, and roast turkey, and nuts, and damson pies, and an infinity of pastry. One-half of the same dissipation on land would necessitate the attendance of the 33^ THE SMILE OF THE SEA. family doctor, and two nurses on the side of the bed to keep the howling patient from leap- ing out of the third-story window. Oh, the joy of the sea ! The vessel bounds like a racer on the " home - stretch," bending into the bit, its sides flanked with the foam, and its white mane flying on the wild wind. We have dropped the world behind us. Going to Long Branch, or Sharon Springs, our letters come, and the papers, but it would be hard for cares to keep up with a Cunard steamer. They cannot swim. They could not live an hour in such a surf They have been drowned out, and are forgotten. On the land, when morning comes, it seems to run up from the other side of the hills, and, with its face red from climbing, stands looking through the pines and cedars. On the sea, it comes down from God out of heaven on lad- ders of light to bathe in the water, the waves dripping from her ringlets and sash of fire, or throwing up their white caps to greet her, and the sea-gull alights on her brow at the glorious baptism. No smoke of factory on the clear air. No shuffling of weary feet on the glass THE SMILE OF THE SEA. Z'^7 of the water - pavement. But Him of Gene- sareth setting his foot in the snow of the surf, and stroking the neck of the waves as they lick His feet and play about Him. He who goes to sea with keen appreciation of the ludicrous will not be able to keep his gravity. We are not conscious of having, in any three months of our lives, so tested the strength of our buttons as on this ten days' trip. We confess our incapacity to see with- out demonstration of merriment the unheard- of posture taken by passengers on a rocking ship. Think of bashful ladies being violently pitched into the arms of the boatswain, and of a man like myself escorting two elegant ladies across the slippery deck, till, with one sudden lurch, we are driven from starboard to port, with most unclerical sprawl, in one grand crash of crinoline and whiskers, chignon catching in overcoat - pocket, and our head entangled in the folds of a rio^olette. Imagine the steward emptying a bowl of turtle-soup into the lap of a New York exquisite ; or one not accustomed to angling, fishing for herring under an upset dinner - plate. Consider our agitation, when, 29 33^ THE SMILE OF THE SEA. in the morning, after waking our companion with the snatch of some famiHar tunes, we found her diving out of the berth head -fore- most, to the tune of " Star Spangled Banner," and Dundee, with the variations. If, in all the ships on the deep, there are so many grotesque goings-on as in our vessel, we wonder not that this morning the sea from New York to Liver- pool is shaking its sides with roistering merri- ment. But the grandest smile of the sea is, after a rough day, in the phosphorescence that blazes from horizon to horizon. Some tell us it is the spawn of the jelly - fish, and some that it is a collection of marin^ insects ; but those who say they do not know what it is probably come nearest the truth. The prow of the vessel breaks it up into two great sheaves of light, and the glory keeps up a running fire along the beam's - end till the mind falls back be- numbed, unable longer to take in the splendor. In one direction, it is like a vast mosaic, and yonder it now quivers the " lightning of the sea." Here it is crystal inlaid with jet; or the THE SMILE OF THE SEA. 339 eyes of sea - serpents flashing through the hissing waters ; or a tall wave robed in white, flying, with long trail, toward the East ; or the tossing up in the palm of the ocean a handful of opals, answered by the sparkle on one finger of foam ; and then the long -restrained beauty breaking out into a whole sea of fire. On this suspended bridge many of the glories of the earth and heaven come out to greet each other, and stand beckoning to ship, and shore, and sky, for all the rest of the glories to come and join them. Meanwhile, the vessel plunges its proboscis into the deep, and casts carelessly aside into the darkness more gems than ever came from Brazil and Golconda. Historians think it worth recording, that, at an ancient feast, a pearl was dissolved in the wine, and drank by a royal woman ; but a million pearls are dissolved at this phosphorescent banquet of the deep, around whose board all nations sit drinking. The stars are to drop like blasted figs, and the sun is to be snuffed out; but when the ocean dies, its spirit will arise In white robe of mist, and lie down 340 THE SMILE OF THE SEA. before the throne of God, " a sea of glass miiigled with fire!' N. B. — I hereby reserve the privilege of taking back all I have said, if, on my way to America, the sea does not behave itself well. POWER OF A CHILD'S FACE. [VERY intelligent American, in cross- ing the ocean, has a lively desire of confrontinof the works of the old masters of painting. He wants to see Pous- sin and Correggio as certainly as Ben Lomond and the Splugen Pass. If he happen first to look in upon the pic- ture gallery of Holyrood, where the faces of a hundred Scottish kings are hung, his first feel- ing will be one of gladness that they are all dead, for such another villanous brood of faces no man ever looked upon. Such eyes, such mouths, such noses, would confound any rogues' -gallery in any city. We believe the whole gallery a slander by 4 Flemish master, 29 341 342 POWER OF A CHILD'S FACE. and that Scotland never had any such atro- cious men or women to rule over her. We say nothing against homely features in the abstract. Any man has an inalienable right to carry such a nose as he will. That is a right patent on the face of it. Lord Welling- ton had a hooked nose, and Thackeray a turn- up nose, and Robert Bruce a nose all over the face ; but to have a nose that looks as if in- tended to be thrust into everybody else's busi- ness, or to be stuck up in scorn, or to blossom with dissipations, or to snuff at the cause of virtue — we protest against any man's right to carry such an infamous proboscis. We are certain that no such-looking faces as we see in Holyrood ought to have been perpetuated by a master. Let the extinct species of such megatheriums never hear the clang of the crowbar. It is not fair that the Royal College of Surgeons should keep the cancer of which Napoleon died. There should be no immor- tality of cancers. But no one can forget the place, or the day, or the hour, when he first ofazed on a genuine work of one of the old masters. We had POWER OF A CHILD'S FACE. 343 seen for years pieces of canvas which pre- tended to have come from Italy or Germany, and to be three or four hundred years old. The chief glory of them was that they were cracked, and wrinkled, and dull, and inexpli- cable, and had great antiquity of varnish, im- mensity of daub, and infinity of botch. The great-grandfather of the exhibitor got the heirloom from a Portuguese peddler, who was wrecked at Venice in the middle of the last century, and went ashore just as one of the descendants of the celebrated Braggadocia Thundergusto, of the fourteenth century, was hard up for money, and must have a drink or die. But I find in my diary this record : ''June 30th, 1870, at two o'clock P. M., in the National Gallery of Scotland, I first saw a 'Titian.' "July 9th, 1870, at ten minutes of three o'clock, in the National Gallery of England, first saw a ' Murillo.' " It seemed to require a sacred subject to call out the eenius of the old masters. On secu- lar themes they often failed. They knew not, as do the moderns, how to pluck up a plant from the earth and make it live on canvas. 344 POWER OF A CHILD'S FACE. Delmonico, for the adornment of a shoulder of bacon, with his knife cuts out of a red beet a rose more natural than the forget-me-not of old Sigismond Holbein, or the lily by Lo Spagna. Their battle - pieces are a Cincin- nati slaughter-house. Their Cupid scenes are merely a nursery of babies that rush out from the bath-tub into the hall before their mother has time to dress them. The masters failed with a fiddle, but shook the earth with a diapa- son. Give them a " Crucifixion " or a " Judg- ment," and they triumph. Indeed, when men paint or write or act from the heart, they are potent. By the time that a thought, starting from the artist's brain, can come down through the neck into the shoulder, and through the right arm to the fingers, and off the finger-tips to the point of the pencil, it has lost its momentum, and languishes on the canvas ; but a thought that starts from the brain, and streams to the heart, there to be taken with a strong throb, and as by the stroke of a piston, forced through the arm to the canvas, arrives unspent and redoubled. The old masters succeeded not in depicting POWER OF A CHILD'S FACE. 345 what they thought so well as In what they felt. Thoughts are often hard, and green, and touorh, till the warm sunshine of the heart ripens them. Most of the ancient artists tried their hand at the Virgin and the Child, always evidencing their own nationality In the style of infantile beauty selected. The Dutch school gives a Dutch child, the Roman school a Roman child, the Spanish school a Spanish child. Rubens's Christ was not born at Bethlehem, but at Ant- werp. And as parents are not apt to under- value their children, It is probable that they took the model which sat in their own nursery, gathering around it their own ideal of the in- fant Jesus. Francesco Tacconi represents the Holy Child as very thoughtful, a young philos- opher at one year of age, with very red hair. VIvarIni gives us a startled child. Duccio paints for us a child wrapped up in admiration of Its mother. But Lo Spagna gives us the look of a glad child that would romp If It were not afraid of jumping out of the picture. Why not a glad child ? The burdens had not yet rolled over on him. Those were good 34^ POWER OF A CHILD'S FACE. days to him. Joseph and Mary walked and trudged, but he always had a soft carriage to ride in — that of his mother's bosom. He had enough to wear, for he was wrapped in swad- dling - clothes. He probably had enough to eat, for mothers in those days were not pinched to death with corsets, and so the child need not go outside of its mother's arms for abun- dant supply. But any pleasant afternoon when the chil- dren of our city are out taking an airing, I could find a score of infanf faces more like Jesus than any I have seen on ancient canvas. Perhaps, after a while, an American artist will give us the Virgin and the Child. It would be more apt to be impartial than that of any of the ancients. They put their own nationality into the picture, and it was a German Christ, or a Venetian Christ, or a Tuscan Christ ; but the American, having in him the blood of many lands, and in his face a commingling of the features of all nations, when he gives us upon canvas Mary and the Child, it will be a world's affection bending over a world's Christ. Not only in the Madonnas, but in nearly all POWER OF A CHILD'S FACE. 34/ the chief pictures, the painters show their liking for children. You see a child peeping out somewhere. If there is no other way to get him into the picture, Paul Veronese will slide him down in the shape of a cherub on a plank of sunbeams. You would hardly expect children in Raph- ael's " Peter and John Healing the Lame Man." You expect that the majesty of the scene will crowd out all familiarities. You would say that children ought to get out of the way when such exciting work is going on. There lies a lame man, his hand in the hand of the apostle. The sufferer looks up with a face that has anguish scorched into every fea- ture; for though born a cripple, he had never got used to it. No man that I ever saw be- fore wanted so much to get well. His twisted foot no human doctor could straighten. The muscles that bound it on the wrong side might have been cut, but the muscles on the other side would not have drawn it back to the right place. There lay the helpless, dis- torted foot, making its dumb prayer. Yonder is another deformed beggar hobbling up. If 348 POWER OF A CHILD'S FACE. Peter is successful with the first case, this lame man would like to have his limbs looked at. Still, he is not anxious. He is angry with the world and angry with heaven. His manner seems to say : " How did God dare to make me thus ? " The wretch had been kicked off of people's steps, and jeered at by the boys of the town, till he did not much care what became of him. A face full of everything hard, bitter, malicious. He is ready either to receive help at the hand of the apostle, or to strike him with the crutch. Does not much believe there is any cure, does not much care. Has not heard a kind word for twenty years, and would not be at all sur- prised if he were howled away now. A foul face — even the hair on the chin curls with scorn. He has the fierceness of an adder, which, trod on, curls up to bite its pursuer. The distortion of the body has struck in and deformed the soul. You feel that your only safety in his presence is that he cannot walk. His figure haunts a man for days. It is a scene that puts the heart in a vice, and starts the cold sweat on the forehead, and POWER OF A CHILD'S FACE. 349 holds you with a spell from which you are try- ing to break away, until you look just over the head of the vicious mendicant, and see the clear, innocent face of a child hushed in its mother's arms, and then look to the left, and see two round-limbed children boundincr into the scene, wondering- what is the matter. With their dimpled hands, they pull out the thorns of the picture. It is a stubborn sea of trouble that will not divide when four baby feet go paddling in it. We are glad that Raphael did not choose for the picture cherubs with wings fastened at the backbone, ready any moment to fly away with them, but children that look as if they had come to stay. Rather thinly dressed, indeed, for cool wea- ther. Raphael's picture-children did not cost him much for clothes. You know it was a warm climate. Though a bachelor, Raphael knew the worth of children in a picture. With their little hands they open the inside door of the heart, and let us pass in, when otherwise we might have been kept standing on the cold steps, looking at the corbeils and caryatides of the 30 350 POWER OF A CHILD'S FACE. outside architecture. It was a little maid that directed Naaman to the Jordan for healing, and it is a child in the picture that shows the leper of harsh criticism where to wash his scales off. It is by the introduction of chil- dren into their paintings that Canaletto gives warmth to the ice-white castles of Venice, and Gainsborough simplicity to the hollowness of a watering-place, and Turner pathos to the " Decline of Carthage," and Ruysdale life to a dead landscape ; and Giotto and Tacconi and Orcagna and Joshua Reynolds follow in the track of a boy's foot. " And a little child shall lead them." ^V-^P??:r EDINBURGH AS A BRAIN-STIMULANT. |USHED at the rate of sixty miles an hour into the capital of Scotland, and set down with the shriek of the steam - whistle — compared with which a sound of an American locomotive is a harpsi- chord — here we are. The sensitive traveller will not sleep the first night in Edinburgh, and will do well if the second night he can be composed. The rest- lessness may not be ascribed to a lack of comfortable couch, for the art of bed-making has been carried to perfection here. You are not called, as in many an American hotel, to sleep on a promontory of mattresses, not certain on which side you may fall off into the sea. There are no lumps in the bed that take 351 352 EDINBURGH AS A BRAIN-STIMULANT. you in the middle of the back, or hardnesses in the pillow that make you dream like Jacob on the stones, barring out the ladder and the angels. The foot - board is not so near the head -board that the sleeper is all the night long reminded of his end. There are no stray points of feathers thrust through the linen to tickle you under the ribs. The covers do not come within just three inches of being large enough when you pull them up, making bare the foot, or when, by the grasp of the " com- fortable " between the large toe and the fatty portion of the foot, you pull them down, ex- posing the shoulder, so that you fancy, in your disturbed slumber, that you are perishing in a snow-bank. But a broad, smooth, affluent couch, on which you may sublimely roll, reck- less of covers, and confident that beyond the point at which you stop there is still further expanse of comfort and ease. But the restlessness will be accounted for by the fact that in no city under the sun is there so much to excite the memory and the imagination. It is a stimulant amounting to intoxication. We find gentlemen whose minds EDINBURGH AS A BRAIN-STIMULANT. 353 have been overworked in this city seeking mental quiet. As well go to Iceland to get warm, or to Borneo to get cool. The Past and the Present jostle each other. The shoul- der of modern architecture is set against the arch of the twelfth century. Antiquity says, " I will furnish the ideas," and the Present says, *' I will freeze them into stone." You take in with one glance " The Abbey," built by Roman Catholic David the First, which has for seven hundred years sat counting its beads of stone, and that modern structure "The Donaldson Hospital," a palace of charity, crowned with twenty-four turrets, inviting to its blessing the poor children of the city, and launching them on the world every way equipped — knowledge in their heads, grace in their hearts, and money in their pockets. While in one part of the castle you are examining old " Mons Meg," the big gun that burst in the time of James the Second, you hear from another part of the castle the merciless bang of Professor Smythe's time -gun, fired off by a wire reaching across the city from the Observatory. Edinburgh and Boston have each been 30* 354 EDINBURGH AS A BRAIN-STIMULANT. called "the modern Athens." We shall not here decide between them. They are much alike in literary atmosphere, but at the an- tipodes in some respects. In Boston, literature has a Unitarian tinge ; in Edinburgh, a Pres- byterian. In this Scotch capital, religion, poli- tics, science, and literature are inextricably mixed. The late Sir James Y. Simpson, M. D., whose face Is In all the photographic show- windows of the city, and whose life was spent in surgery, recently made an address on "Dead in Trespasses and Sins ; " and Doctor Brown, a practising physician on Rutledge Street, wrote of " Paul's Thorn in the Flesh ; " and the collection-boxes of the Scotland Bible Society are set in the railroad stations ; and Reverend Doctor Arnot, last Sabbath, at the close of his sermon, turned around and bowed to the judges of the court seated in the gallery ; and over a door in " Lady Stair's Close " is the inscription : " Fear the Lord and depart from evil." In this city, acutest analysis could hardly tell where literature or politics ends or theology begins. But since the brain and the heart are only about a foot and a half apart, I EDINBURGH AS A BRAIN-STIMULANT. 355 know not why there should be such effort to separate the Intellectual from the spiritual. All frank and intense writers on secular themes have given us a glimpse of their higher faith. We know the theology of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Babing- ton Macaulay and William C. Bryant as well as that of Jonathan Edwards and Archibald Alexander. There is no need that the literati of the world go dodging and skulking about the pillars of St. Paul as though ashamed to be found there. Reaching from Edinburgh Castle, throned on the rocks, down under the city to the Ab- bey of Holyrood, there is an underground passage six hundred years old. Queen Vic- toria, a few years since, offered a large reward to any man who would explore that passage. The poor fellow who undertook it choked to death in the damps and gases, and the Queen withdrew her inducement, lest some one else should perish in the undertaking. I would that the way between the castle of beauty and strength, and the abbey of religion, in all ages, were not a dark tunnel difficult of exploration, 356 EDINBURGH AS A BRAIN-STIMULANT. but a brilliant causeway, and that we all might walk there. Let Science and Piety walk with hooked arms in the hall of the university, and ivy climb over the cathedral wall, and every church belfry be an observatory, and learning and goodness be so thoroughly intertwined and interlocked that every man shall be both philosopher and Christian. Then Galileo will not only see that " the world moves," but that it moves in the right direction ; and the gowned professors of the academy and the surpllced officials of the chapel will unite their strength to shorten the distance between the castle and the abbey. At this summer season, Edinburgh sleeps under a very thin covering of shadows. There is no night there. At ten o'clock p. m. I walked up on Calton Hill, and saw the city by daylight. And the evening and the morning were the same day. The American is perplexed as to what time he ought to retire, and at four o'clock in the morning springs out of bed, feeling that EDINBURGH AS A BRAIN-STIMULANT. 35/ he must have overslept, till he looks at his watch. The day and the night are here twin sisters — the one a blonde, the other a bru- nette. At this season, when tourists are most busy, the curtain does not fall on Edinburgh. The city has been compressed into small compass, so that it might be under the de- fence of the cruns of the Castle. A house ten stories high is not an unusual thing. There are no "magnificent distances." It is but two minutes' walk from the Netherbow to the Canongate. It is only ten minutes' ride from Holyrood to the Castle. In one short saunter you go from examining the Scottish crown in the " Jewel-room " on the Hill, down to the museum, in which you see the stool that Jenny Geddes threw at the head of the bishop. The city has a superb belt of what the Scotch have chosen to call " Hospitals." They are not places where fractures are splintered, or physical diseases assaulted ; but are educa- tional institutions. Considering ignorance a horrible sickness — the wasting away of a marasmus, the benumbing of a palsy, the sloughing off of a gangrene — public charity 358 EDINBURGH ASA BRAIN-STIMULANT. has erected these " Hospitals " for the cure of intellectual malady. A printer of the city gave one million fifty thousand dollars for the building and mainte- nance of one of these institutions, where two hundred and twenty poor children are taught. The structure is vast and imposing ; battle- mented and towered, and embosomed in foliage and flowers — strength in the arms of beauty, without being shorn of any of its locks. The John Watson's Hospital, the Orphan Hospital, the Gillespie Hospital, the Merchant Maiden Hospital, the George Heriot Hospital — the surplusage of bequests not yet em- ployed, and seemingly not needed for struc- tures of the same character — show how much the people hate darkness and love light. God gave to Edinburgh, as to Solomon, the choice of riches, honor, or wisdom. She chose wisdom ; and the riches and the honor have been thrown in as a bounty. While the anti- quarian stands studying the grotesque gar- goyles which frown and mow and run out the tongue from the venerable roofs and arches EDINBURGH AS A B RA IN- S TIM ULA NT. 359 of the city, I see more to admire in the chubby faces of the educated children. But, while Edinburgh is preparing for a grand future, she is not willing that her dead shall fall back into the shadows. With a tight grip of fingers in bronze and stone she holds on to the men of the past. She has for the last thirty years been building monuments, and she will keep on building them. As she denied the request of the Queen that Dr. Simpson be buried in Westminster Abbey, Edinburgh will not now put on the limits the sculptors who perpetuate him. Walter Scott alive, hobbling along the Grassmarket, made not so much impression on this city as to-day, looking down on Princess Street, from under a canopy of stone, one hundred and ninety feet high, the dog Bevis at his feet ; while breakmg out In sculpture on the sides are the " Last Minstrel," and " Lady of the Lake," and Meg Merrilies, the queen of witches, with her long skinny arms seeming to marshal all the apparitions of ghostdom. Here dwelt Alexander Smith, destroyed by his own mental activity, the fire of his genius 360 EDINBURGH AS A B R A I N- STIMULA NT. consuming not only the sacrifice but the altar; and Hugh Miller, who with his stone chisel cut his way into the mysteries of the earth and the heart of nations ; and Playfair, and Dugald Stewart, and Henry Mackenzie, and Doctor Blair, and Thomas de Quincy. Here Christopher North put on his " sporting- jacket," out of the pockets of which he pulled for many of us Windermere and the High- lands ; his swarthy figure in bronze, now stand- ing in the East Gardens, his hair looking like the toss of a lion's mane, his eye wild as a stormy night on the moors, his apparel as sloven as his morals. But these men were of the past. The har- vest of giants has been reaped. Edinburgh has but two or three men of world-wide fame remaining. Doctor John Brown, author of *' Rab and his Friends," may still be found on Rutledge Street ; but he has dropped his royal pen, and has no more "Spare Hours " for the reading public, now that he gives his entire time to his medical profession. If the dogs, whose greatest champion he is, knew that he had abandoned their cause, they would set up EDINBURGH AS A B RA IN- STI MULA NT. 361 a universal howl, and the spirit of " Rab " would come forth to haunt him, wagging before him that immortal stump of a tail. Though the Doctor has sent his dogs scam- pering through every American study, and through many a lady's parlor, he has no dog left. His last one, Kent by name, was so much in danger of being contaminated by the more vulgar dogs of the city, that he was sent over to Ireland to be companion and defender to the Doctor's married daughter. A large portrait of " Kent " hangs over the parlor mantle on Rutledge Street. You would not wonder that all Doctor Brown's dogs have been so kind and wise and good, if you only knew their master. It seems that in one case, at least, his plea for unhappy curs has been effectual. Eleven years ago a poor and unknown man was buried in Gray Friars Churchyard. His dog, " Bobby," a Scotch terrier, was one of the mourners. Next day he was found lying on the grave ; but, as nothing but bronze or stone dogs are lawful in such places, Bobby was kicked out of the yard. The second morning he was found 31 362 EDINBURGH AS A BRAIN-STIMULANT. there, and was still more emphatically warned to give up his melancholy habits. But when, the third morning, he was found on the grave, the old curator had compassion, and ever since the bereft creature has been taken care of. For years he was allowed steaks from an of- ficer of the city. I wish that all the dogs that live on Government were as worthy. We take the train from Edinburgh with a heavy heart. We need a year to study this city of the past and the present — its cres- cents, and mansions, and squares, and monu- ments, and palaces ; a city which hovers above crags, and dives Into ravines, and climbs preci- pices, and shimmers in the blaze of midsum- mer noon, and rolls upon the soul a surge of associations that break us down" into a heart- felt prayer for the peace and happiness of Scodand. FALLACIES ABOUT THE SEA. JVERY man ought to cross the ocean at least once to find how many un- warranted things have been said about it. Those who on the land have never imperilled their veracity by mastodonic state- ments are so metamorphosed by the first stiff breeze off Newfoundland, that they become capable of the biggest stories. They see billows as high as the Alps, and whales long enough to supply a continent with spermaceti, and have perilous escapes from sudden anni- hilation, and see over the gunwales spectacles compared with which the " Flying Dutchman " is a North River clam-sloop. We have not been able to find some things that we expected. We have very often heard 363 364 FALLACIES ABOUT THE SEA. that sea-sickness makes one feel that he would like to be thrown overboard. One day, on our ship, there were near a hundred passengers whose stomachs had turned sommersets; but not one of these people, as far as we could detect, would like to have been pitched over- board. Indeed, an effort to deposit these nauseated Jonahs on the " Fishing Banks " would have ended fatally to the perpetrator. We saw not one of the sickest patients look- ing at the sea as though he would like to get into it. Those who were most desperate and agonizing in looking over the taffrail for the lines of latitude and longitude, held tight fast, lest some sudden lurch of the ship should precipitate them into the Canaan of water for which the great army of the sea-sick are said to be longing. We have also been told, in many well-rounded addresses, that the sails of British and Ameri- can commerce ''whiten every sea!' But we have averaged during our voyage only about two vessels a day. The cry of '' Sail — ho ! " is so rare a sound that it brings all the passen- gers to their feet. The mere ghost of a FALLACIES ABOUT THE SEA. 365 shroud along the line of the sky calls up all the opera - glasses. The most entertaining scollops are dropped from the spoon when, during the dining-hour, it is announced that a ship passes. Let " Fourth of July " orators steer clear of the fallacy that the sails of our commerce whiten the sea. They make about as much impression upon it as a fly crossing the ceiling. We have been told of the sense of loneli- ness, isolation, and almost desolation felt when out of sight of land. But we think that In a popular steamer such a feeling is Impossible. We leave a world behind, but we take a world with us. A Hamburg steamer is a portable Germany. The ship in which we sail Is Berkley Square and Fifth Avenue. London ends at the prow, Broadway begins at the stern. We have on board Fulton Market, and Faneuil Hall, and Drury Lane Theatre, and Apsley House. We do not any more think of how far we are from the shore than we do how far the shore Is from us. Though mid-ocean, we are in the heart of a city, and hear feet shuffling, and 366 FALLACIES ABOUT THE SEA. hammers pounding, and wheels turning, and voices shouting. We have not found any of the monotony of the deep. We have not seen an iceberg, nor a whale, nor a porpoise, nor a flying-fish, nor a water-spout ; but in simply watching and thinking we have found each day so pleasantly occupied that we sorrowed at its speedy termi- nation. So many styles of character as come to- gether on shipboard are a perpetual study. Men by the third day turn inside out. (I refer to their characters and not to their stomachs.) Their generosity or their selfishness, their opulence of resource or their paucity, their courage or their cowardice, are patent. What variety of mission ! This one goes to claim a large estate ; this one to culture his taste in foreign picture-galleries ; that one to amass a fortune ; this one to see what he can learn. On some the time hangs heavily, and they be- take themselves to the " betting-room." Since coming on board, some of them have lost all their money by unsuccessful wager. Two or FALLACIES ABOUT THE SEA. 367 three have won everything, and the others have lost. They have bet about the speed of the ship — bet that it would be over three hundred and thirty knots a day, bet that it would be less, bet that the number of miles run would be an even number, bet that It would be odd, bet that the pilot coming aboard would step on with his right foot, bet it would be his left, bet that gold will be up when we get to Queenstown, bet that it would be down, bet every week-day, bet on Sunday. The surgeon, who read "prayers" for us in the Sabbath service, was one of the heaviest losers. I am informed, by a credible witness, that he took a bet while we were sin^ini.^ the psalm during the religious service which he was conductinor. God save us from the morals and the physic of such a doctor ! But take them all in all we never dwelt among men and women of finer culture, and better heart, and nobler life than our fellow passengers. We shall be glad forever that on this crystal path of nations we. met them. 368 FALLACIES ABOUT THE SEA. The sailors have been to us a perpetual en- tertainment. They are always interesting, al- ways cheerful, always helpful. Each one has a history. Sometimes his life has been a tragedy, interspersed with comedy. Our heart goes out toward him. In his laugh Is the freedom of the sea and the wildness of the wind. We can hardly keep from laying hold with these sailor- boys, as they bend to their work singing a strange song of which we catch here and there a stanza such as : Away ! Haul away ! Haul away, Joe ! Away ! Haul away ! now we are sober. Once I lived in Ireland, digging turf and tatoes, But now I'm in a packet-ship a-hauling tacks and braces. Once I was a waterman and lived at home at ease, But now I am a mariner to plough the angry seas. I thought I would like a seafaring life, so I bid my love adieu. And shipped as cook and steward on board the Kangaroo. Then I never thought she would prove false, Or ever prove untrue, When we sailed away from Milfred Bay On board the Kangaroo. Away ! Haul away ! Haul away, Joe ! Away ! Haul away ! Haul away, Joe ! FALLACIES ABOUT THE SEA. 369 We cannot tell the metre of the songs they sing by day and night, but we prefer to call it " peculiar metre." We wish for these men a safe life-voyage, and a calm harbor at the last. Heaven give them a steady foot while running up the slippery ratlines to reef the topsail ! "STAY WHERE YOU'RE HAPPY.*' |N board the steamer Java I met an English gentleman by the name of Mr. Gale. "And who was Mr. Gale ? " you ask. I know not, except that he was of so bland a nature I felt he must be a " Gale from Heaven." We were leaning over the rail of the vessel, watching the first appear- ance of land — Ireland sending out to meet us the " Skelligs," a cross-looking projection, like the snarly dog that comes out to serenade you with a volley of yelps at the gate of a friend, or like a dark-browed Fenian appearing to challenge the British ships, and bid them " mind their eye," and look out how they run " forninst ould Ireland" — when Mr. Gale summed up all his advice about European travel in the terse phrase : 370 "STAY WHERE YOU'RE HAPPY:' 37I " Mr. Talmage, do not be rushing about in Europe, as Americans generally do. Stay where you 'r^ happy ! " We set this down as among the wisest coun- sels ever given us, although at the very first place we stopped it nearly ruined our pros- pects for seeing anything beside Scotland. Americans travelling in Europe are for the most part in immensity of perspiration. Starting with what they call " the small and insignificant island of Great Britain," and having adopted the feeling of the Yankee who said he thought England a very nice little island, but he was afraid to go out nights lest he should fall off, they expect to see all Europe in a few days. They spend much of their time at depots, inquiring about the next train, or rush past Mont Blanc, with no time to stop, chasing up a lost valise. In our company was an American, who had five ladies and eight trunks. Getting into Switzerland, he let the ladles come on to see the mountains, while he went back a two days' journey, asking Belgium and Germany if they had seen anything of his trunks. As he Is unacquainted with the language, but has 372 "STAY WHERE YOU'RE HAPPY." learned that Das Gepack is the German for '' the luggage," I imagine him going through the streets of Heidelberg, Frankfort, and Darmstadt, at dead of night, shouting till the ^people throw open the windows expecting a war-extra : " Das Gepack ! Das Gepack ! " Meanwhile we offered a little cologne to one of the unfortunate party bereft of their "things,'* and she refused to take it; and, on being urged, blushed, and hemm'd, and finally gave as her reason that she had no pocket-handkerchief. Alas ! her clothes by that time were on the way to St. Petersburg or Halifax. But why sneer at the father and husband on his errand of mercy scouring Europe for his wife's silk dresses? May he be prospered! If he do not find the chignons, may he at least be so happy as to discover the pocket-handker- chiefs ! What more Important than clothes ? But for a deficit in this, John Gilpin would have been respectable and happy, even at the time he could not hold his horse. Lack of this is what made Eve chilly in Paradise. As for ourselves, we carry all our baggage "STAY WHERE YOU'RE HAPPY:' 373 in our two hands, and yet we have two changes of apparel a day ; namely, in the morning when we put it on, and in the night when we take it off. Nobody can steal our baggage unless they steal us. Often travellers, worn out with unnecessary incumbrances, wish they were home. They are not happy. They want to go to their mother. We found one American tug- ging along with a Swiss cottage nicely boxed up, the work of an Interlachen artificer. It. made us think of looking up a pocket edition of Jung Frau. Many of our countrymen are exceedingly annoyed at their lack of skill in the use of the European languages. After a vain attempt to make a Parisian waiter understand French, they swear at him in English. But we remembered the art of the physician who put all the remains of old prescriptions in one bottle, — the oil, and the calomel, and the rhubarb, and the assafoeti- da, — and when he found a patient with "com- plication of diseases," would shake up his old bottle and give him a dose. And so we have compounded a language for European travel. We take a little French, and a litde German 32 374 ''STAV WHERE YOU'RE HAPPY:' and a little English, with a few snatches of Chinese and Choctaw, and when we find a stubborn case of waiter or landlord that will not understand, we shake up all the dialects and give him a dose. It is sure to strike somewhere. If we do not make him under- stand, we at any rate give him a terrible scare. We have not the anxiety of some in a strange land about getting things to eat. We like everything in all the round of diet, except ani- mated cheese and odorous codfish; always have a good appetite, never in our lives missed a meal save once, when we could not get any, and knowing that Eine gej^ostete Rindfleisch Schiebe means a beefsteak, Eine Messer2i knife, and Eine Gabel a fork, and Eine Serviette a napkin, after that we feel reckless as to what we can or can not get. In journeying from country to country, the change in the value of coins is apt to be inextricable. But guineas, and florins, and kreutzers, and double ducats cease to be a perplexity to us. We ask the price of a thing, look wise as if we knew all about it, and then hold out our hand and let him take his pick. "STAY WHERE YOU'RE HAPPY:' 375 As riches take wings and fly away, we are determined to lose nothing in that manner. Fifty years from now a Turkish piaster will be worth to me as much as a Holland guilder ; and it worries me not when I am cheated, for the man who cheats must In the end suffer more than I, so that my chagrin is lost in com- passion for his misfortune. In travelling let us go where we like it best, and then be happy. The manufacturer should go to Birmingham and Manchester. The skil- ful and mighty-handed machinery will make an impression upon him that he can get from nothing else. Let the shipwright travelling in Europe take considerable time at the Liver- pool docks, and watch the odd-looking craft that hover about the French coast. The phi- lanthropist will busy himself in looking up Newman Hall's " Ragged Schools," and go out a few days to Bristol to talk with George Muller, and go down to Billingsgate to hear the women sell fish with the same slang as they did fifty years ago. Let the poet go to* Grub Street, Cripplegate, and, as the cab jos- tles through the dark and filthy street, look out 3/6 "STAY WHERE YOU'RE HAPPY:' and see the places In olden time frequented by hungry authors, and have his sensibilities shocked at finding that John Milton's house, in which "Paradise Lost" was written, is now a soap factory. If a man be fond of a fine horse, and wants to see the perfection of neck, and hoof, and back, and flanks, tamed thunderbolts controlled by caparisoned drivers, let him go out every clear evening, at six o'clock, to Hyde Park, or into the Royal Mews, back of Buckingham Place, and see the one hundred and sixty-eight white and bay horses that wait the Queen's bidding. It is folly for a blind man to go to see Gleseback Falls, or a deaf one to hear the Freybourg organ, or a man whose lifetime reading has been confined to the almanac and his own ledger to spend much time in the Reading Room of the British Museum. Stay mily where you 're happy I At the hotel in Antwerp, sitting at the table at the close of a day that had been to me a •rapture among picture-galleries, a man sat down beside me, and said, '* What a dull place ! There seems nothing going on ! " He had "STAY WHERE YOU'RE HAPPY:' Z77 applied to that exquisite city of art the business tests of the Bank of England. That was no place for him. Why did he ever come out from the shuffle and tumult of the London " Strand " ? Much of the world's disquietude comes from the fact that they will not take the advice of the Encrlishman in the words headinor this chapter. Queen Mary was fondled and ca- ressed in France. Courts bowed down and worshipped her beauty. But she went to Scotland, and Elizabeth cut the poor thing's head off. Why did she not stay where she was happy? Walter Scott had a good home in Castle Street, Edinburgh, no debts to pay, all the world bringing offerings to his genius. But he went up to Abbotsford ; must have a roof like Melrose Abbey, and the grounds extensive as a king's park. He sank his fortune, and roused up a pack of angry creditors, each one with his teeth at his throat. How much better for his peace if he had continued In the plain home. Why did he not stay where he was happy? • Maximilian had the confidence of Austria, 32* 3/8 "STAY WHERE YOU'RE HAPPY:' and the richest of all earth's treasures, — the love of a good woman's heart. He gathered up all that he had and went to Mexico. A nation of assassins plotted for his life. He fell riddled with a crash of musketry, and his wife, Carlotta, goes back a maniac. They had enough before they went. They wanted more. One dead ! The other crazy ! Oh, that they had been wise enough to stay where they were happy ! WAR TO THE KNIFE. ITHIN a few days I have seen Bel- glum, Switzerland, Prussia, and Ger- many marching to their frontiers, the two former for armed neutrality, the two latter for bitterest war, and before this para- graph reaches the United States, you will, by telegraph, have heard the first shock of battle. Last Sabbath, Brussels had the appearance of New York city just after the assault on Fort Sumter. The streets were a mass of excited people. Men were flocking in from the country as volunteers, and the soldiers in bright uniform were parading Rue de la Madeleine. As we passed up the Rhine we saw the fortifications swarming with busy men. Strange, that this most peaceful of all rivers 379 380 H'A/? TO THE KNIFE. should be the object of perpetual strife, and that at the sight of its pure, bright water, the kings of the earth should fall down in hydro- phobia of ambition. Long before the vine- yards that crowd to the lip of this stream shall have purpled into ripeness, war will have trod- den out its vintage of blood. From Mayence to Carlsruhe, on either side the rail-track, are earthworks that must have demanded the shovels and pickaxes of the entire population. The rail- carriages are filled with Frenchmen flying the country, the police commanding their departure. The harvests of Prussia, which look like those of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, for luxuriance, are lodging for lack of a sickle, the men having gone to the war. At Cologne, the flowers and curiosities of the city gardens are being brought into the city so as to be under the defence of the forti- fications. The Prussians are enthusiastic, and ready for anything. They are glad that the conflict has come. They havebeen for years hindered in their enterprise by the arrogant behavior of France, and they want the matter settled once WAR TO THE KNIFE. 38 1 and forever. Their officers and troops, so far as we have seen them, are a class of men that must excite the admiration of all who love nobility of character. They are honest, Intelligent, bold ; and though France, with her great discipline of military, may overcome them In the opening battles, Prussia mill never submit to France ! We called long enough to find that even lethargic Heidelberg had gone off in the ex- citement, leaving Its grand old castle and dirty streets for visitors to look at. The city of Basle, Switzerland, In which we are now stopping, has very nearly suspended business, for the purpose of seeing off her soldier boys, who, this morning at daylight, marched under our windows through the nar- row street, the trumpet sounding an air wild, brisk, and strange to our ears. The red tor- rent of patriotism rages down these hills and among these defiles. Though Belgium and Switzerland are armed for neutrality, they are as Indignant at France as Is Prussia ; and it would not require a very grave provocation to call them Into the great struggle. Where the 382 IV A I^ TO THE KNIFE. trouble will end, God only knows. Until the name of Napoleon comes down into the dust, the world cannot have quiet. The power of one bad man to tear the world's heart to pieces, was never so mightily illustrated as at this hour. A woman rushed out of the crowd when Robespierre died, crying, " Murderer of my children ! descend to hell covered with the curses of every woman in France ! " But that is a moderate execration compared with that which we fear will come from all the outraged nations of Europe when Napoleon goes — to his uncle. There is no more glory in war. In the olden time, when Fitz - James and Roderick Dhu met at Coilantogle Ford, and threw their wrath into a combat that crimsoned Loch Vennachar, and made the crags of old Ben-an and Ben Venue echo with the sword-clang, there may have been romance and poetry in combat; but with such weapons as the new contrivance of death which France will bring into the battle, war is murder, compared with which that perpetrated by the hand of Antoine JVAJ^ TO THE KNIFE. 383 Probst and a Five -Points garroter is inno- cence undefiled. Those who tell us that the millennium is about to begin, must have guessed wrong. We saw, a few days ago, in the Tower of London, an astonishing array of old armor, showing what a miff the world has been in for five hundred years. But we were pleased to see in one room how the swords and guns had, by some artistic hand, been arranged into representations of flowers; ramrods and sabres turned Into lilies and fuschais and Scottish bluebells. We offered a silent prayer that soon all the world's implements of death might so blossom. But, alas ! now the red dahlia of human blood shall paint the grass, and instead of the white-fleeced lamb, which Edwin Lan- seer in exquisite picture represents as look- ing Into the mouth of the dismounted gun of war, destruction and woe shall belch out of it. From the sight of this European tumult we turn away to the mountains of Switzerland, and hope to look upon Mont Blanc, that symbol of the Great White Throne on which 384 PVA/^ TO THE KNIFE, all the world's wrongs will be righted. The mountain gazes upon a few kingdoms, but the Throne will overlook France and Prussia and the world and the ages. Switzerland, July 21, 1870. FRESH PAINT. N art, as in everything else, things must pass for what they are worth. A feeble picture by Orcagna is none the less feeble because five hundred years old. I cannot admire his " Coronation of the Vir- gin," wherein he sets the angels to playing bagpipes. Even the Scotch Highlander ex- pects to put down his squealing instrument this side of heaven. There is no power in the centuries to consecrate a failure. Time has a scythe, but no trowel. Age, in the abstract, excites not my veneration. I must first know whether it is an old saint or an old sinner. The worst characteristic about some things is their longevity. A newly-laid egg, boiled just two minutes and a half by the watch, and placed on the table beside a clean napkin, is a 3S Z 385 386 FRESH PAINT. luxury to bless the palate withal ; but some of us remember that once in our boarding-house at school, we chanced at the morning meal to crack the shell of a Pre-Raphaelite ^gg, and, without " returning thanks," precipitately for- sook the table. Antiquity may be bad or good. As with physical vision, so in mental optics there are far-sighted men who cannot see things close by, while a quarter of a mile away they can tell the time of day from the dial on a church steeple. The sulphurous smell in Church's " Cotopaxi " makes them cough and sneeze, though, at the peril of un- hinging their necks from the spinal column, they will stand for hours, looking straight up at a homely Madonna by some ancient Italian, plastered on the rotunda of a Brussels cathe- dral. Having no sympathy with those who expend so much good-humor on the old mas- ters that they have nothing left for moderns, I shall speak of recent pictures, at the risk of rubbing against fresk paint. Americans, more than any other people, want to see the paintings of Joseph William Turner. John Ruskin has devoted more than FRESH PAINT. 387 half of his working life making that painter more famous. But Ruskin's art - criticisms have nowhere been read as in the United States, for the reason that TJie Modern Paint- er's is published in a very cheap American edition, while the English publishers of that book present it only in expensive type and with costly illustrations, thus keeping it be- yond the reach of the masses. Though Turner lies beside Joshua Reynolds in the Cathedral of St. Paul, and his pictures have become the inheritance of the British nation, London knows little more of him than does New York. But nine out of ten of our friends returning from the National Gallery of England express sore disappointment with Turner's paintings. They think it strange that his canvas should excite the great intellect of John Ruskin for fifteen years into a seeming frenzy of admira- tion, so that he can write or speak of nothing else — enduring, in behalf of his favorite art- ist, all acerbity and flagellation, the masters of British and foreign schools bedaubing the brilliant writer with such surplus of paint as 388 FRESH PAINT. they could spare from their own palettes, and pursuing the twain with such ferocity, that, though the first has hidden from his foes be- hind the marble of the tomb, and his defender has, in ruined health, retired to Denmark Hill, nevertheless the curses need some cool- ing yet. Our first glance at these pictures, covering the four walls of two rooms in the gallery, struck us back with violent disappointment. On our last look, on the last day of our visit, we felt an overcoming sadness that probably we never again should find such supernatural power in an artist. We say supernatural, for if we believe that Jeremiah and David and John had more than human power to write, I know not why it would be wrong to suppose that Paul Veronese, and Giotto, and Rem- brandt, and West, and William Turner were divinely inspired to paint. In the one case, it was parchment ; in the other, canvas. Here it was ink ; there it was colors. Now a pen ; then a pencil. Was it not the same power which handed Raphael's "Transfiguration" across four centuries that has conveyed to this FRESH PAINT. 389 present time the New Testament? I never felt so deeply the suffering- of the Saviour, when reading the description in Luke and John, as when standing in the cathedral at Antwerp. Looking at the " Crucifixion," by Rubens, I was beaten down and crushed In soul, and, able to look no more, I staggered out, faint, and sick, and exhausted, the sweat dropping from every pore. I will not advocate the supernal inspiration of any of these men, ancient or modern ; but must say that the paintings of William Turner exerted over me an Influence different from anything I have experienced. The change between my first and last look of this British artist is to be explained by the change of stand-point. No paintings in the world are so dependent upon the position occupied by the spectator. Gazed at from ordinary distances, they are insipid, meaningless, exaggerated. You feel as if they had not been done with a pencil, but a broom. It seems that each one of them must have taken two quarts of stuff to make it as thick as that. You* almost expect the colors to drip off — you feel like taking your 390 FRESH PAINT. handkerchief and sopping up the excess. But, standing close up to the opposite wall, you see a marked improvement ; yet, even then, the space between you and the picture is too small. You need to pass through into the next room, and then, looking through the doorway, fasten your eye on the painting. Six paces off, and Turner's " Decline of Car- thage "is a vexation; but twenty- two paces off, with an eye-glass, and Turner's " Decline of Carthage " is a rapture. From the last stand - point, looking at " The Spithead," we felt like dividing our life into two portions — that which had occurred before we saw Turner, and that which might occur afterward. This master shifted his style four times. No one mood lasted him long. So many a man looks back, and finds that his life has been a series of fits. Perhaps very young in literature, he had a fit Tupperian. Passing on a few years, and he was taken with a fit Byronian. Getting into calmer waters of life, he was attacked with a fit metaphysical. As might be expected, from being out so much in the fog, he took a violent fit Carlylean. Then, FRESH PAINT. 39I at the close of life, he reviewed his intellectual gyrations ; and, disgusted with his ramblings, he had a fit of common sense, which was such a sudden change from anything preceding that it killed him. It is easy to trace Turner through a variety of artistic spasms, but he is always entertaining. We cannot forget his " Caligula's Palace : " the magnificence of destruction ; the ages of the past looking through the ruined porticos and shivering on the top of the broken marble ; the bridge, in its leap across the bay, struck with a death^ of desolation that leaves it a skeleton in the way ; children playing in the foreground, their diminutiveness and simplicity, by the contrast, piling up the height of the towers, and the gorgeous pretension of the imperial domain ; the sun rising just high enough to show that carved pillars of stone belonging to a kingly fool are but dust when the " Rock of Acres " crashes aorainst them. o o Who can forget the light that Turner pours on Venice, the Campanile of San Marco, the Dogana — light falling with the positiveness of a pebble, but the diffusiveness of a liquid — 392 FRESH PAINT. light that does not strike on the water and stop there, but becomes transfused and inter- mixed — nay, which, by matchless chemistry of color, becomes a part of the wave, so that you cannot say which is light and which is water : gondolas variegated, dropping all their hues into the wave — gondola above, gondola beneath, and moving keel to keel. Light, though so subtle that it flies from other touch, Turner picked up, nor let it slip through his fingers till it touched the canvas. John Mar- tin, the Northumberland painter, tried to catch the light, but instead thereof caught the fire that burns up many of his fine pictures. Turner's light is neither a hot element to con- sume nor a lifeless thinof that mio^ht be called a mere pallor on the cheek of the darkness, but so natural you hardly know whether it drops from the sky-window into the gallery, or was kindled by the hand which for twenty years has been mouldering in the crypt of Saint Paul Cathedral. What water Turner painted ! The waves of the sea knew him. No man could pour such moonlight upon the Thames as he ; or FRESH PAINT. 393 could SO well run the hands of the sea up and down the sides of a stranded ship ; or could so sadden the Hellespont with the farewell of Leander ; or toss up the water in a squall so natural that you know the man in the fishing- smack must be surprised at the suddenness ; or so infuriate the Channel at Calais that you wish you did not, on your way home, have to cross it; or could have dropped a castle- shadow so softly and yet so deep into a stream. The wave of William Turner was not, as in many pictures, merely wet white- wash, but a mingling of brightness and gloom, crystal and azure, smoothed down as a calm morning tramples it, or flung up just as the winds do it. Then, all this thrown into a perspective so marked, that, seeing it for the first time, you feel that you never before knew what per- spective was. You can hardly believe that the scene he sketches is on the dead level of the wall. You get on the bank of his river in " Prince's Holiday," and follow it back through its windings, miles away, and after you think you will be compelled to stop, you see it still 394 FRESH PAINT. beyond, and when you can no more keep the bank, you see in still greater distance what you say may be cloud, and may be water, but you cannot decide. Turner can put more miles within a square foot than any one we know of. There are always back-doors open- ing beyond. But his foreshortening is quite as rare. Often his fishermen and warriors and kings are not between the frame of the picture, but between you and the canvas. You almost feel their breath on your cheek, and stand back to give them room to angle, or fight, or die. After exploring miles of pictures, the two on secular themes that hang in my memory, higher than all, deeper than all, brighter than all, are Turner's "Parting of Hero and Leander ; " and Turner's " Palace and Bridge of Caligula." And there they will hang for- ever. Yet his rivals and enemies hounded him to death. Unable longer to endure the face of a public which had so grievously maltreated him, with a broken heart he went out from his ele- gant parlors on Queen Anne Street, to die in FRESH PAINT. 395 a mean house In Chelsea. After he was life- less, the world gathered up his body, played a grand march over it, and gave it honored sepulture. Why did they not do justice to him while living ? What are monuments worth to a dead man ? Why give stones when they asked for bread? Why crack and crush the jewel, and then be so very careful about the casket? Away with this oft-repeated grave- yard farce ! Do not twist into wreaths for the tomb the flowers with which you ought to have crowned the heated brow of a living painter. ./T-:. BRUTES. DWIN LAXDSEER has come to a better understandinor of the brute creation than has any other man. He must have had a pet spaniel, or cat, or horse, that in hours of extreme confidence gave him the secret grips, signs, and passwords of the great fraternity of animals. He knows the language of feathers, the feeling of a sheep being sheared, of an ox goaded, and the humiliation of a dosf when kicked off the piazza. In presence of Landseers hunted stag, you join sides with the stag, and wish him escape from the hounds ; and when pur- suers and pursued go tumbling over the rocks into the mad torrent beneath, the reindeer with lolling and bloody tongue, and eye that .396 BRUTES. 397 reels Into its last darkness, you cry "Alas!" for the stag, but " Good ! " for the hounds ; and wonder that the painter did not take the dogs off the scent before the catastrophe. Was ever a bay mare more beautifully shod than, In Kensington Museum, Landseer shoes her. The blacksmith-shop Is just such a one as we rode to, with rope-halter on the horse's head, and when, barefoot, we dis- mounted, the smith of the leathern apron, and rusted spectacles, and hands seemingly for five years an exile from wash-basins, bade us look out how we trod on the hot Iron. Does any- thing sound more clearly through the years than the wheeze of the old bellows, and the clanor of the sledcre- hammer, and the whistle of the horse-tail brush with which we kept off the flies ; while, with the uplifted and uneasy foot of the horse between the workman's legs, he clenched the nail, clipped off the ragged- ness of the hoof, and filed smooth the surface, the horse flinching again and again, as the nail came too near the quick ? And then the lightning of the sparks as the hammer fell on the red-hot iron, and the chuck and siss 34 398 BRUTES. and smoke of the bar as it plunged Into the water - bucket ! Oh ! there was a rugged poetry in a blacksmith -shop, and even now the sound of the old wagon-tire at the door rouses me up like a war-whoop, and in the breath of the furnace I glow with memories. Only a few months ago, I walked into a city blacksmith-shop, and asked if at any time I could get a horse shod there. You see, there might be a time when I would buy a horse, and he might need such services ; but our chief reason for going in was that we wanted to see if such a place looked as it did of yore. As Landseer lifts the back foot of the bay mare, the wrinkles of her haunches are warm with life, and her head turns round most nat- urally to oversee the job, as much as to say : " Be careful how you drive that nail," or, "Your holding my hoof is very uncertain." On behalf of all the horses which go limping with ill-set shoe and nails in the hock, I thank this blacksmith. I know he is doing his work well, or, from the spirit of the mare, he would before this have been hurled into the BRUTES. 399 middle of the turnpike — hammer, apron, and nail-box. No one so well as Landseer can call up a bloodhound, and make him lie down in the right place — a decided case of armed peace. You treat him well, not so much because of your respect for dogs, as out of consideration for your own interest. Walk softly about him and see the great reefs of hide — more skin than a dog needs, as though he had been planned on a larger scale, but after he had begun to be filled in, the original plan had been altered. See the surplusage of snarl in that terrier, and of hair on that poodle, and how damp he is on the end of his nose ! And here you find one of Landseer's cows, full-uddered, glad to be milked. You will see the pail foam over soon if that careless milk- maid does not upset it. Bless me ! I have seen that cow a hundred times before. It is the very one I used, in boyhood, to drive up as the evening breeze was rustling the corn- silk, and making the tall tassels wave like the plumes of an Indian warrior squatting in the woods: a cow of kindly look, the breath of 400 BRUTES. clovei sweeping from her nostrils, meeting me at the bars with head through the rails, and low moan of petition for the barn-yard. Even the donkey is introduced with a loving touch in Landseer's pictures. Now, a man who can favorably regard mule or ass is a marvel of sympathy. I am in fresh memory of a mule in the Alps. He might as well have lived on Newark Flats, for all the good fine scenery did him. With what an awkward tread he carried me up to the Mer de Glace, jerking backward and forward, so that I was going both ways at once, but, nevertheless, slowly advancing, because the jerk forward was somewhat in excess of the jerk backward. The flies were ravenous, and to catch one of them he would stop mid-cliff, throw one foot up till he struck my foot in the stirrup, as though he proposed to get on himself, and then would put his head back, till nothing save a strong grip of the saddle kept me from see- ing the Alps inverted. But have the fly he would, reckless of shout and whip, and thump of heel in the side. Mules are stubborn, crafty — unlike men, in the fact that they look BRUTES. 401 chiefly after their own interests (?) ; but these brutes are not very intelligent, considering, from their ears, how large an opportunity they have of hearing. They have most imperfect intonation, and but little control over their voice. When a donkey begins to bray, it seems he does not know when he will be able to stop, or whether the voice will rise or fall in its cadences. But donkeys cannot help this, and for their sins they are to be pitied. Therefore, Edwin Landseer calls them into his pictures. What a kind man he must be ! Blessed the dog that fawns at his feet, the horse that draws his carriage, the cat that mews on his window-sill, the deer that ranees through his park ! Thrice blessed their mas- ter! Animals in Europe are more sympathized with than in America. I see no over-driven horses, no unsheltered cattle, no cracking away at birds with old blunderbusses, just for the sake of seeing the feathers flutter. When, on the 1 2th of August, all England and Scodand go a-grouse-hunting, and Perth and Aberdeen and Inverness and Chatsworth are shaken with 34* 2 A r 402 BRUTES. a continuous bang of sportsmen, there is no cruelty. It is an honest lift of the gun, a fair look across the barrel, a twitch of the fore- finger of the right hand, a flash, and game for dinner at Peacock Inn or Elephant and Castle. You see more animals in bronze and stone in Europe than in the United States. If young Americans, wanting quills to write with, have plucked the American eagle, till, featherless, and with an empty craw, it sits on the top of the Rocky Mountains wishing it were dead, the English have paid quite as much attention to the lion. You see it done up in every shape, sitting or standing, everywhere. The fountains are guarded with lions; the entrances of houses flanked with lions; the signs of stores adorned with lions, — fighting lions, sleeping lions, crying lions, laughing lions, couchant lions. English artists excel with this animal. When French and German sculptors attempt one, it is merely a lion in the abstract, too weak to rend a kid, and never having seen a jungle. But lying on the base of Nelson's monument in Trafalgar Square are four lions that look as though they had a moment before BRUTES, 403 laid down there and curled their long tails peacefully around, and had just stopped there a few minutes to see what was going on at Charing Cross and the Cockspur. On the top of Northumberland House is a lion with mouth open and tail extended in rigid rage, so that it is uncertain which way to run, as you know not with which end he will as- sault you. There are more lions in London than in Numidia. Beef and mutton are liked well by the Englishman, but for regular diet, give him lion. European horses look better satisfied than American. They either have more fodder or less drive. The best-kept horses I ever found are in Antwerp. I saw but one lean nag in that city, and that one I think was an emigrant just arrived. When good American horses die, they go to Antwerp. Europeans caress the dog. He may lie on the mat or sit near the table. Among the Alps we had a wretched dinner — not lacking in quantity or variety, but in quality. There was enough of it, such as it was. The eggs had seen their best days, and the mutton must 404 BRUTES. have been good for two or three weeks after they killed it. A Saint Bernard dog sat near by, petitioning for a morsel. The landlord was out — we saw by the bill of fare we should have high rates to pay — we could do nothing ourselves toward clearing the plates, and so we concluded to feast our friend of Saint Ber- nard. We threw him half an omelet, assuring him first that the amount we gave him would depend on the agility with which he caught it. Either not understanding French, or being surprised at the generosity of the provision, he let half the omelet fall to the floor, but he lost no time in correcting the failure. We threw him a mutton-chop. With a snap of the eye and a sniff, and a long sweep of the tongue over the jaw, he said by his looks as plainly as if he had spoken with his lips : " I like that better. I never get mutton-chops. I think they will agree with me." When the landlord came in, he suspected that some unusual pro- ceeding had taken place between his guests and the dog, and so he kicked him out of the room. The remainincr sin within us suofaested our treating the landlord as he had treated the BRUTES. 405 mastiff, but our profession, and more espe- cially the size of the man, restrained us. I left the inn more sorry to leave Bernard than his keeper. Among the worthiest dogs of the world, or rather of the church, are the Saint Bernards. They have no frisk of merriment. The shadow of the great ledges is in their eyes, and the memory of travellers lost in Alpine snows is in their hearts. When you meet them, cheer them up with chops and omelets. European cities are not ashamed to take some bird or beast under their patronage. Venice looks especially after her pigeons. Strasburg pets the storks whose nests are on almost all the chimneys. Berne carefully guards her bears. Egypt apotheosizes cats. Oh, that the cruelty of man to bird and beast might come to an end ! They have more right to the world than man, for they preceded him In the creation, the birds having been made on Friday and the cattle on Saturday morning, and man coming: in at the faof-end of the week. No wonder that these aborigines of the world sometimes resist, and that the bees sting, and 4o6 BRUTES. the bears growl, and the cats get their backs up, and dogs bark, and eagles defend their eyries with iron beak, the crags echoing with the clangor of this flying squadron of the sky. London, August 27th, 1870. A NATION STUNNED. HE lonof finorer of the oceanic tele- graph may write on the multiform sheet of the '' Associated Press " the news of victory or defeat; but no one not stopping in Paris to-day can realize the condi- tion of things. The city is dazed and con- founded. Paris never before came so near keeping Sunday as on the first day of this week. Not many concerts, but little convivi- ality, and no carousal — it did not seem like Sabbath at all. August 15th, the Emperor's /S^e day, the Fourth of July of France, fell dead in front of the Tuileries. Instead of Paris on fire with illumination, the streets were dull, and the palace, as we passed along at night, had but one lighted window, 407 408 A NATION STUNNED. save the light of the employes in the base- ment. Whatever may be one's opinion in regard to the French Government, he must sympa- thize with this afflicted people. Before this paragraph reaches the United States, the pen- dulum of feeling may have swung from the extreme of sorrow to the extreme of joy ; but not once in a hundred years does Paris sit in ashes. She knows how to shout in a carousal, and to howl in a massacre ; but it is the strangest thing of the century to see Paris in a "fit of the blues." Yesterday we drove out on the Bols de Boulogne, which might be called " the Central Park " of Europe ; and in all the ride we passed not a single vehicle. At a concert on Saturday night we heard the Marseillaise Hymn so gloriously sung by soldiers, in full uniform, with flags and guns, that we involun- tarily threw up our hats, not knowing exactly what we were excited about ; but the general applause that responded to the national air was not as lively as you might hear in any place of amusement in the United States on A NATION STUNNED. 409 any night of the year. I know not but that this quiet may be the lull before the tempest of fire that shall sweep back the Prussians from the French frontier ; but Paris sits dumb- struck to-day. The prizes that were to have been given last week in the schools have been withheld. There is no sound of laughter or mirth. Even intoxication has a subdued voice, and men stagger around having a quiet drunk. Many of the fountains accustomed to dance in the light are still, or only weep a few doleful drops into the stone basin. With thirty-seven news- papers in Paris, there is no news. A placard of a few lines on the walls of the city, about every other day, announces something very unimportant. We get occasionally a London Times, but are left chiefly to our imagination ; and when our friends ask us what the news is, we tell them that the Dutch have fallen back on Amsterdam, and the Germans advanced to Darmstadt. Tourists are in a panic. Americans rush to the steamship offices, wanting to go on the Cunard, Inman, or National Line, or even a 35 4IO A NATION STUNNED. first-class schooner ; and almost ready, were It not for the anxiety of their friends, to go afoot. Some of our friends who have never seen Paris dart down from Switzerland to this city, and take the first train for Calais, expecting to be massacred before they get across the city. We have concluded to risk it a little longer. As we have come on a tour of sight -seeing, we shall stay till we see all ; trusting first in the good Providence which has always seen us through, and secondly upon our American passport. This, of all summers, has been the best for travelling in Europe to those who happened to take Germany first. The climate has been so delicious that we have not suffered from one hot blast. The hotels, heretofore surfeited with patronage and unobliging, now give the best rooms and most obsequious attendance. You have your pick of a dozen carriages, each one underbidding the other. You have a whole rail - carriage for your own party. Though there be but one American newspa- per in the reading-room, no one else wants it. You look at the pictures without the imperti- A NATION STUNNED. 4II nence of any one passing before you. There is plenty of room in the diligence for Cha- mouni. You buy things at cheap rates, be- cause there is no rivalry among purchasers. You hear bands of martial music enlivening the air by day and night. And, besides that, one feels it grand to be here at a point of time which must be as im- portant in history as 1572, when the belfry of St. Germain L'Auxerrois tolled for the horrors, of St. Bartholomew's day. And who would blame me if my pen should this moment trem- ble a little along the line as I write, within hearing distance of the place where the mob hurled the four hundred massacred Swiss guards from the king's balcony, and only a few steps from the place where the chop of the guillotine tumbled the head of Marie An- toinette into the dead-box. May the torch of Parisian splendor never through the pool of human blood go hissing out into darkness ! The torn and shotted battle -flags of France hang in the chapel of Hotel des Invalides, where the old soldiers worship. Oh ! that the banners of the Prince 412 A NATION STUNNED. of Peace might be set up in the Tuileries ! The Arc de Triomphe has In letters of stone all the battle-fields of the first Napoleon. Oh ! that soon, under the arch of heavenly triumph, Immanuel might come up from the conquest of all the nations. In the illumination of that victory there will be no light of burning home- steads ; in the wine of that feast there will be no tears. In a week we start for home. The most welcome sight to us in three months will be the faces of our friends. / am tired of resting. Speed on the days between this and the best rest that a man ever gets on earth — the joy of preaching the gospel which offers to make all men happy and free ! In body, mind, and soul I thrill with the anticipation. |HERE have been men with power to absorb a city. It matters not which way you walk in Edinburgh, you find Walter Scott, and see the unparted hair combed down straight on the great dome of his forehead. You are shown Walter Scott's cane, and Walter Scott's jack-knife, and Walter Scott's white hat, and Walter Scott's residence. After two hundred years, Peter Paul Rubens carries Antwerp in his vest-pocket. The citizens adore him. You are taken to see Rubens' house, and to look at Rubens' statue, and to study Rubens' pictures, and at the mention of his name the face of the dullest Belgian is illuminated. The sceptre that sways Antwerp to-day is a painter's pencil. 35* 413 414 "A^." Coming to Paris, you find a more powerful memory presiding oyer everything. It Is not a name that you see, but simply an Initial In- scribed on pillar, and wall, and arch, and chapel. You go Into the Hotel de Vllle, a place where architecture, and painting, and sculpture have done their best: statues, and fluted columns, and ceilings supported by elaborate caryatides, and stairs so gracefiil they do not climb but alight, and galleries not so much set fast as seemingly on the wing ; gold twisted, and carved, and chased into all the witcheries of beauty ; and after you have walked from rich apartments to the richest, you look upon a platform, on which there is one empty chair, In the upholstery of which is em- broidered the initial, " N." You go into the Pantheon, that holds Its crowned head higher than all other structures in Paris, a building bewildering with attrac- tions, whether you look down to its exquisite mosaic floor, or aside to its carved oaken chapels, or through white clouds of sculptured saints and apostles Into the frescoed dome bright with the wings of angels flying in the midst of heaven ; and as your eye slips from the dizzy height and comes falling down from balustrade to capital, you see encircled by a wreath the initial, N. Louis XV., who laid the corner-stone of this building, would not have liked that letter put there. Charles, who went into raptures with the church, would have objected to such an inscription. Marat, with all his hardness, would have opposed the marking of a reli- gious structure with any human name save his own. Yet so it is, no L for Louis, no C for Charles, no M for Marat; but on right and left, and where least you might expect it, the inevitable N ! N ! You go into one of the rooms of the Louvre, and you are shown Napoleon's saddle, and Napoleon's watch, the hands at seven minutes past three, the moment he died, and his last gray coat, the summer worms having eaten in it two or three holes, for there is nothing that moth may not corrupt; and knife, and cup, and chess-board, on which he played out his games of war in miniature. You look up to see the name of the room. Right over the 416 . . "iV." door, any man who knows his letters may discover it, N ! There is no mistaking this initial for any- thing else. B might be taken for an R, or C for an O, or I for a J ; but in the letter spoken of there are two perpendiculars, and between them a line dropped aslant from the top of one to the bottom of the other ; and there you have it so that you can see it anywhere, the unmistakable N ! If you want your stay in Paris to be climac- teric, leave till the last your visit to the tomb of Napoleon. As you go into the gate, an old man, who was with the great Frenchman at St. Helena, will sell you a poor picture of something that no photographist can catch. It Is a cathedral three hundred and twenty- three feet high, having cost two million dollars, dedicated to one dead man. Under its bur- nished dome is a concentration of wonders. Not his ashes resting there, but the embalmed and undecayed body of Napoleon, in military suit, in a red sarcophagus of Finlander quartz- ite, polished to the last perfection by skilful machinery, and resting on a block of green N." 417 granite, surrounded by twelve funeral lamps of bronze, and twelve marble statues of great size, one with a wreath, as if to crown ; another with a pen, as if to make record for the ages ; another with a key, as if to open the celestial gate for a departed spirit; an- other with trumpet, to clear the way for the coming of a king ! The pavement enamelled into a crown of laurels, from which radiates on all sides a living star. There are gilded gates, and speaking cenotaphs and radiant canopy, and elaborate basso-relievos, and embossed pillars, and two Persian statues, holding on cushions a sceptre and a world, and ceilings a -blossom with finest frescos by French and Italian masters, their light dripping down the marble in blue, and saffron, and emerald, and gold. Oh ! it is a dream of beauty ! If the dead Giant could wake up and look around, he might think he lay in the Moscow palace that he coveted, and the glistening whiteness around were the morning shining on Russian snows, or that universal empire had come to him ; and to make his palace Egypt had sent its por- 2B 41 8 "^." ^ phyry, and Switzerland its marble, and Greece its sculpture, and Rome its pictures, and France its bronze ; and that the reverential spectators in all kinds of national costume, leaning over the balustrade to look, were the adoring sub- jects of a universal reign. At last we thought we had found a building that had escaped the all -conquering initial. From dome to base all is so significant of this one great man that no inscription will be neces- sary ; but turning to the window the old spec- tacle trembled upon my sight, in gilt, all by itself, N ! And Paris is thus signed through and through; and when the 15th of August comes, it is written out in fire on Boulevard and arch, on Champs Elysees and Bois de Boulogne, in front of restaurant and palace, under the silk veil of lighted fountain, and on the night in sky-rockets, N, N, N. All this may be well, but the thought comes to us that great men are expensive luxuries. We are told that Napoleon was the benefactor of the world. If you admit it, then, I ask, were his achievements worth the two great «iV." 419 highways of bone-dust reaching across Europe, showing which way he went out, and which way he came in ? Were they worth a continent of destroyed families, and the myriads of souls flung away into smoke of battle ? Were his bones worth the hundreds of men who, com- ing out to do him honor, froze to death on the day his remains were brought back to Paris ? Were his achievements worth the two million and a half dollars that he spent on his triumphal arches, and the two millions that built his tomb ? Answer the question as you may, great men are expensive luxuries. Paris, August 25 th. PICTURES FELT. NE of the aorgrravations of a travel- ler's life is the being compelled to give but four days to a gallery that demands as many years. As we hasten through, we feel the fingers of worn artists pulling us back, as much as to say : " Is this the way you look at what it took years of pri- vation and toil to do ? " Rembrandt says : " You did not see that wrinkle in the old man's face. It took me weary hours to sink that!" MuUer says : " You did not notice the twist of straw in that upturned chair ! " Delacroix won- ders that we pass his river Styx without a tear over the distressed boatmen. Guerin upbraids us for slighting that drapery which he was a month in hanging. Yet we break away and 420 PICTURES FELT. 421 push on, In a few hours of time passing through a seeming eternity of painstaking. But, as after days of walking through strange cities, there are only five or six faces among the multitudes that you remember, so we recall only a few of the thousands of pic- tures along which we have passed. PAUL VERONESE. Going through the Louvre at Paris, we were arrested by "The Marriage at Cana." In two minutes we are one of the guests. We are not looking at representations of faces, but feel the presence of one hundred and twenty people. At first we are crowded, but soon all stand back to their places, and you are undisturbed by the multitude. We cannot doubt that It Is genuine ivine ; you are sure of the absence of logwood and strych- nine. Wine kept twenty years Is a rarity, but Paul Veronese mingled this three hundred years ago, aijd it has Improved by age. How true the stoop of the servant as he pours out the wine from the amphora Into the cup, his chief feeling one of care, lest the liquid 36 422 PICTURES FELT. spill. He is not much astonished at the mirac- ulous change that has come on the water. His head is thick through from temple to tem- ple. He would not be surprised if the vessel poured apricots. It is his duty to empty the liquid from the larger to the smaller, and that is all he cares about. But you look around to see how the guests take it. This one looks incredulously at the glass. He hardly thinks it is wine. He prides himself on the fact that he cannot be deceived. He is ready to admit the transform- ation. He will keep on tasting it till the cup is emptied once and again, and then will say, "There may be wine in it. Indeed it tastes like it ; but I will not commit myself It is a dangerous precedent. After a while we shall have things so mixed up we will not know when we are drinking wine and when water. For my part, when I pour water into a jar, I prefer to pour nothing save water out." But here is a guest who has eye and hand lifted toward heaven. He feels that the God of the vineyards and the springs must, with his finger, have stirred the amphora. Here is PICTURES FELT. 423 an abstracted, philosophic face. The man sees not so much the flushed water as the lone line of conclusions that must flow from it. It is not with him a mere question whether his tongue is being laved with the insectiferous water of Galilee, or tingling with a beverage that moment brewed at the door of the ban- quet-hall. It is with him a question between jugglery and omnipotence. From the rim of that glass radiate the eternities. There sits a woman waiting for the glass to 'come up. She simply wants a drink. She is very red. Evidently the wine that had been passed before the miracle was not as good as this. One cup will not do for her. Pass up one of the big ewers. I see now why the first quantum of wine so soon gave out. She looks upon this affair solely as one of supply and demand. I do not like her. I wish that Paul Veronese had not invited her. Notwithstand- ing her fine dress, she is not fit for this com- pany. Let her go home and guzzle in private. She will be drunk before the night is over, unless the new refreshments are free from intoxicating quality. The biggest fool on 424 PICTURES FELT. earth is a handsome, gayly-dressed woman, when she has taken three glasses too many. At the foot of the picture are a cat, two dogs, and a clown, with parrot and bells. This unseemly fellow is evidently swelling with inflammation of witticism. He feels out of place. He has, amid this miraculous scene, no chance to ply his trade. A professed joker is in Purgatory on a serious occasion. Wit is healthy only when mingled with sense, as . hydrogen is a necessity in pure air, but when alone is poison. The evident idea in the pic- ture is to make a striking contrast ; but I can see no good reason for introducing the cat, and the scrawny dogs, and the loathsome clown, save that the clown might be set after the dogs, and the dogs after the cat, and they all become so engaged in the chase they would never come back again. It seems to us that Paul Veronese has made the accessories of the picture too imposing. You wonder why they allowed the wine to give out in such a sumptuous place. There are the water-jars finely chiselled, and the pil- lars grandly capitalled, and the walls preten- PICTURES FELT. 425 tiously statued. The servants bend as If their backs would break under the burden of viands still coming in. The plates at this late hour in the feast are still nearly full. If all the par- aphernalia represented by the painter were true, then the exhaustion of the wine must be either ascribed to paucity of calculation on the part of the host, or extraordinary thirstiness of the oruests. Not willino- to believe either of these, we are disposed to think that the scene of the wedding was really an humble home, and that the provider of the banquet, in inviting so many more than he could feast, only proved that his heart was bigger than his purse. But this picture lifts itself up royally in the Louvre, bidding back into forgetfulness many of the statues, bas-reliefs, Apollos, and Dianas that were best looked at about midnight with- out a candle. One of the great wants of Parisian art-galleries is more fig-leaves. But this picture stands out pure and exalted. Blessed are the eyes that see it ! Marriage is no more a carousal, but a sacrament. Bid- ding back all the shadows of his own life, 36* 426 PICTURES FELT, Christ sits here th*;. King of banqueters. And while we see the glowing beverage passed around, we catch a glimpse of the time when the wine-cup carried down into the Babylon of dissipation shall be brought back, and set upon our tables, and there shall no more be the eyeball of death in the bubble on the top, nor the sting of adders wriggling in the dregs at the bottom. THOMAS WEBSTER. To this painter there^ was given a revelation of boys. Between six and fourteen years of aofe the masculine nature is a mixture of mis- chief, and sensitiveness, and spunk, and fun, and trouble, and pugnacity, that the chemistry of the world fails to analyze. A little girl is definable. She laughs when she is pleased, cries when she feels badly, pouts when she is cross, and eats when she is hungry. Not so with a boy. He would rather go a-nutting than to eat, forgets at the fish-pond he has not had his di iner, often laughs when he feels badly, and looks submissive to an imposition practised ipon him till he gets the perpetrator PICTURED FELT. 42/ alone in the middle of the road, and tumbles him into the dirt till eyes and mouth and nose are so full the fellow imagines that, before his time, he has returned to dust. A boy, under a calm exterior, may have twenty emo- tions struggling- for ascendency. After a boy has been tamed by hard disci- pline, and wears a stock, and has learned to walk down street without any temptation to "skip-skop," and sees only nonsense in leap- frog, and enjoys Calvin's Institutes above Rob- inson Crusoe, and feels feathers on the elbows premonitory symptoms of cherub, he ceases to be a mystery. But Thomas Webster, in " The Dame School " in Kensington Museum, Lon- don, gives us the unperfected boy such as we more frequently see him, namely, boy in the raw. This creature is somewhat rough, and uncertain as to where he will break out, super- latively susceptible to tickle, is bound to lose his hat, and comes in red in the face from just having swallowed his slate-pencil. Thomas Webster, in this picture, manages boys and girls perfectly. There he places the spectacled old schoolmistress. I remember 428 PICTURES FELT, her perfectly well, although I have not seen her since I was eight years old, and yet I would have known her anywhere by her nose. Fifty hot summers have dried up all the juices of her nature. Her countenance is full of whack and thump, and the gad she holds in her hand is as thick at one end as the other, not mod- erating into any mercy of thinness. It would never be mistaken for the rod that budded. Boys studying " Rule of Three " look round at her to study rule of one, and, in multiplying the sum of school troubles, carry nine when they ought to carry nothing. How sharp her eyes are ! The boys sitting on the opposite side of the room feel her look on their back clear through the fustian. There is the cracked and peeling wall. There are the hats, and bonnets, and satchels. There is a little girl threading a needle. She will have to twist tighter the end of the thread or she will never get it through that fine head. She will soon be able to hem handkerchiefs, and to take stitches for her mother. May she never have to sew for a living, sorrow and an- guish and despair bigger than a camel going PICTURES FELT. 429 through the eye of her needle ! Here is a boy prompting another in the recitation, telHng him wrong, I am certain. There always was some fellow to get us into trouble with geogra- phy, grammar, or arithmetic lesson, telling us that the capital of Virginia is Texas, and that baboon is a personal pronoun, and that in every whole there are three halves and six quarters. There is a little girl crying over her lesson. Why cannot somebody show her? Napoleon getting his ammunition wagons over the Saint Bernard pass had nothing to do compared with the tug of a little child making her first trial at spelling ''bakery The alphabet to many has been twenty-six tortures. Here stands a little girl with her finger in her mouth. The schoolmistress has not seen it, or she would put an end even to that small con- solation. School is no place for a bee to suck honey out of a flower. A boy is looking through a sheet of paper, which he has rolled into a scroll like a telescope — he is probably an astronomer in the early stages. Here is a plodding boy, prying away at his books. He suffers many impositions from his 430 PICTURES FELT. comrades. Away ! you young scamps with those sticks with which you are annoying him! When a joke is told, and the children laugh, he will turn around with a bashful and be- wildered look, imagining himself the victim of the satire, but next day will cackle out in the quiet of school-time at the sudden discov- ery of the meaning of the witticism. But he may yet outstrip them all. When a boy's head is so thick it is hard for knowledge to get in, the same thickness prohibits its depart- ure. Give him thirty years, and he will make a dictionary. There a boy makes faces, and the whole school is in danger of runninof over with giggle. It is an awful thing for a child not to dare to laugh when the merriment rises, and wells up till the jacket gets tight, and the body is a ball of fun ; and he knows that if out of one of the corners of his compressed lips a snicker should escape, all the boys would go off in explosion. I remember times when I had at school such responsibility of repression resting on me, and proved unfaith- ful. PICTURES FELT. 43 1 There ! to severely correct them, a boy and girl are placed beside each other — a style of punishment greater at that age than ever after. Here is a boy making way with an apple be- hind his lifted book. I expect some one will cry out, " John Greed is eating an apple ! " for it is a peculiarity of children under ten years of age (?) that they do not like others to have that which they themselves cannot get. Whether it be right or wrong, in their estima- tion, depends on whether themselves or some- body else has the apple. Just outside the school-room door is a boy showing his strength. As he turns up his arm in the light, he says, through the art of the painter, "Do you see that muscle?" He is good at a wrestle, can run round all the bases at one stroke of the bat, can take the part of a wronged urchin, and I fear, if the school- dame comes too suddenly at him with the stick, she may lose the glass out of her spectacles. There will be no Sunday-school books made about him, although out of his brawn of body, and mind, and soul, there may yet come an Oliver Cromwell, or a Martin Luther. ^ 432 PICTURES FELT. Thank Thomas Webster for taking us back to school by his painting ! It is the only way we should like to go back. We had rather be almost anything than a boy, the world so little understands him. ROSA BONHEUR. We owe not more to the painters than to the engravers, although for the most part we let them sit, with worn fingers and half-extin- guished eyes, begrudging them the few shil- lings we pay them for their expensive work. They are mediators between us and the great pictures of the world. They popularize art. The people, through drinking these lighter wines, feel the taste for pictures growing on them, till they must have the stronger and intoxicating potions of art, mixed by a Rem- brandt or Claude-Lorraine. And so we can see Raphael's "Transfiguration" without going to Rome ; Leonardo da Vinci's " Last Supper " without going to Milan ; Angelo's " Three Fates " without a-oino- to Florence ; and Rosa Bonheur's "Horse Fair" without going to London. PICTURES FELT. 433 But there are many of the best pictures that have never attracted the eng-raver s art, and, for the most part, the v^orld is ignorant of them. In Luxembourg Gallery, at Paris, hanging in a very poor light, or rather first- rate darkness, is a hay - gathering scene, by Rosa Bonheur. After for hours looking upon helmets, and swords, and robes, and prim par- terres, where grass does not grow without asking the gardener, and there are impossible horses on impossible roads, carrying impossible riders, I came upon this country-scene, in imagi- nation threw myself down on the grass, and unbuttoned my shirt-collar to let the air of the fields strike the skin clear down to the chest. The weather is showery. It will rain in twenty minutes. The men, aware of this, are hasten- ing in the load. The hair of this workman is soaked with sweat, and hangs in strings, as if just out of a dripping bath. The women work so awkwardly you feel that the place for them is the house. The one on the load is evidently not so anxious to pack the hay as to save her own neck, in case the oxen should start. She feels it a risky business on an uneven field to 37 2C 434 PICTURES FELT. Stand on a rocking load. A rosy, white-capped maiden, of seventeen years, standing with rake in hand, does not work very fast. She is at an age when maidens are apt to take it some- what easy. She does not think it will hurt the hay much if it does get wet. Besides that, the shower may pass around. A workman is looking at her bright face. He, too, has for- gotten the showery weather. No use, my dear fellow ! You are too old for her. From her absent look, I know she is thinking now of the nightfall, and of some one who will come in clean smock, tying his horse at the gate. The oxen stand waiting for orders to go on, calm, stupid, honest, sinewy-necked, a skein of foam hanging from their lower lip. On this ox's back a fountain of sweat starts, but is dissipated in the thick gloss. In this dark ox, the night of the face is dawning Into light beyond the hill of the shoulder. They look like the yoke that answered our own command of "• Whoa ! haw ! gee ! " needing to have the language translated by an occasional stroke of the goad, determined to get Into the shadow of a tree though the load upset, taking PICTURES FELT. 435 plenty of time, with the exception of some very uncertain starts In fly -time, hardly ever so resigned as when It Is their duty to stand still. Oxen were only intended for very good people to drive, for It demands grace to do It. The man who excused himself from going to the king's feast because he had bought a yoke of oxen, gave a more plausible excuse than the others ; for I suppose the new team had balked, or upset the wagon, or had really started for the king's house, but came with so lazy a gait that their master was not In time for the entertainment. But we say nothing against these faithful creatures. They do heavy work for small compensation — a few carrots and a forkful of hay. They pant in the heat and shiver in the cold, and, shutting their eyes and dropping their horns aslant, they press through the hail- storm. The Bible says that God takes care for oxen. The next best thing to being in the country is to have Rosa Bonheur, in a picture-gallery, plunge us Into a hay-field. The stroke of a 436 PICTURES FELT. reaper's rifle on the scythe is to me a reveille. The past comes back, and in a moment I am a boy, with a basket of luncheon, on the way to the men in the harvest-field, finding them asleep under the trees, taking their "nooning." Their appetites were sharper than their whetted scythes. Those men are still taking their noon- ing under the trees, but it is a sounder sleep. Death has ploughed for them the deep furrow of a grave. I forgive Rosa Bonheur that she smokes cigarettes, and wears a rowdy hat, and is fond of lounging about slaughter-houses, now, as I stand before this picture of the hay - scene. Like the bewitched workman who looked into the maiden's face, we forget it is showery weather, until it is four o'clock, and the guard of the gallery, with cocked hat, and red sash, and flaming sword, comes round to drive us out of Paradise. » CHA.MPS ELYSEES. HE scarlet rose of battle is in full bloom. The white water - lily of fear trembles on the river of tears. The cannon hath retched fire and its lips have foamed blood. The pale horse of death stands drinking out of the Rhine, its four hoofs on the breast-bone of men who sleep their last sleep. The red clusters of human hearts are crushed in the wine-press just as the vineyards of Moselle and Hockheimer are ripening. Chassepot and mitrailleuse have answered the needle-gun; and there is all along the lines the silence of those who will never speak again. But Paris has for an interval, at least, recovered from her recent depression. Yes- 31- 437 ^ 438 CHAMPS ELYSEES. terday I stood at the foot of the Egyptian red- granite obelisk, dug out three thousand four hundred years ago, and from the top of which, at an elevation of seventy-two feet, the ages of the past look down upon the splendors of the present. On either side the obelisk is a fountain with six jets, each tossing Into the bronze basin above ; a seventh fountain, at still greater elevation, overflowing and coming down to meet them. Ribbons of rainbow flung on the air: golden rays of sunlight interwoven with silver skeins of water, while the wind drives the loom. Tritons, nereids, genii, dolphins, and winged children disport- ing themselves, and floods clapping their hands. From the foot of the obelisk, looking off to the south, is the Palace of the Legislature — Its last touch of repairs having cost four million dollars — its gilded gates, and Corinthian col- umns, and statues of Justice, and Commerce, and Art, and Navigation — a building grand with Vernet's fresco, and Cortot's sculpture, and Delacroix's allegories of art, and the memory of Lamartlne's eloquence ; within it the hard CHAMPS ELYS^ES. 439 face of stone soft with gobelin tapestry, and arabesque, and the walls curtained with velvet of crimson and gleaming gold. From the foot of the obelisk, glancing to the north, the church of the Madeleine comes into sight. Its glories lifted up on the shoulders of fifty - two Corinthian columns, swinging against the dazed vision its huge brazen doors, Its walls breaking Into innumerable fragments of beauty, each piece a sculptured wonder : a king, an apostle, an archangel, or a Christ. The three cupolas against the sky, great doxologles In stone. The whole build- ing white, beautiful, stupendous — the frozen prayer of a nation. From the foot of the obelisk, looking east through a long aisle of elms, chestnuts, and palms, Is the palace of the Tullerles, confront- ing you with one thousand feet of facade, and tossed up at either side Into Imposing pavil- ions, and sweeping back Into the most brilliant picture-galleries of all the world, where the French masters look upon the Flemish, and the black marble of the Pyrenees frowns upon the drifted snow of Italian statuary : a palace 440 CHAMPS ELYSEES, poising its pinnacles in the sun, and spreading* out balustrades of braided granite. Its inside walls adorned with blaze of red velvet cooling- down into damask overshot with green silk. Palace of wild and terrific memories, orgies of drunken kings, and display of coronation fes- tivity. Frightful Catharine de Medicis looked out of those windows. There, Maria Antoin- ette gazed up toward heaven through the dark lattice of her own broken heart. Into those doors rushed the Revolutionary mobs. On that roof the Angel of Death alighted and flapped its black wings on its v/ay to smite in a day one hundred thousand souls. Majestic, terrible, beautiful, horrible, sublime palace of the Tuileries. The brightness of a hundred fete days sparkle in its fountains ! The gore of ten thousand butcheries redden the upholstery! Standing at the foot of the obelisk, we have looked toward the north, and the south, and the east. There is but one way more to look. Stretching awa)' to the west, beyond the sculptured horses that seem all a-quiver with life from nostril to fetlock, and rearing till you fear the groom will no longer be able to keep CHAMPS ELYSiES. 44I them from dashing off the pedestal, is the Champs Elysdes, the great artery through which rolls the life of Parisian hilarity. It is, perhaps, the widest street in the world. You see two long lines of carriages, one flowing this way, the other that, filled with the merri- ment of the gayest city under the sun. There they go ! viscounts and porters, cab-drivers of glazed hat taking passengers at two francs an hour, and coachman with rosetted hat, and lavender breeches, his coat-tails flung over the back of the high seat — a very constellation of brass buttons. Tramp, and rumble, and clat- ter ! Two wheels, four wheels, one sorrel, two sorrels ! Fast horse's mouth by twisted bit drawn tight into the chest, and slow horse*s head hung out at long distance from the body, his feet too lazy to keep up. Crack ! crack ! go a hundred whips in the strong grasp of the charioteers, warning foot-passengers to clear the way. Click ! click ! go the swords of the mounted horse-guards as they dash past sashed, feathered, and epauletted. On the broad pavements of this avenue all nations meet and mingle. This is a Chinese 442 CHAMPS ELYSEES. with hair in genuine pig - tail twist, and this a Turk with trowsers enough for seven. Here, an Enghshman built up solid from the founda- tion, buttressed with strength; the apotheosiza- tion of roast-beef and plum-pudding ; you can tell by his looks that he never ate anything that disagreed with him. Here, an American so thin he fails to cast a shadow. There, a group of children playing blind-man's buff, and, yon- der, men at foot-ball, with a circle of a hundred people surrounding them. Old harpers play- ing their harps. Boys fiddling. Women with fountains of soda-water strapped to their back, and six cups dangling at their side, and tink- ling a tiny bell to let the people know where they may get refreshment. Here, a circle of fifteen hobby-horses poised on one pivot, where girls in white dresses, and boys in coat of many colors swing round the circle. Puff of a hun- dred segars. Peddler with a score of balloons to a string sending them up into the air, and willing for four sous to make any boy happy. Parrots holding up their ugliness by one claw, and swearing at passers - by in bad French. Canaries serenading the sunlight. Bagpipers CHAMPS ELYSEES. 443 with instruments in full screech. " Punch and Judy," the unending joke of European cities, which is simply two doll-babies beating each other. Passing on, you come upon another circle of fountains, six in number — small but beauti- ful, infantile fountains, hardly born before they die, rocked in cradle of crystal, then buried in sarcophagus of pearl. The water rises only a short distance and bends over, like the heads of ripe grain, as though the water-gods had been reaping their harvest, and here had stacked their sheaves. And now we find toy- carriages drawn by four goats with bells, and children riding, a boy of four years drawing the rein, mountebanks tumbling on the grass, jugglers with rings that turn into serpents, and bottles that spit white rabbits, and tricks that make the auditor's hat, passed up, breed rats. On your way through the street, you wander into grottos, where, over colored rocks, the water falls, now becoming blue as the sea, now green as a pond, and now, without miracle, it is turned into wine. There are maiden -hair trees, and Irish yews, and bamboo, and magno- 444 CHA MPS E L YSE E S. lias, and banks of azaleas, and hollies, and you go through a Red Sea of geraniums and dahlias dry-shod. You leave on either hand concert-castles, and party-colored booths, and kiosks inviting to repose, till you come to the foot of the Arc de Triomphe, from the foot of which radiate eleven great avenues, any one of which might well be a national pride, and all of them a-rumble with pomp and wealth, and the shock of quick and resonant laughter. On opposite sides of the archway are two angels, leaning toward each other till their trumpets wellnigh touch, blowing the news of a hundred victories. Surely never before or since was hard stone ever twisted into such wreaths, or smoothed into such surfaces. Up and down frieze and spandrel are alti-rilievi with flags of granite that seem to quiver in the wind, and helmets that sit soft as velvet on warrior's brow; and there are lips of stone that look as if they might speak, and spears that look as if they might pierce, and wounds that look as if they might bleed, and eagles that look as if they might fly. Here stands an angel of war mighty enough to have been just CHAMPS elys£es. 445 hurled out of heaven. On one side of the Arch, Peace Is celebrated by the sculptor with sheaves of plenty, and chaplets of honor, and palms of tridmph. At a great height, Auster- litz is again enacted, and horse and horsemen and artillery and gunners stand out as though some horror of battle had chilled them all into stone. By the time that you have mounted the steps, and stand at the top of the Arch, the evening lamps begin a running fire on all the streets. The trees swing lanterns, and the eleven avenues concentrating at the foot of the Arch pour their brightness to your feet a very chorus of fire. Your eye treads all the way back to the Tuileries on bubbles of flame, and stopping half-way the distance to read, in wierd and bewitching contrivance of gas-light, an inscription with a harp of fire at the top and an arrow of fire at the bottom, the charmed words of every Frenchman, CHAMPS ELYSEES! 38 / HCy -4 1847