I RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST ^3^ G. STANLEY HALL Recreations of a Psychologist Morale Adolescence Youth Educational Problems Founders of Modern Psychology These Are Appleton Books D. APPLETON & COMPANY Publishers New York T241 A RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST // r*.' BY G. STANLEY HALL AUTBOB OB" "adolescence," "edTTCATIONAI. PBOBLBaiS," "rOUHTDEES OF MODERN PSTCHOLOaY," "jESUS, THE CHRIST, IN THE LIQHT OF PSTCHOLOGY,',' fUOHAL^ THE BUPBEkCE 8TANDABD 09 UFB Am) OOHDUCT." D. APPLETON AND COMPANY NEW YORK LONDON 1920 COPYBIQHT, 1920, BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 1^10V -6 1920 VSraTED m THE T7HTTED STATES 09 ABEBICA ■0)CIA601435 PREFACE No one can possibly realize better than the author of these vacation skits how crude and amateurish they are if judged from the standpoint of literature. If they have any merit, or their publication any excuse, it will be as illustrations of psychological principles. **The Fall of Atlantis,'* just written, was largely sug- gested by last summer's reading of stories of ideal states; also by Zeller's account of the fabled strikes of piper- priests and of the women in ancient Kome; but above all by the profound conviction that certain degenerative changes — industrial, social, hygienic, and religious — are going on in our civilization and especially in our own land which may perhaps be realized by a larger historic per- spective, which only imagination can supply. It might have been entitled, * * Strikes of Doctors, Lawyers, Teachers, Clergy, and finally Women, Causing the Downfall and at last the Physical Engulf ment of a Superstate.'' It is in some sense an aftermath of my '* Morale." **How Johnnie's Vision Came True" was suggested partly by the Schopenhauer-Weininger theory of sex counterparts; also by pubic initiation rites and their morale, described in my '* Adolescence. " It is meant, too, to illustrate the psychology of Doppelgamger and of Mond- sucht, as represented by Rank and Sadger respectively, a theme which many writers have attempted from Peter ScMemihl to Wilde's Dorian Grey. **A Conversion" is from a barren, narrow religiosity to true morality, and illustrates the same psychological prin- ciple which Schrempf attempted to validate in his CEdipus vi PREFACE redivivus theory that Jesus was, like Augustine, a fallen man restored. One grave lapse may bring atoning virtue of a higher kind by way of compensation. '*Preestablished Harmony'^ is not so much an extrava- ganza of the ** personal equation" as psychologists know it, as of the older philosophy of ** correspondences, ' ' with of course no trace of imagination in it. ''Getting Married in Germany" is an almost literal ac- count, in which my wife collaborated, of our actual ex- perience in being married in Berlin — although I did not fail in my examination, as the hero of the story is made to do. This was printed in the Atlamtic Monthly in 1881, and I here express thanks for the permission to republish it. '*A Man's Adventure in Domestic Industries" is an il- lustration of one of the various forms of midsummer mad- ness which the author has experienced and observed. ''A Leap Year Romance." I have rediscovered and in- cluded this boyish effusion, first printed in Appleion^s Journal, 1878, with hesitation. I think I had never read it from the time it appeared until just now and had so entirely forgotten how it came out that it seemed as though it could hardly be mine. It is a good transcript, I think, of the out^r and inner life of a typical small western col- lege and of the experiences of a young professorling. No young lady who to-day might make such unconventional advances toward the man of her choice would or should ever be subjected to anything like such penance, and per- haps the day is nearer than we think when woman can, with all propriety, take the first step, as the instances are already vastly more common than we dull males realize when their initiative is decisive in happy matings. Per- haps the chief point illustrated here is the religious sub- limation of love in the heroine. The **Note on Early Memories," written some years PREFACE vii ago, should not perhaps have been included here, for if it has any value it is a purely psychological one, illustrating how experiences very long and effectively submerged may with reenvisagement be made to glow up slowly and dimly after the lapse of decades. To the writer the chief lesson of this study was the intense and predominantly emotional response of childhood to every feature of its environment, for, over and over, when there was no trace of recollection or anything which psychology regards as memory, objects once familiar evoked a very high degree of affectivity, quite without imagery of any kind, indicating that it is the generic tone that survives most persistently, and also that country life and its close contact with Nature in child- hood develops rich and rank forms of emotivity, which are totally unconscious at the time, so that the survival value of these unconscious experiences is far greater than our current psychology has ever suspected. I am under unusual obligations to my secretary, Miss Mary M. McLoughlin, who collected and has read proof of all the articles and has also made many helpful sugges- tions. G. Stanley Hall Worcester, Mass. CONTENTS CHAPTEB PAOB I. The Fall op Atlantis 1 I. The Origin of this Screed 1 II. The Story of Our Discovery op Atlantis . 7 III. The Cult of Health and Its Decline . . 17 IV. The Triumph and Fall of Justice ... 28 V. The Glory and Shame of Learning . . 45 VI. The Zenith and Nadir of Religion ... 71 VII. Woman at Her Best and Worst ... 99 VIII. The Last Scenes and Days op Atlantis . 116 II. How Johnnie's Vision Came True 128 III. A Conversion 147 IV. Preestablished Harmony — a Midsummer Revery op a Psychologist 175 V. Getting Married in Germany 184 VI. A Man's Adventure in Domestic Industries . . . 204 VII. A Leap Year Romance 221 VIII. Note on Early Memories 297 IX THE FALL OF ATLANTIS I THE ORIGIN OF THIS SCREED For days I had racked my brain as a menAer of a com- mittee to arbitrate one of the over three hundred strikes on at that time in this country, and we were almost in despair trying to reconcile the irreconcilables of both sides. I had worked till very late that night trying to develop a new plan which seemed a forlorn hope and yet a hope, and as a nightcap I happened to pick up a copy of Plato which opened in the BepuhUc where Critias tells *Hhe old-world story of Atlantis which had come down in his family from his ancestor, Solon, who got it in Egypt." This always seemed to me about the most charming of all the so-called Platonic myths. This marvelous kingdom, he tells us, once filled a large part of what is now the Atlantic basin west of the Pillars of Hercules. The soil was rich and yielded twice a year. All metals, including all the precious ones, and jewels were found here in great abun- dance, and there was a high and central mountain city surrounded by a vast plain, itself bounded by a canal one hundred feet deep, six hundred feet broad, and three thousand miles long. A temple of indescribable magnificence had been reared to Neptune, the patron deity, with a roof of ivory and pinnacles of gold, and in it was a huge golden statue of the god reaching to the very roof, surrounded by one hundred Nereids riding on dolphins. There was also a golden statue of Atlas and the Ten Kings and their wives. 1 2 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST There were ten thousand chariots and twelve hundred ships. Never had the world seen such wealth and power as in this glorious state nine thousand years before the great deluge! **For many generations the people of this island were obedient to the laws and their kings ruled them wisely and uprightly, setting no value on their riches nor caring for aught save for virtue only. But as time went on, the divine part of them slowly grew faint and they waxed insolent, and thus in the very plentitude of their power they provoked the jealousy of the gods, who determined to destroy them.'' The Athenians in an age of great glory that had been forgotten conquered them and ** there was an earthquake and a deluge and the earth opened and swallowed up" victors and vanquished, and the great island sank beneath the sea so that where it was there is to- day only water, mud- and sand-banks. Would, I thought as I sleepily closed the volume, that this antique legend had told us more than is implied in the above few phrases of the causes of the decline and fall of this most wondrous empire of earth! The "jealousy of the gods" and the *' earthquake and deluge" must in our age be regarded only as symbols, but of what? Must na- tions, even the greatest, die like individuals? Can man never reach a stable society like that of such lowly creatures as bees and ants whose form of state is far older than man and which will perhaps last on unchanged when man is extinct? With this thought I threw myself, stiU dressed, upon a couch in my den and slept. It was Saturday night and on Sunday morning I awoke to find my faithful Henri, who for years has cared for my small suite, served such meals as I want in my room, and looked after me generally, just entering with my break- fast. Henri was intelligent and observant, rarely spoke unless spoken to, knew all my needs and even whims, and THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 3 was so devoted that it seemed as though his only purpose in life was to make me comfortable. Long ago I had rescued him from a fate worse than death, and he knew that in my way I was no less devoted to him than he to me — but that is another story. Occasionally when I had been very intent upon my work (for I was a fairly suc- cessful writer of social and political romances) I had not left my quarters for days and had seen only him. On awaking now I found myself fully dressed and not in bed but on the couch in my den. Rising to my feet, I was surprised to find myself feeling faint and should have fallen had Henri not supported and assisted me to a chair. I felt seedy and mussed and was surprised to find, as I rested my chin upon my hand, that there was a week's growth of beard upon my face. I called for a mirror and drew back at what I saw. My cheeks were haggard, there were dark rings under my eyes, my linen was soiled, and I was generally tousled and disheveled. * * What does all this mean, Henri ? " I cried. And then slowly it all came out. It was indeed Sunday morning, but a week had passed, of which I could recall nothing. Henri said I had not once slept in bed or removed my clothes, bathed, or made any toilet, and had partaken mechanically of the three daily meals he had served, ignoring him and leaving his questions unanswered. He said I had been writing every day and had not once left my rooms during the week. I could recall nothing, but I had a haunting sense that Morpheus had brought me a wonderful dream full of strange beauty and also of pathos and tragedy. Long I strove to recall at least some items of it, but in vain. Al- though Henri insisted that I had spent most of my time in writing, no manuscript was anywhere to be found. When I had bathed, changed, breakfasted, visited the barber, trimmed my nails, looked over the papers of the last week and also my accumulated mail, and cross-exam- 4 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST ined Henri (who reported that he had thought me so strange and preoccupied that he had made excuses to visitors and telephone calls, for which discretion I com- mended him) and had done what I could to arrange my delayed affairs, I sat down to think it all over. I realized that I was not *'all there" and also that I must have perpetrated one of those psychic fugues from reality of which I had read much. But of what my autistic mind had done or where it had been during the lost week I could find no hint or cue. Had my fugitive soul been lured away by some good or bad power ; had my scribblings been mad nonsense or perhaps in some unknown tongue, which, if it ever be found, would need the genius and patience of a Pfister or a Maeder to interpret; or had my personality been a mere calamus or pen, as of old the Evangelists were thought to be of the Holy Ghost; or had I written some- thing that illustrated the higher powers of man — in some rapt state of trance or ecstasy, as their muse sometimes in- spires great geniuses to do, an experience of which I had hitherto never had the slightest trace? Long I pondered trying to find some point of contact with my dissociated other self. When at length I roused myself and turned to my ne- glected task of strike arbitration, and later of continuing the serial story to which I had given all my spare time and energy before this remarkable episode, it was with a distinct abatement of the zest that usually impelled me. Some quality of virtue seemed to have gone out of me. All the world I knew seemed not only less real and actual but at times almost phantasmal and dreamlike. Men appeared somehow a little less worthy ; women not quite so adorable ; our very civilization less satisfactory; and the future of the race less assured and bright. I found mediocrity where I had before seen excellence, and in all I did there was a THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 5 tinge of anxiety or fearsomeness that took no form and had no object; and thus things went on for weeks. One morning Henri brought me a bulky package in my mail. When I opened it, words cannot describe my amazement, for it contained a manuscript, unquestionably in my own handwriting, already set up in galley proof, of the narrative which follow o. I perused it with growing wonder and awe for it all seemed new to me. And yet I had to accept the evidence that my own hand had written it, and Henri recollected having mailed a large envelope for me late the Saturday night before I found myself. Now at last, although the dark veil of amnesia still sepa- rates this extraordinary week from the rest of my life, it is pretty clear what happened. As a patriot and a student of social, industrial, and political affairs from a romancer's point of view, I had grown more and more depressed at the conditions and prospects not only of my own country but of the world in the reactions that followed the war — not only labor troubles but profiteering; the inability of cranky, irreconcilable wills to compromise and do team- work; the lack of public spirit in public affairs, and the persistence and dominance of private interests everywhere ; the leaders- who, faced by problems too large for them, showed all the neurotic symptoms of balking, stressing minor points because perspective had been lost in the sudden larger horizon; the dominance of sectional, class, party, and even individual views and interests all the more marked after the splendid unity of all during the war. My larger racial unconscious self had, under all these depress- ing impulsions, executed a unique flight from all the reality of our present era to another and extinct one. I had left my world and taken refuge in another in which fancy had sought to give expression to all the latent hopes and fears that the present situation has inspired for our civilization. 6 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST Thus I hardly yet have any sense of personal ownership in my screed. It is in a sense a dream within a dream. There was first a projection of eighty years into the future in our own era when the discovery of the Atlantean remains were made, and then a projection backward many thousand years toward the beginning of another era. But if this double involution makes it hard and perhaps impossible for me to connect the consciousness of this strange and perhaps almost insane week of my life with my real, nor- mal self, it may also reduce the chance of my ever falling into this state again. If I ever do so and succeed in unifying my riven soul, remembering freely from one to the other state, this would be a symbol that our own age may come to knit up into its life the lessons of the era here resumed and really profit by them, and then I need not regard my narrative as fiction but as veracious, authentic, and quin- tessential history to be taught, when its fuller records are published, in every educational institution throughout our world and in our colleges and universities, with professor- ates that specialize in it alone. It will be also noted that, while nothing that transpired in my mind during this week is known to me, when I was in this secondary state I seemed to have been able to command all my own knowledge of things in my primal and normal state, so that the power and range of my faculties were for seven days greatly enhanced, and it is doubtless this experience that causes me ever since to be haunted with an oppressive feeling of inferiority which, try as I may, I cannot shake off, and which, added to the depressive fears lest we of to-day may be going the way of Atlantis, almost drives me to melan- cholia. While I have no belief in spirit guidance or in any kind of supernatural impartation, I cannot escape a certain awe at this creation of my_ subliminal self which prevents me THE FALL OF ATLANTIS T from changing a line or a syllable of the manuscript which thus came to me and on which at least I have a stronger claim than any one else Here, then, it is. n THE STORY OF OUR DISCOVERY OF ATLANTIS It was the year 2000 A.D. It was almost a new world as compared with ours of to-day. China, which had greatly extended her boundaries, was the most advanced and pow- erful of all the states of the world, and Slave- Germania^ came next. England, France and Italy were federated v together and with us, so that we felt that the boundaries of eastern France and northern Italy were part of our own frontier. The states of Latin America had organized themselves into one great republic, and only Africa was still divided and subjected. Surface transportation on land survived for all heavy wares, and air roadways were marked out in levels superposed one above the other, and the very intricate traffic rules were enforced by flying policemen. By this method only could the sky, especially in the earlier and later hours of the day, be kept from being darkened in many places by the clouds of aerial voy- agers on their way between their suburban homes and ur- ban offices. Thus there were hundreds of very high and many-storied garages, to which rapidly moving lifts were attached. Electricity had largely taken the place of steam and was also used everywhere for light and cooking. The telegraph and telephone had been largely superseded by wireless systems. Submarines could explore the bottom of the sea, where vast mineral wealth had been found, to say nothing of the salvage from the thousands of treasure ships ever since navigation began. Indeed it would require volumes, if not libraries, to tell of all the discoveries and 8 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST inventions, of the advances of science, and all the great social reforms achieved, and also, alas! of all the growing evils, which constituted a no less sinister menace to the advancement of the human race than do those of our own day. The whole world was overpopulated. Every state and race had accepted the religion of eugenics and felt that the future belonged to those of them that were most fecund, and the squalor and vice at the bottom of the hu- man scale were never so destructive. Christian churches survived, but in their Protestant section chiefly as ethical culture societies, for no one save only the vulgar and super- stitious believed in individual survival after death or in a personal god, but most felt that this world must be so organized that man got his deserts here and in it. Catholi- cism alone was almost absolutely unchanged. It had neither progressed nor regressed. The rivalry between culture and Kttltur was still on. Marriage was more cir- cumspect, divorce easier, woman had become a greater so- cial and even political power, and man left to her the con- trol of nearly all matters relating to sex, family and young children. But all these items and many more at present were irrelevant to my dream. Nor were they the tenden- cies that chiefly determined it, and they have nothing to do with its great lesson. In this new dreamworld I had long been a student of the past, intent on learning all I could of every extinct civi- lization, and I also had a pragmatic propensity to utilize every lesson I could find here by applying it to present needs. I was a professor and had lectured on the history of excavations, not only those at Pompeii, Rome, Egypt, and Babylonia, but also those of Troy and Mycenae. The older and more completely vanished and forgotten by his- tory and revealed only by the spade were these ancient peoples, the greater was my interest in them. We had already deciphered the long-baffling inscriptions of Yuca- THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 9 tan, had learned to read the quipu and the Druidic runes as we had long before learned to read Egyptian hiero- glyphs, thanks to the Rosetta stone. I had also been in- terested in lake dwellings, kitchen middens, mounds, the gigantic stone images of the Faster Islands, dolmens, and all vestiges of earlier man, not like the anthropologists of our day, who are so keen for traces of paleolithic cave- dweUers, for the Pithecanthropus and the Neanderthal race had little interest for me, for I was an archeologist whose chief desire was to extend the limits of the early history of advanced races everywhere backwards. In the year 2000 A.D. there was great interest in ex- ploring the sea basin for traces of man in the last areas of land that had been submerged by geologic and other cosmic and seismic influences, and there was much theoriz- ing concerning what Haeckel had called Lemuria, a lost sunken area somewhere between Madagascar and Australia, of which hundreds of eastward islands were the sunken and therefore disconnected highlands, a land in which many be- lieved we should find the true cradle of the human race if it was ever found at all. Here, too, it was believed man might possibly learn to read his title clearer to being a descendant of the extinct great fossil apes of Europe, whom the last great extension of the glacial era, which has now retreated to the present polar-ice cap, once drove southward. Certain it is that very much of the present sea area had once been land. All this and more of the same sort was more or less present in my strange dream, as indeed it had so often been in waking hours, for my chief wish in the world had long been to add to present-day knowledge in this field, and now sleep brought a unique wish-fulfillment, as so many dreams are only wishes come true. As, my dream unfolded, a great expedition of subma- rines was being equipped to explore the bottom of the sea in 10 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST quest of traces of the sunken Atlantis. Homer had been proved more or less right about ancient Troy, once thought pure myth, and why might not the conjecture of Plato, a far more scientific thinker, be more than day-dreaming when he told us of Atlantis? Perhaps the ** mountain city, zones of the sea, the king's palace, the golden temple, and the statues" might now be really found; and if they ever were, what a wondrous new chapter it would add to his- tory; what a new hope of idealities in statecraft it would bring ; what, if the causes of its destruction could be ascer- tained, a wholesome warning it might give to modern man! As it is, belief that man could rise so high and nevertheless sink to utter extinction is, to say the least, not a very solid basis for optimism. Perhaps better knowledge of the fate of Atlantis would give us a new sorely needed lesson in humility. This was my general attitude, and so great was my interest in this new project that I had my- self enrolled among the many savants who had some of the spirit that animated the quest for the Holy Grail or the Niebelungen Hoard. There were three of these very unique and complicated seacraft equipped for this expedition, a description of which would be far too long, even if I had understood them, which I did only in part. Suffice it here to say, therefore, that they could rise, too, and go on the sur- face, while they could also crawl along the bottom like war tanks, but were usually moved by their propellers. They were immensely strong to resist the great pressure of the pontic abysses, and there were also very intricate devices for grappling and bringing in small, and looping and maintaining wire connections with large objects. Clever mechanisms controlled air pressure, extracting oxy- gen from the sea, and there were very thick and solid ob- servation windows of glass, through which electric lights enabled us to see far into clear and somewhat even into THE FALL OP ATLANTIS 11 muddy and oozy water. But all these descriptions are quite aside from my purpose. We started our three huge craft abreast from a point near Cape Hatteras, about 36° N., and laid our course almost exactly along this latitude for Gibraltar or the Pil- lars of Hercules. After some fourteen miles of shallow but very slowly deepening shore water, we slid some two thousand feet down the steep sea-wall that skirts our eastern coast into the abysmal waters that constitute the true ocean. It was, of course, inky dark, absolutely sound- less, and there was no motion, for we were far below the reach of waves, storms, or oceanic currents. There were I also very few forms of life, although it was the graveyard of all the higher species which had for ages slowly rained down upon the bottom as they died. Our progress was very slow, despite our high-powered batteries, especially so when we had to climb some sunken atoll or reef tankwise. We also photographed every item of interest which our i electric lights revealed. But the irksomeness of the days, weeks, and months that followed was indescribably depress- ing. Every twenty-fourth day or so was a gala day, for then we had to rise for fresh oxygen, after tethering our- selves to the bottom by an anchor so that we might re- trace its cable to the same spot, and it was glorious to see the light and to feel and hear the movements of wind and wave. At length, nearing the end of the fifth month, after eleven days of very gradual ascent along the bottom, my craft, the middle one, found itself against a steep wall of basaltic stone, rising at an angle of 45°. Further examination showed that it was composed of huge blocks of stone of geometrical shapes, closely set together, not like those of Staffa, but evidently fitted and at some time mor- tised by human hands. These our photographs showed. The other craft were signaled and came to our aid, and in a few days we had its dimensions fairly well made out. It 12 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST was a square, about two and one-third miles along each base, and rose, not like a teocalli but like an Egyptian pyra- mid in steps to an altitude of about 1,200 feet. On the top was a huge plane, partly of solid rock, as if a mountain had been squarely truncated, while the rest of the square was completed by huge Cyclopian masonry. We knew at once that our long, tedious, and costly search was rewarded and that we had by the rarest of good fortunes and that, too, on our first crossing, almost stumbled upon the very acropolis of the lost Atlantis. "We sent up buoys to the sur- face and wirelessed our discovery. Thus began a long period of very specialized exploration, in which all civi- lized nations and scores of savants participated with en- thusiasm for years. Suffice it here to say that the remains of the great temple of Neptune were sufficiently intact to enable experts to reconstruct its plan with considerable confidence, that nearly all of the golden statues were found and also those of the Nereids. The king 's palace, too, stood on this acropolis beside the great temple, although many temples and many palaces in other Atlantean cities were soon in process of exploration and graphic restoration, to- gether with many other baildings, so that in a word the learned world was able in a few years to form a rather defi- nite idea of the way in which the Atlanteans lived and of their social, industrial and religious life. The great canal, 3,000 miles long, that encircled the vast central plane, was also preserved sufficiently at many points to enable scholars to reconstruct the whole, and there was a most intricate system of bridges and roads and countless other things of which the Platonic myth gives us no hint. Thus the world was able to resurrect from its long watery grave a sunken civilization that in many respects far surpassed any other the world has ever seen. For two decades the work of excavation went on, with ever richer and new discoveries, and all mankind stood THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 13 aghast to find that these ancient people not only knew every art and science of our own day but had far surpassed us. No soil ever began to be so rich. Gold, silver, and every kind of precious stones were as common as copper; or fine quartz is to-day. Half of this sunken continent: island was underlaid with rich, deep strata of the finest coal the use of which had been mainly superseded. Every kind of transportation, even by air, was highly developed. There were great seats of learning and societies of savants, vast libraries and museums, amusement palaces, forums for games, assembly halls, and vast power-houses which gener- ated electricity for every use, domestic, industrial, and public. Illiteracy was unknown. Eugenics had long been so organized that parenthood could be licensed only after a medical and psychic examination. Hygiene was so highly developed, too, that the average length of life was nearing one hundred years. There was little social or industrial loss from illness, so that the sick or invalided were always subjected to suspicion. In stature the men averaged about seven inches taller than those of our tallest races, the Swedes and Patagonians, and the women were models of symmetry and beauty. To keep oneself always at the top of one's condition was the central item of their code of ethics. Once a year every child and adult must strip, be tested, and examined to see if he was maintaining his own, or gaining in knowledge, health, and virtue, and he was disfranchised and barred from parenthood if he fell below the standard, for human quality was a cofactor with numbers in augmenting the power of the state. Crete was the capital and emporium of the Atlantean J colony of Europe, Tyre of her Asiatic, Sais of her African \ colonies, and Quito, the home of the predecessors of the ■ Peruvian Incas, who then ruled all South America, was a dependency from which heavy tribute was derived. China was, next to Egypt, the richest and most powerful of her 14 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST provinces. Japan and North America were then but sparsely populated and negligible in the world policy of Atlantean statesmanship, although the Ainos and once powerful but now extinct Boethuk Indians of Northeast America had traditions of her greatness, and these coun- tries were often visited by her pioneers and explorers. Thus this colossal and magnificent empire ruled the world, and all our scattered traditions of a golden age and of Paradise that Pfleiderer has collected and which Warren wrongly placed near the North Pole, when it was more tropical, were only faintly reminiscent of Atlantis in her glory. As these discoveries proceeded, contemporary man the world over was slowly compelled to a more modest idea of himself and his boasted progress. He came to realize that he had been surpassed at every point by ancient and forgotten people, that he was only a crude apprentice to life, that better things than he had ever dreamed had al- ready happened, but also that there had somehow been a great fall only very crudely symbolized by the myth of Eden, or by the deluge which Plato said engulfed Atlantis. Some began to wonder whether the old legend of eternal recurrence, which had so obsessed the mind of poor Nietz- I sche, might not be true. Perhaps there was a great cosmic cycle of 24,000 years, after which the slate of history had been wiped clean and everything repeated itself almost in the same order as before. Perhaps man was destined to toil painfully upward until he reached a certain maximum of culture and civilization and then was doomed to decline to barbarism, and in time to start upward again with new stirps as the organ of a new Zeitgeist that was really the old one disguised, slowly turning the secular wheel of fate. During each cosmic day the great Knitter was always knit- ting her marvelous web, which each morning saw unraveled during the night, and so it would be in saecula saeculorum, THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 15 while the gods looked on and laughed at the poor fool they had created for their delectation. What a comedy it must all be to them ! But some of the best of us could and would not accept this logic of despair. We felt that man could and must now beat the gods at their own game. By these discoveries we tore aside the watery curtain they had inter- posed between successive eons. We had found out the sponge they used to erase the tablets of history which myth has always called a deluge. We now could see that this was all done by alternating sea and land. In one eon the sea- bottom became dry land, and in the next the land surface became the sea-bottom. Now that we can command knowl- edge of both, we **are on'' to the great secret of the gods. If we can only find out why the glory of the Atlantean era faded, we may be able to find the antidote for the malady. Very likely all the Atlanteans (for there may have been a long series of them) died of the same disease, and, if so, what was it and is there anywhere any cure, or even any nepenthe ? If so, and if we can find or compose one, there may at last be a kingdom of man that will be at least ter- restrially immortal, as the bee and ant state (which have long preceded and now promise as long to outlast man) almost are. He will surely sometime grow tired of ever re- peating the weary seesaw way, marching up the hill with ten thousand men like the general of nursery tales only to march down the same hill again. This was the momentous question so pregnant and fateful for the future of the human race, which was often long discussed in the international conventions of savants who presided over these great discoveries, and it was this prob- lem of why Atlantis fell that was at last assigned to a large committee of specialists, of which I was made chairman. We had long ago discovered the vast and hermetically rock- sealed central and official library and state records, all the more important volumes of which were printed by inden- 16 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST tation on thin and flexible leaves of gold in characters so microscopically small that we first thought the sheets blank. These we had with great pains and expense mag- nified and photographed and after years of study found the key to read, reconstructing even this deadest of all dead languages. The details of all these efforts and their results and interpretations will themselves constitute many vol- umes of fascinating interest which will amaze the world when this committee reports in full. Suffice it to say that the Atlantean language itself was proved to have been by far the most flexible expression which the human psyche ever evolved. The dictionary of one of its academies in forty volumes contained about one and one-half million words, its grammar was more sj^stematic and logical than that of any language of our era, and its phonic resources exhausted every physiological possibility of the organs of speech. Doubtless the Atlanteans would have laughed to hear us speak their tongue, as we slowly learned to do after a fashion, but it was really so apt and expressive that we tended to use it more and more, until some of us came to feel that our own tongue was vulgar and crude by compari- son, as we developed a real Sprachgefiihl for it. But I must really leave all this and scores of other fascinating and momentous discoveries aside as irrelevant and adhere to those with which my own committee was charged, al- though I am permitted even here at present to set forth only a few of the main essentials, pending a far fuller account. ' In the acme of her power Atlantis had slowly developed V/i .toward syndicalism. All interests, including industries, ' grew more and more highly organized. Each had its local and its central board in an ascending hierarchy. Each was represented in a municipal, state, and national legislative council. Laborers whose conditions would seem to us in every way ideal, capitalists and employers, doctors, priests, THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 17 farmers, keepers and distributors of stores and goods, women, artists, teachers, engineers, actors, and, in short, each great calling became, as we shall see, a guild intent upon its own interests instead of, as in the golden age, upon the public good alone. In a word, and to anticipate all that followed, the fall of Atlantis illustrated the general principle that those who begin by loving their own country better than they love mankind will sooner or later lapse to the next lower stage, in which they love their own party better than their country^, their own sect better than re- ligion, and will then proceed to prefer their own group in- terests, economic or social, to party or creed, and will end by loving themselves better than all else. The Nemesis of hyperdemocratization is the hyperindividuation it always brings. All this can best be set forth if we briefly outline a few salient features of this decline in a number of the leading guilds or Soviets. Let us begin with that of the doctors. ni THE CULT OF HEALTH AND ITS DECLINE In the day of its greatest glory physicians came near illustrating the maxim which may have been suggested to Hippocrates, whom we call the father of medicine, by some not quite extinct tradition of Atlantis: '^ Godlike is the doctor who is also a philosopher. ' ' In fact, philosophy cul- minated in keeping the body, politic, social, and personal, at the topnotch of its condition. Indeed every institution, habit, and vocation was graded for its ultimate value ac- cording to what it contributed to this supreme end of man. They had a maxim which survived even to the time our New Testament was written and which Jesus reproduced in corrupt form. It was, ' * What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own health, or what shall 18 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST a man give in exchange for health?*' Health was virtue, and the temple of its god, Keepup, was quite as splendid, far larger and more frequented than that of Neptune it- self. In place of altare there were baths ; in place of sacred music there were sacred dances; and the chief room in the temple was what we should call a gymnasium, and the shrine was a series of testing offices. Every one had to join the National Health Insurance Organization, to the administration of which in all its many bureaus and complex details a large staff of medical officers gave all their time. Every one paid a monthly rate if he was at the top of his condition, while if he fell below his maximal efficiency, his assessment to the medical guild was remitted, and if he was incapacitated by illness, the guild supported him and his family in the state of living to which they were accustomed until recovery was com- plete. No one was allowed to labor with mind or body un- less he was at the top of his condition, and even every workman's card had to be stamped by a health officer, after a brief examination, each day as he entered the shop, fac- tory or office. All individual medical treatment was, of course, gratuitous, and it was thus for the interests not only of the doctor's profit but for his convenience that all his hygienic parishioners should be well. Thus the pre- vention of disease was far more highly developed than therapy. One group of medics examined all children within three days of their birth, and if they were con- vinced according to certain formulae that by reason of defect, inherited disease, or congenital weakness or predis- position to crime they were destined to be a burden to society and to themselves, these children suffered painless extinction and mothers were exhorted in this matter to accept the inevitable with joy as in the interests of the state. Most of them were Spartan enough to do so, al- though occasionally an exhausted or disordered young THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 19 mother in the privacy of her own apartment would give way to paroxysms of grief. To refuse or resist this decree of the guardians of the blood of the tribe wfis incipient treason. Physicians, too, had to examine and certificate all candi- dates for marriage, and here they formulated not only an elaborate code of laws but another less mandatory one of advice and warnings which was taught to all children at puberty. Sex diseases vere almost unknown, and if a case appeared it was isolated and penalized if it were proved to have been culpably contracted, although even innocent victims of accident were permanently barred from all future relations with the other sex. Bad habits and all forms of perversity in this field were ruthlessly eradicated, for the ancient Atlanteans were already well on the way toward reducing man's hypertrophied sex functions down to or toward the models of procreation set us by the animal world, for eugenics was not only a science but an art and almost a religion. It was under the influence of this guild that these people had attained not only their superior stature, weight, and symmetry but also their longevity. Thus the laws of sanitation and hygiene were everywhere supreme, and in exigencies superseded all others. Physi- cians not only inspected every individual home, workshop, office, mine, latrine, etc., periodically, enforcing everywhere standards for light, air, and cleanliness, but they examined all foods and drinks, condemning and destroying ruthlessly all that fell below the requirements. Purity, the nutritive and thermal values of each staple food, were well under- stood, for they were taught in the schools, and suggestions were given every person according to his occupation and constitution as to which way he might vary from the dietetic norm. Every infraction of any of these laws was almost sure to be found out and penalized. By these methods even wine-bibbing, tendencies to which had never 20 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST been entirely eradicated, was sometimes found to a degree that needed very special attention. Antiseptic surgery had far surpassed its highest achieve- ments under the civilization of to-day. Organs and limhs from fresh cadavers could be indefinitely preserved in cold storage and kept in readiness to graft on to those who were in need of them. Transplantation not only of kidneys, liver, and all the endocrine glands, but even of lungs and in a few rare cases of the heart itself had been successfully accomplished. It was not uncommon to rear infants in incubators if the mothers were found deficient in physio- logical resources or in maternal care. In certain very choice experiments the male and female cells had been developed in artificial media to a certain point, and there was great rivalry between the foremost investigators of each sex as to which of them would first develop com- pletely a true homunculus without the cooperation of the other sex. It was believed that all the noxious bacteria by whose permission human life continues on this globe were known and that antitoxins had been discovered or invented for them all. In all the centers of medical research a great many animals, large and small, were of course in constant use as media for the development of different therapeutic agents. The chief Atlantean cities, in a word, had become so spotless and hygienic that the very phagocytes which act as scavengers in the human blood became degenerate and almost extinct for lack of exercise. In extreme cases it was possible to sustain life for a long time when the entire alimentary tract was thrown out of gear by injection of prepared chyle and chyme, and indeed there was a small group that hoped that eventually thus all the processes of digestion from mastication to at least the absorption of the lacteals and the pouring of their sugared-off products of digestion into the portal vein could be done in the labo- ratory and thus a large part of the total kinetic energy of THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 21 the body freed for higher culture, when they believed a race that even Atlanteans regarded as supermen would be evolved. There were also guardians of sleep whose func- tion it was to determine upon a curfew for different classes and license those who had to be up later to do night work, and to maintain more or less tranquillity. It was also their function to pass upon all hours of labor, to prescribe vaca- tions and even recreations, all of which prescriptions had to be followed implicitly, and it was a part of the duty of these guardians to see that each citizen took a due and proper amount of physical exercise of the right kind with- out overdrawing his resources. They also had in their keeping the ultimate disposal of all corpses after the funeral rites were over ''for the greatest good of the com- munity" — so ran the law. Some, of course, went to the medical schools and laboratories, others were dismembered to supply organs for transplantation, and from others certain compounds which could nowhere else be quite so successfully made were extracted from different organs for various scientific and commercial uses. Vivisection experi- ments were licensed upon all forms of animal life and occa- sionally upon condemned criminals guilty of heinous crimes, although such occasions were of very rare occur- rence. There were also bureaus for statistical and other studies upon the various conditions that could be controlled for large groups of the community in the interests of social hygiene. Many investigations, too, had been made upon the kind and amount of food and drink determined by age, sex, temperament, alimentary type, and occupation. Sanity was given a wide range and was individually deter- mined, for there were few insane, so that medical juris- prudence had not had occasion to lay down a general canon but, recognizing the vast diversity of symptoms here, made decisions of compos mentis only after careful individual study of each case. These wise law-givers desired to de- 22 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST velop a wide range of idiosyncrasies and the utmost license of opinion and tolerance of very manifold creeds, prac- tices, and fashions because they deemed that uniformity, monotony, and the tyranny of custom were on the whole degenerative. This, in general, was the status, and these were some of the achievements of perhaps the most impor- tant of all the professions at the most exalted point of its development that it has ever reached in the world. But as time went on, individuals and then communities became lax in the payment of their health insurance rates. "Why, they said, should we who are well be taxed for the benefit of those who are ill? Let only those who need physicians support them. This heresy, despite its denun- ciations as incipient treason to the state, spread apace. The resources of the guilds gradually fell off and thus its efficiency decreased. Others resented the eugenic control of wedlock and broached the view that each pair should take their own mating into their own hands. Their laws against kissing, which required that this must always be done only after the application of what the "slanguage'* of popidar resentment described as "smooch-paper," which instantly recorded in different colors the presence of all noxious bacteria or kissing bugs in the mouth or throat somewhat as litmus paper now records the presence of acid or alkali, were popular objects of ridicule. Conscientious objectors against the physical examinations which had to precede marriage arose. Red and radical resistance was organized in secret clubs formed here and there which defied the curfew laws and protested the individual right to turn night into day. Consumptives insisted that they were victims of circumstances and not responsible for their malady as under the old laws. Objection, too, was taken to the fact that physicians kept themselves first of all so well that most of them had never had any experience with any form of illness or invalidism, which was so essential for THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 23 sympathy with the sick. Others demanded more freedom to dispose of their dead where and in any way they saw fit not detrimental to the public health. Doctors, strait- ened in their resources, began gradually first to accept and then to exact fees from the sick, to the dismay of their more conservative colleagues who thought that it was as preposterous and demoralizing to sell drugs and advice as Plato later thought it was for the sophists to sell wisdom or for teachers to take pay for imparting knowledge. As this demoralization advanced, patent medicines, private hospitals and asylums developed, and their proprietors made profits out of the misfortunes and disasters of the members of the community instead of as before from their health and prosperity. Thus, as unhygienic conditions in- creased and preventative activities declined and diseases multiplied, the profession grew for a time in importance and in power but on a lower plane, for cure now and not superlative condition became profitable. It was indeed not for the physician's interest to cure but to keep his patient ill, and if he could not do that, to make him think himself in need of medical service; and so adepts arose in. the art of making women and especially adolescent girls and boys imagine that normal processes were alarming symptoms. Thus this powerful profession which had been the corner- stone of the prosperity of the state lapsed as individual practitioners now came to sense chiefly their own private personal interests. The people as a whole slowly grew debilitated or nearly all fancied themselves to be more or less impaired. Scores of crude practices and superstitions arose, and there were also proprietary and patent medicines everywhere, some positively noxious, others only stimulants disguised by misleading names, and still others entirely neutral, which came to be thought helpful, while some grew superstitious and developed senseless phobias of germs. If one drank an innocent glass of wine, there was 24 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST fear of the red and angry drunkard's stomach now some- times represented in our school textbooks of physiology. Those rebels who restored the old habit of smoking were threatened with the bogy of a tobacco heart. If one drank from a country spring from a glass not his own or at the communion table of the goddess Hygeia without his in- dividual cup, the doctors did their utmost to make him feel that he was in immediate need of their care. The dread of infection by carriers in air, water, and by contact was stimulated to the utmost degree and had to be defied by those adventurous souls who often successfully and tri- umphantly violated the official prescriptions in these regards. It was at this stage that the physicians, after much dis- cussion, standardized their fees, although for this no rules proved entirely effective, for there were always those who exacted exorbitant fees from the rich and refused all serv- ices to the poor if there was any reason to doubt their ability to pay. It was at this period, too, that excessive specialization was developed and physicians arose who treated only the diseases of the eye, ear, nose and throat, womb, heart, nerves, stomach, intestines, and did so quite regardless of the condition of the patient's sj^stem as a whole, while general medicine declined until practitioners in this field were almost unknown. Thus things went on for generations, and the decay of hygiene brought many other evils in its train and cooperated in subtle ways with degenerative processes that were also going on in other domains. The mortality increased fastest among the poor because infections were unchecked and the rich could still pay for more or less adequate care. The expense, too, of having a baby born in the family was at one time almost prohibitive save among the wealthy, where the fewest, as a matter of fact, were bom. Laws were passed which sought to compel all to summon a doctor of the authorized medical THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 25 guild upon the appearance of any of a long list of symp- toms — laws which were so generally resisted that the more they were multiplied, the less effective they became. Mean- while the doctors themselves grew ever more arrogant, op- pressive, and often extortionate, and the profession had become so attractive that its numbers had greatly increased until there was one to every sixty of the population, from whom they must live. This was the state of things when the first manifesta- tions of the great revolt appeared. First in certain city wards populated by the poor, and then in rural communi- ties, the movement spread and was organized. There were meetings, private and even public, protests and finally reso- lutions with more and more signatures, pledging each signer to use every means to evade the tyranny of the medical guild. At the same time there came a great recrudes- cence of vulgar or popular home-cures, and the use of herbs, nostrums, and superstitious practices abounded. The people regarded it as one of the inalienable rights of man to take flight to illness occasionally if one desired to do so, and even to die unattended by the minions of this prying and obnoxious profession. Hygienic freedom or death was a many-voiced cry. There were broadsides, posters, tracts, pamphlets galore, uprisings, raids, windows of doctors' houses were broken and their offices looted, and sabotage of much of the armamentarium of medical prac- tice. During all this time there was, of course, great and growing suffering on both sides. Many doctors abandoned their vocation and sought others. Many were in the direst need and had to be supported by the contributions of their more prosperous guild brethren, but even these were grow- ing poorer, for the rich began to catch the infection and realize the impositions and extortions to which they had been subjected. Thus, at last goaded to desperation, the entire brother- 26 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST iood of Atlantean physicians, after careful deliberation, called a kohar, which is the equivalent of our word ** strike,'* hoping thus to bring the people to their senses and to a realization of their dependence. Upon a given day set in advance, every office, every medical school and hospital was closed. Nurses and druggists some days later joined in a sympathetic kohar. No words can describe the Iiorrors and suffering that ensued. Patients in institutions were left to die or to be removed by their friends, one -epidemic after another raged unabated, no medicine was available save such therapeutic plants as could be gathered from the fields or concocted or brewed at home. Under- takers were busy and their guild grew and prospered. The well cared for the sick in a neighborly way, and thus there was a great increase of mutual sympathy and aid, especially at first, for it was gradually realized that on the whole it was the less fit that perished and the best that survived. But the death rate slowly declined as selective agencies began to operate. There were thus compensations. Some of the rich realized that medical attendance was a luxury that could be dispensed with in many cases, and there were invalids who recovered and came to feel that they had been kept ill for profit. Mutual help in illness brought people nearer together and there were more precautions, and the intelligent public sentiment strongly resisted the tendency to lapse toward the crude methods of the witch doctors and exorcisers. Here and there doctors of the old school stiU surreptitiously practiced their arts and there were many people who clandestinely invoked their assistance in emergencies, despite the denunciation of them by public sentiment as helaks, which is the equivalent of our ' * scab. ' ' It was a long and tragic story of boycott, lockout, injunc- tion, with many a brawl, raid, and sabotage, for neither party would yield, and as the net result of all this age-long struggle the healing art was almost annihilated in Atlantis, THE FALL OP ATLANTIS 27 all the institutions that advanced men's knowledge of the human frame had ceased to function, while the health and stamina of the people had greatly declined. The people ate, drank, married, procreated, went filthy or clean as each wished. They applied quarantine, isolation, inoculation against infectious diseases or not, as each local community decreed. ** Hygienic freedom,'* ** break the fetters of the tyrant, sanitation," ''real health is happiness," ''the good old cures are the best," "individual liberty insures the greatest good of the greatest number, ' ' — ^such were the popular slogans. There were itinerant healers followed by crowds which sometimes trampled on each other for a touch or look. Fanatic sects even denied the existence of disease, deeming it a hallucination of the carnal mind too encumbered by mortal flesh. Others thought prayer or the laying on of hands would banish bacteria or paralyze them in the midst of their destructive work, and there were miracle-working fakirs who set bones, imparted glame or *'neuricity" from nervous systems supercharged with it by passes, touching sensitive zones, massage, etc., for those who liked it, while others used magic unguents and even words and formulae. Exercisers, casters of horoscopes, water, air, colored-light and all kind of electric and X-ray cures and tonics abounded. Swarthy foreigners from the ends of the earth brought new rites or nepenthes. In some localities even scatological ceremonials were revived. Pre- ^sculapian serpent-worship and witch broths, various types of elixir vitce, panaceas, plants found to bear the signatures of planets, healing lotions, holy shrines, relics, amulets, mascots, charms to ward off the evil eye, secret curses of enemies which could bring even murrain to cattle and mortal pestilence to man — all these were found, some in one, some in other provinces. Many turned to priests and sorceresses or other spiritual guides with the same faith and confessional abandon with which some neurotic 28 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST modern women turn to their physicians as sanctity took the place of sanitation and even sanity, and thus with the decline of health the very foundations of personal and civic morale were undermined and superstition slowly settled down over all the domain once so highly and richly culti- vated by medical science. Corresponding with this gradual age-long decay of the arts that had so effectively conserved the life and health of Atlantis came similar degenerative processes in other fields, to the next of which we now turn. IV THE TRIUMPH AND FALL OF JUSTICE In the acme of her power Justice with all her institu- tions reigned supreme in Atlantis. There was a kind of Sanhedrin, Areopagus, or academy, election to which body carried with it the most honorific of all titles, or degrees, viz., that of sage, legislator, or sapri, than which no dis- tinction was more coveted. This body made all laws and at intervals codified them. From this final compilation as we now know it, it is very apparent that the stone tables of Moses which he was fabled to have brought down from Sinai, the codes of Hammurabi, Solon, Lycurgus, and many other antique formulations of man's duty and rights were fragmentary reminiscences of this older law, and from this, doubtless, came also the suggestions which prompted Plato to write his Republic and Aristotle his Politics, and which was in a psychogenetic sense the source of so many ideal states and communities with which we are familiar but are accustomed to treat as baseless fancies or ideals impossible of realization. These all now seem to be the offspring of vague and partial memories that have filtered down through the ages to us, not so much by tradition as by unconscious inheritance and submerged reminiscence from the politics THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 29 and constitution of Atlantis. Thus it is that the vast domains of experience of man and also of his far back animal progenitors, when obliterated from all records of the race, leave as their most permanent and last-to-be- effaced trace a predisposition of the imagination to repro- duce their psychokinetic equivalents in forms thought to be original creations, just as the engrams of the great saurians and megatheria of the Trias age inclined the mind of man, eons after they were extinct, to make fables of draconian monsters slain by culture-heroes who unified peoples and founded states, like St. George, Siegfried, Perseus, Beowulf, because man's psyche and its organ, the brain, now inherit all the marvelous plasticity once shown best of all in the morphological plasticity of these most ^ polymorphic lacertilian forms, or finds another illustration I in our altitude psychoses and nightmares of hovering, in which we see reverberations in the soul of the piscine and pelagic life of our aquatic progenitors. The cult of justice in the palmiest days of Atlantis, with all its institutions, courts, judges, law-schools, etc., was based on the prime postulate that happiness and virtue, the chief of which was justice, and also on the other hand wickedness, the chief form of which was selfishness, and pain belong together and that they must be made to coin- cide in this world and not wait for their equation upon another life. Laws that should be *' written reason," and in obedience to which alone man could find complete free- dom, must be so drawn and so executed that each individual promptly gets his deserts, whether good or evil. Again, one function of lawyers which was designated by the term hwmor trcwi, which I translate as *'the apostolat© of the dead, ' ' was to pronounce judgment upon every life, whether that of pauper or king, at its close. Li other words, they must assess its net result in profit and loss for the community. Thus the moral of each individual career 30 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST was drawn for the encouragement or warning of survivors. The problems which each faced, the secret acts of self- sacrifice, indulgences of greed or vice — all were explored and brought to light with clinical thoroughness and im- partiality. What were the chief temptations of each re- sisted or yielded to, the good resolutions kept or broken, the weakness or strength, service or disservice, — all these were exposed and given their true meed of praise or blame, with a kind of Rhadamanthian judgment-day impartiality. Thus everybody could look forward to his own ** death forum" and so regulate his life that his surviving friends would not execrate but cherish his memory with pride. Despite all this, however, it of course sometimes happened that estimates of character were reversed in this forum and those thought most desirable citizens were revealed as craven, hypocritical, and false-hearted, and perhaps even those that suffered social reprobation were shown forth as paragons of social and civil virtue. In economic life in the golden, sometimes called the Satumian age, all wealth was an expression and a measure of service and was prized by its possessor and respected by others solely as such and not for any intrinsic worth of its own or for what it could buy. In fact, the term for both money and wealth, sema-cur, meant *' service measure- Inent." It was dishonorable to possess a wdnu (nearly equivalent to our dollar) that was not earned or bought and paid for by service. Thus it was that the bad citizen was poor and the good rich. To be proved to possess a tainted minu or semOhcur was disloyalty to society and was punished by confiscation of twentyfold by the state. Enterprise consisted in finding new kinds of service or extending old ones. The more essential the undertaking, the greater became each man's service-wealth. All great corporations were cooperative and animated by the same ideals. If, as happened here and there, degenerates be- THE FALL OP ATLANTIS 31 came animated by get-rich motives, the courts investigated, and if they found this to be the case, they pronounced the culprit '^ undesirable " and left him to the condemnation of his conscience and to the outlawry of his fellow-men. He was, however, often allowed to keep his wealth and thus to become an object-lesson to the community that those who amassed riches, however great, by unworthy means were not respected but contemptible. Plato and the Stoics later taught that the tyrant who was bad, selfish, and mean, even though rich, thought great and good, and overwhelmed with honors, was in his secret heart miserable; while the man with a meTis conscia< sihi recti or an approving con- science, although thought wicked, despised, persecuted, and even martyred, was in his inmost heart happy and trium- phant. On the same principle an Atlantean diplomated *' undesirable" nearly always, sooner or later, came to realize his unworthiness and found surcease from his self- condemnation by voluntarily pauperizing himself and starting over again by way of civic regeneration and atone- ment, and thus found sources of a new and deep satisfac- tion which had been concealed to him before. Nearly all forms of what we call crime existed but were very rare. Punishments were, so far as possible, made to fit the crime. Fraud was punished by a tenfold restitution. One who violated his oath was, if this habit was proved chronic, branded and tattoed on either cheek with the letter *'G" for guma, or liar. Murderers were put to death by the same method they had used upon their vic- tims carefully elaborated, and the same method was used for every kind of mayhem on the eye-f or-eye, tooth-f or-tooth principle. Those who became victims of overweaning pride were subjected to a curriculum of indignities and humiliations. Many methods of correcting faulty disposi- tions, far excelling in ingenuity although instinct with the same spirit which animates many of our college fraternity 32 RECREATIONS OP A PSYCHOLOGIST and secret-society initiations in their often drastic and cruel mental and even physical pains, were evolved, always with a correspondence between the fault and the cure, that outdid Dante's Infernal and Purgatorial methods. Thus the tender were toughened; the boorish made mannerly; the opinionated, dogmatic, and self-complacent made do- cile; the cranky given the spirit of teamwork and com- promise; the egoist taught that there were other men and minds; the feeble and dependent were given more oak and iron in their composition, etc. Those it was found neces- sary to isolate for a season were treated with a view to their reformation, for such and all sentences were not vin- dictive but curative in their aim. These moral hospitals for weak and perverted wills had each a corps of experts who prescribed a distinct regimen for each patient, rang- ing all the way from the severest physical castigation to the gentlest persuasion, for besides the determination of the temibility point of each inmate, which decided the ex- tremes of the drasticness of treatment for those nearest the line of incorrigibility, it was the good motivations latent or possible in each that were chiefly appealed to. For the very few cEises that resisted all treatment and for whom all hope of ultimate restoration to society it began to seem necessary to abandon, first castration, and, as a last resort, death was prescribed, for it was thought better that one member of the body politic, civic, or industrial, should perish than that the whole be corrupted. Emasculation was also sometimes resorted to for seducers, for all those who violated the spirit that in our day has made the Mann law, also for the lascivious and adulterers even if they were not diseased, and a corresponding operation was re- sorted to in emergencies for depraved and vampire women. In the great schools of law the spirit of justice, honor, and equity was inculcated, and all students took a solemn oath to be always and everywhere upholders of these prin- THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 33 ciples and to be guardians of the spirit and tlie letter of the Atlantean constitution. Ethics was the basal study, and to these faculties drafts of each new law proposed were submitted to see if it conformed to the supreme principles of virtue between man and man. Whether the passion of the Hebrew prophets for righteousness was the survival of a dim tradition of Atlantis or a spontaneous recrudescence of the same principle under another racial dispensation, wei have so far not been able to determine, but there is at least many a striking similitude between the two. Another function of these schools was to collect and compare model charters for cities, states, corporations, and other institu- tions and organizations of all kinds which serve the public welfare, to select and advise all movements seeking to in- stitute themselves of the most effective and successfully tried-out methods, and finally also to warn against those methods which experience had proved faulty and ineffec- tive. Here, too, was to be found a collection of all the con- stitutions of all the states that had existed from the begin- ning of the Atlantean cycle of history which culminated in the evolution of this great commonwealth, whether demo- cratic, oligarchical, monarchical, or syndical, etc., and the perpetual problem of the savants who investigated and taught in this department was to work out in ever greater perfection ways that conserved most of the merits and avoided most of the defects of them all, for the best state was that which most exactly fitted the nature and best satisfied all the legitimate needs of man. Government was thus an art, a science, and a profession. All the many colonies of Atlantis were administered for their own good, for it was well realized that their pros^ perity and that of the central state were one and insep- arable. The status of every race under this wide jurisdic- tion was carefully studied, and pioneers for the mother state were always teachers and anthropologists. There was 34 RECREATIONS OP A PSYCHOLOGIST thus no antagonism to indigenous beliefs and customs, and those less civilized were not brought to shame in the pres- ence of those more so, but rather strove to emulate them. Absurd beliefs and deleterious customs were thus left to die slowly of neglect and inanition as more and better ideas and practices supervened. Thus all primitive cults and religions that had contained in them higher possibilities, as indeed nearly all did, were carefully conserved and slowly refined by suggestion, for it was seen that every faith and rite, however crude, had in it the germs of the highest. This was as if we in our day should see and say that Jesus gave us only an example of how one old and once grand, but then decadent, faith could be made to blossom into a new and better one, and that by a similar method any of the sons of men who to-day had the capacity thus to incubate any one of the great faiths or the more or less systematized superstitions of even the lowest races could make stand forth revealed all that lay con- cealed in them. The products of these various incubations and palingeneses would differ much in form from Chris- tianity but would agree with it in the chief essential of all religions that man's prime function is to serve man and God, who is only Mansoul personified. In this spirit the Atlantean masters and doctors of law sought in their colonial policy never to eradicate but only to develop and perfect the religious and cultural tendencies implicit in the hearts and souls of the members of all their colonial dependencies, a policy that always and everywhere justifies itself. The elements of the laws and of morality were taught in every school, and with the highest morale, which con- sists in closing the chasm between knowing and doing; knowledge that did not issue in virtue was thought to be an evil and not a good. In the universities the nature of man was the culminating study, and so to organize the THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 35 good and the true within that each individual should be a self -controlled whole or unity was the goal, for the best, preparation for ruling others is to know how to rule one- self. Such was the ethical-legal state of Atlantis at its best. But as wealth accumulated, men tended, as they always do, to decay. The yeoman citizenry had long owned and tilled each his own spot of dear old Mother Earth and had felt the inspiration of standing in the center of his own homestead, however small, and realizing that everything comprised within its circle, however narrow, from zenith to nadir was his own. But now and then, here and there, precious stones, coal or metals were found, some land was rich and some poor, and it was perhaps this fact that marked the beginning of the degeneration of the sense of justice and all the evils that always trek in its train. As some grew rich their neighbors grew jealous. The fortu- nate said their finds rendered a real service, while others accused them of monopolizing the natural resources which belonged to all, and the profits of which they had not really earned, and it was in this controversy, after the old methods of adjustment and arbitration had failed, that each side to the dispute found administrators of justice, who had hitherto been officials of the state and paid only from the public coffers, becoming advocates representing opposing views and claims and each receiving private fees, to the great scandal of their colleagues. From such beginnings it was that the first civil courts, which were those of claims, arose. Before this all lawyers had been essentially judges gathering evidence as best they could personally, or by agents directly from the parties interested, but now they found it convenient to hear the pros and cons set forth by. agents on each side employed by the litigants, disreputable as these new sophisters of legality were in their efforts often to make the worse appear the better reason. For 36 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST several centuries Atlantis had a period of unprecedented material prosperity, and new sources of wealth were opened at home and in all her wide-flung dependencies. But it was found impossible to keep this new wealth distributed according to the old principles of merit and service, so that with increasing litigation, venality grew apace and advocates multiplied and came to replace the older repre- sentatives of the law who were intent only upon justice. So numerous did these meyhus, or shysters become that many of them, in order to live, had to resort to methods of ferreting out possible cases and inciting contented people to engage in lawsuits to enforce fancied and even fictitious rights or to repel no less fancied wrongs. Thus misunder- standings, enmity, envy, and suspicion often arose where formerly peace and tranquillity had reigned. Hence, too, it slowly came to pass that any man in any way conspicu- ous, whether for merit or for wealth, had always to employ defenders against attack either upon his good name or upon his possessions, and to safeguard his fiduciary inter- ests as these developed in range and importance. As time went on, things grew worse and it was found necessary to enact new laws, for many of the older, simpler, sterner ones were found inconvenient and either lapsed or were abolished. Thus new legislative leaders, many of whom had had no training but who called themselves tribunes of the people, were convened in a central, and in many local parliaments. These members were elected from every walk of life, and a new type of special law-giving was developed beside the older one, thus slowly superseding the old faculties and the central academy of justice. Nearly all of their work was emergency legislation, and each member of these new bodies served only the interests of the constituents whose mouthpiece he was. Hence the body of laws was enormously multiplied far beyond the possibility of codification, and thus, too, precedents for THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 37 judicial decisions could be found for almost anything that any litigant sought. No one could begin to survey the entire field, and so experts and specialists of manifold kinds arose who knew little of the enactments passed in any other field than their own. Of old, parties were unknown save that men naturally fall into conservative or progressive groups according to their temperaments. But now par- tisanship often eclipsed patriotism, and the very word politician became opprobrious. All questions were treated with a view to their value as capital for partisan success, and as public patronage grew in volume and public officials increased in numbers, there were ever more bickerings between the '*ins'^ and the ''outs'' who hoped to attain access to the public crib. This made true statesmanship something that was only traditional and no longer possible. The major elections kept all enterprises unsettled half the time. Platforms full of fine phrases and high-sounding platitudes were promulgated that abounded in pledges which were soon forgotten and never even meant to be fulfilled, and manipulators of public opinion developed who were clever enough to do what our democracy thinks impossible, viz., to fool all the people, everywhere, and all the time. Rules of procedures were so elaborated that clever parliamentarians could by their aid often throttle the will of the majority, and there were even filibusters who could at any time call a halt on all procedure. Many law-givers were in close rapport with financial centers that profited by their secret confidences, and many held large retainers from their clients or sold secrets to speculators. Lobbies arose that were more numerous, more astute, and better paid than their victims, and the latter were often even led to betray the very causes they were chosen to serve. Thus the fountains of justice became corrupt at their source and could give forth only muddy waters to those below. 38 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST Vain were protests or petitions, especially where great interests were involved, as also were for a long time all efforts and plans of any kind of initiative, referendum, or recall, for in exact proportion to the length of term for which these servants of the people were chosen did they declare their independence of their constituents and arro- gate judgment and authority to themselves. It is hard to say from the records whether the infection of corruption spread fastest downward or upward. Cer- tain it is that lower and local civil bodies, also themselves with ever growing power and patronage, were composed of bosses and henchmen chiefly intent upon plunder, which generally came in the form of franchises, contracts, and concessions. No private business could have survived such mismanagement a year, and the ever-increasing taxes on everything made all governmental corporations rich beyond all precedent and therefore no less wasteful. Extortion, too, was everywhere rife. The police levied surreptitious rates or margins not only on crime and vice, which they too often protected instead of repressed, but also upon many an honest citizen and enterprise. If such perquisites were for any reason reduced, officials of all degrees, govern- ment clerks, firemen, policemen, transportation agents, and all the rest could always and everywhere have recourse to a strike and thus bring the long-suffering public to their terms. Capital and labor were long at angry odds, and their conflicts enormously reduced the industrial efficiency of the country. All processes became so specialized that no workman knew more than a single brief chapter in the history of the production of the object upon which he was engaged. Moreover, he was often obliged to live the whole course of his active life without adequate satisfaction of the primal needs of man, such as sufficient food, shelter, heat, clothes, family life, recreation, and so very commonly took refuge from his conscious and unconscious worries in THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 39 drink, laws against which abounded but could no longer be enforced. There were many symptoms that anticipated the great revolt. First, in several remote rural localities, communi- ties were formed of families who undertook to make and administer their own laws. Some of these were composed of intelligent and cultivated men and women who longed to lead the simple life close to nature, feeling that urban life had grown too intricate and burdensome to be longer endured. A few were made up of what we should call religious fanatics. Others were dreamers of a new dis- pensation of civilization, etc. As these settlements were small, few, and far, they at first attracted little attention as they all recognized Caesar by paying their due tribute to him. They were open to all save lawyers, who were barred and banned. But rumor spread and exaggerated the charm of these modes of life. Visitors came and pro- nounced it good. Thus slowly a great new ideal arose and spread. **Let us," said the heralds of this ideal, *' reor- ganize our institutions from the bottom up. Let us again think and speak of man 's duties and not solely of his rights. This was the principle upon which the Atlantean state grew great at first, and to this we will hark back. The laws now,'^ they said, **have come well-nigh to destroying all liberty. They regulate our lives from the cradle to the grave — marriage, homes, children, food, drink, sleep, en- joyments, enterprise, traffic, etc., while every crop, dome?^ tic animal, vehicle, fare, ticket, article of dress or furniture, as well as everything found on the table, bin, or cellar, is taxed directly or indirectly, and prying, spying officials dog us in all that is done in kitchen, laundry, yard, bed- room, or street. They ferret out our incomes and expendi- ture, investigate our clubs and societies, report our utter- ances if they show any impatience at the state of things as they are.' )7 40 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST So, at length, first secret, then open groups were formed pledging their members either not to elect lawyers to any body that made laws or ordinances or not to employ attor- neys or not to go to court but to arbitrate all differences, and sometimes individuals and even groups here and there agreed to defy certain laws of the more obnoxious type that infringed most seriously upon personal liberty or invaded human rights deemed inalienable. As this movement grew, many lawyers had to find new fields of activity as their resources were impaired. Others remonstrated and legis- lated voluminously against these recusant types, but to so little effect that these enactments ere long fell into dis- repute. The revenues of this guild fell off, and many turned to other vocations as the medicos had just before been similarly stampeded. As the last act of this drama, the legal body, goaded to 'desperation, also decreed a kohar or strike, and thus at a given date all schools of law, courts, offices, and legislative bodies closed, and all patroUers of the streets and detec- tives ceased to function. Then, again, there was indeed acute distress. There were mobs, sabotage, looting in the street by night, and a large element of the population took delight in defying all the old restrictions and giving them- selves up for a time to an orgy of riot and dissipation. There were often disturbances that the soldier guild had to be invoked to suppress. Colonies once never taxed with- out representation were now levied on against their will, and revolted. Publicans once honest and respected became corrupt and hated. The press, once an endowed, impartial, and fearless oracle of public thought, fell under the control of advertisers and thus lost its freedom. One section of it became reptilian, venal, and subservient to the interests of its secret owners or those who bought its support. Some "widely circulated journals sank to mere scandalmonger ing and even blackmail; others catered to pestilent and trucu- THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 41 lent bflge- water elements in society whom they thrilled and unsettled. Men prominent for service or wealth had often to employ *' sluggers'' to protect their person, and guard- ians facile with their tongues and pens to protect them against defamation. Everywhere there had been over-regimentation. Seats of learning as well as each profession or calling had tomes of statutes or ordinances, sometimes elaborately canonized, and were always in danger of being enmeshed in red tape or held up by antique precedents, for, as to-day, the passion for over-organization was greatest where there was least definiteness of purpose and least to organize; there was most regulation where there was least to regulate, and most circumlocutory functions where there was least to be accomplished. Thus, with the fall of the Nomos and Ethos, the nvores also declined. With the closing of all penal institutions and the abolition of all punishments every species of crime and vice so abounded that for years society seemed lapsing toward the state of Hobbesian war of all against all, and every man's hand seemed against that of every other. Neither life, limb, property, nor reputation was safe. Se- duction, rape, burglary, theft so increased that a reign of terror unprecedented in our era seemed imminent and a debacle of civilization itself at hand, as if man was not after all by nature a political animal, as our Aristotle has said, but a savage brute with whom the only law is that of the jungle where might makes right. Debauchery stalked the streets flagrant and unabashed. '* Because we die to-mor- row and the state and all future hope for man is dimmed, let us be merry and seize every pleasure while we can to-day, ' ' was the cry sometimes heard but oftener lived by. But amidst all this chaos there was a saving remnant that would not accept the grim logic of despair. Though all seemed lost, their wills were still unconquerable and they 42 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST determined to meet fire with fire. As their first and mild- est tentative step they revived and placarded certain old precepts : "Do nothing to others you would not have them do to you/' a saw which survived in the negative golden rule of Confucius; *'Make the motives of thy conduct such that they could be maxims of the conduct of everybody," somewhat as our Kant later said: *'Be honest and keep yourself pure;'' *'"Walk humbly and be content;" "There remains always the simple life, which is after all the best ; ' ' ''Avoid luxury which corrodes the heart;" "Be and keep always at your best;" "In doubt always find the higher, better way;" "Think twice;" "Be mindful of posterity;" "Seek always justice above all riches but practice mercy;" etc. Fortunately in such expressions of primal moral wis- dom the folklore of Atlantis was rich, and the best proverbs and apologues often represented in a phrase the choicest results of ages and experience. Ineffective as this placard and poster method seemed, it was a good beginning. But these wise men among fools also set to work systematically to compile, compare, and apply all ancient codes and tables of law and ethical systems, which were promulgated and diffused to show again the foundations upon which not only the Atlantean but all preceding civilizations had been built. Thus, canons of the primal rights and duties of man were conflated as books "in the bible of conduct." But all this was the least of this great effort to stem the tide of de- cay. Actively to combat present evils secret committees of vigilantes were formed, which occasionally marked out individuals for condign punishment, or even planned mys- terious executions for the most dangerous enemies of so- ciety and of virtue. There were law and order clubs. Codes and courts of honor were prescribed for workmen, employers, and for men of large and small affairs, to which THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 43 many subscribed and from whom, if they refused to do so, those still loyal to the right withheld patronage and sup- port. Corps of volunteers taught and wrought for social betterment in streets, shops, alleys, and home. As these *'true citizens'' (for thus they were called) organized and cooperated, a state council was formed of delegates which promulgated, not laws enforced by tribunals but sugges- tions with no mandatory force but appealing solely to con- science and public spirit. Thus, slowly and faintly at first a new hope arose, for this movement had the incalculable advantage that it was after all only a revival of the spirit of Atlantis in her prime as against the later superfetation of legislation and administration of laws that strangled the spirit by the letter. Thus, in the last chapter of the his- tory of this guild regenerative forces seemed gaining ground over the moral, civic, and economic anarchy pre- cipitated by the revolt of the legal guild. But other causes of decay in other domains cooperated to bring the end, and no one can conjecture the fate of this splendid beginning of reconstruction here. This * ' sa\dor party, ' ' as it was called, was strongly agrarian and sought by every means to de- urbanize the population, and their ideal was that every family should own and till some tract of land, however small the plot of each. They also agreed in holding that all wealth and prosperity comes from labor, either of the head or of the hand, and that all those able should do some of both kinds of work daily. They deprecated and re- stricted the great and growing number of holidays, held that all great enterprises might be cooperative, and were bitter against both inherited and predatory wealth. All deprecated war, but accepted it as a sometimes necessary evil for which they must always be prepared. But in about all other things as these reformers gained influence and power, they differed, often so radically and 44 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST irreconcilably that at the very last it seemed uncertain whether they could maintain the unity necessary to stem the tide of evils. We should caU them socialists, and then as well as now there were nearly as many minds as men, or at least types or dispositions of men. Some would achieve their goal by evolution ; others by revolution. Some would overturn society and bring up the proletariat to supreme power and humble all the rich, great, and powerful ; while others would eschew any program of vengeance for the past and simply start afresh. Some insisted that all were equal, and others recognized the vast native differences of gifts and would reward all according to service. Some favored, but most opposed, the development of any leisure class. There were pro- and anti-paternalists. Some would aggre- gate industries in guild towns, while others advocated a dispersive policy. Some desired to abolish all factory sys- tems and rely upon home industries wherever possible, while others evolved diverse systems of reform, and there were countless panaceas. Some held the right to strike inalien- able, and others would restrict it. Some feared great syji- dicates, and others believed in state ownership. So violent and sometimes disruptive were the wrangles between those who held opposite views that at the very last the powers of anarchy and chaos that these reformers had begun so effec- tively to check almost seemed to be again in the ascendant, so that as this chapter of Atlantean decline closes we are left in a really painful suspense between hope and fear for the future. Like the ''unfinished window of Aladdin's tower," however, the story of the future of this movement to supplant the legal guild must remain forever unfinished. Let us hope at least that our eon may last long enough so that if there should be similar issues at stake, the god of vTiistory that always repeats himself may finish his work with us, because thus only can we know whether man can THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 45 truly domesticate or civilize himself, or whether he is doomed forever to fail at last, and whether, whatever their glory, the worlds he makes for himself must always end in disaster and shame. Y THE GLORY AND SHAME OF LEARNING If there was any domain in which the Atlantean race in its prime excelled all other races of man it seemed to have been in learning; at least her best traditions here appear to have left more of their dim vestiges and sporadic ideal outcrops in the form of dreams and wishes unfulfilled sug- gestive to us of a time when men should become really lords of creation and masters of their fate. We begin with some salient features of their methods of education. After the medicos had accepted the infant as having a privia fade right to live, as it were, in a probationary way, the mother of each was examined and her regimen prescribed con- formatory to an ancient precept that for the first year or two she is the best mother who is the best wet-nurse. She must handle and take personal care of her child, attend to its attire, and make this stage of animal parenthood, on which all its higher functions rest, complete. Mothers who performed all these functions best were endowed by the state and given a bonus for every well-bom child, so that each mother of four could live from this vocation. * ' Stirp inventories," which our baby-shows suggest, were held every year, at which each child up to the age of four years must be present and be carefully inspected by experts and graded on thirty points, with prizes for the best. Each parent had also to answer on oath certain intimate ques- tions and keep certain records, and these dual yearly re- ports were carefully filed as the first pages of a *'life and health book" thus begun at or before the birth of every 46 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST child. By methods more developed than those of our so- called conditioned reflex, not only intelligence but temper and psychic diathesis could be rated during the first year of the infant 's life. The * ' mothers of the state ' ' were proud to wear the modest badge indicating their function and dur- ing the period of lactation they were regarded as vestals even by their husbands, and when they became gravid again, or even for the first time, there was no parturition- phobia, because there were always methods of twilight sleep more advanced than our own and proved innocuous in their results, although most mothers preferred to experience birth pangs, feeling that it made their parenthood more complete. The Atlanteans could not only analyze but com- pound mother's milk, as we cannot; but only imperfect mothers had recourse even to this for those who were nor- mal felt that even if nature's laboratory could be imitated, the very act of suckling their offspring made both the ma- ternal function and infants themselves more perfect, while in the case of those few infants who had thus to become ** parasites of the cow" it was realized that they were more or less handicapped in the race of life. , The importance of the first quadrennium of life, the At- lanteans realized, even more than do our Freudians, should be sacred to the development of character, temperament, and disposition, all of which were now plastic and in their nascent stage, as they would never be again. Thus there were almost no repressions but all possible evocations. In- fants were allowed, and often even encouraged, to cry, because this was their chief form of exercise, especially be- fore walking, and because it developed circulation and gave volume to lungs and voice. The pleasure-pain principle was allowed a wide and almost unrestricted play. Nudity without shame was cultivated, and health and stamina were the prime quaesita. The first education was solely by play and story. One THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 47 group of experts compiled all known plays, games, and sports, and rated the physical and moral value and the best age for each, always on the basis of long-tried-out ex- periments and observations, giving great weight to chil- dren's preferences. The ablest individuals of this group occasionally succeeded in inventing original games or toys that *Hook" with the children and had their own morale. There was thus a large repertory, not only of plays and games but also of toys for young and old, individual and social, free and controlled, indoor, street, park, field, forest, and shore plays. It was understood that almost everything could be taught playwise, and no great institution, inven- tion, or discovery was complete until it had been reduced to its simplest elements in toy form. Capacity for play was the criterion of educability. The child that could not play with abandon was not worth educating. Those, too, who could not do teamwork and recognize the spirit of jus- tice and subordination were not thought to give promise of being desirable citizens and were thus refused education. Toy congresses were also held, with prizes and awards for merit, and there were also museums where were collected, demonstrated, and loaned to schools, every grade and form of illustrative device and apparatus that short-circuited educational processes in every branch. Besides the investi- gators in this field, there were paidotribes who applied their results, reporting their findings that comparisons might give ever clearer verdicts as to the very best and warning against the second best, which is the curse of medi- ocrity. In likewise tbe storyologists ransacked mythology, litera- ture, and even daily life for tales, also simplifying all the older classic ones, and always having the children repeat and thus reedit them tA show what found deepest lodgment and response. These were also curricularized for older and younger minds, and grouped as to the virtues which they 48 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST taugtt or the faults which they were designed to cure. Thus a very carefully chosen canon was evolved, and from this, we may add, grew an organization which passed upon all literature for the young and allowed nothing to be pub- lished that did not conform to their standards. Thus every- thing that we should call classic or biblical was simplified in the form of story roots, and many of them were not only told but acted by and for the children, with due apprecia- tion of their passion for representing not only types of hu- man, but even of animal, character (for great attention was paid to the animal epos). Many of these narratives were also put in scenario form and shown in the movies, for which provision was made in every school. At a more ad- vanced stage every drama or important story prescribed for reading was heard at a theater which was a part of the school system of every municipality, where the morale of each was enforced by every device which scenery, stage trappings, and the best actors could command; and we might add here, too, that the histrionic art, with a model theater and copious literature and all devices of the scenic art, was found and its unique culture power brought out in every seat of higher learning. Certain of the best tales were transmitted by these bards of children solely by oral tradition, and so sacredly were they regarded that it was made a crime to print or write them. In connection with the animal epos, each larger town had its pedagogic-zoological garden, where the typical beasts, large and small, and from various climes, could be observed at first hand, and household pets and barnyards of domesticated animals were utilized for education. Many types of animal life, especially as children know them, em- body single human traits as if Mansoul were dissected into its elements that children might by means of their interest in them here begin the study of man. Thus the lion is the symbol of boldness; Reynard, of cunning; the sloth, of THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 49 laziness ; the eel, of slithyness ; the bear, of boorishness ; and so of the sheep, bat, serpent, wolf, eagle, dog, beaver, rat, weasel, ape, mammoth, butterfly, ant, bee, raven, parrot, pelican, and many more, as countless tropes, similes, fables, and myths show. It is the same symbolism latent in the child's mind that finds poetic expression in Shelley's "Sky- lark," Bryant's "Waterfowl," Holmes' "Chambered Nau- tilus," etc., to say nothing of fictitious creatures like the phoenix, centaur, hippogrif, roc, dragons, etc. Each im- portant animal had its child book abounding in pictures, myth, and also epitomizing the most salient and interesting features that naturalists and comparative psychologists had found out. Children's instinct to fancy themselves one animal after another; their interest in all extreme human types — the miser, sot, hobo, spendthrift, fool, dub, hypo- crite, sycophant, fop, lover, devotee — all these, even if they go to the extreme of impersonation, gave elasticity to char- acter, range of sympathy, and insight and plasticity to the intellect. Great stress was laid upon the educational value of music in a large sense as the language of the emotions, just as speech is that of the intellect. Selections of both words and music which must be truly wed were made solely with refer- ence to the sentiments they cultivated, which were chiefly those found in the field of love and of nature, home, coun- try, and God. The younger children were taught by and to use the voice only and always by rote at first, for it was thought to be as absurd to teach notation before the child commanded a large repertory of songs by ear as it would be to teach writing before the child could speak. For older children in every school there was a canon of both instru- inental and vocal music that might be heard from mechani- cal productions of them hardly to be distinguished from the original. Inseparable from music was, of course, dancing, the 50 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST power of which to cadence the soul, to give it both control and elan, was indicated by the Atlantean proverb, **The father of mind is speech ; the father of prose is poetry ; the father of poetry is rhythm; and the father of rhythm is God. ' * Dancing was carried to a very high degree of per- fection and was of many kinds. There were military dances, which symbolized the salient features and senti- ments of all the typical activities of war ; industrial dances, which pantomimed the chief occupations; social dances, which set forth man's duty toward all the institutional products of his gregarious instinct ; amorous dances, which depicted in sublimated form the manifestations of the mat- ing instinct. Religious dances, which merged by impercep- tible gradations into rituals and ceremonies and pageant representations of the mythos of all the chief faiths, were very highly developed. There were prizes for new motor expressions in all these fields, and every suggestion from savage life was exploited to the uttermost by choreographic artists, some of the most signal devices of whom were as catching as in our era the polka, e.g.^ first proved, when statesmen and scholars neglected their duties to indulge in the pleasures of it. Only Delacrose in our era has glimpsed the possibilities here which the Atlanteans knew so well. The beginnings of education were in the home, and no girl was allowed to marry or become a mother until the marriage board had satisfied themselves of her competence, not only to bear but to train children during the first three or four years of their life. Then it was the custom for some mother in each community more favored by compe- tence and leisure than others to receive the children of neighbors in her own home and with her own offspring, and supervise their activities, teach them proverbs, songs, and something of Nature and God as her maternal instinct di- rected. These home-schools left thus free were found to be THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 51 very rich in spontaneous pedagogic devices, which were always carefully collected and utilized. When boys and girls were six or seven, both were sent to the so-called * * groves. ' ' These were always in the country, under trees, with plenty of sunny spaces and arable and fertile soil of which each child had a plot, the organiza- tion of which somewhat suggests our ' * garden city. ' ' Pub- lic transportation to and from these educational sites was a problem which gave the Atlanteans no difficulty. Here for several years, varying at the teacher's discretion for dif- ferent children, each led during the day a life close to na- ture, largely out-of-doors, with little, and often no, knowl- edge of books, but with copious pictures and with a wide range of hill, shore, and wildwood ever open. During these years, usually to the age of about ten, all reading and writ- ing was discouraged and in some places punished ; the first because it was realized that speech really lives, moves, and has its being in the ear-mouth tracts, centers, and functions, and that the tract represented by the eye that reads and the hand that writes not only evolved eons later but is a process so long-circuited, slowed down, and devitalized that, if cultivated too early, it tends to suppress rather than to develop utterance. Writing was seen to involve too great strain, not only upon the tiny pen-wagging muscles, but upon the eye, so that it was placed at the end of a long series of preliminary exercises with larger fundamental muscles. There was no problem of spelling in the Atlan- tean language. The phonic symbols for each vocal element were unmistakable, and as no two words either looked or sounded alike, it was almost as impossible to misspell as it was to pun. In these fore-schools, too, all number work was oral and mental. It began with counting forward, backward, skipping-wise, and the elements of geometry came out in measurements incidental to children's occupa- tions. The simplest and fewest number symbols were 52 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST learned only when the stage of development had been reached that made them imperative. Thus every kind of arithmomania was avoided. Geography began in topogra- phy and widened from the schoolyard to the township and finally to the state and to the world. Each school laid out a miniature state in a kind of land map plotted to scale and showing mountains, valleys, river-beds, and town- ships, all made with spades, and in the capital city was a large revolving globe one hundred and sixty feet in diame- ter, one-half millionth that of the earth, on the metallic surface of which were etched all the essential details of each country and the smaller items of each province, and even estates often were engraved so minutely that a micro- scope was often required to read them ; while in the wings of the building which housed this globe was a geographical library for savants. In these "groves'* there were models of the moon, sun, planets, and the stars, always illustrated by orreries and charts embodying in juvenile form the major results of astronomy, and also the compiled folklore for the development of sentiment. Of the moon, e.g., it was taught that it was once ripped from the earth from which it was slowly retreating, and was the frozen corpse of a dead world, with no air, moisture, or life, a prophecy of what our earth will sometime become. It was also repre- iSented as the dearest celestial object watching over us, weaving charming spells, and a not unworthy object toward which to direct prayer-wishes. Thus science and sentiment must be harmonised. Play merged over into work first in the construction of toys that the child wished to use, and the fabrication of a series of crude and simple physical instruments illustrating the rudiments of optics, acoustics, electricity, mechanics, etc., the interest being always focused upon the product rather than upon the process. Interest was everywhere the muse, and it was held to be a kind of rape to force knowl- THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 53 edge upon unwilling minds and a sin against the Holy Ghost not to gratify at once and to the saturation point every legitimate manifestion of curiosity. Evocation of zest and spontaneity was always sought, and every child was incessantly observed and rated, not by the quantum of knowledge he acquired but by the strength and manifold- ness of his interests. Even at the end of the higher educa- tion it was understood that the momentum of the impulse to know and do and not the bulk of acquisitions was the criterion of educational values, and graduation was the beginning and not the end of culture. There was no com- pulsion, even of attendance; nor was there much need. During the quadrennium from eight or ten to twelve or fourteen the foregoing methods were supplemented by drill or Dressur. Disciplinary and obligatory goals predomi- nated. All must now learn to read and write, but the rest was elective. Each pupil, with his parents' cooperation, must choose some line of activity and each found fit was held to it by rigorous methods. If one or more other lan- guages were taken, as was rarely the case or need, there was incessant and at first chiefly oral drill, while the speech muscles and faculties were in their nascent period. If it was music, or a technical or even manual labor requiring skiU, all were subjected to rigid mechanical practice to make everything automatic as early and completely as pos- sible. Some dug, planted, helped in the quarries, streets, farms, or factories, for child labor proportionate to the child's strength was deemed necessaiy for physical and moral development, for every form of physical labor was done by the easiest and fewest movements possible, with vast economy of effort in nearly every process. Teachers had many books, and pupils few. Something was taught of the history and culture value of every occupation to give even to drudgery its pedagogic and moral points de repere. 54 BECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST At the dawn of the new life of puberty the ** groves" were left, and all, save those with some marked incompe- tence or inferiority, reverted to their homes in the town or city. Of these some began their occupational life, for every industry had its juvenile department, where the kind, hours, and circumstances of labor were adjusted to the hy- gienic and moral needs of youth, which left plenty of time and opportunity for continuation training, while those fit- ted for the higher education went to middle schools, or people's colleges, which were the pride of every town and municipality. Here the courses lasted from four to five to seven or eight years, according to the intellectual ability of each. No one was held back by slower mates, for the Atlanteans had provided for exceptionally gifted children no less effectively than we have done for those who are subnormal, for the latter were thought far less worthy of pedagogic effort. Now the sexes were more or less segre- gated, as the normal tastes and prospective spheres of each were differentiated. Among girls a still more marked dif- ferentiation spontaneously arose between those who looked forward to motherhood and domestic life and those who sought self-support. There were no dead languages and few studied anything not to be used later. There were no examinations as we know them. Thus, each in a sense had his or her own course, and advancement or demotion almost came of itself. At this stage Kultur perhaps somewhat prevailed over culture; at least applications were every- where attempted and everywhere attended to as zest-gen- erators. All pupils visited under expert supervision all local institutions — administrative, civil, hygienic, indus- trial, charitable, penal, legislative, and thus became in a sense apprenticed to the life of the community, which was made to flow through the schools, and the members of each thus learned to distinguish what kind of knowledge was of most worth. Every locality, especially if rural, was left THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 55 practically free to conduct not only its mother schools, but its ** groves," as it would. The state as such did nothing educational for its children till at the age of eighteen or twenty they were ready for academic life, focusing all its funds and supervision upon the later higher stages of training of its intellectually elite for leadership. Here, in most departments, the ** guides" had early fallen naturally into two chief groups, the demonstrators, and the pioneers. The former conducted the so-called theaters and the latter inspired and led in researches. In physiology, e.g., the demonstrator with his corps of assistants working in the theater laboratory prepared one after another standard ex- periment with elaborate chart-scenery and apparatus set- ting forth objectively every method and result in the do- main of digestion, assimilation, the action of glands and hormones, circulation, respiration, muscle action, secretive and eliminative processes, fatigue, rest, sleep, the functions of every sense, conduction and reaction time of nerves and centers, etc. The same practice prevailed in chemistry £ind physics, while in such fields as astronomy, geology, meteor- ology, botany, zoology, and anthropology, every possible ex- perimentation was supplemented by a wealth of diagrams, models, photographs, and movies. In every science its his- tory, epochs, and great men were stressed to give humanis- tic zest, and even applications to arts and industries had their place to stimulate interest. The Atlanteans had bored the earth for miles in places, so that they could draw on its central energies for power, light, and heat, for their coal proved more expensive and all their forests were artificial. They also utilized energy from sea-waves, tides, and the sun, and some of them had learned to make radium and utilize its incalculable power in place of electricity. Others had successfully signaled Mars and were accumulating precious data on the life of the Martians. Still others were planning an expedition to 56 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST the moon with engines that could, with the aid of the strongest ballistic powers to start them, negotiate the ether. On the summit of their highest mountain a tower of three thousand feet was built to study the effects of rarefication. The botanists had developed majiy kinds of new plants, flowers, and fruits, which were cleverly composed by the arts of cross-fertilization, so that the vegetable kingdom had become very plastic to man ; while experimental studies of animal breeding had led them to control this and to de- velop many new species, some of which could propagate their kind. Certain elements their chemists could generate, and some of them had begun to make diamonds and gold in their laboratories. The biologists could evolve life from crystals and emulsions and could generate many new or- ganic substances by their mastery of carbon compounds. The wealth and resources of their laboratories where all this was done far surpassed ours, and every opportunity and in- centive to the pioneer was provided, with the constant ad- monition to contribute something new to human knowledge, even though it be but a tiny brick in the great temple of science, which was regarded as the supreme creation of man. Those who did so and gave promise of future intel- lectual fecundity were supported by the state and exempted from all other duties. The leading pioneers were given a seat in the academic council, which was the chief honor the state could bestow, and their effigies were placed in the HaU of Fame. They were given the freedom of honored guests of the nation, and along with the leisure thus as- sured, they were given a simple admonition, ''Keep doing your best thing and eschew every second best activity." They were regarded as the light and hope of the state. They had but to present their projects and they were at once put into execution. Whenever they went abroad, it was in state and they were so revered that sometimes cities vied with each other for the honor of having given them THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 5T birth or of having nurtared them in youth, for in Atlantia every one could rise from the humblest to the most exalted station upon merit. Yet even they, and perhaps they best of all, realized that man had just begun to know and com- mand Nature, that even they were small, weak, and ignorant of most that man should know and could do. History was philosophy teaching by example, and its moral aspect was always stressed. It was commonly taught backward from effect to cause, and with the most advanced students penetrated even toward the dawn of history. Here, too, charts, diagrams and graphic methods, and every device of photography were utilized. While the geographic, climatic, and economic aspects of history were stressed, it was recognized that here lay the realm of human freedom and often a very arbitrary choice, and that the characters of great men must be analyzed, and especially that history is ever in the making, so that its best pages cannot be writ- ten yet because the best things have not yet come to pass. It was seen that great leaders are presentifiers resolving everything into the here and now, making every issue a devoir present. Economics and sociology were chiefly intent on compiling all the experiences of man in industrial, civil, and social life, so as to find the very best conditions of his further de- velopment. In the best Atlantean period even these savants were in closest rapport with, the governmental pol- icy and the great organizations and were not recusants from practical life, for all strove toward ideal conditions to avoid lapsing from them, so that experts in this field were not prone to cut loose from reality and revel in Utopian and milennial dreameries. Psychology, after a long speculative period, had emanci- pated itself from metaphysics and to some extent from physiology and had become a culminating academic theme, the only one which all desired and which it was felt need- 58 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST ful to know. It was genetic, comparative, clinical, and strove chiefly to give self-knowledge and self-control. It associated itself closely with religion and also with educa- tion, analyzed individualities to discern the best that was in every one and to guide him to it, and to realize that the soul of man is no less a product of evolution than is his body; and it also regarded all languages, myths, institu- tions, faiths, and even deities and everything transcen- dental as projections of Mansoul. It was more or less prag- matic, but put the primordial developmental nisus which we dub wiU-to-live, elan vital, Ubido, horme, etc., as the V .supreme thing in all the world, surcharged with the promise ■ and potency of a higher race of supermen which it was the business of civilization and learning to produce. The spirit of intellectual Atlantis culminated in the so- called frontiersmen, whom we might call pure academicians, who lived somewhat apart and who planned and executed major enterprises of discovery and control of nature and of man. It was they who had established observatories on each pole, both geographic and magnetic, which were in constant wireless connection with each other summer and winter ; built several steel cofferdams to the very bottom of the deepest parts of the sea which swayed with the stronger surface currents and storm-waves as our skyscrapers do to high wind; constructed and directed the thermal labora- tories which commanded a temperature all the way from absolute zero, where even chemical affinities were dead and every kind of energy save gravity was in abeyance, up to about 20,000° F., at which every substance — earth, rocks, and even the elements — was vaporized and all matter volatile ; suggested and made possible the extremely profits able enterprise of recovering sunken treasures from the sea- bed, etc. In a vast hall all the phenomena of weather changes and climate, storm, thunder and lightning, tornado, and cyclone could be reproduced in miniature under con- THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 59 trolled conditions, and there was a yet more elaborate hall, where it was hoped to reproduce the chief phenomena of the early stages of the evolution of the planets from cosmic ether and nebula. A section of these frontiersmen di- rected the work of making microscopesandtelescopeswhich, by composition and combination and correction of lenses, so greatly extended the range of man's visual knowledge toward both the infinitely great and small that some of our speculative elements like atoms, vital units, such as ids, gemmules and even ions were proved or disproved by an appeal to vision. Another group devoted themselves to hyper- or n-dimensional space, for it was known that be- yond the limits of the stellar universe which is lenticular, the Milky Way being due to the fact that we look out toward the edges from near the center of this cosmic lens, there stretched an infinite ocean of space unpopulated by stars, wherein many of the principles and even the axioms of our Euclidean geometry do not hold. For the details of these and many other scientific enterprises, some more and some less developed, the reader must wait for the fuller account yet to appear in a volume of the above-announced report. I will only mention here one of the most adventurous projects, viz., that of the group of frontiersmen who de- voted themselves to bettering the human stock or to pro- ducing what we only dream of as the superman. They se- lected after many cunningly devised tests and examinations a number of individuals of each sex and also from each race of man that they deemed ascendant and not descendant, and for them controlled all the processes connected with the act and the function of reproduction. The entire regimen of the men was directed to maximize their potential father- hood and that of the woman, their motherhood. In these Edens or new-world cunabula, as they were called, it was sought to determine by experiment and observation the 60 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST eugenic value of love versus the wisest assignment of mates that these pathfinders for humanity could suggest, the best conditions and methods of courtship and even marital approach, its frequency before, and place after, and the effects of abstinence or indulgence during, gravidity. Special attention was given to the effects of divergence, identity, or complementation of types and dispositions, the effects of different emotional conditions during pregnancy and nursing, the length of the latter period, and even the choice of a wet-nurse if in extremity this should be neces- sary. The crossing of different human stocks or races was tried out with a view to finding favorable and unfavorable combinations and to determining whether an exhausted stock could be rejuvenated by blending with one more pri- mal. One of these departments was devoted to the study of the effects of diseases upon heredity and to determine when propagation should be forbidden or even made im- possible. I must omit here all account of the various experimental social and industrial organizations which were located in various provinces of Atlantis to determine the best condi- tions of production, civil and political organizations, as well as even the best forms of religion, for the reports of these experimental stations will make one of the most interest- ing of the forthcoming volumes. Syndicalism, direct ac- tion, cooperation, much and little regimentation, colonial policies, taxation, centralization versus local autonomy, kinds and limits of suffrage which might be, and sometimes were, withdrawn from both individuals and communities, modes of dealing with harlotry and intoxication — on all these it was sought to collect valuable data which would really be scientific and normative. It had taken many centuries of hard work by the best minds to evolve this system, but its decline and fall was rapid. It began with the growth of the proletariat which THE FALL OP ATLANTIS 61 demanded that every opportunity be open to all. There must be no exclusion of the inferior or unfit from every privilege or incentive provided for the best. Throngs of second-rate pupils made it necessary to refit all knowledge to a lower average of intelligence and slow down the pace of the best. Then arose a cry against cloistered learning. The "people" must know all the projects of the pioneers and even of the frontiersmen and pass upon them, and they were charged with quixotic schemes and with extravagance, and thus the resources available for research were gradu- ally cut down. A movement akin to our university exten- sion compelled savants to itinerate and teach the masses, till extensive eclipsed intensive work, and there was little left at the centers to ''extend." All education must be immediately and crassly useful, and everywhere the cult of mediocrity began to exclude that of talent. The pioneers, it was said, had hitherto devoted themselves to the cult of the useless and made their seats of learning places where nothing useful was taught, and now they must execute a volte-face and cultivate nothing useless. A few great leaders had no training beyond that of the "groves," and therefore it was said the higher learning was of doubtful value and the vast resources spent upon it should be better applied. Too much knowledge intimidates, special train- ing would probably enfeeble the great enterprisers, and it is chiefly needful only for tecTmologists who are not masters but servants. Now in fact nothing is so dangerous as great ideas in a little mind or overweaning ambitions in weak ones. The result is always either a Phaethon-like catastro- phe or else a false but festering sense of discontent which may issue in revolt against things as they are ; and in fact both these results were abundantly illustrated in Atlantis. Now, too, the state had to reverse its policy of support. Instead of subsidizing the higher, and leaving the elemen- tary, training to private initiative, the government took 62 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST over and reconstructed not only the *' groves'' but even the mother-schools, and left all advanced training and re- search to private enterprise. Not mothers but more or less trained and apprenticed experts must teach the elements, and that by a method so uniform that the director-general could look at his timepiece and say, ^ ' At this moment every child in all this vast system is doing just this thing, in this way, with the aid of this lesson in this book. ' ' Every topic was curricularized, graded, quantified into modest dosages, and all pupils were organized into classes by lock-step and mass methods, and individuality tended to be lost in cunningly devised ways of dealing with children in platoons. There were also expert organizers, and end- less surveys by experts to ascertain the cost of training each child in each grade per hour and minute. Ingenious formulae for obtaining maximal efficiency at minimum cost were evolved, and the programs of meetings of those who conducted the higher academic training were monopolized by themes of office economy, dean administration, and sta- tistical methods, till those interested in education itself or in children and youth, and especially those who cared chiefly for the advancement of science, held aloof from all this business, and here, again, Kultur slowly superseded culture. Under this new spirit school buildings, often sumptuous, multiplied, and specialinstitutions for training teachers were founded everywhere. If business activities were dull, these latter institutions were crowded; but if enterprise and trade were active and larger salaries were offered elsewhere, they were depleted, so that now there was a dearth, and now a superfluity, in the teaching personnel. This occupation everywhere tended to be so poorly paid that only those who had a kind of missionary fanaticism for it or those of distinctly inferior parts were found in it. Textbook and apparatus artificers multiplied and made their influence THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 63 increasingly felt and in ways ranging througli a long ga- mut from very good to very bad. Boards of control popu- larly chosen from the masses kept everything true to the standards of mediocrity, striving to reconcile as best they could the more or less irreconcilable mandates of economy and efficiency. Higher seats of learning also multiplied. The best grew rich as they grew old, and aspired to cover all the fields of possible knowledge. Some were municipal, some provin- cial, some national, some free and independent of all con- trol. Some were established to perpetuate the memory of the childless rich; others to boom local interests or doc- trinaire views. While some were large and rich, othera were small and poor. All were headed by shrewd and able organizers, whose policy was animated by two ideals : more students, more wealth. Nature and nurture combined, how- -ever, did not supply sufficient men to head all the depart- ments in these many institutions, so that professional qual- ity declined. Many of them were drawn away into more lucrative or technical applications, so that it was found impossible to man some of the most important of them. Departments, and even schools, were founded to meet passing demand, and the small body of certain and valu- able knowledge in the domain of many such mushroom ifields was whipped into a sillabub of courses in which matter was almost hidden by method. Many, if not most, of these institutions and departments were vastly alike, each copying promptly every successful new departure in every other instead of freely differentiating so that all together they could cover the whole field of cognition and not leave a vast and arid acreage untenanted. Yet each of these in- stitutions deemed itself the incarnation of some peculiar, precious, but indefinable spirit that made it excel all others and which was always vociferously appealed to. There were also very efficient student-recruiting bureaus and traveling 64 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST agents to lure students, often with a long list of exemp- tions, privileges, athletic honors, and even bonuses; and there were incessant drives for more funds, till the alumni^ especially if men of means, felt themselves almost perse- cuted by countless subtle methods of importunity. There were expert drive conductors who sold their services for a percentage of what they could raise to different institu- tions, and who instituted house-to-house visitations, proces- sions, placards, engineered subtle implications of disloy- alty to recusants, and who were super-subtle in the appli- cation of methods that were hardly less than extortionate. Great donors were honored by halls, statues, portraits, and degrees, and their names were attached to many a fund and building; and sometimes obnoxious conditions (such is the power of mortmain here) were adhered to long after they should have been outgrown. The frailities of these donors were glossed over by the charity that has such power to cover sins. As their wealth increased, many gor- geous architectural structures arose in which, as a result of bitter controversies between the academicians, who looked chiefly to usefulness, and the architects, who looked to display, the former had to capitulate to the latter. So lucrative was the business of housing and feeding students that private enterprises often entered the lists and made large profits for outsiders, greatly to the disgust of the dons, who felt that all that could be derived from students was legitimately their own. For all funds established for students' benefit the institution took first its toll, deducting it from the ever-rising and multipljang student fees. Ex- aminations were always on, or in prospect — a long series of them for entrance, one for each topic, each term, each year, biennial and quadrennial terminals. There were sprung or unexpected examinations, and often in large classes all recitations were written, with a small but trained body of expert spies to ferret out illegitimate ways of giving or THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 65 receiving help. There was also a large group of bright but impecunious upperclass students, who earned their way by the fearful drudgery of examining and marking every paper of every student from the viewpoint of both matter and form, and all this had to be done accurately because gradation, promotion, and awards to scholarships depended upon these quantifications. These laboriously compiled averages for each. Meanwhile instructors in these higher institutions were made to feel that their calling was so dignified that they could afford to sacrifice material considerations for the honor bestowed upon them and the respect in v/hich they were held. But slowly their old leadership declined, as, e.g., in our own eon the pulpit has done, and some of the professorlings came to realize that they could no longer hold their own with men of the world. Indeed some of the more modest and conscientious among them even ventured to ask themselves whether they were not living in a fool's paradise, not only as to tjie respect due their calling, but whether they were really earning their own modest salaries. "Was theirs really a man 's task ? Had they really grown since they were seated in their chairs or shriveled ? As in Gregory's Meccania these new fashions seemed at fii*st to give a new impulse to the state. Knowledge was diffused and every^body knew something of everything as the omne sihile was chased into practicalities. Great industries attracted scores of experts intent upon saving waste and utilizing by-products. Academic laboratories were engaged chiefly upon problems submitted to them by guilds of dyers, bakers, miners, laundrjmien, farmers, gardeners, irrigators, machinists, engineers, sewerologists, and scores of others. Economists became the servitors of business, and even so- ciologists became apologists of things as they are. Psy- chologists tested and assayed every human quality with reference to every demand for human activity. But it is 66 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST one thing to fit men to be cogs in preexisting machinery and another to develop ever higher powers in man himself which impel him to create ever newer and higher institu- tions as progress demands. Hence the complaint arose in the course of time that there was a dearth of men capable of filling the most important positions. Affairs became Frankensteins that dominated man, their creator. Mech- anism as it became perfect grew unprogressive for lack of original minds, and stagnation, on however high a plane, always results in a decline, and those who think them- selves already perfect never become so. Regression at the top extended downward and complacency camouflaged sub- tle degeneration of morale. There were incessant presenta- tions in diagramed and tabular form, showing the exact financial value of every added year and month of educa- tion, and these were everywhere conspicuously and allur- ingly displayed. Thus teachers came to overestimate the worth of their own services to the state and community and began to form unions to enforce recognition of what they deemed their just increase of emoluments, rights, and privileges. The guild of teachers, which had become a well- organized sect and in some respects a sex by themselves, insisted that they were the pillars of the state and it was their efforts chiefly that had made it great and strong. They entered politics, drafted many and complex laws and ordinances and resolutions, rallied to the support of any how- ever weak members of their own guild who were displaced, and at last, after many and long struggles, organized and executed a strike so effectually that at a given day all the sub-academic schools throughout all Atlantis were closed. Meetings were held in which the janitors were very active, and there were many resolutions and statements to the pub- lic in justification of this action. The * 'pedicos ' ' demanded not only more pay but longer vacations; shorter class hours ; more freedom from supervision ; equal pay for male THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 67 and female, elementary and higher, rural and urban teach- ing; less marking; smaller classes, etc. Thus all these demands, if granted, would involve radical reconstructions of the entire system. Parents, boards, and superintendents urged reconsideration upon the irate teachers, and many modes of arbitration and compromise were proposed, but in vain. Many communities called for volunteers and many such offered their services, but, as we have seen, the police were disorganized, and often mobs led by janitors resisted all efforts to open buildings, although in many places this was done and classes were held under armed guards, often with parents. Here and there were attempts to revive the old system, but progress had been so vaunted that all that was old was discounted. In many families something like liie mother-schools of the good old days were revived, but the idea that teaching was a fine technical art had been so insid- iously inculcated that there was little confidence in teach- ers without special training. Here and there one teacher, or even a group of teachers, relented and resumed their old task, perhaps through pity for the children, or as the result of the importunity of their parents. Meanwhile, as the months and years passed, most of the teachers found no difficulty in obtaining more lucrative positions. Thus weakened by the secession from their ranks of their lead- ers, those incapable of other tasks grew sullen and morose. There were sometimes fires in now vacated school build- ings attributed to them, and occasionally a suspicious ex- plosion wrecked one of the most imposing of these struc- tures. Some of these were sold and perhaps transformed for other uses, while the rest fell into neglect. Meanwhile, too, hoodlumism and juvenile crime increased at a rapid rate. Gangs of swagger young toughs often roamed the street by night and even by day, committing depredations upon property and persons until, especially in suburbs where the men were away during the day, they often be- 68 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST came not only a menace but a terror to all, especially to women and children. Where schools were reopened, it was bands of young desperadoes who often broke them up, smashing windows, sometimes invading the rooms, turning out the children, and perhaps burning school books, furni- ture, and illustrative apparatus. These young Apaches were sometimes led by their brazen girl mates. Looting parties of them sometimes marched defiantly up and down the streets, intent not only on sabotage, but upon looting, and this evil became so great that where the remnant of the police could not quell it, soldiers were called in and there was many a brief battle, with killing on both sides. Former teachers were objects of special antagonism by the most insubordinate of their former pupils, and they were not infrequently held up, befouled, and subjected to every indignity ; and, if fortunate, they escaped with no bodily in- jury. Other of the older but less disorderly children and youth made manifold counterdemonstrations. They pa- raded with placards, petitioning the teachers to return, advocating placatory concessions to their demands, and there were many encounters between these and the hoodlum groups in which former classmates were arrayed against each other. The higher institutions of learning, deprived thus of their ** fitters, " languished. A few students here still managed to qualify privately, or in the few reinstated lower schools, but the once large revenue from students' fees shrank, and naturally the governmental appropriations were still more reduced as the average expense of training each student decupled. All academic teacher-training work was at first stimulated in the hope of filling the places of the secondary staff, but this work soon fell under the ban. Since the collapse of these departments some time before, there were no longer students attending either law or medicine. Great efforts were made to sustain certain courses deemed essen- THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 69 tial, while others were dropped, but there was great di- vergence as to what branches belonged in these categories. Equipment, salary, and upkeep suffered progressively. Both the ''pioneers" and the ''frontiersmen" first tried to sustain themselves by patents and by selling their services to industries, until most of the surviving savants were found with the latter, for commercialism became the last stand of the moribund scientific spirit. Some of the higher institutions abandoned all academic, and devoted them- selves exclusively to extension work, for which the debacle of the educational system for at least a season created a greatly increased demand. But overpopularized learning is diluted and gives a shallow conceit of knowledge without its substance. Thus for a time the masses that thronged the seats of learning, not only evenings, but mornings and afternoons, slowly diminished. They demanded, too, that these new intellectual wares thus dispensed be brought to their own doors. Hence, great scholars had often to travel to outlying districts and crossroad schools to vend their lore. Some few devoted themselves to this task like true itinerant missionaries, hoping thus to stem the tide of de- cay for their motherland. Some of the older seats of learn- ing closed altogether and were left to the slow processes of decay. In one case of this kind we find a pathetic story of an old college janitor and sexton still living on the academic grounds, "whence all but he had fled," and who rang the college bell every hour, although it called only phantom classes, till he died. Some institutions in a long life-and-death struggle to keep the wolf from the door sus- tained themselves by selling part of their grounds for other purposes and leasing or selling some of their buildings for offices, shops, etc. Some institutions not too far apart ef- fected more or less revolutionary devices of federation, lay- ing aside perhaps with much inner mortification a long- cherished and inveterate spirit of rivalry to do so. Former 70 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST heads of these institutions were the most fortunate, for they were especially sought as promoters and propagan- dists hy the larger business firms, while a few achieved emi- nent success in methods of conducting advertising bureaus. Many professors opened private schools, where they often grew wealthy, supplying to parents of means the demand for training, although these new ventures often had to encounter not only opposition but occasionally attack from ex-teachers whose occupation was gone. Once not only all the tangible properties of these institutions had been ex- empt from taxation but even their vested funds. This was at the time when townships had vied for the honor and profit of having them founded in their midst. But now the government exacted its highest rate of taxation for both realty and funds and later even confiscated their en- dowment because their service to the state was gone. Their libraries were stiU open at certain hours, but little visited and poorly manned. Some ot them were sealed under or- ders, and nearly the same was the fate of the museums. Scientific apparatus and instruments for both demonstra- tion and research, with which laboratories had been so admirably stocked, were auctioned; some found its way to, and use in, industrial establishments, and some of it was carefully stored and in a few generations in the more ignorant communities, where their use was unknown and forgotten, became objects of superstitious and fetishistic awe. Letters declined, illiteracy grew apace, till the guilds of both book-writers and printers were dissolved and the many kinds of expertness went the way of the lost arts of our antiquity. Members of learned societies who strug- gled to keep alive the traditions of the past grew fewer, meetingSi more infrequent, and their proceedings more largely devoted to obituaries of members who had died, for most of these Fellows were old and there was little new blood from which to recruit their membership. More THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 71 and more often the work of all experts was regarded as fu- tile and fatuous. In some places they were often regarded somewhat as radicals, dangerous to the established order, so that their sessions and even their existence had to be secret. Thus in these and many other ways ignorance and super- stition slowly spread their dark pall over the land, fold on fold, and as the very acme of pathos even the records of this decline flickered and went out, and thus perhaps merci- fully to those who ages after found and deciphered these records our world is spared the last act of the greatest tragedy in all the story of human culture. If the glory of learning here at its best shames our age into a sense of in-^ feriority by contrast, the later stages may well make us feel exultant, for we can still hearten ourselves with a sense of our progress, and we may safeguard ourselves- against relapse by the warnings that have now most oppor- tunely come up to us from out of the depths of the sea. VI THE ZENITH AND NADIR OF RELIGION The religious history of Atlantis is perhaps most unique of all to our age. Full as are the records here, a very suc- cinct account must suffice. The entire development of At- lantis, it must be remembered, was remarkably autoch- thonous. It was the cunabula of man. The data of paleon- tology here were so widespread and abundant that very early in their history the Atlanteans realized that man had evolved through many developmental stages and through a long line of ancestry. It was here, in fact, that man became man long before he did anywhere else in the world. No Darwin or Haeckel was needed to antagonize old re- ligious dogma in order that man might read his title clear to a pedigree that showed that he had sprung from anthro- 72 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST poids, lemurs, ampliioxus, and all the rest. Every one recognized, too, that he had instincts within him that pointed clearly to a long stage of arboreal life, which had made a paw into a hand and oriented him up and down so that both the sky and earth were a little more permeable to fancy, etc. Indeed everything seemed to indicate that here all the stages of the evolution of at least the higher states of animal life had been more rapid than elsewhere. The pithecoid fossils were found in older strata as well as in vastly greater abundance, so that the stages of evolution that we have had to work out so laboriously from very fragmentary remains had been familiar to them from the first. Here the diluvial and glacial age had effaced nothing Bave in the northern part of the realm, and they believed that theirs had been the very first land to rise permanently above the primeval sea. At any rate, Atlantis was some- what unique in having no traditions of a flood save such as could be accounted for by inundations or limited sub- mergencies. Thus when our ancestors had been troglodytes in the paleolithic Neanderthal stage, the Atlanteans were well on the way to civilization. We have marveled at the similarity between the dragons of folklore and the remains of the great saurians of the Trias, but so close was the re- semblance between the two Atlantean myths that there could be no doubt that primitive man here had seen with his own eyes some of the later representatives of the tita- notheres. Having thus before them so early in the history in the abundant fossils and caves the fullest history Nature ever kept of her ascending processes, it is no wonder that the Atlanteans felt themselves uniquely one with all Nature, the consummate product of her creative evolution. Hence the first being worshiped was somewhat akin to Durkheim's Mama, or a vast, vague or universal being and power suf- fused through all things and animating all. The Hindu THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 73 Only the One and All of Parmenides, the Pure Being of He- gel and all our ontologists, the primeval ether — all these are reminiscent of it. It lives, moves, and has its heing in all things and is at the same time nothing and everything, all that ever was, is, or can be, and immeasurably more than even this. All that begins comes from it, and all that ceases is resolved back into it, while it never began and can never end. Their clumsy words for it no more compassed it than our speech can do, for it is beyond all words and thought and can only be felt as that on which all depends. To personify it is idolatry; yet it cajinot remain unob- jectified, but must have some sjonbol, and there must be more of it in some things than in others; and so various tribes came to regard, some one, some another, object or group of objects as its favorite incarnation. Some tribes saw it in nearly every object and became animistic ; others found it in some rare, curious, or weird fetish; others thought it best expressed in the vast open vault of the heavens and sky; yet others in the sun, moon, or stars. Some saw it in the sea or stream or other forms of water; some in fire, clouds, rain, lightning, storm. Some, in hills and rocks; others, in trees and vegetable forms. Yet others saw its best embodiment in certain animals, and still others, perhaps best represented by humanity or some in- dividual of our species. All had their own rites and cere- monials, places, and forms of worship, and made oblations, sacrifices, and prayers, at first apotropaic or warning their gods to go away and later inviting their presence protec- tion, and aid. In the vast Atlantean realm almost anything was somewhere made an object of awe and reverence, if not of worship. Even the many deities were not jealous of each other, so that a spirit of toleration we can hardly under- stand prevailed, and persecution was unknown because i1 was realized that all cults represented normal stages of 74 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST evolution, 'which, had its most perfect and plastic cultural expression in the ascending stages of the religious con- sciousness. This was because it was so clearly seen that the soul no less than the body was evolved from primal animal instincts and there was no great chasm separating Mansoul from lower manifestations of the psyche or even demarca- ting vital from physical and mechanical energy. There were, of course, no missionaries intent upon soul-saving by conversions from one cult and faith to another, but only genetic parturitionists helping those able and disposed to molt old forms for the new and next higher always present but concealed in the lower and revealed in the higher, all by the methods of evolution and not revolution. It was realized that, e.g.^ all must pass through, and that some few should never transcend the fetishistic stage, and so the cult of charms, amulets, relics, mementoes, col- lections of objects, and especially treasure, culminating often in precious stones, and finally property and the fasci- nation of ownership was developed to its uttermost that the best and most might be made of it. Thus the pedigree of the gold lust was understood and also its limitations by those capable of a higher love thus symbolized. For tree worshipers, woodmen, and foresters, the uni- verse was described in arboreal form. The stars were its fruits, the roots held the world together and progress was ascent, the various forms of life were its leaves, and the awe of the primeval forest, suggestive of groined arches, was connected with the home of man's pithecoid ancestors, wherein they found safety, cultivated curiosity by observ- ing the prowling beasts below, and developed dread of open spaces, physical or mental, and all the gravity or geotropic orientations. Here, too, all climbing and winged creatures found a welcome abode, and there was protection in branches and cadence in their swaying, all of which sur- vives in us only as faint esthetic stirrings but which was THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 75 and could again become a religion instinct with a vitality and inspiration all its own. So, too, water in its three forms was made a mythotheme. with rites and a philosophy and symbolism which to the Atlanteans, especially those on the smaller adjacent islands, was particularly attractive. They all knew that their land had risen from the sea, and it was not their navigators alone that felt the charm and mystery of its many moods and voices. The sun was a ball of the most subtle and fiery ether, secreted each day anew from the earth and sea and akin to the fires in the heart of the earth on which they had learned to draw. Thus it was here taught that man should ever sublimate the highest from the lowest and most material in his soul. The earth came from the sun, which supplies all its energy, and as it conquers the cloud and storm demons, piercing them with its darting rays, so we must conquer sin and ignorance. Fire-worship was akin to that of the sun, for fire refines and distills an ethereal element that soars upward toward the gods and leaves only dross and ash behind. It stands, too, for the ardor of love. Its control marked a great step upward in human progress, and at a certain stage all the deeper religious instincts are connected with it and dependence may well be directed toward, and elevated by it. Limited as the thermal scale of life is, this scale stretches up and down indefinitely, and thus we are in a sense children of fire and light. Animals are our elder brothers and are far better adapted to their conditions than man has yet learned to be. They have taught him many arts, and the lives of many of them are full of morals for man as the animal epos here, which was very highly developed, abundantly shows. Many spe- cies are our direct ancestors and all are our cousins. Man needs their strength, keenness of sense, power of flight, as well as their hides and flesh. Each ascending order was 76 KECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST once a lord of creation, till at last man became their leader. Medicine and hygiene were largely the products of experi- ments npon them. Even now all their wisdom and industry combined could perhaps surpass that of man. They are our totemic ancestors and natural objects of fear and love, and great educators of these sentiments in us. Many spe- cies of them were given statues and a few, temples and services in their honor. Great individuals among them were on their way up and bad men on the way down the ladder of transmigration. Some species, it was held, were simply degenerate men atoning for the sins of their for- mer lives and working their way laboriously up to hu- manity. Some few were held to be deities incarnated in this form by their own choice. Many individuals of many species had been not merely domesticated but edu- cated by the aid of selective breeding to a degree of intelli- gence far beyond anything we know in our beast world, so that they made not merely valued servants but companions of man. Particularly was this true of the ape, horse, dog, eagle, parrot, and some of the larger felidae, while many families were proud to bear animal names. Thus theromor- phic forms seemed to many the best embodiments of the uni- versal Mana principle, and the chief traits of their char- acter and the activities of their lives were set forth in the ancient and ever reedited and relibrettoed symbolic sacred dances near the shrines where they were adored. Highest and latest here, of course, were the anthropomorphic cults, and the chief trait of all these deities was that they died in agony and arose in splendor, as vegetation dies in the fall and arises in the spring, or as the sun daily yields to night in the west and conquers it in the east. In Atlan- tis it was these cults that slowly gained the ascendancy over others, especially for the mature and intelligent. These god-men were all of superior size, strength, beauty, grace, and compelling magnetic personality. All devoted THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 77 themselves with abandon to the elevation of mankind, and at first, with success. Later in their career their develop- ment outstripped that of their fellow-men and often even all their most esoteric followers. When the tide turned, they were ridiculed, buffeted, betrayed, suffered every physical torture and mental indignity in the whole litany of human woes, and at last were cruelly slain and died in utter despair, not only with no hope for, or belief in, another world or life, but convinced of the absolute folly and error of all their ideals and endeavors, and realizing that they were utterly forsaken by man and that there was to be no sequel. The latter, however, always came, but always and only in the minds of their followers who by the eternal law of human nature had to react from the extreme of depression to that of elation. Thus the love and early devotion of their disciples reasserted itself in the fondest creations of their imaginations and all these super- men arose from the dead, some sooner, some later, and were transfigured in splendor to lead mankind as realized ideals upward and onward in his course. Those who prac- ticed these cults had chiefly to rise and die again, not liter- ally, but in a proxy, vicarious way and as really as their imaginations surcharged with sympathetic emotion could make possible. This exercise was regarded as the chief in- itiation into life because this fictive experience was an im- munity bath against being permanently deiDressed by any, or all, ills of life or abnormally exalted by good fortune, and it symbolized the subordination of self to the service of the race. All this gave a psychic unity as well as elas- ticity and rebound, because if our psyche splits or dualizes at all, it is into a pleasure versus pain consciousness, and this experience makes each state amenable to and certain to react into the other. Indeed, every Atlantean religion re- quired its youth to be thus inducted into life by a curricu- lum of hardships and pain, hunger, exposure and anxiety, 78 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST to be followed by release, joy, feasting, and exhilaration, as indeed every novel and drama requires of its hero. This arms the soul against depression and discouragement, on the one hand, and the dangers of too much pleasure, on the other, and makes it mobile as it should be, up and down the algedonic scale. In early Atlantean days there were no priests in our sense presiding over magic formulae or invested with super- natural sanctions, but only *' heart-formers, " trained in a college created to equip men and women for special work with school children and youth half a day in every seven. Here they were taught, as they advanced, a carefully con- sidered course of fetishism, totemism, sun, rock, and moun- tain worship, followed by that of the moon, sun, planets, and stars, leading up to that of the infinite ethereal vault. Then came cults of Mother Earth, sea, water, cloud, fire, and lightning, herbage, trees, and finally of man himself idealized and more or less totemized. Each cult had its myths, legends, rites, processionals, dances, and its col- lection of objects deemed sacred, and its paraphernalia, with appropriate hymns, in order to develop poetic atti- tudes and interests in nature recapitulating that of the race. Thus, each cult had, too, in a sense, a bible of its own. Great stress was laid in bringing home impressively the lives and achievements of all great religious organizers and leaders of mankind, and all the days of all the weeks of the year were named after these ; what corresponds to our Sab- bath deriving its name from a man preeminent for religious insight and pioneering. Each day at school was opened by a brief account and uplift lesson from the life of some one of these great and holy ones, and they finally became so many that it was decided to have a two-year cycle of 730 days in order to give them all place in the calendar. At the end of this course each could choose his cult from among them all or could neglect all. In this field there was no THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 79 drill, memorization, or examination required, but all these were provided for those who desired. Some eventually chose to revere one, some several, and yet other some no deity, realizing that all were only symbols, incarnations, or guides to Mmm. Malignant deities, though often believed in, were never recognized by the ''heart-formers," and all superstitions in this domain were regarded as simply exces- sive belief, and never antagonized, but more or less re- spected and tenderly treated till better forms of expressing the ideals and sentiments they embodied had been pro- vided, so that growth might be normal and without any abatement of the ardor of faith. In children and youth superstitions were regarded rather as rank weeds indica- tive of the richness of the soil. One or another cult was often advised or prescribed to individuals, either as a therapy or as best fitted to regulate life with their peculiar temperament and circumstance, or as we are now beginning to prescribe philosophies, to fit diatheses or correct defi- ciencies. To these '* heart-formers" all, old and young, were encouraged to go or were sent for all kinds of moral perversities — one because he was getting proud, another wealthy, another cruel, others dishonest, licentious, lazy, selfish, etc. They came to these to be straightened as men in our era go to doctors to be physically inspected. Not only was all conflict between science and religion unheard of, but there was no dogma and no question as to the historicity of religious founders any more than we care whether Hamlet or Don Quixote or William Tell were real personages, for the pragmatic value of all these lives, which is the central one, lies in their esthetic and moral effects, since the supreme criterion in this field is not truth but goodness, all but the good being false. Thus all, whether narratives, philosophy, or apologue that worked well, was, some more, some less, sacred and inspired, so that the only canon of Holy Writ was the changing one 80 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST which the consensus of the competent deemed of most worth. All their theology was the higher psychology of the folksoul as it groped its way upward, choosing the right and avoiding the evil and projecting its great creations on the sky or in the hearts of men. Practically men were ac- counted religious in Atlantis if they were truly altruistic and not predominantly self-seeking, and all here were taught to die cheerfully, contemplating the good they had done. As to a future life there were all views. Some believed in ghosts, even revenient ones; others, that sometime, some- where, somehow, personal identity would be continued be- yond the grave, but shrank from definiteness or even proof here lest the imagery that satisfied the heart be faulty and if all were staked on proof it would expose their fond hope to the possibility of disproof. Some held to a hereafter with rewards and punishments in another world and in- sisted that justice demanded nothing less. Yet others held that good was its own reward and evil its own punish- ment. Very many held that man's ultimate fate was ab- sorption into Mawi and that this was the goal supreme to be desired, for it was not only surcease from care and striv- ing, but a homecoming of man to his origin. To make per- sonal happiness hereafter the motive of this life was deemed vulgar, transcendental selfishness. In short, for the Atlan- teans life here was so rich and so prolonged that most had no very active wish to live again and there was no thanato- phobia or morbid dread of death as with man to-day, who on the average is cut off in his prime, while so many suffer a kind of Herodian slaughter that real senescence, with its great and growing life weariness, weanings, and nepenthes, has become for us almost unknown. All shades of these beliefs were found, but there was no disputing about them, for they were regarded as matters of individual intellectual taste, or perhaps idiosyncrasy. Thus it is plain that there THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 81 "was no such, thing as an established orthodoxy, or even pre- vailing standards of belief. * ' One world at a time and this one now," was a phrase often heard. It almost seemed as though each had his own creed, or a variant of one, or else none at all, and each believed in one, many, or no gods, and observed sacred days and services or not, as he felt in- clined. Thus in the same family it often occurred that the children were crass fetishists, the parents honored the great nature deities, and the grandparents held that all godff were mere idols symbolic of the one universal principle, or else projections of man himself or Active agents of his wishes, recognizing the persistency of the tendency of our soul to personate the manifold activities of the infinite One and All from which the worlds came and into which they return. The ''heart-formers" were intent only that there be as many and diverse expressions of the religious instinct as possible, in order that all human capabilities and inclina- tions might be appealed to, and these guides felt that should they become proselytes to the views they preferred, they would have been false to their trust and would have acted as if man were made for religion rather than, con- versely, religions for man. No one believed that there was any religion, cult, or faith that was best for all. As a re- sult of this sentiment very few Atlanteans were without religion of some kind, and no one was ever heard of who denounced or repudiated them all. The "heart-formers," besides their stated functions above indicated with the young, diverged as time went on into many special forms of activity. Some kept open hours for something not unlike our confessional at its best. Those with sore or perverted consciences came to have them soothed or straightened. Those with bad habits came here for cure ; those with morbid ideas came to be analyzed and guided iQ the pathway of life as Virgil led Dante. Some 82 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST became advisers in the moral problems connected with busi- ness, not scrupling to visit and reprove those guilty of practices unjust and harmful to the morale of the com- munity. Some gave experienced and expert counsel to those intending wedlock, or were often called upon to solve peac- ably intricate and difficult marital problems. Yet others recited the great deeds of heroes of the past and the pres- ent at the festivals and told in epic elevation the thrilling romances of these and of the epoch-makers in religion, su- pervised dramatic presentations of such themes at the great festivals, and thus kept alive and pure the great traditions of the past. Some became very expert in what we should call professional arbitration, before there were any formal judges, and after their fall as above described, passed upon all kinds of personal disagreements, and these men were skilled in the use of ancient maxims and precedents from the most revered legends of the race. Some visited the sick and afflicted and sought to administer not only consolation but mental healing and even material relief. The ''heart-formers'* did their best and most intensive work with pubescents and early adolescents, when more time was given to them. Each boy by the male and each girl by the female ''formers'' was formally and progressively told the sacred mysteries of sex personally as his and her own powers of mind and body grew and as need arose, so that none was surprised by the development of normal processes. Anatomy, physiology, hygiene, and pathology were judiciously drawn upon, and the responsibility to transmit the holy torch of life undimmed to the innumer- able unborn was set forth as the chief end of life. Every- thing became of supreme value only when, and in the de- gree in which, it took hold on that most ancient wealth and worth, heredity, and nothing was truly acquired until it had sunk so deep as to make parenthood more effective even for those who did not live to see their offspring bom. THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 83 Here self-control must be rigorous for the probationary years before maturity was attained. There must be no feeble and paltering concession to the clamor of the flesh. In aid of this new self-knowledge, self-reverence, and self- control regimen was now hardy and robeorous. Athleticism was cultivated to develop every part and function of the body to its uttermost and mental work must occasionally be by intense calentures, and the resources of the second- breath that draws upon residual and racial possibilities at will, or what some of us now call the adrenalin diathesis, was fostered with great care, because it was clearly seen that every zest and interest in every field in any degree set a backfire to lust ; while at the same time the spirit of nil admdrari and inertia of mind, which is the result of a life of drill and routine, directly enhances temptation and weakens resistance to it. Each must thus have some muse and cultivate and develop a regimen of inspiration. Thus, for a few years everjrthing must serve the purposes of sub- limation of the crude sex impulse and tend to long-circuit or vicariate for it, like secondary sexual traits in animals, who are our models in this respect. Calentures and ereth- isms there must be, and the all-important problem is to direct this most plastic and metamorphic tendency upward and not allow it to grovel. Hardship, fatigue, plain living, enthusiasms, activity, and cleanliness were preliminary training to the solemn and festal initiation which now began with the sacred right of circumcision. Then followed a fast of two days with iso- lation and solitude day and night close to Nature, during which each was supposed to have some significant dream or vision, to the interpretation of which great care was given. Many here first found or met their goru, or double, formed ideals, made resolutions, etc. These doubles often became a kind of protective presence which attended individuals through life, approving or reproving, and occasionally ap- 84 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST pearing in imaginal forms at critical moments. Then came the initiation proper, which took various forms in various provinces. It had certain general features always and everywhere essentially the same. The novitiate, or candi- date for adulthood, always died and was entombed, some- times almost literally and sometimes more symbolically, heard a funereal estimate of his good and bad traits and what each tended to make him, and thus realized the vir- tues he might attain or the evil ways in which he was liable to stray. First there was darkness and gloom, with dirge-like music, chants, and misereres, and even mourn- ing by parents and friends; then a period of silence and isolation again. Then after an interval more or less pro« longed, according to the temper and needs of each, lights were gradually seen and springtide pastoral strains were faintly and then more loudly heard. The symbolic tomt, opened and the youth or maiden stepped forth, shed his ot her shroud, and was clad in festal attire, and there was joy, feasting, and festive dancing. A symbolic mark was branded or tattoed upon the breast like an individual totem, and this was followed by often very prolonged initiation ceremonies into all the larger life of the community. With this the resurrection program terminated. Henceforth youth which had been served must serve. This new life of altruism was now consecrated to the gens. Childish ac- couterments, plays, and ways were put aside, although some old and cherished toys and treasures were commonly, and sometimes had to be, preserved, and these might later be given to friends as a mark of the very closest personal bonds, for the day of manhood and womanhood had now dawned. Fathers assumed new duties to their sons and mothers to their daughters and talked on all matters in which they were personally interested, with none of the previous reserves, because with the majority now and thus attained each youth became a corporate member of the com- THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 85 nrnnity and of the state and acquired new rights and far more new duties. Each, too, was given some special re- sponsibility for a younger child of the same sex, like our *^big brother" or *' sister" function, and each in turn was given, or was allowed to choose, some older person outside his family as a kind of guardian or godparent who watched over him in a general way and to whom he could turn for counsel in every emergency. The friendships thus estab- lished between old and young constituted a imique bond, one of the virtues of which was that it incited both master and ward to d6 nothing that the other could deem un- worthy. The older members of this triad must always set good examples, and the younger must always emulate them. Only the ' ' heart-formers ' ' were allowed thus to adopt more than one ward, and the favorite among these often had many; but no man of any repute lacked one, and he was in honor bound, however pressing his other duties, not to neglect this, and was held accountable if anything pre- ventable went seriously amiss with his counselorship. These homosexual friendships never degenerated here as they did in ancient Greece. Indeed so pure were they kept that it was often suggested that budding girls, be- sides their female, have a male, and boys also a female ad- viser, but the records so far deciphered do not show that this plan was ever systematically put into practice, al- though in sporadic cases it was adopted and seems to have worked well, especially after wedlock, when fathers-in-law and mothers-in-law were often inclined to assume this func- tion, sometimes with, and sometimes without, the full con- sent of the younger member of the triad. The age of thirty was the normal and most frequent age of marriage for men and twenty-one for women. If at thirty-five a man, or at twenty-five a woman, remained un- wed and was held well and competent, they began to be regarded with suspicion as perhaps addicted to secret vice 86 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST or at least as slackers, were admonished and required to show cause, and if they persisted, were finally assigned spe- cial and compulsory duties and progressively taxed to atone for their recreancy. "Wedlock at this epoch was always sol- emnized by the ' * heart-formers, ' * who regulated all the pre- liminaries and were in a sense held responsible for pre- venting unwise matings. They, too, alone had power to divorce if this seemed, all things considered, wise, and to negotiate the terms of separation. They also saw to it that cases of bastardy, rare as it was in this chaste race until its civilization began to totter toward its fall, were penal- ized by making public the name of the father and requiring him to support his child and its mother till the age of adolescent initiation. So closely associated were esthetics and true piety that all great art in Atlantis was religious in the broad sense in which the latter was interpreted, for beauty and goodness in their essence were always deemed one and inseparable. Hence the productions of the painter, musician, poet, sculp- tor, architect, storj^wright, and dramatist were considered classic or vulgar in proportion as they ministered to the elevation and strengthening of the lofty sentiments of which religion is the root. Thus, there was little room for art censorship, but when it was necessary it was merciless and effective. In many provinces and diverse climes and races of Atlantis there were endless varieties of local color, diversity of dress, fates, traditions, etc., just, as we have seen, there were many religions, so that art here had both a wide field and the purest, strongest, and most inexhausti- ble wealth of incentives and materials on which to draw. The training of the Atlanteans gave them a rare facility, which we have almost entirely lost, of seizing, and holding to, the new and at the same time of clinging with tenacity to the old. Hence progressive as they were, they adhered tenaciously to the old ways to which they could find re- THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 87 course "when they were impelled to retreat for a time from hard and stern present reality, to master which meant prog- ress versus relapse toward the easy ways of their own child- hood and that of the race. This made them almost pas- sionate lovers of the naive, of which childhood is the best paradigm and exemplar, and thus they remained peculiarly sensitized to every manifestation of the spontaneity and creativeness which is the sign manual of the true artiste Nearly every aspect of nature and of human life, and all the great achievements and accomplishments of man thus had their artists with pen, pencil, brush, chisel, builder ^s square, and plummet, but the mere copyist they held to be a shallow tyro intent on merely exhibiting his skill and lacking all tonic quality and morale, and failing utterly to humanize nature. They had no prudery regarding nudity, if only it had a rcmon d'etre, or made a moral appeal, but banished as vulgar and meretricious everything of this kind which taught no lesson. Of art for art's sake they knew nothing. Thus impressionists, cubists, and ultra-realists were to them quaint and curious, but essentially childish in their appeal. From all we so far know the Atlanteans must have been much more eminent in art than any race of our era, excelling us perhaps even more here than in any other field, but the chief trait and probablj the chief cause of this preeminence was the fact that art had been up to the very acme of its influence strictly in the service of religion and morale. But the details of this, too, we must leave for a later, and more special, publication, and only sketch the cause of the decline from this high estate. This began with the demand for a textus receptus or catalogue and canon in authorized version of the best litera- ture in this wide field. The best must be formally gath- ered, edited, set apart, made intact, and transmitted as authoritative and final. This collection must be given a magic origin and character which sets it apart from, and 88 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST above, all other creations of man in this field. Indeed, it must be ascribed to the authenticity of a divine being and be fabled to have come down from, and been revealed by, Heaven itself. This collection must become the book fetish, the supreme object of a bibliolatry unknown before. Thus a college of wise men set about collecting, compiling, some- times themselves writing, rejecting, unifying, and elimi- nating inconsistencies, but in general accepting as they stood a few of the older texts, and giving out that in this "work they were supernaturally guided in their inclusions and exclusions. In this way they evolved a library made up of smaller and larger works, and came to believe that when their own work was complete the age of inspiration had closed forever, so that nothing more could be added. ''This and only this, thus and only thus spake the gods, who would henceforth remain forever mute.'^ The pro- ductions thus edited, agreed on, and adopted, were said to contain all the essential things that man needed to know or do. It was multiplied by every scribal art and elegantly copied by experts who devoted their lives to this work; it was later reproduced in thousands of forms, bound in one massive, or many smaller, volumes ; it was elaborately com- mented on and concordances of every word and phrase were made; it was put into every known tongue, and interpre- ters of it were trained who had to vow that they would defend its every clause and perhaps know no other book. To its texts magic power was sometimes ascribed to exor- cise, heal, convert, or they were thought to work miracles, and occasionally even the very form of its letters were thought surcharged with mystic meanings inscrutable save to the elect. To injure or defile it was a crime ; to doubt it, "blasphemy; and in all these ways it was sought to make it the only rule of faith and practice. Organized leaders, with minds subtle by nature and trained for this purpose, expounded, explained, compared, and found hidden mean- THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 89 ing in what was obvious. Corporations grew rich publish- ing and diffusing it, sending their agents to insist that every household and every individual, old and young, own it. All must study it, perhaps read it yearly, memorizing sentences from it. It was often invested with talismanic power; crude tongues were given consistency and stability by having it translated into them, and there were occa- sionally weak-souled bibliomaniacs who carried it always about with them as a sacred charm to ward off all evils. It was said thus to have stopped bullets in battle on their way to the heart, and there were many fanatics who talked almost exclusively in its idioms and applied it in and out of season to all happenings large and small in the life abdut them, sometimes launching its imprecations against those who sought to moderate their railings. This had hardly been accomplished before it was felt needful to draw up on the basis of these scriptures a set of creeds or a body of holy doctrine. Over the former, At- lantean councils and houses of delegates for several genera- tions had argued but could not agree, and so several came into vogue. These were supposed to embody the essential verity itself for all time, and each demanded universal and unreserved assent ; while the body of doctrine was left to be formulated by great scholiarchs as each saw the truth. Like the chosen canon all the creed-makers had repudiated all but the anthropomorphic faiths. The infinite power that made and sustains all was thus cast into the form of a human personality, despite aU the limitations this must always involve. Instead of many there must now be only one deity, and all others were either diabolized or condemned to extinction. This one supreme personality which man had evolved was now conceived as preexisting from eternity, as having aU possible power and knowledge, as infallible and unchanging, just and terrible in his judg- ments, a bitter hater of all rival cults and gods and intent 90 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST upon their extermination. His altars reeked with the blood and smoke of sacrificial victims ; yet his supreme claim to reverence was his inexorable and pitiless sense of justice from which he never swerved. No one had ever seen him and lived, and although he filled immensity, he could and sometimes did take visible form, although it was a sacri- lege to represent him in art save by some mystic symbolism. This impossible and inconceivable being with all these con- tradictory attributes existed alone for eons beyond number, but at length grew weary of solitude and so created or secreted the universe and stellar world, which slowly evolved through long ages till at last on this man appeared, groping his way upward in the dim light of reason. Na- tions arose and perished in the wide confines of the Atlan- tean continent. Men grew sordid and selfish and the ineffa- ble one gi'ew wroth and at one time almost resolved upon man's annihilation. But gradually he seemed to retreat, become remote and afar, to have grown indifferent, and all belief in so metaphysical a being which the pundits had evolved appeared about to perish from the earth. Now God is dead, the people cried. There never is, or was, any such all-father and never could be. Give us back our ever- present Mana and its manifold embodiments in Mother Earth, sun, moon, trees, animals, and man, they said. Give us our old sages and cults and free us from these canonical compilations. It was at this period that a unique but epoch-making step was taken which was almost without any analogue in our own era. The old ** heart-formers" at first added their urgency to that of the people and insisted that they could be given again their old pantheon human and sub-human, and that the exclusive cult of the absolute per- son be allowed to lapse. This, of course, the scholiarchs, who had to stand by both their canon and their dogma, opposed. Only after decades of controversy, during which many provinces lapsed to crass idolatries, and others, THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 91 fewer but more insightful, found refuge in mysticisms of many shades, was a great compromise effected. The ' ' heart- formers" relinquished their plea for all sub-human deities, while the scholiarchs abandoned their effort directly to im- personate the infinite, and both agreed that a new, but purely human, individuality must now be fabricated as the supreme representative of man and at the same time an incarnation of deity which, both parties agreed, was in fact only Mansoul in general, because the genu^ homo was the ultimate goal of all the developmental processes. So among the many savior legends of dying and revenient heroes they chose as the best modulus or point de repere the dim tradition of a peasant (because he must appeal to the sympathies of the proletariat ) in a remote and little known province (so that while his career had a real historic core, it was so obscure as to admit of the most plastic and ideal transformations to bring out its maximal effectiveness) ; his career must be a masterpiece of pathos (because this brings the closest of all rapports in gregarious man), and after his most tragic death and interment he must come back a con- queror over death itself, which had now become, as it was not in Atlantis of yore, man's supreme object of fear. Fi- nally, as a reluctant concession to the scholiarchs, it was represented that this totemic person should in some way be connected with their great personified Mana as his goal, if not his source, although his own life purpose was to reduce the number and to limit the degree of his attributes. Both the story and the doctrine of this new incarnation had to be evolved. The first, which involved careful mosaic v/ork among many sources, was entrusted to a carefully chosen group of the * ' heart formers, ' ' and their result was made a supplementary sacred canon. The doctrine, which must be semipopular, was confected by the scholiarchs. Thus here we do find some analogy to the distinctions between the Pauline and Petrine trends in our New Testament. Thus 92 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST evolved it is not strange that the new evangel of the Atlan- teans was far more elaborate, its parts more harmonized than all its motifs, more richly dight with incident, its pre- cepts more numerous, and the descent of its hero to the depths of agony and his ascent to the heights of exaltation yet more moving and more completely complemental than in our great Jesus legend. The early achievements of this new embodiment of humanity were more thrilling and numerous ; his disappointments made a yet longer and more cumulative Iliad of woes and disasters ; his death was com- plete and utter both of body and soul and of all hope and for months afterwards despair settled on the earth. His erstwhile most enthusiastic followers had denounced him as an impostor and cursed his memory. His wisdom they now deemed folly. The stages of his return back to life which began with a faint hope were all of them seen by multi- tudes, and for long years he was said to have lived, wan- dered, and taught vast multitudes in many provinces, while his apotheosis at the end was a spectacle of such cosmic grandeur as the world had never seen before and will never behold again. Even the dead arose to see it, and many were mad with joy that the fear of man's arch enemy, death, which had brooded over the earth from the begin- ning, was now forever annihilated. Some even strove to represent this world savior as miraculously conceived and born as a more complete symbol of his filial relation to the One and All than was his putative ascension. But this symbolization of the relation of the individual man to the Infinite was deemed too crass and materialistic for even the most insistent will-to-believe to accept, and it was also thought to detract from the purity of his humanity. The effects of this, the greatest of all psychotherapeutic enterprises for the betterment of the folksoul, were every- where immediate and salutary. There was woven into this legend enough magic and miracle to appeal to, and to sat- THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 93 isfy, those who wanted it, and also mystic idealism enongh to appeal to every intuitive power of the deepest souls, with pathos to melt and victory to exalt; while the offerings to the highest powers that were made from both the vegetable and the animal world sufficiently recognized and also pretty completely sublimated the cults of these sub-human objects of worship so that they slowly died but were transfigured in so doing. Now it was that there arose more strongly than ever be- fore a demand for stated forms of ritual and service to set forth with all the appanage of symbol, music, processional, drama, and poetry, the true life of man as thus epitomized and portrayed. There was also urgent need of organization, buildings and propaganda, so that there arose in the course of time an order or caste practically unknown before akin to our priesthood, which soon differentiated into many de- grees with diverse functions. Before their growing influ- ence the guild of ''heart-formers" declined. It was they who developed orthodoxies of both rites and creeds, inducted all who implicitly accepted their teachings and threatened and imprecated those who refused to do so, gathered in vast wealth that made their organization rich though accepting nothing for themselves. They vowed chastity, poverty and obedience, developed an educational system, an elaborate code all their own, and instituted orders of apprenticeship, and caused many young women to leave the world and devote themselves to this service as they had done. So attractive was the life of these enthusiastic devotees and so many of the best of both sexes entered upon this rule of life, that in the course of a few centuries Atlantis was largely peopled by the lower orders and stirps, and a period akin to our Dark Ages ensued during which the priesthood itself at first flourished and then declined. Thus we now enter an age in the religious history of Atlantis so extremely analogous to our own that we need ^4 RECREATIONS OP A PSYCHOLOGIST not further detail it. There was the same long struggle between Church and State; the same hypertropjhy of anxiety about another life after this; there was a heaven and a hell no less elaborate, and there was the same phobic fetish of an awful judgment day impending; the same multiplication of schools and sects; the same tendency to magnify unimportant differences; the same faith in a vicarious atonement achieved from without, for and not by us, and drawn on by an act of faith. This priesthood bad a similar control over wedlock and death and burial rites, and as the people grew ignorant after the close of the schools, the pride and arrogance of the priests increased. They exacted tithes of rich and poor, built gorgeous tem- ples, acquired vast properties, vied with princes in the magnificence of their ceremonial vestments and retinues, were jealous of every kind of excellence outside their order, and strove to monopolize art, censor learning, and perse- cute innovations of life and opinion, as is the wont of our hierarchies. Then came the greatest and longest war in all the his- tory of Atlantis. In none of her wars in East or "West had the struggle been so bitter as in this conflict between spiritual and temporal powers. It grew from small begin- nings. In the far North was a hardy race that was proud, independent and prosperous. Here the priests deposed and confiscated all the holdings of the local prince, placed the people under a cruel and causeless ban, levied heavy fines which they sought to collect by force, and when all united to oppose them, the hierarchs here closed the tem- ples, suspended all their offices, and withdrew. Only a small band of native monks remained faithful to their people and declared their spiritual independence and laid the foundations for a new religious regime. It was thus and here that the great war began, and from here the revolt spread to more central provinces. Never was war- THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 95 fare more cruel and waged with such barbaric atrocity. Families were divided in nearly every hamlet as it spread, property and wealth vanished, and vast areas were some- times almost depopulated. Gaunt famine stalked the streets, conflagrations destroyed once prosperous towns and cities, and disease and pestilence swept thousands away whom all the other horrors had spared. Armies on both sides grew smaller but they fought on with increased desperation. After a generation of desperate conflict it extended to every corner of the realm ; the hierarchs, realizing that their cause was lost, decided, as a last desperate step, to suspend all their offices. This they did after fulminating an awful curse upon the land, invoking pests to consume all the vegetable products of the soil, murrain to destroy all the flocks and herds, which were to remain putrefying and unburied where they died, cursing all the food and drink of their enemies that it might become poisonous, solemnly condemning them to eternal torture after death, and for- bidding women to bear children. Then carefully providing themselves with as large stores as possible of all things needful, nearly all the priesthood of all orders withdrew to the temples, taking with them those of the holy women they chose and who would come, and here for years they lived in comfort and isolation. Sometimes even these sa- cred strongholds were attacked by riotous mobs of frenzied people, but both the ediflces and their occupants were still generally protected by a certain superstitious awe invet- erate from a long past. Thus it came that people once the most pious of races the earth has ever seen were without religion. Because there were none to marry them lust developed, and be- cause there could be no form of burials the dead were in- terred like animals. There were none to christen and bless the newly-born, so that children were few and their lot 96 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST pitiful. There were none to placate the gods, who seemed wroth with man and bent upon his extermination, or at least they seemed to have withdrawn from earth and showed no further concern for the sons of men. There were none to make offerings to placate them, and the only way by which men could escape eternal suffering was closed. In some places priests were implored to re- sume their functions, but refused, or more often made conditions that were impossible — restoration of all their confiscated wealth, abject submission to all their decrees, complete temporal power, solemn reasseverations of be- lief and pledges of submisison to the ecclesiastical order, which was now more than ever impossible. Thus, many relapsed to paganism and idolatry more vulgar and de- graded than had ever been known in Atlantis before, while some few strove, often with more or less local success, to restore the old order of things as it had been under the ** heart-formers" from such vestiges of their cult as tradi* lion and the records could supply. The dominant sentiment of most of the best Atlanteans was a deep resentment at the entire priestly polity of over- regimentation of the religious life and the hyperorganiza- tion of the normally free movements of the human spirit which had so materialized and mechanized the higher life of the soul. The chief reclamation was against the setting up of another world kingdom which abated the zest for making the most and best of this world. This, they said, had dualized the very soul of man into a diesseits and a jemseits consciousness, setting the immanent and trans- cendent over against each other, and this had led to the bold proclamation that all religion was a pathological hal- lucination. All priestcraft they now came to deem a ma- lign plot to undermine the sanity and peace of mind of the world, the nightmare from which they were now awak- ened, and they felt they must arouse their fellowmeru THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 97 Perhaps it -was some faint and far-off echo of this propa- ganda that reached Confucius, impelling him to dispense with all that was transcendental and supermundane in his doctrine and to teach only the personal and civil virtues that make for the best conditions here. "Let us never think again of a hereafter of gods, or, if we can help it, even of death," they said, *'for we can never know; and let us turn deaf ears to all mystagogues, Uliuminati^ and hierophants. " A few fanatics within this group advo- cated and even attempted not only looting but sometimes burning of the temples and of the holy men and women now gathered in them and making a tabula rasa in order to symbolize '*a new departure without all these parasitic excrescences which had brought so many woes upon us. Thus only can we make a new start on secular and lay lines." But these drastic measures found but little favor among the masses, for they still held their self -deposed guides in too much awe. The most general result of all these long wars of arms and of opinions was that most of the old bonds that had united men were loosened or broken. Each individual did, felt, and thought as he inclined until even parties, lo- cal communities, and interests lost their old cohesion, so- cial disintegration grew apace, and the very instinct of the herd, normally so strong in man, seemed to suffer an eclipse. Egoism everywhere was rife. Even the armies that remained lost the spirit of discipline and often re- volted against their officers, and their separate divisions evolved military programs that it was impossible to har- monize, as the resentment against all authority, already so prevalent in other fields, as we have seen, wrought out its dire consequences in this domain. Even where there seemed some faint hope of ultimate restoration in some form of what had been lost, there was now none. Love, friendship, and with them joy seemed to have taken flight 98 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST from the earth, and in their place was only distrust, sus- picion, jealousy, lust, greed, and underneath all a deep half -unconscious sense that some dire and supreme tragedy impended. There was a vague dread of doom which none could formulate and which was, therefore, all the more op- pressive. Some ineluctable decree of fate seemed to have been pronounced which awaited only its execution. So acute and widespread was this sense of final disaster that many of the most earnest and insightful men and women yielded to despair and took refuge in suicide from sheer pity for the lower state into which man had fallen. There were now no physicians for the body or for the soul, no justice, no learning, and no religion. Those who should have led in these domains and once did so had abandoned their function by a hararkiri decree tantamount to suicide for their order and had thus done all in their power to make life no longer worth living, and hence for the indi- vidual to end his own life seemed the ineluctable moral. Those who took this fatal course did so with imprecations upon all the revolters as their last message to those left behind. Finally there came to be something like a litany of curses decreed by and for those thus about to die by their own hand — "upon the * medicos' who had betrayed the health of the state; the apostles who had become the apostates of justice; upon the disciples who had become the traitors of learning and research; and on the priestly caste who had deserted their sacred office and refused all ministrations to man's spiritual nature, for these are the assassins of the state and our blood is upon their hands." Thus the Atlanteans might now almost be called a people without a soul. In our era many religions that have thrived must have been borrowed from other racial stocks and flourished by transplantation, but Atlantis comprised all the then known world and so there were no alien faiths that could be thus imported. All its human stock was im- THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 99 paired; crime and vice were unpunished and tlius "unde- terred till the very instinct of order and justice seemed vanishing, ignorance and superstition unchallenged and everywhere increasing, all the restraints and stimuli that come from belief in a supplemental life of rewards and punishments swept away, they were left without gods in the world, and thus Atlantis stumbled on in its downward path, a prey to all the ills from which it had once been so uniquely immune. There were even no crude or savage stirps from which to restock the world by the regenera- tive infusion of new blood, and no vigor, wisdom, or public spirit to inaugurate any policy of arrest of the decline, still less of restoration. Indeed, there were no leaders, and such had been the rancor against all rule and author- ity that, had there been leadership, it would have found itself impotent. As if dimly anticipating that the end of things was fast approaching men gave themselves up to the frenzied quest of every gross and immediate pleasure still attainable. Rapine, debauchery, lust, and outrage abounded. But the end was still delayed, for there is an- other and yet more pathetic act with which the awful drama concludes. vn WOMAN AT HEB BEST AND WOEST In the good and great early days of Atlantean history woman was everywhere held in high respect. She, like man, had been large, strong, vital, and vigorous, but, as is her nature, was more generic, nearer to the life of the race and a better all-sided representative of it. She had been not only the priestess of the home, but man's best adviser and confidante, and the guidance of her intuitions had always been sought. There had never been a matriar- chate and there were no Amazons, but her sex had never 100 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST lost a modicum of the religious regard which we often find among the primitives of our era inspired by her wondrous special functions. She not only swayed man by all these influences, but had in a sense fashioned him by molding his very diathesis in the first few years of life during which character is plastic. She sought no sophistication, but trusted her intuitive promptings, realizing that ac- cording to an old proverb, *'The eternally feminine im- pels the race onward, '* her soul was in a sense the ** pil- lar of cloud by day and of fire by night, '^ both to guide and to impel man to his goal. Many old women were venerated as seeresses, or were deemed to be custodians of the half -mystic, traditional < wisdom such as Plato ascribed to his instructress, a quality i which in our less evolved civilization has led men to ascribe to them the most diverse attributes, such as fates, furies, pythonesses, oracles, witches, muses, etc. Their insights were never regarded as uncanny or their influence ma- lign, but they were generally looked upon with such re-' spect that young women no longer dreaded or concealed their senescence but more often looked forward to it with longing. Grandmothers were revered in every household, and those fortunate enough to have two or more were thought specially favored; while great-grandmothers, who were not uncommon, were consulted by all their household in everything deemed important enough to be worthy of their attention. Their counsel, especially in all domestic,, social, and religious matters, was generally implicitly and reverently followed. All men charged with large public or private affairs chose one or more of these sage women as^ his confidante or adviser. Never in our era has old agej in women been so noble, so dignified, and so worthy ofj the reverence here bestowed upon it; nor, we may add,' has their estate so often been envied by men. Not only were honeymoons unknown and the first days THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 101 that followed wedlock made as nearly as possible sample days of subsequent life, marked by daily separation and absorption each in his or her occupation, but these unions were regarded as the beginnings, and not the end, of the romance of life. Even the tales, legends, romances, and dramas, which ended here, were deemed more or less im- proper, while all the best of them were devoted to the de- scriptions of the mutual adjustments, revelations, correc- tions, supplementations, and refinements of each by each after wedlock, or else were designed as warnings against the fatal errors in these processes — misunderstandings, un- reasonable exactions, causeless suspicions, undue sensual- ity, and jealousies, etc. Each party was made to realize that it was vastly easier to win than to hold affection, and since, as we have seen, failure to do the latter involved separation, the methods and spirit of courtship must be maintained through life, for there was no legal or religious bond to be relied on to perpetuate a loveless union, so that these were almost unknown or impossible in early Atlantis. If, as rarely happened, a husband fell a victim to inebriation, gossip became curious about his home table and the attractiveness of his domestic circle. If he sought other women, gossip suspected that the wife, who had every advantage of position, propinquity, safety, and seclusion, had not surrounded the most sacred part of the marital relation with all the subtle charms of allurement, of very gradual approach and finally the full abandonment of which this relation is capable and without which it is liable to lapse, for what married man, they said, could possibly forsake all this for a few wild hours of surrepti- tious orgy with purchasable favors ? If a wife went astray, the husband was suspected to be at fault, for it was felt she was probably a victim of his neglect, over-absorption in outside affairs, failure to study and adjust to her na- ture and needs, or at least to her moods and fancies, or 102 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST that he had become less, not more, a lover, the re- verse of which should be the case, with every year of domestic companionship ; or perhaps he had been wanting in thoughtful protection or had shown the imperfection of his true paternal feeling by relaxation of tenderness when it was most needed, viz., at the time when from being his mistress his partner's life began to be transfigured by motherhood. If then he had allowed her trust in him, which is so often tried and strained at this season, to falter and becloud her bliss over her new-born, it was well understood that this impaired her true maternal function and handicapped the future of the chUd. All these as- pects of married life were the favorite theme of fiction in these golden days of Atlantean history, and all this fa- vored youth, health, and longevity, so that women bore eugenic children at sixty and were fully senescent only at eighty. Women held property independently of their husbands, and because of the communal tables above described and the *' groves," had much leisure, and so could work in the gardens, fields, or enter any occupation they chose. The ambition of nearly every one was to be a good mother, and to this end most were willing and eager to subordinate every other. To them, too, were left by general consent the methods of dealing with young children, and most affairs connected with religion were predominantly in their hands. They, too, were the chief coadjutors of the *' heart- formers." They kept somewhat informal, but effective, censorship over public and private morals. If a young man became profligate, they withdrew from all association with him, as they did from all men who offended the public conscience by extortion, flagrant dishonesty, and unpa- triotic or flagitious conduct. Against matrimonial al- liances with such offenders it was a part of the duty of the matrons to warn young girls, and thus in nearly every THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 103 community some of the mature women came to be selected out by an unformulated consensus to advise innocent girls about to marry concerning the duties, rights, and oppor- tunities of their new relation. The care of these matrons, too, extended to young wives and especially young mothers. While love was regarded as indispensable to happy unions and as generally involving a kind of mystic intuitive wis- dom with which it was a serious matter to interfere, still their idea of Cupid was not that he was a blind boy, but rather a maiden with eyes very wide open and not very liable to lead astray if only the young were given a wide basis of selection. Thus, the matrons provided and pre- sided over manifold occasions, some more, some less, stated, where nubile youth and maidens could meet and become acquainted, judge, compare, and elect. All elementary, and later all the highest, forms of education, were open alike to both sexes, although it was very early found that there was a great and natural difference in the fields to which each was drawn, as well as in the kind and strength of interest and the most effective methods. All women wore a kind of trouser from waist to knee, and over this a short peplum, tunic, or camisole. Both these garments might have any desired length, texture, or design. Most wore stockings and heelless sandals, and there was little or no headgear save as a protection against sun, cold, or rain. Any or no overgarment was worn, according to ^he taste or comfort of the individual, but this had the widest range, for there was no tyranny of fashion, and the first law of dress was that it must feel right (i.e., smooth, harsh, stiff, or flexible) to the wearer, rather than appeal to onlookers. All garments must per- mit the freest possible movement. Thus it was that indi- viduality and even originality in attire were fostered and each woman was stimulated to invent her own style of garment, and as each made her own clothes, good work- 104 EECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST manship together with agreeable designs took precedence over quality and texture of material. The hair was worn long and was never cut after the age of five, and the coif- fure, though extremely diverse, as much so as all the fash- ions of all the people of our day together, was generally jsimple and without artifice. Cosmetics, once in very general use, had long since been banished. There were few ornaments worn save a ring at betrothal. The gar- ments of nubile girls were usually ornate and even very elaborate products of their own skill and artistic needle- work, as were their marriage trousseaus. All mothers were proud to wear on their breast a star, or, if they pre- ferred, a medal for each child, white for a girl and blue for a boy, and these were replaced by a black disk if a child had died. Modest as costumes always were here, each youth and maiden of marriageable age was reQ[uired to assemble at a local beach in the coldest season of the year, and first one sex and then the other, with only a loin-cloth, had to run, swim, dance, sing, and engage in often a long program of alternating sports in the open, no matter how inclement the weather. The patronesses of these festivals were the matrons, the '^heart-formers,'' and other invited guests. To strip well was regarded as a significant feature not only of body-keeping but of morale. As a result of these competitive exhibitions there were verdicts, with prizes, for excellence of both physical form and merit of perform- ance, and admonitions were meted out for neglect of body- keeping or training. Thus temper, disposition and char- acter in general, as well as symmetry, endurance, and assiduity were tested, and the incentive to make a credit- able showing at these festivals was strong throughout the year. In many ways, too, that need not here be detailed, these a^emblies proved a strong incentive to marital unions, for normally those of either sex whose excellence THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 105 was here set forth were especially sought by the other; and thus, too, those shown inferior were neglected and so given a high-power motive to do better the next year. Later, in addition to this physical program, both youth and maidens here brought the best samples of their handi- work, and yet later, intellectual products, not only liter- ary and artistic but attested records made by the ' ' heart- formers" of any signal achievement made in any field during the year. Thus these festivals became a kind of assay of the quality of the marriageable material in the land. The youth of each sex were exhorted also to act always as if the noblest specimens of the other sex were present and looking on, and thus to avoid all that would seem unworthy of them. As a result of the spirit here fostered, adults, both men and women, came to feel that they must do nothing youth would condemn, thus realiz- ing their responsibility as pattern-setters for those in this golden age of life, so plastic to the influence and example of those older, wiser, and better known. There and then, as here and now, the sentiments and ideals of youth were recognized as the best material for prophecy, for, as adoles- cents feel to-day, the world will go a generation hence. Thus, these unique celebrations kept adulthood in vital and sympathetic touch with this best age of life and its inspirations, while in turn its best impulsions were also stimulated and given power to irrigate not only maturity but even old age. Nations and races, like individuals, have their adolescent stage, and this in Atlantis was the age when woman was at the acme of her power and in- fluence. In every community in Atlantis the married women united in sustaining a ''house" and also a hospital, both of which perhaps merit description. The ** house" varied greatly with the size of the community but always pro- vided three things; sleeping accommodations for guests, 106 KECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST suites for social gatherings, and a hall for meetings. These ''houses'^ were always open, and here the women met and discussed formally and informally all the af- fairs of the community, somewhat as in our era men do in clubs. These confabulations were prevented from sinking to triviality or gossip-mongering by the *' courts of honor,*' through the pronouncements of which women in each community worked perhaps their chief influence. When- ever any man in the community, whether in public or in private life, had done an act of any kind of conspicuous merit or demerit, service or disservice, he and his deed were, as it were, placed on trial in one of these secret courts. Here any woman witness could be summoned, and if there were no volunteers to plead both pro and con, such were appointed. The findings of the courts were then posted in the hall and were modifiable or even re- versible for a year. In their final form they were com- municated by personal missive to the man approved or censured, and if the former, a button of a special form, size, and color, to which symbolic meanings were ascribed, was given, which those thus approved wore if they chose and which indicated that they held one or another form of honorary membership in the women's *' house.'* At first these badges were held in small esteem by men, but in time they came to be prized and regarded as insignia of a new order of nobility. Those given the highest of these insignia were granted entrance to the * 'houses'* at certain functions, always under carefully chosen chaperonage, and were here allowed certain other privileges and exemptions ; while those whose conduct was found dishonorable were subjected to more carefully drawn rules of ostracism with many features of what we might call boycott. In all this it was at first found extremely difficult to resist the plead- ings of friends, especially of good wives of offending hus- bands, but as time passed, precedents multiplied and THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 107 standards grew more definite, recognized, and accepted, de- cisions more impartial, and the verdicts of these courts more influential in the lives of men of the community. Thus woman's great function of selection found here its most effective installation. Girls and unwed women were never admitted to these ** houses," but were initiated only upon marriage. The hospitals for and by women received those ap- proaching motherhood and also treated all the diseases most common in this sex ; trained, registered, and assigned to service midwives and nurses and also later social work- ers to keep watch over hygienic and moral conditions of children throughout the community, in both school and home, and also of girls in store, shop, factory, and home. They also had to cooperate with all the agencies of social, mental, and moral hygiene. Most nubile maidens had served a voluntary apprenticeship as probationers in these institutions, some of which delegated to each girl the special care of some family or child, and each of these caretakers had followed courses of instruction and demon- stration given at the hospitals to test her competence for such duties. Often these novices were found in wards as helpers, dispensing cheer, distributing flowers and dainties, reading at bedsides and to larger groups, thus making their later ministrations in their own, homes more effective. Some of the more hardy of them even attended operations and became accustomed to the sight of blood, while all be- came familiar by objective demonstration methods with first-aid treatment for many kinds of emergencies, as well as of the newly-born, the preparation and serving of food for the sick, the use of simple home medicaments, and thus they were given more or less proficiency in all we need for our Red Cross service. All the larger of these hospitals had an academic func- tion which in the best of them was the core and heart of all 108 RECREATIONS OP A PSYCHOLOGIST their work. Here the hiological sciences were taught, each with a more or less sharply defined practical focus in eu- genics, which might perhaps be called the religion of these institutions. Botany and all the methods of cross-fertiliza- tion were taught in open gardens, hot-houses, and labora- tories. In zoology the basis of heredity and transmission of life in the animal world led up to human anatomy, physiology, and hygiene, a field in which human evolution culminates. Here was a field for which young women had special tastes and aptitudes, somewhat as young men had in physical and mechanical sciences. In this state of affairs, it seemed almost as if woman, after the first flush of the nubile instinct to attract favor- able attention to herself had attained its goal and faded, shunned all publicity and sought to limit her sphere of activity to those in her own immediate environment. Most seemed to prefer anonymity for even their best achieve- ments, almost as if they had accepted the ancient slogan now so often heard and attributed to man that ** those are fhe best women of whom least is heard." Certainly there was no rivalry of sex against sex, but rather each was recognized as the inspirer of most of the best traits in the other. The women most revered were those who bore and reared to maturity the most and best children, and in these their ''epistles known and read of all men'^ they took their chief pride and found their chief honor. Unostenta- tious as they were, they came thus to wield an influence upon Atlantean affairs far greater than they have ever wielded in any civilization of our era. In no land and age that we know has woman been so revered or so sympa- thetically and devotedly served. The very recognition of the all-dominance of unconscious factors in the human psyche which we are just beginning to attain gave to woman as the better embodiment of it than man a unique preemi- nence. That civilization is best, they felt and said, in THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 109 whieli woman can be kept at her highest and best estate, and the best criterion of human institutions is how much it contributes to this end. "Woman's naive intuitions were, in a word, regarded as almost the sole and only guide given to man to direct and impel him upward in the path of progress. The decline from her high estate was gradual and almost imperceptible at first and involved so many factors and stages that it is hard to tell just when, how, or where it began, or what chiefly led to it, significant as it is for us of this era to ascertain. Sometimes men gi'ew jealous of woman's property rights, which under the operation of conditions here often made her holdings more than those of her husband. Some of the latter grew jealous of woman's great and growing influence over childhood and youth. Others deemed her moral censorship too exiguous and too severe. When, and before, the ''medicos" revolted they resented her efforts to assume some of their aban- doned functions. For her efforts to mitigate the woes caused by the defection of the representatives of law and order, of education, and of the priesthood, she incurred the disfavor of all these recalcitrant orders. But before, and beneath, all these causes a subtle degen- eration had begun within the sex itself. Slowly and with succeeding generations the high ideals of motherhood began to suffer impairment. The number of those who would not, or could not, bear children increased. As with us wars and great social or political convulsions that decimate the males are followed by an increased percentage of male births, while in long periods of peace females predominate, so in Atlantis during the many centuries of tranquillity that followed her mastery of the world as it then was, there came to be a marked and ever-increasing predomi- nance of women which even the advanced scientists of that day could not check at first, although, as we shall see, they no RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST learned to do so later, and with the exception above noted monogamy was too firmly established to be successfully challenged by any scheme of plurality of wives. Woman, thwarted in the attainment of her true goal as wife and mother, becomes restless, goes in quest of surrogate ends, and may come honestly to spurn in all her conscious processes the very thing that the depth of her soul, if she only knew it, cries out for. Thus more and more she came to seek other careers than that of motherhood. Some lapsed to flippant coquetry, seeking attention without intention. Some few sold themselves to sensual men. More sold their services, rivaling, and sometimes displacing men in the competition for positions, and while thus entering ever new fields as man's rival, demanding all the courtesies, deferences, and amenities accorded her in the ancient regime of the mothers. They demanded, and after a long struggle won, admission to the *' houses" and the "courts of honor," disparaged and flouted many of the activities taught and practiced in the hospitals, broke ruthlessly away from the old customs of dress and deportment, and strove long and earnestly everywhere to make their sex a sect. Many who wed, bore no, or at most one or two, chil- dren, who were more liable to bear through life the well- known physical and psychic stigmata of inferiority so common among only children. Longer and more bitter than the struggle between men and women was that between the fully and the half-sexed women, in which the latter had many advantages. The former, indeed, had nothing to gain and everything to lose. The latter demanded the right to use man's attire ; to enter even the army under their own officers; to be wardens of the street, magistrates, counsellors of state, heads of local government; to man ships, run public and all vehicles of transportation; loved the platform and processions; while some became engineers, priests, professors and statesmen, THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 111 insisting that as the mothers had been the paramount sex under the old, so they, the new women, should be under the new dispensation. Laws they deemed unjust they os- tentatiously violated, and if taken into custody, drew about them the mantle of the injured dignity of their sex and insisted upon all the deference shown the mothers of old; while if the stem methods invoked for male offenders were resorted to, they took refuge in hysteria, voluntary starva- tion, or patheticism. Those who did not, or could not, have men of their own to serve them became even more mannish, in all their ways, works, and ideals, and often cursed the fates that had made them women. As time passed, some of the mothers themselves became infected with these ideals and laid aside their femininity to become feminists. The home was no longer the center of their interests, and they broke away into the open and sought a new thrill in the hustings, or before the footlights, or harangued in the streets, or led attacks by the ** direct method" upon indus- tries or man-made institutions which they disapproved, till insurance agencies were established against their wild and unpredictable depredations and sabotage. Everywhere, on the other hand, there were conservative counselors of pru- dence, moderation, and appeals to the old order. Many matrons broke with the traditions of centuries to make public reclamation against violence of conduct or extreme views, but only thus drew upon their heads more bitter objurgations. They were denounced as defenders of anti- quated customs and ideals and traitors to their sex, advo- cates of the old male tyranny, and were generally silenced because they could not, or would not, compete in stridency with the less scrupulous and more fanatical activities of the more radical innovators. They, it was said, were naive and unsuspecting victims of a long and deep-laid plot of subjection by man and were twice to be pitied, once for their simplicity in not realizing their subserviency, and 112 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST again and yet more, for consenting to play the role assigned them after its real nature had been disclosed to them. To meet these new emergencies thus forced upon them the men were, if possible, less prepared and more impotent than were the mothers. They faltered, hesitated, tried alter- nately coercion and severity, persuaded, coaxed, threatened, made some cases examples of leniency and others of all the harshness of the law, for men now listened to the many and voluminous appeals, petitions and resolutions, and now turned a deaf ear to them, or strove to appeal to reason and prudence. But all was in vain, for the tide seemed fast growing too strong to be stemmed. They sought wisdom in counsel, but failed to find it, and womankind seemed fast drifting toward open revolt. It was as if she were striving to make her rule supreme in every walk of life. Often the defection extended to the home, and wife and daughter or both became, over night, as it were, new creatures, with a new nature and a new stock of opinions, arguments, and above all, new demands. Thus many households were dis- rupted, and many a union of married partners where quiet and happiness had reigned for years was broken up. Not a few men capitulated and fell into line, either from con- viction, expediency, or love of comfort and harmony, and proclaimed their readiness to concede all. Thus it came to pass that Atlantis slowly fell again under feminine do- minion, although in a new and very different sense from that of yore, for, whereas woman once dominated by * * sweet- ness and light,'* by inherent merit and virtue, now it was by coercion and vociferation. Once she attained all while claiming nothing ; she now demanded all and far more than she had ever sought before, and seemed in a fair way to attain everything. Woman had protested against all the great revolts above described, and when each great group of these institutions had ceased to function by its own act, she had come to feel THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 113 deeply that there was something essentially mistaken in man's efforts to improve his estate. Thus the disasters of the times naturally deepened her distrust of his manage- ment of the world. Thus, too, when at first the structure of religion fell and its leaders withdrew, she felt, as woman never had so much cause to feel before, that all was lost unless she could find and lead a program of restoration. Perhaps if she had fallen back upon her own deeper in- stincts or harked back to the old order and striven to restore it instead of turning to external and more mechani- cal methods of restoration, there might still have been hope. But at the critical moment, when she was the for- lorn hope, she, too, following the all-dominating trend of events, had looked without and not within, and in making this fatal mistake man's last hope took flight from the world. Slowly as she won her victorious way to domi- nance throughout the land, all the easier because man him- self was so profoundly conscious of failure in the convul- sions and disasters which followed the downfall of each of the great culture institutions he created, woman, too, be- gan to lose confidence, even in the hour of her completest triumph. She, too, began to feel incompetent to cope with the forces of degeneration. She now had her will but found it both weak and without confident aim. Indeed, there was a moment when the mothers, had their insight been clearer and their resolve more resolute, might per- haps have saved the day. But even if so, it was now too late. Nor would it avail to appeal again to man, whom they had evicted from his true place. There could be no longer help from him, for he was too disheartened by the coUapse of his own handiwork to be of any aid. The gods were forgotten, gone, or probably dead; the vigor of the human race, sapped; even Mother Earth was less fertile, the land deforested, and mines exhausted; the enterprise of industry had vanished ; families were dy- 114 EECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST ing of race suicide and the entire population was ravaged by manifold diseases; property and even land tenure was becoming ever less secure; and mutual suspicion, envy, jealousy, malice, and revenge often had free course and piety was deemed folly. The physique and even the aver- age stature of the people declined, while symmetry, grace, and beauty in man and women became more and more in- frequent. Some women had led in the foundation of rural communities on various agrarian, social, civic, domestic, and other novel plans, hoping by getting back again to Nature and making a fresh start thus to retrieve their moribund race or at least thus to find respite for themselves from a reality too grim and full of foreboding to be faced. But as the twilight of the race darkened, these sporadic com- munities served only as dim beacons, which gave little light, as the sun of Atlantis hastened in its setting, to guide man's faltering steps. Never had the sum of human misery been so great in the world. Happiness there was none, and feasting and gross pleasures were often fanatically grasped to sustain the soul amidst the wreckage. Love, even between man and woman, grew cold, and rancor and enmity often took their place as each held the other responsible for the woe- ful conditions. Then came the great revolt or emut of the women. It was not strange that many mothers, as the fortunes of the land sank so low, had individually refused to bear more children, since living had lost all that made it worth while. Taking their cue from the new women, who were not like the mothers who had sunk to despair and heart-sickness, but sought to feed fat their inveterate hate against man and to complete his subjection, they planned and organized secret sodalities of the wed and unwed, who took the solemn vow of both celibacy and chastity. When the Atlanteans learned later, as we have not learned, how to control sex THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 115 before birth, some extremists urged that only girls or a greater preponderance of them consistent with race per- petuation be allowed ; but this proposal, which at fii^t met with some favor, proved abortive in the end. Others thought the very threat of such a step would bring men to terms with certain pet whims and hobbies of their own which they wished to impose on them, and were dismayed and even sought to cancel their vow when the men refused to capitulate. It was those who took these vows precipi- tately for ruse, bluff, or transient pique toward lovers or spouses, who gave most trouble to the leaders who were in grim earnest. Despite these and other obstacles, these so- dalities multiplied, and in the short space of a few years were found in each community and embraced most of the women in it. Thus it was that a strike of matrons like that fabled to have occurred in ancient Eome, which Zel- ler describes, and which soon brought the recalcitrant Sen- ate to accede to their demands, was organized throughout the land and grew more determined and implacable. Man sought both consciously and unconsciously to reenforce his refusal to yield by seeking to restore in his soul all the an- tique horror of homosexuality and even incest, which was more potent of old in Atlantis than ever in our era, as described by Ranke, and to direct it all against the half- sexed women. So effective, however, was this taboo woman had placed upon her sex that in a decade, we are told, the rate of increase of population declined nearly one thousand- fold, and most of the very few who were born were either illegitimate or condemned to wear the bar sinister, never so damning as in Atlantis, or else had sprung from parents who were social outcasts. Thus as the years passed, the population grew old and died. Cities were depopulated and the grass grew in streets once thronged, while build- ings and institutions decayed and wild animals lurked in 116 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST the ruins, and the living could hardly inter the dead. The few children led lives of indescribable pathos, were pitied by all, and occasionally even slain by their parents as a solemn act of mercy. vin THE LAST SCENES AND DAYS OF ATLANTIS Meanwhile the whole island-continent had been slowly sinking. The sea had engulfed many a wide and once populous plain. Here water gradually filled the cellars and streets and the people took to Venetian ways of transport and evacuation. There it was possible in a smooth sea and on a clear day to catch a glimpse of inundated buildings beneath the waves. Elsewhere earthquakes had caused sudden submergence and tidal waves had swept away whole communities and left only ghastly ruins and debris; while Atlantis was becoming an archipelago of island^ once united. Wild beasts multiplied, and, like men, were con- centrated by the rising waters and made their lairs in what had once been the homes of men, and, having de- stroyed the flocks, they strove to subject feralized men to their old dominion. Here and there families or groups of them constructed or equipped vessels or arks in which they put all they held dear, and trusting their fortunes to the sea, trekked out into its boundless domain. Most of these venturers were wrecked; others were marooned or made a landing, after desperate and decimating hardships, upon the far colonial shores which we know as Yucatan, Peru, and Mexico, while some even reached China, Egypt, and Crete, or their descendants made mounds in America. But the race was moribund, and we of to-day can only trace with the great- est uncertainty a few faint vestiges of their presence even THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 117 in these lands in our era which the overbold and perfervid imagination and ingenuity of Ignatius Donnelly has vainly sought to validate. The chief bequest all these widely scat- tered and transient colonies have left in our era is the tra- ditions of a great flood, which as Andree has shown, are found in every land accessible to Atlantis from Chaldea to Central America and are best found in those regions once most easily reached from Atlantis. On most of the far-flung northern coasts of Atlantis countless vast ice-floes and bergs were brought by the pelagic currents of a system of which the present configura- tion of land and sea has left no trace. With the increasing cold of this era these stranded bergs were reenforced by glaciers that crept downward from the northern mountain slopes, and also by the ice-packs that extended miles from the shore and the sheet-ice brought down from the rivers, and thus bays and gulfs were so filled that there can be little doubt that for centuries the tip of the Arctic ice-cap bridged the strait that had formerly separated Atlantis from Greenland. Certain it was that glaciation came to ex- tend much farther south than at any point where it has left its vestiges upon any of the continents as we know them. This secular advance of boreal climatic conditions not only brought many of the modifications and redistribu- tions of fauna and flora in these regions but involved many changes in human life. The inhabitable and tillable areas were restricted, and hence there were treks of hordes of rude and hardy Northmen into the more populous and ad- vanced south, somewhat as the desiccation of the trans- Caspian lands once drove waves of Huns and Vandals west into Europe. These Atlantean Norsemen, if they may be so called, were, however, only slightly less advanced in all the arts of civilization than were their fellow-countrymen of the south, and they brought a fresh and hardy strain of blood. Thus with them came invigoration, which for a 118 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST long period retarded the processes of decline in the central regions, just as had happened eons before when Antarctic conditions had slowly advanced from the south. Human migrations by land had thus here been chiefly north and south and not mainly westward, with slight refluent eddies toward the east, as in our cycle, and these movements con- tributed greatly to the homogeneity of the aboriginally very diverse Atlantean people. Great mountain chains and ranges extended north and south throughout central Atlantis from the northern to the southern zone, some of which were, of old, snow-capped in midsummer under the equator. They represented the Plutonic activity which in the far back pretertiary time had first elevated this land above the primeval sea. Along these ranges there were many long-ago extinct volcanoes. During the period of the retreat of the above northern glaciation more and more of these ended their period of quiescence and broke out in fresh eruptions. Here and there, from this and that summit, belched forth fire, lava, and ash which had buried cities, as in our era Vesuvius overwhelmed Pompeii. Some of these cities the Atlanteans had excavated after millennia, while others still await, now far beneath the waves, the resurrection that will never come. During all this age the land was slowly sinking. Here and there dikes which had been constructed to re- sist the encroachments of the sea were broken down in some fierce storm, once fertile valleys were inundated and houses swept away, cities demolished, and thousands swept to death. Never since man appeared on the earth had Nep- tune and Pluto waged such terrific war. Atlantis included all those regions of the earth on which man had himself fully evolved, and here he wrought out his civilization, which culminated in the eocene dawn of the tertiary age. Here alone had men seen many of the animal forms long extinct for us which we therefore call prehistoric. Here THE FALL OF ATLANTIS U9 once the saurians and megatheria had most abounded, and here only had some of them lingered on till half, if not fully, human beings appeared, so that the oldest draconian myths have a vestigial kernel of actual human experience behind them. Here, though much earlier, porpoises, dolphins, walruses, seals, and whales, probably in this order, after a long interlude of terrestrial life, had reverted as back- sliders to their first love of the sea, and the closing scenes of this process were accelerated by the great submergencies that now seemed coming again. Thus, once more, we see that the primitive Atlanteans were closer to the great moral of the lives of the megatheria, which perished because of hyperindividuation or because they had to give all their time and energy to finding, consuming, and assimilating nutriment for their own gigantic bulks and could give no thought or care to their young or even to their eggs. All creatures that had aquatic stages in their phyletic evolu- tion tended to relapse toward it, and many forms that had lately left the amphibean stage reverted to it. When the water reached, and poured into, the deep pits above described that drew power from the central heat of the earth, there were explosions of often volcanic vio- lence, and the pits became new craters, while earthquakes rocked and tore open the earth, as also occurred when some of the volcanoes sank beneath the sea still spouting flames. Sometimes new islands rose from the sea over night, only gradually or suddenly to sink again. Water-fowl in- creased, and many species of land bird, one after another, as if sensing danger from afar and after a season of per- haps long perturbation, assembled in great flocks, and cir- cling high in the air and with plaintive cries took their de- parture over the waste of waters in quest of new and more settled conditions of life. This goal some may have reached, although it is probable that most were lost. At any rate, they were seen no more in Atlantis, once so rich in avian 120 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST life. As these departures of the feathered tribes, of which Atlantis had been a veritable paradise, became more and more frequent and better understood, the ill omen they boded came to be more and more depressing to the inhab- itants. * ' What does this betoken for us ? " they said or far more often silently tkought. Wild animals that had been few multiplied, and most domesticated species that had not died of the plagues that fell upon them or been decimated by beasts of prey them- selves relapsed to their original feral state. Thus many dogs grew wolf -like and cats became large and fierce, while sheep and goats retired again to the mountains whence they had come, and flocks of horses, cattle, and pigs were seen on the plains where grain and maize once flourished or in the forests, which were steadily encroaching upon the crop areas; while many men reverted to the pristine stage of the hunter and fisherman. Sometimes packs of wolves attacked and almost depopulated outlying villages, and great felidas and troops of mammoths boldly invaded even the outskirts of cities. Most dreaded of all were the troops of great manlike apes, more sagacious and more formidable than any of the four higher species we know, and which were the direct progenitors of men. Their special quest was not adult men but women, children, and even infants, whom they carried off and reared and who often lost the power of speech and sometimes became leaders of ape tribes, com- pensating for their inferiority in strength and agility in tree-tops by their superior cunning. Some of these stolen female humans even became fertile with the apes, and the crossed offspring of these unions were particularly dreaded, for they seemed chiefly bent on carrying maidens into the jungle, from which they rarely emerged again. Some of these female anthropoids became vampire-like seducers of men. The unspeakable orgies in which these creatures led THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 121 them left only very suppressed and distorted vestiges in our tales of sirens, bacchantes, Walpurgis Night revels, tales of Venusberg, Buddhist rites and superstitions, and the legends of the sons of gods mating with the daughters of men. The foul females of this new race found their way by night into the haunts of men to lure them to their embrace, and as the Atlantean females of the later era grew more mannish and unattractive, this quest was sometimes successful. Some members of this novel breed could hardly be distinguished from human beings save only by the fact that they had a usually very carefully concealed caudal appendage which was the chief mark of their pithecoid strain. Thus it came to pass that the last great and con- certed struggle in which all the Atlanteans were united was against these semi-simians. A crusade had long been directed against them, especially by the Atlantean women of both the new and the old types. The war began in a city of the south where the pithecoid aggressions had been peculiarly bold and cruel. The archon of this city, which was named Sikas, summoned all to array themselves either on the side of the humans or the sub-humans, and he was amazed to see the strength marshaled on the side of the enemy, which was also well organized and well led. It was a war of extermination in which no quarter was given or asked. Besides the two armies on the plain, men and women, and even children, fought in nearly every street and alley. All day the battle raged, but at its close the simians and their human allies were completely routed and mercilessly slaughtered, and their survivors fled like skulk- ing fugitives. Other cities followed until the warfare spread to every hamlet, and fortunately eveiywhere the Atlanteans were victorious, for nowhere was the foe so strongely entrenched as in Sikas. So intense was the fury with which this war was waged that for years every simian or quarter-simian found in the land was summarily slain. 122 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST In some waste areas where the submergence was rapid, men and animals were often crowded together on hilltops, and there were sanguinary conflicts of claws and fangs versus knives and fists, there were desperate struggles for the summit of rocks as well as trees and housetops, while all things that could float were fought for ; but most of those who won them and drifted off sank later with bubbling groan or were devoured by the huge sharks, which we call antediluvian, that now swarmed in all the Atlantean wa- ters. Here geysers spouted hot water that filled the air with steam, killing every green thing, there buildings sank slowly or rapidly as in quicksands, subterranean waters oozed through the softened earth beneath them, and there were earthquakes that wrought their devastations and brought their characteristic panics. It was strange to see men and women who had long for- gotten the old gods now pray to all of them, while here and there peasants sacrificed not only of their flocks but their first-born children on crumbling altars. Of old those who believed in the deities thought them above and when they implored them it was with upward faces and arms raised supine, and moreover they were deemed good. Now all the deities invoked were thought to dwell in the nether regions, below the surface of the earth or sea, and were deemed malign. All worship now was solely inspired by fear and its motive was propitiation to avert or find a vicariate for divine wrath. As the tides rose, all forms of burial rites ceased and corpses were consigned to the waves as soon as life was extinct. As the awful drama drew toward its close, there were left only a few mountain tops and highlands near and afar as islands in the waste of waves. On these were gathered all the men and beasts that had survived. Some of these elevations suddenly belched fire and swept away every liv- ing thing upon them. On others, starving men and beasts THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 123 fought and devoured one another or died of hunger and thirst. At length all the higher peaks sank and only the lofty plateau with its vast solid truncated rock was left whereon stood the temple of Neptune, the palace, the cathedral, the statues, and many other marvelous structures, the greatest architectural achievements of man upon this planet. These alone were built with every time-defying device that the master minds of Atlantis in her prime could bring to bear upon their work, and if the most destructive agencies that Nature can command had not been turned against them, they would to-day have been the marvels of our world. Within the sacred walls that enclosed all this magnificence were gathered only members of the scribal caste and the wise men they had selected, excluding all the hordes of those they deemed unfit that long clamored from without and who were fijially swept away by the rising flood, which for a few final years made all that was left in Atlantis seem like a wonderful architectural apparition at the bot- tom of a shallow sea, from which it was protected on all sides by a cofferdam. Here these few scores of men, fore- thoughtfully provisioned as if for a long siege, lived for months, the sole survivors of their race. Here they grad- ually died as the waters very slowly rose toward the sum- mit of the sea-wall that engirt them. And now we must describe what is recorded as if in a new hand in the microscopic script of the last pages of the great record book, which it was the chief business of these hamics, scribes, or archivists to write and preserve. Hamic was one of the chief founders of the Atlantean em- pire. Of unknown, but almost certainly of very humble, origin he rose by virtue and sheer ability to supreme power, led armies east and west, north and south, com- pleted the conquest of the world, and with able coadjutors organized and gave laws to mankind and was given almost 124 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST divine honors. But at the age of sixty he retired from all public cares to devote himself to study and meditation. The great and sole achievement of his later life thus was to conceive and found a universal library that should con- tain every manuscript, book, written or printed matter, which a body of advisers, two in each department of knowl- edge, should pronounce worthy of preservation and whosa duty it also was to grade the merit of everything admitted. Thus every admission of a production to the probationary lists, which were kept open for five, fifteen, and thirty years, when it was given its final place, was a most coveted honor. Despite this rigorous, yet liberal. Censorship, as the centuries and millennia passed the collection grew in size to millions of final entries. All this material was sys- tematically arranged and kept by a corps of clerks in a huge rock-hewn series of crypts and vaults within, and beneath, the vast pyramid above described. Of all this the descendants of Hamic were long the sole custodians, but later they elected others of the most eminent ability and learning as coadjutors in this function, which became one of the most honorable of all in the realm. The Atlanteans had always had a very strong historic sense, more highly developed than anything our era knows, perhaps because the country was older, and all regarded the recording and conservation of the archives as almost a sacred function to which those charged with it were bound with most solemn oaths to set down all and only the truth and to spare no pains in ascertaining it. From this college everything written for the public, printed, or published, was collected, and all the many outside establishments for reproduction and multiplication of copies and their promulgation were supervised. Even after these auxiliary institutions were all submerged, the old tradition of keeping the records true and full through every vicissitude and to the end was the all-dominating idea of every member of this caste, a THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 125 spirit that had grown strong, with an increased sense of responsibility, since the disastrous period of history began. It was they who had gone on missions far and wide, re- gardless of danger, and from which many had never re- turned, in order to note at first-hand all the items of all the above calamities that befell the land. Everywhere pos- sible they had observed, photographed, transcribed, com- piled, and digested testimony, and collaborated with each other before they set down their attest on the flexible gold leaves in which they were to be transmitted to posterity. For decades there had been no women in this sacred en- closure, and now in all that was left of Atlantis there was, so far as this doomed and isolated scribal colony knew, no one left in the world but them. Death was rapidly re- ducing their own numbers and only some two-score of the old archivists were left. Thus at length, upon a day set beforehand, they met, fasting and in formal and solemn conclave for final conference. "We," they said, "are the last and with us the race of man becomes extinct. How vain and futile is our piety to record that which no eye will ever see. If our country is the victim of its own folly, it is we who have been the greatest fools in our fanatical piety for records. Let us open all the now sealed alcoves and stocks of our library to the sea in token to each other that we died disillusioned and that all our work may perish with us. Let us eat, drink, and feast once more and then greet Death with a cheer and a final curse on Life, the arch betrayer, which it will now be a rapture to escape." This latter counsel prevailed, and so they banqueted in great Neptune's temple and pledged each other in wine. They taunted the waters, invoked the flood to come soon, toasted those they had known who had already met the Great Deliverer, drank again to imprecations of justice, health, long life, learning, piety, women, in drunken rev- elry, consigning all their own work and that of their pred- 126 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST ecessors formally to Neptune, their bodies to his finny tribe, and their souls to the infinite void out of which the worlds and aU of them had come. But there was one young man among these holy sages, Zotes by name. He had but lately come, but we are not told how or why, from a far-off colony east of Egypt, and by his skill and learning had been adopted as a probationer by the sacred scribal college. His courageous heart sank within him as he listened in silence, els became his rank among them, to these carousals and resolutions of despair. In his childhood he had heard tales of far-off Lemuria which abounded in anthropoids that had not left apehood but had shown signs of slow approximation to the estate of primitive man. Perhaps, he thought, this eastern island continent was not all submerged and the deluge not uni- versal, and perhaps some time here another race of men might arise and — such is the irrepressible buoyancy of youthful fancy — ^they might, ages hence, learn of Atlantis and find in its story both encouragement and wholesome Warning for their own race. In such reveries Zotes found some consolation, and his very soul revolted at the senti- ments of the senescent elders who were ready to abandon all they and their forbears for more than ten thousand generations had lived for (for this was the period of clear, continuous, and authentic history, while the beginnings had extended thousands of generations farther back) . So while they caroused, Zotes stole away, and all night transcribed on a new golden leaf all he had seen and heard of the great conference and the feast, how he came to write, and who he was and what he intended to do. Then, assum- ing that he completed what he intended and what the find- ings of our expedition show to have been done, he opened the highest and only unsealed horizontal door into the high- est vault of the vast halls of books, inserted his final leaf, replaced the heavy metallic lid, and concealed it with the THE FALL OF ATLANTIS 127 cement left after closing all the other openings. Then we may suppose he sat down and calmly awaited the inevitable end when the waters broke down the enclosure and en- gulfed him and the revelers in a common doom. We have waited long, oh, Zotes! but not in vain. Now that we, who have sprung from the very half -human apes of Lemuria, whom you dreamed of, have found you out, your name and your deed, the only link between the great- est era of the world and our own stands forth unique in all the world. If, as you fondly hope in death, we can profit by the lessons and warnings that have now come up to us from the depths of the sea, we owe it all to you. Per- haps you yourself, without knowing it, were the very first human product of Lemuria and our forerunner. Would that we might thus claim you as of our era, as well as also the youngest and last of the Atlanteans opening to us a world cycle of a length compared to which ours is but a few short years of which we should have known nothing but for you, and which, when we have fully exposed it, promises to be the most precious possession of all our culture. n HOW JOHNNIE'S VISION CAME TRUE* It was Sunday in early June and Johnnie Smith was fourteen that day. He was as commonplace to look at as his name was. He was a farmer's son and had worked at planting all the week on his father's farm, a mile from the village. He had dutifully ridden to church in the family carry-all, having harnessed and hitched up the horses himself for his father to drive, and had no less duti- fully attended Sunday School with his brothei^ and sisters afterwards, and then had partaken of the late but bounti- ful Sunday dinner always served at two P. M. As there was no supper Sundays, for this was in New England two generations ago, and as it was his brother's turn to help the hired man milk the cows and do the other chores at night, Johnnie faced a whole afternoon of leisure, and the problem of how to spend it weighed somewhat upon his mind. He was a sturdy, old-fashioned boy, already very useful on his father's large farm, for he could milk cows, fodder sheep, pigs, calves and horses, could drive ox teams, chop wood, make maple sugar, harvest, could break young steers, and, in fact, could do almost everything that a man could do except hold a plow, and train fractious colts to the har- ness. The last two winters, when his father had been away in the legislature, with the help of a neighbor's husky son he and his brother had borne the entire responsibility of the barns and stables and had also attended schooL * Partly suggested by J. Sadger's Veher Nachtwandeln und Mond- sucht (Leinzig, 1914) and Otto Rank's Der Boppelgdnger (Imago, 1914) 128 HOW JOHNNIE'S VISION CAME TRUE 129 But how dull and unsatisfactory farm life was to him! How he loathed the monotony and drudgery of it all ! He was at the age when nature begins to whisper the wisdom of all the ages into the alert ears of youth, and Johnnie had ears to hear and, what was more, he pondered the message in his heart. His mother had been a teacher and had always read to the father and the boys noons and evenings and always had attractive books borrowed from the little town library, and she alone subtly felt and unconsciously, if not con- sciously, was in rapport with Johnnie's ferment, for Na- ture had given her some insight into the needs of pubescent years and she had grown up with younger brothers. Mother and son had lately had a memorable heart-to- heart talk in which Johnnie expressed his yearning to get away from the farm and make more of himself than his father and uncles had made, and the mother had even sug- gested college as a possible, though a far-away, goal. John- nie, moreover, although he breathed no word of this and would have been mortified beyond expression if he suspected his mother divined it, was profoundly conscious of every- thing that Ann, a neighbor's eighteen-year-old daughter, said and did. How much of his life centered in thoughts of her ! But neither she nor Jennie, his flame of the year before, ever suspected the state of his heart. He had known their respective brothers, two older college boys from his own town, and noted how all the girls ''fell for them." Thus the germs of both ambition and of love were just sprouting from the richest possible soil ; or, to change the metaphor, a double infection fairly seethed and fer- mented in his soul. His father had also attended school and doubtless had had his youthful calentures. But they all seemed to have burned out, the paternal aspirations now tending toward material prosperity. The father wanted his eons to work 130 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST hard as he was content to do, and he would put more money in the hank and till new acres, and when his sons were of age have them settled if possible on adjacent farms to con- tinue on the basis of his success, or at worst reconcile himself to their going West, where he had already wan- dered as a young man and stayed long enough to estab- lish his claim to severgil well-chosen government reserva- tion lots. But nothing of this kind appealed to Johnnie, who was already nourishing a youth's sublime of a very dijfferent kind. * * I have meat to eat that you know not of, ' ' was a phrase in the morning's sermon which stuck fast in John- nie's mind and he thought he knew what it meant better than the minister. Just now Johnnie's problem was what to do with his long summer afternoon. Some two miles to the east on another farm was a high hill, called in local parlance Mt. Hatch. It was densely wooded on all sides, but had a sin- gularly bald, rocky top rising perhaps two hundred feet above the highest trees. It could be reached only through a deep valley, also densely wooded, and by a long sharp climb, and it was towards Hatch top Johnnie found his somewhat aimless steps directed with an impulse of re- search characteristic of his age and of springtide. He had set out with no very definite purpose or goal, but had long been curious to visit this hilltop so plainly visible from a much lower hill just back of his home. He told no one where he might go, but stole back, after he had started, to take along a second-hand shotgun for which he had lately paid three doUairs and which was just then the most precious of all his possessions. As he wandered away rather aimlessly eastward over the pastures, he wondered if he really should go as far as Hatch top, but after a couple of hours of alternate sauntering, resting and steep climbing, in which he had encountered no bulls or rams, HOW JOHNNIE'S VISION CAME TRUE 131 of wMch his experience had given him more tangible reason to be afraid than the ancient knights ever had to fear the dragons they are fabled to have slain, and which had made many of his plans for excursions somewhat tentative, he reached at length the summit of the hill. Here he sat down on the very highest rock, which was a deeply creviced ledge, and gazed about him. The view was far more extensive and commanding than he expected, more so, in fact, by far than anything he had ever seen or dreamed of. Eastward a long row of lesser hills stretched away as far as he could see, and in this direction, too, lay the great forest in which he had heard there were Btill catamounts, lynxes, wolves, and even bears. The Orient is the region of origins and traditions. To the south he looked down upon a village which he knew well, which was stretched out along a stream bed in the valley. Beyond it lay soft fields in a misty light symbolic of the humanities. To the west lay his own home just hidden from view itself, but with many familiar landmarks near- by, and beyond was the Great West, which his father had explored, a symbol of hope and of the future; while stretching around from northwest to southeast, or from Graylock to Monadnock, ran an irregular row of hills serrated on the far horizon a background of the infinite ocean of sky, from which quarter comes the pure cold light of reason. All the world he knew and far more now lay stretched out in clear and beautiful perspective below, and of course he could at best only feel these fourfold symbol- isms far below the ranges of his consciousness. Gradually as he sat and stood and turned, his interest in identifying points he knew merged into a vague unique sense of exalta- tion. How big the world was and how splendid, and how fine to look far down upon so much of it in a single sweep- ing glance ! In vain Johnnie 's sager elders are now asking with great 132 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST earnestness why this excelsior motive, this altitude tropism, that Johnnie had followed as blindly as a climbing chamois or a soaring eagle. What induces mountaineers to scale ever higher peaks? Whence the passion of the aviator to beat the record and look down upon the world from an ever greater altitude? Why have mountains played such a role in history and myth where so many great men of \^ the earth have communed with gods or fought their own way clear through their doubts or solved their problems? Both deities and muses live among the mountains where the heavens and earth touch and inspiration comes literally from breathing here the same celestial ether with divine beings. Johnnie on his little colline must have felt something of this, for as he looked back on his short life he felt that he had hitherto been half asleep, that he ought to wake up from his dream and look reality in the face. The future could not, and should not, be for him as the past had been. If that was so, in a few years he would be married and settled for a long life of a routine so dull that there would be nothing further to be noted of him save the date of his death. No, things as they were were intolerable and should never remain henceforth as they had been. He would do, be, have something more, something worth while. He almost loathed his present life. He must molt it all. He must have a career. His father seemed to him never so sordid and unambitious as at this moment. Possibly he was not his real father, but this was a horrible thought in its implications when he thought of his mother. Perhaps he was an adopted child of a better breed taken over for some reason by his supposed parents. Boys of this age often have experiences akin to ecstasy that come like a kind of spontaneous second breath, per- haps as a psychic vicariate for, or sublimation of, phenom- HOW JOHNNIE'S VISION CAME TRUE 133 ena usually more physical. Perhaps the very act of climb- ing predisposes to such exalted mental states. The sun was near its setting and Johnnie tried for a moment to look it straight in the face, shouting to it to witness his vow. He ran with arms outstretched toward it, exclaiming, '*0h, sun, help me." "I will, I will." *'0h, life, what is life? Give all of it to me, make me live long." "Shine into and through me. I want to know aU the world as you do. You never saw a shadow. You could not. And all I know is shadow darkening down into black ignorance. Don't set, but rise in my soul." Johnnie knew he was alone with Nature as he had never been before, and he capered about, laughed aloud, and sang in his triumph, and dedicated himself to the sun as the loftiest, biggest, most dynamic thing he knew. He wanted to rise on the world as a conqueror like the morning sun, disperse mists and cloud-demons, and he longed in the end to set gloriously, for the first real death thought had come, as it always does, after pubic erethism. Then as the frenzy went and left him, he lay on his back and gazed up at the zenith, then lay on his stomach and tried to project his very soul downward to the depths of the center of the earth and at last he almost slept for a time, perhaps in reaction, but it was not a dead sleep, but full of visions. Then the full moon rose in all its splendor, and Johnnie found himself, without knowing how, on his knees mut- tering to it. As he gazed at its markings, he thought he saw in them his mother sitting there and looking down be- nignly at him, till a lump came in his throat. What was the matter with him? Was he going crazy? "Oh, moon, how pure and beautiful you are! How far and yet how near ! How you draw my very soul up and out ! Why can- not I go to you? Take me up to you now, now. I am homesick for you. Be you my mother, and the sun my father." He felt that the moon had a messaore for him. 134 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST What, oh what, was it? The very stiUness meant that the world, as well as his own soul, was listening for it. Long the queen of the night had waited to impart her secret, and now perhaps he was the one of all mankind who would hear it. ** Peace, my son, be strong, be calm.'* These words arose in his heart. Was it that, or was it, ** Arise and shine as I do,'* which he also almost seemed to hear? At any rate there was some new inner rapport established between them so that henceforth the moon would mean something more to him. He was in a sense adopted, ini- tiated, or had he heard oracles, hitherto unsuspected, out of the depths of his own psyche? Gradually the ecstasy abated and a great peace supervened. The outer world of reality faded and the night-time constellations began to appear, and at length he really feU asleep. Then came the dream-vision, as by inevitable psychic laws it needs must, for after the storm and stress of this intense per- sonal experience the tides of Mansoul turn and often ebb and in symbols the vaster life of the race finds expres- sion, as the stars come out when the sun and moon set. Johnnie's vision was of a woman, mature and of the mingled charm of mother, sister, and bride. She seemed to hover in the air just above him and very near where he lay. Every lineament of her face was apparent and won- derfully distinct and vivid. He felt that she was wise in life and had known its chief joys and sorrows, its high lights and shadows; that without the lore of pedants or books she understood the world and, best of all, under- stood him. She resembled no one he liad ever seen be- fore, unless it was a rude woodcut of the Holy Mother that he saw in a Catholic church he had visited months ago in a little village. But he unconsciously knelt before it as he had seen people do there. He had a feeling, too, that she had come down from the moon to bear to him its message but she did not speak, but only gazed at him out HOW JOHNNIE'S VISION CAME TRUE 135 of the depths of her luminous eyea which spoke unutter- able love and yearning, and also revealed trusting con- fidence. Slowly, very slowly, she moved toward him, ex- tending her arms, while he rose to his feet and cast him- self into her embrace, where he was pressed close to her heart till soon his lips met hers in a moment of such ecstasy as he had never dreamed of before. *'You must never leave me," he whispered at last, and her soft, sweet voice replied, ** Never. You shall obtain all you seek. I shall be always with you, but you will not see me. Never seek me here. Be true, pure; cherish, and you will attain the ideals born in your heart here to-day, and then sometime, somewhere, when the hour is ripe, I wiU come to you." He awoke. The moon was riding high. Breezes were blowing. Where was she, and who? Nothing suggesting her presence was anywhere to be seen. But with his eyes closed he could see her and still seemed to feel her warm embrace. He had heard his father, who in his adventurous youth had known red men, tell how their boys just about to enter manhood fasted and were secluded until they had apparitions of some totemic animal or communed with the Great Spirit, or found their tutelary genius, but he had never heard of the Garu that the Hindoo youth meet, nor of the doubles of many kinds, sometimes in the form of their own good genii, which appear to men as per- sonifications of their own highest unconscious aspirations. But Johnnie wondered with all his heart what had really befallen him. It was a balmy June night, and he yearned unutterably for the wonderful figure whose image was so indelibly impressed upon his heart. He knew she would not return there, but she had promised to meet him some- time, somewhere, again face to face, and he felt a sense of her presence, unseen though she must remain, and this he knew could never leave him. He felt, too, that his own inarticulate ambition to be, and do, something signifi- 136 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST cant for the world was to be gratified. He would be pure, strong, and great if he could, and above all he would be true to the mysterious lady of his vision. It was a long, hard, and somewhat fearsome walk home, where he arrived near midnight, climbing up the terrace to the shed and L-roof, and thence into his bedroom win- dow unobserved. His gun had been forgotten, but was probably safe in the cleft of the ledge on the hilltop to which it had slid. But there it must remain, much as he might want it, for never again would he visit Hatch-top till he held realized at least some of the lofty aspirations that had been born there. He would look at it whenever he needed strength or courage, but to visit it again unless, or until, he could bring some assurance of achievement, would be profanation. He and his bald-topped hill held a sacred secret between them that none must ever share. So he took up his round of home duties as before, intent chiefly that none should suspect the great crisis through which he had passed, a conversion by which the boy had become overnight a man. Now he knew he had a mission in the world, but what was it? Everything about it had been so vague, in terms only of emotion and desire. It was surely not to be the great hunter and frontiersman of his gun day-dreams. The lost gun told him that. Perhaps it was music. He had fiddled for dances and played the accordion, and envied the organist at the church, a girl not many years older than he. So, at the intercession of his mother, an old piano had been bought and Johnnie took lessons, only to learn after a year of hard work that he lacked gifts in this field. Perhaps he might write novels. To this he turned at fif- teen, covering many pages of foolscap on both sides with wild and lurid adventures, dealing with horrible incidents and burning, deathless romance, always written in red ink, with the inspiration of Sylvanus Cobb and Maria Edge- HOW JOHNNIE'S VISION CAME TRUE 137 "wortli strong upon him. More secretly yet lie tried poetry^ but this Muse proved too coy for him, and even Johnnie's girl cousin, about his own age, who had been allowed to read his romances and pronounced them splendid, was never allowed to see this. Oratory thrilled him, and he spouted eloquence in the form of declamations and even wrote orations imagined for great occasions when the fate of nations was at stake. But here again was no thorough- fare. Slowly he realized that fame could not be attained by any short cut. His cousin, a dashing and brilliant fel- low, five years his senior, whom he greatly admired, had entered college, and the glamour of his example fired him, Johnnie stood well in school, and so now in the autumn af- ter he was fifteen he took hold of his Latin with a new zest, began Greek, and the father, after much persuasion by Johnnie and his mother, in due time gave his consent, and two years later Johnnie became a freshman. But this story is not of Johnnie's career. Suffice it to say here that he worked hard and acquired high standing in literature, as well as excellent rank in general scholar- ship, was able with the help of a wealthy relative to study in Europe, entered a profession and by dint of hard, ab- sorbing effort achieved for himself a standing and had a career, and at length married and had children who grew up well, married and left him. So at the age of sixty-five he found himself a widower, alone in the world, but fairly prosperous, respected and indeed eminent in his field, known, too, as a writer of successful books, and honored by learned societies. He was hale and hearty, had no thought yet of retiring, but in his rather desolate life a sense of solitariness and a nameless sorrow grew upon him. He felt a new craving for a different career. His life had not after all been satisfactory, successful though it seemed to others. He wanted something, he knew not what. He had been a good and faithful husband, as well as father, 138 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST but never a lady's man and never fond of society and its conventions. He was not rich, but might have retired com- fortably in his old age. But he was still absorbed in his work which he loved above all things. No one would ever have suspected him of romance, but now it came. And now this story really begins, and its end is also near. One day, when Mr. Smith had come home early from his office to get ready for a sudden business trip West, the card of a lady caller was brought him. He would have ex- cused himself, but with the card came a message that the call was urgent and would take but a moment and that the visitor had been there twice before. He surmised that she sought his subscription for a new church already be- gun nearby, and so in fact it proved. As he hastened to her he was calculating how much he ought to donate. The lady rose to meet him with her back toward the window, which he faced, and by the dim light he could not at first see her face clearly, but there was something in her voice, mien, and, most of all, in her calm, composed manner which impressed him strangely. Indeed he forgot about his trip for the moment, and when the topic of his visitor's errand was broached he asked many questions about the new edi- fice, for his curiosity was strangely stirred and he was loath to have his guest depart. When he could think of nothing more that was natural and essential for a prospec- tive donor to know, he wrote a generous sum against his name, and consented to head her paper in the street for which she was solicitor. As she moved toward the door and their positions were reversed so that the light now fell fully upon her face and his was in the shadow, what was his amazement to see standing before him in living flesh and blood the identical lady of his pubescent hilltop vision, which had never faded in any of its lineaments from his memory. He could scarcely believe his eyes and swiftly passed his hands over them to make sure that he was now HOW JOHNNIE'S VISION CAME TRUE 139 awake and that it was not another hallucination, as he knew the boyhood phantom had been. He glanced at her card, which was still in his hand and which he had not even looked at in his haste before, but it bore a name not only new to him, but as unique as his own was commonplace. ** Madam," he managed to say, *^we have met before." **That is impossible," she replied, *'I have lived all my life in the South and came to this city only a few months ago." **But, surely, once, many many years ago," he faltered, and stopped, realizing her youth and freshness. ''Perhaps your mother . . . May I ask if you resemble her?" *'No," she replied, wondering at his curiosity. ''She was dark and very slender, and died when I was a child." The interview was at an end and she withdrew, evidently embarrassed and flushing slightly under his eager gaze. The Honorable John Smith (for he had served a term in the lower House of Congress) was stirred as he had never been before in all his career. He reviewed again and over and over his boyish experience on the hilltop, of which he had never spoken to a living soul. He realized that he was facing a problem too deep for his psychology. He re- viewed every item of the interview, and longed to see the mysterious stranger again. Leisure time found him some- limes walking his own and nearby streets in the hope, if he would confess it, of catching a glimpse of her face by daylight, but no such good fortune awaited him. A year rolled by. The church was nearly finished. He watched its progress with interest, and finally offered to add an organ to his first gift, an offer which was gratefully ac- cepted in a gracious letter signed by the pastor and the trustees. When the church was dedicated he was present, to the surprise of his friends and neighbors, for he had rarely been inside a church for a quarter century. At the doorway, coming out he met her face to face. He took the 140 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST extended hand as she thanked him in behalf of the commit- tee for his new and generous gift, and again they parted. He had not been mistaken. It was the very same face and :figTire of his vision. He must know more of her. She was young and he was old enough to be her father. She was in the prime of womanhood, while he was entering upon the seared and yellow leaf of age. But could it be that Love's rejuvenating processes were awakening within him again? He realized that absorption in his career had di- verted him from all such abandon to the tender passion of his early life as poets and novelists write about. But now he understood that they might be right. He could see that to his marital love he had given himself, as it were, with reservations. Or was it that his wife, with whom he thought himself happy, to whose memory he was devoted, had not touched the deepest things over which Eros pre- sides in the soul and that there were still belated possibili- ties of natural affection hitherto latent? Or was this all but the fantasy of approaching senescence that sometimes flashes up for a season as the torch of life just begins to grow dim ? Could he love again, and this time more heart- ily than before^ His career was made and he could retire at any time from all other occupations and give the first place in his life to the woman of his choice, as he had not been able to do before. But what would his friends, and above all what "would she, even if she were free, think? Would it not seem a foolish infatuation at his age? But, on the other hand, what a void she would fill in his deso- late and lonely household and above all in his heart. He was not a clubman and had, in fact, few intimate friends, although he had a vast circle of acquaintances and a still larger one who knew him by his writings and by his offi- cial position. But all this which had filled his heart be- fore seemed now utterly unsatisfactory, and he wondered if, after all, his life had not been more or less of a failure HOW JOHNNIE'S VISION CAME TRUE 141 in that he had none or little of the greatest thing in the world. He understood in a general way the theory of counterparts in complexion, temperament, diathesis, and all these laws he fancied were applicable to this woman who seemed outwardly to fulfill all his ideals. Why might not the same doctrine be applied to age ? Such were some of the thoughts and feelings that came to claim more and more of his vacant hours. There was much trouble between his judgment and his desires. Surely, a man of his age and experience, thought to be sane by all who knew him, could be trusted to be reason- able. But, on the other hand, there was this growing and almost irresistible urge so unprecedented in his life, which j was sweeping him away from so many of his old moorings, and it would not be put by. Moreover, his life had been a long and hard struggle and he had had little time for, or inclination toward, the other sex. True, he preferred some members of it to others, and several enterprising damsels, a few even younger than she, had made alluring advances, some almost offensively and even flagrantly so. But all left him unmoved, though some of these self-con- stituted candidates for his favor had been beautiful, a few rich, and one a scholar, and another famous in letters. On the other hand, he had not even thought whether this new star that had come into his horizon had any, all, or none, of these qualifications. But he knew that he wanted her and only her. ! On her side, too, he thought, could she ever really love such a man as he, and that, too, for his own sake? He be-i lieved that in their advances the others had had chiefly in mind his position, for he had small opinion of his own per- sonal attractiveness. Indeed, he hardly knew whether he possessed any or not. He knew women could scheme and feign affection and occasionally one could even blackmail. Oh, if he were only young, poor and obscure, but how 142 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST could he tell as lie was? Young women have often led old men a merry dance, have toyed with their affections, lured them to all sorts of extravagances, and in their hearts laughed at them, and at the worst had other, younger lovers. But he must know. He must devise subtle tests. Yet it seemed impossible that the lady of his vision could have anything in common with any of these. It was prof- anation to think of her as any kind of adventuress. If she was not good and true, nobody could be. Now he was often found at church, was seen at some of its social functions, and often he met Her. He observed and learned all he could about her as if incidentally. She was a widow, had led a somewhat sad and desolate life, had known less joy than sorrow, had made an impulsive and not altogether happy marriage, and there were even a few things that it pained him to learn about her. But she was at heart good, true, pure, with boundless possibilities of affection, had rare powers of native insight and sagacity, had learned exceptional wisdom in the hard school of life, and had emerged chastened, calm, serene, genuine, honest, loyal, with definite and high ideals of life, the rarest self- control, had always been unmindful of self and ungrudg- ingly devoted to her services for others, had a boundless wealth of mother-love for children, and the more he knew of her the more completely all his fears took flight and the surer he was that he could love and honor her and take pleasure in making her hitherto rather somber life a happy one if only the springs of her affection could be made to flow toward him. She was not one who could or would pretend, she was not loquacious, her words were few and from her heart. She was retiring, and one who seemed" to prefer to appear less and worse, rather than more and better, than she was. She had few friends, her desires were limited, her demands on life moderate, her interests nor- mal; her ambitions were not inordinate, her religion was HOW JOHNNIE'S VISION CAME TRUE 143 chiefly that of service. None could ever call her selfish. Of vanity she knew nothing, but rather was prone to un- derestimate everything pertaining to her own personality. Her virtues were of the homely, old-fashioned type, sug- gestive of her simple Southern upbringing. That she was not incapable of romance was attested by her wide but desultory reading in this field and by a few short stories she had composed and printed anonymously in several of* the less prominent magazines. All this he learned, concluded, and pondered, for al- though his love for her grew, a man of his training and ability could not plunge madly and blindly into love. Meanwhile, their acquaintance had ripened into some de- gree of friendship, and he felt that although she had given him not the least token of any tender sentiment, she showed toward him a confidence and frankness out of which deeper feelings often grew. Save at their first meeting they had never been alone to- gether. But one stormy evening when an important parish committee meeting was called at the pastor's house only four were present, and in the midst of the session both the pastor and his wife were called by phone to the home of their daughter, who had met with an accident which at first seemed to be serious, in a distant part of the city. Thus He and She were left alone. **You can finish the de- tails by yourselves, ' ' said the pastor as he left them. His mind had already been made up, for he had long waited for just such an occasion, and made characteristic provision for every issue, and when the items of business were finished he began. *' Would you listen to a very personal story of my boy- hood which has never been told to any one before, but which my acquaintance with you has brought very vividly into my mind?" She showed none of the hesitation or embarrassment 144 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST which, he had expected, and assented. Whereupon he nar- rated all the details of the hilltop much as it is ahove re- corded. She listened with an interest more absorbing than he had expected, and when he said in closing, ' * This woman was you in every detail of face, figure, and expression, and when our eyes met and the vision faded, her face had just the look of tenderness, charm, fascination, insight, that I seem to see in yours now. ' ' He paused. The moment of silence was broken only by the sound of rain on the trees outside. '^^ Listen," she said at length, **I am far less surprised at your tale than you think, and now I, too, will tell you what no one but myself ever heard and what I could never tell to any one else, not even to you, but for what you have just said. My girlhood, too, was romantic. I was reared on a Southern plantation where I was very much alone and found solace for my solitude in books, but very few of those about me seemed as real companions as those I read of. Gradually, too, I evolved a double and coun- terpart that eventually assumed a very distinct form, which embodied my idea of manhood. I even gave him a name and he was always with me on my rambles and rides. He was my imaginary companion for years and I judged all men I knew by him and found them inferior. He became the hero of my day-dreams and I fancied he would appear to me sometime, as he did several times but only in dreams by night. He was partly the idealized image of my dead father as my mother had described him. He was also my ideal of a husband, though older, wiser, better than I. Then I came North, married in haste, alas, only to repent at leisure, and when my husband was brought home in the dim light of early morning killed in a drunken brawl I was wicked enough to feel little sorrow but a deep gladness in my heart that 1 was free again, and vowed that I would henceforth live with, and for my ideal HOW JOHNNIE'S VISION CAME TRUE 145 knight, no longer dreaming that he ever really lived.'* She paused. **And did he?*' he asked almost breathlessly. **Yes," she answered. **He is here/' she murmured, as she laid her hand lightly upon his arm. He clasped her to him in a long and warm embrace, and their lips met. When at last he released her, they gazed for a moment into each other's eyes. *'Have not our doubles been kept apart long enough? Do we not owe something to them?" he said. ''I have thought so," she said, ''but ever since I saw you it has seemed to me as though they were married already. ' ' A latchkey was heard at the front door. The pastor and his wife had returned with their sick daughter and a physi- cian. But when the situation had been explained to the clergyman in a few brief words, he consented to perform his office then and there, and they went forth, as the moon broke through the clouds, man and wife. It remains only to be added that on their honeymoon they made a pilgrimage to old Hatch top and there they found imbedded under the growth of many years of ferns in the chasm of the rock the remains of the old gun, from which the stock had rotted entirely away. It was a sym- bol of the first stage of sublimation which had culminated in the unique union not only of this man and his wife but of senescence and adolescence. Those who are now saying that romance really ought to and that the new romance will not end but begin with marriage may be right. Now that women are coming into their own in the world just at a time when a new psychol- ogy of sex is being born, love chronicles will not end but begin at the church door, and the first few years of wed- lock and the readjustments it involves open a new domain 146 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST as yet explored only by a few pioneers. When tales of this kind are in vogue, and when the situation here de- scribed has further evolved, such a sequel may perhaps sometime be written. ni A CONVERSION **0, Lord, above all save our young men from the curse of rum. Break, God, the power of the saloon. Bless the great cause of temperance and all its leaders," etc. With such phrases and many more Samuel Cooley always concluded his petitions to the Almighty at the Wednes- day evening prayer meetings in Stringfield, which he always attended and in which he always took part. He was a fairly prosperous farmer whose large old house was just outside a large and growing New England village. Here his father and grandfather had lived, and when the former died the church promptly made Samuel deacon in his father's place. He was in the early forties, large, strong, ruddy, steady in his habits, a hard worker, a con- servative Democrat because this was the party of his sire and grandsire. He had graduated at a local high school, but had no disposition to seek the so-called higher educa- tion; nor had he traveled much. At twenty-one he had married a neighbor's daughter, Prue Ketcham, who had borne him two sons and two daughters, the oldest a boy now eighteen and the youngest, a girl, thirteen. Samuel Cooley prided himself upon being old-fashioned, and loved the good old ways. He was unfavorable to most labor-saving devices, whether on the farm or indoors. In vain his boys had urged him to put in a mowing or a reaping machine, an auto truck, a system of drainage pipes for the meadow, and enter upon a path of progress as his neigh- bors had done. But whenever he had yielded to these 147 148 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST ** new-fangled movements'' it was slowly and with reluc- tance. During tHe winter he had one hired man, and in the summer usually three, hut when he engaged them he always stipulated that every one who worked for him must have signed a temperance pledge, and if any of them broke it or was heard of in the village saloon it meant t£at he must seek a job elsewhere. This strenuous and intolerant attitude had made help hard for him to get and harder to keep, and, in fact, if he but knew it, necessitated his paying a higher wage; but in such matters he was uncompromising. Those who knew his family and its his- tory ascribed his teetotalism and his general pharisaic op- position to so many of the joys of life, in part, at least, to the fact that both an uncle and a great-uncle had fallen victims to John Barleycorn and the one had become a town drunkard and the other a general reprobate. Samuel Cooley even kept up the good New England custom of family prayers after breakfast every morning, and this service the **help" both indoors and out were expected to attend, though in the haying time and when work was pressing the time devoted to it was somewhat curtailed to be made up on Sundays. He was not only a religious, but a severely moral man, built on a puritanical model such as can only be found now in New England and even here only very rarely and in rural communities. And he was proud to be so regarded by those who knew him. He was honest, lived plainly, economically, saved money and put it in the bank, hated tobacco as an abomination second only to alcohol, was a strict Sabbatarian, kept up the old traditional, puritanical prejudice against cards, dancing, indecorous slangy language, and everything that could be called frivolous. Evenings after the work was done he read his daily paper or his weekly Temperance Advocate, and perhaps listened to his daughters* simple rendering of their small repertoire of tunes on a melodion A CONVERSION 149 which he had bought for theln, not without some hesitation and only at their mother's earnest solicitation. It was the practice of the household to retire when the nine o'clock curfew rang in one of the town churches. Thus the weeks, months and years glided placidly along and thus they seemed likely to go on until in the due course of time Cooley should be gathered to his fathers and his sons in their turn should take his place. But in the autumn of the year when Samuel Cooley was forty-five there was an exciting local political cam- paign. The lukewarm attitude on the temperance question of Squire Brewster, who had for many years represented the town in the state legislature, was severely criticized. Other political and local issues entered in and created an excitement unprecedented in the community, and in the end Samuel Cooley, after much genuine reluctance, consented to become an opposition candidate, and to the surprise of many and the consternation of the Squire and his over- confident followers Cooley was elected by a small majority. In due time, thus, he left the farm in care of the boys for the winter and found himself situated in a modest hotel in Boston, which city he had never ^dsited before. As a prohibition law-maker, commissioned by his constit- uents to make the State safe on the temperance ques- tion and with an ardent desire to do what in him lay for the great cause so near his heart, on finding a bar in the basement of his hotel he very promptly moved to another, poorer and less conveniently located though it was. The first weeks of the session were uneventful. Cooley made many acquaintances but none of them intimate, and began to feel that he understood the run of things a little, and although his voice had never been heard and was not likely to be heard on the floor of the House he did not hesitate to make his convictions known. Then the all- 150 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST important prohibftion bill was introduced and its discus- sion was opened ably on both sides. This was the state of things when one day Cooley, as if by chance, met a fellow-member of the House whom he knew as Sturgis and who seemed to be a man of great influence and always the center of a group that appeared to look to him for leadership. He was a tall, large man of rather imposing physique and seemed much at home in his environment. * ' Cooley, won 't you come to lunch with me between ses- sions — that is, if you have no other engagements ? " he said to him. Cooley felt not a little pleased that this experienced and distinguished member knew his name and also that he subtly assumed that he might have other engagements when he had, in fact, nowhere found himself in demand but felt rather strange and alone in the city, and so he readily accepted. He was still more pleased when he found no other guests at the little table save a Mr. Howes, who was introduced as an outside friend. Sturgis ordered wisely and well, and with the viands was brought a generous pitcher of lemonade. After some general conversation Sturgis spoke incident- ally of the Mahew, or Prohibition Bill, remarking that the forces aligned pro and con were very evenly matched and, in fact, it seemed that perhaps a single vote would decide. *'I suppose your mind is made up, Cooley,^' he said. '*! shall vote for it," said Cooley, *'of course." *^So I supposed," said Sturgis. ''For me, too, there is only one side." "That is right," put in Howes, "but these liquor men are well-organized and have bushels of money. They would right now slip a sum in greenbacks up into four figures and no questions asked for a single vote." A CONVERSION 151 **Yoii don't say so," said Sturgis, as if in surprise. **Such a roll would look good to me. Just how do they do it?'' **Why," said Howes, "you have simply to slip word to Houstein, the little Jew lawyer, that, whereas you were for the measure, the arguments for the other side had been so strong that you are now open-minded, and then you will receive a big greenback by mail as a kind of retaining fee for you to make further investigations for the benefit of the House, so you can go about and inquire further into the merits of both sides. You would, of course, hear all who come to you for and against the measure, and talk matters over with those you know who are for it, and if you are convinced and vote their way then the rest of the pile will reach you by the wireless route, and then there will be nothing to show that you had ever had a cent. It is a wonderful metliod and absolute secrecy is, of course, a matter of honor." **I confess I should like to know something more about this," said Sturgis. **How does it strike you, Cooley?" **Why," said the latter, *'I don't know much about these things but it looks to me like downright corruption and bribery. Is that the way they do things here?" **WeU," said Sturgis, thoughtfully, *'I am rather in- clined to think that you are right about it." **0f course he is right," put in Howes. "But that is the way the members of the opposition work." Meanwhile, the lunch was most appetizing to Cooley and the lemonade had a delightful and, to him, new flavor or tang about it, and the more he sipped and tasted the more he wanted. These two men were so sympathetic and congenial that he felt his old reserve gradually slipping away from him and he became talkative. He told his new- found friends something of his native town, his farm, and even his family, and how he came to be elected in place of 152 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST Squire Brewster whom both the others knew and spoke of in high terms as a sagacious man but not always inclined to be decided enough when great moral issues were at stake, subtly implying in what they said a certain admira- tion for one who could win out over so doughty a com- petitor. It was now Cooley who led the conversation, and he grad- ually launched out on a theme which, thanks to the many home talks in public on the subject he had given and especially to the Advocate he had so diligently read, made him feel more or less at home. And he surprised and apparently entertained and delighted his two new friends by his portrayal of the evils of intemperance. He quoted statistics and told much of the sufferings of wives and children of habitual drunkards and of inebriation as a cause of crime, while the sympathies of his hearers, who glanced significantly at each other, seemed to increase. ' ' He surely puts it strong and well, ' ' said Sturgis. * * The House ought to, and really must, hear these things." **And that would probably settle the fortunes of the bill,'' added Howes. ''Do you really think so?" queried Cooley. ''Surest thing on earth," replied Howes. "You are a bom advocate, Cooley. If you only repeat what you said here to us, and with the same fervor, it will settle the fate of the measure. Wet your lips with one more drink of this lemonade and we will return and shall be just in time for the afternoon session." Thus fortified within and without, Cooley, escorted by one friend at either arm, entered the Chamber just as the speaker's gavel fell, calling the session to order. The morning discussion of the Prohibition Bill was to be con- tinued. Before any one else could do so, Cooley rose and his voice rang out clearly and strongly, "Mr. Speaker!" He A CONVERSION 153 was recognized, as he a little uncertainly rose in his place, steadying himself with a hand on either side of the ma- hogany desk before him. *'Mr. Speaker," he began, **I represent but a small part of this great State. I had not meant to speak but my good friends, Sturgis and Howes," pointing to each of them, **tell me that it is my duty, and I (hie) never shirk a duty. ' * The House was quick to divine the situation, and a hearty round of applause rang out with cries of ' ' Bravo ! ' ' and one keen member from the opposition shouted, ' * Three cheers for Sturgis and Howes." Cooley was flushed and pleased and his manner showed that, having so successfully broken the ice, he was resolved to push on and do his duty to the very uttermost. He drew a deep breath, grasped the desk more firmly, and pro- ceeded. **Yes, it is my duty," he shouted, *Ho raise my feeble voice against the infamous iniquity of King Alcohol who is so firmly enthroned in this State." Here came a new salvo of more prolonged applause which the Speaker could not suppress, but this time it was all by the opposition, while the supporters of the bill were silent. *'Itum," he cried, *'is the greatest curse in the world,'' banging his fist down on the desk with a resounding thump. ** Think of all the poor wives and hungry, starving chil- dren " Here his voice broke and a tear from either eye coursed down his cheek as he thrust both hands into his pocket for his handkerchief. In regaining his poise he swayed over toward the right and then over toward the left. The room seemed to be whirling about him and, catch- ing at the next desk, he fell prone in the aisle. Such a scene had not been witnessed in the Capitol before in the memory of the oldest members. Amidst confusion and out- cry Cooley was picked up and borne, feebly struggling but 154 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST loudly vociferating, from the hall and into a small ante- room, where he was deposited upon a couch and left to a comatose, soon to be a stertorous, sleep. Thus Sturgis, the boss of the liquor party in the legisla- ture, and Howes, the experienced lobbyist, killed the Pro- hibition Bill for that year. ''They got up a scream and strangled it," as one member tersely put it. Poor Cooley awoke hours later and made his way back alone to his hotel, slowly realizing what had befallen him. It was too disgusting and also humiliating for him or any one to face. Even the scavenger press stated that he had fallen suddenly ill in the midst of an impassioned speech, but all his colleagues knew that such things would eventu- ally spread even to Stringfield. He felt he could never go back to the House, or even face his home again. Thus he lingered, day after day, in the hotel, and wandered about the city most of all in the evenings. Once or twice he met a legislator who inquired, with a veneer of courtesy to veil the irony of it, how he had recovered from his shock. But he knew that they knew the awful fact that the pillar of virtue in his community had been drunk, very drunk, and had made a ghastly exhibition of himself and defeated the cause he loved and was commissioned to up- hold in the Capitol of his State. To explain would be to reveal himself as a ''rube" and a fool, as weU as a weak- ling. There seemed no way out. Rehabilitation was im- possible. Thus as the days passed he came to regard him- self almost as an outcast and heard within all the mad coun- sels of despair. From his intolerable reflections he instinctively grasped at every source of diversion. It was the mad instinct of self-preservation. He ventured into the theater, an insti- tution he had never seen before, and found it harmless and amazingly entertaining, so much so that he went again and again. Movie shows of all sorts helped him to forget A CONVERSION 155 his distress. He strolled into the nine A. M. session of the police court, and learned much that was new and instruc- tive of the seamy side of life and how the other half lived. He fell in with a very engaging drummer at his hotel, who seemed drawn to him, and the attraction became mu- tual. This Cohen was full of interesting and racy remi- niscences which suggested certain temptations that Cooley had never felt before. One night they strolled into a bar- room and both took a glass of beer, and later he sipped rather freely from a cocktail that was brought while they were dining together. * ' One must learn, ' ' he told himself, * * to know the enemy if he meets him again, and also one must be convinced that he can indulge and remain temperate. To resist is better than to flee temptation. ' ' Another stranger and transient guest at his hostelry in- itiated him into bridge. And once he staked a dollar on a game of poker, won, and had the courage and the sense not to play again that night. He yielded to the fascina- tion of billiards enough to see that he might indulge more, if he wanted to, without scathe. He smoked a little, enough to know how it felt, and, to make our narrative complete, he even toyed with other temptations in ways that must here only be suggested and which cannot be described. He was intent only on knowing life as it really was, and he had a confidence, which proved fully justified, that he would not fail in his experiments. He had a kind of in- stinct to be led into temptation, rather than to be saved from it, as Jesus prayed. Perhaps the ideal that lay con- cealed at the bottom of his soul was not unlike that of Du- mas, who wanted to know everything, evil as well as good, in the world. Suffice it to say that all these little adventures together served to lift the curtain to a great world of which he had hitherto known nothing, and what was his surprise to find that he liked it passing well and he thought 156 EECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST that he was not harmed but benefited by it. The kind of virtue he now longed for was a manly virtue that did not need the support of precepts that appealed to juveniles, and it was also of the normal kind which did not need as- ceticism or any extreme curative treatment. What he was really after was a true classical temperance that held a golden way between all extremes and regarded nothing human as foreign. Thus it was that Cooley went through a kind of moral molting. Then the long-delayed blow fell. He had not once re- visited his seat in the House since the awful incident that had proved so tragically undoing, but had intimated noth- ing of this in his letters home, although nearly three months had passed. One day he received a marked copy of the home paper, which intimated in a veiled, yet most sug- gestive manner what had really happened. ''What if a certain prominent citizen sent out on a mission to the Capi- tol had disgraced himself and wrecked the cause he was sent to serve by a public exhibition of intoxication, and if his seat in the assembly, where he was sent to look after the interests of those who elected him, had been vacant ever since that incident?'' etc., etc. It might have at first struck one as a libel, but he knew that in fact it was but a part of the whole shameful truth. He must act. But how? His wilder thoughts suggested that he mortgage his farm and start for parts unknown, beginning life anew and under another name. But he had done nothing really wrong, and flight would look too much like a confession of real guilt. He was no coward. It took him a long time to make up his mind, but when he did, he acted, as was his wont, with promptitude. He wrote to the chairman of his party committee at home, resigning his office as legislator, to take effect at once, *'for personal reasons." Shortly after he went home, he gathered his family together and told them frankly the whole story that centered in the A CONVERSION 157 fateful and singularly tinctured lemonade. But if there were no reservations, there were also no details in this family confession about his life in the Capitol during the subsequent months. This little course he had given him- self in the great school of life was his own secret. In con- clusion he told his household that he had brought home from the legislature a newer and larger view of life, that, whereas he was asleep before, he was now awake, and that they would see a change and that he believed himself a new and better man, and that he had a truer and richer out- look upon the world, and that he was going to adopt a new religious creed, for he had heard considerable liberal and some radical views, not only from the pulpits during his peregrinations among them on Sundays, but from men of the world he had met. Thus he returned to his place and his home and his work upon the farm. But socially he was ostracized to a degree possible per- haps nowhere but in a conservative old town in New Eng- land. But it was his family that suffered most. The chil- dren were taunted because their ''drunkard" father had disgraced the whole town. And, most of all, his wedded partner of twenty years, pious, austere, more conserva- tive and untraveled even than her husband and long in feeble health, weakened, sickened and died under the shock and mortification of it all — "of heartbreak," the gossips said. As for his former activities in the church, in which most of the social life of the community had long centered, Cooley had sagacity enough to know that even if he had wanted to renew them, he would be no longer welcome. And so he absented himself from all religious services and resigned his office of deacon. But this did not satisfy the watchdogs of Zion, and when he ignored the summons of the church committee to appear before its members and 158 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST explain and confess, lie was dropped from the roll of church members. Some of the most scientific students of human nature have lately told us that the middle forties are on the whole the very best years of a normal, modern man's life, that about then men incline to take stock of life and perhaps take new tacks, and that almost never afterward do great changes occur either for better or for worse. It was just this law that Cooley now, though all unconsciously, illus- trated. For a time he again thought of making the break with his past complete by selling his ancestral acres and home and going West and starting anew. But he knew that there, too, sooner or later, wherever he might settle his story would find him out. This course, moreover, did not square with his New England conscience, and to his dogged will it seemed too much like retreat, if not confession. The net result of his many musiQgs was that he decided, like Hester in The Scarlet Letter, to stay right where he was and to make the best and the most of the rest of his life. If his **fair* had really, as the church thought, cut off his hope for a better future beyond the grave, he would try to get all he possibly could out of the here and now. **One world at a time, gentlemen, and this one now," he had read somewhere, and liked the sentiment. Thus, off soon to the State Agricultural College went both his sons, where they were told to learn everything new and good that could possibly be applied to the old place. Soon, too, the girls were sent away to a school of domestic science and social service, with courses of physical train- ing, dancing, etc. He bought beer by the keg and served it out moderately every evening to such of his workmen as desired it. He bought a billiard table and had a large attic, hitherto unused, finished off and furnished as a kind of clubroom, where smoking was not disallowed. And now that the children were away and the wife dead and the A CONVERSION 159 farm work increasing, he had to employ six men and two women to conduct the place properly. Under these cir- cumstances all were loyal and interested, and the attrac- tion of the saloon in town abated for his men. Sunday presented a serious problem. No work save the necessary chores was done and every one did as he pleased. On that day the carry-all was placed at the disposal of pic- nic parties, and some evenings a few of the neighbors came in for a social dance or a card game, to the great scandal of the orthodox and the pious. Young people were especially attracted, and despite the affirmations of the clergyman that in the Cooley place the Sabbath was being desecrated, they continued to frequent it, especially Sun- day evenings when those that were able furnished music. Thus things went on for two years. The boys had brought home many useful and practical ideas. The old mill-pond on their place was drained and its rich deposit of muck and loam used on the farm as fertilizer and sold. A gravel pit, long freely accessible to all, was commercial- ized and a small fee was charged per cart-load to all who used it. The Cooleys adopted the fashion of using it for con- crete, for which an outfit was bought, and this was loaned for a small fee when not needed for home work. "With its aid, a new bam with model stables was constructed, and then adjoining it a silo, and later a model pig- and hen- house were built. The soil of the various parts of the farm had been taken to the College and analyzed, and new crops were put in with fertilizer as suggested by the analysis. Improved machinery was bought and put to work. A water-gas plant was put in and its products used for cook- ing and lighting. The attention of a large company of manufacturers of agricultural instruments in a distant city was attracted and this concern, after due deliberation, adopted the policy of making the Cooley place a model to show the community what could be done; so their advice 160 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST was now added to the suggestions the boys brought for the land and the girls for the house. Here the neighbors could see object-lessonwise what the very latest methods and appliances could do. Exhibitions were held and new in- struments, tools, and new methods of doing work were demonstrated. Cooley was now forty-seven. Just before his **fall,'' a new female principal had come to the old, and very slightly endowed, local academy, which was half pri- mary and half high school. She meanwhile was bring- ing, too, a new spirit to the town through the medium of the young people. She insisted that teaching the need- ful standard topics of the old curriculum should be sup- plemented in many ways, so that children should know all possible about their environment. Under her guidance and inspiration they collected, pressed and labeled grasses, ferns, and, in short, specimens of all the local flora. A kind of town museum was started in an unused upper room of the older of the two school buildings, where insects, both harmless and pestiferous, samples of local birds and their nests and eggs, and all the land fauna were gathered. The school botany and zoology were thus made practical. Greek was dropped, and Latin dwindled save for a few ;;vho defi- nitely planned careers in which it would be of service. History was taught backward from current events, and be- gan in the story of the town and widened centrifugally to that of the county, the state, the nation, and the world. Culinary art and domestic science were taught practically to the girls. Parent conferences were organized, the school grounds were improved, a school bank started, and the older pupils even founded a civic club where local affairs were debated, and finally a school press was organized, which published a tiny weekly sheet devoted to local bet- terment, noting improvements, defects and needs in door- yards, gardens, houses, walks, and roadways, in which the A CONVERSION 161 Cooley place often figured fiavorably. The seliool gardens and playgrounds, which had been begun years before but had fallen into neglect, were revived, enlarged and put to work, for the new school-mistress had traveled, read and thought much along the most progressive educational lines, to a degree, indeed, which had brought disaster to her in a larger and more censored and oversupervised school sys- tem in another part of the state. But Selma Sears clung to her own convictions, and here she was popular from the start, and her work was soon found so useful by the community that, as time passed, the committee, although its members often shook their heads at the new departures, did not feel sure or strong enough to offer much opposition. The worst thing about I\Iiss Sears was that she showed little evidence of being religious as this was understood by this community. She had attended church the first two Sun- days she had spent in town, but had not been seen there since, and w^hen she was approached by the superintendent (who showed some inquisitiveness about her religious state of mind and standing) about taking a class in the Sunday School, she had gone so far as to glance over the standard lessons she would be required to teach and declined **for want of time and strength." In fact, she had wisely de- cided that no salvation could come to this community from the droning church she had found there. Miss Sears sent a request to Cooley to bring her upper classes over to his place some Saturday, and when they came Cooley elected himself chairman of a reception com- mittee, the other members of which were his two sons and his two daughters. The latest novelties in farm procedure were demonstrated, and refreshments served, and thus and then it was that Cooley and Miss Sears, who had heard so much favorable and unfavorable of each other, met. Both realized that they were working for the same uplift to the community by different methods and that they 162 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST thus had much in common. Cooley had by this time far more than regained his former self-respect, and had not only self-confidence but a strong vein of new ambitions, some of which, although he had hardly begun to realize it yet, extended beyond the limits of his own acres. In place of his earlier hectic religiosity there was a sullen, smolder- ing rancor against the cruel judgments of society, and espe- cially against the pharisaic righteousness of the church that, instead of forgiving seventy times seven, welcoming the prodigal, seeking out the one lost sheep, etc., had so lightly put its cruel ban upon a man's whole life, which had, save for a single lapse, been blameless. Selma Sears, too, had dismally failed in her first educational position and had her own little inferno of doubts whether all her weU-nourished and warmly cherished ideals might have to be, after all, unrealizable. But her years of success here had given her, too, new hope and confidence. Thus, as a result of this meeting, each felt that the other was an ally, and that there could and should be some kind of union of their forces. It was Selma who first suggested betterment meetings at the farm Sunday afternoons. To the objections of those who might hesitate at attending on account of the day, it was said that the church had allowed Sunday afternoons to go to waste till it had become not merely useless to the community, but often worse, for temptations follow in the wake of idleness. The first session was on gardens. Each told what he or she was doing. Then the elder Cooley boy told what he had seen at the College and what he had read, and new departures were suggested. Other sessions were devoted to flowers, poultry, sheep, livestock, water supply, walls and fences, roads, each of the chief crops of Stringfield, the new and the old education, newspapers and periodicals in connection with the old library now kept open every Sunday and every Saturday evening, the insti- A CONYERSION 163 tutional church and church extension and federation, for, besides the larger church already mentioned, there were five other feebler ones in town. After much discussion, culminating in the annual town meeting, it was voted by a very small majority to open the Academy building to these meetings, and when they were held here educational themes were in order, especially the various forms of school extension. Cooley opened a special pasture for golf, and a ball-field was measured off here and three tennis courts fitted up, and a bath-house erected beside the old South Pond on which Cooley 's land abutted, and evenings the new barn floor made a good dancing pavilion. Here, too, light drinks were served at plain board tables. In the fall an amusement hall was erected, with light and heat, as a more permanent home for all these social activities, and in. it was a small, simple stage for amateur dramatics and a stand for the band which one of Miss Sears' teachers had organized. Thus Stringfield gradually came to be divided into three groups: first, the church people, religious, severe, or- thodox and uncompromising, and antagonistic to these lib- eral amusements; second, the saloon group, composed chiefly of the workmen and women in a large woolen mill, where almost the only foreign element of the population was found; while the Cooley-Sears group made up the third. The first and second were thus brought into a strange harmony in the bitterness of their antagonism to the third. Although they never ostentatiously made com- mon cause, none could fail to perceive that there was a very unique sympathy that was likely to spring up between the interests of these hereditary foes, for the church and the factory interests always voted against every suggestion emanating from the other group. The church was the first to weaken, and finally to capitu- late, for it was just at this juncture that there arrived a 164 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST new preacher and his wife, whose acquaintance one of the Cooley boys had made, and suggested to his father, who had judiciously and very indirectly and diplomatically en- gineered him into his position. He and his young wife were fresh from their studies and with no experience save a year in social service work. He and his sagacious help- mate soon realized the situation. With great tact and in the face of difficulties that often seemed insurmountable, he organized an Inter-Church Young People's Club, and this was soon leavened by those members of it who had fallen under the Cooley-Sears influences. It was in some sense a conflict between the young and the old in which families were often divided. But it was a very vital and new bond of union between the hitherto aloof and often hostile sects, and its organization really came to mark an epoch in the history of Stringfield. And after much strenu- ous debate the Cooleyites were even invited to use the church buildings and grounds as they wished for their Sunday afternoon meetings, which had so far been held either at the farm or at the school. The Rev. Frank Burke was fearless and aggressive, and his wife winning. Cooley was invited back to full member- ship in the church with its now very socialistic, ethical, and non-theological creed, and he consented to return to the parish, but to the church never again. Selma Sears fol- lowed his example. In the new parish house, next to the church, there was a reading and smoking room and here two pool tables were set up with stands for cards and, strange to relate, these games under proper supervision held their own despite severe criticism. And thus the regener- ating influence of the play spirit was set to work. Meanwhile, the reports of these extraordinary and rapid new departures spread abroad, often at first in a most exaggerated and sometimes perverse form, so that visitors from a distance, at first social workers, and then teachers, A CONVERSION 165 preachers, and a few young graduates and lawyers with, political ambitions, came. The two other clergymen who lived in the town began to Be seen at the Sunday afternoon sessions, amazed and shocked at first, but slowly realizing that their ministrations had been dull and unappealing. And thus they slowly awoke, as if from a long and tedious dream, and found new inspiration as they saw that even amusements that they had always opposed could be made not only innocent but regenerative. And slowly the oppo- sition, which had at first been vociferous and sometimes almost vituperative, subsided and the staid citizens of Stringfield, who had lived the lives of their progenitors with but slight and few concessions to the modern pro- gressive god of things as they are, began to feel in their hearts a new pride in their town and the recognition it was winning in the larger world outside. Now the common enemy was the great factory and the hotel with its bar, owned and operated by a strong absentee corporation, so that here a new strategy was needful. The long row of workmen ^s and women's tenements upon the lower street was crowded, unhygienic and squalid, and the moral condition of the employees was bad. At least half of them were of foreign birth, and there were almost no recreations and no social intercourse between them and the rest of the town. Here again, Cooley, now the leading and most prosperous citizen, was appealed to, and slowly and surely he began to feel a new responsibility. Thus, after some preliminary investigations, the three allies, the teacher, the pastor and his wife, called upon the resident manager of the factory and set forth such facts and statis- tics as they had been able to gather, concerning truancy, crime, immorality, intemperance, and living conditions. They told him that the new prominence Stringfield was acquiring in the county and state made the conditions as represented certain in the near future to be given unfa- 166 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST vorable publicity, adding that in their opinion better wages and housing were imperative. Hickson listened to all they had to say, but expressed little sympathy, either in manner or words, but promised to bring the matter before the im- pending meeting of the directors. Ten days later he gave them their answer, which was in effect that under the pres- ent conditions of the market and of raw material his board of directors could not see their way just now to take defi- nite action but would not forget the matter, adding signifi- cantly that if changes were really needed they themselves would naturalfy be the first to see them, and would have the strongest motive to act without outside suggestion. Seeing in these temporizing generalities no prospect of amelioration the self-constitated committee realized that they must find another angle of approach. The first step they decided on was to bring in a trained investigator of factory conditions and his woman helper. After a few weeks their report was filed. It covered wages, profits, hours of labor, housing conditions, hygienic and moral sug- gestions. The showing was, on the whole, not less than ap- palling. In this establishment at this somewhat isolated place almost every law of safety against accident, disease, cleanliness, care of the old and disabled, school attendance, child labor, work of young mothers before and after con- finement, had been disregarded, and immorality and drunk- enness had flourished. The Factory Board itself owned and made a generous profit from the saloon and hotel. It also owned the groceries and other stores where clothing and domestic wares were sold at excessive rates. It tabooed unions and collective bargaining, hiring and discharging individuals at its own sweet will. When the substance of this report was laid before Hick- son his indignation was uncontrolled. The facts and fig- ures were met by a blank denial, and he insisted that these things were no business of outsiders and that such inquiry A CONVERSION 167 without authorization of the company was impertinence, and challenged the reformers to do their worst. The battle was now on, for it was too late to beat a re- treat. Hence, at Cooley's advice a dozen of the most in- telligent workmen and two women were invited to the farm one Sunday afternoon and the outline of this expert's report, which was essentially true, was laid before them. To their delight the Catholic priest, who had ministered to most of the factory people who still held allegiance to any church, invited himself to this conference and proved most sympathetic and helpful. From him, too, it was found that there was a great deal of unrest and far more recogni- tion of hard conditions on the part of the toilers themselves than the committee had dreamed of. It was at this meeting that, after long discussion, the extreme method of a strike, which, despite its dangers, seemed on the whole the only way out, was finally agreed upon as the only expedient pos- sible under the circumstances, and to this end the details of procedure were worked out. We have no space or need to describe the stirring weeks and months that followed. Unionization, carefully drawn demands presented and denied, a walkout, a lockout, pick- eting against scabs, injunctions, and later riots and sabo- tage, and finally a great explosion and a fire that destroyed the mill and most of the tenements, marked the stages of this attempt at reform. Dynamite had been found near the big dam in time to save a part of it, but most of the lower village had been swept away, with some loss of life. The syndicate that had made the mill here a part of a larger trust system found it inexpedient to rebuild, and all that remained of its holdings was sold for a song to a group of local men, headed by Cooley, most of the employees mean- while having left town. With the dam partially and power-plant wholly intact, it was at length decided to utilize them. First a gristmill 168 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST was built that ground what corn and grain it could and sold at moderate profits, such as meal, shorts, and other provender as was demanded by the farmers. Then came a new creamery, which connected and evaluated the milk with a Babcock centrifugal machine and soon made cheese. A new sawmill came next. Then electricity was generated- and sold, and finally, as there was still much power, a modern woolen mill of sufficient size to take care of the products of this sheep-raising county was built and put to work, and new cottage tenements of the latest patterns erected. An expert was brought in to test every employee, for general intelligence and efficiency, and each was given his place in the establishment accordingly. Moral stamina was evaluated as far as that could be done. The latest machinery was put in. A cooperative emporium was or- ganized and the principle of profit-sharing was everywhere adopted. The old hotel, which had been acquired by its proprietor from the company and which had held out against the rising tide of reform, at length capitulated and became a community house, and its bar was allowed to sell only beer and light wines. Easy terms were arranged for the workmen who desired to purchase their homes and the ample gardens that were attached to each. A trade school, the curriculum of which had special reference to local insti- tutions, was begun. The dangers of paternalism were rec- ognized from the start and the notion of self-help was al- ways and everywhere appealed to. Thus, in as many ways as the water comes down at Lodore, the lower street was at length redeemed and Stringfield came to be as proud of it as of its agricultural and social and religious progressive- ness. Now Cooley was nearing fifty and Selma Sears, who had been his active coadjutor in so many of his community ac- tivities, was thirty-five. Both his sons and his elder daugh- ter were married and lived in nearby homes of their own. A CONVERSION 169 His farm was well maimed and lie began to relax from his arduous labor, wbile Miss Sears* school now almost ran itself. Both of them had a pleasing sense of tasks success- fully accomplished, numerous as were the details that yet required attention. Both had time to look in a broader way at the present and to wonder what the rest of their lives had in store. Both had passed the age of romance, and each respected the character and the achievements of the other. So absorbed had both been in their work for the community that they had had little time to think of their personal relations, despite the fact that they had been very close and confidential. Their cooperation had always been complete and sympathetic and of late each had come to recognize a new kind of self-consciousness in the other whenever they met. Each, too, had asked what it meant, but neither had quite found any acceptable an- swer.* It was Cooley who did so first, and he acted with characteristic promptitude. One June evening after supper with his men, instead of returning to the field to finish the day 's work, as he gener- ally did, he walked across the fields, when the sun was set- ting, to Selma^s cottage. He had not changed his working" garb, and found her in her flower garden. He had never called on her thus before, save in exigencies where his pur- pose was obvious and anticipated. But if she felt some mild surprise and curiosity she did not show it. **I have come to talk to you,'* he said, as they sat on a rustic seat under the cherry blossoms. **We have cooper- ated with and understood each other pretty well all these years. ' ' Then "he paused. *'Yes," she said, calmly enough, but not without a faint flutter of anticipation. "We have come to know each other, too, pretty well, haven't we?'* *' Surely," she said, '^I think we may say that." 170 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST **We have had about the same aims and have never had any disagreements." **That is true," she replied, *^ except about the school playgrounds," a matter where their views had been at first widely divergent, but in which hers had finally pre- vailed. He ignored this. '*And we can honestly and modestly admit that we have done some good for this town. ' ' *'I am sure you at least may say that," she said. *'Do you know," looking her fully and searchingly in the face, * ' that just before you came here I was practically expelled from the legislature for being beastly drunk on the floor of the House?" ''Oh," she cried in great distress, **you must not speak like that. It is too horrible." * ' That ^s just what it was, horrible. So you have heard ? ' ' **0f course," she replied, "I heard the gossip when I first came here and I half believed it at first and was not anxious to know you, but I saw long ago how unjust it was, and everybody has practically forgotten it." *'No, it will never be forgotten, although it may now be pretty well silenced, but the worst you have heard was probably not so bad as the truth. But," he went on, "I liave atoned and I want to tell you what will probably strike you worst of all, that I do not regret it, that it was the best thing that ever happened to me. It showed me what the world was and how bitter, how cruel. It showed me the bigotry of pious Christians and, what was a thou- isand times more precious a lesson, it taught me that there were recuperative powers within the soul 9,nd that there is no salvation save that which a man achieves for and in himself. It showed me that we must live in, and make the best of, this world, and that if we cannot achieve Heaven here we never can do so elsewhere. It taught me what hypocrisy is and what a smug life I had led. But for that A CONVERSION 171 great awakening I should have remained as I was to the end. That experience with drunkenness, disgracing myself and the town I represented, awakened me, for in a sense I had been asleep. It was like the light and voice Paul saw and heard in the desert. The sanctimonious thought that when I came home and had to leave the church I was entirely beyond the pale, and I almost felt at times that I was in a sense converted downward, as it were *devilward'! But if it was Satan's doings, I am now his disciple. ' ' ''No, no," she broke in, stopping a wave of eloquence that had surprised them both. ''You shall not talk like that. You overcame. It was a magnificent fight and a magnificent victory. You were a hero. It was all so won- derful, more so than I have ever known, heard or read of. It is not only you but this town that has been regenerated. It is not the devil, but the spirit of the Blessed Christ that has possessed you. I think He has inspired you to do all that has been done in this town. You are a true follower of the dear Lord, although you do not know it. ' * She broke off abruptly and her face flushed as she felt her enthusi- asm had found too frank expression. ""Well," he said, now more calmly and deliberately, after a long pause, "what I came for was to tell you that I have at length realized that far more of my good work than I knew, such as it is, has been inspired by you.'' "How can that possibly be?" she said, with genuine surprise and a new thrill. "Why," he said, "I heard all about your leaving your first position, and how bitter and personal was the struggle which culminated in your dismissal. I was encouraged to see how splendidly you had organized victory out of de- feat." Again she flushed, but added, * ' I hoped that you had not heard of that, but I knew and felt that we had something 172 RECREATIONS OP A PSYCHOLOGIST in common. In a sense we were both conquering our past, but what I have done is nothing compared with your work. ' ' **Well/' he said, "now we understand each other. What is the next step ? What does the logic of events point to ? What have we yet to do?'' ''What?" she said. **We must marry, or else the whole story will be unfin- ished.'' ''Oh!" she cried. "We are both beyond the callow, gushy age of romance, or I would have told you on my knees, perhaps, that I be- lieve I have long loved you, although I have, in fact, but lately realized it. Do you want me to kneel and tell you that I cannot live without you ? Indeed, I can perhaps hardly honestly say that. You, too, do not need me for support or protection, but we do at least like the things we have done together and stand for. We are both mature and sensible. We are not too far apart in age. Our temperaments fit. We might or might not have children. That we could naturally better decide later. The school could now dis- pense with your services, unless you wish to continue them in such ways or to such a degree as you can make compati- ble with your new duties. We ought to make a new home together which should be a center of the social influences stiU so needed in this community. I have tentative plana for a new house which you shall help me complete. I have thought it all out in the last few days. It doubtless seems sudden to you and you have had no time to consider. I do not expect your answer now, much as I want it. You will have many things to consider. This is my errand, and now it is done. Good-by until I have your answer." He ex- tended his hand as he rose from the seat. "One moment," she said. "I like your manly way of asking me. I respect and honor you far more than any A CONVERSION 173 other man I have ever known. I think I love you, but I cannot be sure just now what I ought to do. You know it would involve a very great change for me. How glad I am that you do not try to carry my heart by storm, like the hero of the stage or the novel. Come to-morrow night for your answer.'* They parted with a firm and somewhat prolonged hand- clasp. That night each of them sat late under the trees of his and her yard, and each retired and slept soundly and serenely, and on the morrow both went to their work out- wardly calm but inwardly preoccupied and tense, but on the whole happy. Almost at the stroke of seven he ap- peared, this time in his best suit, when she met him in her best attire. They walked to the seat by the cherry tree in silence. Before they sat she faced him. ''Yes,'* was all she said. "I hoped, thought, even prayed that that would be your answer," he said, and pressed her yielding form to his breast with one long fervent kiss. * ' And now, ' ' he said, as they sat down, "how soon can it be?" ''Term closes next week," she said, "and then I can be- gin preparations." "Why not the next day, and make preparations after- ward?" he said finally. And it was so agreed. The wedding was simple and at twilight under her cherry tree. There was no honeymoon or journey, but after receiving congratulations from all, for half the town responded to the general invitation to all that wished to attend, they retired to his home. The first days in their married life were spent in contem- plating plans for his new home, which he had already projected on a site nearby, and a year later it was com- plete and a house-warming party was held, and the old house given over to the "help." Flowers were planted and shrubs placed in abundance, and a spacious garden 174 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST was cultivated behind the garage, and here they often re- ceived their friends. Some years have passed, and as we ring down the cur- tain we see here often at play a boy of four and a girl of two on the lawn. Samuel Cooley was a bom symbolist, although he never knew it, and in the center of the com- plicated arched window over the front door there was a design in colored glass of a big, yellow lemon. ''Fate proved how a lemon could be made lemon-ade. ' ' It was a clumsy pun, and the only one he ever attempted. The lesson of their lives had been that there is a redemptive power in the depths of human nature in all of us that can bring the best results out of the direst evil. IV PEEESTABLISHED HARMONT A MIDSUMMER EEVERY OF A PSYCHOLOGIST One raw, cold day in January just before nightfall, Pro- fessor Hardipan, of Boston, was walking slowly and ab- stractedly from his laboratory to his lodgings, nearly a mile distant. He was a somewhat hard-headed, positivistic man, on the shady side of forty-five, who had already won a very prominent place in the scientific world. He was a psychologist of the empirical, experimental school, inter- ested in human nature generally, and especially in every- thing that was exceptional and out of the way. He had frequented prisons, asylums for all sorts of defectives, was very fond of studying the ways of animals, somewhat bluff in his manner and perhaps a trifle crabbed in his disposi- tion. He was an incorrigible old bachelor, a member of a club of plain speakers, devoted to roasting each other, and was past president of the nil admirari club. He had long ago eschewed society, but had a rather strange foible of reading, thinking, and speculating about marriage and woman in general, and was widely read in all sorts of sta- tistical, physiological and sociological literature bearing upon tlie subject. His friends in whose presence he occa- sionally vented his views about doubling man's rights and halving his duties feared he was almost in danger of be- coming a woman-hater, yet he was at bottom a good-hearted man, a fast and true friend, and some of his blunt and outre notions were thought by those who knew him best to savor of affectation. 175 176 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST He wore a heavy, dark fur overcoat, buttoned with loops, and carried under one arm a portfolio of charts and a few books, and a ease containing a physiological instrument in the other hand. The snow was very deep and a fresh storm was evidently just beginning, and where the snow had not blown from the icy sidewalk it crunched under foot with a dry, crispy noise, the cause of which he had investi- gated in a special memoir. His thoughts were busy, quick- ened by the frosty, gusty air, and he was annoyed at the crowd of shopgirls who just after the closing hour thronged the streets on their way home. He finally struck out into the open common which became more and more secluded the farther he penetrated it, and soon found himself in one of the narrow and unfrequented walks near the center of it, where the snow had been shoveled for many a rod into a high wall on either side, when suddenly he became aware of a lady walking rapidly in the opposite direction. He observed that she was absorbed in a revery of happy mood for she seemed in the dim light to smile to herself, quite unconscious of his approach. Just at that point the snow, that had been melted in the sun on the north side, had frozen so as to make the pathway much higher upon that than upon the other side. He was not a gallant man, and with his head bowed, continued doggedly upon the lower side, characteristically slackening his pace for her to pass. This she would have done readily enough had not the ice upon the upper side, which he left for her, been as smooth as polished glass, so that she slipped suddenly back trans- versely to his side of the path so close in front of him that the bobbing feather of her hat actually tickled his nose and he felt her warm breath for an instant upon his cheek. Not for many a long year had his lips been so near a girlish face. As she stepped quickly back he observed in the -gath- ering night that she was fair, fresh and young, and that she was blushing crimson at the awkward accident. PREESTABLISHED HARMONY 177 Professor Hardipan had been brought to a full stop, but with characteristic promptitude and a natural attempt at gallantry he bravely stepped up the slippery side with a sudden spring that would have carried him safely round her where she stood, so that each could have gone on his way, had she not stepped quickly back half frightened by his sudden spring. Thus it came about that as he glided down to the lower side as she had done instead of having passed her, they were again as before, face to face. The books under his arm had gently touched her shoulder, al- most like a good-natured and confidential nudge in the ribs, and she got the peculiar odor of the laboratory that always enveloped his person like an aura and even smelled the cigars in his vest pocket, that for an instant were not six inches from her pretty nose. Had not her muff and the professor 's box acted as a buffer, their proximity would have been still closer. They stood thus but an instant, when by a simultaneous and natural impulse they both sprang with a strong impetus to the steep side, each with the design of allowing the other to pass with a wide berth before the inevitable slide. So exactly together was this design conceived and executed, however, that there was a square collision at the top and both slid slowly down four feet face to face to the other side again. In the instinct of saving herself from a fall, she automatically clutched at the portfolio of anatomical charts under his arm, which fell and lay open at their feet at an introductory cut of human figures facing each other. She was the first to spring away, while Professor Hardipan, as angry as so petty a vexation could make a petulant and tired man, ground his teeth and clenched his fist as he stooped down to pick up his charts. Unfortunately, how- ever, the loop of his fur coat had caught in the button of her jacket and her recoil had been so sudden that the pro- fessor was literally jerked off his feet and fell upon his 178 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST face before her. Books, cigars, and instruments were scat- tered by his side, and she perforce was bending over him. This tableau, however, was ended quickly, for she stooped Btill lower (as if whispering into his ear as he afterward humorously said) to relax the tension of half his weight about her neck and unbutton the sudden attachment be- tween them. She might easily have sprung over his knees and gone on her placid way as the deep and rare oath of rage, whether at himself, or her, or the fates that were thus suddenly and relentlessly enmeshing him in their web, no doubt prompted her to do. "Who shall tell why she lingered and helped collect his scattered luggage, while he slowly regained his feet? Why, before reencumbering his arms with his par- cels, did he not take her gently by the shoulders and waltz her around in half a circle safely to the other side of him- self ? Why above all did she notice the scratch upon his nose from which the blood was trickling and ask, in the tenderest inflections that ever modulated a woman's voice, if he was hurt ? Why did he reply only by a defiant snort of anger and thus lay up food for future remorse, as her sweet tones echoed and reechoed afterward in the deepest chambers of his heart ? Wliy did no one come along ? Why had any one of the thousand things not happened so that they should not have met at all or a few rods sooner or later? If any of these things had been otherwise, the story of these eventful seconds in this unromantic spot, where the course of true love, it was afterwards plain, had proved all too smooth, would have ended here. As it was, however, when he was up and had full pos- session of all his traps, Professor Hardipan seemed a trifle mollified, and he slightly — let us hope, gracefully — inclined his head to his fair vis-a-vis as he was about to step lightly aside for her to pass. But once more, for truth is incredi- bly stranger than fiction, by one of those rare concomitant PREESTABLISHED HARMONY 179 variations we often experience upon the street or sidewalk, where it is impossible always to turn to the right, she cour- teously and simultaneously did the same. Instantly both dodged back now but half the width of the narrow walk, and back and forth they went several times, each about the same distance and at the same rate. It was a clear case of what Leibnitz called preestab- lished harmony between two hu^man beings. No two pen- dulums, it seemed to the professor, ever swung with more perfect uniformity, and he declared afterwards that the awful thought occurred to him that they might, if breath and muscle had been unfailing, have gone on thus till morn- ing. Each for an instant suspected the other of design, but as they paused and looked into each other's eyes, it was evident that all the thoughts and energies of both were now bent solely and intensely upon ending this most em- barrassing encounter. Each threw a hasty glance behind as if with the thought of turning round and giving up the pass, but as they faced each other again it was evident that vexation had gradually begun to give place to another quaint, if somewhat scientific fancy, in the breast of the professor. It flashed, across him that this must be a ease of perfect identity of the personal equation which he had investigated and which has been said to be the same in no two human beings. Here were two independent human wills, both automatically free, yet perfectly constrained and indeed checkmated, as it were, by the other. It sug- gested to his psychological mind an indefinite perspective of inner harmonies, which might be the other's fate, coun- terpart, or what you will, just as the hypothetical Brun- dusian ass if ''exactly" between the two bundles of hay would surely die of starvation. Up to this moment at least he would have ridiculed the Platonic legend that flitted through his mind of male and female created in pairs or rather as one monadic soul, which Jove later split like a 180 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST sorb apple with a horse-hair, and which malign fate had shuffled with other halves through the world. Here the halves of an original whole were brought together again in their rarest affinity. This timid, palpitating, blushing, yet courageous creature had awakened the greatest interest he had felt toward any individual in all her species these many years. His fair encounteress appeared to be the one in all the world peculiarly adapted to be questioned, observed, studied, experimented on at close range. She somehow seemed to carry a key essential to his deeper self- knowledge. She might possibly sometime be made to love him beyond the dream of the Patient Griselda herself, enough even if he required her to submit to X-ray ; but no, such a thought at least must be absolutely forced out of his mind. Such, at any rate, is a tolerable account of Pro- fessor Hardipan's consciousness at the end of the first minute after he first saw the unknown girl, who still con- fronted him. Thus it came to pass that it was with something like genuine good feeling that he said in tones more bland and apologetic than those he was wont to listen to from his own lips, the simple words, *' Please excuse me,'^ as he was about to deposit his bundles in order, we suppose, to take her hand and chasse half round. Judge then of his utter astonishment to hear at the same time the same words, ** Please excuse me,*' from her lips in perfect soprano ac- companiment, not only of tone and pitch but inflection and cadence. He stood erect and stared into her face in dumb bewilderment. If his own shadow on the ground had risen up, or his own image in the mirror had stood forth and spoken to him, it would have seemed no less a miracle. Nay, he could hardly trust his senses. It must be a dream or hallucination, a mirage and entoptic delusion, a ghost strayed from the rooms of the telepathic society or con- jured up by some mischievous necromantic agency as yet PREESTABLISHED HARMONY 181 unknown to man. Perhaps he was bewitched with a vision of beauty like the knight in Tasso's enchanted forest, and he must violently break the spell that was upon him. He stepped back, and like a mirrored reflection, she did the same. He decided to walk straight on, over or through the phantom, but she advanced apparently with the same hardy and desperate impulse, and he instinctively shrank back, and she did the same. It was thus evident that not only their actions but quite likely their thoughts and feelings were falling into conso- nance; some mystic agency was cadencing their souls into complete unison. Would they ever be able to separate and go different ways? Each had perhaps hypnotized the other at the same time and in the same way and with the same kind of suggestion, for even such things he had read ac- tually sometimes occur. How and by whom could such a spell that seemed to link their very souls be broken? A faint smile, that had irradiated both faces for an in- stant, now vanished and both renerved themselves to quell this sudden apparition of destiny between them. Each sprang to the upper side and tried to clutch the snow on the high drift at the top with greater energy than before, but were able only to meet and by no means to pass each other. To whichever side each turned the other did the same, till the very gas lights in the distance seemed to wink and leer at them faintly, and yet more faintly. The curve of muscular fatigue itself was the same for both. It was no use; they must both with stoic resignation accept the inevitable with what joy they could. Nothing could be done. Their very breathing and loud heartbeats he fancied were both utterly and hopelessly synchronous. As they paused again and for the last time, chagrin and confusion not unmixed with anger and petty despair were depicted upon both countenances; but as their eyes mirrored each other again, each face brought home the utter ludicrous- 182 EECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST ness of the strange adventure, dispelling all other feelings, and both broke forth into laughter. Lightly and cheerily it rang out upon the frosty air. His was lighter and heart- ier than his friends had ever heard, but hers kept both time and tone, and some good genius prompted him to say, '*It is plain, miss, that one of us must turn back. "Will you go my way or shall I go yours?" She faltered in reply, '*I will go yours, ' ' and turned promptly about. The spell was broken, but a far more lasting spell was upon his heart. In emerging from that unfrequented walk, they found themselves in the south side of the park, and his house was just across the way. He ventured to ask her to allow him to attend her to her home, after leaving his books and instra- ments at his own door. To this she modestly, yet with some evident embarrassment, consented. It was a long walk, but we will not prolong the story. *'Will you go my way for life ? " he said — and they married a few months later. Professor Hardipan, though by no means a model hus- band, has never been suspected of any designs of experi- menting upon, still less of analyzing, his wife in the cause of science. His instincts are rather of an opposite, syn- thetic sort, and three children have already blessed their union as I write.^ Mrs. Hardipan 's version of this story is far less extraor- dinary. We have adhered strictly to his. Hardipan 's mir- acle or conversion, as it was called by his cynical friends in the club, was regarded as an egoistic semi-myth, gradu- * It is perhaps worthy of remark that this plain tale here told, with literal and kinetographic truthfulness, illustrates how severely the old classical unities of time, place, and action may be adhered to with the most objective conformity to facts; viz., whole time of action ex- actly two minutes; place or space of action 6x4 feet; action itself except the fall, an admitted defect, a pendular smus vibration, the simplest of all dynamic unities on a plane surface of two dimensions. It is for these merits chiefly that this story claims a unique pre- eminence over all others ever written. PREESTABLISHED HARMONY 183 ally evolved to excuse to others and explain to himself how it was that such a man as he came to fall so suddenly and desperately in love. Gossips of the other sex have whispered that it was a coquettish woman's trick to catch the attention of an eligible, rough diamond of a bachelor. Some have declared it was a wager and that Jeanette Moore had even boasted beforehand how she would do something like the above. Others more friendly have declared it was in a spirit of pure, unpremeditated, girlish frolicsomeness that she dared to balk a bearish don, simply because it happened to come into her head to do so, on the street, where his face was well known. For ourselves, we have no theory about the matter, but are sure that no man can be happier than the professor, and we see no reason why, were he not a scientific man and a free thinker, he ought not to thank God daily that he has become, as in the strange providence of love every bachelor may, a married man. GETTmG MAREIED IN GERMAlTy Mary and I had been engaged nearly a year and a half, so that our story begins where most others end. We had both been in Europe several years: I had been working for my degree at Berlin and Heidelberg, and she had been living quietly with her mother at Munich, Florence, and finally at Dresden, studying the languages, and paint- ing a little in water-colors. Mary thought it would be nice to be married in Paris, but there were rumors of so many formalities and possible delays that we had given it up and agreed that Germany should be the favored land ; and, as each of us chanced to have either friends or relatives in Berlin, it was decided that that should be the place, and that June should be the happy month. *'Let it be the first, ^' I had pleaded, and she had consented. We planned to go quietly in the morning to some little church, or to some clergyman's study, and afterwards, perhaps, to ask our friends to a lunch or breakfast in a private parlor in some hotel — such as I had once been invited to by a friendly Docent in the university, who married on an income of -Qnq hundred dollars a year. One lovely morning early in May. two weeks before my final examination, I received a letter from Mary saying she had heard that I could not possibly be married without a passport. Her friend. Miss Allen, had a cousin whose chum, an American, had been married in Germany, two years before, to a German lady, and it had first to be done at a common police office, she wrote, and there a passport 184 GETTING MARRIED IN GERMANY 185 was required. Now Mary knew that I had criminally evaded the German law, and this was the way it came about: Before I had been settled two days in Berlin my kind-hearted landlady took occasion to explain to me that I must be announced at the police office, and that there a passport would be demanded within ten days. A passport would cost twenty-eight marks, she informed me, at the office of the American legation; and if I cared to save money, and would give her ten marks, she would risk the penalty (as she had done before for my countrymen, for whom she had a great liking) , and not announce me at all, and I could remain unmolested and unrecorded as long as I wished. I had paltered with the temptation, and finally, with the aid of an extemporized theory about the relations of natural and legal justice, villainously capitulated, and saved eighteen marks. Here seemed, at first sight, a dilemma which was not to be evaded without a plump lie. If I obtained and pre- sented a passport now, I should be asked how long I had been in the city, and if it were more than two weeks I might possibly be ordered to leave for violating the city ordinances, as an unfortunate acquaintance of mine had been six months before. My landlady would certainly be heavily fined for not announcing me, and possibly, if her other delinquencies in that line should come to light, she might be also deprived of her pension license. If, on the other hand, I declared that I had just arrived, my answers to the long cross-questioning to which I was liable to be subjected at the bureau might excite surprise, and a single inquiry at the post-office or of the letter-carrier would be sure to involve us both in far deeper complications. I promptly remembered the Trinkgeld I had so long for- gotten to give the postman, and sought counsel of my land- lady. She at first seemed quite dismayed at the situation, 186 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST but at length reminded me that a few days before I had made a trip to Potsdam. *'Give me your passport/* she said, **and remember, you arrived in Berlin last Tuesday evening/' Precisely what she did with it, or told the police, my conscience never let me inquire; but a few days later I was summoned to the police office, where, in answer to many interrogations, I explained that I had been in the city sometMng more thrni (t week; did not know precisely how long I might stay, but would give information when I decided; that I was there to study, and what ; that when I did leave I might go home, and might travel, and where; and at last left with a light heart, feeling that my answers had been so transparent that if there had been any suspicion that I meditated another attempt upon the venerable Kaiser's life it had been effectually allayed. The next morning I was waked at daybreak by a call from a magnificent police offi- cer, who politely explained that the bureau had some trou- ble in deciphering the middle name of my honored Frnwi mother. Foreign names were sometimes very hard, he added. I wrote it out (in my rohe de nmt, upon the back of my visiting-card in the steadiest hand I could command • — Cymantha) , and handed it to him in the corridor through the peep-hole in the door. He apologized again, saluted, retired, and came no more. A week later my passport was returned with a number of official stamps upon it. I carried it thenceforth always with me, as we never fail to carry our legitimation cards after matriculation, feeling that in the big green seal of the legation and the fair round hand of our ambassador I possessed not only a sort of war- rant of citizenship in two countries, but a key to the ady- tum of Hymen's temple. My examination was now to occur in a week. I had paid my preliminary fee, almost finished my thesis, and waj cramming at my very best pace with a team of three other GETTING MARRIED IN GERMANY 187 Eepetemien. Still I had found time to order my wedding suit and get the bridal ring, with June 1st and my initials engraved on it, and one morning I ran into the house of our American clergyman, long resident in Berlin, to ask him to perform the ceremony. What was my consternation to be told that the laws of Germany would not allow him to marry us! '*But," I pleaded, *'we are Americans. It might be done quietly, and the authorities here need not know it. I am sure it is none of their business." '* There is a new international arrangement — I don't know precisely what; but I am positive it would not be safe for either of us to attempt it, ' ' he said. I retired, meditating that the reverend gentleman had no fine feeling for the delicacy of a situation like ours, to say the least. After losing several hours, now very precious for study, in puzzling over the matter, I resolved to call upon our ambassador himself. Ill though he was, he received me very kindly. **Are American citizens ever married in this oflBcef I inquired. *'It has been done once only, I think, under one of my predecessors; but there were some very exceptional rea- sons.*' *'Well and good; that is my case. Can you marry me here next Wednesday?'' *'The lady is not ill, I hope?" *'Not in the least." **Then your best way is to go to England. If you choose the simplest form, and are married by an independ- ent clergyman, it is necessary only that one of the parties should reside there two weeks before the ceremony can be performed.'' **But that is really impossible in this case," I replied. 188 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST * * My — Miss — that is, the lady is rather High Church, and I have an examination just ahead. Besides, we have made all the arrangements for here and the first of June." '*I think I may say you will find that out of the ques- tion.'' *'Then you refuse — ^you really cannot do it?" I asked, with a strange, unsteady feeling ahout the corners of my mouth. ''Is not this office construed by international law as American soil?" I added, bringing out the grand stra- tegic point of all my morning's meditation. ''So far from it under the new arrangement, if it were done here and knowledge of the fact should come to the ears of the authorities, not only should I myself be seri- ously compromised for ignorant or willful violation of the laws I am here to see observed, but the officiating clergj'-- man would be arrested at the door, and the marriage would be declared void, even in an American court, and even though tlie case be first tested years hence. A marriage must now be valid according to the laws of the place where it is celebrated, or it is null and void, ' ' he explained. I made an ill-disguised attempt to smother something in my throat, and I am ashamed to say I retired awkwardly, abruptly, ungratefully. What a fool I had been not to learn this before; and Mary would, of course, think so, too, however much I might plead intense preoccupation with my studies ! It could never be concealed, and it would be a joke which my acquaintances would never forget. Be- sides, her dresses were probably all ordered or ready, and everything would be out of fashion, perhaps, long before the German authorities — ^whom I knew to be very fussy about such matters — would let us get married. Mary's father had left his driving business for six weeks to see the ceremony, and was now upon the sea, and I knew must go back with his wife in July. My old chum, Will Murrey, who had been spending the vrinter in Italy, was to be in GETTING MARRIED IN GERMANY 189 Berlin in time to act *'best man*' for me so far as was needful, and I knew Mary had asked Miss Punto to sustain her in whatever sense might be needful during the cere- mony. Besides, early June was the best time, so everybody said, to start on a trip through the provinces along the Danube, where I had planned to make our wedding tour. It was in no very happy frame of mind that I sat down that night to write the result of my day's investigation to Mary. What I wrote I no longer remember, nor will she aid me to do so. It must have been, to say the least, queer, for when I pressed her afterwards to let me see that letter she seemed very serious, and confessed at last that she had made a note on the margin of it which she did not wish me to see, but kindly searched the letter out and burned it before my eyes. I waited nearly two days for an answer, during which I was, of course, in no mood for work. After all, she wrote, it was perhaps just as well. She would prefer to wait rather than to go to England, unless her father should very strongly urge it. It would be nice and funny, as well as probably very impressive, to take the Lutheran forms, she thought, and ended by exhorting me not to let trifles like that interfere with needful preparation for my degree, be- cause when she did marry me she had her heart set on being a Frau Doktor, This time I was bound to make sure work, and so, with the best information I could procure, started off for the civil bureau (Standes Amt) to ascertain precisely what was required. * ' Upon what business do you come ? ' ' demanded the pom- pous servant at the door. '*I am an American citizen, and want to know how to get married in Germany," I faltered. He opened the door of the main office and shouted, * * Ein Herr Amerikaner wishes to marry himself!*' and then 190 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST showed me into a large and well-filled waiting-room to take my turn, every occupant of wMch gazed fixedly at tine without winking for some minutes. One thin, dark, wiry man, in soiled linen, and bright yellow kid gloves, had dropped in to announce the death of his third wife. A trembling young mother was sharply reprimanded for let- ting the legal third day pass before announcing the death of her child. A somewhat seedy clerk had come, with a radiant face, to announce the birth of a boy fourteen hours old, and to be called Johannes Conrade Hermann Degener- meister. A servant-girl and her lover were waiting in one corner — she red and giggling, he erect, dignified and taci- turn as a head- waiter — ^to be made man and wife. I had plenty of time to observe, for nearly an hour passed before my turn came. At length I was shown into a long room, with half a dozen clerks at one end, who twisted their necks, adjusted their glasses, and gazed and listened with open- mouthed wonder. **I wish to get married in the very simplest and quickest way," I said, presenting my passport. **Will you please tell me how to do it?" **It is extremely simple," said the officer. *'We must have a certificate of your birth {Geburtsschein) signed by the burgomaster of the town in which you were born, and with its seal, and witnessed in due form. Your certificate of baptism {Taufsdimfi) should also be sent, to guard against all error, sealed and witnessed by the present pastor or the proper church officers. These must be presented here by each of the contracting parties, with their pass- ports, as the first step." I carefully noted this, and he proceeded: *^The parents, if living, should certify to their knowledge and approval of the marriage. "We must also be satisfied that there is no obstacle, legal, moral, or otherwise, to it; whether either of you have been married before, and if so GETTING MARRIED IN GERMANY 191 whether there are children, and if so their names and ages. The parents' names should be in full; also their residence, occupation, age, and place of birth should, of course, be given for record here." - I begged for another scrap of paper and made further notes. **When we have these here in this desk," he continued, patting fondly that piece of furniture, "then either we can publish the bans (Aufge'bot) by posting a notice of your intention in the BatKhaus for fourteen days, or else you can have it printed in the journal of the place where you reside in America, and bring us a copy here as evi- dence that it has actually appeared. After the expiration of this time you can be married in this office." * * Must it be here ? " I queried. **0f course," he said. **This is the only place which the law now recognizes. Poor people are content with civil marriage only, but all who move in good society go from here to the church for a religious ceremony." ! '''Is it not possible to shorten the time?" I timidly ven- tured to inquire. ''We had made all the arrangements for an earlier day, and are seriously incommoded by the delay, I did not know the requirements. It takes four weeks to hear from America, and then two weeks more, here, and You do not, perhaps, exactly understand, and yet I hardly know how to explain. But there is really haste. We are pressed for time." "Haste? Pressed for time?" he repeated. "Perhaps I do not understand. I am sorry, but it cannot possibly be sooner. You think we are slow in Germany. True, but we are sure. We require our people to ta*ke time to think over the matter beforehand, and divorce with us is far from being the easy matter I have heard it is in America." I was in no mood for opening a discussion of the statutes of Indiana, and so demurely withdrew, feeling that it was 192 RECREATIONS OP A PSYCHOLOGIST no use to try to wriggle into matrimony through such mazy meshes of red tape, and that Mary would, of course, now consent to England. This was naturally implied through- out the letter I dispatched that evening. But I was mis- taken. She ''could not think of England for a moment now. It would be 50 interesting in Berlin, '' she wrote. We could be very comfortable for six weeks. The middle of July was not very late, aft;sr all, in that latitude. I must write at once the details of the requirements, and she would send for her papers. I complied, and sat down to write for mine. Now I happened to be born in a little, remote Western hamlet, where I did not at present know a soul, nor in all probability did my parents. How to get the certificate of my birth, or, in other words, to prove at the civil bureau that I had been really and legally born, was no trivial mat- ter. I finally addressed a detailed and courteous letter to the mayor of Hornersville, begging him to have the fact and date of my birth from the town sent me, witnessed and over the town seal; and in order to inclose two dollars in United States postage-stamps, I ran at random into the nearest bank. I was counting out my German money, and the first clerk had gone to the back office for the stamps, when the brisk junior principal stepped up and asked me if my head was in any way diseased. I thanked him heart- ily, but not without some surprise, and assured him that it had never been better. ' * Because, ' ' he continued, ' ' it is customary in our country to remove the hat in all offices of this importance. ' * I doffed it instantly, and begged par- don, I am sorry to say, before I thought; and, although I had been taught the same lesson once before in a little shoe-store, regretted passionately half the way home that I had not thoroughly wrung his impertinent nose, in honor of the American eagle. I next passed to the consideration of the baptismal ques- GETTING MARRIED IN GERMANY 193 tion, the precise relations of which to the natal problem I have not been able to this day precisely to understand. The least forgery or evasion was, of course, not to be thought of, however justifiable in a moral point of view I might deem it under the cruel circumstances, because that would make the marriage itself null and void. This I clearly inferred from my interview at the civil bureau. Moreover, no certificate whatever could have the least value unless it was stamped with an official seal ; and, again, every error would necessitate an additional delay of four weeks; and, lastly, it was better to do too much than too little. These ground categories, I reflected, must never be lost sight of. Now the fact was I 'had never been baptized. My father, although a good church member, entertained, twenty years ago, some rather independent views on the question of in- fant baptism, and so, despite my jnother's wishes, the mat- ter lingered until I was too big. In Germany, where every boy baby must be either baptized or circumcised, I was a monster, for whom her law made no provision. Mary's parents held no latitudinarian scruples, and she had been baptized thoroughly as an infant, and again later by im- mersion. Why had no one hinte'd to me, when I left home, that it might be convenient to take a Taufsdiein along with my passport! After instituting inquiries, I ascertained that, among several other obstacles, I was now too old to be baptized in Germany, and that an English baptism would not help me. I could not think of leaving my examination and crossing the ocean to be sprinkled in the normal way. Only one thing remained, Tiamely, to get my parents' pastor and parish clerk to certify amply and strongly, under oath and seal and before witnesses, that, although duly born, I had never been duly baptized, and that such omissions, unfor- tunately, were not infrequent in the United States, and 194 EECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST were attended there by no civil or temporal disabilities. In my letter I begged my parents to send a certificate of their consent to my marriage, giving them a favorable de- scription of Mary, enclosing her photograph, and gently hinting at the end that if they withheld their approval it would simply necessitate our running over to England. Another letter to my uncle, who happened to be a district judge, begging him to certify that I had never been married before, and that, according to his and my families' best knowledge and belief, there was no obstacle, ''legal, moral, or otherwise," to my marriage with Miss Mary Adelaide Prout, of New York, seemed to me to complete the busi- ness. Yet, no: it would be best to have the bans printed in our little home pap^r, strange as it would look there, and*have a copy — or better two, in case a steamer should be sunk at sea — ^sent me. That might save two week^. And again, it might be well to copy all these letters, and send a duplicate of each a week later, to make assurance doubly sure. If there should be any additional delay by error, there would be some consolation in having the fault on Mary's side, I reflected. I now had thirty-six hours for cramming before my examination, and at it I went. Here were the lecture notes of five semesters and two small shelves of text-books which ought to be reviewed. As the case seemed desperate, I resolved to concentrate my- self on anatomy and chemistry, where I was weakest, and risk the seven other ample sciences which a doctor is re- quired to know. Two of my examiners were aware that I had been a diligent student, and I would get a certain good friend of mine to call on another of them and hint that I had been distracted by family troubles, and per- haps, in case of need, they would advocate tempering jus- tice with mercy, and letting me through easily, as it is said is often done with American students. I worked well all GETTING MARRIED IN GERMANY 195 day and till about one o'clock at night, and then fell asleep^ over the group of peptones. At nine in the morning, while I was taking my coffee, a letter came from Mary, requesting more detailed directions for ordering her papers, and when it was answered I realized that I was in a mood which made study impossible. I took a bath and ran into the gymnasium, but was no bet- ter; drank a glass of beer, and read the American papers at the bank, but grew worse; then started off for a long walk in the Thiergarten, and came back only in time to make my toilet for the dread ordeal. In evening dress, I was ushered into a long room and seated at one end, while my examiners were discussing a comfortable spread at the other — paid for, I knew, out of the two hundred thalers I had given for being admitted to examination. Of the* three hours of mental anguish I here endured I will attempt no description. I was passed from one inquisitor to an- other, and at last, after waiting ten minutes in an ante- room, recalled to learn that, notwithstanding the excellence of my theme, and my diligence, good conduct, etc., my ''oral examination had not been in all respects entirely satisfac- tory''; and I was advised to take advantage of the new regulations, and present myself again as a Bepetent in the autumn. I retired, scarcely knowing what I did, and walked bare- headed in the cool night air a couple of hours, overwhelmed with shame, wondering over and over again what Mary, what my parents and friends, would think of me; and at last returned, jaded and haggard, designing to slip into my room unobserved and seek the oblivion of sleep. What should I find, however, on opening my door, but my hostess and several friends festively drinking wine around my table, on which was a magnificent piece of confectionery like a skeleton Gothic tower. It had turrets and minarets and festoons, and was wreathed in flowers, and a ginger- 196 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST snap banner high above all was d«one off on one side in stripes and stars with red, white, and blue candy-work, and on the other side stood Herr Dohtor above my initials. Herr Studiosus Ottfried "Wilhelm Griesebach, my best Ger- man friend, sprang up and hugged and kissed me in spite of myself, and the congratulations of the others were so loud and given with such beery impetuosity that it was some time before I could make them comprehend the awful truth that I had "fallen through." They were really si- lenced then for an instant, during which I caught a glimpse of my hostess, with real delicacy of feeling, stealth- ily breaking off the candied, doctored ginger-snap banner and slipping it slyly into her pocket. It was but for an instant, however, and it was Herr Griesebach, to my surprise, who first attempted to meet what he considered the demands of the occasion. Springing again to his feet, and, I actually believe, brushing away a tear, he thumped upon the table, and cried Silentia! in true convivial German-student style, though it was just then as still as the grave. ** Honored Herren/^ he began glibly enough, **love and science are jealous rivals, but thrice, four times happy the man who is favored by either. Our dear friend was going to become a doctor one week and wed a beautiful girl the next.*' **The bride lebe hocJi!" shouted one of my visitors, and all rose, clinked their glasses, and drank deeply, nodding and smiling to me. **The gods were envious and in their councils it was ordained that instead of completing a four years' course of medicine then, as he intended, he should pause for a short course on the German marriage law. In his native land'* — '* Americans leben JiocJi!^^ was shouted and drunk to as before — **they say, I have heard, that time is money.*' [These words in English — all he knew, I be- lieve ; but he graciously repeated them sotto voce in German,- GETTING MARRIED IN GERMANY 197 with a benevolent glance at my hostess.] "Well," slowly shrugging his shoulders and raising his eyebrows, ''our friend's faculty has given him four months' time," lay- ing his forefinger aside his nose at the word ''four," and tapping it again at the word "time." This was execrable and exasperating enough, it will be confessed, and I sup- pose that my face fell still more and that my convivial friend noticed it; at any rate, he stepped to my side, grasped and wrung my hand, and added in changed and almost tender accents, ' ' I have been in the university eight years. My head is mossy enough, but of the many American students I have known our friend is the only one with true German Gemuth; and before I say dixi I propose that we rub a vigorous salamander to the Herr Brdutigam. Let him live high, high, high ! " he cried, raising his glass and drinking long and deep, as did the rest, after which all rattled their glasses noisily at his command till he gave the usual signal for silence, and then sat down. He had done his awkward best, and so did all the rest in more informal words of consolation, but it was of no use. It only revealed to me how great and lifelong in German eyes was the disaster which had overtaken me. When they had gone I sank back in my chair (a rocking- chair, by the way, which I had got made only with infinite pains, after satisfying myself that I could not obtain one otherwise in all the city ; indeed, it was the only one I ever saw in all Germany), and tried to think things over calmly and gather courage; but the longer I sat the more com- pletely unmanned I became. I could think of nothing, in fact, but the words, "I have failed! I have failed!" kept repeating themselves in my mind over and over again, like the inexpugnable, "Punch, brothers, punch with care," etc., which Mark Twain has described. I sat there for hours, benumbed, in a sort of oriental trance. I had no wish, no strength even, to go to bed, though I knew dream- 198 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST ily that my condition was morbid. I remember thinking, on the whole, rather favorably of the project of going back to the Thiergarten and shooting myself, as an American student had done in the autumn before — without a quar- ter of my provocation, I was sure. But that would require too much effort. Many other absurd things flitted through my mind, while the day dawned and the sunshine stole in at my feet. I wished for half an hour that the window of my room was open; I knew the air was not the best, but I could not summon the resolution to get up and open it. At length I was roused by the knock and entrance of my hostess, who informed me that my usual breakfast hour wais considerably passed. I ate mechanically, and came back to my chair in a room with freshened atmosphere, and slowly began to realize that I was suffering from a nerv^ous reaction which might become indefinitely serious. I will not here pause to go into professional details. Suffice it to say that, following the best medical advice, it was several weeks before I at all recovered my health and spirits. During the first few days I had been too listless to do more than glance over Mary's letters as they came, and deferred answering them, always only for an hour or two at a time, till at length, on the fourth day, becoming really alarmed at hearing nothing from me, she had come on to Berlin with her mo'ther, and surprised me at dinner. She seemed to understand the situation at once; found out — Heaven knows how — the regimen that had been prescribed for me, and kept me up to it. She got me out on long walks, astonished me by her own endurance as my com- panion, and did her best to amuse and keep me cheerful. It must have been a dreary task, for I was so blase to every intellectual interest, so indifferent to every enthusi- asm, or even to my own future, that only true love could have made my companionship endurable. And yet she brought me slowly out of my trouble back again to life. GETTING MARRIED IN GERMANY 199 Four weeks had meanwhile elapsed. Mary's father had come and returned alone without her mother, and I began to hear from my home letters. First came my parents' consent to my marriage to Miss Prout, drawn up in stately and formal terms ; for iny father was a country squire, and knew something about how a legal period should be stuffed. At the bottom of thfs my sister had roguishly imprinted the motto of her class in the seminary, of which, as secre- tary that year, she chanced to have the metallic stamp. It was a Greek translation of the phrase, ' * I will find a way or make one." It was as big as an English penny, and with a bit of red ribbon affixed looked so imposingly official that I thought it best to let it stand; and good service it did me in the end. My uncle, the judge, promptly declared that to the best of his knowledge there was no obstacle to my marriage, and affixed the stamp of the county to his certificate that I had never been married before. Then came the baptismal paper, and a most lame and beggarly document it was. First came the statement of the pastor. He had good-heartedly taken it upon himself to instruct the German government all too elaborately that, much as it was regretted, it was, nevertheless, a fact that scarcely one-half of the native-born Americans were nowa- daj^s baptized, as the ceremony was not here required by law. After some expatiation upon this point, he graciously added that he had always seen much to commend in the German practice in the matter. His declaration was ac- companied by my father's apologetic statement of his ear- lier scruples about infant baptism. From my letter and inclosure to the mayor of Hornersville I have never heard to this day. I had, however, anticipated this possibility, and as, fortunately for me, all four of my grandparents were living, asked them to certify to the dates of my par- ents' marriage and of my birth. This they did, and as 200 RECREATIONS OP A PSYCHOLOGIST the town where they resided possessed no stamp or seal, the town clerk good-naturedly pasted round pieces of green paper and a few inches of red ribbon at the bottom of each declaration. These documents, making with my passport seven in all, were carefully laid aside. Within a week Mary had the same number of papers, and, without stop- ping to examine them, I made them into a formidable budget, and again visited the civil bureau, only to learn that they must all be officially translated, and that each paper must bear the two-dollar stamp of the American legation in witness of the accuracy of the translation. As the office was then quite full of business, five or six days elapsed before this was accomplished. Upon returning to the German bureau, carrying now twenty-eight documents instead of fourteen ^some of which, however, proved even- tually to be useless or superfluous), it was promptly found that Mary's papers certified to her two baptisms, but failed to make out that there was no legal or pecuniary obstacle to her marriage. I had heard of the tedious litigations about inheritances which, under the former laxer laws, had grown out of carelessness about this point, but suppose^ Mary's mother, who had remained with her, could satisfy the authorities upon that point. Therefore I waited in silence for my own papers to be examined, hoping that if my irregular baptismal certificate was challenged, Mary's supererogatory baptism might be somehow vicariously cred- ited to me. Mine, however, was accepted, but nothing which Mary's mother could do or say was sufficient to sat- isfy the German law that I might not be capturing an Heir- ess by methods which it deems inadmissible. There was, therefore, no way but for Mary to cable her father in New York, ^'Certify consent and no pecuniary obstacle to mar- riage," and for us to wait two weeks more for the docu- ments. A delay of another fortnight was needful for the bans, or Aiifgehoi. Mary herself began to be impatient. GETTING MARRIED IN GERMANY 201 It was August, and the heat was intense; all our friends had left the city, and both my best man. Will Murrey, and Mary's friend. Miss Punto, had returned to America, and were eventually married before we were. The dresses were getting out of season and out of fashion, and it was too late to travel anywhere but in Russia, Sweden, or Scotland, and we were not as enthusiastic about any of those countries as we had been about the Danube. But the day long sighed for, long delayed, came at last. As IT had to be my own best man, and attend to all the thousand and one little unexpected jobs that turned up, I had hired a faitliful man-servant for a week, to whom I entrusted the arrangements at the church, the preparation of the spread, the care about carriages, getting off the bag- gage, etc. Before I escaped m the morning, the house por- fer, three servants, the washer-woman, coal man, two serv- ants from the laboratory, and a tailoress called — most of them in their best attire, and several bringing flowers or bouquets — to give me their parting Gliickwunsch, expressed in all the pretty phrases for such occasions in which the German language abounds. They were all moderately feed, but were happy. Some of them almost wept — so I fancied — as I drove off with Johann mounted beside the driver. Mary was ready, and with a half dozen friends we were soon in the Tittle back parlor of the civil bureau. Here again was a long delay. One of the two witnesses required by German law was six months too young, and not one of our friends had the requisite papers of legitimation with them to take her place. One of the latter was personally known to the officiating squire, and another was the wife of a well-known public man, but this was not *' regular.*' Even my servant had no * ' paper with a stamp ' ' about him, and none of the idlers in the office, who are sometimes called in for a shilling in such emergencies, was any more fortu- nate. One of Mary's friends became indignant, and be- 202 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST gan a caustic history of our vexatious delays in broken German to the officer, until at length he turned his back upon her, tore off his swallow-tail coat, which had been donned for the ceremony, put on an inky gown, and re- tired to his desk, leaving us to find a way out of the fuss as best we could. None of the party lived nearer than two miles away, but luckily one of them remembered a lady acquaintance upon the next street, and went forth to find her. Although she was ill, she rose, dressed, took her pa- pers, and drove to our rescue. The marriage service was rather long, and under other circumstances might have been impressive. When it was done we signed our names, I took a few more papers for use at the church, tipped four bobbing ushers who had opened four doors for us, left or- ders for a marriage certificate — which is not necessary in Germany, but which we thought might be interesting to our friends at home — and got into the carriage. "Mary," I said, "we are really and truly married al- ready, and let's cut the church. It is an hour and a half late ; our friends will all have been tired waiting and have gone home. Besides, I have stood about enough of this. I have kept patient during two months of this rigmarole, but I am afraid a reaction is coming, and that I shall knock the minister down." She replied only by pressing my arm more closely with her own as we stopped at the church door. A carpet was laid, and the organ struck up as we were ushered up the main aisle and seated in front of the altar in velvet-cush- ioned chairs. The clergyman had become tired waiting for us and had gone home to lunch, and we sat there ten min- utes until he came in, out of breath, in a black robe and skull-cap. The length of this service depends somewhat upon the fee which he expects, and we found it very long. To me, at least, it was not particularly solemn. He whis- pered to us in broken English what responses to make, and GETTING MARRIED IN GERMANY 203 where to kneel, stand, join hands, etc., as if he feared we did not understand German. When it was all over there were extra fees : one for the fine chairs we sat in, one for opening the church, another for the carpet on the side- walk, and one each for the organist and bellows-boy. We were invited at the door to buy photographs of the church and clergyman, and his pamphlet discourses, and a printed copy of the Lutheran marriage service. We did so, and drove off to our spread. The thing was done at last. Here, too, my story ends. It is my first, and will be the last I ever write. Marriage ceremonies and preliminaries were never made so complex, it is said, as the civil mar- riage law — the compulsory clause of- which was repealed, I believe, last spring — ^made it in Germany for foreigners; and therefore only the eight or ten American couples who passed the same ordeal during^its full operation are as thoroughly married as we. VI A MAN'S ADVKNTTmE IN DOMIESTIC UraiTSTBIES A STALWART young college professor, a friend of mine, lately spent the summer vacation at his home trying to write a book on industrial education for girls, a work not yet published. For exercise, tiring of his wheel, chest weights and dumbbells, and stupid solitary walks, and wishing to use his strength practically, he lately did a week's washing for his family of six under the direction of his laundress, and to her mingled amazement and amuse- ment. He tells me he never learned more, or more rapidly, in the same time, and that neither in the gjonnasium, on the tennis court, nor on the golf links did he ever get quite such varied or hygienic exercise. In the splendid freedom of a collarless, cuffless, un- starched shirt, an old pair of discarded and unsoilable pants held up by a belt, in low slippers, he went about the day before with a large washbag gathering sheets, towels, handkerchiefs, skirts, napkins, under- and night-clothes, from nursery, bathroom, bedrooms, and closets, that the preliminary mending might be done. He applied salt and lemon juice to rust stains, a special acid to ink spots, and other things in bottles for grass, berry, and other stains; he rubbed lard on the greasy places, and soft-soaped some of the most dirty spots and things. He put everything to soak in three set, stone tubs in the basement washroom, keeping the white and cleaner things by themselves; and he also sawed, split, and laid kindling under the big copper cauldron by the tubs. 204 ADVENTURE IN DOMESTIC INDUSTRIES 205 After ransacking the college library and worrying its chief for literature on the subject of laundries, only to find that no one had ever put together all that needed to be known, he resolved to assign it as a master's thesis to fhe next girl graduate who consulted him. But he has suggested it to one only; she told him plainly that she came to college to get away from such things, and seemed grieved and almost affronted lest it imply he thought her incapable of a loftier career and theme. He told her that one of the best commencement parts he had ever seen was at the well-known Oread cooking school, where a girl in a mortar-board hat, but with bare arms, washed one shirt- waist and ironed another before an audience, telling them at the same time what she did and how and why. It was all in vain, for to this the young lady replied that she was not seeking a diploma as a washerwoman, and would die before she would do such a thing in public, and so would all the rest. So that settled it. Next morning when the college chimes rang six he was already at his work, with the enjoyable sensation of bare feet a la Kneipp, and sleeves up to his shoulders. He ensconced his laundress in a wicker chair in a cool corner, near an open window, to direct. They both agreed that Chinamen who sprinkled clothes with water from their mouths were filthy, and that the steam laundry, which used acids and tore off buttons with machinery, even if it did make things whiter, was not suitable for real Vere de Vere families or for climbers who would be true top- notchers. She gave him nuggets of information in a rich brogue about soaps, a kind of lecture so meaty that he wished to stop on the spot and note points. From the anatomical laboratory my friend had procured a pair of rubber gloves used in dissections, but soon dis- carded them. First, he gently punched and prodded the soaking mass in the tub containing the cleanest white 206 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST things, soaping and wringing a little till his inspectress was satisfied, and transferring everything into the already bubbling cauldron. In the next tub it was dirtier. To get down to first principles, he had discarded washing ma- chines and wringers and went to work on the washboard, an imitation of which has been cleverly smuggled into the list of gymnasium apparatus under the imposing and euphonious classic name of sthenico-dynamo-generator, or chest strengthener. This he found an ideal apparatus for the pectoral muscles and for those of the back and shoul- ders, combining some of the best movements of rowing, parallel bars, and sawing wood. Here, indeed, he felt he had found an athletic bonanza. In wringing there were half a dozen exercises, always on the principles of opposi- tion of the two forearms, and all a distinct improvement upon the hand-wrist-twist-weight-lifter of the gymnasium. The clotheslines of white cotton, which had been taken in weekly and Fept in a bag, were strung on trees over his hedge-protected back yard. Unlike wires they were in- capable of staining. After carrying his first tubful, weigh- ing one hundred and thirty-seven pounds, up the steps and some eighty feet, he stretched each garment_out synunetri- cally — not without soiling a few, however, which had to go back — hanging white garments in the sun and colored ones in the shade, fastening each in place with a basket of wooden pins, which he had learned meanwhile could be bought at ten cents for six dozen. Now the trophies of his toil swung like banners in the glorious wind and sun. Thus he persisted, keeping woolen garments in successive waters of a cool and constant tem- perature to avoid shrinking, boiling the linen and cotton with a tablespoonful of kerosene, a little bluing, and just a pinch of sal soda. After three hours, during which he snatched a hasty breakfast, his work was done — soon after nine o'clock — ADVENTURE IN DOMESTIC INDUSTRIES 207 and he had himself photographed, standing before the drapery he had cleansed, proud as a huntsman beside his first bear, or a fisherman with his best catch. At nine- thirty A. M. he had taken a cold bath, re-dressed, and was at his desk with a clear head, an exuberant sense of well- being and of having done something, and a bit touched with conceit, leaving to his mentor the more unheroic task of bringing in the wash when it was dry. To be sure, his knuckles were a trifle raw and sore and, athlete though he was, his forequarters were a little tired. But he had tasted all the gamy flavor of camping out with- out a hot and dusty journey to get there and back. He almost — but not quite — resolved that henceforth he would always do the wash, and not throw away so wholesome and inspiring an opportunity for physical culture to be enjoyed by paid servants. Now at least no washerwoman's union could boycott him. The servant may have dimly felt his thoughts, for as the task went on she passed from volubility to taciturnity and glumness, possibly fearing that she would suffer from future economy and retrenchment. However, the first act of the drama was successfully ended. I wanted to print the photograph of my friend as he stood six feet one, weight one ninety-eight plus before and one ninety-seven minus afterwards, deducting his breakfast which he was methodical enough to weigh. His modesty, however, forbids me. Were he the first woman in the land, he declared, he would have been proud to let it appear. He marveled that there were no young ladies perhaps just from the high school, or normal school, or college who would set the world a new fashion, and won- dered whether they were all too coy and shy of the many Calebs in search of a wife who would chortle with joy and fall at their feet if they had shown this proclivity for the domestic life. To think of it seriously, why this horror of washing, 208 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST especially when many society ladies confess to me con- fidentially that they do it and love it in a small way — privately ! Schuyten found in a comprehensive census just published that less than two and one-half per cent, of the giri students in the teens had ever wished or planned to devote themselves even to domestic life in general, although seventy-five per cent, were proposing teaching or other culture careers, and a great majority of them would prob- ably sometime marry — so little does our educational system fit young women for their destiny! How many of them to-day ever did or could do a good washing, or have either the brain, muscle, or endurance for it? Tuesday, again at six A. M., my friend was in the laundry cleaning and firing the stove, and getting out and polishing the flatirons, and preparing three qualities of starch. There was no mangle or roller and all was by hand. In ironing, however, he had to be shown as well as told by his teacher, for this was skilled labor and of a very different order. But he was patient and docile and learned to avoid tearing off buttons, ripping openwork, making holes with the point of his tool, scorching, etc., and got a few points about ironing in creases and folds, to tow up well into plaiting, not to rip delicate tissues, how to use different irons in relays and to tell when each was too hot or cold. At nine o'clock, leaving most of the hardest things to his expert, he arrayed himself in the things he had ironed himself, even a bosom, collar, and cuffs, and was photo- graphed again with his pile of garments beside him, which he then distributed to their places. Mending he did not undertake yet. His courage was still triumphant, but the heat and the mental and nervous strain had told upon him, and some of his fundamental ideas about woman and her work were a little joggled. He became conscious of a silent sense of superiority on the part of his employee toward him, and wondered if hence- ADVENTURE IN DOMESTIC INDUSTRIES 209 forth it might be harder for her to feel all the respect due to the head of the house. Several bums distracted his attention from his study, although he had learned and applied some valuable recipes new to him which might come in handy in other circumstances. His six-year-oid girl complained at dinner that the collar of her white dress scratched her neck and was as stiff as a board, and the precious pocket in her apron would not open, and he noticed that his own collar was a little limp and spotted, which required him to change it later. His thirteen-year-old girl, in the fluffy-ruffles stage, seemed conscious throughout the evening of something wrong about the one garment of hers he had attempted, but his devoted wife never let him know that some of his chef- d'ceuvres had to be starched and ironed over again. She tactfully answered his inquiries during the week, whenever he saw one of his own bits of handiwork in use, that all was well, that even the clean napkins did not open too hard, and that it was all the style now to have them so stiff and pasteboardy that they would stay put and almost stand on end. What puzzled him most of all was how the laundress, who had never read a book or an article, and never took a lesson, learned to do all these things, for the effects of never-printed tradition and long practice were hardest of all for this professor of books to appreciate. He ransacked his library in vain to find any trace of the evolutionary history of this art, or to learn the how, when, and where of the development of the instruments and the skill. How accomplishments like ironing could have developed in the race and been transmitted for countless generations with- out any of the adventitious aid of print, was to him a marvel. Here he feared he must leave a great gap in his book on household arts and education. Wednesday was cleaning day, and he started off feeling 210 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST quite himself again. First lie took all the rugs from the library to the yard and beat them weU and long, learning to stand on the windward side. This, together with rolling and unrolling and carrying them, he found capital exercise, as was taking the furniture out into the hall. Sweeping, too, was dead easy, but going over the floor on hands and knees with a wet rag set back the shoulders, brought out the chest, strengthened the cuculares, complexus, biventer, and erectores trunci, and many other muscles. Almost nothing woman does or can do, he declared, could be quite so hygienic, although going over every part of a chair with a dust rag requires so many positions that it is a close second to floor scrubbing in hygienic value. Dusting the mantel and bric-a-brac and handling all the books was careful, puttering work, and in doing this he had several lessons in the delicacy and deftness of manipu- lation required, and also a lesson in charity to servants who have accidents with ornaments. He also learned much of sequences as well as of patience, and even to marvel at the acuteness of perception of his wife, now his overseer, as she detected spots of dust which he had left not only in the crevices but in the openest spaces. Furniture and picture frames, he declared, should always be plain, with no groovings or flutings; every floor corner should be beveled ; there was no use in having so many useless things about for mere ornament ; windows should never be opened to let in dust; decorated china and everything repousse and in relief should be eschewed ; and books should be kept behind glass cases with rubber-fringed, dust-tight doors, with flaps at every keyhole. "WTien he asked his wife to mark the grade of his excel- lence in this morning's work, she gravely said that there were three demerits for breakages, that he deserved about forty-five for dusting, seventy-five for wet-ragging the floor, ADVENTURE IN DOMESTIC INDUSTRIES 211 pointing out his defects, and one hundred plus for rug- beating and handling. This ended the third lesson with many new types of physical culture of hoth fundamental and accessory muscles, and new knowledge and viewpoint of women's work and ways which he had seen from the outside before, but never till now felt or appreciated. He wondered if he ought not to advocate in his book that all intending hus- bands should be required by law to take the course he was now giving himself before they embarked on the sea of matrimony, a consideration that probably will be amplified in his volume in a way that I think will command the thoughtful attention of housewives who may read it. He fancied that marital ties would be cemented if the lords of creation acquired such intelligent sympathy and apprecia- tion of their wife 's responsibilities as this experience would insure. After these experiences my friend felt an inspiration to take a vacation the rest of the week, and the next week his wife and children spent with her parents, leaving him alone with the servants. Monday morning he resolved to give a stag dinner to eleven of his friends, to some of whom he had long felt under obligations. He also wished to feel that he could do it alone en regie. So, after a care- ful inspection of pantry, ice box, and cellar to note the supply already on hand, and having timidly broached his purpose to the cook, studying from several cook books what courses Be wanted, he sallied forth to the market. Clams on the half -shell with lemons and ice were easily provided for; so was soup, with vermicelli and rice, a favorite of his. For fish, he wished his guests to have each a good brook trout, but found it closed season, with a stringent law well on. The fishmonger told him confi- dentially, however, that there was a way of providing them at about twice the usual cost, and so he culpably com- 212 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST pounded with crime and ordered them. A crown roast of lamb with peas gave little trouble; but, in providing the ice, which in his judgment must have rum, he realized that he lived in a no-license town. But here again the grocer knew a way, and again he became a silent partner in crime. He had set his heart on partridges, at least half a one for each guest ; but this the game laws seemed to make improb- able, and he could only leave an order to provide them if practicable, otherwise to fall back upon squabs or snipe with mushrooms. Thus he became thrice a potential criminal. The ice cream must be made at home and cast in indi- vidual molds, and these he had to find to his taste and buy. Nuts, Porto Rico coffee, sweets, ginger, apollinaris, and other minor items were provided, and wines he fortunately had. And so he went home, with some complacency, after several hours of nerve-racking and mentally fatiguing work. But now his real trouble began. The cook absolutely balked, and declared she could never prepare all these dishes without the superintendence of the mistress, and that the home-made ice cream in individual molds was im- possible. He thought, too, that he detected in her mind lack of confidence in her ability to prepare the trout as he wanted them, and she declared that, if she undertook the entire task, she must have three dollars extra and a helper. Being unwilling to apply to his neighbors for the loan of a cook he set out for an intelligence office, and learned of an expert, whom he at length found in a remote part of the city, who would bestow her efforts for the day for five dollars, but must be supreme. At this his own cook, at first flew into a downright revolt, threatening to bolt at once, bag and baggage. But by promising her an extra three dollars, she consented, though with no very good grace, to the conditions. The chambermaid agreed to serve ADVENTURE IN DOMESTIC INDUSTRIES 213 at the table, as she had often done, but let it be plainly seen that she, too, expected to do so for a consideration. He wished^ another table girl in the same kind of black dress with white cap and shoulder-strap apron, and she suggested that a friend of hers would be willing to come in for the evening for a proper fee, although she had no uniform. She was found, taken to an establishment, duly fitted out for eleven dollars and a half, and at seven P. M. my friend sat down to his solitary meal, excited in mind and body, a real case of nerves which perturbed his sleep with painful dreams. Happily, he little realized what was before him the next * day, on which I perhaps ought to draw the veil. I will not enumerate the things found lacking or the orders which came late, or not at all, so that sudden shifts had to be made; nor how his colored man and he were subjugated the entire day and kept running by the cook, who was an empress in the kitchen for ten hours. Nor will I describe the friction between the special and the stated help, the discovery, when the table came to be laid, that several plates and glasses in the sets required were one or more pieces short, and the further shifts, trips townward, and purchases thereby made necessary; how, when he came to don his tuxedo, no clean, broad-bosomed shirt was found save one he had ironed and which it made his very soul groan to wear; how both the trout and squab for some mysterious reason proved one short, so that he had to decline both rather than let one guest go unserved in these courses; how very promptly each invited guest arrived; how long the initial wait before dinner was announced, or how long the delays between several of the courses; how anxious he was throughout, in contrast to the ease and confidence he had felt when giving dinners in which his wife had borne all the burdens he was now bearing and had given no sign; how light of heart he grew when the 214 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST coffee axid cigars were served, and especially when a familiar guest praised the perfection of an establishment that could give such a dinner; how pride tempted him to reveal the fact that he had done it all and that his wife was not only not in the kitchen at all, but one hundred miles away, and in blissful ignorance of his treacherous invasion into her domain. Nor will I describe his feelings when later he added up the cost of his little dinner per plate and compared it with what he might have offered approximately the same for at the club. But it was all his own, his very own. And it would be easier next time, only this time was quite enough for him for the present. But this adventure in domesticity he felt sure would outrank all the others in its bitter-sweet memories when it came to the olim meminisse juvabit, which was kept fresh in his mind during the subsequent days, when his own lonely meals were made up of or interlarded with the remains of his Sybaritic feast. Cooking, to him, had come to seem the art of arts. Man is what he eats, and ever since Prometheus gave men the control of fire, they have been evolving this ''preliminary digestion,'^ every advance in which sets free more kinetic energy for culture and civilization. Good cooking, too, is the only cure for intemperance, and bad cooking its only cause, he held. He had studied the chemistry of foods a little and experimented a little with Fletcherism and the opposite theory that food should be bolted; he was a little heretical about the advantages of regular meal times, and inclined to the view that eating only when one was hungry, and what one most wanted, was best for the system. He tried to teach his children geography a little by telling them where each item on their table came from, how it grew, was prepared for the market, etc. He told them, for instance, of the habits of salmon, mackerel, swordfish, and the rest; of Africa and the Eastern Islands where ADVENTUKE IN DOMESTIC INDUSTRIES 215 spices grew, of slaughter houses and the canning of meats and vegetables, while grains of all kinds, fruits of all sea- sons, birds, every edible variety of meats, and even wines and beers, and all the rest, were texts of informal talks which he had carefully prepared for years that the chil- dren's appetites might be made apperception centers for all the botanical and zoological knowledge, and the accounts of processes and localities, that they could be made to con- tain. To this rather unique organization of his knowledge he was slowly adding a limited curriculum of cooking, and on this theme had accumulated several shelves full of books and choice recipes in clippings. Plain cooking he knew something of, and Thursday and Sunday afternoons, when the cook was out, he with his wife and children prepared the evening meal and kept alive the old, traditionary feeling of the hearth as the heart of the home. But there were many mysteries of this high art he could never master. Practice and study as he would, his wife excelled him here as much as he did the children, or as the cook excelled her. On the paternal farm, as a youth, he had learned to do many things, and as a student in the laboratory in Germany he had taken courses of lessons each of a shoemaker, plumber, glass blower, broom maker, and bookbinder, and he set type and carved wood a little. But with all his unique and chronic passion for learning to do new things, nowhere did he make closer acquaintance with more of his own limitations than in the domain of the kitchen, although he had for years been a culinary endeavorer. Of almost everything that the chambermaid, butler, and coachman knew, he was already past master, but house- cleaning was his pet foible. In this avocation for some two months every spring, he found just the physical exer- cise and mental diversion that seemed most of all helpful for both mind and body. Two or three hours a day sufficed. 216 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST Beginning in his own study and arrayed in suitable attire, with every window open, each book was carefully dusted out of the window, two or three at a time, shelf by shelf; the books of each tier were removed, cleansed and re- turned, and as each section was finished, covered with a sheet well tucked in. Windows were washed, curtains taken down for cleansing and repair, and every picture overhauled and rehung. Incidentally, too, every book, pamphlet, paper, lecture, book note, letter file, and drawer was overhauled and arranged in order, sometimes according to a new scheme. "Wheelbarrow loads of literature were discarded and taken to the library or the cremation furnace in it, or to the second-hand bookstore, or to country friends ; to make room in advance for the accumulations of the following year. All this process meant also that everything was mentally inventoried, lost treasures found and relocated in their proper place, stray and scattered leaflets, manuscripts, let- ters, and clippings were sorted, fastened together, pigeon- holed in the desk, and like brought to like, to the great saving of time and energy throughout the year. This work no other could possibly accomplish, however carefully directed, without adding to the confusion. New and im- portant arrangements here where most of his working hours were spent gave also a unique and most exquisite pleasure, perhaps because it placed him in masterful command of all the resources in this plethoric room, full of the accumula- tion of years. Standing desk, low table, lounge, reclining chair, drop light, smoking stand and all its accouterments, rotary bookcase, cases of drawers for cards and for filing large envelopes, writing and reading chairs — everything was rearranged and many pretty labor-saving devices and conveniences gave a glow of happiness of a hitherto psycho- logically unclassified kind. Wliat was it? At any rate, all this brought him nearer to his work, made him more com- ADVENTURE IN DOMESTIC INDUSTRIES 217 pletely master of all his resources, and restored actual touch with many things that were lapsing from his cog- nizance. It gave a clear and fresh feeling of increased efficiency, and made old things seem new. It was somewhat as if his very brain was undergoing reorganization and resanification. His thinking could now be more systematic and effective, and his whole intellectual nature felt tidied up, cleansed, and refreshed. Our ancestors, the cave dwellers, apparently never cleaned house, but let the debris of broken flint implements^ worn-out mortars and pestles and even garments accumu- late, to say nothing of bones, shells, and ashes, living on. top of it all for generations, and when the cave was full moving to another. I know old houses in which the in-^ mates inherit a similar propensity and are unable to dis- pose of disused and even broken, worn-out articles. Old papers, clothes, shoes, hats, letters, books, and furniture are carefully preserved, perhaps relegated to attic, lumber room, or closet, until all are bursting. ''Anything may come handy" and so it is carefully laid up and forgotten. Woe betide him or her who lays destructive hands upon it ! Households have been disrupted by this conservative in- stinct clashing with that to clean up. One estimable house- wife I knew fell into hysterics because in her absence an old chest full of rags, samples, remnants, envelopes, clip- pings, was sorted over and the worthless part burned on the dump by a husband who needed the chest, although she had not opened it for fourteen years. For a year after, everything she could not readily find she was sure had been destroyed in the great holocaust. Housecleaning should be an imaginary moving and, pain- ful as it often is to condemn old things hallowed by asso- ciations, to have once been strenuous in this matter often gives ''a peace that passeth understanding," probably somehow akin to the elimination of waste tissue by the 218 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST agency of a too long neglected bath. To keep lengthening rows of old shoes, rubbers, trousers, coats, dresses, for years in the vague hope of needing them for some outing, or until just the right person to use them comes to the door, is a form of psychic slouchiness akin to letting the tailings of a mine block its entrance. Heirlooms and special keepsakes are different. Yet the moral of nature's lesson is iconoclastic. Man needs to molt most such things in order that his soul may grow, attain adequate detachment from the past and live more palpitatingly in the present. Nations with the longest and most elaborately recorded history, like modern Italy and Greece, are not better for that fact, if indeed they are not impaired by the burden of their memories. This may help, to some degree at least, to explain my friend's passion, amounting almost to a mania, for house- cleaning. Perhaps when he is older he will feel differently. But he lately declared that for nearly, though not quite, every old book, the substance of which he knew tolerably ivell, that he expropriated or destroyed, he felt an access of power to master the next new one upon the subject. Every old file of letters that he consigned to the waste T>asket, with some exceptions, to be sure, gave new exhilara- tion, because of the feeling that he would never have to look them over and decide their fate again, as he had so often done annually. The distribution of unmendable furniture relieved his mind of the faint but year-long prompting to get it repaired, for such a feeling of duty to invalided articles may become almost an obsession and per- Iiaps weaken the character, as good intentions too faint ever to prompt to action are said to do. Thus he or she who does not sometimes clean house with his or her own hands does not and cannot feel the full sense of ownership and possession of treasures. To be Teally loved, they must be touched, handled, moved, fur- ADVENTURE IN DOMESTIC INDUSTRIES 21^ bished, and the more work lavished upon them, the more they are not only sensed but loved and treasured. Thus the rich do not own their *' things"; they are simply stored with them and are ownerless. It is like the case of mothers who have borne but never nursed, fed, dressed, or other- wise tended their children, so that the latter are really orphaned, though living in plenty. It is moral slouchiness about psychic housekeeping, akin to senescence, which is caused by the accumulation and non-elimination of the waste products of decomposition, that lets useless things accumulate unduly; while, conversely, the drastic exercise of the spring function brings rejuvenation of spirits and makes and keeps us like young people who have not yet lived long enough to accumulate burdensome impedimenta. The proper exercise of this function is akin to a wholesome Cathartic for a victim of chronic constipation. I have not begun to do justice to my friend's ijractice or to his theories. If I rightly catch his drift, he is pene- trated with the conviction that woman is in danger of losing respect for, and interest in, some of her own most fundamental functions, and he desired to see at first hand whether these were all so loathsome. He finds most of them exhilarating and peculiarly hygienic. He is not con- ceited enough to think that his solitary example — and soli- tary enough it is — or his precept, when his book appears, will set her again upon her lost trail. He fears she is abandoning her glorious kingdom and that so set is her determination to follow man that she will return to her own only if he leads the way. He is able to find, experi- enced as he is in athletics and in varied industries and handicrafts, nothing quite so wholesome for body and soul as doing precisely what woman is now turning her back upon. He holds, too, that no housewife can possibly have washing, cooking, cleaning, etc., well done by servants un- less she has learned how to do, and actually done, these ^20 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST things well herself, and that whether she be a millionaire or a professional married woman, helping her husband out- side the home to support his family. He would find and make in domesticity new centers for the education of girls and women, and he holds that it would not be less, but more, purely cultural than present methods. But, as a lady professor in his own college remarked, ' ' though he is a good fellow, he is a queer Dick, and the bats that have domesticated themselves in his belfry seem to be a new species, though they are probably harmless. ' ' A LEAP-YEAR ROlilANCE I A TRUE TALE OF WESTERN LIFE ' * ^Tis a wonder, by your leave, she will be tamed so. ' ' Springtown City is a quiet little village that has grown up around a college for both sexes, which was founded by a vigorous religious sect, something less than half a century ago, in what was then the far West. It stands upon a gentle southern slope, from which, across a deep ravine or glen, can be seen a magnificent expanse of rich level bottom- land. Farther up, behind the town, in a grassy oak-opening, stands an immense but now somewhat dilapidated wooden hotel, which a rash speculator had built fifteen years before our story commences, over a large chalybeate spring. The glen, through which now flows a tiny stream, must once have been the bed of a mighty torrent, for it is more than half a mile wide, very deep, and cut with many a curve, quaint, tunneled arch, and dangerous pit-hole through the solid blue limestone rock. Indeed, one of the professors of the college had been for years, and despite some ridicule, patiently accumulating evidence for a pet theory of his, that the three central great lakes along our northern boundary once found a nearer outlet to the sea through this ravine, but that it had been for most of its length filled up by the debris of the glacial epoch, till the rising waters of the lakes were forced to seek out a new and higher 221 222 RECREATIONS OP A PSYCHOLOGIST channel, now caUed the Niagara, into Ontario and the St. Lawrence. Both college and town had been larger twenty-five years ago than now. Indeed, the claims of the former upon the patronage of the community had been at first so success- fully urged that more than a dozen ignorant heads of fam- ilies actually sold all they had, and came in canvas-topped prairie-wagons and encamped for weeks under the unfin- ished walls of the dormitories in the vague hope that some- how their dirty and unlettered youngsters were here to be trained up into lawyers, editors, statesmen, and perhaps presidents, by a new-fangled educational process which they did not pretend to understand. The town also had once given promise of speedy and unlimited growth. For a few years extravagant expectations of sudden wealth had attracted many capitalists, until, as the larger enterprises failed one after another, investments were withdrawn to more promising fields. Springtown City had now entered upon a second and more tranquil period of its history. A large portion of the population was still transient, settling here for a few months or years, on account of the extreme cheapness of Tent, for the education of children, or for health and recrea- tion. Half a dozen wealthy business men from a not far- distant city had established summer homes in or near the village. But the strangest thing about the place was that the influence and number of the unfair sex had been steadily decreasing until by the last census it was found that in the village proper the men were outnumbered almost three to one by the women. Widows left with slender incomes, anxious mammas who looked upon a college town as a cheap matrimonial bazaar, wives of business men who could spend only Sunday with their families, and a whole chorus of sharp-witted and often sharper-tongued maids, old and young, made up the society A LEAP-YEAR ROMANCE 223 « and the sentiment of the town ; while for half a generation the younger and more ambitious men had sought compe- tency or professional renown in wider and more promising fields. In the college, too, the girls had gradually come to out- number and even outrank the boys, while their influence upon the latter grew more and more dominant. They had never been regarded with contempt as rivals, and from the first their presence, almost without their consciousness, had tended to repress many of the bad habits and licensed bar- barities of college life. But now a stolen moonlight ramble with a young lady classmate, or a picnic in the glen, was gradually becoming more attractive than a midnight raid on freshmen or a game of ball, until at last the robust boy- life of the American college, which, with all its abuses, seasons and straightens many a green and crooked stick, was almost forgotten. Even the faculty were obliged to admit that the collection of specimens in natural science was vastly facilitated by allowing the classes to pair off in their studies of flora and fauna. The boys sometimes wrote essays on domestic life, on ideal womanhood, and on the prominence given to the sentiment of love in the literatures of the world, and were fond of attending the Hypatia Club, where social and political themes were discussed by their young lady rivals, often with great sagacity and maturity. In all social gatherings where town and college met, men were at quite a premium. On Shakespeare evenings ladies sometimes had to assume the parts of Orlando, Ferdinand, and even Benedick and Petruchio. Two of them became quite acceptable as bass singers, and all took turns in dancing "gentleman" with white handkerchiefs tied about the right arm. In the weekly prayer-meetings at several of the churches, the most edifying exercises were usually led hj women. A few of the stronger-minded once walked to the polls, and vainly demanded the right to vote, and 224 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST one of them afterward went so far as to allow her piano to be sold rather than to pay her taxes. Another, at a public anniversary, read a rather too scientific essay on tight- lacing, and another persisted for a year in wearing a reform costume. But, on the whole, despite some gossip-monger- ing, and now and then an eccentricity like the above, a wise spirit of moderation pervaded the place. Not a dram- shop was open there after the woman's crusade. Im- morality was repressed by a rigid social ostracism, while the whole moral atmosphere was kept singularly pure and bracing by an all-pervading censorship, sometimes as rigor- ous and outspoken as a woman's indignation, and some- times as subtle as feminine tact. • •••••• The beginning of our story takes us back to late one evening during the Christmas holidays in 1872. Mrs. El- more had opened the spacious double parlors of her summer home — in which she had been detained from her usual winter season at the hotel in the city, by the sickness of an only son — for the entertainment of the Springtown Liter- ary Club. The exercises, which consisted of a conversation on Dante's Vita Niiova, led by a young college professor, and a representation of scenes from As Yau Like It, had been unusually well attended and interesting. The guests had slowly taken their departure in a pelting storm of mingled snow and rain that had suddenly arisen since they had assembled. When the door had closed after the last good-night, Mrs. Elmore pushed a large easj^-chair before the grate, and, languidly seating herself, summoned the maid to bring a bottle of the choice cherry-wine she had put up with her own hands five years before. ''And tell John," she added, ''to go to Mrs. Newell 's at once, and say that Miss Josephine will stay with me to- night." Mrs. Elmore was a tall, large woman, with a decidedly A LEAP-YEAR RO]\IANCB 225 Roman cast of features, and of commanding, almost reginal manner, yet with a complexion as fresh as a girl of sixteen, and with eyes and lips full o^ tenderness and sensibility. She was the spoiled only daughter of a well-to-do lawyer, whose name had been quite prominent in the early political history of the State, the alternately teased and petted sister of three older brothers, and was now the wife of a rich old speculator, who had retired from business nearly a score of years before, when he married her, a girl of seven- teen. Always allowed to follow her own capricious and adventuresome will, she had acquired an unusually wide and varied experience as a woman of the world ; while her independent and original ways and views in all matters within her ken, domestic, social, and sometimes even liter- ary or political, to which it was her particular affectation to call attention, had made her the center of quite a salon of admirers. The ceaseless and exuberant flow of animal spirits which led her sometimes to make ludicrous the foibles of others by good-humored though rather too trenchant caricature, had sharpened the tongues of the village gossips against her; but, in spite of this, it was more than whispered that she was the trusted counselor of many a lovelorn lad and lass, who were somehow led to pour their secrets into her ear, and seek her sound, wo- manly advice. If this was so, she did her kindly offices silently, and kept her own counsels with perfect discretion. In short, she was by no means a vulgar backbiter or an intriguing matchmaker, whatever Mrs. Grundy might sur- mise. Before the maid returned, a young lady entered from behind the curtain of the temporary stage in the back- parlor, and seated herself on an ottoman with the air of a familiar and consciously welcome guest. She was dressed in the last hymeneal costume of Rosalind, and her face was still flushed from the excitement of the evening's per- 226 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST formance. Yet, in spite of the hearty and well-merited applause she had received, there was no look of triumph upon her brow, but rather a trace of anxiety and even pain. Without noticing this, Mrs. Elmore began: ''What foolish whim was it that made you try to give up your part at the very last moment? You look well in the costume of a page. The * mannish air,' the 'swashing martial outside,' become you admirably. You fit the de- scription of the character which is put into Oliver's mouth. You were just bom for a Rosalind, and she seems to me the very crown jewel of all Shakespeare's womanly crer ations — so delicate yet so resolute and independent, «o tender yet so noble. What ought a sensible girl of princely breeding, suddenly thrown upon her own resources, to do but find the man she loves, satisfy herself that her affection is returned, and then let him know she is ready? You had no such morbid scruples about the part when you were a coUegian ; for, if I remember aright, you had tried it be- fore, though with far less success. Still," she mused, **I am not surprised at all." "It is no such foolish pride as that," replied Miss Newell. "To be sure, I expected to feel more awkward in such a character at twenty-eight than I did at sixteen, though I felt far less so. But what saddens me more and more every day is the thought of Brother George's mar- riage in the spring. The old home, that I have kept for him ever since poor father's death, must be broken up. Our tastes were similar, we read and studied together through college, and I thought we should always live to- gether. I do not know what I shall do." Her voice trembled, and her eyes were filled with tears. "Nonsense! I thought you abhorred sentiment," said Mrs. Elmore. "Your brother ought to have married long ago, and you ought to be glad of a chance to get away from Springtown at last. A sister's love should never A LEAP-YEAR ROMANCE 227 make her jealous of a wife^s. I have not been surprised at what I have seen in you to-night. The townsfolk who have known you longest, and have always complained of your cold, proud ways, were all struck with the warm, •loving manner in which you portrayed Rosalind's love. Your brother would have been astonished most of all had he seen you to-night." There was no reply, and Mrs. Elmore continued : "Now, Josie, I asked you to stay to-night, not because I am afraid to be alone in Mr. Elmore's absence, and not because I forget your strange love of walking in all kinds of bad weather, but because I have something very plain and particular to say to you. Professor Moors is in love with you. There! don't smile, and don't look so scornful about it. Poor fellow! It was really pitiful to see the timid glance he gave you as he was describing so earnestly Dante's growing, yet hopeless, passion. I was not sur- prised. I have long suspected it. Your snug little fortune makes you an heiress in his eyes, so that his pride, as well as his bookish, bashful, inexperienced ways, will always hinder any avowal. I doubt if he is himself as conscious of his affection as those who have observed him of late, and of course he would feel deeply mortified if he knew how conspicuously he had worn his heart on his sleeve to-night. He is a rough, undressed stone, fresh from the quarry. Carve away boldly, and you may find the perfect husband that I am sure lies concealed within." She watched her listener's face closely as she spoke, but could detect nothing but indifference. **And now," she continued, **I see plainly that I am called to give you a rather serious lecture. You are well, energetic, and practical, and therein much superior to the average woman. But this silent reserve of your manner repels what is absolutely necessary to every human being — friendship and love. Your heart has always been strangely 228 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST solitary. It is dying of starvation. It asks affection, and you give it — books, science. Away with this foolish, cruel philosophy of life — this systematic repression of sentiment ! There is, to be sure, such a thing as a tender, almost attrac- tive melancholy, often seen in young and earnest souls. It is a common, perhaps a necessary, phase of growth. It comes of extravagant ambition, and is often the reaction of unrealizable ideals and hopeless love. And — oh, dear! — ^how common such cases are nowadays — in novels! But yours is a little less commonplace, at least in degree if not in kind, for mature years ought to bring, and generally do, a sound, stable contentment. If they do not, the end is— well — the worst thing that can come to a well-meaning woman — a lingering, decaying discontent, that stultifies and kills all that is best in her nature. Come, now — ^you know I admire your ambitions, if I do not approve the direction they have taken. I know you better than you do yourself, and love you far better than you love yourself, so do think about all this seriously." * ' Is that why you have kept me to-night ? ' ' replied Miss Newell, with some warmth. *'I have always liked that little homily of yours, and it has never impressed me more than now ; and so let me say, once for all, I have no thought of marrying. I have put it entirely out of my plans. I have no wish to hsilve my rights and double my duties. The very best women nowadays are unmarried. The flirts and the drudges find husbands easily enough — the silliest first, for that matter. Men love sentimentality, and affecta- tion they take as a superfine form of compliment. I am old enough, too, to see woman 's wrongs, which I pity, while I despise her weaknesses. As to the townspeople, you know I never care for their senseless gossip, and with Professor Moors I have scarcely more than a bowing acquaintance.'* Yet, as she spoke, her color heightened. **I have often half suspected your sincerity in these A LEAP-YEAR ROMANCE 229 views/' said Mrs. Elmore, ''and I am not surprised at what I see. Your very demonstrativeness in stating such theories assures me that — unconsciously, perhaps — you are trying to preach down your own heart, and that is as vain and senseless as trying to mortify the flesh in a cloister. It is the supreme duty of every sensible and well-bred young woman to use every honorable means that God and Nature have put into her hands to get herself safely and happily married; and what is one woman's friendship worth to another save to render wise aid in advancing this great end ? It would be a funny thing, ' ' she added, with a loud, merry laugh, ''if a loving couple who met almost daily should die of 'concealment like a worm i' the bud' — he too bashful to tell his love, she shouting 'Excelsior' to the last to drown the softer accents of her own heart. ' ' "When you have told Professor Moors your suspicions about me, if you have not already done so, your duty will be ended. Much joy may you find in your bootless task!" said Miss Newell, rising, and now thoroughly angry. "Well, I am not at all surprised. You are tired now, but sometime you will do me justice. By the way, I wanted to ask you to spend a few weeks with me in the city next month. You were never properly introduced into society, you know." "Oh, I understand," said Miss Newell. "You think that now I am to be alone in the world I need a little of your wise advertising and bargaining to save me from a forlorn old-maidhood. So kind of you! But I tell you I hate the dependence of married life. The helpless con- dition and the narrow, shallow life of most married women is the most pathetic thing in the whole wide world to me. I will show people that one woman at least has sense enough to take care of herself. Whatever else I was made to do in the world I was not made to smirk, and simper, 230 EECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST and blush, under the stare of every brainless, impudent beau. ' ' **I am not surprised, my dear, at your feelings," said Mrs. Elmore, ^'but you need rest now — so good-night. Mary will show you to your room.'* **No, I am not at all surprised," she soliloquized, after her guest had retired. ''Poor girl! she knows she has be- trayed her secret to me. Her pride will make her avoid me. Her heart will have a long and lonely conflict with her ambition, and we may well be anxious about the result. I shall not be surprised, however it may end. It is such a satisfaction to foresee things ! ' ' and she looked abstractedly through the bottom of her empty wineglass at the dying fire till she realized that she was both sleepy and chilly. Early in the morning she was awakened by a gentle tap at her door, and Miss Newell's voice: *' Don't get up; I must go home before 'breakfast, and I only wanted you to lend me a book." ''Certainly; anything," said Mrs. Elmore. *'I did not mean to be rude last night. Do forget it." '*0f course. I told you I was not surprised under the circumstances," replied Mrs. Elmore, trying to rouse her- self. On going downstairs an hour later she looked over the shelves of her library, and could not help smiling and mur- muring to herself, ''I am not surprised," as she noticed that the Vita Nuova was missing. It was very lonely at Miss Newell's during the week while her brother was away. The only inmates of the large, old-fashioned house besides herself were an invalid mother, a little brother, and two servants. After break- fast, and when the day's marketing had been done. Miss Newell retired to her own room. It was one she had occu- pied alone from her girlhood, and it was filled with the relics of many a girlish enthusiasm. There was a small A LEAP-YEAR ROMANCE 231 case of geological specimens, a well-prepared herbarium, tha skeleton of a cat she had dissected, and several birds stuffed by her own hands in her college days. The walls were covered with portraits of all styles and sizes, of what she poetically called the heroines of the ages, and which she had been at great pains and much expense to collect. All types of womanhood, historic and fictitious, from Minerva to Mrs. Somerville, from Kriemhild and Trojan Helen to Florence Nightingale and George Eliot, were grouped on the walls with evident care, but upon a prin- ciple not obvious to any but herself. They were framed^ too, in every conceivable way, and not according to the value or style of the picture, but evidently according to some sense of poetic fitness. Some were deeply matted in gilt and velvet, and some only bordered by varnished burs, spruce-cones, and oak-leaves, and some were framed in spatter-work or plain white paper curiously folded and cut. A large and well-selected library occupied one side of the room, in which historical works seemed to predom- inate, and all the furniture was rich, but plain and worn. Miss Newell seated herself before the small coal-stove,, and was soon absorbed in the book she had borrowed. As she read the passionate sonnets she tried to trace the maze of fact and allegory in their mystic lines, crammed as full of meaning as a cabalistic text. She saw how the poet's ambition was fired, and his soul expanded and tempered by the heat of love into genius — a love which, perhaps, she who was its object never suspected. She recalled how the young professor had, the evening before, contrasted the purity of Dante's passion with the pagan love described by Tibullus and Apuleius, and the half-sentimental, half- sensuous love of knight-errantry, and the poet's noble frankness with the vanity of Rousseau, and his willing docility to the teachings of affliction with the long heart- martyrdoms of asceticism, until at last, wearied and di& 232 RECREATIONS OP A PSYCHOLOGIST satisfied, she threw down the book, put on her shawl, and set out upon her solitary daily walk. The weather had grown colder in the night, the wind was biting, and the walks were slippery. But the usual two miles were faithfully done. As she returned past the college the hour-bell was ringing, and she turned her steps, as she was quite in the habit of doing, toward one of the lecture-rooms where all resident graduates were allowed to attend whenever they chose. She had often visited Pro- fessor Moors 's room, but she lingered in the hall till the students had all taken their places. It required a slight effort to enter, and she hardly knew whether she was more relieved or disappointed to find that the wizen-faced Dr. Skinner had been assigned this room, and with his hard, dry sentences and crispy German accent, was beginning a lecture on philosophy. She tried to understand something about tlie absolute spirit, and pure thought, and divine archetypal intuitions, but the desolate snowscape which she saw through the window was more interesting. Just before the close of the hour, however, her attention was arrested by a transition in the lecture. ' ' We come now, ' ' said the professor, ' * to Schleiermacher, whose position is in many respects the exact opposite of the pure, dry intellectuality of Hegel. The former be- lieved that feeling, not thought, is the absolute; that growth in the consciousness of dependence, not independ- ence, is the true measure of human progress; that enthu- siasm is better than reasoning or science; that it is deli- cacy and intensity of feeling that make genius in the artist, conscience in the reformer, faith in the devotee, and the truest nobility in man, and especially in woman. The highest and absolute form of feeling is a sense of depend- ence upon something that is above us. His pupil, Neander, summarized his system of religious doctrine in the phrase *The heart makes the theologian.' There is no such type A LEAP-YEAR ROMANCE 233 of the true relation of the Church through all its member- ship to Christ as pure wifely love.'' Miss Newell had listened to the same words six years before, but they had made no impression upon her. With- out thinking deeply on what she had heard and read that morning, she went home with a vague, half -serious thought that Providence had somehow conspired with Mrs. Elmore to alter the course of life she had marked out for herself, but this she vowed with the greatest earnestness they should never do. This impression was not lessened when, on entering the dining-room, she found a formal invitation for herself and brother to attend the usual New Year's reception in the college parlors, where she knew she should meet Professor Moors, with whom she had not spoken since his return from the summer vacation. When the evening came, Miss Newell found herself in- stinctively avoiding the young professor. Their eyes met once or twice during the evening, but toward its close they suddenly found themselves face to face. **It is singular," he said, ''how we escape each other. This is the third evening I have lately spent where you were, but we have not met since last commencement. ' ' Confused to feel that in spite of herself her manner was never more frigid. Miss Newell could only say: * * I hope your summer was pleasantly passed. You were in Maine, I think?" **Yes," he replied. **The lonesome life I lead here has made me enjoy my home-visits more than ever before. What a wonderful place this is for work — so quiet and so healthful ! But when one feels the need of rest and recrea- tion, then the trouble begins. One asks one after another of his friends to walk, finds them always preoccupied, and then has to force himself to go stupidly and lonesomely without company. One may drum on his piano when he is sick of work, but if he studies new pieces it is work again. 234 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST There is no one to play whist, or even chess. If one could work here all the time, he would not get pessimistic. As it is, I confess I do sometimes/' ' ' Happy at work, and miserable when play-time comes ! ' ' said Miss Newell, now almost surprised at her own anima- tion. ''Then I ought to wish you a most laborious life. Probably you have eaten so much of the fruit of the tree of knowledge that you are divinely sentenced to greater toil than most of us." "No," replied he, very gravely. "That is the root of most of the gloomy philosophy so alarmingly prevalent nowadays. Sound knowledge never brings unhappiness. The fall was a yet more supreme blessing to the race than Jesus himself brought. I have always told my classes that * Faust' and all that sort of works are immoral because they dispute the fact that the human mind was designed to seek the "unattainable, like a ship built for the sea and not the harbor, with many sails and but one anchor. Those who have really tasl;ed the fruit of the tree of knowledge have come to know that on the whole, as things are, the most toilsome life is the healthiest, happiest, most success- ful — in short, the best and fullest, however measured." "I have vaguely felt that myself, and I am grateful to you for saying it so distinctly, ' ' said Miss Newell, heartily. * * But yet it is so different with me ! I say to myself every day, I must work harder, though I have nothing more definite to work for than self-culture. And now when I am about to break up my dull home-life here, and have nothing to care for but my own culture, I am very sad, and begin to realize how happy I Juxfve been." "Yours is a rare good fortune," said the professor, "when contrasted with the dreadful drudgery of a teach- er's life, for I confess I should give up my theory if I had no higher ideal of work than even I am able to put into practice. ' ' A LEAP-YEAR ROMANCE 235 *^You think teaching so hard, then?" she asked. **No one who has not tried it,'* replied the professor, "can imagine the petty vexations, the earking cares, the lifeless routine, and the abjectness of spirit, which it is impossible for even the best entirely to escape. ' ' **Then what do you think,'' she added, quickly, **of the condition of so many women who prefer the lowest grade of it, at starvation prices, to the many other things that a woman may do ? " ' ' They do not enter upon it as a life 's work, ' ' he replied, **but only as a makeshift, till marriage or sometning else comes to them. Of course, they do not enjoy it. Women need a congenial and all-absorbing 'task for a life-pre- server' as much as men," he continued, speaking now more and more earnestly and disconnectedly, as he felt himself borne along on a new and more dangerous hobby of his. **And that is the whole of woman's rights? Look at it! The women will have to answer for a large share of the disorders of modem society. They must be fashionable, though their children are neglected and their husbands become mere money-hunters, or perhaps thieves. Half of them would rather live in an expensive hotel than be mis- tress of the best of homes. * Anything but domestic life,' is the cry. They will teach, preach, stand behind counters, set type, write books, and what not, all at half prices, rather than rescue the kitchen and the nursery from foreign in- competency. Most of them, too, are invalids nowadays, no more fit to marry than they are to compete with men in active life, and so they are selfish, morbidly excitable, yet often strangely unfeeling, never satisfied — in short, have all the symptoms of mental and physical invalidism. Look at our young lady students. There is not one of them, however much she might want to marry, who would not feel a little humiliated afterward to be found washing dishes or making bread, and all her old mates would pity 236 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST her, and think her education was, of course, a dead loss. And yet, no one thinks it particularly hard for a young lawyer, however superior his training, to begin his pro- fession as the counsel of a drunken Irishwoman or a hog- thief, or for a young doctor to work half a day in trying to set one of the broken metatarsal bones of a dirty negro 's foot. Three quarters of the happiness of the human race ought to be domestic, and would be, if our wrong-headed women had developed instead of turned their backs upon that good old Anglo-Saxon home-life, which is the best character-school, the best source of high motive power, the most purifying and refining influence in the whole world. ' ' The professor was speaking with great earnestness, and would have said more, had he not noticed with real alarm the rigid pallor of his listener's face. Before he could express his concern, however, she was speaking very rapidly : *^Tou have made me listen to the most cruel, yes, insult- ing words I can conceive of! Women have always been victims of man's selfishness and tyranny, but not often in the worst days of such ungallant, rankling, wholesale con- demnation. Have you studied all the abuse of woman's worst enemies, to vent it upon me? I have heard of such ideas, but never supposed before that they were sincerely held, much less that I should ever listen toN^^^ir avowal by a man of intelligence. Most of your notions are as false as they are outgrown. If woman is feeble, man made her so. If she is vain, it is because man has condemned her to a shallow life. If she hates the domestic circle, it is be- cause she has always been made a slave there. But she is and does none of these. She is longing for a fuller, higher life, with all the strength of her nature. She may seem at times unfeeling, but it is because she longs so sternly to know, be, and do, more in the world ; and man, instead of helping her to realize her aspirations, thrusts his hard, A LBAP-YEAE ROMANCE 237 cold fist in her face when she attempts to rise. Sir, you are most unjust and unfeeling.'' Passionately as she spoke, her face had now almost a beseeching look, and she stood with her haads clasped and her eyes cast down. 'If I am so heartless, I can doubtless do nothing more agreeable than to leave you,'' said Professor Moors, as he turned away to chat gayly with a group of lady students till the party dispersed. Two weeks passed. Professor Moors had met Miss Newell several times on the street, but her bows had been so very distant that he was not a little surprised to find one morn- ing among his letters an invitation, written in a clear, bold hand, to attend a tea-party at her home, to which was added a request that he would mark out for her and bring with him a short course of reading in romantic fiction. She had from principle read very little in that direction, the note went on to state, so that the commonest stories would probably be new to her. Professor Moors prepared, with much care, a short list of representative novels, such as could be found in the college library, and such as he fancied would benefit and perhaps please her most. It did not occur to him until he afterward glanced over the list that the characters most prominently portrayed in every work he had selected were women, as Romola, Annele, Irma, Lucille, etc., who had been humbled and at last sweetened and regenerated by long and painful tribulation. It was a curious circumstance; he would mention it to Miss Newell. When the evening came, notwithstanding his early arrival, he was somewhat disappointed to find the large old parlors already quite full of guests. On entering, Miss Newell received him in a cold and, as he was a trifle piqued to fancy, condescending manner, and turned imme- diately away to other comers, and it was in vain that he sought to meet her again. Soon a lap-tea was served, and 238 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST he found himself seated between a substantial old shop- keeper and his wife, where he could not help listening to the harsh voice of Miss NewelT's grandmother, who had come up from the city with one of her daughters for a week's visit. The old lady was a little hard of hearing, and was speaking in a correspondingly loud voice to Mrs. Elmore. "What upon airth! You don't say so? Ef I could b'lieve it, I should feel middlin' kind o' streaked about it myself. But it just can't be. Why, bless yer, when she was in pantalettes, she was a 'ready the pertest, sassiest lit- tle minx ye ever seed, and so chuck full o' grit that her big brother darsent pester her. When she got put out she wouldn't go round tewin' and takin' on, but she'd just spunk right up to the biggest on 'em. Her gran 'ther used to say, says he, * Won't she wear the britches when she gets married, though? Won't her man hev to stan' round lively ef her dander gets up ? I tell you, Beckey, ' he used to say, 'ef he don't jest toe the line to a dotted t, she'll skin the poor coot. I kin see her now/ says he, *a-deaconin' and a-readin' it off to him.' *' 'Well,' says I, 'there's one thing — she won't fret her gizzard clean out of her ef she don't git married, as some gals I knows on, and that is some comfort, anyhow.' ** 'All right, Becky,* says he, 'but sich gals ez Josie, they'll either marry some shiftless scaly gump that comes gallivantin' an' honeyfuglin' round 'em, that they don't really care a bung-town for, 'cause they don't want ter be old maids, and 'cause they want a man to boss 'round ; or else they'll get on a new bent, and come and knuckle all under to some strappin', big, bullyin' feller, who'll tame 'em down like a cosset-lamb.' " 'Well, then,' thinks I, 'she'd best lay out to git along without marryin'.' And so I told her father afore he died j and when a gal gits to be twenty-eight and can bait A LEAP-YEAR ROMANCE 239 her hook with such a fortune as Josie, and hain't had any bite, she'd better stop fishin'." Mrs. Elmore said nothing, and the old lady remarking that she was ''clean tuckered out/' and solacing herself with a pinch of snuff, went upstairs to bed, and the com- pany heard a few blasts as from a distant foghorn, as she struck the keynote of the nasal music that usually soothed her slumbers. The professor had no opportunity to speak with Miss Newell till her guests were taking their departure. Then he handed her the list of books without a word of explana- tion, as he bade her good-night. Exactly at the end of another fortnight he found an- other note upon the desk of his recitation room, placed there, perhaps, to escape the all-seeing eyes of the gossipy postmistress : **Miss NewelPs compliments to Professor Moors. Would lie be so kind as to allow her to be the companion of one of his ^stupid, lonesome' walks? She wishes to say something particular to him. She will be at home after ten o'clock every day this week." The professor waited several days, and it was not till late Saturday afternoon that he rang Miss Newell 's door- bell. She answered it herself, and left him standing for a moment in the hall, while she made ready to accompany him. As they started out, he almost fancied he heard Mrs. Elmore's merry laugh within. He might have been mis- taken. They walked rapidly. Each repeatedly accused the other of trying to keep ahead. Then they would slacken their pace for a moment, but it was sure to accelerate again till one or the other proposed to go slower. On and on they walked along the icy glenroad, till the sun went down, and the bright, early stars of a midwinter night came out. *'"We will turn back. Miss Newell, whenever you wish," he had said, repeatedly, and she had always answered: 240 BECRBATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST '*I am not at all tired. Walk just as far as you would without me/' By following the glen round a curve of several miles, they could reach home by an unfrequented road over the hill past the spring and the old hotel, without any sudden turn about, and this course they both at last seemed re- solved upon. Their talk was mainly of objects by the way, the club, and other indifferent topics. Each felt that the other was slightly constrained and uninteresting, though the conversation was not allowed to flag for an instant: As they were entering the village, Miss Newell suddenly asked : ** Why did you choose for me only stories of proud women becoming broken-hearted ? ' ' **It was purely accidental/' he said quickly. *'I did not notice it till it was too late, or I would have changed the list. I found no chance to speak of it that evening. ' ' *'You surely do not go so far," asked she, **as to think that women need to be schooled by such terrible experi- ence, to teach them a proper sense of their dependence? You have not pointed me to your ideal of woman's life?" '*By no means," he replied. **I should prefer to know more about the ideal men of romance," she said, *'so I have asked Mrs. Elmore to select some reading for me. I want more action. I admire force, energy. That is why I like Carlyle. I am coming to be- lieve in work, perhaps, as much as you. But purely ^seden- tary, mental work would be duU to me, I fear. Do you not feel it so?" '*I do not find it dull, though, of course, it is often ex- hausting," he replied. They had reached Miss Newell 's gate now, and, late as it was, and supperless as they both were, she paused and said: **You spoke of being lonesome, and well you might. A LEAP-YEAR ROMANCE 241 shut up in that desolate room of yours. I know how to pity any one who suffers so, and have often felt, too, that you were distressed by some private grief or misfortune. Concealed sorrow, you know, sickens and kills. You need a confidant and an adviser. As the latter, please let me say, look to your health. Do not work so hard. Be out- of-doors more. I should be very glad to walk again — to play whist with you some night ; still more, to hear any of your music. ' ' She spoke very firmly and deliberately, and still lin- gered. The professor tried to conceal his confusion, and could only reply : *'I shall be happy to call again, but it iS so late I must really bid you good-night now. ' ' She turned away suddenly, and the professor heard the gate close with great force as he walked off rapidly toward his room. Weeks passed again. Miss Newell 's grandmother had taken her departure, and Mrs. Elmore, who was almost her only intimate friend, had gone to the city. Her brother's wedding had just been celebrated, but Miss Newell still re- mained in Springtown. The professor, perhaps, did not realize how lonely she felt; at any rate he did not call. The first of April came, and with it another note in a hand that he did not recognize. It was written with a pencil, was slightly soiled and crumpled, and many words and phrases were underscored. It read as follows: My dear Professor Moors: I trust and respect you so much that I venture to write what perhaps no woman ever wrote to a man, and my only excuse is that I believe no such circumstances ever existed before. I love you more and more every day in spite of myself. What can I do except to say, as Rosalind told poor Orlando, "I am yours if you will marry me." You need a wife and a home. Perhaps it is for me to say, first, that any differences which may exist in our circumstances should not be a barrier to our love. If your heart does not tell you who wrote this, know that it is 242 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST from one who would celebrate leap-year day, which is also her birth- day, in a way as rare as that event. In great suspense, Devotedly yours, Alpha. P. S. — Please destroy this note. I have now carried it a month without daring to send it. The professor read the note again and again. He could not think it a joke, though received upon All Fools' day, and his suspicions at once pointed to the true source of it. He attempted no reply for several days, while his students found occasion for some amusement in his fits of abstraction in the classroom, and some of the bolder ones ventured to give incoherent answers, while he gazed out of the window, till a suppressed burst of merriment would recall his thoughts to the work in hand. The class in Chaucer became uncontrollable, and he quite lost his temper, when one day he said to a young lady stu- dent: '* Please begin — 'When that Aprille with his shoures soot« The drought of March hath pereed to the roote,' and scan the first twenty lines, Miss — Newell. ' ' Within the next week he wrote, and afterward destroyed, many replies, until at last the following was written, and, a few days later, sent : My Good Friend Miss Newell: I received on April 1st an anonymous note, which I believe to have been from you, and the contents of which I believe to be as sincerely meant as they were frankly spoken. I need scarcely say that your confidence shall be forever sacredly kept. But I ought now, by every consideration, to be no less plain in reply. If I have in any way become an object of your pity, I have at least never sought to win your love, nor consciously given you any right to fancy that I loved you. But whatever my feelings may be, I am compelled to believe that the love you express is too selfish and shallow, as it is evidently too sudden, to sanction the great experiment of life. You are candid enough to say I need a wife. I do feel more deeply day by day the need of companionship and sympathy in my own lines of interest — in fine, of a true helpmeet. But my ideal of wedlock is, I hope, so high that I never should dare to propose marriage from such or any other motives of convenience or necessity. I will venture only to A LEAP-YEAE ROMANCE 243 remind you that there are thousands in the world who would eagerly seek what I am and always shall be so very old-fashioned as to refuse — wives who prefer to adorn social or public life rather than the domestic circle, and who bring to it pride and wealth rather than true and tender love, which alone can give happy and sweet-tempered content and satisfaction to the humblest home. Yours truly and sincerely, Omega. Miss Neweirs daily walks had become very irregular during the dreary days of real suspense before she received this letter; sometimes they were omitted, and, when taken, were over unfrequented roads or during the hours when she knew the professor would be engaged at the college. When it came at last, she hastened to lock herself into her room, unheated though it chanced to be, before she opened it, and even then she paused, looked toward all the corners of the room, listened till she could hear her own heart beat, then took it from the envelope and resolutely tried to calm herself as she turned it over in her hand and walked to and fro. At last she spread it out upon the standing-desk where she generally studied, and read it carefully, sentence by sentence, trying to catch the full import of every clause as she proceeded. When she had done, and as she was slowly and mechanically folding it, she caught a glimpse of her own face in the mirror which had always hung before the desk. The cheeks of the image she saw there were so blanched, the lips so firmly compressed, the brow so rigid, the face so hard and stem, that she started back with sud- den dismay at a visage so old and haggard. The air seemed to grow close, and there was such a heaviness now at her heart that she staggered, clutching wildly at the nearest support, and bringing down the case of geological speci- mens — stones, skeleton, and all — ^bruising herself severely by falling upon them. She did not faint, but before she could rise both her servants were knocking at the door in great alarm to know what had happened. She left them to collect the treasures whfch hitherto no hand but her own 244 KECRBATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST had been allowed to touch, and arrayed herself, scarcely knowing what she did, and started out for a walk. She had not gone so f^r since the long walk with the professor, and tea was waiting when she returned. Her little brother had already climbed into his chair and was waiting very impatiently. He checked his clamor suddenly when she appeared, looking long and earnestly in her face, tried to steady his manly little lip and keep back the rising tears, but soon began to cry aloud. "Josie don't care for little brother, or she would not walk so far off, and look so tired and so sorry/' was the only articulate form of his grief. **Yes, Josie does love little brother, and will make him happy," she said, impulsively clasping him in her arms and finding relief at last in mingling her tears with his. **But Josie is all alone now, and little brother must love her, too.'' The little fellow was greatly astonished at this sudden burst of tenderness, and still more so when his sister did not call Kate, as was her wont, but took him up to bed her- self and sat at his bedside till he fell asleep. Sunday came, and again Miss Newell found herself lis- tening to the crispy accents of the German professor, whose turn it chanced to be to officiate in the college chapel. He was so skeptical, and withal so dry and philosophical, that he was far from popular. But for once he had left his too critical methods, and chosen a large, sjrmpathetic theme. He spoke of the corn of wheat falling into the ground and dying that it might bring forth much fruit, and of the blessings that attended self-sacrifice. ^'We are seldom called upon," the speaker said, ^*to die for a good cause as thousands have been in the past. Ours is the harder duty of living daily and hourly for those ob- jects which are dearer than life. The Christ of our day would have toiled to the weary end of a long life. When A LEAP-YEAR ROMANCE 245 the heart and the mind have once made the great surrender to those objects which are higher and larger and more glorious than they, there comes a sweetness, a strength, and a light, unknown before. To live for self is suicide of all that is best in us. Look at the faith of one fourth of the whole race, that annihilation, absolute and complete, is the supreme good to be always toiled and prayed for. For them, this hidden secret sense, that urges them to 'some unknown good,' is strong enough to be followed against the current of every other known motive, wealth, fame, power, or happiness, here or hereafter. The great lesson is, that man's use to men is all, his credit with them noth- ing.'' Miss Newell followed the speaker intently. As she walked slowly home she felt in her breast a sentiment of restfulness and peace, that had been a stranger there for many a day, and which so transfused her very slumbers that night that she awoke in the morning with a strong sense that something unremembered had just faded from her soul too transcendently sweet to be ever thought or felt again, and some days passed before the old bitterness gradually began to return. Meanwhile the professor had been expecting an angry reply, but two weeks passed and he heard nothing. At length he learned that Miss Newell had gone to the city very soon after the date of his note. ''She is with Mrs.- Elmore," he said to himself, "and will, doubtless, find in her circle suitors more to her mind, who will gladly fall at her feet and offer far higher and more congenial stations than I can ever hope for. She is likely enough already ashamed of her flitting interest in me, associated as it was with an ill-judged avowal, which must, upon mature reflec- tion, injure her self-respect as deeply as my perhaps too harsh reply must have humiliated her pride. The village gossips, then, are right. Mrs. Elmore is an intriguing, mer- 246 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST cenary matchmaker, who has acquired a morbid, ahnost in- sane, passion for trafficking in affection, and Miss Newell is heartless enough deliberately to place herself in such hands, because the time has come when she feels the need of a home.'* "With such thoughts the professor applied himself with renewed energy to the work of his chosen field, while spring passed and the busy season of commencement came on apace. Mrs. Elmore had now returned alone to her sum- mer home, while Miss Newell's house still remained closed and billeted ''For sale." One day, in glancing over the morning papers in the col- lege reading-room. Professor Moors noticed the following advertisement : **Miss Josephine Newell's Collegiate Institute for Young Ladies •will be opened in the fall on the completion of the new buildings, to all who pass the required examination. A full corps of competent instructors has been engaged, who will arrange a new advanced and thorough course. Many special city privileges have been secured for the pupils, and the endowment is such that free tuition is offered for the first year. The patronage of all who desire a higher culture for women is respectfully solicited.'' His interest was at once so strongly aroused by what he read that he hastily determined, though not without many misgivings, to call on Mrs. Elmore and learn more about it. As he waited in her parlor lie reflected that he must be wary and not rouse any suspicion by displaying more than an educator 's interest in a new scheme. He would bring it in incidentally. Besides, if she suspected any curiosity on his part, it would be like her to refuse to gratify it. But such thoughts were cut short as she entered the room and began abruptly: **What have you Springtown people been doing to drive Miss Newell away? I left her re- markably happy and contented, and on my return I find that she has fled away as if in a panic, without a single adieu to her friends here, and has embarked all her prop- A LEAP-YEAR ROMANCE 8^ erty in a new-fangled educational scheme. I always thonght she had too level a business head to run any such risk, I must find out more about it.'' **You have not seen her, then, in the city?" he asked. *'No, indeed!" she replied. **I heard of her enterprise, but she did not call, and, of course, I could not run after her." * * I suppose she will make a veritable Lady Psyche or an Ida, ' ' said the professor, who, although he felt that he was being watched, could not repress a slight inflection of con- tempt. **That can hardly be known till some admirer has cour- age enough to woo her," said Mrs. Elmore, so innocently that Professor Moors felt that his curiosity had not be- trayed him, and he might further indulge with safety. * * I do not think, ' ' she added, very gravely, ' ' that she will ever become a regular man-hater. She has too much senti- ment and sense. Besides, she has chosen for herself the department of romantic fiction ! She says, I am told, that her school is designed to make women first, ladies after- ward. ' ' ''But," he asked, **you do not think she can succeed \vith her new method, and quite without experience, too?" **I think she will use up all her substance and die in the attempt rather than fail," said Mrs. Elmore, warmly. *'You do not know her. "When she has once set her mind upon an object, obstacles seem only to rouse her into new action. Perseverance is the chief trait of her character. So no measure of success would surprise me." **The higher education of woman," said the professor, abstractedly, "is certainly an object worthy the devotion of the wisest and best, but she will need to husband all her resources to effect any reforms in the direction I presume she intends." **She will learn lessons of more value than any she will 248 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST be able to teach others, ' ' Mrs. Elmore replied. * ' I think she will be changed herself in her work far more than she will change the inveterate prejudices she must encounter where Bhe is. ' ' The professor was heartily glad to find himself so far mistaken in his judgment of Miss Newell, and now could not avoid a vague suspicion of a possible cause for her sudden enterprise which he did not allow himself to en- tertain, and reproached himself for even fancying. A year passed away, and brought to Professor Moors all •the weary, uneventful round of duties which fill up a teacher's life so often with only faint-heartedness and petty, oppressive care. But he succeeded at last, with a purer ambition and a more resolute will than ever before, in so absorbing himself in the work of his chosen field that a fresh and generous enthusiasm, hitherto unfelt, was opening new sources of conscious power and enjoyment. He became more and more firmly wedded to his daily tasks. His teaching was so successful, and the recognition of his contributions to his chosen department was so general and hearty, and his judgment on all educational matters so mature and well informed, that the trustees at their annual meeting, though not without much opposition from the older members of the board on account of his youth, at last voted to confer on him the newly-vacated position of vice- president, which, on account of the age and infirmity of the president, was the virtual head of the college. Meanwhile, with her helpless mother and little brother, Miss Newell had taken up her abode in the bustling little city of Ashton, near to the scene of her newly-chosen labors. Here her crotchety, petulant old grandmother had for years dwelt alone in her own house with her servants, not far from the residence of her son *s family. She had prom- ised to reward one after another of her relatives by a gen- erous remembrance in her will, if they would live with her; A LEAP-YEAE ROIVIANCE 249 and several of them had made the attempt, but she was so absolute and exacting, and so bad-tempered, that they had all left her to a solitude which she had slowly come to en- joy, till now the gathering infirmities of years had brought a growing sense of helplessness. She had always abused Josie^s mother — now as a soft-hearted, weak-minded thing, whom her son was impulsive enough to marry out of sheer pity ; now as a wily, scheming upstart, who had woven her subtle charms about her husband 's heart with a cunning in- spired by ambition, not by love. Still Josie had always been her favorite grandchild. The old lady now felt self- ishly glad that she did not seem disposed to marry, and glad that her new enterprise had brought her, even with her detested invalid mother, to be an inmate of the same house with her. Miss Newell found herself living in a new world. It was not the ideal life her fancy had so often painted. It was so crowded with occupations that she had little time at first to indulge in feelings of either joy or regret. Her heart beat high with aspiration and hope. If love was denied her, she was about to find more than it could give in a new mission broad as philanthropy itself, and high and noble as a purely unselfish devotion could make it. She was surprised at her own executive energy and dispatch. The buildings rose rapidly. The design, the arrangement of rooms and grounds, all was her own. She figured out every night an approximate estimate of the expenses of the day in labor and material, interested prominent citi- zens to subscribe for a scholarship and prize fund, and found time to visit many other institutions large and small, and to gain some insight into methods of instruction and administration, besides devoting a stated portion of each day to special preparation in her own line of teaching. The city council had been induced to remit her municipal 250 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST taxes for the first year, and even the school board were at first disposed to make friendly advances. At last all things were ready, and the institute was thrown open to students. Three quarters of the large bevy of young ladies who presented themselves succeeded in passing the required examination, the standard of which, though it was held ostentatiously high in the prospectus, it was thought best quietly to lower, like a leaping-pole in a circus-ring, which is ducked dexterously down under the feet of the clumsiest athlete, and then instantly raised higher than ever. All the exercises of dedication and in- auguration were postponed until the end of the academ- ic year, and a sort of scholastic quiet gradually began to pervade the premises. All the while, with rare administra- tive tact, Miss Newell was at work collecting and investing funds, animating her band of teachers with her own spirit, personally soliciting patronage, and everywhere directing improvements, so that she found time for but three hours per week of actual classroom work. But now one of those strange and startling tragedies of domestic life, which often seem too sudden and phenomenal for the uses of fiction, came like a stunning volcanic explo- sion, which scatters its scorching debris over newly-mown but fertile and reblooming acres. Miss Newell 's mother had once been a woman of much intelligence and breadth of sympathy, but affliction, confirmed moodiness, and fan- cied neglect, had slowly led her from easy-going, liberal views upon religious matters first to absolute and implicit faith in the letter of Scripture, and then to a sterner and severer subjection of her reason to the captious logic of medieval interpretations. The good women of the Presby- terian Church in Springtown, who had often held their sewing-circles at Miss Newell 's for her mother's accommo- dation, were sometimes thrilled by the impassioned fervor with which her mother applied her favorite denunciatory A LEAP-YEAR ROMANCE 251 texts to some of their commonly sanctioned practices and amusements. The vigorous austerity of Puritanism was the form of life contemplated by the Bible she read. Her creed continued to grow narrow as her heart grew cold, till at length all her thoughts centered about the doctrine of the depravity of the human heart, and the awful hazard of eternal despair which encompasses every soul. She loved more and more the solitude of her own room. Her gloomy, brooding self-consciousness could be broken only momentarily by the society of friends or by riding abroad. At length the sense of impending doom of which she lost no opportunity to warn others with grim vehemence, as they gradually left her to her own musings, she began to feel for herself. When she was moved to Ashton she seemed brighter for a time, but at length shut herself up in her own room to escape the occasional outbursts of the temper of her mother-in-law, and would allow no one to enter save her children. One evening, to celebrate the close of the winter's term, Miss Newell had prepared, with her grandmother's reluc- tant consent, to entertain a select number of her friends and patrons. The guests had assembled, and were chat- ting in the parlor, while in the dining-room Miss Newell was herself superintending the preparation of the table. Wine was standing upon the sideboard, and some one had struck up a merry air upon the old piano. Suddenly Miss Newell 's mother appeared in the parlor doorway, and gazed about with a glance so fierce and frowning that to those who noted her she seemed like the sudden apparition of a horrible specter. In an instant, and without a word, she hobbled unaided to the dining-room. *'Why, mother," exclaimed Miss Newell, in great aston- ishment, **how in the world did you get downstairs? We said nothing to you about it, because we feared it would 2S2 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST distress you. You shall stay now, and have a seat here next to me/* *^ Josephine, Josephine!'* cried her mother, aloud, her rancor against happiness roused almost to frenzy. *'In there you have made me hear the sound of the dance. This you have made a room for gluttons and wine-bibbers,'* she continued, slowly and more loudly than before. ''I have raised up chfldren, and they have rebelled against me. You have brought down my gray hairs with sorrow to the grave. Would to God that you had never been born ! * * Mortified and really alarmed at the unusual violence of these exclamations. Miss Newell could only entreat her to calm herself and speak lower. ''Never!" she shouted. ''I speak the still small voice of conscience and of God — a voice you must hear again at the last great day. Help me to my room now, ' ' she added, a new and sudden purpose changing her voice and man- ner. ''There you cannot hinder me from praying God to pluck your soul as a brand from the burniag. Then I shall have finished my duty toward you." She was aided upstairs, and the company had just taken their seats about the table, awkwardly trying to resume their tone after the embarrassing incident, when a heavy, falling sound was heard overhead. Instantly every face took on a look of terror, and, without a spoken word, the thrill of a nameless fear chilled every heart, and Miss New- ell, her grandmother, and several of the more familiar guests, hastened to the invalid's room. It was locked, and there was no answer to their call. Miss Newell was the first to pass into an adjoining chamber, out upon an open porch, then into her mother's room. There, upon her knees, her body resting upon the sofa, lay her mother, already dead, the blood streaming from a wound in her temple. Miss Newell had come to feel an increased sense of A LEAP-YEAR ROMANCE 253 safety in her solitary mode of life in keeping a tiny pistol, an old present from her brother, and scarcely larger than her little finger, in the drawer of the stand which stood at her bedside, and it was this her mother had used, holding it so close to her head*that no report had been heard, and the entire charge had entered her brain. When the others entered the chamber of death, there sat Miss Newell upon the floor, holding her mother's head in her lap, wiping away the oozing blood, and kissing the pale lips and up- turned eyes whereon now rested a sweet, placid smile, such as in happier days, long and weary years ago, had shed joy upon her childhood. In the wild insanity of sudden grief, the daughter called the mother by every endearing name, while friends gathered around speechless and power- less to render aid or comfort. But it was only for a mo- ment. The grandmother had made her way to the scene, and her lamentations were so abandoned and uncontrollable that Miss Newell, with a great effort at self-possession, at last led her away, to her own chamber, where a long, cling- ing embrace seemed to calm them both. Returning almost immediately to the dreadful scene of death, upon which strong men gazed an instant and then turned away, cover- ing their eyes with their hands. Miss Newell was the first to rememoer that the law must be satisfied and a coroner's jury summoned, and she withdrew only when nothing more could be done. "When the verdict of the jury was made known, *'Died from a wound inflicted by her own hand," the old lady^a grief burst forth anew. \ "Oh, deary me ! deary me!" she wailed. **Just to think where them that kills themselves goes to ! I shall meet all my kith and kin on the shining shore but her, and I drove her to it — I know I did! Oh, deary, deary me!" Miss Newell listened some time to such exclamations, till all that was within her rose in rebellion, even then in the 254 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST hour of ^ief. *'Husli, grandmother !' ' she said. *'If Christ ^s love means anything, it means hope, and comfort, and help in this extremity; it must bring all that these words can possibly mean to us now — all that we can wish them to mean. ' ' Ever after that the two women seemed to grow nearer to each other in heart, and tried to inspire in each other comfort and good cheer, though each knew that the other passed solitary hours of silent grief. For Miss Newell, too, a nameless horror seemed to per- vade the house. Ghostly shapes flitted over her pillow at night. She fancied scowling, spectral faces peering in at the windows. She would start and turn suddenly about before her glass at night, imagining she saw vanishing and monstrous forms, and no effort of reason could banish the delusion. Thus weeks wore away. Her school duties were per- formed more and more listlessly and mechanically; and at length, although spring was crowding all the pulses of nat- ural life with its freshness and wondrous power and beauty, her cheeks continued to grow thin and pale. At length her little brother fell sick, and suddenly, with the last melting snows of winter, his innocent spirit passed away. TheTi tears fell freely and brought actual relief. Then the house was swept of all its strange, haunting hor- rors. Then grandmother and granddaughter drew very near each other in mutual sympathy and love, and Miss Newell found herself warmed with a new affection toward the young, taking all her pupils into her heart more than ever before. And when the first year of her school closed, with the formal exercises of dedication, she sought rest, feeling that now she could give herself wholly, and without reserve or distraction, to her chosen work. Autumn came again, but, in spite of her fresh hopes and purposes, Miss Newell experienced a shrinking reluctance to enter upon the duties of the opening term, which it re- A LEAP.YEAE KOMANCE 255 quired no small effort to overcome. The institute was full, and she busied herseL£ at once in making such changes and introducing such new features as the experiences of the past year and her own summer musings had suggested. An extended course of art-study was introduced, which had been hitherto entirely excluded. Religious instruction was given on Sundays by each teacher in her own way, and all the pupils were required to attend, each where she wished. Alternate studies were provided for some of the severer branches. A fortnightly lecture-course, to which the town was invited, was planned for the benefit of the library. Miss Newell resigned many of the official duties she had previously executed, into other hands, that she might at- tend to the experiment of a Kindergarten, which she had planned to hold in a neat new building at one extremity of her grounds — and also that she might have more time for self -culture. But in all that she did or thought there was a subdued temper, born in part from a sense of loss and of fatigue, which she vainly tried to overcome by increased applica- tion. Superior to her sex in general, as she fancied herself, Bhe had, like most women — the strongest-minded, perhaps, least of all — little power distinctly to realize or analyze her own motives and emotions; else she would have come to know ere this that what had lately sustained and now sub- dued her was a love for Professor Moors, which, shallow and impulsive as it had been at first, was daily absorbing more and more of her whole being. She was little con- scious of the depth and strength it had already acquired, still less of the futility of all the resources she sought against it. In every hour of repose, when the inner cham- bers of her soul were opened, there was his image shriued in the holiest place, idealized now by absence, and deferred, almost hopeless longing. It was this idealization of her love that supported and perhaps saved her. It had awak- 256 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST ened purer and deeper instincts, warmed her heart with truer social sjrmpathies, and almost won its cause against old and still pleading ambitions before the tribunal of reason and judgment. Under all the weight of sorrow she had felt, far below all the bustle and noise of distracting cares and duties, against the current of all her conscious purposes, a new life was springing forth which already ministered peace and joy. It was a life so warm and glow- ing that it might one day melt all the ice of selfishness and distorted ideals and proud reserve which had so long de- layed the growth of more womanly sentiments. Professor Moors did not love her, she said to herself. Mrs. Elmore, in her officious zeal, had cruelly deceived her; and it was not so much, she was coming to believe, the change of cir- cumstances which her brother's marriage had brought, as it was mortification mingled with desire to escape from a passion powerful only when it had been denied, that had made Springtown unendurable to her. Love for him had suggested her present vocation, and it was sweet to feel that, impassable as was the gulf that separated her forever from him whose memory was now so fond, she was constantly drawing nearer to him in com- mon sympathies, tastes, and pursuits; for how close are those who labor in the same spirit and for the same object! She read and reread his letter, so full of cutting reproach and stern rejection of all she could offer. The time at length came when she must confess to herself how utterly he had come to fill her heart. She was able to find some comfort in the thought that she was doing as he wished her to do whose destiny was to be shared with him. How much more of a helpmeet she might be to him now than be- fore! But no, she never would deceive herself again for a moment. Every possibility in that direction must now be banished from her most secret thought absolutely and forever. What remained? They were both solitary, both A LEAP-YEAR ROMANCE 257 laboring in the same field, and by mutual council and advice might perhaps be of great service to each other and to the cause to which they were both devoted. Friendship would be an inestimable boon. Perhaps it was a duty they owed to others if not to themselves. The purest feelings, she had read from Comte, were those formed by the high- est duties. Such was the course of her often-disturbed thoughts for many days, till slowly all the currents of her soul set in one channel toward this one object. She felt the need of counsel. She would show Professor Moors, at least, that she harbored no resentment — that all her pride had been sacrificed ; and so she wrote to him again, hastily and impulsively, as was her nature: Dear Sir: I wish to acknowledge and express my deep regret for a note that I sent you many months ago. The blame was all mine, and would that I could offer something more than a tardy and cheap apology for any trouble it has caused you! I thought your reply cruel. I was mistaken. It was just — yes, kind. Bitter as it then seemed, I owe to it I know not how much good that has since come to me. I do not venture, in writing again, to seek any answer to my ques- tions which you then passed by. That I have ceased to desire, but I wish to say that it would now be, to me at least, an advantage and a pleasure if such friendship and communication as our common interests and pursuits suggest might be established between us. This, however, by every consideration, is for you to say. Indeed, I should be so chiefly the gainer thereby that I half suspect my own motive in writing to be selfish and wrong. I beg leave to sub- Bcribe myself Your friend, Josephine Newell. A postscript added an invitation to Professor Moors to deliver the opening lecture of a free course in Ashton be- fore the girls of the Newell Institute, on any subject that he deemed suitable. The professor received this note in the midst of the duties and vexations of a new year and a new position, compli- cated and almost doubled as they were by the disorders of previous mismanagement and present inefficiency. He re- membered the indomitable perseverance which Mrs. EJmore 258 RECEEATIONS OP A PSYCHOLOGIST had described as the chief trait of Miss Newell 's character. The latter, he reflected, had doubtless thought, as he had, of the material advantages which might accrue from any association of their interests. Perhaps, also, other experi- ences, with which eligible old bachelors are only too fa- miliar, had led him, as does so many, to suspect matrimonial devices to be lurking under every act and word of all mar- riageable women. At any rate, he scribbled only a hasty and ill-considered reply: I do not believe in Platonic love. As a man of business, however, I can accede to both your propositions, provided only that I can put you down for such exercises as I see fit — at a Teachers' Institute I have planned here soon after the date of the lecture. Miss Newell pondered long and sadly. All the old grief was fresh again in her heart. Could she appear as a public speaker ? How strange, with the views she had heard him express, that he should ask it! Yet she had often wished for such an opportunity as this. But could she curb all her old pride and appear in Springtown, before the staring townsfolk she had always looked down upon, as a common teacher among teachers, and there make, perhaps, the worst appearance of any? What would Mrs. Elmore think, and, above all, how could she stand before Professor Moors again, who was always so calmly balanced and possessed, so hypercritical, as she fancied? Perhaps he wished only to study and experiment with her. No, he could not be so utterly unfeeling. At any rate, she would go, and so it was arranged. n The evening of the lecture Professor Moors called, and walked with Miss Newell to the hall. The manner of both was constrained, almost awkward. It was late, and they hastened on in silence, or speaking only upon incidental A LEAP-YEAR ROMANCE 259 topics. Her form was as erect and her step as lithe as ever, but he observed new lines of care upon her face. Her brow seemed heavy, and yet her eyes were larger and more lustrous than before, and the whole mold of her regu- lar, strongly Grecian features was mellowed by a new ex- pression of sadness and tenderness. The hall was crowded, and for the first time in her life Miss Newell found herself speaking in the presence of a large audience. The professor was introduced as a distin- guished educationist, whose views were worthy of the most thoughtful consideration of all. Stepping to the front of the platform, he began in a very conversational style, but with perfect and deliberate pos- session : *'By the courtesy of my friend, I am to have the honor of presenting my views to-night on the higher education of women — a subject of such vast interest and importance that I shall venture to ask your serious attention to a plain and free talk, without any of the formality of the lecture- room. Woman is dishonored most by those who pronounce studied eulogies upon her sex, and attempt to caress her self-love by enumerating main and conspicuous instances which illustrate her virtues. These are as admirable, as various in kind and degree, as indispensable to human well- being in every way, as man's; and it is a flippancy bom of assumed superiority and of shallow ignorance of the forces that make up the world of thought and action which assumes that the claims and needs of one half the human race are to be met either by the dexterous compliment of the drawing-room, or even by smoothing woman's way to the ballot-box and to public positions. To define her proper station is a practical problem so vast that all theories thus far are crudely and even grotesquely inadequate, and its solution must be left to the general course of thought and events." 260 RECREATIONS OP A PSYCHOLOGIST His manner and utterance were so graceful that the at- tention of every one present was fastened upon the speaker. Miss Newell smiled and nodded her approval to her first assistant, who sat upon the platform by her side, and who smiled grimly in return, but whispered, **I fear we ought to have learned more about his views before we invited him here.'* **I think we can trust him,'* Miss Newell replied. ** Meanwhile, ' ' continued the speaker, **let me confess frankly at the outset that, while I cannot believe with a great writer that she is the best woman of whom least is said or known, and while I would not challenge her abstract right to any position or pursuit, I am ancient enough to believe that the public franchise, that business and most professional careers, that even severe and protracted men- tal culture, are the last and least things that she ought to seek, or her friends to claim for her. The home is older than the school. Piety, courage, love of truth, were first taught there. Nay, more: religion itself prospers or de- clines with home-life. When home is made attractive, in- temperance and all the vices of private indulgence diminish in rapid ratio. She is the best woman who is the best wife, rears the best children, and fills home with the choicest fruitions. The range of emotion is deeper and wider than that of thought, and her wondrous endowment of sensibility gives woman such a breadth of experience that a contracted sphere of life imposes little restraint, for no experience can give adequate utterance to what the meanest can feel. The divinest service man can perform for woman is to voice her own inner life, to reflect to her mind that which fills her heart, and which she strives in vaia to realize or to express, and what he needs in her is a heart-culture that shall give a steady flow of pure and healthy sentiment, where he can ever go for sympathy and comfort, and which will save him from a life of dry intellectuality or mechani- A LEAP-YEAR ROMANCE 261 cal routine or misanthropy. I am one of those who be- lieve that the highest and most perfect form of emotion is a sense of complete dependence and unreserved self- surrender. The religious sentiment — love for any and every worthy object, esthetic susceptibilities which respond to beauty wherever found, and even conscience — all are but diverse forms of this supreme feeling, elements of what the poet describes as the soul of eternal womanhood. Alas for that man who has not learned to reverence this ideal, and thrice happy he who has found it worthily en- shrined in some tender, loving heart!" After this introduction the speaker proceeded to explain with, some detail what he deemed to be the true subjects, aims, and methods, of female education. His views were, on the whole, somewhat abstract, immature, and quite reac- tionary, but so earnestly advocated that a round of hearty applause greeted him at the close. **Just look at Miss Hardtack's nose!" giggled one of the girls, as an elderly teacher, a tall, slender creature, sprang to her feet and hastened from the stage the instant the speaker ended, and began talking rapidly, and apparently in high dudgeon, with a middle-aged, mild-minded trustee. If such a rigid martinet as Miss Hardtack was offended, that was sufficient reason why all the girls should like the professor, and all they could or could not understand in jhis lecture. No one upon the platform, however, had a word of con- gratulation for him, until just as he was hastily taking his departure to catch the evening train to Springtown, Miss Newell came to him while most of the audience yet re- mained in the hall, and smiling her approval, and placing her hand in his, thanked him cordially for his lecture. **I do not object to most of your views," she said; ''and, on the whole, I am glad to have them expressed here, though some of my friends will be quite seriously displeased." 262 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST She would have added more, but just then a wealthy and influential old German, whose patronage Miss Newell had vainly tried to obtain, bustled on to the platform, and, grasping the professor's hand, said: *'Dat is vot I calls goot sound doctrine. You shall have both my girls, and I vill do vot I can for you, too, Miss Nevell/' The professor expressed his gratitude, and quickly left the hall. ** After all," he mused, sadly, to himself, as he rode homeward, ''so many women seem made to deceive them- selves, and to live and thrive upon delusions, it is not strange if they cannot help deceiving others." In a week Miss Newell was in Springtown again. As she entered the village, and 4s the associations of two years ago were revived one after another at every step, she felt all her calmness and self-control giving way to a state of fluttering, nervous expectancy, whether bodeful of good or ill she vainly wondered. There was her old home, which, although now sold to a stranger, furniture and all, was still unoccupied^. There were the tin-clad spires and brick mina- rets of the main college-building, and the red walls of the dormitories half covered with American i^^, dyed with all the hues of autumn. And there came Professor Moors, hastening to meet her party, and to offer them the best entertainment which the hospitality of the villagers could afford. ''Do you stop with friends, or shall we provide for you with the rest of the party?" he asked, doubtfully, as they approached Mrs. Elmore's gate. **I will go on with the rest," she murmured, dropping her veil, and slightly quickening her pace. "Mr. Hand will entertain two guests. Shall I take you and your assistant there?" he asked. Mr. Hand she remembered as a worthy and well-to-do A LEAP-YEAR ROMANCE 26a old fanner, from whose dairy and garden she had often supplied her table, and his wife was one of the most sa- gacious oracles of the village gossip. ''I have no choice," she said. And there they were es- corted, to make ready for the first session of the institute, which was to begin in an hour, while the professor has- tened away to give directions about their baggage. Miss Newell 's presence excited great interest among the teachei^. The fame of her enterprise had preceded her. She explained in a quiet, modest way the plan and aim of her own school, what she believed the true order of studies, her own theories and methods of imparting literary culture to young ladies, and found herself obliged to answer, as best she could, many perplexing questions. But, because Professor Moors seemed to listen with appreciation, she found her interest increasing with every exercise, and, con- trary to her plans, she remained to the end of the last day's session. At the close, he took occasion to express publicly his deep appreciation of her services, and adding after- ward, to her alone, words of warmest praise, offered her a check for a small amount, saying: *'I thought you might dislike to have any remuneration for your valuable assistance publicly voted by the associa- tion, and so, using my discretionary power over its funds as president, I beg you to accept this. ' ' Instantly the same rigid pallor of indignation which he had once before observed with so much alarm overspread her face, but she only said: "I could never consent to receive pay under the cir- cumstances. ' ' The days she had looked forward to with such mingled, but anxious, feelings were now ended. All the old acquaint- ances whom she met observed a new grace and sweetness in her face and manner, and had remarked upon the change. It had inspired them with a more cordial and ten- 264 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST der regard, which in some almost took the form of pity. She, too, had noted the change in their manner, and she had ever found herself asking if they could know or suspect her great secret. She had visited the old home, and sat again in her own old room and mused drearily over the sad and impassable chasm which so soon had yawned be- tween her and the old life now gone for evermore. She had taken again a long, solitary walk down the glen and home over the hill. From the window of her room she had seen Mrs. Elmore ride past, but she had no wish to meet her. As she walked slowly toward the station with her assist- ant, to take the evening train, she again met Professor Moors. Leaning upon his arm, and looking up earnestly into his face, she recognized Mrs. Elmore's niece, Emma May. They had been warm friends in their school-days. Al- though rivals in the class-room, no feeling of emulation had ever prevented them from sharing each other's secrets, or laying famous plans for a future in which they were always to be associated, till, as they reached maturity, the latter grew diverse. Miss May had little of her companion's energy of soul, stiU less of her reserve, but her character was a combina- tion of ingenuousness so complete that it often lapsed into effusiveness with admirable tact — a combination as happy as it is rare. She had devoted herself with great enthusi- asm to art, and had just returned from four years of for- eign study. There was an instant of mutual recognition on the part of the ladies, but both seemed determined to make the gathering darkness an excuse for hastening on without salutation. ''They do say,'' began Miss Newell's companion, *'that Professor Moors is visiting that girl, and that she is very handsome and accomplished, and has brought home from. A LEAP-YEAR ROMANCE 265 Europe some beautiful pictures of her own that will make her famous. Come to think, you must know her, for she grew up here.'* ' ' She was my old playmate. Excuse me now if I cannot talk of her, ' ' said Miss Newell, unable to control herself. The glib, chatty little normal teacher looked at her in speechless amazement, and scarcely spoke again till they reached Ashton. Once securely in her own room at her grandmother's, Miss Newell gave way to such violence of grief as she had never felt before. She walked up and down with stream- ing eyes, and then threw herself upon her bed, and buried her face in the pillow to stifle her sobs. It was an angry grief. "What right has this man to come between me and my long-cherished plans — to embitter all my life? I offered him all, and he deliberately poisoned love 's arrows for me, and feels no pang himself, while I love on in vain." Her heart did not break ; but all the ice which had so long hardened about it was melted now, and gradually she grew calm. Then a sense of bitter loss succeeded; yet she felt that her life was isolated from all those warm human sym- pathies which soothe and support. The world to her seemed a dreary sea, on which she was floating and drifting hope- lessly, while day and night, like unmeaning light and shadow, were brightening and darkling over her unrespon- sive spirit, and while from the heavens above, deep and in- scrutable as destiny, came no answer to her prayers. Thus benumbed, and stricken through and through with despair, she sank, toward morning, into a fitful sleep. Mr. Meechum was a bustling little man, with a head pre- maturely tinged with gray, and with a parboiled complex- ion, who had been for several years superintendent of schools at Ashton. Miss Newell had known him in college, when he had the reputation of being a first-class election- 266 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST eerer and trotter for his society, a somewhat obsequious and very serviceable man in general. He had a wise, scheming and politic brain, and a rare talent for pleasing all without committing himself to anybody or anything in particular, and without ever expressing a decided opinion. By his genius for trimming and shuffling he had managed to find or make his way into the best society of the town without being looked upon as a social parasite. If there was anything to which he stood fairly committed it was the view that men and women were absolutely equal and alike in the schoolroom, and must have the same hours, privileges, grade, and wages. This he had said in a card to the Ashton Torchlight, and this gained him his election •by a handsome majority over his competitors. He had watched Miss Newell and her enterprise from the first with the liveliest concern, and, as they grew in popular favor, not without some dismay. But mature reflection revealed matters in a new light. Here was a chance for a most advantageous alliance. Edu- cational and social prestige was the prize. Cooperation between the new institute and the public schools he knew Miss Newell had sought with little success thus far. He had called on her, and talked over a plan by which, with slight changes which it was in his power to make, all girl- graduates of the high-schools might be prepared to enter the institute. He had enlarged on the reciprocal advan- tages»of harmonious relations between them, to all of which Miss Newell had very warmly assented. Of late he had been quite a frequent caller, and Miss Newell had met him with a courtesy which he felt to be very flattering. In Miss Newell's absence her grandmother had several times received him, and his manner had been so gracious that she had been completely won over to his interests. It was nearly noon the day after Josie's return from A LEAP-YEAR ROMANCE 267 Springtown that the old lady entered her granddaughter's room with breakfast on a tray. **I thought I'd fetch it up myself, just to see how you git on ; though ef you hain 't slept out yit I '11 come up again bime-hy. But it's gettin' rather hard to lug my old bones up the steep, squeaky stairs/' ** Thank you. Please set it on the stand. I will get up soon," said Miss Newell, wearily. **Why, law sakes alive! How dragged out you do look. Humph! And no wonder you hain't got no emptins left in you after all you've been a-doin' on a fortnight back. Josie, it ain't in natur', unless you're made out of steel springs and ingines, to work so. I've done it all my life, but 'pears like young folks ain't made o' the same stuff as we was in my day. And now I think on it," continued the old lady, settling herself into a chair, and lowering her voice at the same time, and vastly pleased with herself to think she had introduced the special object of her \^sit with so much tact, ''there! Mr. Meechum's called — let me see — once, twice, to see you when you was away. Now, I '11 allow he ain't no stavin' great shakes — p'r'aps. I don't s'pose he 'd ever set a river afire, but he ain 't no booby, and that 's sartin as preachin'. He hain't never let on to me, not one word. I reckon he feels a little kinder shameful, and loath to speak. He ain't one of them kind as blurts right out like some, and I don't s'pose he's ever said anything to you. As long ago as you and he was in Springtown study- in', Mrs. Hand once said to me at a quiltin', says she, just as hateful as she always was arter about three cups of tea, when her eyes begun to bung out of her head, and her tongue to run at both ends — says she, 'There's Meechum and Josie — how's that for a match?' I was bitin' mad then, and I just up and spoke right out in meeting'. Says I, ' Mrs, Hand, you git a new whimsey eveiy cup o ' young hyson you drink. He couldn't shake a stick at Josie, and 268 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST everybody knows that only you. ' But I look at things very different from what I used to," she continued, with some tenderness in her accent. ''Now, Josie, s'posin I drop off sudden, what 11 you do all alone in the world? And Mee- chum thinks so much of you he'd always do just as you wanted him to. He'd make such a nice and obleegin' hus- band, and if you don't feel the need of one now you will bime-by. You ain 't grouty 'cause I spoke of it, are you ? ' ' said she, after a pause. "Oh, no, dear grandmother; I will get up and take my breakfast," said Miss Newell, rising and kissing the old lady, who started off to the kitchen, pleased at the fancied success of her diplomacy. Miss Newell resumed all her old school duties the next week, but they had lost all interest for her. She was fight- ing with a stout heart and an iron will against despair now. Mr. Meechum continued to call. Miss Newell was even glad to see him. His society was far more pleasant to her than self-communion. But her manner was such that he ven- tured to make no advances. Thus some weeks passed before the inevitable crisis came. Despondency, anxiety, overwork, had brought sleepless- ness, and at last utter nervous prostration, and Miss Newell found herself obliged to resign all school duties to her assist- ants, and to seek rest and quiet in a change of scene. The physicians prescribed Europe. The sea-air and the new interests of foreign travel might revive and refresh quickly, at any rate most surely. The present must be entirely banished from her consciousness for a time, or the worst consequences might ensue. And so it was at length ar- ranged. As the day of her departure approached, Ashton and her home began to seem unendurable to her. It was well she must go, for she could no longer stay. Her fevered fancy boded some nameless and impending calamity if she did not hasten her departure. She felt, too, that she was A LEAP-YEAR ROMANCE 269 leaving a life to which, she was never to return. But some- thiQg within, resistless as destiny, urged her on. It was with much effort that she met friends and pupils for the final adieus. She fancied that all saw her heart, and read its inmost secret. Despite the protest of her physician, and the most earnest remonstrance of friends, she persisted in starting upon the long journey alone. She must resolutely face all her griefs, and carefully and persistently think and feel her own unaided way through them all to sanity again, or be lost. During these final days of preparation Mr. Meechum was unusually attentive. He was constantly bustling about, offering every conceivable kind of aid. His services, offi- cious as they grew, were accepted with courtesy. Even when he proposed a correspondence on educational mat- ters she had no power to refuse. He accompanied her on the train to a distant town, and his unctuous good-by was the last friendly voice she heard before leaving her native shore. The voyage was delightful. The bracing sea-air, the un- wonted sights, and sounds, and pastimes on shipboard, soothed and calmed her beyond the most sanguine predic- tion of the physician. Instead of resolving all the oppres- sive sadness of the last few months by sternly looking the specters of the mind out of countenance, as she had hoped, she seemed to herself to be leaving them far behind. Animated by a lively and curious interest, she passed some months in flitting from place to place, seldom leaving the frequented paths of foreign travel, but seeing all that a woman may see in a few days in Glasgow, London, Paris, Geneva, Florence, Rome, Venice, Vienna, until at last, fatigued with sight-seeing and guide-books, she determined to pass what remained of the winter and the spring in Berlin. Her kiad-hearted old German patron in Ashtou had insisted on giving her a note to his friends in that citjr. 270 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST which now she was heartily glad to use. It introduced her to a family of considerable refinement and gentility, who kindly assisted her in finding suitable lodgings, and whose friendship and hospitality were so cordially offered that she learned to look to them for almost daily counsel and assistance. The war with France had ended long ago ; and, although the Prussian capital was already the center of progressive Teutonism, the vestiges of old German particularism were yet abundant, and Miss Newell was charmed to find that she had fallen in with the simple life of the old Berlin burgher. The quaint and well-kept furniture, the peculiar provincial accent and vocabulary, the home-made garments for everyday, the coarse fare, the heartfelt piety that so reverenced each morsel of daily bread as a special token of heavenly favor, the unquestioning loyalty to God and the kaiser, and, amid and over all, such abundant measure of the untranslatable Gefm/ilthMchJceit — all this endeared her new friends, and helped to give life a new zest again. With another American lady, whose acquaintance she had made by chance. Miss Newell even ventured to call on the new rector of the university and solicit the privilege of attend- ing lectures; and at last, after much delay, was informed that for the first time the academic senate had voted per- mission to attend, provided the consent of the several in- structors could be obtained, although matriculation was not allowed to women. But the observations excited by her presence among the students was so embarrassing, the lecture so special, and her acquaintance with the language so inadequate, that Miss Newell soon left her more hardy and ambitious companion to the sole enjoyment of this privilege, and decided to apply herself to drawing under the direction of a visiting instructor. Herr Schroder was an enthusiast in his devotion to art. When a young man, he had visited Rome with a few com- A LEAP-YEAR ROMANCE 271 panions, who, like himself, were fired with the ardent pur- pose of making art the means of restoring the Fatherland to the hosom of the true church. Devotion must he pas- sionate in order to he pure, they maintained. Europe had lapsed into secularism, which was only a euphemism for doubt. Faith alone could reanimate the corpse of modern society. It was the divine mission of art to realize the good and the true in the forms of the beautiful. True art is that which translates the vital doctrines of Scripture and sacred tradition into forms of sense most adequately and effectively. Some of the little band assumed almost the garb and habits of life of one of the monastic orders. Two of their number had vowed celibacy. They met semi-weekly to criti- cize each other's work, and to share each other's new in- sights and enthusiasms. When they returned to Germany, and slowly realized how fond and vain their hopes had been, some clung with yet more passionate devotion to their principles after, and perhaps because, it was apparent how dreamy and barren they were. Others gradually fell away to pagan styles and subjects, despite the sharp reproaches of their old associates. Herr Schroder belonged to the for- mer class. He had become known at Berlin as one of the most earnest and accomplished of modem ''Diisseldorfers.*' Surrounded then by hostile influences, he had so often al- lowed himself to lay down the pencil and brush for the pen of the critic and controversialist that his hand had grown less facile on the canvas. From this and a variety of other causes he had at length become a teacher of his art without losing any of the commingled religious and esthetic fervor and sentimentalism which had so strongly charac- terized his youth. This pleased Miss Newell. She loved to listen to her in- structor's rhapsodic accounts of his emotions on first visit- ing Rome, to his description of the grand masterpieces of 272 RECEEATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST medieval art he had studied there, and of the incalculable influence which they had exerted upon the tone of modern Christendom. She found his zeal contagious when he ex- patiated upon the mission of art in the world in localizing and harmonizing divine truth. She became interested in the history of painting, and visited with her instructor several of the numerous private galleries in the city. ''Is it not plain," he said to her, one day, *Hhat religious devotion alone can inspire real artistic genius?" * ' I have seen too little to form any opinion as yet, ' ' she replied. ''But, surely, you do not deny genius to the Greeks?" "They knew how to treat the body," he replied, "but there is nothing in all classical antiquity that satisfies, or even appeals strongly to, the soul. Not till the discipline of the Church had taught men to mortify the flcvsh, and to find the higher meaning of life in meditation and prayer, did art learn to make the face mere expressive than the hand." ' ' At least you do not deny great merit to what you term profane or secular art?" she queried. "Suppose," said he, "an artist paints fruit and flower studies so perfectly to the eye that one cannot distinguish the original from the copy. What good is done? It is at best but a reduplication of Nature. Some chromo-photo- graphic art may be invented any day that shall make all that superfluous. As to pagan mythology, not only does it lack the prime element of reality, is unsubstantial as dreams, cloud-shadows, instead of reflections of heavenly truth, but it yields either no moral or a bad one. No artist who has labored in this field has ever overcome the constant tempta- tion to sacrifice spirit to sense, which, in fact, his theme quite generally compels him to do. But, granting the very most that can be claimed, it can convey at best but a A LEAP-YEAR ROMANCE 273 merely moral lesson, or express possibly some distant prophecy or dim allegory of revealed wisdom." * * What do you say, then, of historic and landscape paint- ing?" she asked. ** Simply this," he replied, **that it is either untrue or uninteresting. Secular history in itself is extremely monotonous, save when it may serve for the enforcement and illustration of the facts of religious history. Like a landscape study, it can have little intrinsic merit, or excite little independent interest. The chief use of both is to make tone and background for the data of revelation, like an accompaniment in music. Examine, for instance, as I have done," he continued, ''the great Passions and the Madonnas, and you will not fail to observe that it is devo' tional ardor which has given an almost superhuman refine- ment of expression, an intensity of feeling, a depth of soul, a fervor of aspiration, nowhere else to be found, and a touch of living reality which makes itself felt in the ex^ quisite finish of form and glowing warmth of color." *'I am so crude," said Miss Newell, "I need to think of these things." *'If you would learn to paint," saidJSerr Schroder, ''or even to know what painting is, you must study the master- pieces in Rome. The genius of the place there will whisper the open secret of art to you." "I fancy," said she, "I should need you for my inter- preter, for I confess I am such a barbarian that after three days of the most diligent sight-seeing there, and interesting and grand as everything was, I was on the whole dis- appointed. I like Berlin far better." Herr Schroder only raised his eyebrows, sighed, shook his head slowly, and shrugged his shoulders significantly in reply. In the course of the winter Miss Newell frequently 274 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST thought of this conversation, and had repeatedly sought to continue it, but always in vain. '*Ah, Fraulein," Herr Schroder replied one day, *' these things are so deep and sacred with me ! Art and religion are one and inseparable. I am a painter because I was first a believer ; and how can I ever hope to make you, who have no faith, understand me? These things need the in- sight of sympathy. Yet, if I could think that you had ever experienced some — ^yes, any — intense and absorbing feel- ing, deep enough to break up and mold anew your whole soul, and make life and death seem indifferent save as they might minister to the attainment of its object, then I might hope to make intelligible to you the devotion which both religion and art should inspire/' *' Excuse me if I have seemed to ask a confidence which I could not give in return," Miss Newell replied, with a stern effort to be calm. When Herr Schroder left her that day, the old heart- soreness which she fancied was well-nigh healed, returned. "He, too, finds me cold and unfeeling," she thought. **I seem to myself to have a heart of proud flesh ; to others it seems a stone. There is no danger of betraying my secret when everything I do belies my very soul. But yet, why did he speak of such a sympathy, if he did not suspect ground for it in me? Can it be hidden nowhere? No confidant or confessor in the world could ever draw it from me. If it had never found utterance, I might hope one day to be happy again ; but now, Memory and Love ! is there no escape from your power? Must I face the only issue which remains for those who suffer what can neither be cured nor endured ? " When her .reflections grew calmer, she determined to de- vote all her strength to the study of painting. If it led her toward the Church of Rome, or into it — yes, or even into a convent as a bride of Christ — what mattered it? Her A LEAP-YEAR ROMANCE 275 ^prejudices against Catholicism were probably bred of igno- rance, and, if she could only find nepenthe there, all might be well again. So she pored over the lives of the great masters, and made large collections of photographs and engravings, and studied every accessible painting of note in the city, spent a week at Leipsic, and would have gone to Rome despite the lateness of the season but for the reiterated protests of her instructor. Her toil was as unremitting as her zeal was ill-directed and impulsive. She worked with the in- considerate and impetuous haste that only those yield to who are at cross-purposes with themselves. She had sud- denly resolved to make art fill the place of social enjoy- ment, friends, country, family, and even of love and re- ligion. She found great solace in a few sketches she had designed and executed with much care with the pencil, and which she hoped soon to be competent to attempt in oil. Women more than men always reproduce themselves in art, and no wonder that she found a kind of self-ministra- tion which was almost sacred in this employment. As she gained power to realize and objectify her own sorrow, it became less poignant. This she might do with safety, for, even if other eyes than her own ever beheld her work, they could not interpret her hearts Now she felt that she was on the only road which could lead her again to perfect mental and emotional sanity. Meanwhile she had received frequent letters from Mr. Meechum. They informed her of all the educational gossip afloat in Ashton, and of the waning fortunes of her institu- tion. His were the only communications she received save from relatives and her vice-principal, and they were all answered promptly. She recounted to him her university experience, described the sights she had seen in her travels, and even her acquaintance with Herr Schroder. Against the influence of the latter, Mr. Meechum felt it his duty to 276 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST warn her most solemnly and emphatically. He had heard that Jesuits assumed every dis^ise to win proselytes to Rome. Her instructor was probably no artist, but a priest. Thus spring slowly passed, and summer approached. Herr Schroder came twice a week, and was very greatly pleased with the progress and zeal of his pupil. * * If you had begun earlier, and had had good instruction, you might perhaps have made an artist, after all," he ex- claimed, with much ill-disguised surprise, as with a sudden burst of confidence she one day showed him some of her unfinished sketches. * 'Perhaps you will be able to under- stand me yet some day," he said, with beaming delight. **And why not now?" said Miss Newell, impulsively. The painter looked at her with a long, earnest, inquiring gaze, till she blushed, and stopped to pick up a fallen sketch. * * Ah ! " he said, .with a smile. * ' You American women are such materialists and so world-wise, and have such a business way about everything, that I have been much afraid of you. I think I should like -to tell you everything. Yet," he added slowly, ** these things cannot be so well told as seen and felt by intimate friendship. Such friend- ship, I begin to think, I could enjoy with you." '*I fear that it would be selfish in me to accept it, and that you would be sadly disappointed in me," slie said, de- murely. **I must add more," she continued, after a pause and with much effort — ''that all the friendship which can spring from common sympathy in the matters of which we have conversed will be more grateful to me than perhaps even you can imagine. But I can never receive or give anything more." Thenceforth they understood each other, and the former reserve between them was gone. She saw him only as before, and, when the hour of instruction was ended, he took his departure yet more promptly than formerly. But A LEAP-YEAR ROMANCE 277 now they could speak freely. She gathered incidentally the story of his life, and felt safe in pitying his lonely and unfortunate lot, and in indulging her growing admiration of the faith that could minister such overflowing happiness to a life which had been filled only with unrealizable ideals, deferred hopes, and impossible ambitions. So reassured had she been by her instructor's manifest satisfaction with the unfinished sketches she had shown him, that she at length undertook to finish two of them, which she deemed the best, in oil; and, when they were done, no eye but her own had seen them. She had such a growing sensQ, of their imperfections that they were soon locked away in the closet, save now and then, when visitors were not expected, she found satisfaction in bringing them forth from their hiding-place, till they had become the theme of the meditation of many a lonely hour. One had for its background the high citadel and battered walls of Megara, which rose darkly and massively against the clear eastern sky, faintly tinged with the purple dawn, while the waning moon still cast long, pale shadows from the west. A grassy knoll to the right was covered by the tents of the Cretan army, all now wrapped in silent slum- ber. In the foreground, by the door of the royal tent, stood King Minos, without sandals or helmet, hastily wrapped in his mantle. In the hand that held the folds of his garment he grasped a sheathed sword, and the other was extended in a violent gesture of disgust and repulsion. Scylla stood before him, her father's purple lock, which the oracle had declared the Palladium of the besieged city, lying at her feet. Her hair was bound by a broad, golden fillet, the front of the upper rim arched into a diadem which proclaimed her royal birth. At the extreme right stood slaves with precious treasures from her father's palace. She had seen and loved from afar, and had stolen forth to offer father, friends, home, country, aU she was 278 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST able to conceive the man of her choice might desire, only to find herself despised, abhorred, and rejected. Mingled rage, guilt, and despair, without fear or remorse, flamed in her face. Her hands were clinched, her attitude full of defiance, and her hair, still carefully smoothed above the coronet, below seemed coiling into forms which resembled the shining tresses of the furies. Love in an instant turned into implacable hate. In the other picture a broad, square tower rose above the walls of a crumbling old castle, from which through an open casement leaned the *'lily maid of Astolat" — Elaine. AU the environments were roughly finished, and Miss Newell had devoted all her care to the central figures. Below, Lancelot, his face pale and thin from the long ill- ness through which she had so tenderly and faithfully nursed him, was putting spur to his steed without even an adieu, with ''rough discourtesy to break or blunt her pas- sion. ' ' The shield she had so long guarded hung upon his arm. She had scoured all its old dints so brightly that the soft light of the setting sun was reflected from it into her face as fully as when *' First she placed it where morning's earliest ray Might strike it and awake her -with its gleam.'* The knight's brow was stern, and his lips compressed, and he was in the act of tearing from the old shield the *'red sleeve bordered with pearls" which he had worn in his last and greatest tourney as her token. Her face was pale and thin. Since first " . . . . she lifted up her eyes, And loved him with that love which was her doom,*' no deeper anguish had pierced her heart than now. Not even when, as the favor he begged her to ask, she besought that she might have his love and be his wife, and when. A LEAP-YEAR ROMANCE 279 because it could not be, she swooned with anguish. Now it was a calm, deeper climax of sorrow that dimly dis- cerned, as from afar its own balm. Her lips were parted with an expression no less sweet than sad, which seemed to welcome love and death alike. Her hands were clasped upon the silken case she had braided, and her eyes, though fixed upon the high plume of the knight, seemed to look vacantly far beyond to their future meeting, when, in the chambers of the false queen who had renounced him, he should pluck her letter from her clay-cold hand and read — **I loved you, and my love had no return, And, therefore, my true love has been my death," and pause to leave a kiss upon her lips and a tear upon her brow. Such a look was on her face as holy pilgrim- women wear when they pause in barren places and look upon a cross. One day, when she was idly gazing at these pictures, her instructor announced himself so suddenly that she had no time to conceal them; and, when he entered her work-room, they were at once discovered. Without observ- ing her discomfiture, he examined them carefully, pointing out defects she had and others she had not observed^ **But,'* he said, at last, giving way to his enthusiasm, **they are wonderful for your practice, especially the scene from Tennyson. I once sought myself for such a subject, and even made a sketch of poor Vanessa in an ideal scene. Profane themes are well for studies, but there is no in- spiration in them. I almost think you might now succeed with a Madonna. Even this face," pointing to Elaine, ** would be remarkable as a Dolorosa. But do you observe how much these faces resemble each other, and how like both are to expressions I have often seen lurking in your own face? You should vary the type and subject. Be- sides, you are attempting too much. I must insist on a 280 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST vacation. In a few weeks it will be safe to visit Rome. That must be the next step in your studies. You are far better prepared to go than I thought." A few days later she set out. It was a somewhat senti- mental journey. She lingered awhile at Lucerne, and again at Geneva. Saddened hearts find comfort and companion- ship in mountains. The clear and pure air, the silence, and solitude, and grandeur, soothed and calmed without ex- hilarating. She had no desire for adventuresome ascents, and felt no impulse to copy or paint, but was content to contemplate, and enjoy, and write in her journal. Yet Herr Schroder was right about Nature. The great metrop- olis of art whither she was bound must be far more refining and regenerating than it ; and oh ! regeneration — that, after all, was what she needed. In the Eternal City she would find the true home of her soul ; and she wrote in her diary : "I will taste the lotus no longer, lest no power of hel- lebore avail to help me hence. I will obey the call ! ' ' and two days later she was comfortably quartered in Rome. Guide-book in hand, wandering at random in her im- petuous and desultory way with a fresh and insatiable curiosity, she had, during the month that elapsed before Herr Schroder arrived, become quite familiar with the most obvious sights and sentiments of the place. Here she found that which absorbed her into self-forgetfulness. Alone as she was, she felt the need of no society. Here, too, was the independence she long had sought. Here she would spend all her remaining days. The old life must be forgotten. She would break from it completely. This would be a new birth, indeed. She owed no duties to her grandmother, whose own children were anxious to minister to her com- fort, and, as for her institute, it had declined in popularity, and was mortgaged for taxes. So, at least, Mr. Meechum had written. Possibly he might be willing to make her an offer for it. Of course, she must lose heavily, but perhaps A LEAP-YEAR ROMANCE 281 more heavily if she delayed. By the laws of the State he, as school superintendent, would soon control it independ- ently of her. Again it might revive and become more use- ful in his hands than it ever could be under her manage- ment. A few months later, therefore, it became his for a small sum, and, when all was done, Miss Newell was some- what surprised to observe that his letters abruptly ceased, leaving even her last inquiries unanswered. This roused for a time some feeling of indignation and chagrin, but,, when it subsided, she became moralist enough to write in her journal: **Even ungrateful neglect and indignities, which are among the ills we have to bear, may be endured, if, like Dr. Pangloss, we reflect how much more grievous they might have been. We may learn some wisdom from Dr. Pangloss, absurd as he is.'* She had counted the days till her instructor's arrival. She had hardly realized before how large a place he filled in her thoughts. She really longed to see him. She had studied what he liked, and imagined his opinions on many things which she had seen. She had sketched but little, but had seen and pondered much. She would confide in him without reservation when he came. He could explain everything, and she had saved up so many questions to ask him! When they met, she was not greatly embarrassed to find herself blushing in his presence, while she fancied that the vivacity and sprightliness, which she did not try to repress, made him more deeply serious than ever before. Herr Schroder was at home here. He knew the digni- taries of the Church, and the artists, and was favorably known by them. He explained to his pupil the sjonbols of the ritual, and the paraphernalia of the festivals, and intro- duced her to several of the painters, and to a distinguished prelate, and found her a teacher of Italian. They saw 282 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST mncli of each other now, and took frequent strolls, and even saw the Coliseum by moonlight together, and her journal was forgotten. **What more auspicious time and place," said he, as they stood upon a huge hewed block of stone by the ruins, **to make a great life-choice? Here is human power crumbling and decaying like Babel, confusion, doubt, secu- larism, temporality, Protestant schism, and iconoclasm. There" — pointing to the dome of St. Peter's — "is the type of spiritual unity and aspiration, a mere shadow which will fade and vanish like these ruins, but which will leave behind it a precious immortality of influence. Its very ground-plan, a cross, will make its ruins more eloquent of suffering endurance, the capital virtue of Christianity, than its perfection can ever be. Oh!" he continued, with in- creasing vehemence, *'what has science done or can it ever do for faith? Nothing but correct her proof -texts and revise her illustrations, and reword her dogmas; but art, from the first, has made religion a power in the world. The Muses give higher motives and better comforts than material possessions or knowledge can ever do. Art alone can realize for holy ends all the traditions of imperial Rome, and make her the center whence a new and higher civilization shall spread over the world." *'You know I have chosen," Miss Newell broke in, with deep emotion. * ' But do you know that, if you choose Christian art, you enter upon a via dolorosa which will never lead you to either wealth or fame?" asked he. **I have renounced possessions, country, a life of ease, perhaps some renown, my own will, yes, and my very heart itself," she said, with tearless eyes but with a trembling voice. * * What more ? I think sometimes I could do almost anything in art which you would advise and direct. I feel that art may by-and-by give me something to cling to, to A LEAP-YEAR ROMANCE 283 lean upon; and something — something in heaven or on earth — I must have!" She covered her face with her hands, and Herr Schroder gazed long and almost tenderly upon her, and only said: **Do not despair; have patience; it is the secret way to genius. You may be accounted worthy to serve the holiest. The spirit of power may come to you at any moment. Men are still inspired here." They walked home slowly and silently. The next day they were teacher and scholar again, and talked of work. "It is about time your apprenticeship should end," said Herr Schroder. * ' You must try to learn to trust your own creative power. Put your taste, your creed, your heart, yourself, in short, into some original subject. Think it out ceu^efuUy, and express it slowly and patiently, using me for details. Drawing is your best point. It is in coloring that I can help you most." After much deliberation, and with the same unconven- tional candor of sentiment and motive that so often char- acterized her action, she chose an old, old theme, so spun over with dogmas, and hedged about by traditional forms of treatment, that to one ambitious merely of artistic fame it would have seemed beset with too great dangers and difficulties. It was the Holy Night of Nights — the supreme hour of motherhood, when love becomes complete, and every first-born child seems the offspring of Heaven — Immanuel. An arched grotto in a crumbling limestone rock had often been a noonday retreat and a theme for pencil-sketches, in the glen at her "Western home. In such a shelter, slight- ly improved by a fore-work of stones and branches, upon a bed of dried straw and grass, lay a young mother clasping a child, *'all meanly wrapped," to her breast. The face of the child was not seen, hardly the outline of its form, but all the beatitudes seemed to rest upon the face of the 284 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST mother. The dawn was scarcely gray in the east, but a l)right light, softer than that of the sun, lay warm and fresh from an unknown source upon the scene — a type of the new revelations and insights of love. A male figure knelt near the mother with face averted, but evidently absorbed in contemplation, less carefully finished than the rest, with slight constraint and more affectation, evidently mingled with a deep ardor of devotion. Before the outer edge of the shelter paused a yet more rudely-clad herds- man, with a face strangely eloquent of meaning. It told that these intruders were strangers, far from home, in need of sympathy, perhaps of help. Pity, and surprise, and reverence were there, but above all a tender sadness, which, when it was once caught and felt by the observer, seemed to dim the splendor of the light, and make the pile of fagots at one side suggestive of a sacrificial altar, and the faint shadow that fell prone and uncertain upon the huddled sheep behind him, of a cross. Both gazed upon the mother, and she, unconscious of all — even her child — seemed ab- sorbed in the vision of some higher presence, unseen save by her. The lines of care and suffering, and of present pain, were too deeply worn in her brow to be effaced, but they only made more expressive the tranquil calm and deep joy that now filled and completely satisfied her soul, and made every accumulated ill and shame of life forgotten in the supreme joy of motherhood. Such was the ideal that gradually took shape in Miss Neweirs mind, and toward the expression of which she wrought with great diligence. She studied faces and groupings, and gathered suggestions from almost every col- lection in the city. She was with her teacher more than ever before. Never had she felt such constant need of him. Never had she longed so earnestly for greater skill to ex- press her conceptions. Only the encouragement of his enthusiasm kept her from despair of her own powers; and A LEAP-YEAR ROMANCE 285 yet, upon the whole, she had never found so much pleasure in any task, and the praises of her mentor had never been so warm and valued. She knew he was pleased with her choice of theme, and he had found but little fault with her conception of it. She had Hoped to finish it before the festivities of Christmas, that she might find needed rest and recreation in these. One day when it was nearly complete, Herr Schroder rapped at her door much earlier than usual. He found her already at her work. *'I have been suddenly called away for a few days," he said, in an unusually earnest and intense manner ; " I could not go until I had spoken to you about a matter which you may perhaps easily anticipate, and which has occupied my thoughts especially of late." Miss Newell 's heart was in her throat in an instant. She could not trust her voice, but only motioned him to sit. * ' You must have felt in this last work of yours, ' ' he said, after a long pause, *'the deep impulse which sometimes seems outside of and more mighty than self, so that you appear merely to look on and see yourself work. This larger life, which men call enthusiasm, love, genius — forms of inspiration of the Holy Ghost, all of them — ^you must have felt?" "I have felt it," she said, slowly. *'At least, I love my work; but not purely for itself — for something else. My former life will linger in my thoughts in such a sad, sweet way, that I often wonder whether I should enjoy more or less here if I could forget it entirely." '*You did well," he rejoined, *'to renounce and try at least to forget the past before you came here. But, in doing so, you must have had higher thoughts and feelings to sustain you and make all ills seem blessings in disguise. * * "Yet," she continued, "I often feel that somehow selfish- ness is at the bottom of all, and am often conscious of the 286 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST need and absence of all you describe, and almost sink for the want of something to cling to for support. ' ' ''Ah! that," said Herr Schroder, gravely, *'is the need of every human heart, and it is the chief business of all mental culture to discover what that something is. Do you not believe that the Muses are aU servants of the Holy Ghost?" *'No doubt," she replied, ''but we must love the divine through the human. Is that not the highest precept of art? Christ seems so far away! The theologians have almost resolved him back into ineffable God." "But," said he, "we have his representatives — ^the clergy, the Church, and its holy offices. Yet it is true we need more. I have felt most deeply the need of companion- ship and sympathy in my solitary life." "We cannot live without love. We need not disguise or deny it," she said, with a slight tremor in her voice, while her eyes, gazing into the distance, showed her thoughts to be far away. "Perhaps," he rejoined, "you and I have reason to feel this more than most. In this common need, we have much ground for mutual understanding. You caa best judge of this, however, for you know far more of my life than I of yours. Yet you were wisest in concealing and trying to forget the past. Now you can help me to a new life. ' ' ' ' I am bound to you by debts of gratitude, which, I fear, nothing less than that could ever repay. Would that I dared to hope it were possible ! ' ' she added, after a pause. "I cannot explain to you the long reserve I have felt in speaking of this, ' ' he said, ' ' and now it is only because the voice of Heaven commands no further delay that I am here." His manner was more impassioned and fervent, and he drew very close to her side as he said : "The Divine will has decreed for us the holiest of all earthly vows. Shall we obey?" A LEAP-YEAR EOMANCB 287 *'We cannot do otherwise," she said. *'I, too, have long wished for a higher consecration to art, yes, prayed for it often. If you could show me how it is attained, oh, how light my weary griefs would become ! ' ' Yet the tears were gathering in her eyes. *'And I!" he said, almost rapturously, scarcely heeding what she said. ' ' The thought of this has led me on almost from the first. My prayers are answered. You have given me strength. And now," he continued, suddenly clasping her hand in his own, ''when, through the holy rites of the Church, we are dead to the world and to each other, and the sacred veil of the bride of Christ has fallen " She started up with a sudden cry of horror and agony as his meaning flashed upon her. She had thought only of a higher devotion to art, which was to lift her above the ordinary griefs of humanity, and had clung to Herr Schroder as the minister to that end. He, enthusiast as he was, had thought only of mutual vows of retirement into the holy seclusion of monastic and cloistered life; or pos- sibly the flames of love and of religious fervor were so commingled in his soul that he had by turns mistaken each for the other, and, by the influence of Miss Newell's ac- quaintance, had become conscious of being drawn now to thoughts of marriage — ^now to purposes of higher religious consecration. The latter motive had prevailed, or the latter mood chanced this hour to be paramount. To be sure, his words had vaguely suggested such thoughts to her mind before, but they had always been dismissed without serious consideration ; for, if he desired to renounce the world, she could see no reason for any wish ort his part that she should do the same. This time the shock was too great for her exhausted sys- tem. With a low moan of agony, she fainted in her chair. Possibly her teacher suspected the cause of her distress. 288 RECREATIONS OP A PSYCHOLOGIST At all events, when she was restored, others were over her and he was gone. The next day he called, but he could not see her. The morning following she left Rome, and in two days was in her old quarters at Berlin, which had chanced to remain' vacant during her absence. She was warmly received by her old friends, who had been greatly concerned because nothing had been heard from her since her solitary departure for Rome. They hastened to place in her hands a few letters which had lain there for some time till her new address should be known. Among these was one from Professor Moors. She recognized the handwriting, but, although nearly pros- trated with fatigue and exhaustion, opened and read it with perfect composure. The professor had some hope of establishing a home of his own in the spring, the letter stated. He wished a fe^s' tasteful pictures, copies in oil, if they could be procured, of some of the great masters. His house had several rooms somewhat like those in her old home in Springtown. It might aid her to keep this in mind. A few general speci- fications as to price and character were added, leaving a wide range of choice to her own taste. This was a commission which it would require several days to execute, but she set about it at once, and it was soon done. During her previous residence here she had, through the family of the house, made the acquaintance of several visit- ing Sisters from the convent of the Holy Cross, and had felt strongly drawn toward them. The placid repose of soul which they seemed to enjoy, their tranquil and yet beneficent lives, charmed and hallowed by an atmosphere of peace and subdued satisfaction and joy, had from the first provoked her curiosity. She now met them again, and requested to see them whenever they came to the house. A LEAP-YEAR ROMANCE 289 In the quiet days that succeeded it was inevitable that certain trains of thought and purpose that before occupied her mind should be revived and reviewed. Those first weeks in Berlin, when Herr Schroder had been to her only a teacher, seemed now to have been almost happy. What, after all, if he had been in the right ! It might be that all the wounds of earth could be healed and forgotten in pious seclusion and meditation. Her life had been indeed un- usually solitary. There might be a divine purpose in that. Of course, intellectually, she was conscious that she had no proclivities toward Catholicism. Many of its dogmas she knew only as noxious and almost profane. But an asylum from the rough, cold world, the opportunity for spiritual advancement and confidence, a true confessional of soul, perhaps — these seemed invested with a wondrous and growing charm. Here, too, she might find occupation. She could still paint, and find consecration and inspiration, and live in the midst of insights and motives that would suggest and interpret the highest subjects; while for her leisure hours there remained devotion, study, works of charity. Her pictures, too, would sell for a small sum, no doubt — enough, with what was yet left of her inheritance, for the deposit-fund required at the end of her novitiate, before she took the final vows. At last she was resolved; the pictures were sold, and their price — far less, she knew, than their real value — laid by. She began to feel herself, in reality, dead to the world, to its common pleasures and pains. How kind was Providence to lead her heart, and at last her feet, to a home, sweet home, for her tired soul ! Some weeks were to elapse before the initial, and many before the final, rites of consecration, by which she, with several others, was to be set apart from the world. On the morrow she had decided to accept the kind invitation of the Sisters, and to occupy a room with them in the convent dormitory, and a seat at their commons-table. 290 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST The morrow was Christmas. It was one of those rare days of warm and perfect splendor which sometimes smile down upon old Berlin in early winter through Italian skies, and which, whenever they come, make a holiday of Nature's own setting apart, for all who have or can beg or steal leisure to enjoy it. Miss Newell 's sleep had been sound and untroubled. Her great elevation of feeling made her the more calm. This morning she spent nearly an hour in devotional medi- tation and prayer, exercises almost new to her, and which added greatly to the depth of her joy and peace. The members of the household where she lived had sent in a neat little bouquet of flowers, with a card on which was written Prosit zwm Weihnachtsfest ! and she was just taking out the plain but neat garments she was to wear, when a caUer was announced in the parlor below. He had sent no name or card. She went down at once, and found herself face to face with Professor Moors ! For an instant neither spoke. There was no form of salutation. This time she was more calm than he. She observed that he looked jaded and anxious. He began speaking rapidly: **I left Ashton three weeks ago, traveling with Mr. and Mrs. Elmore. She has shown me long ago the great wrong I have done you. I have come to Europe to find you and to tell you that I have loved you from the first.'* She suddenly raised her hand deprecatingly, but it fell again. **You are not married, then?'' she asked, after a pause, with a tone of simple surprise, yet very calmly. ''I have never had a thought of it," he said, with great emphasis and more surprise, ''which did not lead my mind and very heart toward you." He paused a moment, but she said nothing, and he con- tinued : **I had foolish and cruel motives. I thought you proud, A LEAP-YEAR ROMANCE 291 unfeeling, wrongly ambitious, and I fought long and bit- terly against my own heart. How little I knew you then! I was proud and heartless. Now I am ready, longing for any sacrifice, any atonement. Nay, more — I feel that my life henceforth will be a poor, worthless thing if it cannot be linked with yours." She stood drearily, almost breathlessly there, while these words, that would once have thrilled her heart with un- speakable joy, seemed now like the echo of a far-off sor- row. **Have you ceased to love mef he exclaimed, with trembling voice. * * I fear so — worthily, ' ' she said, slowly. * * If you could see my heart But no, I will not speak of my suffering. Great as it has been, yours has been far deeper, I know. Nay, do not draw back. I know far more of you than you suspect — ^know it honorably, as a man and a lover has some right. I dare even appeal to your own heart. Do not answer hastily. Let me leave you now to take counsel with your own thoughts. ' ' He turned toward the door. "You are rigFt," she said, yet more calmly. *'I must not listen to you. It is Heaven that has parted us. Oh, this is all a dream! We may, we must take time,'* she' burst out impetuously after an instant's pause. * ' Ah ! if you wish to humble or test me, it is perhaps but just,'^ he said. *'Yes, impose anything, any task whatso- ever." ^^As you have done to me? Not for worlds!" she inter- posed, with deep feeling. ''But you did not, could not know!" *'I knew nothing. I misinterpreted all from the first — till a month ago," he replied, **when, thanks to Mrs. El- more, my eyes were opened." ** Perhaps we need not speak more of it," she said. *'It 292 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST can do no good. I cannot, dare not, abandon the life I have chosen. The vows are already in my heart. It would be worse than weakness to look back.** * * But these plans cannot be deliberate. Is there no hope — ^none ? * ' ** There is none/' she said, with deep emotion, and with manifest effort to be firm. **I belong to my friends but for a few hours, and after that I hope never to leave the society of the Sisters I have found here.** The professor lingered a moment, and then, with a sud- den impulse, left the house abruptly and without a word. When he was gone. Miss Newell sank into a chair, quite overpowered by a sense of utter weakness and helplessness, such as she had never felt before. *'Once,'* she thought, ***this would have been an hour of supreme bliss. Once, too, when friends called me hard and cold, I might have steeled my heart against every thought of love, but now I can only — ^what? Pray? Yes.** And she prayed silently in anguish of soul as she sat there, her face covered with her hands; prayed that her love might be all refined, and, ceasing to clasp things of earth, might be absorbed in things heavenly and divine; that she might follow duty with an eye more single and a consecration more unreserved; that she might learn from the life of the dear, loving Jesus Him- self how to find ''all the joy that lies in a full self- sacrifice. * * She had sat thus she knew not how long, when the door opened and Mrs. Elmore entered unannounced, and threw her arms about Miss Newell's neck in her old warm impul- sive manner, almost before she could rise, and began at once : ''There, my dearest Josie, I am not in the least sur- prised, not the least in the world. I always knew it would be so. Why, he loved you from the first, just as I said, and you thought I dreamed it, or else lied, and that he A LEAP-YEAR ROMANCE 293 cared for my niece. You wicked girl ! ' ' and she embraced and kissed her yet more demonstratively than before. Miss Newell raised her hand deprecatingly and began : ''Do you, then, not know '^ ''Know? Yes, everything," interrupted Mrs. Elmore, now almost fiercely; "but you don't mean one word of it. If you do, upon my soul, you are crazy, and you shall not leave this house ! If Heaven sent you to a convent, it sent me across the sea to prevent your going. It is the same old pride in a new and more dangerous form than ever. Now it would complete its work in entirely crushing out your heart. You love him, and if you can't see that God wants you to make this man happy — to save him from a heavier and longer grief, perhaps, than even yours has been — you had better seek a hospital for your soul ! Why," she continued, after a pause, "he has not had a thought that was not yours, but he feared you did not truly love him. Your cold manner he thought was heartlessness. Now he knows you love him, and you cannot escape him if you try. He cared for your school, and when it all ran down in Mr. Meechum's hands, he bought it himself, and reorganized it much on your old plan. Your old Spring- town home, too, he purchased a year ago, and now it is refitted and furnished, and ready. If he seems to have presumed too much on your love, that is all my fault. ' ' "If I thought it was pride " said Miss Newell, ab- sently, after another long pause. "Of course it is. Willful, wicked, stubborn pride, and oh, what a dreadful direction it has taken, and how you must have indulged it!" said Mrs. Elmore. "If you can subdue it now, it will be a real regeneration. The culture of all the religions can do no more than that." "You are my best friend. I have done you great wrong !'^ exclaimed Miss Newell, now throwing her arms about Mrs. Elmore's neck. "If you could only know how 294 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST I have suffered!'' and Mrs. Elmore became positive that she did know all about it as she felt the hot tears fall upon her cheek, but this time she was silent. **How shall I tell the Sisters?" Miss Newell asked at length. **"Tell them everything, and they will give you the kiss of peace and bid you 'Godspeed!' " was the reply. *'But there is another with whom you must break your word first. Sit here and grow calm while I step over to the hotel ajid call him," and she hastily left the room. In a few minutes the professor entered, almost timidly. Each looked into the other's eyes an instant, and then she was in his arms. She was the first to speak. *'Do you know how my love has wavered and wandered — ^how much pride and selfishness you will have to bear with?" *'I should be cruel, indeed, if I were as unjust to you as are your own thoughts." **What first convinced you that I really loved you?" she asked next. ''Mrs. Elmore made me feel it at last," he replied; "and then I came by chance the other day upon a picture you sold, which contained my portrait as a herdsman, so won- derfully and tenderly finished from memory." She blushed deeply, and he continued : *'You will see that and two others I have been able to find and identify after some pains, in your own old room in the old house in Springtown — ^soon, I hope." She could not speak, but she rested her head upon his shoulder. Such absorbing peace and joy filled her heart so long estranged from its highest good, but now satisfied and atoned. At last she turned her face toward his, and, with a smile faint but full of happiness, said: "I must impose one condition. You do not ask me to stand by my A LEAP-YEAR ROMANCE 295 old letter to you? I do not like that. You must go off and begin in true fashion and write me some ardent love- letters. Then, perhaps, if you should ask me to say — in two months, in Springtown — that will be next leap-year- day — I might have no objection/' Of course, Mrs. Elmore dropped in again before an hour had passed. The professor almost fancied she seemed a trifle disappointed to see, as she did at a glance, that her services were needed no longer. She has since said that the disposition of each was so willful that her anxiety was vastly relieved when she saw them sitting Well, kind reader, no matter how — for now the writer may as well confess to so modest a thing as being the hero of his own tale, which is every word a true one. We began rather late, but we have been happier than a younger and less experienced couple ever were or could have been for nearly a year. We shall always celebrate leap-year-day. My wife must not see this little story till long after you have forgotten it — till we have been married just four years. Then I shall gather all these friends, if- God spares them, every one, and, when the best dinner I can afford is over, I shall read this tale to them, and then I know Mrs. Elmore will say, with great emphasis: *'You are quite right. It was all due to me. I foresaw it from the first. It was the most bothersome match I ever en- gaged in. Those are always the happiest. But the town- gossips — why, there is not one of them ever so much as dreamed why the wedding was leap-year-day to this day." And my wife will say in her quiet, modest way : * ' I was not made for a heroine, my dear ; and I am afraid that has spoiled your story. I was very headstrong, and enthusi- astic, and foolish, but now I fear I forgave you more easily than you deserved. However, the wrong-doing you have spun it all from was mine." 296 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST I shall reply: **My dear, our marriage is one of mind as well as of heart and soul. You completely fill woman's sphere for me. There is nothing I would change in you. I was a little inconsiderate, and, on the whole, I think, perhaps, I ought to bear all the blame. The best philosophy of the domestic relation '' And then I know Josie's good-hearted but shockingly coarse grandmother (long may she live with us if she does not alter her will!) will interrupt me: ** Children just bite right off. You'U quarrel yet who is the wisest. I'll allow you're quite a dab at story- writ- ing. But you've got one thing wrong. I alius knew Meechum was a scamp. I knew, too, you'd marry each other in the end all the time ; so just change that a bit, too, wliile you are about iti" And my little boy will be three then, and I mean he shall be able to say, "Yeap-year ith better 'an Kithmath, an' T'anksgivin', an' New- Year, all todether"; and if he should add, ''^But, Oh, papa, p'ease don't write any more long towies — I'm so sleepy!" then I am sure he, if all the rest of us have failed to do so, may touch a tender chord of sympathy in some reader's breast. VIII NOTE ON EABXY MEMORIES Most of the first fourteen years of my life were spent upon several farms in the hilly region of western Massa- chusetts. This home I revisited during all vacations of my course at the preparatory school, college and profes- sional school. Nearly every summer since, when I have been in the country, I have reverted to the region for at least a few weeks, and still retain possession of one of these old farms. Here I have given free vent to a number of fads. One summer I walked up and explored in rubber boots all the stream beds within a wide radius of Ashfield village; collected and, with expert help, labeled all the stones and rocks I could find. Another August I devoted to flowers, grasses and ferns, collecting about one hundred species of the latter alone. One season several weeks were devoted to climbing the hills, naming them, and marking directions, counting church spires, and tracing with the aid of a local antiquary nearly one hundred miles of old stone wall in town which marked the earliest partition of farms. Once I amused myself by tracing glacial scratches in the rocks and exploring the terminal moraines. Once, with an old lumber wagon, I drove around and asked every one I knew to let me explore his attic and thus collected about three hundred objects: from old looms, spinning wheels and primitive plows, to calashes, shoe buckles, pewter plates, foot and bed warmers, ancient school and hymn books, homespun frocks, pitchpipes and such other 297 298 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST mementos of ruder days as those with which Mr. George Sheldon has filled his fascinating museum at Deer field. These are now housed and catalogued in the basement of the academy building, where on Friday afternoons they yield a very modest income to the janitor, who is allowed to charge ten cents to all who desire to visit the collection. Another August I questioned old people concerning local history, visited sites of the old mills, cellar holes, apple orchards, and made out nearly two dozen family trees which show the sad decadence of this sturdy old Puritan stock. A few summers ago, however, I undertook as a vaca- tion diversion a more or less systematic exploration of all the farms I had ever known, noting on the spot everything remembered from early boyhood. I climbed in through the windows of abandoned houses and explored them from roof to cellar in quest of vestiges; sat alone sometimes for hours trying to recall vanishing traces and to identify ob- jects which I knew must have once been familiar. Thus during the month I noted between four and five thousand points, sometimes revisiting the same scene to observe the effects of recurrence, and from it all I gathered some general impressions of memory quite new to me, which it is my object here to note. Farm I was where I was bom and where the first two and one-half years of my life were spent. It contained about one hundred and twenty-five acres of very diversi- fied land, and although I had often driven past it (little of it was seen from the road), I had not entered the buildings in all that time, so that more than three-score years had inter- vened. I was allowed by the present tenant, who had occu- pied it ever since we left, absolute freedom within doors and without, and spent there many hours, notebook in hand, at various times. Often, as e.g., while gazing eastward toward a dense swampy forest, where even yet an occasional NOTE ON EARLY MEMORIES 299 bear or deer is killed in winter, or when coming upon cherry trees near a ledge or visiting two large rocks beside which were two old maples, a feeling that I thought to be a glint of vague familiarity was experienced. On coming to a knoll upon a vast heap of stones near trees I found myself articulating *'why yes, of course, there was some- thing like that. ' ' On coming upon a bit of woodland with many large dark stones near the house this feeling was very strong, and I was suddenly reminded of an older girl cousin who seemed somehow lacking and due there, al- though I have no recollection that she ever sa,w this farm, yet on general principles she probably had. Several ex- periences of this class suggest to me that association is deeper and more indelible than conscious memory. So with the rocky end of a knoll came an almost imperative association of cows being milked by a woman. The present occupant stated that the barnyard used to include that point, and it has now been told me that our hired man 's wife used to milk. There was a very faint suggestion of a dis- continued lane from this point to the pasture, which I am told did exist. The sudden smell of catnip, the gloomi- ness of an old wall of very black stones, a deep well be- neath the kitchen, the abundant and peculiar moss on the ledges, were other things that brought a distinct sense of familiarity but no trace of anything usually called mem- ory. A deep wild gorge to the west of the level road, although quite hidden from it; the stumps of three old maples on the east some distance from the house ; the slight slope of the front yard and that of a neighbor's with a well-house, vaguely suggest reminiscence, but it is more a feeling of a strong and peculiar interest than any identi- fication with past experience. The only clear and distinct memory connected with this place, which I have always carried and often revived, is of a red upright wooden spout with a wheel attached, through which I poured water, and 300 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST which to my great grief was left behind when we moved. As an older boy I used to question my parents about it, but they seemed to have forgotten what it was. I rum- maged the attic and shed, and finally found two red water spouts fastened together to which an old reel wheel had been nailed, thus triumphantly vindicating my memory. Thus out of all the very many objects and incidents that' were impressed upon a child's mind during the first two and one-half years of his life, almost nothing was definitely recalled. The inside of the house which was changed but little; a few vestiges of old furniture in the attic which we were said to have left; the long shed entirely un- changed; the barn; all these things abounding in objects of absorbing interest to childhood, time had almost com- pletely obliterated. Yet knowing well and having experi- enced delusions of memory I am positive that I cannot be mistaken in the repeated sense of reminiscence upon com- ing upon some of the features above noted. Phrases like *'why, so it was," **yes, to be sure," in some cases almost came to spontaneous vocal utterance at first, while in others, sitting and gazing slowly developed this sense. It was a hazy kind of beyond-the-woods feeling or a stony- hillside impression with an emotional tone of effort to climb it, and repeatedly with a strong desire to sit an hour or two in a spot to enjoy the rapport that I felt would come. Occasionally when I sat thinking of something very different or reading a book I had brought along, automatic side associations seemed to spring up. It was certainly not like other places, and it differed from them more than by the knowledge I had that I once lived there and any ex- pectant tension that fact might generate. I have little doubt but that if I had met that ensemble of landscape features unexpectedly in some far country I should have been struck by some reverberations of reminiscence per- haps akin to those Plato connected with d previous state of NOTE ON EARLY MEMORIES 301 existence. The points of contact between my mind and the past at least did not take spacial form, but were upon such general impressionistic items as the gloomy blackness of the wall, the dreadfulness of the dense spruce and hem- lock woods in the east, the difficulty and perplexity of the stony and rocky places, the upward and downward slant of the small hills. The outdoor impressions were far more cogent than the barn or house or anything in them, and up and down directions of the rolling ground evoked a reaction so peculiar as to suggest that the experience of going up and down hill for a child of the age I was when that was my home left a lasting impression. These observations at any rate have raised in my mind the query whether or not experiences of that early age distinctly tend to lapse to vague and evanescent emotions. The influences of the environment at this very formative and plastic age of rapid brain change must have been great, and I cannot but believe that my psychic organiza- tion would have been quite different had I passed this period of my life upon a prairie. It may be that remote ancestral phylogenetic influences are related to such nebu- lous psychoses of memory somewhat as they themselves are related to the clear, detailed, conscious impressions arising from recent experience. Indeed we may opine that such vestiges may be the forms which our experience takes just as it is fading from consciousness and sinking below its threshold into the larger unconscious life, where instinct and the heart, which from their unfathomable depths dom- inate so much of our lives, hold their sway. Thus it is perhaps, "Weissmann to the contrary notwithstanding, that the experience of the individual tends to transform the race, somatic cells to affect germ cells, so as to determine the psychic disposition of offspring. It is, at any rate, not impossible that hereditary vibrations are simply, yet more vague and shadowy than, this all but lost psychic or 302 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST neural stratum of my own soul, which faint as it now is must have had a high determining value. Perhaps an opposite theory is truer. At that stage I may have been a creature of sentiment, and sense and feeling may have been closely related. The emotional tone which colored all impressions may have been the organ of experience and there may have been no change in the psychic processes or even the nerve and brain cells, which mediated the experience of these years, but the later mentality of maturity may have simply grown over them, and the traffic of mind and life have followed these newer strata. In this case the vague impressions I had were recrudescences of baby stages of mind or what was unde- cayed of them, and there may have been none but a relative change in their position on the scale, if such there be, that separates reproduction from conscious individual experi- ence. Certain it is that I had here a rare opportunity in the very salient and permanent features unvisited during all the interval to look for conscious reminiscences. But to make the experiment absolutely conclusive I should have been brought up to believe that these years had been spent on one of two or more very different farms, each of which I should have explored to find which was the true one from those effects of expectant tension and peculiar interest which have always centered about this place, the effects of which under such circumstances have never been measured, and could not have been eliminated. Farm II where I lived from two and one-half to eleven and one-half years, I have driven by perhaps a dozen times since I left it. The house was almost immediately removed, as were the trees near it, and everything was smoothed and grassed over, so that where it once stood is now an open mow-lot. All the outbuildings, including bam, shop, shed, und stable, remain almost entirely unchanged. Once or NOTE ON EARLY MEMORIES 303 perhaps twice in the nearly sixty years since we left it I have walked over the farm a little, but in my study of these places now I spent a day, notebook in hand, zigzagging systematically across it from end to end, save perhaps in the more densely wooded parts, and hardly a square rod of ground escaped observation. Of nearly eight hundred items noted I am quite sure that at least half have been in my mind in some connection since. In the case of most of the rest the faintness of the reminiscent sense tends to confirm my impression of no such intermediate revival. The most striking experience of all was on coming sud- denly upon a wild rose bush in a pasture near the house, which somehow affected me profoundly and actually evoked tears, and something almost like a sob for some reason utterly unaccountable. I could not possibly recall emy- thing definite about it except that it somehow very closely suggested my mother and brought up later the image of her looking out from the front door up the rugged pasture hiU, where it stood. I fancy that it was this very bush that my automatic imagery used to associate with her sing- ing **The Last Rose of Summer," which always seemed to me very pathetic; but, although I have racked my brain since, I can recall nothing else. A distinct class of impressions are those which at first sight I vividly remembered with a sense of a very long intervaL since their last recall. Among these were, for in- stance, a peculiar flat white rock against which I was fond of glancing stones to see them strike fire. Another large squarish stone in a brook beneath which I caught my larg- est fish in a most peculiar way, and with a pin hook at that; a slight bend in an elm which otherwise I remem- bered very well ; a rectangular stone sluice at the entrance of a little causeway; the strips of ash bark on the beams of the barn ; a large twisted knot-hole through which swal- lows entered it; the peculiar tan color of the boards as 304 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST they approached the eaves; two large piles of stone near a stone bridge; some curiously weathered ledges; a peculiar branch in a beech tree in the woods; the shadows of the sun shining through the beeches upon ferns at a certain spot; an old tree, the roots of which diverged long before they entered the ground ; a large white rock in the wall at the remotest comer of the pasture shaded by an immense beech ; — oft repeated experiences, such as coming to a pecu- liar curve in some woodpath ; a rise or fall of the ground ; a hollow or a knoll; a bend in the little stream; patches of brakes and polypods, elders and sumachs; these and other impressions like them glowed up vividly in memory. The larger features of a diversified landscape are probably the most permanent forms of all topographical memory, but here again slight elevations or depressions in the ground seemed to be almost indelible. I could never have recalled them in the sense of active recollection, but when presented to sense, I remembered them with great certainty and detail, as indeed I did many peculiar knolls in one part of the farm where these abounded, and not a few of the best holes for both fishing and swimming in the large and small brook which flowed through it. I estimate that up- wards of four score individual trees in the ten or fifteen acres of woodland and in the orchard were definitely identi- fied, as were the many groups of spruce, hemlock, willow, and white poplar. One knoll strongly suggested winter- greens, and on going to it there they were. Another damp place in the edge of the woods brought to mind jacks-in- the-pulpit some time before I got there, and there too they were, though without any sense of ever having seen them there before. Pausing at familiar spots and striving to bring up associations with their salient features rarely brought anything so vividly to mind as what was pre- sented to sense, but there was often a feeling like the glint of partial or possible imagery as though perhaps there had NOTE ON EARLY MEMORIES 305 been many associations which had become too felted to- gether to be disentangled. Places near the house were, of course, best known. Those near the two roads, that nearly quartered the farm, and near the footpaths, driveways, and woodroads came next. Rocks and stones in these, and indeed everywhere, are the sheet anchors of this kind of memory, as they do not change. Special and somewhat exceptional features are what evoke and start reminiscent imagery, and when these were lacking I have sat long studying places I once knew most intimately, but have been unable to recall anything. Another class of memories among the most vivid of all were those associated with the strong instincts of play and its incidents. Verj^ many square rods of ground where I had mowed and raked I could recall nothing of, while another no better marked spot shone out like a star of the first magnitude, as a place where I had caught a mink, built a willow booth, slid in winter, learned to skate, pushed over my little brother, had a long fight after school with another boy; made my first effort to smoke; built a bonfire; played fox and geese in winter, etc. Over and over again this moral, that work is forgotten and things interesting remembered, recurred, although this rule, if such it be, is not without important exceptions. If I re- membered where I shot a crow I recall just as well where the hired man hit me with the ox whip. I remembered where I found a quarter in the road, and remembered quite as well where a team was for some time stuck in a snow- drift near by, which I helped the men dig out. A ditch, a bit of stone wall that was built, a sugar-house, changes in the cellar, the stable, several new tools, the new sleigh, buggy, robe, harness, and scores of other such things asso- ciated more with work than with play seemed to stand out almost as vividly as the new sled, the new suits of clothes and hats, little pleasure trips, etc. 306 EECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST Another group of reminiscences, if such they may be called, were moods with no definite picture. A kind of open glen in the woods, for instance, recalled nothing, but gave a very extraordinary and unwonted sense of pleasure and of previousness. A big dark rock, which I must have known intimately, gave a very substantial impression of frowning stability unique in its emotional tone, and to which I seemed to owe a certain power of appreciating moral steadfastness, although my memory could only say ** perhaps a rock was here." The distant sight of a group of hemlocks suggested that they were striving to conceal something, and this gave them a kind of secretive char- acter. A large wide-spreading beech that stood alone brought up a unique feeling of large and benignant gen- erosity. The angle of the woods against the sky in one place, behind which the sun used to set, evoked with much force a sense of being restrained, limited, shut out from something very much desired. On entering the woods from the open lot there was a sense of being on more solemn ground with an old feeling of awe and hush, of being shut in, of low-toned vague fear with indefinite expectancy. The note of a wood thrush very familiar there, which was heard again, never vibrated so deeply. The view of the house as it used to be, and the open lot beyond, had an almost human expression of smiling invitation that always drew me like a magnet. The noises of the brook, where it parted each side of a large stone and then paused in a deep dark spot under the willows, gave a sense of hurry and rest very pleasantly contrasted; while the brook always had strange drawing power, and kept saying *'come and play with me.'' An old sash with small window panes, in one of which was a peculiar air bubble, instantly revived a whole series of frost pictures that I used to watch with great interest when they were \ery elaborate in the morn- ing and as they gradually melted away, always beginning NOTE ON EARLY MEMORIES 307 in the upper middle of each pane, and letting in the view without. The scenes we used to fancy and even draw in the frost, and the zest with which the rain was watched with a kind of hedonic narcosis, as it trickled in lines of broken drops against these panes, have left their marks upon my soul. I believe that I could fill a volume with descriptions of things, processes, and incidents connected with this place. The new and striking generalization of all the study here, however, was that the physical features of this old farm had such amazing power to play upon my deeper sentiments and emotions. The buttercups, clovers, and many flowers and plants, — all had psychic qualities and definite expressions; so did the clouds, the rainbows, the rising and setting sun, the moon, the stars, particu- larly Orion and the Dipper, the noises of the wind, etc. Love, pity, deep dislike, fear, religious awe, aspiration, juvenile ambition, directly stimulated by the excelsior motive of hill-climbing, and every shade and color of joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, seemed to have been brought out by the items and incidents of this environment as a skilled musician evokes all the possibilities of his in- strument. I deem it fortunate to-day that I was exposed to such impressions, and hold that all the advantages of city life and of better schools would have been too dearly bought by the sacrifice of these. The country is the child's heaven, and every child ought to spend as much of his life as possible under the influences of Nature ; and I doubt if there has ever been a better school of infancy than the old New England farm in its best days. Very many of the objects in this place retained the very vivid associations with the imagination which they used to have in boyhood. A dark closet with no window always seemed a little awful, because it was associated with Blue- beard, who here slew his wife amidst a lot of dead ones. A spot near an elm in the pasture, otherwise unmarked. 308 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST was where the demon in the Arabian Nights escaped from the bottle. A steep acclivity in the mow land with rocks and scrub trees was Bunyan's **Hill of Difficulty," and a boggy place in the cowpath was the ** Slough of Despond.*' Moses lay amid the bulrushes behind the willows just below the dam. Understanding that an altar was a large pile of stones, I pictured Abraham about to slay Isaac near one in the east lot, and no experience of my real life is more vividly associated with that spot. Not seeing very many pictures, I made them, and the features of this farm were the scenic background and setting for many an incident and story. Everything read to me was automatically lo- cated. Miss Southworth's stories, which I conned furtively^ in * * The Ledger, ' ' all seemed to have been laid out on this farm, with the addition of a few castles, palaces, under- ground passages, dungeons, keeps, etc. In a school com- position, I parodied Addison *s '* Temple of Fame/' using local personages and events, and there it still stands in all its dazzling marble magnificence, with its spires, bright shining steps, streaming banners, minarets, massive col- umns, and a row of altars within, on a hill in our pasture, which in fact is drearily overgrown with muUen and brakes. The *' Sleeping Beauty'* was just behind a clump of hemlocks. Under a black rock in the woods was where the gnomes went in and out from the center of the earth. My mother told me tales from Shakespeare and I built a Rosalind's bower of willow, located Prospero's rock and Caliban's den. Oberon lived out in the meadow in the summer, but could only be seen by twilight or in the morn- ing before I got up. There was a hollow maple tree where I fancied monkeys lived, and I took pleasure in looking for them there. After a gun was given me, I peopled all the brush and trees with small and even large game. One spot of brush was a jungle, going past which I held my weapon ready NOTE ON EARLY MEMORIES 309 to shoot a tiger quick, if he should spring out suddenly at me. On one tree I once saw a hawk, which I fired at from an impossible distance, and toward this I always stole up for years after, hoping to find the same hawk, or if not that, an eagle, or just possible the great roc itself. This gun was perhaps the most effective stimulus of the imagina- tion I ever had, for it peopled the whole region about with catamounts, wolves, bears, lynxes, wild cats, and a whole menagerie of larger animals ; made me the hero of many a fancied but thrilling story; took me over a very much wider area of territory and helped a sort of adventurous exploring trait of mind, which I think on the whole may be favorable to originality and independence. Moreover, it gave me some knowledge of animals and their ways, prompted me to make a trunkful of stuffed and otherwise prepared collections of the meager fauna of that region, and although it perhaps did not teach me much, natural history, it gave me what was better for that stage — a deep sympathy with, and interest in, animals and all their ways, which now quickens my interest in the psychology of in- stinct. Although it aroused a passion for killing, which is anything but commendable, it may have stimulated the very strong reaction of later years, which now makes it almost impossible for me to give pain to any animal. In another group perhaps may be placed revivals of things long since entirely vanished — an old hollow log here, a rock long ago blasted away, the details of every room in the long since demolished house, the garden, espe- cially its more permanent features, the vanished orchard, etc. In many such cases the environment has brought up the missing thing so vividly that were it installed into objective reality just as it was fancied, I think little correc- tion would be needed. Yet, on the other hand, there are a number of items of vanished things which I had entirely forgotten, quite as prominent as these and as closely con- 310 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST nected with, my life, which have been furnished by my sister, but are now so well incorporated in my memory plexus that they seem to be reinstated just as securely and naturally as those images which I had preserved without aid. Another feature was the element of personality about certain objects, which the faint traces that I am now able to recall show that it must once have been very strong. Three white stones in the buttress of a bridge, with no resemblance whatever to a face, always gave me the im- pression of being pleased, satisfied, contented, and constant. A large window in the barn was broad and smiled forth its good will upon all passers-by. A tall slender young tree near the house seemed inspired with ambition to mount as high as possible and to exercise guardian and protective functions. A sharp steep hill a quarter of a mile away in front seemed to frown, threaten and repel, but an open flat, which extended still farther up by the brook side, invited and almost beckoned us to walk up it. A crooked tree seemed tense, dissatisfied, unhappy, and another with low branches always invited us to climb and took pleasure in having us in its limbs. When the wind blew, this tree talked to us and we patted it. The horses, sheep, cows, pigs and hens, all had individual traits and character and many of them had names I even now recall. Some were feared, others hated, and yet others loved; while some possessed only indifferent qualities. We were never alone when in their company, and there was always a relief, espe- cially if it was a little dark, in finding them in the pasture. One whole chapter could be written upon the celestial experiences; the peculiar sunsets which invited us or sug- gested the Judgment Day; the storms of rain, snow and hail, with thunder; the wind with all its notes and noises in the trees and down the chimney; and especially the clouds with all their peerless schooling for the imagina- NOTE ON EARLY MEMORIES 311 tion. Everything conceivable almost was seen in their forms and they contributed even more than thunder to give a sense of reality above. Some of the objects upon this farm which came home very distinctly to the mind, I believe, were of things I never had directly in the focus of attention but were known in indirect thinking as automatic side activities. Often when meditating on a subject or intent upon a strong experience of pleasure or pain, I used to catch my mind at a totally irrelevant perceptive process and would almost ejaculate the word **by" the window, tree, or whatever object this latter process concerned. This was a unique and oft- repeated experience, and I cannot with confidence explain the connotations of this word that spontaneously came to designate it. It was when an alien impression was injected into a train of thought and perhaps when two disparate psychoses were contemporaneously in the mind. I think the *'by'' meant ''halloo" clock, post, or whatever it was, *'you are thrusting yourself upon a train of associations where you do not belong," unless by way of a kind of punctuation or cross-association. Retracing the same path and also carefully rethinking all that it suggested, step by step, often brought out a new crop of memories. All these from this or any other source needed but very little effort to be fixed. Indeed on read- ing over my notebook items, I find not only little help from it, but I can generally go beyond it and add new points. Hence comes the impression that were I to spend some weeks on the old places new impressions would continue to arise. Almost everything had a mnemonic value and dur- ing how many repetitions this fecundity would continue, it is impossible to tell. Again all the distances seemed less; the hills were smaller ; the effort of walking above the woods and to other extreme points of the farm was not so great as at the age 312 RECEEATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST of eleven or twelve. Perhaps part of tMs is due to a rather robust muscular habit that has grown wonted to consider- able exercise and to much longer walks, but I am inclined to think a part of it must be explained as due to a develop- ment of larger space experiences which made the "whole place seem small. Eye-minded impressions have in my sedentary life grown yet faster than motive impressions. The general outlines and large relations and directions of things rarely needed reconstruction. Envisagement mainly jBlled in details and revived old memories. * ' Yes, there was a tree here, a nutting place, a cow path, blackberries, a curious stone there, this was the old door hook which it is a certain pleasure to rescue from entire forgetfulness, the same old stone wall half torn away remains. ' ' The pleasure in making these identifications was so strong as to prompt me to wish to buy back the old farm, build a study and work here; or perhaps to read, think, or even write at different places giving the mind some opportunity to wool- gather and letting revery have a long line, partly to revel in the pleasure of revival and partly from a feeling that one could do intellectual work here with some special ad- vantage. Do such revivals link the present and past in a sanif ying, useful, restful or tonic way ? Do they strengthen the cornerstones of the mind and soul or ought these ruined memories to be left to fall away, while mental energy is devoted to more serious work in later adult years ? Would the revivals of such associations not tend powerfully to correct some types of slowly supervening insanity, if the soul was sound when these impressions were first knit to- gether? Wherein consist the surprising memories of the ups and downs of such curving ground? Is it primarily retinal as, of course, the larger features must be, or is it partly seated in the centers innervating the leg movement of running over or up and down it? Is it reaUy advan- tageous to carry such permanent topographic maps on the NOTE ON EARLY MEMORIES 313 brain, scrappy, dog-eared, blurred and half effaced as they are, or is the fascination of these ruins the charm of decay ? In general, I find most of my sister's memories cluster about the house, where they are detailed and minute, while my own are much fuller of the farm. On the whole I was perhaps even more surprised at what I could recall than at what I could not. Memory seems more permanent than anything else on this place, save the general features of the landscape. Washouts have exposed some rocks and sunk others; little forests are beginning to grow up and part of the old one is removed; man has leveled, cleared away, filled up, put up and destroyed buildings and walls, but memory remains true to its past. Of the educational value of the inventory of my impres- sions of this farm, it is hard to speak. The deeper things like the discipline of toil, the pleasure of rest and recrea- tion, the seriousness of religious experience, the communion with nature ; — all these did their work and molded the soul, but have left few pictures. Yery many of the latter are concerned with items which might have been very different with little obvious change in evaluation. The memories of this period, while very numerous and distinct, may have less emotional tone than the obscure and uncertain recru- descences on Farm I; and yet very frequently strong im- pressions of father, mother, brother, and sister would re- turn with pathetic emphasis. There was here a distinct and all-pervading sense of sadness that all was gone and forever past recall ; and yet, when I frequently asked my- self whether on any conditions I would be put back as a child and live it over, I was able to think of no conditions on which I would consent to any such repetition. What then is the origin of this peculiarly somber hue of the *'days that are no more"? It is surely not all because we know they might have been better lived, nor is it because maturity has not still greater joys than they, nor yet again 314 RECREATIONS OP A PSYCHOLOGIST all because pleasant impressions abide and painful ones are forgotten so that blessings brighten as they take their flight. Childhood is the paradise of the race from which adult life is a fall. Childhood is far more generic in body and soul than even woman, just as she is more so than adult man. The "shades of the prison house'-' are the in- evitable specializations necessary in becoming a member of the community, and I am quite clear in the opinion that the fascination which the memories of a happy childhood always exercise upon the mature mind is due to the dim sense that in those halcyon days we were more complete and all-sided, more adequate representatives of the race. The other charm seems due to the sensuous life of child- hood, which is all ear and eye, curiosity, interest, which devotes all its energies not to a bitter struggle for exist- ence or the intellectual working over of impressions, but surrenders itself with abandon to the impressions them- selves. This and, to some extent, the next farm were my earthly paradise, and although in the current that has long so strongly impelled young rustics toward more urban centers I have wandered and fallen far, I hark back to all the old local associations in these spots with a piety that is almost filial toward the very trees and rocks. On Farm III I spent a number of months each year from eight to thirteen. It comprised some four hundred acres and joined several others with which I became quite familiar, as they were owned by relatives. Of one aban- doned house into which I climbed, I still preserved a dis- tinct memory of every door and window, could have drawn the rooms and replaced most of the furniture. The inter- esting revivals, which I am sure could not have been in my mind for decades, were details like a peculiar door knob with a defect in it; a cross beam in the kitchen with a peculiar pattern of paper which I discovered by tearing off two later superposed wall-papers j several peculiarities NOTE ON EARLY MEMORIES 315 about the cellar stairs; a white stone in the wall of the well ; a hollow in a door step ; a bullet hole in a shed ; and many others of the same kind. Often I was at first un- certain about these, but they generally soon grew clear. In one room there was an almost imperative association of col- lective prayer and of a quilting bee ; in another of a baby in a cradle, a young lady and her beau sitting on a black hair sofa, but there was no trace of any reminiscent feel- ing, although each of these items quite likely was really experienced. Still more dim are fragmentary images of people sitting around ; of some one in the morning coming out a side door, rarely opened, to pick flowers; of some- thing exceptionally good to eat; of something else very interesting kept on the stairs; of some curious kind of an animal in the sink, etc. Of the arrangement of the rooms upstairs, where I often slept, I could recall nothing what- ever. Another once familiar, but now abandoned, house into which I climbed produced like this a tangled meshwork of memories, which seemed to interfere with each other, so that when I often thought I had found a clew, it was hard to bring definite images above the threshold, but there was a vague, massive feeling of reminiscence that was overpow- ering, full of interest toned with both pleasure and pain. Here I unexpectedly came across an old school seat and desk which I instantly recognized as from the old school- house. A broken hearth of an old stove had a striking pat- tern which shone out with great vividness, and which my eyes as a boy used to be very fond of tracing out in revery, and I instantly recalled just how it stood in another house. A lot of rude abandoned sap tubs from which as a boy I used to help make maple sugar, and the general patterns and certain individual tubs were clearly remembered. A very antique chair, bottomed and backed with woven strands of braided colored rags; an old stool wliich my 316 RECREATIONS OP A PSYCHOLOGIST grandfather often iised in lying down ; the broken part of the colored glass of the old clock ; the funny snapping appa- ratus of an old reel; the knot which made a defect in the cheese basket; a curious red salting box; the door of a cat hole also with a curious knot in it ; a blind window ; a crack through the broad hearthstone; a discolored spot in the ceiling; the mark of my knife in the woodshed door; the one imperfect brick in the back of the fireplace — ^these things suggested to my mind that objects, rarely and per- haps never in the exact focus of consciousness, but about which daydreaming and absent-minded revery no doubt played a great deal, constitute a large factor of such mem- ories. Irregular forms, like knot holes and exudations of gum, especially from spruce boards, imperfections in bricks, corner stones, clapboards, unsymmetrical trees, were con- venient perching points for the flitting imagination, and perhaps points de repere for quite elaborate structures of fancy, like the ink blotches of the psychophysic laboratory. At any rate, I doubt if such objects as these were ever the centers of so concentrated attention and so much or so long continued interest with me before. Passing to the house of Farm III, itself temporarily closed, but with some of the old furniture still remaining, and through every room of which I slowly went alone, notebook in hand, memories crowded very thickly with the opening of every new door, and seemed almost to assume the vividness of sense impressions. The old parlor paint never looked so white, the castellated old stove, almost never used except on Thanksgiving Day, was still there; on this side lay my grandfather and here my aunt in their coffins; the old mirror with its wide mahogany frame still had the little crack in the comer, which was even better remembered than the mirror itself ; the smaller long narrow one with its gilt and black frame and the gaudy flowers painted in the glass of the upper part ; the red table which NOTE ON EARLY MEMORIES 317 still showed my ink spot on it; the old daguerreotypes; the carpet ; wall paper ; mahogany sofa ; the same old black books, Clark's Sermons, Baxter's Call, Bunyan's Holi/ War; the yellow boards and the bird's-eye maple cane-seated parlor chairs ; the large-figured red carpet ; the curious bulge in the post of the old mahogany stand, with its two yellow drawers with their two small mahogany handles each; the big red pincushion built on a broken glass lamp stand — ^were well remembered images in this room unvisited for at least forty years. In the sitting-room, where far more time was spent and which had been frequently revis- ited in the interval, I could not do as well, although I was able to jot down over seventy partial old memories of scenes and events connected with that room. Occasionally things I had first thought new, like the stone floor of the cellar, the place of the various bins and cider barrels, were later remembered. Here trifling things almost flashed back, which I cannot think had been recalled for decades, such as a peculiar latch fastening ; curious round-turned curtain holders; a milk stool with block and peg identified by a knot; a very old-fashioned green, black and red wagon; a large and curiously broken rock in the pasture wall; a cracked and worn-out ring in a discarded ox yoke ; a four- sided razor strop, red gum in one end and the handle broken; a few square yards of very stunted little daisies back of the barn ; the same old woodchuck holes almost al- ways in the same places. Some associations experienced very vivid revival. On en- tering the cellar, the first thought was of a pitcher of cider I had fallen with and broken; the next of an old apple parer; the next of a relative, I had often heard of, who long ago fell down the stairs of the old house and broke her neck; then of a musk rat I once caught at the mouth of the cellar drain ; next of the peculiar flavor and look of three of my favorite apples, one of which was of almost 318 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST delusive intensity; the rows of barrels of apples with a slightly purple tinge ; of something very curious that once happened outdoors and which I saw through the cellar win- dow, but the very nature of which I could not recall ; of an- other something exceptional that once stood for a long time on the east side, and of something that hung from a cellar beam at a pretty well located point, but whether a hanging shelf, cupboard, dressed pig, or a cask of home brewed beer, I could not recall, try as I would ; the front window event may have been getting in potatoes or apples, clearing out the cellar, shoveling snow away to let the light in, a game, or a team driving up with company. The spacial reference was definite, but my brain functions here are in a state of unrestorable ruin, for they enabled me to mark nothing but the site, where once something stood, sug- gesting a prepotency or rather a prepermanence of site location. In wandering over this rocky, hilly and very diversified farm, almost every square rod of which had features all its own, my notebook was rapidly filled with the flotsam and jetsam of reminiscences. Sometimes the outline of a hill or a whole perspective glowed up, but more often it was some insignificant detail or incident. There was a spring once piped to the house and later to a tub near by, annually cleaned, which I knew well, with the trodden cattle path to and about it in winter and its cooling draughts in haying; but the brightest memory was of a story I had heard that once a dead muskrat was found in it. Here was an old wall with a high shady rock cracked a foot in the middle to which I carried the nine o 'clock baiting to the half dozen men, who had already swung their scythes in unison for three hours, and who here paused fifteen minutes to drink water with vinegar, molasses and ginger and eat the thick quarters of apple pie. In one comer as a boy my grand- father had told me he saw a bear; here he caught a coon; NOTE ON EARLY MEMORIES 319 there grew the fever plants; there was a stony acre over- grown with poison ivy which I loved to travel barefoot to show my immunity ; two cellar holes rich to a boy in inter- ests with woodchucks, squirrels, lilacs, birds' nests, apples, and a little brook running through its garden corner where I made a toy sawmill that would cut potato boards ; there was a small hill thickly strewn with heavy white quartz boulders; a rocky corner famous for raspberries, another for thistles and yellow birds ; a beech crowned hill where the three species of woodpecker abounded ; the light- ning ash tree ; adder tongue knoll ; lightning rock ; the win- tergreen and running pine places ; the strange isolated rods of rank Texas blue grass; the sugar Louse nearly a mile from everything with all its rich associations; the many cows, calves, horses, oxen, and pigs, whose individuality is still preserved; the large pond, now a meadow, with many incidents of fishing, swimming, skating and trapping ; the solitary sheep bam, which, populous as it was, needed to be visited only once a week ; the half dozen barns I knew so well, and which in the winter when they were full of poultry and stock were so full of interest ; the places where soap, shingles, cheese were made ; the butchering and hunt- ing incidents; the long and dreadful Sundays with my grandfather's tedious stereotyped prayer, the slowly ap- proaching close of which was so welcome ; his mighty bowl of milk ; the weekly dressing of his hair, braided very elab- orately up over his bald crown; my making of complete palm leaf hats; my crude skill at the accordion; flageolet, fiddle, bones, double shuffling ; my soprano performance at the singing school; the details of sheep washing, shear- ing, breaking colts ; quilting, husking, apple paring, road mending bees and raisings; the kitchen dances Thanksgiv- ing ; the Thursday evening prayer meeting in the old school- house ; the two dozen herbs in the garret for medicinal pur- poses; fence mending, road breaking, laying in wood; the 320 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST stories of tlie winter choppers by the fireplace; the long, discourses of one of them to me after I had gone to bed about the impending second coming of the Lord; several new buildings; the tearing down of an old house which I knew well till five by frequent visits, but of which nothing whatever remains except the memory of a funny old wooden latch with a string through a hole : — such lists which could be greatly extended showed me plainly that starting from such centers and working along association tracks as I sit in my study afterwards may be quite as prolific for the period represented by this farm as reiterated personal vis- itations and efforts of recall made on the spot. In meeting schoolmates of these and later days, I am often struck with illustrations of what I believe to be a general law, viz., those who finished their education at the district school retain far more vivid and detailed incidents of school life up to that period than those who go on fur- ther. In reunions of classmates of high and fitting schools, who ended their education at this stage, I find that their memories are more copious and retentive than mine. Those who stop at college, and again those who end study at the professional school without subsequent graduate or uni- versity study at home or abroad — all illustrate the same principle, that each advancing stage of schooling tends to obliterate memories of the preceding stage. With regard to the utility or mental hygiene of persis- tent efforts at revivals like the above, which may have in- volved something we can figure as regenerative tensions of decadent structures, it is clear to me that such interests are for the time a most salutary kind of diversion from the overwork of a year. The distraction seems wholesome, but if carried too far it may tend to diminish the vigor of later acquired interests or knowledge, and help toward the puer- ile tendencies often seen in senescence. Such memories as these probably linger latest amid the declining functions NOTE ON EARLY MEMORIES 321 of extreme old age, when later attainments are first swept away. Much ought to be forgotten and the very neural structure plastically wrought over into new shape. Too great persistence of juvenile impressions may retard men- tal development, and too much accretion of such barnacle- like traces of experience may distinctly handicap the up- ward push of the soul toward an ever more complete ma- turity. The psychology of forgetting is in the main yet to be written ; perhaps the Wagnerian Parsifal, who at the dawn of manhood was able to recall almost nothing what- ever of his early life, represents a more normal type than most of us, or at least than I do. If Spencer's conception of memory as instinct in the making be correct, such recol- lections are the crude material of higher powers, which, have undergone arrest or abortion on their way. They are the unutilized remainders of our culture. Is there after all any value, when I have a distinct experience of envisage- ment with some of these objects with all the pleasure that attends it, in the attendant sense that I have envisaged it before ? On this farm my boyhood memories seem most distinct and numerous, although I was less familiar with it than with Farms II and IV. This was in part due to its greater size and diversification, the larger number of persons and activities going on, but also I think in part to the fact that my stays here were intermittent, usually only a few weeks or months at a time, so that experiences here became less monotonous and there were more of the intensifying effects of novelty. My notebooks abound in associations of taste and smell, both of which are very fecund. Caraway brings back viv- idly to me anywhere the soul of my experiences with the Puritan Sunday church services, and the three distinct kinds of cookies which I should instantly identify any- where. The sight, smell and taste of catnip is a whole 322 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST plexus of feeling rather than distinct memories of my annt, mother, the white and yellow bowls, my drinking of it sit- ting up in bed for a cold, etc. So peppermint, spearmint, the taste of the yellow birch bark, the life everlasting, the sweet flag pods, slippery elm, the new grown raspberry stems, the so-called cheeses of the little barnyard plant, beechnuts, the medicine made of cherry twigs, the taste of certain apples known nowhere else, the smell of penny- royal, the barnyard, the breath of cows, of corn silks, new mown hay, brakes, freshly turned sod, burnt over pastures, spruce gum, the varnish smell of the coffin shop, the odor of pines, the taste of maple sap, sage, sorrel — bring up strange uncertain moods with quaintly accented emotional tones which suggest that the latter are perhaps the accumu- lated mold of long past years of intellection, the felted de- bris of vanished experiences, the stratification of past ages of life deposited in layers. I attended to many auditory impressions to which I sought to give opportunities of re- vival, when they seemed peculiar to this stage of my life. The sound of the brook in certain places ; the tones of the wind blowing through trees, especially pines; the song of several birds rarely heard since childhood; the whistle of the woodchuck ; the drumming of the partridge ; some pecu- liarities in the thunder at one house on a high hill ; the call- ing of cattle of the different species; the aspirated screech of the henhawk; the bubble of the sugar pan — all these showed again the close association of sounds with feelings. On Farm IV, where we moved when I v/as eleven and one half years, and which was my constant home for nearly four years and my intermittent home ever since, my system- atic exploration began on one of the pleasantest mornings of early autumn, with the sky a perfect blue, with a wide horizon of hills stretching from fifty to seventy miles, and some twenty-two shades of green as I thought distinguish- able in the landscape. These one hundred acres I own and NOTE ON EARLY MEMORIES 323 have a great piety toward, and I would not part with them for many times their very modest value. From noth- ing I ever possessed do I derive such helpful and sanifying influences, partly because it is land and partly because of its associations. I have plowed or mowed, made fences, ditched, harvested, or followed cattle over nearly every foot of it. When worn out with work, worry, or grief, and sometimes if ill, I have gone to this farm, contact with the broad surfaces of which has never yet failed to speedily set me up. I own it, and it owns me in a sacred and unique sense. Just as nowadays those who ride behind a horse with a coachman do not know it as did those of old who rode on it, trained it, hunted and slept with it, owed their lives perhaps to its speed, and so owned it in a unique and individual sense; so I own this farm, in a way, too, that refutes at least in one sense the argument of those who advocate public ownership of land. The rooms of death, the almost absolute stillness that now reigns here; the old awe and vague dread of the evening gloaming, which I have lately reexperienced, bring a sadness so sickly sweet that I can hardly tolerate it — and yet it all has after all a won- drous charm. What, too, are the psychological sources and what are the stages in the hereditary development of that strong passion to improve land, never so fervent and domi- nant as in the early periods of New England ? Whence this rancor against forests and brush that even yet forbids us the comfort of roadside shade or the beauty of roadside growths? Very rarely in the history of the world has worse soil been cleared of brush and stones and made to yield a tolerable income and supported a more stalwart or intelligent race. To come upon a decayed stump where once was a familiar tree was a little like finding on a grave- stone the name of some old acquaintance who was thought to be still alive. I climbed several old trees with the branches of which I was most intimate when a boy; got 824: RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST on to roofs I used to frequent; crawled under the bam floor; squeezed into the hollow trees in quest of memories. I spent a number of hours here carefully studying and making notes on two inches square of ground chosen al- most at random, counting each blade and root of each growth, distinguishing last year's dead from that of the year before; watching the ants of at least three species; slowly penetrating under a magnifying glass into the soil, noting the different forms of sand-grains and fine pebbles; tracing out the ant hole, and also coming upon a white grub ; going through the shallow mold where was an angle- worm, as a representative of the species through the body of which Darwin thinks this mold has often passed, to the red sandy earth beneath, and realizing what a rich book could be written on all that those two inches square con- tain. Up in the woods and grove I believe I could distin- guish with eyes closed the poplar, pine, beech, and perhaps other trees, by the noise of the wind through them. Per- haps I had better make my confession complete. During the days on this farm I soon gave up wearing my hat, for it shut off the view above and obstructed the susurrous of forest music, so that the ears had a freer feeliag without it. Soon the coat came off, for the heat, then the vest. The collar was hot and sweaty and was loosened. The spirit of boyhood was on me, and I suddenly preferred to carry my shoes and stockings in my hands. There must have been forty kinds of feel and tickle to the feet in the various rough and smooth rocks, sand, clay, hot and cold bits of roadway, diverse species of moss, grass and stubble, in the puddles and brook, the leaves and pine needles; so that I not only revived memories of barefoot days, but realized what an important surface of contact man loses and by how many stages he is removed from nature by shoes. As I was sure to be alone I concluded that pants only and those roUed to the knee would be enough and to spare. The NOTE ON EARLY MEMORIES 325 contacts of leaves and brush, and the sun that burned my back may have been intoxicating, but however it was, I finally several times enjoyed the great luxury of being in complete undress, and of feeling pricked, caressed, bitten and stung all over, reverting to savageiy as I had often done as a boy by putting off civilization with all clothes and their philosophy. It was a curious experience of lightness and closeness to nature. Without the shoes one is let down half an inch in stature; the center of the gravity of the body is lowered; there is a sense of lightness; and I often had spells, sometimes I think an hour or more long and quite spontaneously, of singing, yelling, and many kinds of vocal gymnastics that sustained and perhaps in- tensified the peculiar kind of nature communion, philoso- phy and reminiscence to which I gave way on this spot, where I reveled in the rankest and most absolute freedom with, a kingly sense of ruling as well as owning. Here I may mention incidentally that I am a faddist on hill-climb- ing, because it exercises the heart and lungs so much neg- lected in sedentary habits, and exercising just those move- ments most natural and healthy, gives a sense of overcom- ing and surmounting with a peculiar exhilaration on every hill-top attained, with a sentiment of victory in the do- ing, of breadth and exultation in the end, besides enabling one to straighten out the axes of eye muscles and accommo- date for a distance. On and near this farm are many hillsides and many curious terminal moraines, almost terraced by cow paths. In one place I crossed sixteen in present use in about eighty paces, and there were many more in all the stages of disuse. In moving to or from feeding grounds, cows go in files and are marvelous engineers to avoid going up or down steep places. In and out went the scarped serration of the declivity, and right and left wound the cow-paths for perhaps one-third of a mile, occasionally deviating for 326 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST young growing trees, nearly trebling the distance in order to maintain almost a water level, passing spots so precipi- tous that a false step might have been fatal, and altogether constituting a curious manifestation of instinct. This farm has been so often revisited that renewals of undoubted boyhood are fewer and harder than elsewhere. A curious crack in the upper right corner of a window pane was always one of the most striking things in the house, perhaps never directly in the focus of attention as a boy, but I found I could draw a complete outline of its rather complex figure, which I used to find myself tracing hun- dreds of times. Every room visited now, some after a lapse of but one and others nine years or more, had a memory tone more or less distinct and all its own. The most archaic' memory stratum was the attic, an old shop, a bin, and a quarry hole where rubbish had been dumped for many years. These I carefully explored, especially the latter, which I dug up layer after layer, coming upon older and older reminiscences with increasing interest and zest. Un- der ashes I found old carpets, broken crockery, things clean and unclean. I came upon now a bit of china, a piece of a stove, tool, bed quilt or carpet pattern, which shone out with diverse kinds of memory phosphorescence, each richly set in emotional tones and knit up with more or less com- plex associations or ramifications. Here I found a rather suggestive analogue of my memory strata, for things had been dumped here once a year at every house-cleaning from the first, and the organization of its material was about as slight, and the stages of decay were about as marked and progressive as were those in my mind. It was not unlike exploring the slowly accumulated debris in the west European caves of the Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon Troglodytes. In a chest in the old shop were frag- ments of a foot and hand warming soapstone from which irradiated an idyl of decayed memories of my NOTE ON EAELY MEMORIES 327 mother, the stove, sleigh rides, etc.; a scrap of blue cot- ton reins from an old harness shone up brightly from a great depth and were very well recalled after a very long interval; some curiously notched harrow teeth; a carpen- ter 's gauge ; a rude but wornout whetstone of rare virtue ; the lock of my old gun; a paper of sheep redding; two powder horns which I made and ornamented; a cake of oH meal once in high favor for calves ; a much admired pair of martingales; the strangely formed iron step of a cart; the brass nibs of my little scythe ; a red cherry rolling pin ; a ex)m scraper; many broken antique cast iron wrenches; the hatchel and wire foot-spool used in domestic broom making ; the six-inch needle ; leather hand-thimbles and black thread and broom press, with the paper of gold leaf for the handles ; a set of well marked wedges for splitting wood; the iron head beetle, identified by a peculiar gnarl; the battered seat of the old buggy, with its white broadcloth cushion belted in by a patent leather strap ; two door fas- tenings ; a part of a sled I made ; several traps for rats and woodchucks ; a jug of woodchuck oil, and a whip lash of its skin I braided ; a trowel, bullet molds, ornamented harness, my old buzz-saw; most of these surely cannot have been warmed up in my brain for several decades. Other things which had the same air of resuscitation, but which had been so open that my mind has no doubt flitted over them in my annual revisitations, but which it was a great pleasure to revive more definitely, were quite a list of stones, rocks, fences, wood paths, wild grapes, cattle; my marks in the barn and shed; the crowded contents of old shelves and cupboards, which I carefully reexplored ; the curious paint- ing of green and white spatter work on the floor of a room carpeted ever since we first moved into the house ; and here again suggesting a whole psychological treatise were door knobs, latches, hooks, leather hinges, wall paper, and grain- ing, often in the foreground of memory. The curious little 328 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST arch over the window of a very nnfrequented room; the strangely figured paper on the rarely used fire-board; a knot-hole in the front of a chamber door; an unfloored place in the attic where there was perennial danger of stepping through the lath; a long unbroken comer of a stove door ; some blue bread we ate, an aborted product of our own wheat field; the figures on the old blue crockery; piy place at table ; several dress and bedquilt patterns ; the little red and lettered cup ; my penny banks ; a curious old firkin ; — of a good many of these I could write a brief trea- tise were I to characterize all the incidents and especially the feelings which they brought to mind. Here, too, in comparing my notebook with a list of things my younger sister best remembers, I am yet more forcibly struck with the great superiority of a girl's memory of house, garden and yard, and a boy's of the farm. In reviewing this memory furniture, many questions arise. As a boy I used to rake, pitch, chop, dig, and am fond of more or less of these same activities now. Do I get more rest and refreshment from these restorations of boy- hood activities than I should by rowing or indulging in new games that involved different activities and laid the chief strain on different muscles? Is it a correct theory of rest and vacation thus to restore old habits or does it tend to reversion in a way that makes progressive growth harder? Again the temptation here is always great to ut- ter abandon and absurdity, and to seek restored equilibrium from an overworked sedentary life with much brain strain in it by what might almost perhaps be called the silly or giggle cure. Does one rest any supernormally developed eictivities by exercising the subnormal weak ones? Is there here the material for a real new cure in a psychic restora- tion of the old joy of life characteristic of childhood? Another chapter might be written on hill experiences. One distant summit I had never climbed since one day in NOTE ON EARLY MEMORIES 329 the early teens, when I had spent a good part of a whole Sunday there alone trying to sum myself up; gauge my good and bad points till I found I had been keyed up to a kind of Jeffrey rage, and walked back and forth vowing aloud that I would overcome many real and fancied obsta- cles and do and be something in the world. It was resolve, vow, prayer, idealization, life plan, all in a jumble, but it was an experience that has always stood out so prominently in my memory that I found this revisitation solemn and almost sacramental. Something certainly took place in my soul then, although probably it was of less consequence than I thought for a long time afterward. My resolve to go to college, however, was clenched then and there, and that hill will always remain my Pisgah and Moriah in one. Again a hill is a good dynamometer. Many years ago I began every summer to climb a distant hill and get back to the hotel, from which I started as speedily as possible nearly every day at five o'clock, and noted the time and have kept my record these many years. From my teens to the present time, I can walk rapidly on the first heat just about so far before my breath and legs become uncomfort- able, and I want to pause. This is approximately a con- stant and has not varied perceptibly in all these decades. For a long stretch of hill climbing, however, the case is very different. Training decreases my time much. Be- ginning last year with one hour and a quarter, at the end of a month I could do the same work with about the same forcing in forty-nine minutes. I hope to keep this record yet many years, and although it will be sad when the inevit- able senescent diminution occurs, the curve may have a little interest. A wide gamut of pleasure and pain is experienced in a remarkable way. When I walk to the old place from the hotel a mile away on a bright morning, the joy of seeing everything is very intense, indeed to the point of exhilara- 330 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST tion and almost intoxication. As I wander about all day, take my dinner alone on the hill and continue the peregrina- tions of the afternoon, the pleasure very steadily becomes less exquisite, pales and declines. Sunset is sad and the gloaming becomes oppressive, while as twilight darkens to early evening out of doors and night comes and I go to bed alone in the house, memories of the past grow al- most insupportable, and old fears which sometimes haunted my boyhood, but have been unfelt since, of ghosts, robbers, and even of sudden death or fire, delay or even banish sleep for a time. My euphoria cannot hold out against night and solitude here. Nowhere else have I experienced these ancient fears in any such force, although I have been no less alone. • Several times, first on a dark stormy windy night and last on a bright moonlit one, I undertook to wander through the village graveyard, which is some distance from any house, but met with utterly undreamed-of difficulties. As I approached it, there was a depressing sense of loneliness which darkened down to a strange kind of fear. I found myself tense, anxious, expectant of something painful be- fore these apprehensions took any form or had any object. Then I thought of ghosts and kindred wild scenery, that made me as a boy run by this place after dark. As I forced myself to climb over the black fence under the pines and to touch a few of the nearest grave stones, the nervous awfulness of it all increased. I paused to gather courage and lit a cigar on the nearest tombstone, forced myself along a rod farther, paused and felt great tension. Had there been need, I certainly could have gone through or spent the night there alone, but each time I retired simply because it would have taken such a great nervous effort to have forced myself on. I dread great heights, but can climb almost anywhere, just as here the tension of the neu- roses is painful and wasteful. This experience suggested NOTE ON EARLY MEMORIES 331 to me many problems. The old fears were not of very vivid imagery of sheeted figures, etc., but the fear without an object was intense. "Whether this was ancestral or caused by the many gruesome tales of childhood or both, it is impossible to tell. In an old yellow chest I found carefully preserved all my compositions from the first at the age of five on ''The Rat'* up through various contributions to the unprinted school paper and a kind of valedictory at the age of four- teen, together with several juvenile diaries which I was encouraged to begin at the age of seven. I also succeeded in finding again about all the old school books from the little red primer up to the ''village reader,'' Webster's speller, Colburn's and Adams's arithmetics, Mitchell's geography and atlas, the first grammar, etc., all of which I have carefully looked through, together with quite ex- tensive files of letters of my parents written to me from fourteen on when I began to be away from home. Of this mass of material the most striking fact is how much has been forgotten. The reader was in use for years, and yet I marked only fourteen selections of which I had any recol- lection. Several of them I recalled memorizing, but beyond the first few lines or verse or two there is only a general feeling of familiarity. The poetic extracts linger longer than the prose; of the fourteen I doubt if more than five have been distinctly in my mind since boyhood days. The great majority were utterly unfit for childhood, and I can recall nothing whatever, but it is always those that were best liked at the time that are best remembered. The speller is most familiar. Nineteen or twenty of the lists of words as they stood in columns (lady, baker, shady), I could still repeat if started. Many of the illustrative sentences, too, like "fire will bum wood and coal," came back with great distinctness. Clearest of all, however, were the fables in the back with the pictures, and next the abbreviations; 332 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST but the three pages of laws concerning sounds of letters in the front and rules for punctuation in the back, memorized with such tediousness and unintelligibility, only had a faint echo of familiarity. Now from a perfect understanding of what they mean I could memorize them with approximate verbal accuracy in a very short time. It is curious that the order of disconnected words the same in sound and varying only slightly in spelling should be so much better remembered than coherent sentences, which were inter- spersed. This, I think, shows the very phonic nature of juvenile memory. Of the geography the pictures were by far best remembered, especially those of men and animals in action. All the scraps about the productions, the frag- mentary history and population, have gone, and most of it would be now valueless. The general outlines of the col- ored states was generally remembered, but I could now easier prepare for an examination in a new science than on this farrago. I read through the shorter catechism and recalled the relation and sequence of the sonorous words, and remembered particularly the crabbed places in the stiff and awkward sentences which were so antistylistic, and yet this at the age of nine I knew by heart, teste a diploma to that effect still in my possession, signed by the minister, superintendent and class teacher. Of Colbum's arith- metic, in which I was rather expert, the most striking recol- lection was of the symmetrically ordered lines arranged like poetry. Of the Adams arithmetic the tables of weights and measures stand out clearest, and next a few specially hard sums, and the rudiment of some of the ponderous rules, together with certain scenes of the schoolhouse (blue slate, blackboard, and teachers) that were associated with them. Of the primer the bright and scarlet cover was best remembered, next the pig sentences, and some of the alpha- bet pictures. In language work Green's grammar and analysis brought back little that was vivid or pleasing. NOTE ON EARLY MEMORIES 333 The ponderous mouth work of the latter (adjective element because it describes a quality according to rule 17 ; of the third class because it contains a subject and predicate ac- cording to rule 23, etc.), looms up through the fog of years. By far the most vivid of all were the school declamations, various sentences of which could be recalled. The case with my own effusions was quite different. Almost everything here came back in a sense. The favorite topic of my earliest productions was animals and fights. Occasionally, at a very tender age, I lapsed into poetry which was very rich in promise of the bathos of later fresh- man and sub-freshman effusions. My two chief endeavors were to be either funny or eloquent, and it is hard to re- peruse these efforts without sentiments of self-pity, and they are a most drastic lesson in humility. The diaries, sometimes kept up at the rate of a few lines a day for a year or more (occasionally I would write up on Sunday all the space for each day of the past week), are mostly very monotonous records of the weather, going to school, but quite frequently with specific events, most of which recalled nothing whatever. Near the dawn of adolescence, the spring after I was fourteen, I conceived it would be vastly fine to write my own life, and this was spun out to some forty pages of fools- cap. It is fullest on school life and events. Nearly every term of the preceding eight years of school life I had had a different teacher, over twenty in all, and each of these is described and in order. This convinces me that a great body of details of early life remembered at fourteen lapses later, for I could not now recall even the names of all these teachers, still less their order. Most of the leading events bring up a sense of recollection, but nearly all the minor ones have been swept away in the stream of time. At this age, too, being an ardent admirer of Silvanus Cobb and Mrs. Southworth, I wrote in red ink a story of some eighty 334 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST large pages and in ten chapters. This was read with what I was led to understand was the most eager interest, chapter by chapter, by a younger girl cousin, but by no one else. I have made several attempts to read it morning and night, when rested and fatigued, but it absolutely will not read, and my mind balks at early stages and I have not yet been able to get half through it. This same year I also made an inventory of all my secular music and catalogued eighty- seven pieces that I could either sing, play, or both ; but the tragic pity of it all is the quality. Of most of these pieces I could now whistle or strum the air, in some the rhythm seems intact, but the words are in various stages of de- cadence. Especially do I recall the secret day-dreams I had of being a great musician, orator, literary man, poet, etc. Strongest and perhaps most vividly remembered in all this group is the perfect craze for clog dancing and its various steps and shuffles, together with playing on the bones. This period of my life, and not before, is marked by the beginning of a coherent and sequent memory. From this time on I can give some account of at least every year of my life in order, and although I can do this to some extent before, most of it is both transposed and too full of gaps. My present life really began here, so that whatever has happened since seems far more a part of myself, and what preceded, despite the filmy links of personal reminiscence, is more objective and as if it were of another person. That a child of twelve months has certain memories of experience of the preceding week or month, there is every reason to believe. Mr. Colegrove ^ thinks males best remember pro- tracted or repeated occurrences, and females single or novel ones, and holds that there are different kinds of memories that culminate at different periods of life. I can- * Oolegrove, F. W. : Individual Memories. Am. Jour, of Psy., Jan, 1899, Vol. X, p. 228. NOTE ON EARLY MEMORIES 335 not, however, think that I remember clothes, tastes, foods, playmates, friends, special pains or pleasures, accidents, or exceptional incidents better at one time than another. Mr. Colegrove 's memory curves all show that early adolescence, and particularly the fourteenth and fifteenth years, are on the whole richer in memory material than any other period of life. Probably the years from twenty to thirty come next, as important changes are then occurring. On the whole I think pleasant predominate over unpleasant mem- ories in my life. During all these earlier years, there was no epoch-making event like the death or any severe sick- ness of a member of the family. Finally, there was every degree of readiness of recall. Some revivals seem purely spontaneous with no external suggestion. Others (the old weasel hole, the mill wheel) came back instantly and clearly upon envisagement. A plot of deadly nightshade was recalled quite clearly, but its personal equation was much slower. A flock of yellow butterflies at a certain spot in the road was dormant for some minutes, but gradually came out with great distinct- ness. A large bunch of unknown white berries in the woods I slowly came to believe quite surely I had known as a l)oy, but in other cases the reminiscent sense super- vened very slowly and perhaps was not quite clear till the next day. Other objects I must have known well gave no glimmer of reminiscence. I am able to recall several cases in which I have attached to my own memory continuum alien matter that has been told me and which after having long believed to be a part of my own experience, I was obliged to confess never could have been. Such experiences give me some little charity for those of my theosophist friends who talk and write of the memory of past births and describe their own previous life in the Lost Atlantis, in ancient Greece, when they heard Homer, or when they shouted for Caesar or Brutus 336 RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST in the Fomm, or think they recall with great vividness the items of some particular event that happened to them thou- sands of years ago with many Lethes of birth and death intervening. On the whole, painful as have been many of the re- vivals in this pre-adolescent past, there has been a prepon- derance of pleasant impressions. WhUe this does not show that pains tend to fade and pleasures to brighten, because we have no common inventories of each, it nevertheless comforts me with the sense that on the whole my boyhood was preponderantly a joyouc one, as it was meant to have been. Finally, the act of recall itself has, I think, in every case had a certain unique kind of pleasure attached to it, so I will close this all too scrappy note with the feel- ing that if I were able to write a complete autobiography of my own childhood and boyhood, reflecting all of even its more typical experiences as they actually were lived and felt at the time, restricted as it was in both nature and cir- cumstances, so that it should be a complete history of all the stages of evolution of even one limited conscious per- sonality, it would be a book second in scientific and general interest as well as practical value to almost no book ever written. THE END 3W7-6