Glass. Book. PROSE MISCELLANIES THOS. E. WATSON THIRD EDITION Press of JEFFERSONIAN PUB. CO. Thomson, Ga. 1917 Prose Miscellanies Thos. E. Watson Third Edition Press of Jeffersonian Pub. Co. Thomson, Ga. 1917 \ ^r.r ^^ cu'\ ^\A y.< Copyright By the Author 1912 x'i '\ 1 L Dedication to Miss Georgia Durham TN whose pure affection and loyal soul a briefless young law- yer found faA-or in the good year 1877, and who not ^o very long afterwards — for the course of true love, as from time immemorial, did not run smooth— became Mrs. Thos. E. Watson, and who has, ever since, walked the long path by his side, through health and through sickness, through joy and through sorrow, through sunlight and through the temp- est, with the unfaltering devotion of the typical wife, and Avho now turns with him to face the afternoon of life, with- out any sort of fear, and with the peace of soul that passes understanding. April 7, 1912. CONTENTS PAGE Planting Corn 7 The New Year 1 A Forgotten Scholar 13 A Tragedy in a Tree-top 20 In the Mountains 24 Convalescent 28 Glimpses Behind the Curtain .35 Not Quite 45 How I Came to Write Napoleon 43 At Fifty :. 60 Eccentricities of Nervous People G3 Dream Children 66 The Oddities of the Great 70 Bubbles on the Stream 75 A Rose on the Snow 78 Ee'sterie and Suggestion 81 As It Is, and as It May Be 86 The Song of the Bar-room 90 The Vulture 94 The Wine Cup 98 Toward the Light 100 The Country Wife 102 The Path of Glory 103 Is It Worth the Price? 105 The Late 108 The Old Packet Boat by the James 112 An Incident in the Life of E. P. Snead 124 Fortitude 126 Planting Corn np HE bluebird was out today; out in his glossiest plumage, -'■ his throat gurgling with song. For the sunlight Avas Avarm and radiant in all the South, and the coming spring had laid its benediction on every field and hedge and forest. The smell of newly plowed ground mingled with the subtle incense of the yellow jasmine; and from every orchard, a shower of the blossoms of peach and apple and pear was wafted into the yard, and hung lovingly on the eaves and in the piazzas of the old homestead — the old and faded home- stead. Was there a cloud in all the sky ? Not one, not one. "Gee! Mule!!!" "Dad blast your hide, why don't you gee-e-EE ! !" "Co- whack" goes the plowline on the back of the patient mule — the dignified upholder of mortgages, "time price" accounts, and the family credit, generally. Down the furrow, and up the furrow, down to the woods, and up to the fence — there they go, the sturdy plowman and his much-enduring but indispensable mule. For the poplar leaves are now as big as squirrel-ears, and it's "time to plant com." On moves the ploAvman, steady as a clock, silent and reflec- tive. Right after him comes the corn-dropper, dropping corn. The gi-ains fairly chink as the bare feet of the corn-dropper hurry past; and before the corn has well cuddled itself into the shoe-heel of the plowman's track, down comes the hoe of the "coverer" — and then the seeds pass into the portals of the great unknown ; the unknown of burial and of life renewed. Peeping from the thicket, near at hand, the royal redbird makes note of what is going on, nor is the thrasher blind to the progress of the corn-dropper. And seated with calm but watchful dignity on the highest pine in the thicket, is the melancholy crow, sharpening his appetite with all the antici- pated pleasures of simple larceny. The mocking bird circles and swoops from tree to tree, and in his matchless bursts of varied song, no cadence is wanting, no melodv missed. S PROSE MISCELLANIES. The hum of the bees is in the air; white butterflies, like snowflakes, fall down the light and lazily float away. The robin lingers about the China tree, and the bluejay, lifting his plumed frontlet, picks a quarrel with every feath- ered acquaintance, and noisily asserts his grievances. The joree has dived deeper into the thicket, and the festive sapsucker, he of the scarlet crest, begins to come to the front, inquisitive as to the location of bugs and worms. On such a day, such a cloudless, radiant, flower-sweetened day, the horseman slackens the rein as he rides through lanes and quiet fields; and he dares to dream that the children of God onoe loved each other. On such a day, one may dream that the time might come when the}'^ avouIcI do so again. Rein in and stop, here on this high hill ! Look north, look east where the sun rises, look south, look west where the sun sets — on all sides the steady mule, the steady plowman, and the children dropping corn. Close the eye a moment and look at the picture fancy paints. Every field in Georgia is there, every field in the South is there. And in each, the figures are the same — the steady mule and the steady man, and the pattering feet of the chil- dren dropping corn. In these furrows, lies the food of the republic; on these fields, depend life, and health and happiness. Halt those children, and see how the cheek of the world would blanche at the thought of famine ! Paralyze that plowman — and see how national bankruptcy would shatter every city in the Union. Dropping corn ! A simple thing, you say. And yet, as those white seeds rattle down to the sod and hide away for a season, it needs no peculiar strength of fancy to see a Jacob's ladder crowded with ascending blessings. Scornfully, the railroad king would glance at these small teams in each small field : yet check those corndroppers, and his cars would rot on the road and rust would devour the engines in the roundhouse. The banker would ride through those fields thinking only of his hoarded millions, nor would he ever startle himself with the thought that his millions would melt away in mist, were those tiny hands never more to be found dropping corn. The bondholder, proud in all the security of the untaxed receiver of other people's taxes, would see in these fields merely the industry from which he gathers tribute; it would never dawn on his mind, that, without the opening of those furrows and the hurrvinsr armv of children PROSE MISCELLANIES. 9 dropping corn, his bond wouldn't be worth the paper it is written on. Great is the might of this republic! — great in its schools, churches, courts, legislatures; great in its towns and cities; great in its commerce, great in its manufactures, great in its colossal wealth. But sweep from under it all these worn and wasted fields, strike into idleness or death the plowman, his wife and his child, and what becomes of the gorgeous structure whose foun- dation is his field ? Halt the food growers, and what becomes of your gold and its "intrinsic value"? How much of your gold can you eat ? How many of your diamonds will answer the need of a loaf? But enough. It is time to ride down the hill. The tinkle of the cow- bell follows the sinking sun — both on the way home. So, with many an unspoken thought, I ride homeward, thinking of those who plant the corn. And hard indeed would be the heart that, knowinsr what these people do and bear and suffer, yet would not fashion this prayer to the favored of the republic: "O rulers, law- makers, soldiers, judges, bankers, merchants, editors, lawyers, doctors, preachers, bondholders ! Be not so unmindful of the toil and misery of those who feed youP'' The New Year T EAD us gently. Father Time, as you take us to the portals ^-^ of the New Year. We know not what may be within ; and our souls are burdened with fear, as we stand here at the door. Lost, forever lost, is the Confidence with which we used to go bounding into the New Year — as revellers hastening: to the feast. We have met the Unforeseen so often, have mourned where we thought to have rejoiced, been trampled upon amid the horrors of panic and defeat, where we had so stoutly fought for victory and reward, that our hearts are sadly subdued. We did not seek this awful life-woe. Father Time. Thrust, from some great outer darkness into the hurly- burly called Life, we gaze upward at the stars, in helpless igno- rance of what it all may mean; and some irresistible force pushes us, pushes us, swiftly, inexorably, onward to another outer darkness that fills us with speechless awe. Have mercy on us, Father Time. We have been beaten with many stripes, are covered with many wounds. God ! How we have suffered ! We knew nothing at the beginning, and we know but little now ; and for every lesson we have learned, we have been made to pay in heart-aches and scalding tears. Always struggling, often down, always anxious for the morrow, often in torture today, we have stumbled forward. Father Time, still looking for the smooth road and the sunny sky, and the bright companionship of success and peace. Shall we never see them, Father Time ? We shudder when we think what vou did to us during the Old Year, Father Time. Ah, but you were hard on us — bitter hard. Our little ones panted for a breath of fresh air. Father Time: and thev died like flies, in noisome, reeking, crowded tenements, because there was not. in all God's universe — where there's lisfht and air for every flower that flecks the field — a breath of fresh air for the little children of the slums. Ah, it was pitiful. Father Time! Our feeble ones, young and old, perished miserably of cold -r '^ PROSE MISCELLANIES. 11 and hunger, in the midst of a hind that worships tlie Good God, and amid such an accumulation of wealth as was never known before since the morning stars looked down upon a newly-made world. Poverty, crime, vice, drunkenness, riot, war, famine, pesti- lence, earthquake, and conflagration have glutted their awful appetites upon us during the Old Year, Father Time. To what are you leading us in the New ? Will the heart of the world grow harder and harder, Father Time? Will the greed of human avarice demand still larger sacri- fice of human lives? Will the selfishness of Classes sforsre itself still further UDon ravenous conquests, and remorseless exploitation? Shall the cry of the white slave never reach Heaven, Father Time? Shall the song of the angels who hung over the infant Christ, never throb, a living principle, in man's government of man ? Is the reformer always to be the martyr, Father Time ? Is wrong never to be dethroned ? Oh, Father Time ! We tremble as we feel vou leading us toward the door of the New Year. Beyond that portal we cannot see, and we dread it — as children dread the dark. Deal gently with us in the New Year, Father Time. Give us strength to bear the cross — for we know that we must bear it. Give us courage for the battle, for- we know that we must fight it. Give us patience to endure, for we know that we shall need it. Give us charity that thinks no evil, and which will stretch forth the helpful hand to lift our weaker brother out of the mire, rather than the creul scorn which passes him hv. or thrusts him further down. ^ -^ Give us faith in the right which no defeat can disturb, and no discouragement undermine. Give us the love of truth which no temptation can seduce, and no menace can intimidate. Give us the fortitude which, through the cloud and the gloom and the sorrow of apparent failure, can see the distant pinnacles upon which the everlasting sunlight rests. Give us the pride which sutFers no contamination, no com- promise of self-respect, no wilful desertion of honest convic- tion. 12 PROSE MISCELLANIES. Give us the purpose that never turns, and the hope that never dies. And, Father Time, should the New Year, into which you are taking us, have upon its calendar that day in which the few that love us shall be bowed down in sackcloth and ashes, let that day, like all other days, find us on duty- faithful to the end. LEAD us GENTLY. FATHER TIME. A Forgotten Scholar HAVE you ever heard of Hugh Swinton Legare ? His father was one of those Husnienots who left France because of religious intolerance, and came to America because of its promise of freedom. „ ^ . , , His mother belonged to the Scotch family of Swinton, whose warriors defended the border, and whose names are honored in the chronicles of Froissart and Walter Scott. Hugh Swinton Legare was born in Charleston, bouth Carolina, January 2, 1797. A large, well-formed child, he grew to be almost a deformed man, on account of having been vaccinated for smallpox. Fearing that the disease might attack the boy, his fond parents delivered him to a doctor, who gave him such a bad case of artificial smallpox that he never got over it. For months he was kept flat on his back, his knee joints and elbow joints terriblv inflamed. For eight years his growth was arrested, and when he did begin to grow to man- hood, the growth was mostly above the waist line. Therefore, Hugh Swinton Legare had the head, shoulders and chest of a finely shaped man, while his lower limbs were so short in comparison that there was no beauty of proportion. Seated, he seemed a magnificent specimen of manhood; standing, he had none of the impressiveness of stature which adds so much to the "imposing presence." As a boy, his infirmity made him unfit for rough games and exercises. Naturallv, he took to solitude and books. His father died while Hugh was very young, and to his mother was left his training and education. Mary Swinton Legare was one of the noblest women of the Old South— and when that is said no more can be said. To make of her bright boy a useful man, became the purpose of her life; and to her pure teachings, her firm control, her wise guidance, Hugh Legare was indebted for the splendid honesty of character, the unselfish devotion to high ideals, that makes a study of his modest career so beneficial. After some preliminary schooling, which included a course at the celebrated Academy of Dr. Moses Waddell, Hugh Legare spent four years in Columbia College and graduated with the highest honors. (December, 1814.) The next three years. y(Uing Legare devoted to a study ot the law; and at the age of twenty-one, he could have com- (13 14 PROSE MISCELLANIES. menced the practice of his profession, better equipped than Benjamin Butler, Daniel Webster, William H. Crawford. Henry Clay, or George McDuffie. But young Legare had a scholar's lust for knowledge, and he went to Europe to complete his education. In his beautiful letters to his mother, he tells of his studies m Edinburgh, Scotland; then of his travels and studies on the C'Ontinent. After two years abroad he returned to Charleston, and two more years were spent in the study of law. And then he was admitted to the Bar. Now, let those young men of the present day who bemoan the fact that they have no college education, study the fate of Hugh S. Legare. Fortune gave him ample means to attend schools, ransack libraries, pursue knowledge, exhaust the sources of informa- tion, both at home and abroad. Nature gave him as fine an intellect as ever warmed the heart and whetted the zeal of a teacher. He could learn and he could remember. He could think, as well as learn. He was an effective speaker and a magnificent writer. In a classical controversy he could, and did, make a monkey out of the famous Englishman, Lord Brougham. His essay on Demosthenes is one of the finest things in the English language, and Rufus Choate is said to have never tired of reading it. His paper on the "Democracy of Athens" has never been surpassed in solid, sterling value, by Macaulay, Carlyle, or anybody else. His argument against Nullification is sounder than Web- ster's, for it is not built upon a false foundation, as Webster's was. In short, Hugh Swinton Legare was, perhaps, as able a man, naturally, as Clay, Webster, Calhoun, Benton, or Craw- ford : and, r/,s o s-rhoJar, he infinitely surpassed them all. He had read more books, garnered more knowledge, learned more languages, spent more time in preparation than any of them. Academically, he was easily the master of'the Avhole group — Clay, Webster, Calhoun, Benton, Crawford. That is to; say, in book learning he excelled them all. He probably knew more than all three of "the Great Trio," with Benton and Crawford thrown in for good measure. Why is it, then, that Hugh S. Legare never succeeded in proportion toiiis natural ability and his mental culture? Why is it that nearly every schoolboy knows something of Clay, Webster and Calhoun, while not one boy in ten thousand will ever hear of Hugh Legare? Why is it that the speeches and PROSE MISCELLANIES. 15 writings of Clay, Webtser and Calhoun are to be found in all the book catalogues, while the writings and speeches of Legare are the "rare specimens" of a few libraries? It is a curious conundrum, and illustrates what I have long been saying to the young men — namely, that a collegiate education is not absolutely necessary to the success of a practical layer. Abraham Lincoln had almost no sort of an education, vet see what a success he was as a lawyer. Ben Butler had only a smattering of collegiate education, yet he put Rufus Choate to rout, the very first time they clashed. George McDuffie had no education to compare with Legare's, yet Legare had no practical success to compare with that of McDuffie. Think of these things, young man, and don't^ be down- hearted because you are too poor "to go to college." Lots of men "who were never great, "went to college;" lots of men who were great, didn't. So, you see, it's a question of lohat is in you. If you haven't got within you the stuff out of which suc- cessful men are mae, no teacher, no book, no college will ever put it there. If you have got the right sort of stuff in you, and will dash ahead, determined to succeed, as Clay. Jackson and Lin- coln did, you will succeed, just as they did. Andrew Jackson got a college degree — got it in New Eng- land, at that — ^but it was after he had become a success as a lawyer, a merchant, a farmer, a soldier and a politician. He did not get that college degree until he was President of the United States. The school advertised itself a little by giving the lii'eat Tennessean a degree which he couldn't read — for it was m Latin. Old Hickory laughed as they mumbled over the words of the degree, and remarked that the only Latin he knew was, E Plunhus Unum. What was the matter with Hugh Swinton Legare? Why did not his success measure up to the scale of his prepara- tions? Because his perfect culture had put him out of touch with the men among whom he moved. His eminence was an, isolation. Placed above the average of his community by his elaborate education, he was not in sympathy with the average man. and the average man was not in sympathy with him. But it is the average man who gives verdicts and votes ; it IS the average man whose shouts of applause make the tempo- rary fame which rules the court-room and the hustings. To be so highly educated as to lose touch with the average man, is 1(3 PROSE MISCELLANIES. to be over-educated. Mr. Legare himself sadly admitted, that he had wasted too much time in preparation. He had mingled so long with scholars and book-worms, had lingered so lov- ingly in academies and libraries, that he was not fitted for the companionship of the average man, or the hurly-burly of the busy world. It became his deepest regret that he had not thrown him- self earlier into the struggle of life, and learned the ways of men by practical experience. As suggested by his biographer, he had become too supe- rior to the commonplace man to exert any influence over that commonplace man He was so uncommon in his perfect cul- ture, that he could not get the benefit of his actual talent among common men. Like a man who would put all his money in big bills, he could not get about the world as well as the man who carries small change. . After he had been a lawyer some years— years in which McDuffie, Petigru and other less learned lawyers were earn- ing big fees— Legare was asked by a friend how he was getting along. "Sir," answered he, "do you ask how I get along? I will tell you. I have a variety of cases, and, by the bounty of Providence, sometimes get a fee; but in general. Sir, I practise upon the old Roman plan; and, like Cicero's, my clients pay me what they like— that is, often, nothing at all." He served two or three terms as a member of the Lesris- lature, and his reputation as a man of great powers and attainments spread among those who could best appreciate him. After awhile he was appointed Attorney-General for the State of South Carolina. Duty calling him to the Supreme Court of the United States, he made an argument before that tribunal which showed what he really was, and which fixed his status as one of the great lawyers of his time. He soon afterward accepted an appointment, in the dip- lomatic service, and represented his Government as Charge d' Affaires at Brussels. Here he must have enjoyed himself thoroughly, for he moved in the best society, was treated with the 'utmost consideration, and had the companionship of scholars, the living and the dead. Returning to Charleston (1836), he was elected to Con- gress, where he at once made a brilliant record in debate: but he was thrown out at the next election by a hostile local com- bination. Resuming the practice of law, he was now employed in PROSE MISCELLANIES. 17 some really good cases, and, I hope, got some good fees. It was time. He took a prominent part in the Presidential campaign of 1840, making speeches in Richmond, and New York, which were considered magnificent. Next year the original Harrison Cabinet resigned, and Mr. Legare was appointed Attorney-General of the United States. Nobody questioned his fitness for this high place, and his conduct of the business of the oflEice was a success. When Mr. Webster retired from the State Department, President Tyler confided to Mr. Legare, ad interim, the care of that depart- ment. Thus Mr. Legare was doing double duty, and his strength failed under it. His sister, Mrs. Bryan, to whom he was tenderly attached, died in July, 1842. The January following, he lost his mother, whom he had loved to the last with boyish' devotion, the mother to whom he wrote from Europe, in 1819: "The whole happiness of my life is henceforth to make you happy." A noble pledge ! and nobly kept. In 1843^ he went with the President to Boston to take part in the Bunker Hill celebration. Seized by a sudden and vio- lent illness (June 16), he was unable to attend the ceremonies, and died on the morning of June 20. He had never married. Taken altogether, here was, to me, one of the saddest of records. Who could have begun the race of life with better chances to win it than Hugh Legare ? By birth, he belonged to the slave-holding aristocracy, the alleged ruling class of his State, He had the benefit of the best education that money could buy. He literally ransacked the world in his quest of knowledge. He had a mind of high order to start with, and his indus- try in improving it has seldom been surpassed. His character was without a blemish; his disposition amiable; his manners those of the accomplished gentleman. He neither drank and gambled, like Henry Clay, nor did he play cards and get drunk, like Daniel Webster. He had no quarrels and duels, as McDuffie had; raised no rows at horse races and other places, as Andrew Jackson did; shot down no enemies in street fights, as Thomas H. Benton did; beat no Congressman with a stick, as Sam Houston did; had no feud with a neighbor about that neighbor's pretty wife, as Jeffer- 18 PROSE MISCELLANIES. son had; and published no Mrs. Reynolds Confessions, as Hamilton thought it necessary to do. No! Hugh S. Legare was a "Mother's boy" — a model of good conduct and of good character; a model student, a good citizen, elaborately equipped to be a model lawyer, a model orator, and a model statesman. Yet he failed. He failed all along the line. He tried to run a magazine, The Southern Review, but his articles went over the heads of the people, and the magazine died of too much learning. He tried politics, and "practical fellows" tripped him and. passed on ahead. He tried to be a lawyer, and, so far as knowing the law was concerned, Webster was not his equal, nor Pinckney his superior, but Webster and Pinckney had a success at the bar which painfully dwarfs the career of Legare. He made fine speeches, but couldn't keep in the swim. A favorite among scholars, the common people loved him not. He did not understand them, nor they him. The mystic tie of sympathy was not there. "I started too late; I lingered over books too long; I should have plunged into the fight earlier, trusted more to my natural capacity and less to education. / ain over-educated.'''' Was there ever a mournfuller wail than this? He took no sweet woman to wife; children came not to sit upon his knee. Books — and his sisters ; books — and his mother ; books — and some forgotten speeches; books — and a few mas- terful but neglected essays; books — and a few second-rate ap- pointments to office; books — and a sudden breakdown and death. It is almost appalling; so much study and so little result; so much labor and so little done. Such royal liberalitv in seed-sowing, and such a beggerly harvest. Had the handsome, brilliant, sweet-tempered, golden- hearted Hugh Legare buckled right down to practical affairs, as soon as he left college, getting used to the ways of folks, wearing ott" the wire edge and getting on working terms with the average man, gaining by actual exerience that knowledge of men and things which cannot be got in any other way; had he got down olf the high horse and mixed and mingled with the boys; had he studied Tom, Dick and Harry, and caught the cue; had he looked upon the marvellous leaves in the great book of Human Nature and read what is written there; had he made himself a man among men, caught the glow of their passions, felt the warmth of their sympathies, swam in the current of their energies and their practical pur- PROSE MISCELLANIES. 19 poses, he would have known better how to talk to them, how to get votes and verdicts from them, how to mold their con- victions and lead their advance. Had he got down upon the ground floor with the people, as all Americans who have achieved great practical success as lawyers, authors, orators and political leaders have had to do, he might have been as powerful with the pen as Horace Gree- ley; on the hustings, he might have equalled Clay; in the court-room, Webster would have met him with the stern joy which warriors feel in foemen worthy of their steeL As it is, he is but a memory in the minds of a few. He went forth into the fields of toil, and came back with empty arms. He spoke, and nobody heard. He wrote, and nobody read. Upon the sands of time he left no trace. The. brilliant morning of his life led to no midday splendor, no gorgeous afternoon, no immortal afterglow. Only the curious student, exploring obscure corners of the library, and poring over ''quaint and curious volumes of for- gotten lore," will ever learn the strangely melancholy story of the forgotten scholar, Hngh Swinton Legare. A Tragedy in a Tree Top npHE blizzard of 1895, which froze the tea-olive, the banana ■*■ shrub and the japonica, came near killing the live-oaks which had grown from the acorns I brought home from South Georgia when I was a young lawyer. She planted them on the sunny side of the chicken house, and when the trees grew large enough to demand more space, I pulled down the house. Yes, the inner bark of the live oaks turned dark that winter, and it took copious waterings next spring to carry them through the summer. But in April, 1896, when I came to note the many gaps which the frost had made in the shrubbery, I missed some- thing else. No blue-birds came singing in the apple trees. The cold had been too much for them. The hollows where they had made their winter homes had been their sepulchers, and the April sun carried no warmth to the pitiful little forms in blue, rigid and decayed. ^ It was in the spring of 1898, that I was riding along through the country, some ten miles out from town, when with a thrill of joy I heard the old familiar notes of the blue-bird. Sure enough, here were half a dozen of the tribe, chirping musically in the sunlight. After that they gradually became more common, and in 1902 they were once more flitting about the orchard and the cornfield. Two years ago I watched a pair closely, and found the nest. Creeping up to the old apple tree, I peeped down into the hollow, and there cuddled at the bottom, were four well- feathered youngsters that would soon be ready to fly. In a few days the entire family of six, the parents and the four children, were out in the cornfield, all singing together, flocking together, as companionable as folks, and giving every evidence of complete enjoyment of life. Thus the blue-birds made a home with us and multiplied. But the next winter was very severe. Twice the sleet drove down from the North and chained the South. Every tree wore its armor of ice, and when the hoarse wind blew, ev^en the giant oaks and hickories and pines shivered and bent, while great limbs were sna])ped and hurled to the sfround. It was bitter hard upon the birds. PROSE MISCELLANIES. 21 So, then, when the warm days of spring came on, She and I thoug:ht we woiikl do something especially good for our feathered friends, and we put up the boxes in the trees, boxes in which they could nest. In this way the cold rams and chdl winds would not endanger the young birds. Up went the boxes, and the birds came. But only two blue-birds— just one pair. All the others had perished of cold. Great was our delight when we made certain that this pair had begim to build a nest in one of our boxes. I happened to see them first, and told the good news. ^'Oh, isn't that fine!" cried She, clapping her hands, her eyes a-dance with joy. "But we must not let them catch us watchmg them, said She, "because that might make them leave the nest." So we were over-cautious, and I kept away from the tree lest I should alarm the busy home-makers. From week to week, I merely made sure that the birds were still at work in the box— and that made us content. One dav in April one of these blue-birds sang with a volume which attracted my attention. I had never known one to repeat its simple little notes so continuously and so loudly. Usually a blue-bird is subdued; this one was almost bois- terous. , Something or other— I don't know what— made me uncom- fortable I got the vague impression that the bird was in dis- tress Yet there was nothing disturbing it. Had it flown back and forth from the box, or had it hovered about that tree, I should have suspected the horrible truth. But the bird was quite a distance from the box, and 1 could not dream that such a tragedy had happened as I now know had happened. . My usual monthly trip to Xew York occupied ten days, and on my return I looked for the young blue-birds. They were not to be seen. I made inquiries, but none on the place had seen any. That evening at dusk I saw one of the birds alight on the shelf of the box and look in upon the nest. All is well, I thought. But next day I became uneasy. It was tmie the young birds were out. What had happened ? ., , n u i The fear of doing harm to the little family held me back until nearly nightfall, and then I could stand it no longer. 1 must see what was the matter. "Bring me the step ladder, Steve." 22 PROSE MISCELLANIES. It was a rickety old thing, and Steve had to grip it at the bottom while I went np. Reaching the level of the nest I peered in, but the limbs of the tree shut out the light, and I could see nothing. "Run and bring me some matches, Steve." He brought them, and when I struck one of them and looked in, there was something that looked like fish-scales. Puzzled and alarmed, I struck another match, and looked more closely. There was no sound from within the box and no siffn of life. What pathetic mystery was this? "Steve, this looks like the skin of a snake!" "Law. Boss! Come down from dere and let's wait till mornin'." "While Steve Avas working up an excitement from below, I lit another match, poked about in the box, and became con- vinced that no life of any sort was there. Whatever had been done, was finished. We wrenched the box from its fastenin2:s in the tree, and took it out into the open Avliere the light was l)etter. When the roof had been knocked oil', I pulled out the con- tents of the box and spread them on the ground. The birds had made an unusuallv large nest. Thev had evidently fallen in love with their house. Thev had intended to make it their permanent home. In the nest were four eggs, looking old and dry and dis- colored. And ihere was the rasf-off skin- of a snake/ It lay along that empty nest, that blighted home^ghastly memorial of the tragedy in the tree. What had occurred? The snake, probably a black tree-climber, had found his wav into the nest, and swallowed the mother bird, and then orone into quarters there until it had cast off ,its skin. It had appropriated the proi)erty after having devoured the owner. Bt why had the eggs been left? I cannot guess, unless it be that they were stale, and that even a snake dislikes stale eggs. The supi>er bell rang, and I went into the house. As I took mv seat at the table, I said heavilv : '"'The poor tittle hinhr Then She knew that there had been a tragedy. She heard the story, and neither of us wanted any supper. It went below, untasted. PROSE MISCELLANIES. 23 The big yellow moon came soaring over the woods, and Hickory Hill was soon in a blaze of silvery liffht. But the mocking-bird that was singing so sweetly down in the meadow seemed almost a nuisance, for I couldn't get my thoughts oil* the snake and the missing bird. Ah, if you could see the Avidower — the survivinar bird ! It would touch your heart. He will not return to the tree any more. He goes fui-ther from the house every day. I know now that when I saw him on the shelf lookinii; in upon his ruined home, he was paying his last visit. I know now that when he was singing so stridently that day in April, the serpent was already in his home and he without a mate. The last I saw of him was early yesterday morning. The sun was glorious: birds of every sort were bringing olf their young, and the air thrilled with their songfs. And the blue-bird sang also, but mournfully — and he had already left my place. He was perched at the top of a tall tree in the adjoining field. He sang and sang and sang — calling for his mate, perhaps — and then a bee-martin struck savagely at the homeless, mateless blue-bird, and, with a melancholy chirp, he disap- peared in the remote woods. In the Mountains r\ N this gray pinnacle of rock, I sit enthroned ; the clouds ^^ hang their curtains far below, for this is ''Mountain Top," in the Blue Ridge. Down the valley, to the east, towers Jetierson's last great work, the University of Virginia; on the right, the blue haze makes dim the outline of the giant peaks, which stand guard over the glories of the Rock-fish Valley ; far away to the west, stretches the Valley of Virginia, with the North Mountains losing themselves in the skies; and over yonder to the North- east, are the eternal hills which saw Stonewall Jackson's march to fame. Is there in the whole world a lovelier view than this? Does Nature anywhere gather together so many of her treasures within the range of human eye? Here is the ever changing play of light and shade as the clouds rest or move, anchor or sail, collect or scatter, smile or frown, fleck the heavens with gold or strew the beach of the horizon with broken waves of foam. Here is the limitless wealth of field and forest — fields forever green, and forests whose infinite variety defies the winter to strip them bare and the summer to find them stale. Here are the crystal waters, bursting from the blue slate rock and dashing with reckless speed down a thousand hidden waterfalls to the rivers which pierce the plains. A nobleman's park, after a century of care and cost, is not more grateful to the eye than these wonderful slopes and natural swards cropped close by the flocks, trodden smooth by the herds. And if you will pluck one of each of all the flowers and ferns which Nature's garden tenders you here, the nobleman will envy you the richness and the fragrance of the field. This rock is my throne, and as I gaze upon the soul-lifting sublimity of the landscape, I feel like crying out. as Gold- smith did when he looked down from the Alps, "The world, the world is mine!" This farm may belong to Jones, that forest to Brown, this mountain to Smith, that orchard to Tompkins, but the land- scape is mine, is yours, is anybody's ! He that has eyes to see, let him see. Down yonder in front of me, looking east, is the Rock-fish (24) PROSE MISCELLANIES. 25 Gap ! It was the first passway for pioneers crossing the Blue Ridge to reach the Alleghany mountains. For years, this was the road the emigrant took going West. See how deeply worn into the rocky earth is this ancient highway, even on the very summit of the Gap. Are you much of a dreamer? Here is the place to dream dreams and see visions. Fill that time-worn road with the pioneers who made it; call back the adventurers who once thronged it, and you will see the banners of civilization flying over the dauntless men in buckskin who pass upward and outward and onward, from the valleys of the lower Soutli to found empires in the West. People the Gap with those whose rifle and axe afterwards made the "winning of the West," and you will see the militant cohorts of the white man's ambition and daring and ideals go marching by ! Deep, deep is the hard soil, worn by their tireless feet; and if the Old Road of Ohain marks one epoch of English heroism, it is as nothing in lasting importance, world-wide significance, to the Old Road on Mountain Top, trenched out by the westward foot-beat of those who aspired and ventured and endured — striving to make this Nation the greatest on earth. Out of Albemarle and up through this Gap, passed George Rogers Clark on his marvelous march to the Wabash — a march whose surpassing heroism added four States to the Union and to civilization. Through this Gap, and likewise from Albemarle, came Lewis and Clark on their way to plant our flag upon the Rockies, the Columbia, and tlie Pacific, Greatest of all who toiled up the mountain, passed the Gap and stopped at the old Tavern, was Jefferson. From Albe- marle he had gone to write the first real defiance to King George; to break down feudalism in Virginia and foreisfn tyranny in the Confederation ; to write the statute of religious toleration, and the Declaration of Independence, to send forth Lewis and Clark to the unexplored West, and to add a dozen great States to the Union, in the Louisiana purchase. In his old age, in his decrepitude, he painfully made his way from Albemarle to this ruined Tavern on Mountain Top, and met in conference Madison, Monroe and others of the eld- ers in Israel, his purpose being to convince them that his Uni- versity — the Benjamin of his old age — should be located at Albemarle. It was so decided at the conference; and when you go to Monticello they will show you the spot where the feeble Jef- 26 PROSE MISCELLANIES. ferson, too weak to ride any more, used to sit, glass in hand, and watch the bnikling of the walls of his great school. Yes, indeed yon can dream dreams at Mountain Top, and see visions. Washington, stately and grave, goes by to the Indian wars; the chiefs who used to stop at Peter Jeft'erson's for advice, and to whose pathetic pleas for justice young Thomas used to listen, passed along this trail to Albemarle; then the day came when the last Indian Avarrior stood there, to gaze in despair over the land he had lost, as the Moorish king looked back upon lost Granada. Down yonder, on the green slope, by the scraggy trees and the group of springs, lie the ruins of the ancient Tavern, and among them you will mark a large pile of bricks. Sort these out curiously, and j'ou will find a few which have upon them the hoof-prints of the dogs which were chasing the deer. It was in the olden time. The bricks, in the mud state, were lying spread out in the "yard," the chase went tearina: by, the terror-maddened stag left his tracks on the bricks, and the hounds left theirs, also. Here they are, curious mementos; and another Keats — gazing upon those footprints of the deer, which is now a shade ; the pack which chased it, also a shade; and the hunter who followed the pack, likewise a shade — all gone, save this tablet, which tells of the lust of pursuit and the agony of flight — could even match the almost matchless ''Ode to a Grecian Urn.*' Here, on the ridge commanding the mouth of the pass to the North, are seven semicircles of earth and rock thrown up at wide intervals. What's this? When pioneers passed through the gap going out from Virginia, no redoubts confronted them ; only the Indian with his bow or rifle. Who were they that wanted to come back through the Gap and were met with guns in the battery ? They were the children of those who had gone from the South to the winning of the West ; and. from the conquered West, they came through the Gap which their fathers had worn deep in the soil — came to conquer and devastate the South. Far down there, on the plains at the foot of the mountains, lies Waynesboro; and, at Waynesboro, Sheridan and Early fought. Let your eye range over that wondrous valley ; in your fancy you can fill it with warring armies, dead and dvina" men, riderless horses, burning towns, ruined homes. Into many of those valley cisterns and Avells, dead men were flung PROSE MISCELLANIES. 27 until the cistern was full. Manj^ of those gardens over there have trenches full of soldiers' bones. And through this famous Gap rode and marched the Blue and the Gray, until that splendid gentleman and soldier, Colonel C. C. Talliaferro, of Roanoke, carried the flag of peace from Lee to Grant, and Appomattox rang the curtain down. We were sitting on a huge boulder, gazing towards the Massanutten Mountains, when he said to me, reflectively, look- ing ati the ruins of the old Tavern : "The last time I was here, was forty-odd years ago. I was going horseback on a stafl" duty for General Lee, to Charlottes- ville. I rode in at t^iat lower gate yonder, and stopped in front of the Tavern. I recollect that a number of gentlemen were sitting on the veranda, drinking mint- juleps. I asked if I could get something to feed my horse on, and I was told that I couldn't. There Avas nothing to feed him on. I had to ride on down to Afton to get him fed." After the war, this officer went to school at Lexington ; then he settled in Georgia, became one of my lieutenants in the great battle for Populism, got enough of that pretty soon, and is now, like "the Thane of Cawdor, a prosperous gentleman," who attends to his own private business, and doesn't care "a conti- nental d — n" for politics. Meanwhile, I still dream dreams and see visions: and I look through and beyond these shadows of the valley, to where the sunlight catches the far-off tops of the mountains; and while I know that the distance is too great for me now, and the climb too much for my strength, yet the course shall be laid towards it, even though I go alone, and do not reach the heights. Convalescent VAOU had been a very sick man. For months the elements of disease had been gathering in your system — you had vaguely suspected it, and had spoken of it — but had not known what to do; so you had gone on from week to week, slowly approaching a crisis. At last some trifling cause, some one- straw-too-many, had precipitated the inevitable, and had knocked you over. It might have been a stale "blue point" at a late dinner, a tainted bit of fish, ^a salad which angrily resented the wine — it might have been one of a dozen errors in diet; but, whatever it was, you awoke at midnight to find yourself in the throes of pain, and with the swiftest possible speed you stepped down toward the Valley of the Shadow. Week after week you lay abed, racked with pain. The frightful cough which shook 3^ou almosf to the point of exhaustion, the shiver of cold and the burning fever, the rheu- matism which swelled and stiffened every joint — then the lassi. tude of utter weakness in which you could barely muster strength to answer necessary questions or to swallow necessary medicine. It was a toss-up as to whether you would die. You knew it, and you didn't care. Of all the phenomena of illness, that surprised you most. You looked Death in the face, and were not afraid. You sim- ply didn't care. Over the mantel was a picture of a schoolboy of twelve years, — school-book and school-bucket in hand, and a white wool hat on his head ; and in his freckled face the bold, frank, confident look of robust youth. During all the years and all the changes, you had cherished the little picture — a souvenir of days when the world was young to you, and none of the illusions was lost. Now that you were so very ill that even She grew pro- foundly anxious, you looked from the bed, waved a feeble hand at the little boy over the mantel, and whispered, "You haven't got much farther to go, little boy." But for Her, you didn't mind it, at all. She would grieve — you knew that — and for Her sake you would keep up the fight ; otherwise, it did not at all matter to you whether the long lane turned or not. For you had reached middle age, and the illusions were gone. Perhaps yours had been a hard PROSE MISCELLANIES. 29 life— unusually hard. Perhaps, in everything which you had undertaken, it had cost you twice as much toil and persistence to succeed as it had seemed to cost other men. Perhaps, you had come to realize that you were one of those men with whom P'ortune deals jjrudgingly, one of thpse whom Hope deceives and Success laughs at; one of those who always has wind and wave against him. and who never by any sort of chance finds himself in league with Luck. It may have been that when you were a boy you read too much, thought more soberly than most boys do, and dreamed dreams of the future. It may have been the ambition of your life to work manfully until you could possess a competence and then, made independent of Poverty, to devote every talent and energy to the service of your country. Public life allured you. To be a Tribune of the People, leading them upward and onward, cheered by their applause, made happy by the blessings of those whom your life-work elevated and benefitted, seemed to you the noblest task you could undertake. To prepare for it, you became a lawyer. In no other pro- fession could you hope" to earn an income so quickly and so surely. You iDuried yourself in books. The midnight lamp never failed to find you at study. Year in and year out, you worked by day and studied by night. You began with pitifully small fees. Often you i-ode all day, to and from Justices' Courts, to earn the half of five dol- lars. The entire labor of your first year at the Bar gained you but two hundred and twelve dollars. You lived in the country, ate a cold dinner which you had brought to your office with you, and waited for clients — eager for work. Year after year passed. So wrapped up were you in study, labor, anxiety, ambition, that fireside pleasures were almost unknown to you, and you lost — ah, the sadness of it now !-^ the holy joys of home life with your children while they were still children. Ten years passed — then three more ; and then the goal was reached. You were safe. You had gained a competence. . Fear of Poverty would trouble you no more. You closed your office, went before the people, explained the principles which formed your creed, and asked to be elected as their Representative in the national councils. Court-house rings, town cliques, professional wire-pullers were all against you ; but you went into the country precincts, you spoke to the people in the village streets, at the country school-grounds, at the crossroad-stores. Wherever fifteen or twenty would assemble, there you would speak to them. 30 PROSE MISCELLANIES. The politicians laughed at you; but when your opponent came home from Washington to meetl you in debate before the mass-meetings throughout the district, lo ! the people were with you, and your triumph at the polls was unprecedented in your State. Your political party, which in convention after convention 'a picture of a school boy "■ ^ school-book and school-bucket IX HAND."' had adopted your platform, suddenly changed front and denounced those principles. What were you to do? You decided that prhu-iples were dearer than parti/, and you stood by your prinicples. The people of your district indorsed you — nine counties out of eleven giving you overwhelming majorities. In the other two counties, the swindlers who had charge of the ballot- PROSE MISCELLANIES. 31 boxes simply stuffed them with ballots enough to beat you ; and so the people were robbed of representation. As to you, the dream of your boyhood was at an end. The object aimed at, in thirteen years of steady, life-absorb- ing toil, was forever put beyond your reach. It was hard, wasn't it 1 You tried again, at another election. The result was the same. Once more you tried. Result, as before. You appealed to Congress. Both political parties hated you and your creed. Both voted to bar you out'. You asked for a hearing on the floor of the House. It was denied you— for the first time in the history of your country. Then, exhausted and disheartened, you quit the hopeless contest. Your enemies shouted with great joy, and amid bon- fires and street parades, you were burned in effigy — a disgraced and ruined man. You almost wished that you were dead. How near vou came to losing your reason and your life, in the bitter grief of that crushing disappointment — She knows — She, only. Then you shut the world out of your life ; buried yourself to all but the very few; called around you the serene com- panionship of Great Authors, breathed the atmosphere of the past ; entered into the lives, the hopes, the struggles, the suffer- ings of the sublime reformers to whose courage and sacrifice we owe all that makes the world tolerable — all that gives us liberty of person, of conscience, of speech. And then, full of the inspiration drawn from the lives of these grand pioneers of human progress, you reached out for the long-idle pen, and you wrote. Ah, how your heart did forget its own troubles, in that work! You wrote, and wrote, and wrote — many a night till it seemed that you alone of all the world was awake ; the pen all too slow to follow the burning thought. Many a time, you reeled with fatigue as you rose from the desk where six hours or eight, of whose flight you had been unconscious, had sped; many a time, the page was blotted with tears, and you could not go on. Always, always, your soul was in the pen, and you wrote no word that did not come from the heart. At length the task was finished, and your book (blue- penciled horribly by a critic who was afterward adjudged a lunatic) came forth. What really had you hoped? Had you dared to believe that the world would be fair to any book bearing your discredited name? Had you faintly breathed some pathetic prayer, that the 32 PROSE MISCELLANIES. fierce abuse which had beat upon you as a political leader might spare your book? Poor fool, you! Political hatred, like religious bigotry, never forgets and never forgives. The very college professors who had examined your manu- script for tiie publishers ; and who had, in writing, pronounced your history "the greatest since Macaulay," caught the conta- gion of attack; and they assailed you as savagely in the re- views, as though vou were a cross between Jack Cade and THE LOO SCHOOL HOUSE IN SCREVEN CO., GA., WHERE MR. WATSON TAUGHT SCHOOL. Marat. Your book was damned — incontinently, successfully, eternally damned. But you must needs try again. Perhaps you would have better luck next time. So once more it was toil at the desk; once more there was the rapture of composition; once more the long, shining lines of thought swept l)efore your mental vision, and you were caught up into and swept away by the ecstacy of creative com- position. Surely the world would be interested this time; surelv the work and the workman would be recognized, appreciated. Not so. The world had no more of welcome for the second book than for the first. Yet you tried once more. The third failed like the second ; and a fourth completed the melancholy list. Then you thought it time to quit, and you quit — swallow- PROSE MISCELLANIES. 33 ing as b€st you could the bitter pill of failure, and the pangs of unconditional surrender. What was left ? Could you try your hand at anything else? Oh, yes, you could go to work and make more money. And you did so. ^ It was the only thing you could do. With dis- gusting facility, you could heap thousand upon thousand. In the court-house, 3'ou could name your own fees; you could choose your own cases. On the lecture platform, you could name your own price, and you could earn as much or as little as you would. Four or five years passed; and the one thing of which you had enough was, money. But the old hunger gnawed at your heart. You were not happy. You longed to do something worthier of what was best in your nature. You longed to fight a good fight for justice, for better law^s, for beneficent institutions, for con- ditions that are more equitable, for a fairer distribution of the bounties and blessings of nature and human industry. You scorned the mere getting of money. You wanted to be useful, to be a power for good, to be a leader of public opinion, to the end that the best principles and the best ideals might prevail. You especially wanted to reach the young; and to lay your hands gently upon the lines of their thought and conviction, so that, long after you were gone from earth, you would live, in the patriotic endeavor of men irhosee'fforts for gooS might he happier than your own. So once more you take up the pen. And it so happens that, in the very midst of this new ambition and new work, disease strikes you down. No wonder you grow weary. No wonder you feel indif- ferent. The way has been long, and it has been rugged, and at last you are tired. You look, just a little contemptuously, in the very face of Death, and you say in your thought — "I'm sure to be vours sooner or later; take me n-ow, if you like." And, to the little boy on the mantel, you lift you eyes and whisper, with a half-mocking smile, ''•'■Not m.ueh farther now. little hoy.''"' Yes; it all depended upon whether the inflammation would extend. You knew that well enough ; and when the nurse applied hot cloth after hot cloth, hour after hour, for twelve hours, you knew what it meant. It was a pitched battle be- tween Death and the nurse. Well, the nurse won. 34 PROSE MISCELLANIES. The fever and pain stood at bay ; the exhausted nurse stag- gered off to take her rest; and when morning broke, you knew that you would g-et well. Were you glad? Not particularly so. Just what you had to live for, was not so clear to you as it used to be. You came back to life without regret, and without enthu- siasm. The song of the birds is sweet, but not sweeter than before. The rustle of the wind in the trees, the breath of the flowers, the lazy beauty of the distant landscape, the splendor of sum- mer evening, sunsets, and rising moons — all these are glorious to you, but not more so than they ever were. Convalescent ? Yes, convalescent. On Her account you are glad. She would have missed you. As for the rest of it — the horse is back in the treadmill, and the dull plodding around the circle goes on as before. Glimpses Behind the Curtain /^F history one may grow tired, but who does not find peren- ^^ nial interest in piquant Memoirs and chatty biographies* History was ever too stilted to pick up trifles, and yet trifles are often priceless, for they reveal hidden causes and unlock the mysteries of events and of character. History passes along the highway with pageantry, with imposing mein, formal stride and orderly procession. Branching off from this main historical thoroughfare, run the by-roads, the quiet lanes, the wandering trails of personal detail, of minor incident, of spicy anecdote, of subordinate episode that shed vivid sidelights upon that stately narra- tive which travels by the highroad. It may not be true that the course of time turned upon the length of Cleopatra's nose, or upon the grain of sand in Crom- well's ureter, as Blaise Paschal surmises: but there can be no doubt that a very trivial word, or fact, has often the appear- ance of being a necessary link in the chain of decisive events. The assassin who sprang upon the wheel of Henry the Fourth's carriage and thrust a dagger into a fatal spot, certainly changed the political situation of Europe: and it seems probable that the train of events which led up to the murder arose out of the fur}' of a woman scorned. The German Empire today is a mighty product of ambi- tion, ruthless perseverance, and unscrupulous valor: but had not the sudden death of the great Catherine taken the Russian armies out of the field, Prussia would perhaps have been parti- tioned, as Poland was, afterwards. There was a time when France wavered betw.een Catholi- cism and Protestantism: and the national faith of the na- tion hung upon the decision of one man. The woman who controlled Francis the First, at this crisis, fixed the destinies of the realm. And whoever the woman was, she, in turn, was putty in the hands of a priest. The Canadian empire was lost to France because Montcalm could not get supplies. And why cQuld he not get the means of defense? Because the scarlet woman of a libertine Bourbon king needed the money. There was not enough in the treasury for the soldiers and the courtiers, too: and therefore the cour- 36 PROSE MISCELLANIES. tiers, being on the ground, helped themselves, leaving the soldiers to suffer privations and the lack of necessary muni- tions of war. Edward Lacey, of South Carolina, rode eighty miles to warn the Mountaineer horsemen of the South not to take the wrong road; had his horse fallen with him, as he galloped, the warning might not have been given, and the battle of King's Mountain not fought. Without that victory, Corn- wallis would hardly have been forced to retreat upon York- town. * * * * * * But our purpose is not so much to show^ the influence of small events over large results as to emphasize their signifi- cance in revealing motive, giving insight into character, and modifying by personal detail the historical portraits of great men. The George Washington of the battle-field, of the council of war, of the Cabinet, of the parlor, and the public place, is sufficiently familiar to most Americans; and a grand histori- cal figure he is; but for my part I could not thoroughly understand him, or feel that he was human, like the rest of us, if Memoirs and biographies had not told us how he "cussed out" Gen. Chas. Lee on the field of Monmouth, swore at the prankish boy who was speeding his favorite horse, and broke the gun of the poacher whom he caught prowling in the Mt. Vernon marsh. Then when we find him laughing till he cries, as the Brit ish officer sang that funny, naughty song, and hear him call for it to be sung over again, we warm up to him mightily — he is behaving like a man and not like a. demi-god. Could we ever understand Henry Clay, if we confined our- selves to historical and partisan biography ? What do such booka tell us of the man? Mighty little. A "gentleman gambler" pretty much all of his life, a hard drinker for many years, profane and over-bearing, from first to last, yet warm-hearted, gallant, dashing, proud, fearless, and, withal, a very tricky, selfish, calculating politician, who did his country a vast deal of harm. Somebody asked Mrs. Clay if her husband's gambling did not worry and trouble her. "Oh, no." said she, "he most always wins." To see Henry Clay in the Senate, is to see personal dignity personified; go with him to a country dance, and you will hear him call for a reel, and when the ifiddlers do not happen to know the tune, he will whistle it to them until they learn it. Stanton in his "Random Recollections" tells this anecdote: PROSE MISCELLANIES. 37 '"111 the stormy days of John Tyler, while Webster was Secretary of State, and Riifus Choate was in the Senate, and Congress was in extra session in the Fall of 1841, the question of chartering United States bank was shaking the country. Mr. Clay, as chairman of the Finance Committee in the Senate, was pressing the measure, and Tyler was resisting it. A con- ference of leading Whig Senators was held. Clay, with lofty mein, was for waging relentless war on the accidental presi- dent, who had stepped into the White House over the dead body of General Harrison. Choate again and again told what Webster thought ought to be done. Clay was restive, and exclaimed, 'AVho cares a d — n about what W^ebster thinks?'" Henry A. Wise, in his ''Seven Decades," gives a graphic description of the manner in which Clay took the news of his defeat for the Whig nomination in 1840, "In the very hour of his defeat he was sitting in a room at Brown's Hotel, anxiously waiting to hear of his nomination. He made most singular exhibitions of himself in that moment of ardent expectancy. "He was open and exceedingly profane in his denunciation of the intriguers against his nomination. We had taken two Whig friends of our district to see him; and after they had sat some time listening to him, in utter surprise at his remarks, full of the most impudent, coarse crimination of others, in words befitting only a barroom in vulgar broil, of a sudden he stopped, and turning to the two gentlemen, who were dressed in black and both strangers to him, he said, 'But, gentlemen, for aught I know, from your cloth you may be parsons, and shocked at my words. Let us take a glass of wine!' and rising from his seat, he walked to a well-loaded side-board, at which, evidently, he had been imbibing deeply before we entered, "Thereupon we bowed and took leave. One of the gentle- men, after retiring, remarked, 'That man can never be my political idol again;' and from that time to this he has ceased to admire him. In a short time after that he (Mr. Clay) went across the avenue to the parlor of his boarding house, where he awaited the arrival of his two personal friends, on the night of the nomination at Harrisburg, to bring him the news of the final proceedings and choice of the Whig Convention, "We went to the depot and got the intelligence of the nom- ination of General Harrison and Mr. Tyler, and hastened back to him with the news. Such an exhibition we never witnessed before, and we pray never again to witness such an exhibition of passion, such a storm of desperation and 38 PROSE MISCELLANIES. curses. He rose from his chair, and, walking backwards and forwards rapidly, lifting his feet like a horse string-halted m both legs, stamped his steps upon the floor, exclaiming, 'My friends are not worth the powder and shot it would take to kill them I" He mentioned the names of several, in- voking upon them the most horrid imprecations, and then, turning to us, approached rapidly, and stopping before us, with violent gesture and loud voice, said. "If there were two Henrv Clays, one of them would make the other President of the United States.' " * * * * * * In the ''Memoirs of One Hundred Years,'' Dr. Edward Everett Hale labors to remove the impression that Daniel Webster got drunk. In the innocence of his noble heart, Dr. Hale states that he saAv much of Webster, and that he never saw him drunk. Alas ! he did gnward rusli of the stream: to vieAv the man and his work, as a whole; to note what the European systems were before he came, and afterwanh; to fathom liis ideals, and learn from PROSE MISCELLANIES. 57 the unfinished sketch what was in his mind ; to charge up to his :account every fault and vice and crime, and then to enter upon the credit side of the ledger the unremitting toil and the mag- nificent achievement — this has been my rule in dealing with Napoleon. Partisans of aristocracy in all countries hated him, and lied about him while he"^ lived. They hate him and lie about him now. Apparently, the ruling caste in Great Britain still consider it necessary to hire pamphleteers and alleged his- torians to write against a militant Democrat who did his utmost to lay the broad, deep foundations of good government, and to build upon it a temple of opportunity whose every golden door should always be open, and from within whose blessed portals should peal forth the invitation, "Whosoever will, let him come." Always, Napoleon has had a friend in me. When the rich boys made fun of him at college, my own little fist would double up, ready to help him fight. When he wrote prize essays which did not take prizes, and composed histories which publishers were afraid to touch — I was in sympathy with the disappointed author. When he went hungry, in order that his last penny might be laid out in buying a book, I understood. When he snatched the colors at Lodi and made the dash for the bridge, and won the triumph which first put it into his head that he might take a decisive part in public affairs, I in- tuitively knew his thought. When he went to Egypt, when he made himself Consul, when he put away Josephine, when he took the Austrian Avife, when he yearned for a son who might inherit his splendor and perpetuate his name, when he over- stretched the bow, went too far, took counsel of his pride, and fell, as Lucifer fell — I sympathized with him, all along, for it was all so human. In his reverses, I suffered. When his bosom- friends deserted him, when his old school-mates betrayed him ; when those to whom he had never refused a favor, turned on him and rended him, I was in grief, even as he was. "Berthier, don't leave me. I have need of consolation." So pleaded, vainly, the prostrate Napoleon at Fontaineblau, beseeching Berthier not to join the deserters — Berthier, his bosom friend, his pet, the favorite upon whom had been showered every gift of imperial bounty. And Waterloo — ah, Waterloo tears me all to pieces, just as Gettysburg does. The positive suffering which I have to en- dure in reading of those two calamities to the human race, is •something you could not imagine. I shrink from those two subjects, as a heretic must have shrunk from the torture-cham- fcer. The heretic knew what was in there ; and his flesh must 58 PROSE MISCELLANIES. have quivered and his bones ached, as he approached the room of horrors. Even so, I shun Cxettysbiirg and Waterloo, the two great calamities of the Nineteenth Centiuy. As 'a boy and as a man. my heart was Avith the captive at St. Helena. When the English Governor nags at him, when the lion is teased and fretted by the mean and tyrannical keeper, when they won't forward the books sent to him by friends in Europe, when they detain the portrait of his boy, when they open the letters of his mother and sisters and brothers, when they refuse to allow him to be addressed as THE TOMB OF NAPOLEON. "Napoleon,'' wdien they deny him the comforts necessar}^ to his age and infirmities, when they put such humiliating conditions upon his taking exercise that his self-respect will not allow him to take it, when he tries to interest himself in gardening, when he fights all his battles over again, Avhen he stands out upon the jutting rock of the cliffs, and gazes silently toward France — France which will one day bring him home to the lordliest tomb in all this earth, amid the thunder of cannon and the trickle of a nation's tears — he never fails to command my pro- found interest and admiration. I felt, as a boy, wdiat I know, as a man, that he was crushed by the combination of Kings, because of the principles for which he stood — those principles being of deadly hostility to Absolutism, Divine Right, and Class-rule. PROSE MISCELLANIES. 59 And it so happened that, in my mature manhood, I recurred to the study which thrilled me in my youth. In the volume which embodies the result of the reading of a life-time, I endeavored to tell the truth about Napoleon — not as a partisan, but as a student who has never tired of him, and who considers him the most terribly attractive figure history presents. Had I not been cast out of Congress by the ballot-box stuffers; had the poor, ignorant negroes not been voted against me, ten and twenty times apiece, by rich, educated white gen- tlemen : hacl dead men and fictitious men not been registered, in order that bribed voters might vote those names, I might have remained in public life, and might have worked out my well- considered plan for a grand political alliance of the West and South, against New England class-rule. But, since the casting out was an accomplished fact, the necessity was upon the Disinherited to do something better than brooding over the loss of the Estate. Out of this necessity, came first, "The Story of France," and, then, the "Napoleon." So it is, that adversity may be good for us, and the diet of bitter herbs, a blessing in disguise. At Fifty I'^HIS is Las Olas — he called it so, in the indulgence of that * fondness for giving pet names to those things which one especially loves. He had already grown old when he chanced upon this spot — old and rich — and the joyousness of boyhood had come back to him, and he found pleasure in nature and his fellow-man. Peace to his memory ! he was as golden-hearted a gentle- man as ever took a wage-earner by the hand, and called him brother. After him I came; and after me will come another — and so runs the world away. A narrow spur of land, stretching out from inlet to inlet, forming a ribbon-like island, closed in upon the east by the Atlantic, and on the west by the streams that drain the Ever- glades — such is the place. Ages and ages ago, the wash of the ocean, met by the wash of the rivers, banked up a ridge of .sand ; and upon this sand, nature, in the long run of the years, planted a jungle; and in the tangled mazes of the jungle the deer tramped a trail, the wildcat found a lair, the raccoon made a home, the cougar crouched for squirrels, and the rattle- snakes multiplied. Water-fowl of all kinds whirled and screamed, as they flew from feeding ground to roosting place; and the red-bird, the wren and the mocker were never more plentiful or musical than here. The ships, in stately procession, ])ass down from North to South; over yonder on the distant horizon, you can see the smoke, or the masts, of those that follow the Gulf Stream from the South to the North. Here, on the one hand, is the great world and the ocean; on the other, the inland route — by lake and sound and river — where traffic flows in safer ways and no storm besets the sailor. Sit here on the wall of the boat-house, and gaze south- ward. A lovelier stretch of water the world does not hold — for the tide is still on and everything is water. A fringe of forest bounding the view southward, a thread of brilliant blue marking the spear-thrust which the ocean makes into the brown bosom of the river, the tossing foam which shows where the billows from the sea charge home upon the distant beach ; and, over all, the mellow radiance of the sunny afternoon — for the tide is ebbing now, and the sun is going down. PRO&E MISCELLANIES. 61 All ttfat the ocean could do, this time, has been done — for- evermore. The outgoing currents drove back the lake and the river, mounting over them both, marching mile after mile land- ward, conquering mile after mile of reluctant ground — but the invader could go so far and no farther, and he is now sullenlj^ drawing back into the sea. Great monsters of the deep followed the invading waters, as they rolled towards the Everglades, and many a tragedy that was veiled by the waters would make you shudder at its story, if the victim could speak of its cruel fate — but the monsters are drifting seaward now, and their battle of life moves to another field. If you glance over the island, you will see that the air is white with butterflies. There are countless thousands of them. They do not fly from flower* to flower, some one way and some another, hovering aimlessly or lighting idly, here and there — as we dwellers of the up-country have been accustomed to see them do. These butterflies are drifting, all in one direction; these butterflies have no mind to stop ; these butterflies neither linger, nor hover, nor dawdle; these butterflies go drifting from North to South, as though they had been called by some mysterious voice, were fastened to some mysterious purpose, and were the helpless instruments of some mysterious Fate. All day long, they have been flying by, over the jungle, over the beach, over the lake, over the Sound, over the River — obeying some unheard order, following some unseen leader, answering some unfathomable design. I wonder what it will all be like, when the last tide has rolled backward to the sea, and its monsters come forth no more — for I am fifty years old, and it is the time of the ebbing tide and the declining sun, with me. I w^onder whether those creations of the mind, which some of us have thought important, are, after all, as aimless and as fragile and as ephemeral as these butterflies which go stream- ing past, leaving no trace on earth, or sea, or sirv — for I am fifty, and I should like to know whether all this effort of heart and mind leaves the world brighter and better; or whether we are just so many butterflies which Yesterday did not know, and Tomorrow will forget. There is, at least, this much at Las Olas, and at fifty: If one needs rest from turmoil and strife, one can have it. If Hope does not come to us as often as she used to do. Resig- nation comes oftener, and stays longer. If Disappointment brings a^ bitter a cup as she ever did, we have at least learned that we need not drink every time we are temptedl by Desire. If ambition is as false a traitor as he ever was, we at least 62 PROSE MISCELLANIES. know that Duty is a certain guide. If Fame has ftiooked us with treacherous flatteries, she has treated us no worse than she has treated others; and we can, at least, quit foUowing, and be content with the approval of the Voice Within. If the road has been rocky and the march has been marked with the blood of one's feet, we can, at least, reflect that the soldier always flnds it so, and that the end of our campaign cannot be far away. Thus, after all, one learns philosophy at the best of schools — Actual Life. Who would be a drone in the hive? Who would be a deserter from the fight? Shall trumpets call strong men to the fields of human elfort, and I play dastard? Shall flags float by, with brave soldiers marching forth to the service of Duty, and I play the Coward? Never, by the splendor of God ! Better the march and the struggle, and the heart-break of failure, than the selfish refusal to try ! Better the battle, the good fight and the defeat, than the craven lurking in the^ rear. Of all the worthless, despicable creatures under the sun, is the man who can only eat, sleep, propagate and rot ; the veno- mous coward who hates other men because they have been bold where he was timid, strong where he was weak, loyal where he was false. Of all things contemptible, is the man who follows, with the hungry eyes of jealous rage and hate, the bigger, loftier men who marched while he hung back, toiled where he looked on, fou^it while he ran away. ^^ /Give me the man who will liA^e and die for his ideals, who ^-w^ will surrender no righteous position without a struggle, who ^ Avill perish rather than pollute his soul bv apostasy from Eight! Better — a thousand times better — the tempest and the ship- wreck with such a creed, than inglorious decay at the wharf, with any cither. Better a Waterloo and a glorious death in the •squares of the Old Guard, than worldly pensions and honors for base betrayal of cause and country. So I thought at twenty. So I think at fifty. I have the scars to show for it. And, like any other soldier of the Avars, I am proud of them. Let the tide ebb — it must be so: let the daylight fade, it must be so — but this much any poor mortal can do, and should do : Hold aloft, to the very last, the banner of your creed ; fight for it as long as you can stand ; and when you go down, let it be possible for you to say to those who love you: "Lay a sword on my coffin : for I, also, was a soldier in the great struggle for humanity." A' Vv r": Eccentricities of Nervous People Y\/ASN"T it Schopenhauer, the German philosopher, who , said that the mental dullness of a man could be measured by the amount of noise he could endure without protest? Did he not practically contend that nobody but a very stupid per- son could be insensible to annoyance of dog-barking, cock- crowing, calf-lowing, piano-thumping, and similar afflictions? Possibly the old philosopher was feeling out of sorts and cross, when he went to the extreme above mentioned. Napo- leon could sleep on the battlefield : and surely Napoleon was not a dull man. Burns composed his best poem during a ride in a thunder-storm — and in Scotland a thunder-clap makes noise. Sir Walter Scott wrote his best books while workmen of all kinds were building him a great, new house; and the sound of hammer and saw and chisel is generally considered a tribulation. So it must be. that the suti'ering from noise does not neces- sarily imply lofty intellect ; nor does the fact that the well- fed citizen sleeps soundly all night, while his neighbor's dog is iniiDartially saluting each star in the heavens with the same monotonous yelp, raise any presumption against the integrity of the mental machine of said somnolent citizen. It isn't so much a question of brains, as of nerves. Julius Cpesar could not hear a rooster crow, without shud- dering; but it isn't every fellow who shudders when the rooster crows, that has the head of a Csesar. DeQuincey would fall into an agony of pain when the pea- cock opened up in tuneful numbers; but it isn't; every objector to pea-fowl veils that could write "The Household Wreck." or "The Flight of a Tartar Tribe." Carlyle, when in Scotland, fretted and fumed because the roosters broke upon his meditations; and in London, he com- plained bitterly of the piano next door; but it isn't every one who finds fault with pianos and chickens that could produce "Sartor Resartus" and "The French Revolution." I have my own idea about a man who is not at all put out by the long-continued lowing of a calf, or a cow; but I dare not express that f)pinion. It would lose me the good-will of hundreds of people who no more mind the loAving of a cow than thev do the fifteen-minute solo of the factory whistle, or 64 PROSE MISCELLANIES. the practice-lesson of a boy aspiring to a place in the brass band. The royal stag may be king of a boundless rangq of forest, but he is powerless t6 escape the vermin that burrow between his horns — pestering him every day of his life. Looking out upon the waters of the ocean, you will see the great sword-fish, a terror of the deep, spring into the air and give himself a convulsive shake ; he is trying to throw off the tiny fish, which are to him what the barnacles *xre to a ship. It is much the same in human life. Wliila Hercules strug- gles with the monster, the little crab nibbles his toe. The small things vex, where the large things would but rouse you to exertion. Many trifling annoyances, coming at once, or in quick succession, drive you to a frenzy ; when, if they had all been concentrated in one trouble, your fortitude would have steadied the boat. DeMorny, the half-brother of the Emperor Louis Napo- leon, was a very great man ; he put the stupid Louis Napoleon upon the throne and kept him there while he lived; yet with all his power, DeMorny did not know how to escape the nui- sance of a flute-player whose room was in earshot of the Duke's palace. The first Napoleon detested and dreaded three smaller men — Fouche, Talleyrand, and Bernadotte; yet, with all conti- nental Europe at his feet, this greatest of men did not know how to rid himself of three deadly enemies who were appar- ently in his power. Similarly afflicted, the English King, Henry the Second, cried out in a burst of impotent rage, "Will nobody deliver me of this pestiferous Monk?" — and three zealous courtiers went straightway to the church and slew the Monk with their swords: whereupon Thomas Becket, the factious Monk, be- comes "Saint Thomas of Canterbury": and the proud King goes penitentially to the tomb and gets upon his knees, lays bare his royal back, and is retributively scourged by surviving monks. So it seems that, in striving to get free from little aggra- vations, we may easily run into big troubles. The antlered stag may roam ever so fast and far, but the parasite still burrows into his head. The sword-fish may spring ever so often and so high, but, in spite of all his con- vulsive shakes, some of the tiny fish will hang on. So with us, the small vexations are inseparable from life; and perhaps if we could remove this one, and that one, and the other one, we might become intolerably exacting; and we might complain, as the spoiled Grecian did, when a crumpled PROSE MISCELLANIES. 65 leaf, on his couch of roses, broke the complete sweetness of his rest. Nothing so soon unbalances a man as a perpetual annoy- ance, which nags at him every day of his life. The irritation will become a serious inroad upon the comfort to which he is entitled in his home. The raindrop wears away the rock; and many a man who ought to have gone joyously to take his place in the march and the battle of important effort, has been worn into peevish, in- active discontent by the constant drip of trivial aggravations. That mysterious Wallenstein, of the Thirty Years' War, who was almost a match for "the Great Adolphus" himself, was unruffled while cannon boomed and swords clashed, but he could not bear the rattle of a spur, dragging at the heels of the wearer. Nor could he endure the barking of dogs. To have peace in his home, in Prague, he bought all the surround- ing property. The philosopher Kant moved away from a pleasant home, to escape the nuisance of a crowing cock, on the adjoining place. Rather than have his life worried out of him by pin-pricks and flea-bites, it is better that each of us should do in our small way what Wallenstein found it necessary to do. If we cannot buy a place big enough to afford a quiet center for our study or work, we can do what Immanuel Kant did — move out and let the chicken crow to the fellow who doesn't mind it. Why should a man waste his strength in struggles where the game isn't w^orth the candle? As we grow in wisdom, we husband our resources for nobler purpose. Consider the case of Daniel Webster and the rooster, at the Country Fair. Wlio was grander than Daniel Webster, on a great subject and a great occasion? No man that ever lived. Yet when he attended the County Fair and got up to make a hum-drum speech, the big rooster m one of the coops began to crow — thinking about the prize, maybe — and "the god-like. Daniel" gave up the unequal contest. No speech from Webster, that day. To rise in the Senate and hurl Jovian thunderbolts at Hayne or Calhoun, was worth his while; but to speak at a County Fair, against a noisy and self-assertive rooster! — no wonder Webster gave it up, and sat down. Dream Children T ONG ago, Charles Lamb wrote an essay on "Dream Chil- dren." He had known what it was to be tend&rly attached to a good woman, whom he could not wed. Always poor, burdened with the duty of caring for a sister who was more or less insane, the gentle recluse went his way, in mournful resignation, leaving his lady-love to become the wife of an- other, and more fortunate, man. But Lamb never escaped '"the quiet sense of something lost.'' Affectionate in disposi- tion, upright and pure in character, the domestic circle would have been to Charles Lamb an Eden of endless bliss. So it was that, in his later years, he brooded over what "might have been"; called around his knee the children of his fancy; and upon these, the ethereal creations of his brain, bestowed the caresses which actual children never came to enjoy. In the imagination of Lamb, the dream children are those that are longed for; or those that should have come and did not. But these are not the only ones that might be called "Dream Children.'' Charles Dickens was referring to the other class, in "Little Dorritt," when Mr. Meagles, who had lost one of his daugh- ters in her childhood, speaks of the dead child, as growing up by the side of her surviving sister. Yes, the children which should have come and did not, are Dream Babies, but so, also, are those which should have stayed with us, after the}^ came — and did not. These seemed to die, and to the world they are dead — forever lost. A narrow ridge in the church-yard, a tablet, with a name and a date — that is all. But. to the grief-racked par- ents, the child is not altogether dead. In that Dreamland which is as much a pai't of us as the visible world itself, the child lives; it comes back to us now and then; reminds us of every little Avord and caress; and wrings our hearts, once more, with infinite pain. In "Little Dorritt,'' Charles Dickens fancies that the dead child grows apace with its sister, becoming taller as she grows taller, older as she grows older. It is not so, at all. The great) novelist, whose soul sympa- thized with every living creature, made one of his few mis- takes, in dealing with the Dream Children. PRO^SE MISCELLANIES. 67 They do not change. Time halted at their grave: no more could he take, or give. What they were, the day they died, they remain. Children they were, when Death hushed their lips and froze their little hands, — children they are, in Dream- land. The tracks that were all about the yard, on the dreadful day wdien sickness seized her, were still there when you came back from the funeral, — the tracks of a child at play: and ■while the merciful Avind and rain and the passing of other feet, soon, hid these tiny footprints, the tracks that she would now make, if she could leave the borders of Dreamland, would still fit the little shoes that are laid away. You sometimes hear her voice,, some time when the day is done, and the Spirit of Silence has locked a slumbering world; and the voice is that which you heard wdien she climbed upon your knee, and laid one hand to one cheek, saying, ''This side, Mania's." lending the other to your kiss. No, they do not grow up, along with the surviving children, — no, indeed ! Carved upon memory by the stern hand of Grief, their little figures are as immortally young, as the marble children following the motionless procession upon a Grecian frieze. You do not place her, in youi^ fancy, beside the young peo- ple in the ball-room, or on the tennis ground, or even in the school. No : she is too young to be there. She w^ould not be in her proper place. Nor is she apt to join the other children, even of her own age, in the morning, or at mid-day. No: she comes in the quiet, melancholy afternoon, wdien the shadows are growing longer, when the hurly-burly of the day is. done. Then, if tliere should be any little children play- ing about in the yard, or lingering on the lawn, she will come. You will see her with playmates of her own age ; you may fancy her voice mingling with theirs: once more, comes the holiest and sweetest of all melodies, her laughter of the years gone by. Your other children grow up. pass out of the home, are swallowed up in the great big world. But the Dream Children never leave you. There is a plaintive Scotch song whose burden is. the sweet- heart's answer to her pleading lover, '"I must not leave the old folks yet, we'd better bide a Avee." But the Dream Children are yet more inseparable from the home and parental love: they abide with you evermore. 68 PROSE MISCELLANIES. To the living we sometimes feel like saying, "Oh that we could keep you just as you are, — always a child, always inno- cent, always free from care and sin and suffering/" The Dream Children are so — the3\ only. They never pass beyond the place where sleep soothes every disappointment, cures eveiy wound, hushes every sob, dries every tear. Eternally young, eternally pure, she is yours yet,- — a child, as she was the day you closed her eyes. Upon ever}^ Christmas Eve, she comes into the stillness of the Library; and she hangs her little stocking up, in the fire- place, just as she used to do. The other children learned the secret of Santa Claus, long ago ; and they quit hanging up their stockings on Christmas Eve. But she never learned the secret : she will never learn it, now : and, in Dreamland, she still loves Santa Claus. So it is — she comes softl}^ into the Library, every Christmas Eve. and hangs up the little stocking, just as she did, in those days when you did not know how much soul- anguish quivered in the voice that was heard in Ramah. In you and in me, the conflict goes on, forever, be- tween the evil spirit and the good. Today, the Evil Genius takes possession of us, and we sin. Then, the good Angel gains the upper hand, and we repent bitterly what we did yesterday — and we do good tomorrow. When the Angel of our better self is with us, the sunshine is brighter, the song of the bird is sweeter, the faces of friends reflect our happi- ness, the home circle glows with joyous animation, and our souls expand to embrace all mankind. When the Evil Genius comes, it is another world that we are in; and we are different beings. The malign Pontiff of the invisible papacy has put all nature and all nations under a blighting Interdict. Joy flees, laughter dies away, the East wind blows: the clouds are leaden and low; we have no friends; home yields, no happiness: life is not worth living. Who has not experienced this? Happy the man who has not. But thrice happy the man who, being the victim of such a curse, will try, and try, and try, again, to break the spell of this tremendous Excommunication. And the Dream Children ? They, also, dare not cross the dead-line of the Interdict. On the dreadful day of Excommunication, they, also, avoid us. In the death-struggles of fierce and ruthless passions, they have no place. They can only come, when the Evil One has been PROSE MISCELLANIES. 69 thrown out. But, when the spell has passed, when the heavens smile again, then the Lost One comes; then she sits upon the knee again; then her head nestles against the breast again; and once more is heard the old-time music of her voice, as she puts a little hand to one of her cheeks, and says, "^'This side. Mama's." The other, you may kiss, — as you yield to the infantile imperialism, which reserves a realm sacred to her mother. The Oddities of the Great TS IT a fact, that men of genius are more apt to be eccentric than average mortals who are not so gifted? Or is it that nobody cares to notice the peculiarities of the obscure, while a hero-worship]Ding Avorld fastens greedy eyes upon the small- est detail which illustrates the manner of man that a genius happens to be? The grouchy old Thomas Carlyle declared, most imreason- ably. that Harriet Martinau's description of Daniel Webster's manner of lounging before the fireplace, with his hands in his pockets, was worth more than all the books which that industrious blue-stocking had written, on history, biography, political economy, and what-not. The surly sneer is undeserved, of course, but it illuminates the human appetite for details about great men. Carlyle put upon paper his own impression of Webster, after having been in "the great expounder's" company, and a most masterly portraiture it is — "Steam engine in breeches," and so forth. I:^ you thought It worth your while to make a study of the comparatively unimportant individual who owns the adjoin- ing farm, or who keeps the fruit store, or who presides over the Justice's Court, or who represents the railroad at the ticket- window, or who assigns your room at the hotel, or who. takes your fare on the cars, you would probably find him just as full of a sense of individuality as any of the Great : and his daily life, his home habits, his little personal peculiarities, are just as marked, as were those of the more conspicuous mor- tals who possessed genius. Nevertheless, we are not going to j^ester ourselves to gather facts concerning the queerness, the eccentricity, the meanness, the odd freaks of intellect which characterize the anonymous Toms, Dicks and Harrys: what we do want to know, is the whole story, every detail, concerning the lofty men who domi- nate our hero-worshipping souls. Did Jones, who owns the adjoining farm, cut a large hole in the door of the house, for the use of the cat, and a small one for the kitten ? We don't know, and we don't care. But if Sir Isaac Newton does a thing like that. — behold the bug in amber! Literature will tell the tale, to the remotest pos- terity. Su])pose a miscellaneous city dude hires a horse and buggy, PROSE MISCELLANIES. 71 lakes his gum-chewing Mary Lou to ride, and is confronted with an emergency which requires that he unharness the horse, —and he doesn't 'know how. The fact does not even attract the attention of the rural correspondent of the country paper, as does the hirgest turnip, the earliest water-melon, and the goings and comings of the local John Henrys and Susan Anns. But how dilferent it is with Coleridge and Wordsworth ! Those mighty monarchs of the realms of rhyme come driving home, find the hired man absent from the post of duty, and fatuously undertake to strip the gear off, all by themselves. The poets progress famously until they try to remove the col- lar In those days the collar did not buckle and unbuckle, as now. It was a continuous ring of leather. The two poets could not get it over the horse's head. In vain they pulled and pushed. No go. They then fell back to get a good view of the horse. Was he sick? had his head swollen, since the collar was put on? Manifestly, something unusual had hap- pened. It was the same collar and the same horse; yet, the collar, which had gone over the horse' head, was too small to come off. The two poets gravely and anxiously discussed the matter, and made another earnest effort to remove the collar. Nothing doing Happily, the servant-girl caught sight of the puzzled philosophers, and went to the rescue. Turning the big end of the collar upward, she passed it over the horse's head, and sailed off triumphantly, full of pride and the exultant sense of superiority. In her eyes, the men who didn't have sense enough to unharness a horse, were mighty sorry creatures, even though they had written "The Ancient Manner,' and "The Excursion." The visitor who found Shelley climbing a picket-fence, every time he left or entered the yard of the Italian villa he had "rented— the OAvner having left the gate locked— was vastly amused at the poet's simplicity. "Why don't you break the lock, and use the gateway?" asked the sagacious visitor. "Bless my soud, I never thought of that!" said Shelley, immensely relieved at the idea of not having to climb the picket fence again. Can you doubt, that the visitor went away, pluming himself, upon his advantage over the radiant intellect of whose marvel- ous fruitage are the "Adonais," the "Cloud," and the "Ode to the Nightingale"? If Shakespeare had any peculiarities, we don't know it: he is so rounded-out, symmetrical, and perfectly healthy as to 72 PROSE MISCELLANIES. be almost impersonal. So I would speak of Goethe, were it. not for his cold brutalities to the women whom he fascinated. But, with these two exceptions, it is almost impossible to name a single literary genius whose eccentricities were not conspicuous. You will dispute this, and remind me that Sir Walter Scott's was a heart of gold, his mind eminently sane and free of the morbid. But you would be wrong — terribly wrong. Deep down in the soul of Sir Walter, there was that unmanliness which crouches and cringes. It is a hard thing to say of him who wrote the "Young Lochinvar," "Marmion," and the battle-song in "The Lady of the Lake," but it is a true sa^ang. Had Sir Walter treasured, as a sacred heirloom, some cups which had touched the lips of William Wallace, or of Robert Bruce, or of that magnificent brute, Richard the Lion-hearted, we could understand him, and respect him for it; but when we see him catch up and put in his pocket, to carry home and keep as a holy relic, a glass whose wine had been guzzled by George the Fourth, that most putrid of all putrid Kings, a gust of scorn and contempt sweeps over us. Why? We see the crouching of the courtier, to the office of King. We see that, after all. Sir Walter's was the soul of the lackey. The cringing to power and Avealth and militarism, saturates all his books. A Tory to the very bottom of his heart, he hates a rebel, as constituted authority always does. Upon the Dissenter, in religion and in politics, he empties the phials of his uttermost derision, — doing his level best to make him ludicrous and despicable. "Submit yourselves to those in power; bend your necks to Kings and Popes; believe that every wrong is right, if you found it established when you came into the world" — that is the message of Sir Walter's books, and it has done enormous harm. The oddities of Carlyle Avould of themselves fill a lengthy chapter. The crowing rooster bothered him grievously; the lowing cow was not his favorite music ; the dog that sat in one place and barked 1,000,000 times found no favor in his sight; and the piano banger next door sometimes got notes, which were not on her scale. Poor old philosopher, telling all man- kind how to live, and be good and happ}', and raving like a madman most of the time, himself. Discovering after marriage that he had no business marrying, he humanly went to Avork to make both himself and the unfortunate wife wretched. Caught in a similar predicament, John Ruskin gave his wife away — to the painter Millais, who had made her, and a fine lot of children, ideally happy. Apparently, no other man sought to win Mrs. Carlyle, and she was left to the life which caused her to say, in the anguish PROSE MISCELLANIES. 73 of her hungry, tortured soul, '1 feel as if I were the keeper of a private madhouse." Lamaratine says, "Genius bears within itself a principle of destruction, of death, of madness." This is unquestionably true — a very terrible fact. Such men as Byron, Coleridge,' Shelley, Alfieri,- Dante, Swift, Ten- nyson, Poe, Landor, were assuredly nonsane, if judged by ordi- nary standards. There was an unbalance of faculties, a lack of mental symmetry and poise. What a motley procession it is — that of the great men of English literature! There is burly, surly, overbearing Doctor Johnson, with his drawing-room amenities — such as "I per- ceive, Sir, that you are a vile Whig!" and his catching hold of the hands of one of the company, to prevent gesticulation during the conversation; and his stopping in the street to pick up orange-peel, for some mysterious, undiscoverable purpose; and his touching the lamp-post regularly, as he walked along; and his swallowing, without a wink, the absurd story about the Cocklane Ghost, and his compiling a Dictionary, in which he scornfully defines a pension as "the bribe taken by a traitor for the betrayal of his country," and then accepting a pension for himself. There is poor Chatterton, starving in his garret; and Henry Fielding reeling toward home, after midnight, drunk as a lord. There is Dr. Smollett, poor as a church mouse, writing masterpieces of realistic fiction, that have delighted millions and made fortunes for publishers and book-sellers. There is the Satanic figure of Dean Swift, hating the whole human race, venting his impotent rage in torrents of bitter obscenities — incidentally breaking the hearts of the only two fellow-beings that ever loved him. There is Pope, the little cripple, who is so bright and so ready to sting; who has to be sewed up in a sack, every morn- ing, and put to bed like a child at night; and who threatens to spite the unappreciative age in which he lives, by writing no more poetry. There is Oliver Goldsmith, the sweetest spirit that ever touched the chords of human feeling; and there is Sheridan, who, when arrested one night for maudlin drunkenness, and asked his name, answered, thickly. "Wilberforce" — that being the eminently respectable name of England's pioneer Prohibi- tionist. Yes, and here is her ladyship, Mary Wortly Montague, high-born dame, of brilliant wit, known as the introducer into Europe of the extremely dubious vaccination practice; and whose hiirh breeding once manifested itself in a rather famous 74 PROSE MISCELLANIES. repartee. Some daring person having ventured to remark to the Lady Mary that her hands were dirty, that courageous patrician retorted, daintily, "You ought to see my feet!" And there is Southey, tearing along the road of that hag- gard existence of his, composing monumental epics, which no- body reads, and throwing off a lew lyrics, and one biography, which are classics, and immortal. And let us sigh for Keats, the sensitive. Did he really creep to bed, turn his face to the wall, and grieve himself to death, because an immensely inferior man had made fun of his poems? I hope not. His work has so wondrous a quality, it is painful to believe that he was so structurally weak. How much finer Byron was, when the same Quarterly Review ridiculed his ridiculous early poems. Instead of going to bed, my Lord Byron gulps down a few bumpers of wine, seizes his gray goose quill, and goes after the whole tribe of English and Scotch Reviewers, putting some of thein to bed. In fact, Byron hadn't written a line that was worth while, until then. The lash of the reviewer aroused him. Much of what the poets write is unintelligible. Perhaps they, themselves, understood it, but that is doubtful. Don't you get the idea that Goethe lost his wa}^ in the latter part of Faust? Does Coleridge always make his meaning knowable? Are you quite sure that Poe and Browning knew what they were trying to say, all the time? We live in a land where Walt Whitman has many warm admirers. Let me close by quoting a few lines from the inspired Walt. The devotees will doubtless unravel the poet's meaning; but a lunacy commission would be justified in hesi- tating, a long while, before deciding that such writing is not evidence of mental aberration: "Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touched from; The scent of these armpits, aroma finer than prayer: This head more than churches. Bibles and all creeds. If I worship one thing more than another, it shall be the spread of my own body, or any part of it." Bubbles on the Stream THE day is drowsy : insects by the million make their sub- dued, 'silvery music in the fallow field: louder sounds have, somehow, gone into the distance: infinite quietude falls upon nature, and upon you. Intensely green is our much-scorned but marvelously beau- tiful, short-leaf pine, luxuriant of plumage, endless in variety and grace of symmetry; and against its serried ranks of un- broken green stands the yellowing poplar, and the sweet-gum turning to bronze. Notice how the vine of the poison-oak wreaths its scarlet ribbons through the maple and the pine; see it run, like streams of blood, down the tree. You drink in the scene, as a Bacchanal would sip the nec- tar of the gods; and then you stroll down to the creek, and rest on the rock, by the little cascade. You fall to watching the bubbles! The surface is covered with them, always; but no combi- nation, however cunningly arranged, can remain so. Not for an instant. The bubbles form, the bubbles break, the bubbles re-form, and again they break. Always, there are the bubbles, but never there, to stay, are the bubbles at which you gaze. Al- ways coming, they" are always going ; always combining, they as quickly dissolve. Bubbles of Yesterday— where are they? Bubbles of Tomor- row — what will thev be ? The stream is eternal, like the hills: bubbles come, bubbles go, but the stream sings the old, old Song of the Brook. Is there any symbol of life more complete, more striking, than we have here in, these bubbles on the stream ? Consider the family— can its relations be made to endure? It is different today from what it was yesterday— different m its own members, different in its touch with the outer world. Even your own little household, is a group of bubbles on the ever-running stream of life. Where are those who sat around the hearth, in the years gone by? ■, - a Where will tomorrow leave those who sit around it now? The stream will flow on, to its appointed purpose in the unfathomable plan of the Master; but the bubbles— ah, they come and they go. 76 PROSE MISCELLANIES. Even as we clasp the hand, it is cold. Even as we kiss the cheek, it fades. Then consider that larger circle — your friends. See the bubbles change. Yesterday, your enemies were your friends: Tomorrow, your friends will be your enemies. No tie can fasten these human hearts of ours. Gratitude is a dream. Loyalty is the unattainable. Under the feet of Selfishness, of THE STREAM ETERNAL AS THE HILLS. Envy, of Jealousy, the ennobling affections are trampled with remorseless tread. No fair Italia, of kind offices and jientle words, can stay the ruthless march of Attila and the Huns. So it is that the circle of friends is just as a larger group of bubbles on the pool, ever changing, never staying, ever com- bining, now falling away, now coming together again. Alas, the heart-break of it ! Then look again, and contemplate the larger stream of town-life, of State-life, of national relationship, of world-wide alliances. PROSE MISCELLANIES. T7 What are these but vaster collections of bubbles on the stream ? You hear people say, "Politics make strange bed-fellows." It means that the bubbles have changed. They had to. It is the law of nature. . , • n In the commercial world, in the domain of religion, m all industrial callings— everywhere we look, we see the bubbles breaking, and the bubbles forming. Nothing endures. Each great nation is not only composed of ever-changing bubbles —each a scene of perpetual breakings up and re-alignments — but the family of nations is never the same, for a single year. They change' their attitude to each other, while you look. Friendly today, any two of the Powers may be at war tomor- row. Poor mortals that we are ! Each bubble of us fondly be- lieves that he has come to stay. And Ave never can bring ourselves to realize that, in the immeasurable dimensions of the Universe, we are no more than bubbles on the stream. "Down and out!" laughs the cold stream, as it hurries away with the breaking bubbles. "Down and out!" is what the epitaph means, whether writ- ten on the monument which defies Time, or briefly traced in the memory of the few who knew when the bubble disap- peared. A Rose on the Snow T^ID you ever snatch a day from the dusty world of strife, ^ and carry it with you to the great, silent woods of Indian Summer ? Did you ever take by the hand the sweet, patient wife who loves you so, and say unto her, "Sweetheart, will you walk with me, today?" If you never have, then a rich old glass of the nectar of the gods stands neglected within your reach — nectar as free to the peasant as to the King. Very quietly, we went, we two, my sweetheart and I, taking our way along the path, then across the falling leaves — saying little. The sounds of travel on the road were left far behind, and we were alone, she and I, in the majestic forest. How gorgeous it was ! The dress-parade of nature was never more brilliant, nor more alluring. The red Sugarberry put its battle-flag on every summit. The golden Maple walked hand in hand with the Ked Elm; and, underneath, crowded the Dogwood and the Sassafrass in serried skirmish-line. Saul-like, towered the Pine, over blazing yellow Hickory, over purple heads of Oaks. And the falling leaves — how they drifted, dazzling snow- flakes of rainbow hue from the skies that held no cloud — drift- ing, here against a rock; drifting, yonder against a bank; falling straight, or falling aslant — ^but falling, falling, and making upon the ground a carpet, deep and soft and matchless. We walked uj^on it very slowly, looking about us and paus- ing to listen, now and then. A squirrel was gathering nuts, just above us. How silly it was of him to break away, leaping frantically from limb to limb to reach his cozy home ! He was in no danger, for we had no cruelty in our hearts, that day — surely none, that day. The sap-sucker and the yellow-hammer were busy on de- caying limbs, and the tattoo which they beat with their long bills rang metalically down the woods. A covey of partridges, sunning themselves, got almost un- der our feet before, with a great flutter, they rose and whirled away — my sweetheart clapping her little hands with pleasure as they went. Over le^ge after ledge of rocks between two steep hills. PROSE MISCELLANIES. T9 heavily wooded, dashed a little stream, from the spring, far up the slope. Was ever music sweeter? We said we did not think so; and as we noted the record of the water-path on the rocks, and counted how long, how very long, that little stream must have been cleaving its way down to the gray rocks whereon we sat, we caught some idea how old, how very old, it all was ; and I wondered if a Red Man had stood there, beside the dusky damsel he loved; and which furrow on the granite the slender rill was running in, when Helen of Troy was young, and when chained thousands, beneath a tyrant's lash, were hewing the stone for the Pyramids. No wonder that in this idle dreaming my sweetheart got away from me, unnoted, and went further down the glen. She soon called me to see her feed the fishes— silver-sided fishes by the score, which came to her scattered crumbs almost as if they knew her. And so we strolled from rock to rock, and tree to tree — each more splendidly aglow with the colors of Indian Summer than the other. It was all quiet— very grand, very lovely, very saddening. Boisterous laughter in these regal woods had been sacrilege. Light thoughts, beneath those falling leaves, had been crim- inal. In the sound of these speeding waters over the old, gray rocks, bad passions hid themselves, and kindness was in the mind and in the heart. The rude, busy world geemed far away — and forgotten. Its cares, its toils, its strife, its aspirations were all behind and away. We were alone, my wife and I, and our thoughts like our hands, were joined together. We did not speak overmuch. There was no need. "What need had I to tell her how my thoughts had gone back to the time when a nameless, homeless suitor founds grace in her sight? There was no need. She knew — she well knew. What need for her to say that amid all shortcomings, I had given her the knowledge of fervent loyalty, of unbounded devotion which never wearied in its utterance, or its proofs? There was no need; I knew it well. Wh^i need of either to speak of these things ? None. And ah, what need was there for us to speak of that which always makes the lip tremble and the very soul cry out, in boundless grief. There was no need. I knew that the tiny footsteps of one 80 PROSE MISCELLANIES. who shall never walk again, followed her all along those woods I knew that the clear, joyous little voice sang in every song of the water. I knew that down every glade of the murmur- ing trees, there came the whispered question to her as to me, "Shall she ever be ours again?" And I had only to look into her sad face to know, that the question was not answered unto her, any more than it was unto me. And so I took her hand and led her from the woods — kiss- ing her queenly lips many a time, and bearing her up the steeps with my arm. As we went to our home, the long red lances of sunlight fell over the brown fields, and the evening came in upon us, radiant and warm. When the moon silvered the treetops that night, it looked into many a happy home, I trust, but into none had it followed man or woman who had more deeply drank from the splendors of the day. Oh, friend and brother, leave your plow some day; leave your mill some day; leave your bank some day; leave your office some day, and in God's magnificent forest, commune with Him and with yourself — your past, your present, and your future. Your life must be a bleak snowdrift indeed, if such a day does not lay a rose upon it. Reverie and Suggestion /^HRISTMAS is in the air. You can feel it in the night- ^ time, when you hear the chickens wierclly crow, as they do not at any other season. You can feel it in the daytime, as you note the loosening of the close-fitting harness of business and social form; as you listen to the ring of the small voices of the children, who step more briskly down the street and cluster in more hilarious groups; as you see the tendency o:^ Man to throw off the light costume of restraint and civilization, and to let slip, once more, the lustful inclination of the original savage. * * * * * * * Yes, there's a feeling of Christmas in the air. What sort of a feeling does that put into your heart, my brother? Docs it melt you to think of the dim years when you were a bright little oy, and when you tip-toed into the parlor at daybreak, to see what* Santa Claus had put into your stocking? Long before the sun thought of getting up, you were up — you and your little sister — and into the half-dark parlor you went, almost in fear as well as in hope, for the white stockings hanging stiffly there in the fireplace seemed the least bit ghostly. In that gray dawn, how happy you were to empty the stock- ing and find that, by some mysterious chance, Santa Claus had brought you just what you wanted. Since then, has purer joy ever filled your soul? Has life given you sweeter mo- ments ? No: the exquisite enjoyment of that early morning is some- thing that Providence never gave to you, again. Do you remember the vague' pain that smote you when you had grown large enough to be told that there was no such Benevolent Friend of all the little children, as Santa Claus? What was the next great event and happiness of your life? It was when the sweetheart to whom you had been awk- wardly, timidly, making love, let you "cut out" all the other boys, and walk home with her. Weren't you proud? And wasn't she pretty? Those clear, pure eyes; those rosy cheeks; those smiling lips: that wealth of glossy hair; those pearly teeth — heavens! how you worshipped her. 8:;^, PROSE yfTSCELLANIES, Would you have swapped places with a King that day, when she first accepted your invitation to a buggy ride? When she came close to you and pinned the hyacinth or the violet to your coat-lapel, your heart beat pit-a-pat, and you held your breath till the dainty boutonniere was fixed. And when you had worn the flower till it Avas wilted, you reverently laid it away in some book — didn't you? And you have them yet — nor is there gold enough in all the world to buy those faded flowers ! After ever so long a time, as you thought — ages^ it seemed to your impatience — she said, "y^s" — and let you kiss her. Wasn't that a glorious night? You walked on air as you went back to your home, didn't you? You were in such a state of happy exhilaration that you couldn't sleep. Are you ashamed to admit that deep down in your heart was a tender thankfulness to the God who had blessed you with the love of so good a woman? Ah, well — you were married to her, and you two began the upward struggle together. How hard the climb of the hill ! What labor there was ; w^hat disappointments; what days of bleak despondency; what nights of black despair. In that terrible climb of the hill, did you neglect your wife? Did you fail of that tender consideration which was her due? Did you sometimes bring your clouded face and sour mind to the fireside, and morosely impose your own sufferings upon her? AVere those sweet lips made to tremble in mute pain? Those fond eyes to shed secret tears? Happy the husband who can say, "I never did. Wretch that I am — / can noty After a while, children came to you. Then were renewed delights of Christmas Eve and Christmas Morning. To settle upon what should be bought for the children's stockings; to smuggle these selections into the house; to watch the little ones hang up their stockings; to hear their guesses and specu- lations, as to what Santa Claus would bring; to listen to the naive, "I hope Santa Claus will bring me" so and so; and then after they had cuddled down and were sound asleep — do you remember how you and your wife went back into the room where the stockings hung? There was pleasure in it — and yet, there was sadness, too. PROSE MISCELLANIES. 83 It was late in the night when you were acting Santa Claus for the little ones, and it was a time for sober thoughts. Would next Christmas Eve find all the stockings hung? Would three merry voices mingle in the hubbub over the gifts of Santa Claus, and would three happy little faces shine^ as they came running to you, with: "See what Santa Claus* brought me?" Or, upon next Christmas Eve, would you be sitting alone by the dying fire, racked with a pain that would never, never lose its power to torture — because upon this Christmas Eve there were but twof The years pass, pass, pass — and now you are on the Western slope of the hill. The wife who climbed the hill with you is still at your side. No matter who else failed you, she did not. No matter who else found fault with you, she never did. If she ever spoke to you unkindly, and served you reluctantly, or fell short of perfect wifely devotion, j^ou did not realize it. How can you reward your noble wife ? Will you not prove to her that you appreciate her? Will you not bring to her that splendid loyalty, which a proud woman prizes more highly than a miser prizes gold? In word, in thought, in deed, will you not be as true to her, as she has been to you ? Will you not prove by unfailing tenderness with which 3'OU minister to her happiness, now, the depth of your remorse for your shortcomings in those early years? Will you not call back the spirit of the days of your court- ship, and be as proud of her kiss, just as happy to take her to your arms, as on that glorious night when she promised to be yours, and yielded her queenly lips to your kiss ? But perhaps you are of another sort. Perhaps you think all this silly. Maybe the softening touch of Christmas-time softens nothing in you. I pray God it may not be so. For your sake, as well as your wife's, listen: The only human being that you can count on to stand by you,, in spite of "the world^ the flesh, and the devil,'' is your wife. Children will grow up and pass onward — out of your life and into one of their own. Relatives and friends may go with vou a long way, but they will not go all the way. Your wife will. In all the universe, you can't be sure of any one but her. Then make the most of her. Are her cheeks faded ? Kiss her on the lips, and then see the roses blossom once more on that pallid face. Have her eyes been swollen and dim with tears? Put your 84 PROSE MISCELLANIES. arms about her, and tell her you love her just as much as you ever did. Then watch the light of joy kindle those eyes, until they sparkle as brightly as in the days of youth. Ah, it is so easy to make a woman happy, if the right man PROSE MISCELLANIES. 85 wants to do it. And the right man td make your wife happy, is you. Think of the nights you were sick untO) death, and she nursed you; think of the fearful agonies of the birth-hour, when she brought your children into the world; think of the long-drawn years in which she has daily done the drudgery of a slave; think how she has had to bear the Cross of your troubles, as well as her own; think what she has had to go through with in rearing your children; think of her cramped, dull and monotonous life at home, while you were mingling with the bustling crowds of the outside world. Think of all this, brother, and allow much for the jaded, faded wife. Go to her and warm your own heart, as well as hers, by talking to her, in the old, old way of lovers. Court her again, as you courted her when you sought her hand. Tell her that she is just as pretty as ever. This may pos- sibly not be the truth; but. if a lie at all, it will be the whitest one you ever told. The Recording Angel may feel in duty bound to charge it upon the debit side of your account, but as he washes it out afterwards with a tear, he will enter an item to your credit on the other side of your ledger, and he will write it in letters of gold. As It Is, and as It May Be I WAS very tired, for the work I had been doing was hard-, * and now- that the room grew warm and the long task was finished, I fell asleep. No one in the house had been awake but me, while I had for many hours gone over the dreary record of the poor, the patient poor, the suffering poor — God's unprovided poor. The hours had stolen by, like slippered monks, and it was far into the night when the heaviness fell upon my eyes, and I was asleep. Many a Avhirling fiction passed through my heated fancy before there was order in my Dream, but after a while all was clear — cruelly, shockingl}^ clear. A universe unfolded, spreading out, like a map. Every grade and class and condition of human life was before me, at once — with no mist before my eyes and no distance to con- fuse the outline. What I saw was this: A magnificent world of land and sea; of river and lake and forest and fertile field, mountains seamed with hidden wealth ; valleys rich with grain. To this world its Maker had given the name of "J. home for th6 human familyy But the human family had grown very large. Its foot- prints were thick upon every stretch of solid ground, and its vessels moved upon all the waters of all the seas. But the earth was no longer a family-home, and men were no longer brothers. With furious enmity, they hated each other. They worshipped God, but none of them regarded His law. They cried Peace, and loosed the war dogs. They rose from prayer, and Avent to rifle-practice. Churches flourished — so did crime. Schools flourished — so did ignorance. Charities flourished — and paupers died in the streets. I wondered what it all meant. There was land enough for all. They said that God had made it for all. But the few had taken possession of it, and the many had no homes. There was food enough for all : but the few had seized it, and the many had not enough to eat. I tried to discover how the human family kept itself alive. I found it was by Worl-. There were many kinds of work. Some labored to pro- duce food : some labored to produce clothing. Some labored PROSE MISCELLANIES. 87 to make houses, others to make deadly weapons, only. Some labored to teach the peoj^le the law of God; others to ex- pound and enforce the laws which men had made for them- selves. Others still labored (or pretended to labor) to make just laws, by which God's will should be done in the affairs of men. In my dream, I saw clearly a most singular thing — those whose work was most important to the world, were paid less for their labor than anybody else. Those who merely amused the world, got higher wages than those who fed and clothed it. Those who played and danced, got higher pay than the man who built the house they played and danced in. Those who labored to amuse the idle, drew enormous salaries and were the pets of the powerful ; while those who kept the powerful clothed and fed, lackfed food and clothing for themselves. In my dream, the cause of this cruel state of things became clearer. Those who had made the law had so cunningly done it, that the strong man was master of the weak. The strong man became the ruler, and out of the weak man's own pro- duce, gave him whatever lie chose. This made the strong man stronger, and the weak man weaker. I thought I heard a great heart-breaking cry go up from those poor producers of wealth, but their task-masters heard it not — so deaf are they who will not hear. I thought that, now and then, these workers and producers grew furious against their oppressors, and rose in revolt. But they were put down again — some shot and some imprisoned. I thought that, now and then, T^eaders sprung up among those suflt'ering people and promised to go to the Great House of Council, where the laws were tnade.^ and to change these bad laws into good ones. But either, such Leaders were too fcAv. or the strong men would take those Leaders aside into some safe and secret place, and, by some unknown charms and per- suasions, entice those Leaders into forgetfulness of the miseries of the People. So passed the first day of my dream — the Dream of Today — of the world as it is. Like a vanishing landscape, I saw the great Palaces of the Rich, and the wretched huts of the poor; the fine raiment of the one, and the rags of the other; the Avell-spread tables of the one, and the cold hearth and empty dish of the other. The factories went whirling into space — but through the windows I could see the pale, thin features of the children who toiled there. The mine opened one brief moment, and I could see the pitiful serf of the Coal King. The garret sped by, and it made the tears come, to see the shivering needlv-woman sew- 88 PROSE MISCELLANIES. ing there. The streets swam by, filled with their squalor, their hunger, their ceaseless vice and crime and suffering — and Christianity spoke in these streets through the mouth of the Policeman, and what she said to the ragged outcast was: '"''Move on''' ; what she said to the starving child was, '"''Move onP And it strangelj^ got into my Dream, somehoAv, that the cause of all the sorrow was that the Order of the world; was a mistake — a dreadful misunderstanding. The unnatural had become the rule. A feverish haste had taken possession of mankind; and the race was madly run for things which men really did not need. One man rushed because another rushed, cheated because others cheated, hoarded because others hoarded — was cruel because he thought the same measure would be meted out to him^ were situations reversed. * V >;: * * * * But the troubled nightmare passed, and I fell into the Dream of Tomorrow — a gorgeous Dream, a Spirit-lifting Dream — of the world as it may be. I seemed to look upon the same world, but it was filfed witH harmony, and bathed in light. The great rush and worry had passed away. The fever and the pain were gone. The vast machinery of production moved like the stars, ''''never resting., hut never hasting.'''' There was room for all, and food for all. The Earth was dedicated anew as a Home for God's Children — its products their food. Religion burst out from the cold churches, and abode in the lives of men — that high Religion which loves mercy, does good and seeks the Right. Law was no longer frittered away among wrangling advo- cates and stupid Judges. She took her broad principles into the walks of life, and did justice., between man and man. Technicality no longer manacled Truth, and a Judgment Avas no longer the trophy of the trickiest, or strongest lawyer. The Rulers of the People no longer scorned them, nor defrauded them with cunning laws and sharp practices. The People themselves now ruled, and the worker was no longer a dependent. Special Privilege had been slain, and Opportunity was free for all. There were no outcasts — for all had homes. There were no beggars, for there was work and fair wages for all. None had much more than they needed; none had much less. There was little crime, for its cause had been diminished. There was brotherhood among men, for the motive for rivalry and hatred had been taken away. War had ceased. The killing of men had become horrible, PROSE MISCELLANIES. SU whether singly or b}' thousands. A Murderer was detested, whether he sleAv with a knife or a sword, Avith a pistol or with a Maxim. The hum of peaceful industr^i was in the air. The melody of innocent laughter was in the streets. The song of the con- tented Reaper was in the field. Music was supreme — it was the melody of healthy, happy life. Why was Tomorroio so much brighter and better than Today? This question seemed to come to me in my dream. And from somewhere, this reply seemed to be borne : "Because the mistake of yesterday had been found and corrected. Because Injustice had been driven out of the Laws; because favoritism in legislation had ceased; because the pro- ducer of Avealth had secured fair treatment ; because the cun- ning laws of the Task-master were all dead; because there were a few brave men all over the world who had solemnly sworn, before God, that the old false order of things should Out of the dim Past seemed to come voices: One said : "/ gave my life to fleasure. Wine was good, and women were good, and mirth was good. But youth passed — age came, and my heart was empty and sad." Another voice said: "■/ gave my life to war. Cities I sacked, enemies I crushed; laurels have I won and worn. But the sword rusted in my hand. The spiders weave 'twixt me and the sun. And in my ears, as I grow old, is the cry of the widow and the orphan," Another voice said: "/ gave my life to my felloiv-man. I pitied his misfortune. I championed his cause. I loved the friendless. I hated wrong, and fought tyranny wherever I found it. The work has been hard: the way has been sown with thorns. But now, as the evening comes. I fold my arms in contentment and fear not at all the approaching shades. The Master's touch is on my head, and I hear Him say, ^'Inasmuch as ye did it unto the least of these., ye did it unto Me: " ' Thus passed my dream. And I awoke, heavy of heart; for I knew Today was as I had dreampt, and that Tom-on'ow might never come: that the World as it is. and the World as it may be, are as far apart as the real from the ideal. The Song of the Bar Room A LIVE, let us live. Where is Yesterday ? Lost forever. Where's Tomorrow ? It may never come. Today is here. Within its fleeting hours, runs the only certainty that you'll ever know. Come ! eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you die! The chains of Self-restraint are galling — throw them oif ! The burden of Duty i^ grievous — fling it down ! The cross of Responsibility is crushing — let another bear it ! Live for yourself: live for the Noio: live for the lust of living. Drink ! and forget dull Care. Drink ! and ease the heart- ache. Drink ! and drown the passion for the unattainable. See how men are drawn to me ! My lights blaze a brilliant welcome : I am never too hot, nor too cold. Mirrored Vanity smirks in my gilded reflectors ; and no one is ill at ease, in my Free-for-all Club. No shrewish wife can tongue-lash you, here; no peevish child annoy you with its cries. Leave to them the ugliness of your haggard home, and come unto me for comfort. Theirs, the cold and the gloom and the lonely vigil — yours, the warmth and glow and social joy. Clink your glasses, men ! Drink, again, ^"Here's homing.'''' 'Tis well to toast her here, where begins the trail to the grave of Hope. Be jolly; let the place ring with laughter: relate the newest story — the story that matches the nude pictures on the wall. What's that? A dispute, angry oaths, a violent quarrel, the crash of overturned chairs, the gleam of steel, the flash of guns, the stream of life-blood, the groans of dying men? Oh, well, it might have liappened, anywhere. The hearts of mothers and fathers, I wrench with pain : the souls of wives, I darken in woe. I smite the mansion, and there are wounds that gold cannot salve: the hut I invade, and poverty sinks into deeper pits. I sow and I till, and I reap where I sow, and my harvest — is what ? Men so brutalized that all of humanity is lost, save the physical shape — men reeking with moral filth, stony of heart, bestial in vice — men who hear the name of God with a wrath- ful stare, or a burst of scornful mirth ; men who listen to the PROSE MISCELLANIES. 91 death-rattle of any victim of their greed or their lusts, without a -sign of pity. And the women, too ! How can I fitly sing of the Woman of my harvest-time? Did you ever hear her laugh? It must be the favorite music of the damned. Did you ever hear her ribald talk? The very sewers might shrink at bearing it away. Have you ever heard her libidinous songs? Did you ever watch her eyes — those defiant, mocking, hopeless, shame- less eyes? What warriors have I not vanquished? What statesmen have I not laid low ? How many a Burns and Poe have I not dragged down from ethereal heights? How many a Sidney Carton have I not made to weep for a wasted life? How many times have I caused the ermine to be drawn through the mud? Strong am I — irresistibly strong. Samson-like, I strain at the foundations of character; and they come toppling down, in irremediable ruin. I am the cancer, beautiful to behold, and eating my remorseless way into the vitals of the world. I am the pestilence, stalking my victims to the cottage door and to the palace gate. No re- specter of persons, I gloat over richly-garbed victims no more than over the man of the blouse. The Church, I empty it : the Jail, I fill it : the Gallows, I feed it. From me and my blazing lights, run straight the dark roads to the slums, to the prisons, to the bread-lines, to the mad-house, to the Potter's Field. I undo the work of the School. I cut the ground from under Law and Order. I'm the seed-bed of Poverty, Vice and (Crime. I'm the Leper who buys toleration, and who has not to cry "Unclean!" I'm the Licensed ally-of-Sin. I buy from the State, the right to lay dynamite under its foundations. For a price, the^^ give me the power to nullify the work of law-makers, magistrates and rulers. For a handful of gold, I am granted. Letters-of -marque, to sail every human sea and prey upon its life-boats. Huge battleships they build, casing them triply with hard- ened steel; and huge guns they mount on these floating ram- parts, until a file of Dreadnaughts line the coast — for what? To be ready for perils that may never come. But I give them a pitiful purse; and, in return, they issue to me the lawful rights to unmask my batteries on every square: and my gims play upon humanity, every day and every night, of every year. And were my Destroyers spread out upon the Sea. thev would cover the face thereof. 92 PRO^E MISCELLANIES. Around that grief-bowed woman, / threw the weeds of widowhood— but I paid for the chance to do it; and they ivfio took tmj rnoyiei/ hneir that I would do it. To the lips of that desolate child, / brought the wail of THE SOULS or WIVES, I DARKEN IX WOE. PROSE MISCELLANIES. 03 the orphan — but I bought the right to do it; and they loTio sold me the right .^ hneio what would come of it. Yes ! I inflamed the murderer : I maddened the suicide : I made a brute of the husband: I made a diabolical hag out of the once beautiful girl: I made a criminal out of the once promising boy: I replaced sobriety and comfort, by drunken- ness and pauperism — but don't blame Me: hlame those from whom I purchased the legal nght to do it. No Eoman Emperor ever dragged at his chariot wheels, on the day of his Triumph, such multitudes of captives as grace my train. Tamerlane's marches of devastation were as naught beside my steady advance over the conquered millions. The Csesars and the Attilas come and go — comets whose ad- vents mean death and destruction, for a season: hut I go on forever .^ and I take my ghastly toll from cdl that come to mill. In civilization's ocean, I am the builder of the coral reef on which the ship goes down: of its citadel, I'm the traitor who lets the enemy in : of its progress, I'm the fetter and the clog: of its heaven, I'm the hell. The Vulture LJAS it ever occurred to you that the law of compensation * * is illustrated perfectly, in the case of the obscene, ungainly buzzard ? Think of it a moment. He has no enemies : envy, jealousy, unreasoning prejudice, aim no poisoned shafts at him: no other bird wants his job, and he himself is contented with it. True, he has no friends, but he doesn't appear to need any. He IS perfectly independent — and he knows that, as long as Death endures, he will have enough to eat. As to wearing- apparel, his remain on the free list. He bothers nobody's business, and nobody bothers his. Of all creation, he enjoys the exclusive luxury of being left alone. Look upward into the heavens above you, some sunny day of summer — away up yonder, almost out of sight, there is the buzzard, circling slowly, steadily, serenely around; the only unconcerned living creature that your eyes can perceive. The other birds are all uneasy about something. They all have enemies. The laAv of their lives is, eternal vigilance. They dare not feed, or bathe, or fly, or perch, without scanning narroAvly the surroundings, in which may lurk the snake, the hawk, the cat. They live in constant fear: they start at every sound. Their foes are legion; and after a harassing day of continual peril and narrow escapes, the owl, or coon, or 'pos- sum, or rat may clutch them where they roost, at night. Not so the vulture. He hasn't a care, or a fear on his mind. He sails composedly through the cerulean sea, loftily secure. ^* * * * * * * There are the beasts of the field — they all have their ene- mies, their anxieties, their conflicts. Lion assails lion, tiger rends tiger, serpents battle with serpents, the great stolid ox shivers with fright when he sees the glittering eyes of the snake in the grass; torturing swarms of insects pursue to madness the helpless quadruj^eds: the hog devours the kid and the lamb; and the wolf, the bear, the fox and the man devour the hog. Throughout animated nature, the strife is incessant. Nature's law — inexorable and universal and un- changeable — makes the weak the food of the strong, makes the stomach an insatiable sepulchre, sends the resistless roots of life deep down into the fertile soil of Death. PROSE MISCELLANIES. ^5 Xot so the buzzard. Nothing feeds on him — he feeds upon everything. He doesn't have to work for a living, nor stalk his prey, nor swoop hawk-like for his dinner of quail, or his supper of spring-chicken. He doesn't have to crawl on his belly and serpentine his way over meadow and fallowfield, on the hunt for mice, or bird-eggs, or young rabbits, or nest- lings. No, indeed. Others provide his food. Sailing peacefully, evenly, without visible beat of wing, floating with no apparent eii'ort, circling in fixed orbit, as though he were himself some black-sheep member of the distant constellations — the vulture bides his time. He isn't worried about anything. Where his next meal will come from, is a matter of no disquieting anx- ieties. He knows that it will come — and he sails, round and round, in a fathomless, shoreless, radiant sea. Consider the ocean and they that dwell within it : can you find security and peace and rest? From the tiniest mullet to the monsters of the deep, there is war — unending, merciless war. Never will you put your eyes upon the fish that isn't nervous, watchful, in dread of the enemy. Never will you find one that isn't afraid. Everlasting caution, eternal effort, ceaseless activity — is the price he pays to live. In those treach- erous depths, what battles rage, what massacres take place, what ferocities of attack and pursuit, what agonies of flight, or defense, there are ! What anguish of futile effort to escape there is, when the squadron of sharks encompass the whale, or pursue the dreaded swordfish ; and what a ghastly combat that is, when the sharks fight over the prey, and wounded sharks are beset by sharks ! And that which we see among the birds of the air, the beasts of the field, the fishes of the sea, is faithfully duplicated in the life of man. There is no peace anywhere, nor rest, nor security, nor freedom from care and fear. The rivalries of business, the inroads of disease, the enmities which luxuriate along the path, the dread of tomorrow, the terrors of the unknown regions that lie beyond the dim river — ah, who is free from thrall? Worn out by the battle and the march, the straggler may fall by the wayside, crawl into a corner, and seek rest. He will not find it. Nobody has ever found it. Those who are perfectly sure that they're saved, leave their mansion in the New Jerusalem vacant, just as long as .possible. Human saints who tell us. most positivel3\ that they will walk the golden streets and harp with angels, stick to our dirt-roads with piteous tenacity and reveal a singular preference for the mundane phonograph and piano. 96 PROSE MISCELLANIES. No, brethren ! Let us deal honestly by one another, and make the confession that's good for the soul. We are a Jot of cowards. We could hardly be anything else. From the cradle to the grave, we are surrounded by hobgoblins, imaginary terrors and real dangers. A part of our childish training con- sisted of elaborate ett'orts to undermine our native good sense. Civilized creatures that we are — we frighten our own children, destroy their self-confidence, sap their inherent strength of mind and character, feed them on Booger-man stories, poison- ing the very fountains of thought with fictions and super- stitions — and the marvel is, not that so many are permanently enfeebled or enslaved, but that anybody ever emancipates him- self. So ingrained becomes the fear of the dark and the mys- terious, that the bravest of men will quake, in uncontrollable panic, if, at night, he hears sounds that are differenti from anything he ever heard before — sounds that he cannot connect with any ordinary occurrence. He immediately imagines some nameless horror, and his hair stands on end. He isn't afraid of any human being, he isn't afraid to die, but he is afraid of that unearthly sound, because it has aroused the slumbering cowardice that was injected into him by ghost-stories when he was a child ! So it happens, that while most people who have been sick, and who have gradually weakened, are not afraid to die — let sudden death confront anybody, saint or sinner, and you will see that the grimiest log cabin is passionately preferred to the best of those mansions in the skies. Yes, we are all cowards : if not afraid of one thing, we are of something else; and much of it is due to the wretched sys- tem of dealing with the child. And so, when I seek a picture of repose, I look upward, and gaze upon the buzzard, peacefully engaged in drawing invis- ible circles in the upper air. The hubbub in the marts of trade are nothing to him. The fierce rivalries of men atfect him not. Is the w^orld at peace? His rations will not be cut off, or shortened. Are the nations at war? So much the better for him. Is it a year of bountiful harvests? He will not go unfed. Does famine smite the people? It has no terrors for him. The storm comes up from far aAvay, and thunderclouds obscure the sun : he either rides wath the gale as if he loved it, or soars above the tumult, and lets it pass below. Some day you will hear a rush of sound, the volume start- lingly strong, and you will look up in surprise — it is the buz- zard having his fun, apparently, by taking a headlong dive into space. So then this unclean, unsociable, isolated bird PROSE MISCELLANIES. 97 actually possesses a sense of enjoyment, in addition to his unlimited fund of solemn self-conceit. Poor old weather-beaten mariner of the skies ! Tireless swimmer of the invisible waves I Lone sentry of the trackless beat ! You are not pretty, and you probably smell bad, and you eat in a way that we despise — although we daily devour dead things ourselves — you have never had a write-up., by one who appreciated your advantages and s^mipathized with your limitations. Well, you've got one, at last, such as it is. The Wine Cup 1 T IS a warrior whom no victory can satisfy, no ruin satiate. * It pauses at no Rubicon to consider, pitches no tents at night-fall, goes into no quarters for winter. It conquers amid the burning plains of the South, where the phalanx of Alex- ander halted in mutiny. It conquers amid the snow-drifts of the North, where the grand Army of Napoleon found its wind- ing sheet. Its monuments are in every burial ground. Its badges of triumph are the weeds which mourners wear. Its song of victory is the wail that was heard in Ramah : "Rachel crying for her children, and weeping because they are not." It never buries the hatchet : its temple of Janus never closes its doors. No dove of peace ever carries its message; in its hand, is never the olive branch. It sends no flag of truce, and receives none : its wounded are left where they fall, and its dead bury their dead. Every citadel that it storms, it devastates; and in every charge which it makes its cry is, "No Quarter." Those who fall before its onset, die deaths of shame; and they go down to dishonored graves to which love can bring no willing tribute of flowers, and over which pride can rear no enduring monument. To its prisoners it grants no exchange, holds them to no ransom, but clutches them fast, in a captivity that is worse than death, and which ends only at the grave. The sword is mighty, and its bloody traces reach across time, from Nineveh to Gravelotte, from Marathon to Gettys- burg. Yet mightier is its brother, the wine-cup. I say "brother," and history says "brother." Castor and Pollux never fought together in more fraternal harmony. David and Jonathan never joined in more generous rivalry. Hand in hand, they have come down the centuries, and upon every scene of carnage, like vulture and shadow, they have met and feasted. Yea : a pair of giants, but the greater is the wine-cup. The sword has a scabbard, and is sheathed; has a conscience, and becomes glutted with havoc ; has pity, and gives quarter to the vanquished. The wine-cup has no scabbard and no conscience, its appetite is a cancer which grows as you feed it; to pity, it is deaf; to suffering, it is blind. The sword is the Lieutenant of Death, but the wine-cup is his Captain; and if ever they come home to him from their PROSE MISCELLANIES. 99 wars, bringing their trophies, boasting of their achievements, I can imagine that Death, their master, will meet them with garlands and song, as the maidens of Judea met Saul and David. But as he numbers the victims of each, his psean will be : ''The sword is my Saul, who has slain his thousands ; but the wine-cup is my David, who has slain his tens of thousands.'' Toward the Light WHEN SIR WALTER SCOTT was lying on his death- bed, he was' very cahn and resigned; he had always been a kind-hearted man; had always been a gentle man, — and so when he came to die, he was not afraid. He had worked wonders in his way. The tireless hand, pnshing the pen, which, in his youth, a neighbor had seen throgh the window that morning in Edinburgh, had Avritten on, and written on, until the books had grown into a library, and all the ^orld was reading — even as it does today. He had toiled much, enjoyed much, suffered much, — and the last time that the old literateur had gone to the polls, he had been hooted by his neighbors, his vote having been antag- onistic to theirs. Then he went back to Abbotsford, sorrowing; and soon afterwards laid him down to die. His son-in-law, Lockhart, an author of world-wide fame himself, was a different sort of man. Bitter and cynical, he had slight capacity for friendship; appeared to take a delight in giving poisoned wounds; had numberless feuds,, and no reconciliations; had few intimates and few friends; and faced, with inflexibility and scorn, a host of enemies. As the misanthropic Lockhart leaned over the death-bed^ the dying Scott said to him: ^''Be a GOOD niariy my dear; he a GOOD man. It is the^ only thing that can give you comfort^ when you come to Ue herey Not riches, not place and power, not fame, not great deeds of any sort, — only the good works, they alone, can soften the pillow for the dying head. ■ Sent into this terribly complex life, by the unknown and unknowable, we are cursed bj^ the universal sin, and must struggle^ if we reach the light. Something within us tells us that it is better to do right, better to be honest and true, better to resist evil than to embrace it. We can not help the occasional fall, — we are just human, with hearts that are desperatelv wicked. But we must not stay down. That's the point,— T7£^ MUST NOT STAY DOWN. When I was a young man, twenty years old, I entered my first political fight, a petty local affair. With all the hot zeal PROSE MISCELLANIES 101 of inexperienced youth, i worked for victory. Our side got the worst whipping you ever saw. Awfully cut up about it, I was sitting on the sidewalk, filled with despair, believing that I was ruined. An older man, seeing my distress and sympa- thizing with it, said to me: ''Rise, and come againP'' Immediately, the load was lightened, and the fit of blues soon passed away. Ever since then, that word of encouragement has never ceased to be a benefit to me. After every one of my many defeats and falls, there would come the momentary collapse. "What's the use? Fate is against you. You are attempting the impossible. You don't amount to a row of pins, anyway. Tender your sword. You are down and out." So whispers the evil spirit, and. it almost gets me some- times — but not quite. Always I hear the words of George McCord (dead these many years ago), '■'■DonH give way to it. RISE, AND COME AGAINP So, I brush the dust off, bandage the wounds, and go at it again. When I come to face my Father, I want to be able to say to Him : "Father, take pity on me — it was You who made me just what I was. With "all my raging passions and disfiguring imperfections. You sent me into the wicked world, where there was so much that I could not understand. I know that I've sinned, deeply and repeatedly, but, oh, my Father! I did try to please You. Often guilty of wrongdoing, I strove ever to get right, and stay right. I've done the very best I could — to be adjust man. a high-minded man, a pure man, a good man." If, at the end of the chapter, I can still' say that,—^^ I can up to now, — I won't be the least bit afraid of Him. I know, in my inmost soul, that He will forgive me the sins that I could not help committing, and that He will not doom me with His eternal, implacable frown. The Country Wife (An effort was being made to secure an appro pnation of $10,000 for the purpose of sending city women, to improve the wives of country folk.) AS TO asking the aid of the Georgia Legislature to make ■^ better wives and mothers of the country women of this State: I have rarely known a subject more difficult to discuss patiently within the bounds of moderation. There are thou- sands of devoted and absolutely admirable waves and mothers in our cities, in our towns, and in our villages, and it gives me pleasure and pride to testify to the fact; but if you ask me to carry you to the home of the true wife and the true mother, one Avho loses herself entirely in the existencei of her husband and children, one who is the first to rise in the morning, and the last to retire at night, one who is always at her post of duty, and the one who carries upon her shoulders the burdens of both husband and children, one who is keeper of the household and the good angel of it, utterly unselfish, happy in making others happy, with no thought of seeing her name in the papers, no thought of fashionable pleasure, perfectly content in quiet home life, in which she does nobody harm and every- body much good, taking as many thorns as she can from the pathway of her husband and strewing it with as many roses as possible, strengthening him by her inspiration as he goes forward to fight the battles of life, smoothing the pillow upon which he rests his tired head when he comes home, tenderl}^ rearing the boys and girls who will in turn go away from the door some day for the last time — the boy to become a good soldier in life's continuous warfare, and the girl to become some ardent suitor's wife and to be to him what her mother has been to her father: and who, when all toils are done and her strength is departing, will sit calmly in the doorway, watching the setting sun, with a serene smile upon her face, and never a fear in her heart — ask me to find where this woman lives, where this type is to be found, and I will make a bee-line for the countrv. The Path to Glory IN SIR WILLIAM FRASER'S book, "Disraeli and His ^ Day," we find this passage: "Like men who have a real knowledge and appreciation of true poetr}^, Disraeli was a gi-eat admirer of Gray. He said to me with great fervour, 'Byron visited Greece ; he walked on Olympus; he drank from Castalia: there was everything to inspire him. Gray never was in Greece in his life; yet he wrote finer lines than Byron: " 'Woods that wave o'er Delphi's steep : Isles that crown the Aegean deep; Fields that cool Illyssus laves, Or where Mseander's amber waves In Jhigering labyrinths creep.'' "He pronounced the last line yery slowly. "On another occasion, I asked him which he admired most of the stanzas of 'Gray's Elegy.' He replied, 'That will re- quire a good deal of thinking.' He added, 'You have made up your mind?' 'Yes.' ps i;. V^'The boast of Heraldry; the pomp of Power: i jA^\ ' And all that Beauty, all that wealth e'er gave, \ 3 Await alike the inevitable hour : The paths of Glory lead but to the Grave." I have often heard this stanza from Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," used for the purpose of discouraging ambition. In my judgment, the poet had no such intention. He meant merely to give expression to that thought which the Romans had in mind when they placed in the chariot of the conqueror, on the day of his triumph, an attendant whose duty it was to repeat from time to time in the ear of the victor, "But remember that you are mortal." The same thought was in the mind of the Orientals, who dragged a mummy case through the banquet hall where revelers were feasting. Properly understood, there is in all this no discouragement to honorable ambition. True, the paths of glory lead but to the grave, but whither leads any other path? The law-giver, after all his toil and all the splendor of the civic crown, sinks to 4pm ir3 104 PROSE MISCELLANIES. the dust ; but equally so does the thoughtless, aimless boor, who had no care beyond his pig-stye. The warrior, after the battles have been fought and won, after the dash of onset, the thrill of contest, the hot wine of triumph, sleeps coldly and alone; but equally dismal is the fate of the coward cur who wounded himself with an imag- inary bullet, shirked the fight, and lived, the scorn of man- kind. There was once an Indian Chief, celebrated in the moun- tains of North Georgia. Some one asked him the way to his home. The red man haughtily answered, "I go home along the mountain tops." To each one of us comes the hour when we meet "The Shadow cloaked from head to foot, Who bears the key of all the creeds." To me, it seems far more noble, far more inspiring, to have the inevitable meeting somewhere in the pathway that leads us home along the mountain tops. Is It Worth the Price? THE WORLD is full of young men who are panting to throw oti' the restraints of youth and enter into the battle of life. In every class-room, there is at least one boy who nurses the profound belief that he is ''the coming man," and that he will open a new chapter in the book of human achieve- ment. In the Court-house he will win cases which Toombs, or Ben Butler, or Daniel Webster, would have lost. In medicine, he will cure where Pasteur, or Koch, or Battey would have killed. In science, he will make Hubboldt and Spencer and Huxley and Darwin appear pigmies. As an Orator, he will spell-bind, where Phillips or Prentiss would have put to sleep. As a Statesman, he will begin where Gladstone left off. As a Warrior, the first "round" in his lad- der of glory will be an Ansterlitz or a Jena. When I'was at college, this "Coming Man," was in every class. In fact, there w^ere two or three of him in every class. And, of course, I was one of him, myself. That was long ago, — so long ago that when I met one of "the coming men" of these college days a few weeks since. I found himas gray and as subdued as a still, drizzly day in October. He was traveling about, selling a new edition of an excellent Cookbook. This feverish, desperate contest for Fame and Wealth and Position — is the reward worth the labor? Is there any "reward" at all, in the success achieved, which brightens the home, gladdens the heart, and fills the soul's desire with satisfaction? In the hub-bub talk about you, which the world calls Fame, how many of the talkers are men whose good opinion is of actual value? And how many of thes<^ worthiest of peo- ple are citizens whose good opinion is so indispensable to you, that you would work your legs off and your heart out to get it? AVhat is that good opinion going to do for you, that you should turn your days into days of drudgery and your nights into sleepless vigils of anxious thought ? What are you going to get out of it, that repays you for the health and the peace and the happiness it costs ? 106 PROSE MISCELLANIES. Napoleon believed that Fame was the only immortality. He had no belief in the soul. Yet, after toiling so hard over his books that he stunted his growth; after reaching supreme power by such a career of blood, hyporcisy, selfishness, genius, labor, lies and good luck, as the world never saw before; after carrying his triumphant eagles from Cairo to Moscow, he had the mortification to learn that there were people living, even in France, who had never heard of him. Where there is one man in the world today who has any clear idea as to who Napoleon was, there are forty thousand who do not. Once upon a time a very prominent burgher of the town where I live, — a man of eminent respectability and intelligence, — closed a harangue I had been making to him on the subject of Napoleon's greatness, by asking me, with the utmost seriousness, if Napoleon was dead. What was there in the splendid fame he won, which made it easy foe Henry Grady to give uj) his young life? What is there in it that Bill Nye should work himself to death — killing himself to supply the public with fun? Where is the recompense which repays to the slave of am- bition for the loss of the sunny daj^s in the fields, the myriad voices of the autumn woods, and the leisure hours at the fire- side of a happy home? Shall there be no rest for weary feet, in this mad race for Fame and Wealth and Position? Shall there be no furlough from this all-devouring army? Shall there never come a time when the rainy day is mine, and the long, sweet hours in the quiet library? Shall the fever of pursuit so entirely enslave us that there shall be no hour which belongs to friendship, none belonging to solitude and reflection, none, to memory, and to the sacred teachings of Regret? A great man once said to me, "We are not judged by char- acter, but by reputation." Just so : and perhaps that's the A^ery reason why it is worth while to stress the fact that the reputation is not worth the price we pay for it — for surely the real value of the man is his character, and not his re]>utation. Get all the fame that flows from a good life. Such fame is as healthy as the light that pours from a star — as unfeverish as the breath of a I'ose, or tliQ song of a bird. Such a fame is but the halo that follows sterling worth. Get all the money you honestly can. You owe it to your- self and those, who depend on you to bring the vessel into port, if you can — safe from the storm. PROSE MISCELLANIES, 107 The man who says he loves being poor, is a liar, and he takes yon for a fool— else he wonldn't tell yon so. you 'win Position in life, if yon feel that Duty calls for No man should under-rate the importance of Fame, of Wealth, or of Position :— but the man who pays his health and his happiness and his life for them, pays too much. The Late "DEADER, did you ever run over the pages of a Magazine, scanning items of news, dipping into heated controversies, pausing at the love-stories, as a humming bird would at a flower, and suddenly find yourself at the last page, where the editor chronicles the list of "'The Late?" Who are "The Late?" They are the men who have acted their part, and have left the stage. They are the dead. Last month, they Avere full of life — working, quarrelling, loving, hating, scheming, dreaming, planning for indefinite futures, as though all Time w^as theirs. They read the Magazine last month, just as you are doing this month. They scanned the news, dipped into the discussions, laughed at the jokes, lingered with the lovers, and sighed over the chronicles of "The Late." Then they closed the book — and now their life-books are closed; and they join the lists of "The Late," which you and I are, this month, to read and to sigh over. How sad it all is. Last month here was a scholar, delving deep into the hidden lore of granite rocks, of dust laden manuscript, of ruined tem- ples, of monumefital inscriptions leading back into hoary ages of the Past, — and now his nerveless hands are crossed, and his eager feet hurry no longer after knowledge. Last month he was a palpitating actuality, all ablaze with hope and purpose: this month he heads the list of "The Late." On the other hand, there was an author, one who had long been suitor to fame: one who had toiled and fought grim pov- erty and cold neglect. Year after year, he had struggled upward to the light — falling back again with many a sickening disappointment. But at last, as the silver threads began to streak his head, a sudden sun-burst of Fame was his. The storm lifted, and the haven Avas there. The wilderness ended, and the labor of travel was over. Poverty fled, and golden ducats rained. Neg- lect vanished and the world crowded upon him with plaudits, with the eager offerings of universal Fame. All this was last month. Your whole heart went out to the storm-tossed mariner Avho had so joyfully made port. Your hands clapped in unison with all the others for the brave sol- dier who had at last won his fight. This Avas last montli. PROSE MISCELLANIES. 100 Where is the author now? Dead. You will read his name m the list of "The Late." His Fame still rings around the world, but, alas ! his ears are too dull to hear. You may hand him ever so many crowns of laurel, ever so many wreaths of flowers; his closed eyes cannot see, his frozen hands cannot hold. Yonder, again, was the statesman, the politician, if you like. Last month, what a robust figure was his ! How he bustled, how he shoved, hoAv he aspired, how he intrigued ! With what immense vitality did he strive to lift his voice above other voices, his head above other heads ! What schemes did fill his busy brain ! Throughout all the walks of life there was not a man more active, more resolute, more full of pluck and ambi- tion. He clashed against his foes with a force that made the arena ring. He would shiver a spear with any challenger who struck his shield. Ardently he sought honors, fiercely he com- batted opposition, tirelessly he served friends — hoping that they would serve him, in turn. That was last month. All eyes followed him as he gal- lantly rode down the lists, armed, from golden spear to plume- dressed helm, seeking in honorable strife to bear away the prize, and live a space m the huzzas of brave men, in the smiles of lovely women. That was last month, and now, it is all over. Death struck him as he rode. The lance fell from his hand, his good steed gallops on, riderless. The brave Knight will seek the prize no more. His name appears on the list of '"The Late." And so it all goes: — sad, heart-breakingly sad. And it cannot be helped. We have trodden down the dead of last month : the living will tread us down, next month. Preach peace as much as you will, and preach love and charity. May their kingdom come. May they rule the world. They do not rule it now. However much we wish to disbelieve it, the race is mostly to the swift, the battle to the strong. The strong nation oppresses the weaker nation; the strong man, the weaker man. You hold your place in life, as in a battle-field. You hold it by being able to hold it. When your strength fails, you retreat. Bismarck grows old — and is forced off the stage: Glad- stone decays, and the reins si:)urn his palsied hands. I look over the list of "The Late," and I read the name of one I knew. Was he my foe? Was there enmity between us? Alas, how pale and worthless the feud now appears. My passion is all gone. His white hand seems to wave me a flag 110 PROSE MISCELLANIES. of truce. Death obliterates his fauls (if indeed they were his faults and not my prejudices,) and I recall whatever was manly and strong and admirable in him. I review our differ- ences, mourn over the estrangement, and grieve that malice ever arose between us. The way so short, the time for joy so brief, human ills of the inevitable sort so numerous, that it seems to me now a supreme pity that we wilfully added to the thorns which beset the journey. Was "The Late" my friend? Was the dead man one who had loved me, sympathized with me, stood by my side in some hour of danger come to my relief, when I was friendless, poor, and down-hearted? Then indeed what terrible words are these, "The Late." I cannot see them through the mist of tears. I see only the white face of my friend. I think only of those folded hands, that loyal heart which beats no more. Eeader, some day our names will go into the columns of "The Late." The list is there, and our names will be written into the blank, after a while. To us it will not matter at all what the world may think, or may say, when it reads our names in the list. We will be at rest them — so far as the world is concerned. Love cannot reach us — nor malice, thank God ! Misconstruction, envy, hatred, can hurt us no more. It matters not what the world will say, except in so far as the world speaks the Truth ! While we lived, the False may have worked us enormous harm. It can never harm us again. The True will reign supreme. While we lived, we found lies to be much more terrible things than the Sunday-school books (and others) had pre- pared us to believe. We found that lies had power to damn, so far as the world was concerned. We found that the people were ignorant, credulous, easily duped, and falsely led. We found that a lie, repeated every day, became practically the truth. We found that the public scarcely knew the whole truth about anything, and that the people were designedly kept weltering in lies, and half-truths (which were more de- ceptive than lies) in order that the "powers that be" could continue to misrule. We found that the world had become so wedded by custom to this system, that it was hardly possible to tell the people the whole truth upon any subject whatever. But all the while you felt that a lie was a despicable thing — a thing preordained to death and damnation. Deep down in your soul, you felt that there was finally no hope of your land- ing your feet on the eternal rocks, unless you fought lies, and championed Truth. PROSE MISCELLANIES. Ill Did you do it? — That is the question which then assumes terrible importance. Can it be truly said that you loved Truth and Eight, Justice and Mercy? Can it be truly said that your heart turned always to humanity, and strove ever for better things ! Can it be said that Duty, as you understood it, was your gos- pel, from first to last, through good report and evil, through cloudy days and fair? Or, did you bend and twist, here and there, first one way and then the other, true to nobody, true to no conception of right, fawning upon wrong to get a part of the fruits thereof, adding your voice to the clamor of Ignorance and Superstition, and Prejudice, and Evil, in order that you might be one of a dominant majority? Did you lay down your manhood at the feet of Error, knowing it to be Error, and join in the carnival of Wrong, simply because the greater numbers were on that side? Did you put your soul into bondage knowing that it was a Falsehood you obeyed? These, and these only, will be the vital questions, when we shall have left "the quick" and joined "the dead." God pity us all! And may Truth, the handmaiden of the Most High, claim us as votaries, in that dread day when we shall have been added to the hosts of "The Late'." The Old Packet Boat by the James TpHE train was slowing down for Lynchburg; passengers were rising from their seats, getting ready to leave the cars; my companion leaned over me and pointed to a distant object on the far bank of the James, and said: "See that old boat up there under the trees? General Jackson's body was carried in that from Lynchburg to Lexington." In the swift view^ of it which I got, as the train carried us on, it appeared to be a low, irregidar hut, squatting there dis- consolately, dilapidated and forlorn. And that was the hearse which bore toward its last resting place, "at Lexington, in the Valley of Virginia," the corps of one of the greatest soldiers the world has known. The instantaneous photograph of the old boat, which that fleeting glimpse of it made on my mind, will never fade. For it fired the long train of memory, and the whole of "Stone- wall" Jackson's phenomenal career seemed to form the back- ground of the mental picture of the old boat. His early life of poverty, orphanage and disease; his in- domitable determination to get on ; his record at West Point, where his angularity and industry were his most noticeable traits of character: then his services in the Mexican war, where he was somewhat of a rollicking officer, brave as his sword, full of dash, but also full of fun. Quartered in the ""Halls of the Montezumas," he threw himself into the social pleasures which folloAved so soon upon the close of the fighting. No officer in the army was fonder of the society of the beautiful Mexican ladies; and in order that he might the better enjoy their com- pany, he mastered the Spanish tongue. Then came the service in the Seminole war, in which there were no laurels to be gained. Professor in the Virginia Military Institute, Jackson was regarded as an oddity, and nothing more. The boys played all sorts of pranks off on him, and the Faculty held him as an almost negligible quantity. Because he was so strict, angidar, and rigid, Jackson was not popular with the gay young fel- lows who came there to loiter their way through to gi-aduation. At school he had been nicknamed "Fool Tom Jackson"; and now that he was a teacher of boys, the same tendency to pro- voke ridicule clung to him. On the drill ground the pieces PROSE MISCELLANIES. 113 of artillery, in default of horses, were drawn by the students: to tease and annoy Jackson, these artillery teams would pre- tend to get frightened, during the maneuvers, and would ''run away" with the cannon. When I was at Lexington a few years ago, a member of the Faculty who was attached to the College at the time Jackson was a "teacher there, told me, as an evidence of Jackson's self- control, that on one occasion, when a student who nursed a grudge against the strict Professor, threw a brick-bat at him, from behind, as he was taking his walk in the grounds, Jack- son did ont so much as turn his head. ii iiliiyi^ •1 m i» 1 .V- T p^»i^,fs^ m 1 ■ii ^..•*« THE OLD PACKET BOAT BY THE JAMEs This gentleman also told me that the Faculty of the Insti- tute were considering the matter of dispensing with the chair filled by Jackson, when the Civil War broke out, and the angu- lar Professor was called to the field. They showed me the very commonplace house which was Jackson's home in Lexington, and it aroused in me emotions which no palace on this earth would stir: — a very modest house, with an ugly location, — for its front wall is flush with the sidewalk, — standing on a side street, near the centre of a town which occupies a site of great natural beauty. And that was the "garden of Brienne" of Stonewall Jack- son ! The place where he buried himself in study, standing at his desk, Avithout book or paper, concentrating his thought in- tensely upon- all that he had read during the study-hours of the 114 PROSE MISCELLANIES. day. Then, when the clock struck nine — not before it began to -strike, and not until the ninth stroke had sent its record- voice to the past. — did the rigid student throw off the shackles of dis- cipline, and begin to romp with the children, on the floor, or mingle in the light and familiar conversation of the household. For the odd Professor, whom nobody understood, but who was thoroughly respected by every sober-minded person that knew him, had somehow or other won the heart of a beautiful young woman, had made her his wife, and was now a beloved member of her family, Margaret J. Preston is known to almost every one who reads, but her sister Eleanor is remembered by the few, only, who know that it Avas she whose loveliness of person and character completely subdued the shy and complex character of the Professor, converted him to her own religious faith, gave him the hrst inclination toward becoming devout, and by her untimely death, after one year of domestic happiness, gave him a sorrow that darkened the remainder of his life. To me, ''Stonewall'' Jackson seems to belong to the class of Havelock and "Chinese" Gordon. Like those great soldiers, he was a religious fanatic. Like them, he was a mystic. Had he been made Commander-in-Chief, in some war fought for the sake of religion, he would probably have developed into the Greatest of Great Captains. As it was, I see in Jackson, as in Lee, a curious occasional apathy. Somehow, I get the idea that, while both were absolutely loyal to the Southern Confederacy, unselfish and unsparing of themselves in the service, neither Jackson nor Robert E. Lee had that suprenve confidence, that whole-hearted passion of purpose, which is so essential to success. Both Jackson and Lee were at their best when repelling invasion. The presence of Northern troops in the Valley, aroused all the lion in Stonewall Jackson, and he put forth the terrible energy which made that campaign immortal. The approach of the Northern hosts upon Richmond had a similar effect upon General Lee; he rose to the crisis and was the Great Captain — some say the greatest of all the soldiers pro- duced by the Anglo-Saxon race. But once the supreme danger to native land had passed, neither Lee nor Jackson pressed their advantages home, with the ruthless purpose of destroying the enemy., as each would have done, had, they been f,ghting any other people save their own flesh and Mood. The blundering, disastrous pursuit of McClellan, as he fell back to the James, after the fighting around- Richmond, PROSE MISCELLANIES. 115 shows this. The Southern army would have been immensely better off had it simply kept in sight of the enemy, compelling him to continue the retreat by threatenmg his flank and his base of supplies. I fact, Gen. E. P Alexander, m his most valuable book of Keminiscences, describes the conduct ot btone- wall Jackson, during the retreat of McClellan ma way that leaves no doubt of the great commander's lack of mental en- ergy during the pursuit. . , ^ , x i j. j The o-entlemanlv manner in which General Lee conducted GEN. ROBERT E. LEE. his operations each time that he invaded l^e enemy s country, proves my analysis to be correct. Think of Wei mgton, or Blucher, or Napoleon, or Marlborough, scolding^ his troops, furiously, for taking apples from the orchards of the foe, or for making a campfire out of his fence-rails! An old soldier, who now lives at Sugar Valley, Georgia published a letter in my paper, in which he told how General Lee, in high wrath, called him a "thief," a "disgrace to the army," and other "hard names," because the soldier, hungry and tired, had taken some fruit from an orchard, and was trying to satisfy his hunger with it. This was during the m- vasion of Pennsylvania. t ..o fl,a<- It was the highest degree creditable to Kobert E. Lee that 116 PROISE MISCELLANIES. he would order one of his men to "put that rail back on that fence," — but is that the spirit which wins, in war? It ought to be, I grant you, — but is it ? There used to be much of that noble spirit in the days of Chivalry, and in the days when the French officers were supposed to say to the foe, "Gentlemen of the English Guard, we never fire first." But whatever remains of that spirit were left in Europe, the era of Napoleon swept away ; and' ever since he scandal- ized the decorous Austrian officers, by fighting them in any way that meant most damage to thern^ — rules or no rules, — the practice has been the reverse of chivalrous. The ruth- lessness of Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, and Rosecrans, was most ungentlemanly, — but most effective. Had our West Point generals waged war upon the North with the same destructive fory, the resolt of the conflict might have been different. ******* And the old boat crouches on the bank of the river, slowly settling down into ruin. Thirsty, feverish, money-loving Commercialism hurries by, giving the lonely derelict a merely casual glance. And yet the sight of it calls up so much to those who knew the past. I close my eyes and hear again the peal of thunder and see the distant lightning, as Stonewall Jackson crashes against the Union flank at Chancellorsville. I hear the "ten thousand whippoorwills" of whom Gen. Jeb Stuart spoke afterwards; I see the Confederates struggle forward in the dense scrub woods; the Federals scatter in confusion and Howard's Corps is annihilated ; the rapid advance of Jackson's men has broken their own formation and there is a perilous confusion; the enemy, in a desperate attempt at salvation, plants a battery 'and shells the turnpike; a momentary halt is made by the Confederates, and Jackson, caught up in the concentration of a great purpose, rides too far, too far to the front; with all his might he is pushing around to the enemy's rear, to cut him off from the United States ford, and take his entire army prisoners, or destroy it ! Alas, he rides too far into the darkness, — no picket line protects him from the enemy and he comes within their musket range, is fired upon, gallops back toward his own men — who have orders to fire on cavalry and who do not know that Stonewall has ridden beyond them — is fired upon by his men and is carried, here and yonder, by his frenzied horse, is at length lifted from the saddle to the ground, where he lies beneath a tremendous cannonade of the enemy, M'ith a drawn face, white with pain, turned up to the moon. PROSE MISCELLANIES. !!'<' "Mv God! it's General Jackson!" cried a soldier march- ino- by: and in a few days tlie heartbroken wail rang through- out the South, "My God! Stonewall /ackson is dead. Whether Gen. Jackson assumed that a picket line had been thro'^out in front, or whether his act m ridmg forward was nddent to his absorption in his great purpose, can never be known During the days of patient sulfering which preceded hi diath- he death of'a resigned, undoubtmg Christian-4ie made no effort to account for what had occurred. A pathetic de nil however, is that those who saw him just- after he was lit reMrtha Us expression was one. of utter astomshment But'the iron lips closed down and he saicl nothing. Nothing? Nothing about the calamity that had hMlen hrm. But when Gen. Pender expressed a doubt of being able to hold his advance, an exposed and temporarily unsupported position Jackson'L order came, prompt, stern, emphatic : ^ ''you must hold, your ground, General Pender/ You must '%!ZJ^s S Wlod, unable to stand, -ked w^^, the soldierly instinct and heroic spirit were masters to the end. "^If r^£^^^s.s, Gen. Thomas Jonathan Jackson woidd not cnve ground to thQ enemy, was immovable and con- fito when thf wrecks of broken brigades were all around him and L won the title by which his people Preier ^o call him' It was fitting that his last order on the field of battle sCdd have been just what it was: 'To. must hold your ^Ten f^der was a brave officer, and Gen Lee's official .epStof'^StLellorsville makes n.^^^^ gallantry displayed by him, m the battle on the day attei Jackson's fall. ^ * * • Thei*e never was a sublimer funeral given to any National m'tbursts of grief that betokened a ""'J^^'.^" '^;^„,,f ^^e found and unobtrusive piety, his dramatic and tragic fall m 118 PROSE MISCELLANIES. the hour of glorious victory, his fortitude in suffering, his touching submission to the will of God. H: $ 41 H: ^ :>: ^ I turn to the Diary kept bv Margaret J. Preston. The date is May 5th, (1863.) Here is the entry : '"Today brings news of a terrible battle — but no particu- lars; only that Gen. Frank Paxton is killed, Jackson and A. P. Hill wounded." STONEAVALL JACKSON. »"May 7th: Another day of awful suspense. Not a soli- tary letter or person has come from the army to Lexington; only a telegram from Governor Letcher, announcing that Cap- tain Greenlee Davidson is killed; his body and Paxton 's are expected tomorrow. What fearful times we live in!" "FridaA^, 8th. Today we hear that Gen. Jackson's arm is amputated and that he is wounded in the right hand. How singular that it should have been done through mistake by a volley from his oAvn men. It happened at midnight Satur- day." "May 10th, Sabbath : This afternoon Dr. White attempted to hold service: but iust as he was beginning, the mail arrived, PROSE MISCELLANIES. 119 and so great was the excitement, and so intense the desire for news that he was obliged to dismiss the congregation. We only hear of one more death among the Lexington boys, young Imboden. Several wounded ; this is much better than we had dared to hope." , . , , ''May 12th, Tuesday : Last night I sat at his desk writing a letter to General Jackson, urging him to come up and stay with us, as soon as his wound would permit him to move. / went downstairs this morning, with the [^iter m my hand and was met by the overtohelming news that JACK SO IS W A^ DEAD! A telet^ram had been sent to Col. Smith by a courier from Staunton. Doubt was soon thrown upon this by the ar- rival of someone from Eichmond, who said he had left when the telegram did, and there was no such rumor m Eichmond. So between alternate hope and fear, the day passed. It was saddened by the bringing home of General Paxtons remains, and by his funeral. At five this evening the startling con- firmation comes-Jackson is indeed dead ! My heart overflows with sorrow. The grief in this community is intense; every- body is in tears. What a release from his weary two years warfare. To be released into the blessedness and peace ot heaven' . How fearful the loss to the Confederacy! The people made an idol of him and God has rehuked them. No more ready soul has ascended to the throne than was his. Never have I seen a human being as thoroughly governed by duty. He lived only to please God; his daily life was a daily offering up of himself. All his letters to Mr. P. and o me since the war began, have breathed the spirit of a saint In •his last letter to me, he spoke of our precious Elbe, and the blessedness of being with her in heaven And now he la ioined her, and together they unite m ascribing praises to Him Iho has Adeemed them by His blood. Oh, the havoc death is making! The beautiful sky and the rich, perfumed air seemed darkened by oppressive sorrow. Who thinks or speaks of victory? The word is scarcely ever heard. Alas! Alas. When is the end to be?" , "May 15th, Friday: General Jackson wa| buried toflay, amid the flowing tears of a vast concourse of people By a strange coincidence, two cavalry cx>mpanies happened to be passing through Lexington from the West, ]nst at^ th ou of the ceremonies: they stopped, procured mourning foi then colors and ioined the procession. . . . . li^e exeici.e. were very appropriate: a touching voluntary was sung ^itl subdued,- sobbing voices; a prayer from Dr. Eamsey of most 120 PROSE MISCELLANIES. melting tenderness; very true and discriminating remarks from Dr. White, and a beautiful prayer from W. F. J. . The cofRn was draped in the first Confederate flag ever made, and presented by Pres. Davis to Mrs. Jackson ; it was drapped around the coffin and on it were laid multitudes of wreathes and flowers which had been piled upon it all along the sad journey to Richmond and thence to Lexington. The grave, too, was heaped with flowers. And now it is all over, and the hero is left 'alone in his glory.' Not many better men have lived and died. His body-servant said to me, 'I never knew a piouser gentleman.' Sincerer mourning was never manifested for anyone, I do think The dear little child is so like her father; she is a sweet thing, and Avill be a blessing, I trust, to the heart-wrung mother." In his "End of an Era," John S. Wise writes: "It was a bitter, bitter day of mourning for all of us when the corps was marched down to the canal terminus, to meet all that was mortal of Stonewall Jackson. We had heard the name of every officer who attended the remains. "With reversed arms and muffled drums we bore him back to the Institute and placed him in the section-room in which he had taught. There the body lay in state until the following day. The lilacs and early spring flowers were just blooming. The number of people who came to view him for the last time was immense; men and women wept over his bier as if his death was a personal affliction ; then I saw that the Presbyte- rians could weep like other folks. The flowers piled about the coflfn hid it and its remains from view. I shall ever count it a great privilege that I was one of the guards, who through" the silence of the night, and when the crowds had departed, stood watch and w^ard alone with the remains of the great 'Stonewall.' "Next day, we buried him with a pomp of woe, the cadets his escort of honor: with minute-guns, and tolling bells, and most impressive ceremonies, we bore him to his rest. But those ceremonies were to me far less impressive than walking post in that bare section-room, in the still hours of night, reflecting that there lay all that was left of one whose name still thrilled the world. "The burial of Stonewall Jackson made a deep impression upon the corps of cadets. It had been our custom, when things seemed to be going amiss in the army, to say. 'Wait until "Old Jack" gets there: he will straighten matters out.' We felt that the loss was irreparable. The cold face on which we had PROSE MISCELLANIES. 121 looked, taught us lessons which have been dropped from the curriculum in these tame days of peace. "Many a cadet resolved that he would delay no longer in offering his services to his country, and, although the end of the session was near at hand, several refused to remain longer, and resigned at once." An Incident in the Life of Epenetus Alexis Steed EPENETUS ALEXIS STEED: June 6, 1829 — November 9, 1885. Minister and Teacher: Graduate (Second Honor) Mercer Uni- versity, 1851 : Chair of Ancient Languages, Mississippi College at Clinton; Pastor of Thomson Baptist Church, Sweetwater, Greenwood and Pine Grove: Chair of Latin, Mercer University, 1872-1885. Sir Walter Scott used to say that he had never met any man from whom he could not learn something. No matter how ignorant the humblest citizen may appear to be, the chances are that he knows a few things which you do not know; and if you will "draw him out," you will add to your knowledge. The Virginia negro who happened to pass along the road while the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States was puzzling his brains, over the problem of mending his broken sulky-shaft, knew exactly the one tbing which John Marshall then needed to know. The great lawyer was at his wit's end, helpless and wretched. How could he mend that broken shaft, and con- tinue his journey? He did not know, and he turned to the negro for instruction. With an air of superiority which was not offensive at that particular moment, the negro drew his pocket knife, stepped into the bushes, cut a sapling, whittled a brace and spliced the broken shaft. When the Chief Justice expressed his wonder, admiration and pleasure, the negro calmly accepted the tribute to his talent — and walked off, remarking: '"''Some folks has got sense, and some ain't got none." ******* That anecdote is a hundred years old, but it's a right good little story. A school-teacher, whom I loved very dearly, told it to me, when I was a lad. He was the only man I ever knew who had it in him to be a great man, and who refused to strive for great things, because, as he said, "/^ isn't worth the troubled He was naturally as great an orator as Blaine or Ben HilL PROSE MISCELLANIES. 123 But after one of his magnificent displays of oratory, he would sink back into jolly indolence, and pursue the even tenor of his way, teaching school. "It is not worth while. Let the other fellow toil and struggle for fame and for office: I don't care. They are not worth the price," Few knew what was in this obscure teacher ; but those few knew him to be a giant. Once, at our College Commencement, EPENETUS ALEXIS STEED. (Mercer University, 1880,) the speaker who had been invited to make the regular address was the crack orator of the State. He was considered a marvel of eloquence. Well, he came and he delivered his message; and it was all very chaste and ele- gant and superb. Indeed, a fine speech. He sat down amid loud applause. Everybody satisfied. Then the obscure genius to whom I have referred rose to talk. By some chance, the Faculty had given him a place on the program. I looked at my old school-teacher, as he waddled quietly to the front. I saw that his face was pale, and his eyes blaz- 124 PROBE MISCELLANIES. ing. I felt that the presence and the speech of the cele- brated orator had aroused the indolent giant. I hneiv Iw would carry that crowd by storm — would rise, rise into the very azure of eloquence, and hover above us, like an eagle in the air. And he did. SEATED, ON LEFT, PitOF, E, A. STEED, THOS. W. STEED AT RIGJIT. STANDING: JAMES HAMILTON ON RIGHT: L. CARLTON SMITH, ON LEFT. Men and women, boys and girls, laughed and cheered and cried, and hung breathless on his every word, as no crowd ever does unless a born orator gets hold of it. Actually, I got to feeling sorry for the celebrity who had made the set speech. He sat there looking like a cheap piece of neglected toy work of last Christmas. The faces of the leading people, after my old teacher had PROSE MISCELLANIES. 125 sat down, were a study. The expression seemed to say, "Who would have thought it was in him?" I did not applaud : No. But I looked at my old teacher, through a mist of happy tears; and my lips quivered, uncon- trollably : he saw it ; and I think he was deeply pleased. We talked of it, later, in our chummy way ; and we laughed over the surprise he had given everybody. I never saw him, again. • I don't think he ever made another speech. The brilliant eyes will blaze no more. The merry smile faded, long ago. That great head, fit to bear a crown, lies low, for all the years to come. He left no lasting memorial to his genius. Only, as through a glass, darkly, you may see him in a book called "Bethany," written by one in whom he, the unambitious, kindled the spark of an ambition that Will never die. Fortitude T^ O not become discouraged ! Don't lose heart. You may not be able to see the harvest where you have patiently sown the seed, but be assured of this: No seed is lost. The truthful word manfully spoken, the earnest effort hon- estly made, the noble creed consistentyl held, — these are things which do not perish; they live on and move the world and mould the destinies of men, long aft^r you are dust. Leave cowardice to the cowards; leave servility to the slaves. Be a man — proud, though in homespun; free, though in a hut. ,^ Own your own soulj^^ Dare to listen to your own heartbeat. Between you and God's sunlight, let no shadow of fear fall. What is there to live for, if you are never to think, never to speak, never to act, save as the echo of some master? Bet- ter the death of the brave than the long misery of the mental serf. Not always is it easy to know the right, — very often is the road rough. Human praise can be won by shorter routes. Honors and riches are not always its rewards. Pleasanter days and calmer nights may be yours, if you float smoothly down the tide of policy, — steering deftly by the rules of the expedient. But has life nothing loftier than this? Is there no divine voice within you that calls for better things? Is there no great pulse-beat of duty within you, — no flame of the warrior spirit, when insolent wrong flings its gage of battle at your feet? Are you willing that the Right shall call for aid, and you give no succor ; that Truth shall plead for help, and you bear no witness? Is the sacred torch of Liberty — passed on from hand to hand, down the ages in which brave men dared to keep it lit — to find you unwilling to hold it aloft? Shall the temple of civic freedom, reared by the great men who are gone, stand vacant, — calling mutely, calling vainly for votaries at the shrine? Was it all a mockery, — this long struggle your forefathers PROSE MISCELLANIES. 127 made for Justice ? Is it an idle tale— this story of the heroism with which the rights of the people were slowly won? Not so— not so! Levity may slight, and ignorance may disregard the blessed heir-looms of human endeavor, of pa- triotic purpose, of high-minded self-sacrifice, — ^but they are there, and, like the signal fires of the highlands, they call heroic hearts to duty! You may have desponded, but you must not despair. You may have stumbled, but you must not fall. You will rouse yourself, and press forward. You will do your duty— for that is your religion. If Wrong triumphs, it shall not claim you as a partner in the crime. If the light dies out in the homes of th© people, the curse ,^ of the unhappy shall not blast your name. You shall bee-aziffi»«,— loyal, fearless, independent, ready for work, and loyal to the last, to the creed which your heart approves, i, ^i i Lt)'' ^'VUx^v^'^ Men/, like these,— and no others,— won every treasure in the storehouse of liberty, every jewel in the crown of good government, every thread in the golden tissue of religious and political freedom, , Men likie these,— and no other,— are going to keep alive the sacred fires our fathers Idndled, are going to stamp out the foul heresies that imperil our rights, are going to fight to the death those who would turn back the march of human happi- ness, and are going to re-dedicate this government to the principles upon which it was founded! Stand firm and fear not. Brave men who are nothing more than brave, rush into the combat, get worsted and quit. Brave men, who are something more than brave, take no defeat as final. FINIS. 'iiCM^ THE MASSACRE OF ST. BARTHOLOMEW NEW EDITION IF you read the serial articles dealing with this awful chapter of Roman Catholic persecution, in France, four hundred years ago, you must have realized that you had never seen the subject treated in as forceful, interesting and absolutely historically correct manner as Mr. Watson handled it. The articles created a sensation, and the demands for the Magazine containing the installments were sold out — and no more could be had. Mr. Watson has carefully edited the matter, added much more to it, and the book is now ready for delivery. Send in your order for m MASSACRE OF ST. BARTHOLOMEW By THOS. E. WATSON Profusely illustrated and splendidly printed. PRICE 25 CENTS. THE JEFFERSONIAN PUB. CO. THOMSON. GEORGIA -x I J I The Story of France I * t I IN TWO VOLUMES J * - I I I I The STANDARD HISTORY of France | t Chosen by the French Scholars as such % I t * =^ t I t * Price $3.50, delivered + * t * t I The Jeffersonian Pub. Co., Thomson, Ga. % t t INAPOLEON I By THOS. E. WATSON J % Regarded by Critics and Scholars as one | I of the best histories of the Man of Destiny | I I % I % PRICE S1.50, DELIVERED % % t % THE JEFFERSONIAN PUB. CO. % I THOMSON, GEORGIA % % + IrgI THE HOUSE OFHAPSBURG By Thos. E. Watson The Latest of Mr. Watson's Historical Works States Cause of Present European War. Shows the Origin of the Present House of Hapsburg ; The Growth of the Papal Power of Rome. John Huss, John WickUffe, Martin Luther, the Thirty Years War and the Reformation. ILLUSTRATED— 96 F»agcs Stiff Paper Cover; Well Printed; Good Type SO Cents Postpaid JEFFERSONIAN PUBLISHING CO., Thomson, Georgia THIS SERIES OF F»A1VIF»HLEXS By Thos. E. Watson. 1 Oath of 4th Degree Knights of Columbus 3 The Inevitable Crimes of Celibacy 2 Is there a Roman Catholic Peril ? 4 What Goes on in the Nunneries ? 5 The Italian Pope's Campaign Against the Constitutional Rights of American Citizens. Eop- 35c. - - - Rostpaidi. After reading thiis series of pamphlets, a clear, concise, understand- ing will be had of the effort to IVIAKE AlViERICA CATHOLIC and of the disastrous results that will follow. B The Jeffersonsian Publishing Co., ■ I THOMSON, GA. I The Roman Catholic Hierarchy A BOOK WHICH IS THE RESULT OF YEARS OF STUDY By Thos. E. Watson Contains historical data showing the evolu- tion of the Papacy, and its adoption of Pagan ceremonies and rites. It cites Roman Catholic theological authori- ties, whose instructions to priests as to questions to be asked women caused Mr. Watson to be indicted. Richly illustrated Price, $hOO Jeffersonian Pub. Co. Thomson, Ga. A Short Hi^ory OF THE Papacy and The Popes Condensed from the large book of LOUIS DeCORMENIN PRICE 10c, POSTPAID ORDER FROM The Jeffersonian Pub. Co. THOMSON, - GEORGIA Roman Catholics in America Falsifying History AND Poisoning tlie Minds of Protestant SGliool-Children By Thos. E. Watson Price IOg, Postpaid The Jeffersonian Publishing Company Thomson, - Georgia jH^rmtt Jtti M' The Facts About the Present System Proving how we have flooded Foreign Mission Fields with money, while we permit abuses in every walk of life in the United States By THOS. E. WATSON FIFTH EDITION Richly Illustrated Well Printed Paper Cover, Sl.OO, Postpaid JEFFERSONIAN PUBLISHING GO. THOMSON, - GEORGIA I I I I 11