The Evacuation of England: The Twist in the Gulf Stream

by L. P. Gratacap

THE EVACUATION OF ENGLAND

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CHAPTER I.
IN WASHINGTON, APRIL, 1909.

Alexander Leacraft was regarding with as much interest as his constitutional lassitude permitted, the progress of a distinctly audible altercation on Pennsylvania avenue, Washington, D. C. The disputants had not felt it necessary, under the relaxing influences of a premature spring, to interpose any screen of secrecy, such as a less exposed position, or subdued voices, between themselves and the news-mongering (and hungering, let it be added) proletariat of our nation’s capital.

A small crowd, composed of the singular human compound always pervasive and never to be avoided in Washington, which, in that centre of political sensations, is made up of street loafers, accidental tourists, perambulating babies, “niggers,” and presumptive statesmen, enclosed this “argument”; and from his elevated station, within the front parlor of the McKinley, Mr. Leacraft was afforded a very excellent view of and an equally distinct hearing of the disagreement and its principals.

The two disputants were themselves sufficiently contrasted in appearance to have allured the casual passer-by to observe their contrasted methods in debate. One—the taller—was a thin, angular man with unnaturally long arms, a peculiar swaying habit of body, an elongated visage, terminating in a short, stubby growth of whiskers, and a sharp, crackling kind of voice, with unmistakable nasal faults. He seemed to be a southern man modified by a few imitations of the northern type.

He was addressing a bulky, rather disdainful man in a checquered suit of clothes, who had advanced the season’s fashion by assuming a straw hat, and whose rosy face, broad and typical features, and yet not plethoric expansion of body, strong and stalwart frame betokened much animal force, and reserved power of action. He might have been a northern man. As Alexander Leacraft looked at them, it was the southern man who was speaking, and his uplifted arm, at regular intervals, rose and fell, as the palms of both hands met in a cadence of corroborative whacks. It may interest the reader to know that the particular time of this particular incident was April, 1909.

“Let me tell you this, Mr. Tompkins,” drawled the southerner with loquacious ease, the crackle and sharpness of his intonation appearing as his excitement increased, “the necessities of our states demand the Canal at whatever cost. It will be the avenue for an export trade to the east, which will convert our stored powers of production into gold, and it will react upon the whole country north and south in a way that will make all previous prosperity look like nothing. Our cotton mills have grown, our mineral resources have been developed; Georgia and Alabama are to-day competing with your shaft furnaces and steel mills for the trade of the railroads, and builders; and for that matter we are building ourselves. We can support a population ten times all we have to-day; our resources have been just broached, but exhaustion is a thousand years away. Our rival has been Cuba. She has robbed us of trade; she has put our sugar plantations out of business; even her iron, which I will admit is superior in quality, has scaled our profits on raw ingots, but she can’t hold us down on cotton. Open up this canal, and we will gather the riches of the Orient; our ships will fill it with unbroken processions, and in the train of that commerce in cotton, every section of the Union will furnish its contribution to swell the argosies of trade. I tell you sir” and the excited speaker, conscious of an admiring sympathy in the crowd around him, raised his voice into a musical shout, in which the crackle was quite lost, “the commerce, the mercantile integrity of these United States will be restored, and American bottoms for American goods will be no longer a vain aspiration; it will be a realized dream, an actual fact.”

He paused, as if the projectile force of his words had deprived him of breath, and then at the momentary opportunity Mr. Tompkins, in a clear and metallic voice, with a punctuative force of occasional hesitation, undertook his friend’s refutation.

“I’m not contesting the fact, Mr. Snowden,” he said, “that the opening of the Canal means a good deal to your portion of the country. Does it mean as much to the rest of the country, and does it mean so much to you for a long time. You mention cotton. Do you know that the cotton cultivation of India and Egypt has increased enormously, and that it is grown with cheaper labor than you can command. You have made the negro acquainted with his value. You have raised his expectations, you have thrust him into a hundred avenues of occupation and every one of his new avocations adds a shilling a day to the worth per man of the remainder, who stick to field work and cultivate your cotton fields. The cotton of Egypt and the cotton of India, I mean its manufactured forms, will go through that canal to Asia and Japan and Polynesia just as surely as yours will, and it’ll go cheaper. It is poorer cotton, I know, but that will not effect the result.

“That isn’t all. Brazil and the Argentine Republic are growing cotton, and they are doing well at it. Europe will take the raw stuff from them and keep up her present predominance in that market while she turns their cotton bolls into satinettes and ginghams for the almond-eyes of Asia. The canal, breaking down a barrier of separation between the two oceans, turns loose into the Pacific the whole frenzied, greedy and capable cohorts of European manufacture. It will make a common highway for Europe, and our unbuilt clippers and tramp steamers will stay unbuilt, or unused, to rot on their ways in the shipyards. The west coast will be sidetracked, and our trunk railroads will cut down their schedules and their dividends at the same time. Roosevelt put this canal through, and your southern votes helped to elect him against his protest, but brought to it by an overwhelming public sentiment that applauded his power to chain or sterilize trusts; and he promised last March to your southern rooters, at his inauguration, to see that before his present new term was over, before 1913, the canal would be opened, and perhaps he’ll make good.

“You southerners elected Roosevelt, and you have killed the Democratic party. The new powers of growth of that party were most likely to develop among you, but you shoved aside the proffered offer of political supremacy, because you too had surrendered to the idols of Mammon, and were willing to sell your birth-right for a mess of pottage. Well! You’ve got the canal and you’ve got Roosevelt, and let me tell you Mr. Snowden,” and the restrained, almost nonchalant demeanor of Mr. Tompkins became suddenly charged with electric earnestness, “you’ll get Hell, too.”

This admonitory expletive, uttered with a force that seemed to impart to it a physical objectivity, caused the increasing circle of auditors to retreat sensibly, and, without more consideration, giving a glance of mute scorn at the flushed face of the southerner, the speaker pressed his way through the little crowd, which, after a moment’s suspension of judgment, seemed reluctant to let him escape, and disappeared.

His opponent was distinctly chagrined. The wrinkled lines about his peculiarly pleasant eyes, indicated his strained attention, and were not altogether unrelated to a sudden muscular movement in his clenched hands. His hopes, however, for some sort of forensic gratification might have been sensibly raised as he discovered himself the sole occupant of the small vacant spot on the side walk, walled in by a human investiture, the first line of which was made up of two pickaninnies, three newsboys, one rueful cur and some impromptu mothers who had taken the family babies out for air and recreation, but, overcome by the indigenous love of debate, had forgotten their mission, and held their charges in various attitudes of somnolence or furtive rebellion against the hedge of men behind them.

It was evidently expected that the southern gentleman would relieve his feelings, and it was also evident from a few ejaculations hap-hazardly emitted from the concourse, that the majority of those present was in his favor.

Mr. Snowden looked around him reflectively, and a sense of personal dignity forced its way against the almost over-powering impulse to appeal to popular approval, and convinced him that the place and the audience were inopportune for any further discussion. He could not, however, escape the demonstrated force of popular expectancy, and, with a consenting smile, a shrug of his shoulders, and with his hat raised above his head, swinging gently, he called out “Three cheers for Teddy and the Canal.”

In an instant the group seized the invitation, and under the cover, if it may be so violently symbolized, of the cloud of vocality, his enthusiasm evoked, Mr. Snowden, like the fortuitous and directive deities of the epics, vanished.

There remained an unsatisfied group to which more accessions were quickly made, the whole movement evidently animated by some emotion then predominant in the national capital. This group broke up into little knots of talkers, and as the day was closing, no urgency of business engagements and no immediate insistency of domestic duties interfered with the easily elicited Washingtonian tendency to settle, on the public curb, the vexed questions of state, if not to enlighten Providence on the more abstruse functions of His authority.

Alexander Leacraft willingly surrendered himself to the study of this representative public Althing, and felt his exasperating torpor so much overcome by a new curiosity as to make him not averse to stepping out into the hall of the hotel, descending the steps into the street, and engaging himself in the capacity of a rotational listener at the various groups, sometimes not exceeding two men, who had become vocally animated, and felt themselves called upon to supply the deficiency of objurgation, so disagreeably emphasized by the sudden departure of the northern and southern disputants.

The illuminative results of his ambulatory inspection, and his own expostulations or inquiry, may be thus succinctly summarized.

Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, elected in his own behalf in 1905, as president of the United States, after having served out the unexpired term of William McKinley, who was assassinated in November, 1901, and with whom he had been elected as vice president, had been again re-elected in the fall of 1908, against his emphatic rejection, at first, of a joint nomination of the Republican and Democratic parties. The campaign, if campaign it could be called, had been one of the most extraordinary ever recorded, and in its features of popular clamor, the grotesque conflict of the personal repugnance of an unwilling candidate nominated against his will, and in defiance of his own repeated inhibitions to nominate him at all, because of his solemn promise that he would defer to the unwritten law of the country, and not serve a third term, was altogether unprecedented, and to some observers ominous. He was reminded that his first term, although practically four years, was still only an accident, that there was no subversion of the unwritten law, in his serving again, as his actual election as president had occurred but once, that his popularity among the people was of such an intense, almost self-devouring ardor, that it was an act of suicidal negation, of unpatriotic desertion to shun or reject the people’s obvious need, that a war, yet unfinished, had been begun by him against corporate interests, that its logical continuance devolved upon him, that the unique occasion of a unanimous nomination to the presidency carried with it a sublime primacy of interest, that cancelled all previous conditions, promises or wishes on his part, and laid an imperious command upon its subject that deprived him of volition, and absolutely dissolved into nothingness any apparent contradiction of his words and acts. Finally, it was insisted that the Panama Canal was nearing completion, that its remarkable advance was due to Mr. Roosevelt that this fact had been prepotent in shaping the councils of southern Democrats in proposing the, otherwise unwarranted, endorsement of a Republican nomination, that a strong minority sentiment had crystallized around an angry group of capitalists who were only too anxious to get rid of Roosevelt altogether, and that in the case of his refusal, these men would so manipulate the newspapers, and inflame public apprehension, against some possible outbreak of social radicalism, financial heresy, and anarchistic violence, that a reaction begun would become unmanageable, and some tool of the reactionaries, and the railroads, would be swept into office, and with him a servile Congress, and Roosevelt’s work, so aggressively and successfully prosecuted, would be all sacrificed. Nor was this all. The return to a divided nomination, with an unmistakable intention on the part of the conservatists to repeal all disadvantageous legislation to the monopolies, corporations and trusts, would at once precipitate a conflict of classes.

A radical man, possibly a demagogue, would be placed in opposition to the choice of the plutocracy. His election was also not improbable. The powers of socialism, enormously strengthened by the adhesion of an educated class, might be triumphant, and the succeeding steps in social revolution would bring chaos.

This dilemma was so pertinaciously displayed, so forcibly accentuated, that Roosevelt had yielded at the last moment, not insensibly affected (as what spirited man would not be) by the magnificent assemblies (mass meetings) throughout the country, tumultuously vociferating the call of the people.

The southern people, with characteristic warmth, and through the suddenly consummated attachment of Senator Tillman to Roosevelt, and under the coercion of Senator Bailey’s logic and power of argumentative persuasion, had swelled the tide of popular approval. Roosevelt became an idol—his election was almost unanimous, a handful only of contestants having gathered in a kind of moral protest around Governor Hughes as a rival candidate. Governor Hughes’ nomination was achieved through a combination of opposite political interests, as anomalous as that which chose Roosevelt, and having precisely the same quality of coherence.

It represented dissatisfied Republicans, an alienable remnant of Democrats, and had drawn into it a few sporadic political elements that barely sufficed to give it numerical significance. W. J. Bryan, who would have been otherwise a candidate himself, had endorsed Roosevelt, furnishing thereby an example of political abnegation which had enormously increased his popularity, and assured him the nomination of Nationalists, as the new fusionists were called, in 1913. This was also deemed a wise forethought, as a provision against the possible success of the rampant Hearstites. Hearst would have been the socialist candidate in the last campaign, had not the principal himself, on hearing of Roosevelt’s nomination, sapiently withdrawn, fearing defeat, which would have too seriously discredited him in the next national struggle.

The Prohibitionists had, by an act of virtual self-repudiation, thrown their not inconsiderable vote to Roosevelt. The Socialists were the only important opponents of his election, and their surprising record made the prophetic warnings, which had convinced Roosevelt of the necessity of his candidacy, appear like a veritable intervention of Providence, at least this was the language commonly used with reference to it.

Roosevelt had displayed remarkable self-control and consistent gravity, and had even, in a very extraordinary address at his inauguration, deprecated the unanimity of his election. He deplored the precarious dilemma of a country which found itself forced to do violence to its traditions in order to escape an imagined danger.

Almost synchronous with his re-election, the announcement had been made that the Panama Canal, upon which the President in his former term, had exerted the utmost pressure of his inexhaustible enthusiasm, energy and exhortation, was advancing very rapidly, engineering difficulties unexpectedly had vanished, a system of extreme precision in the control of the work, itself largely the device of the President, had facilitated the entire operation, and a promise of still more rapid progress was made.

This promise had produced a storm of southern enthusiasm. The south, completely restored in its financial autonomy, had been growing richer and richer, and their public men had not hesitated to paint, in the brightest colors, the further expansion of their prosperity with the opening of this avenue of commerce between the oceans, assuring its people the markets of Asia, and their rapid promotion to the political, social and financial primacy in the United States.

Northern capitalists had not been incredulous to these predictions, and in a group of railroad magnates, whose interests seemed now seriously threatened, a sullen resentment was maintained against Roosevelt, in which the unmistakable notes of designs almost criminal had been detected. Mr. Tompkins, whose altercation with the southerner had led Leacraft into this voyage of interpellation and discovery, was a paid agent, in the employ of this cabal.

Alexander Leacraft was an Englishman, inheriting an English temperament without English prejudices; he was fortunately free from the worst faults of that insular hesitancy which imparts the curious impression of timidity, and had advanced far enough in cosmopolitan observation to get rid of the queerness of provincial ignorance. He was indeed a sane and attractive man, and provided by nature with a forcible physique, a good face, and a really fascinating proclivity to make the best of things, admire his companions, and bend unremittingly to the pressure of his environment.

He had not escaped the dangers incident to youth, and his heart had become attached to a lady of Baltimore—one of the undeviatingly arch and winning American girls—to whom he had been introduced by her brother, a commercial correspondent.

The nature of his affairs—he was the secretary of an English company which operated some copper mines in Arizona and Canada—had made him a frequent visitor to the shores of the New World, and he had not been unwilling to express his hope that the United States would become his final home. These sentiments were quite honest, though it might have elicited the cynical observation that the capture of his affections by Miss Garrett had done more to weaken his loyalty to the crown than any dispassionate admiration of a Republican form of government. But the imputation would have been malicious. Leacraft did feel an earnest admiration for the American people, and yielded a genial acquiescence to the claims of popular suffrage. His connexion with America had been fortunate, and he had come in contact with men and women whose natures by endowment, and whose manners and habits, conversation and tastes, by inheritance and cultivation, were elevating and engaging—men and women whose nobility of sympathy with all things human was reflected in an art of living not only always decorous and refined, but guided, too, by the principles of urbanity and justice.

The Garretts of Baltimore were a widely connected, and in numbers an imposing social element, and none of the various daughters of light and loveliness who bore that name more merited consideration in the eyes of manly youth than the capricious, captivating and elusive Sally. Her graces of manner were not less delightful than her conversation was spirited and roguish, and her assumption of a demure simplicity had often driven Alexander Leacraft to the limits of his English matter-of-fact credulity in explaining to her the relations of the King to Parliament, or the municipal acreage of the old City of London. All of which information this very well read and much travelled young woman, as might be expected, was possessed of, but just for the purposes of her feminine and cruel fancy, not too well disposed towards her patient suitor, disingenuously concealed. Sally really enjoyed the painstaking gravity with which the young Englishman explained the eternal principles of English rule, and the never-to-be-forgotten superiorities of London.

Mr. Leacraft had met Sally under circumstances the most provocative of admiration. In her own home; where the sincerity of hospitality and the urgency of an American’s deference to the best instincts of courtesy, did not altogether mitigate her coquetry and mirthful affectations, and even, by the faintest gloss of repression, made them the more delicious. The Englishman was bewitched, and his infatuation declared itself so plainly that Sally—whose heart was quite untouched by his distress—tried the resources of her ingenuity to avoid meeting him alone.

Leacraft, on the morrow of the day, whose close had so deeply inducted him into a study of American politics, expected to make a deferred visit to the Garretts at Baltimore, and he had quite firmly resolved that he would reveal his desperate extremity to Sally, and plead his best to show her how empty life would be to him without her, and that it would be shockingly obdurate in her to decline to regard him as the goal of her marital ambitions.

He felt some fear of her revolting gayety, and his fears were not assuaged by the remembrance of any particular occasion when her conduct towards him permitted him to indulge in hopes. Still the thing must be done. His unrest must be quieted. To know the worst was better than this feverish anxiety of doubt. And besides, with a prudence not altogether British, he thought he could endure repulse better now than later, and in the event of that evil alternative, he could cast about him for alleviating resources which might be more easily found now, than if he waited longer, and if he continued to expose himself to the perilous encounter of her eyes, and the tantalizing caresses of her wit.

When Leacraft returned to the hotel, he found a letter waiting for him, which he saw at once was from his friend, Ned Garrett. He tore it open and discovered, to his considerable discomfiture, that it postponed the event of his momentous proposal.

It read:

Dear Leacraft:

Aunt Sophia is very sick at Litchfield, Conn. Mother and Sally have gone on. Can you put off your visit until May, say the 28th? You will find it dull here without Sally and Mother. I shall go with them as far as New York. We all intend, if Aunt Sophy concludes to remain in this bright world a little longer, and the Dr. endorses her good intentions, to visit Gettysburg on Memorial Day (Decoration old style). The President will deliver a memorial oration. Come with us and see the great battlefield, which is a wonderful monument to the nation’s dead, a beautiful picture itself, and probably you will see and hear things worth remembering besides. Write to the house, and I will get your letter when I return in two weeks. But do come.

Yours sincerely,
Edward T. Garrett.

Leacraft put down the letter slowly. He was disappointed. A summons to the west, to the mines in Arizona, had reached him just the day before, and he must get out there before a week was over. He had thought to have finished this affair first, and to find in the tiresome trip distraction, if Sally was unfavorable to his appeal, or unexpected interest if he succeeded in winning her assent. Still he could readily accept the invitation. He would be back in May, and, perhaps after all the occasion might be more favorable. Sally softened into a little sympathetic humor by her visit to her sick aunt, and he strengthened by the encouraging reflexion of having successfully dissipated the little cloud of misunderstanding, or worse, at the mines, might produce conditions psychologically adequate to bring about his victory.

He stepped to the window. The view from it was always pleasing, at this moment in the descending shades of the closing day and with the vanishing lights hurrying westward beyond the Potomac, it possessed an ineffable loveliness. The great white spectre of the Washington monument, immaterialized and faintly roseate against the softly flaming skies, and brooding genius-like above the trees of the Reservation was always there, and that night it assumed the strangely deceptive but fascinating vagary of an exhalation, as if built up from the emanations of the earth, and the vapors of the air, remaining immobile in the still ether as a portent or a promise. The man’s face grew clouded as the fairy obelisk faded, and with the enveloping darkness became again discernible as a dull and stony pile.

That evening Leacraft felt particularly restless and detached. He felt the need of entertainment, and of entertainment of a sort that would fix his faculty of thought, awaken speculation, and immerse him in reasonings and the intricacies of argument. The few theatrical bills presented no attractions more weighty than a clever comedian in a musical farce, a sensational melodrama (“much better,” said Leacraft), and vaudeville. Music was shunned; there was nothing quite serious offered, and then music has so many painful influences on the apprehensive mind, and is turned to such cruel uses in the economy of nature, for making uneasy lovers more agitated. No! he didn’t wish music. Baffled for an instant, he concluded to walk. Muscular exercise, mere translation on one’s legs, is a marvellous remedy for the diabolical blues, and then it can never be told what the Unseen holds for you, if you only go out to meet It in the streets, and amongst other people, hunting, perhaps, like yourself, diversion from their own inscrutable megrims. It—the Unseen—may quite divertingly mix you up in a comedy or a tragedy, or consolingly give you a glimpse of other human miseries immeasurably greater than your own.

So walk it was. He had hardly covered two blocks towards the White House, when he met Dr. M—, the most amiable and accomplished editor of the National Museum, and one of those multi-facetted gentlemen who respond to every scientific thrill around them, and hold in the myriad piled up cells of their cerebral cortex the knowledge, selected, labelled and accessible, of the world. Leacraft knew the Doctor; had indeed consulted him upon a chemical reaction, in the elimination of cadmium from zinc. The Doctor, with genial fervor, grasped his hand, persuasively put his own disengaged hand on Leacraft’s back, and dexterously turned him around with the observation: “You are going the wrong way. Binn reads a paper to-night before the Geographical Society, over at the Museum, on a live subject. It’s about earthquakes and the Panama Canal. The matter has a good deal of present interest. The President may be there. It’s worth your while. Come along.”

Leacraft jumped with pleasure, if an Englishman may be said ever to respond so animatedly to a welcome alternative. This met his requirements exactly. He would, in these surroundings and under the stimulation of an intellectual effort, in listening to a lecture which he hoped might possess literary merit as well, quite forget his immediate solicitudes.

“It is curious,” resumed Dr. M—, as they directed their steps towards the umbrageous solitudes of the Reservation, “how inevitably many practical questions demand an answer at the hand of geology or physiography, which are however never consulted, and disaster follows. In the spring of 1906 a destructive outbreak of Vesuvius occurred, and much of the ensuing loss of life might have been prevented by reliance upon scientific warnings. Indeed, the loss of life on this last occasion of the volcano’s activity was greatly reduced through the premonitions of its approach by delicate instruments. For that matter, from the beginning, the vulcanologist, at least as soon as such a being was a more or less completed phenomenon in our scientific life, would have pointed out the considerable risk of living on the flanks of that querulous protuberance. But it can hardly be expected, I suppose, that large populations can effect a change in habitation as long as the dangers that threaten them occur at long intervals, and the human fatality of unreasoning trust in luck remains unchanged. Take for instance the case of the village of Torre del Greco, four and a half miles from the foot of Vesuvius. It has been overwhelmed seventeen times, but the inhabitants, the survivors, return after each extinction to renew their futile invocations for another chance.”

“I suppose,” queried Leacraft, “that we are to be informed to-night whether the Canal from the scientific point of view is a safe investment?”

“Perhaps,” doubtfully returned the doctor. “You see, it’s this way. In the spring of the year that saw the outpouring of lava that invaded the villages of southern Italy, San Francisco suffered from a serious earthquake that ruptured the public structures of the city, dislocated miles of railroad tracks, ruined the beautiful Stanford University, shook out the fronts of buildings, and precipitated a fire that all but wiped out the Queen City of the Pacific coast. It has been feared that some such seismic terror might demolish the superb structures of the canal, and we are to learn to-night whether these earth movements threaten the new waterway at the isthmus.”

“I have reason to believe,” rejoined Leacraft, “that this canal has been itself a source of political disturbance, and that it is likely to effect convulsions in your body politic as dangerous in a social way as those which brought about the financial and physical upset at San Francisco.”

“Don’t worry on that score,” replied his companion. “I can tell you that the political texture of this country is not to be worn to a frazzle by any collision of interests. Such things adjust themselves, and the way out only means a new entrance to brighter prospects and bigger undertakings. Yes, I guess someone will be hurt, but individuals don’t count if the whole people are benefited.”

“Still,” remonstrated Leacraft, “the people is made up of individuals, and it’s simply a fact that you can’t disturb the equilibrium of one part of society without jostling the rest.”

“In a way, yes,” slowly answered the doctor. “But it is quite clear to my mind that the enormous advantages of the canal will hide from sight the losses that may be inflicted on the railroads, in the dislocation of rates, and even that will be temporary, as the new business raises our population, and their passenger traffic touches higher and higher averages.”

“The canal has been an expensive enterprise,” suggested Leacraft. “It would be a great misfortune if it brought any kind of material reverses.”

“Rubbish,” retorted the doctor; “this prating is the madness or the envy of croakers and cranks. Do you think that a connexion between the oceans that will shorten the route from one to the other by nearly 6,000 miles, and bring our eastern seaboard, with all its tremendous agencies of production within reach of a continent that is slowly becoming itself occidentalized, and demanding every day the equipment of the west, is a mercantile delusion? We are all gainers. It is a scheme of mutualization on a world-wide scale, but America distributes the profits and holds the surplus.”

The two friends by this time had reached the entrance of the Museum, and passing through its symbolic portals, turned to the left, and found themselves in a dull room, portentously charged with an exhaustive exhibit of the commerce of all nations. Here, on tables and shelves, was displayed a wonderful assortment of primitive and modern ships, primeval dugouts, Philippine catamarans, Mediterranean pirogues, sloops, schooners, brigs, brigantines, barques, barkentines, luggers, lighters, caravals, Dutch monstrosities, models of those extraordinary ships which Motley has described as “built up like a tower, both at stem and stern, and presenting in their broad, bulbous prows their width of beam in proportion to their length, their depression amidships, and in other sins against symmetry, as much opposition to progress over the waves as could well be imagined,” the Latin trireme and the Greek trireme, the ironclads of France used in 1855, the monitors of the Civil War, the recent wonders in battleships, torpedo boats, and destroyers, with naphtha launches, submarine wonders, the old time American cutters, and models of the stately packets that once made the trip from New York to Portsmouth in fourteen days, with a various and diversified exhibit of yachts and pleasure boats, all burnished, japanned and varnished, and now dimly lustrous in the futile illumination of the room. Above them on the walls was a prolix illustration of the hydrography of the world; charts of currents, pelagic streams, areas of calms, submarine basins, maps of rainfalls, prevalent winds, storm regions, precipitation, barometric maxima and minima, and then still higher up on the walls, that dispensed knowledge over each square inch of their dusty and dusky surfaces, Leacraft descried the tabulations of tonnage of the merchant marine of the nations of the earth, with fabulous figures of imports and exports, and the staple products of this prolific and motherly old earth, caressed into fructification by the tireless arms of her scrambling broods of children.

Leacraft was soon deserted by the doctor, who found occasion to wander among the slowly arriving scientific gentry and politely inquire after the health of the particular scientific offspring, whose tottering footsteps each one was engaged in nurturing into a more reliant attitude before the world. Leacraft found the dim room, with its preoccupied occupants vacantly settling into the seats around him, and its motley array of picturesque models strangely congenial. It soothed, by the abrupt strangeness of its contents, the subdued intellectual placidity of the audience, and by its mere physical retirement from the outer bustle of the streets, and the iterative commonplaces of the hotel corridor. The exact process of subduction would have been hard keenly to analyze, but Leacraft seemed to forget his personal disquietude, and develop into a congenital oneness with these earnest men and women around him, eager to know, and not too patient towards sophistry or pretension. He hardly cared to know who was who. It made no matter. They all seemed freed from the petty vanities of living, and now engrossed in the triumphant tasks of thought; and he felt himself elevated into a kind of mental abstraction which eagerly carried on its functions in an atmosphere of ideas.

And yet how was it, that just above the little desk which was to receive the honorable burden of the lecturer’s manuscript, he suddenly distinctly saw the fair face, with its light blue eyes, its delicate blush of color, and the slightly mocking pout of the lips of Sally, the beloved. Leacraft almost rose upright in his astonishment at the impossible hallucination. He was leaning forward, half incredulous of the report of his own senses, and half subjected by a delicious whim that the apparition was an augury of success, when a commotion spreading on all sides of him roused his attention, and the vision fled. He would have willingly had it stay. People were rising in his vicinity, and soon the assembly was on its feet. Some one had entered who was the cause of this unusual excitement. “The President” came to his ears, murmured by a dozen persons near him, and he had hardly sprung to his own feet when, with many salutations, a strongly formed, rather bulky man, with a manner of almost nervous scrutiny passed by him moving down the aisle to the front. It was indeed President Roosevelt, and Leacraft, now startled into the most active interest, slipped forward a seat or two, to gain a position which might afford him a better view of this remarkable person. The audience remained standing until the President, escorted by a tall red-whiskered gentleman, whom Doctor M—, who had just turned up in search of his friend, whispered was Dr. George O. Smith, the distinguished Director of the Survey, had reached a seat reserved for him at the front of the hall.

Leacraft now observed more closely the character of the convocation, and realized its composite and representative elements. Dr. M—, always himself immersed in the study of the lives, achievements and distinctions of the prominent men of the country, was an enthusiastic verbal cicerone through the maze of faces which seemed suddenly to have condensed into a really crowded audience. Here was Dr. D—, the Alaskan explorer in the early days of the nineteenth century, the world recognized authority on the tertiary fossils of the east and west coasts, and a man of erudition and delightful literary skill. Beyond him sat Dr. M—, a quiet-faced man, curator of the National Museum, author of text books, and gifted with a singularly shrewd thoughtfulness. At his side sat the sphinx-featured F—, of Chicago, a gentle-minded scholar, to whom the Heavens had entrusted the secrets of their meteoritic denizens, and who, by a more fortunate circumstance, held a pen of consummate grace. Again at his side was the Jupiter-browed Ward, an erratic over the face of the globe, possessed with a transcendant enthusiasm for the same celestial visitors that F— described, and chasing them with the zeal of a lynx in their most inaccessible quarries; a man of immense conviviality, and controlling the smouldering fires of a temper that defied reason or resistance. At the front of the rows of chairs, and not far from the cynosure of all eyes—the President—were two notable students of the past life of the globe, Professors O— and S—, men whose studies in that amazing storehouse of extinct life which the West held sealed in its clays and marls, limestones and sandstones, had continued on higher and more certain levels the work of Marsh and Leidy and Cope, and who had transcribed before the whole world, in monuments of scientific precision, the most startling confessions of the fossil dead. To one side, on the same row, sat Prof. B—, known in two continents, for chemical learning, especially on that side of chemistry which mingles insensibly with the laws of matter. And whispering in his ear, with sundry emphatic nods, sat, next to him, Dr. R—, of Washington, learned in the ways of men’s digestion, and the enigmas of food and the arts of food-makers. In the row behind, the expressive head of Young, aureoled with years and honors, was seen, and at his side the face of Newcomb, who had set the seal of his genius and industry across the patterned stars. Here was A— H—, the geologist, reticent and receptive, there C—, weighted with new responsibilities in furnishing time to the rapacious biologist, and in discovering new ways of making this old world. Behind them sat M—, wise beyond belief in bric-a-brac and brachiopods, vindictively assertive, and self-sacrificingly tender and kind. There was McG— and I—, W—, A—, V—, and B— W—, bringing to the speaker the homage of archæology, of petrology, of zoology, and morphology. In a group of motionless and eager attention were A—, the sage metereologist, beloved in two continents; B—, abstruse and difficult, meditative, as a man might be who kept his hand on the pulses of matter, and B—, skillful in weighing the atoms of the air, or probing the volcanoes of the moon. In one line, mingling in conversation that reached Leacraft’s ears as a strange jargon of conflicting sciences, were G—, H— and H—k. And beyond them, mute, as if by mutual repulsion, sat F—, the agile scrutinizer of Nature’s crystals; P—, holding in his labyrinthine memory the names of half a universe of shells, and B—n, to whom each plant of the wayside bowed in recognition of a master’s knowledge of itself. Against the wall, in a triad of sympathy, was A—, the surgeon; S—, the neurologist, and R—. And alone, in an isolation that belied his intense geniality, was K—.

And through all the scientific congeries, which were far more extended than Leacraft could recognize, or even Dr. M— recall, was a more garrulous grouping of politicians, statesmen, diplomats, ministers, the well dressed circles of the rich, and the dillettantes, drawn to this unusual assemblage by the presence of the President.

The quiet and dull room, faded, and with contents tiresomely drilled into the exact alignments of a museum hall, took on an almost brilliant appearance. The fancy amused itself with the thought that it too felt, in its stagnated life, the unique occasion, and shook itself into a momentary wakefulness, to note and record its distinguished guests, that its streaked walls tried to hide their unseemly rents, and the multiplied models and charts struggled to look recent and familiar and appreciative, amid such intellectual tumult.

But now the audience was forgotten at that theatrical moment when the chairman and the lecturer advanced over the platform to assume the directive guidance of the evening. They did advance with that curious gaucherie which somehow always disables the scientific man in his official and public utterances, and seems, by some trick of compensation, the more unredeemable as the unfortunate victim of its cynical attachment is the more distinguished and renowned.

Dr. S— stepped gingerly forward, a tall, effective man with hair hardly sanguine in color, and quite conventional in arrangement, with a cerebral development, that somehow disappointingly dwarfed the lower contours of his face, domed and broad as it was, with much scholarly promise. He was followed by the speaker of the evening, Mr. Binn, who seemed half inclined to screen himself from observation behind the utterly inadequate profile of the famous Director. The two men momentarily catching the full assault of the numerous eyes, each pair among them being the visible battery of a questioning and critical mind behind it, underwent an obvious confusion of intention and movement, and became somewhat mixed up with the table and chairs, and with each other. The Director extricated himself, came forward to the edge of the platform, and in a voice of half propitiatory jocularity, introduced the subject, and the speaker. He alluded to the favorable conjunction of the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and that of the National Academy of Science, which brought so many eminent thinkers and observers together, and administered an especial emphasis to the question to be considered this evening. He mentioned, with a deferential bow in the direction of the President, that they had all been deeply honored by the presence of the Chief Executive of the Nation, to whom perhaps, more than to anyone else in the brilliant audience, the grave question of the structural and geological stability of the Isthmus of Darien, was one of overshadowing interest, and he congratulated everyone that the subject was in the hand “of one whose geological fame was beyond dispute, and his carefulness of statement unimpeached,” and the Director sat down, pulling off to one side of the stage, lest his own refulgence might dim the legitimate monopoly of that article by Dr. Binn. Leacraft observed that as the lecturer unrolled his manuscript on the reading desk, the President leaned outward, adjusted his eyeglasses, and scrutinized the geologist, who, from a rather embarrassed fumbling with his sheets, seemed conscious of the inquisition. A moment later, as if satisfied with his inspection, the President leaned back, bulky and immobile, and became an absorbed listener.

Mr. Binn, well known for his lithological studies, and the possession of a good style, in the scientific sense, was a short man, evincing, under control, however, the peptic influences of years, with a face of decided legibility, in which sense and penetration seemed equally indicated.

He had provided himself with charts, which had been distended in an irregular line above his head, and to these he occasionally referred. His reading of the important pages before him was clear and audible, but totally neglectful, of the informing appliances in elocution, of melody of voice, accent and deliberation. The lecture was brilliant and distinguished, and quite comparable in its qualities to the serious people who had gathered in great intellectual force to receive its instructions.

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CHAPTER II.
THE LECTURE.

Note.—If the reader is too much interested in getting to the upshot of this tale, let him skip the Lecture. But it is a mistake. This Lecture was delivered by Mr. Binn on the Ninth of April, 1909, and is well worth while.

“Mr. President, Dr. Smith and Ladies and Gentlemen,” began the speaker; “The area of the Panama Isthmus and the West Indies has been an area of successional changes very considerable in their amount, very persistent in their frequency. It embraces a tropical area contiguous on its Pacific side to a meridional section of the earth which is very unstable, and which almost monopolizes the contemporaneous volcanic energy of the earth. It adjoins, or is limited itself on the east, in the Atlantic, by the Antillean islets, the emergent crests of submerged volcanic vents. It could be presumptively held, on these grounds, that the Isthmus itself partook of these characters of inequilibrated crustal motions. It might be affirmed, with a fair amount of precision, that its future history would continue this impression.

“The West Indies, as defined by Hill, embracing the islands that with Cuba form a long convexity terminating in Trinidad, on the coast of S. America, represent to-day a disintegrated continent. They are supposed to have embodied a former geographical unity. It had terrestrial magnitude, and lay Atlantis-like between South America and North America, at a time when the present narrow neck of land upon which our eyes are now, as a nation, fixed with anxious preoccupation, was itself swept over by the confluent waters of the two oceans, and when at that point which now forms an attenuated avenue of intercourse between North and South America, the tides of a broad water way alternated in their allegiance to the East or West coasts of the separated continents; and possibly a precarious and fluctuating contribution from the warm Gulf Stream found its way into the Pacific.

“The discussion of this question opens up for our consideration the examination of the geological structure of these oscillating terranes, as to what these are made up of, and it is evident that we must reach some general conclusion as to the succession of the strata composing them, and their relative positions to each other, as whether they are, in the language of stratigraphy, conformable or unconformable. The inference and argument are simple. If we find that the rocks composing these sections are crystalline, ancient, and deeply bedded formations, presumably coexistent, so to speak, with the original or very early formative beds of the world, and referable to its beginnings, we are permitted, by all the analogies of induction and deduction, to assume that these rocks have at least a relative stability. On the other hand if our examination reveals the fact that they are recent deposits, more or less unconsolidated, easily disturbed in their positions, easily readjusted in their molecular or physical structure, then by the most unexceptional and matter-of-fact observation, we shall regard them as questionably permanent, indeed as unmistakably non-resistant to the subterranean forces of terrestrial mutation.

“Again it is clear that a pile of bricks, or of any other superimposed building blocks is the more secure, in its equilibrium, if the component parts overlie each other, along the broadest surfaces, and come in contact, or fit, as we say, in parallel position. If these bricks succeed each other in lines of brick that are flat, and then in lines that are vertical, or placed on their thinnest and narrowest edges, and these two contrasted positions alternate, or are irregularly disposed with reference to each other in the same wall, such a construction implies, involves, elements of weakness, and under the shock of any incident force would succumb in ruin more quickly, and more irretrievably than the former. If further, the latter building style had suffered ruptures and dislocations and the gaps or openings and broken surfaces of contact between its parts had been invaded or replaced by an irregular or incongruous assortment of ‘filling,’ differing from the original bricks in substance, texture and hardness, then we have a third pattern of composition that again is weaker than either of its predecessors. But further. If this least massive and most vulnerable type of structure has been subjected to repeated and considerable strains of elevation and depression, and strains recurrent at short intervals, then, without inspection, we know that its interior coherence has been much shattered, and that it has undergone a progressive dilapidation.

“But I am constrained to go one step farther in this hypothetical picture of structural defectiveness. To return to our wall of brick. It can be made up of bricks laid upon each other in consecutive tiers; it can be made up of tilted tiers of bricks, bricks laid on each other, but inclined to a horizontal plane, and finally it is conceivable that the bricks may be so arranged as to be inverted in their relations to the horizontal plane. The diagrams make clear these contrasted positions.

“Now of all these types of structures the last obviously best meets the requirements of a type which will prove the least susceptible to dislocation. I think that can be apprehended almost without explanation. A moment’s reflexion will make it conspicuous.

“The bricks tilted up in inclined tiers or beds, upon disturbance, if the cohesion between them is seriously impaired, tend to fall away from each other, and gravity increases the effects of the initial displacement. If the bricks lie flat they do not fall apart, upon the cessation of any push or upheaval, but remain disordered, falling back into some quasi-position of rest. If the bricks are inverted and form in section a series of lines converging to the base of the wall, their disarrangement is largely rectified by their own gravity, bringing them back into their first positions.

“In Geology strata overlying each other, in succession, as the bricks do when on their flat faces are called conformable, if they succeed, one over the other, with the edges or summits of the lower, abutting against the horizontal surfaces of the next, as do the bricks when they are placed in flat and vertical positions, in alternating strips, that is unconformability.

“If the strata are usually horizontal like the evenly piled series of bricks, they are called undisturbed; if inclined against each other, they are inclined, and they may make monoclinals, having one slope, or anti-clinals when they lean up against each other like the opposite sides of a peaked roof; or synclinal when inclined towards each other in an inverted position like the same roof overturned, with its ridge pole on the ground, and its inclined sides lifted into the air, or like the bricks in the last pattern of structure described.

“When we carry these similes into nature, we have all kinds of rocks, and we have them in mountains, in planes, and all the familiar configuration of the earth’s surface.

“Now we find that those portions of the earth immediately beneath our feet, extending for a mile or so into the surface of the earth, are variously made up of layers, strata, beds, formations, lying on one another, and conformable or unconformable, undisturbed or thrown into anticlinal or synclinal folds; that the material in its general mineral character, is limestone, marls, or sands and sandstone, slates, clays, metamorphic rocks like gneiss and quartzite, etc., and associated with them are granites which may have been melted lava-like rock before it cooled and crystallized, while there is plentiful evidence of abundant outflows of igneous, melted or viscid rocks; evidences of lines of eruption, of foci, or craters of eruption. Thus, as in the brick structure, where unrelated and later material has been introduced in fissures, gaps, openings, holes, etc., of the walls, we have some of the architecture of the earth, an original bedded structure invaded by very contrasted substances, and which give to that architecture, as in the brick wall of our homely illustration, lack of homogeneity, and lack of strength.

“In the West Indies and on the Isthmus of Panama we have the states of instability which we have signalized, viz., secondary deposits of a somewhat loose and unconsolidated material, and wanting in the deeply bedded crystalline rocks which in New England, in the Adirondacks, and the Piedmont or higher regions abutting on the coastal plain in the northern United States, furnish a solid, and probably fundamentally deep seated pediment of resistance to shock. Again in the West Indies and in the Isthmus, we have the beds unconformable over each other, which you will recall in our symbol of the brick wall, was a feature of weakness; also these unconformable beds are inclined in anti-clinals, a further aspect of structural insolvency; and further these beds have been widely, pervasively, in places, infiltrated and ruptured by subsequent introductions of volcanic substance, ashes, lavas and intrusive magmas. Thus the geological aggregates present the previously illustrated condition of fragility, and the absence of the so-called tectonic elements of rigidity. But still one step more in our disheartening study of this equatorial problem.

“I, a few moments past, called your attention to the fact that ‘if this least massive and most vulnerable type of structure has been subjected to repeated and considerable strains of elevation and depression, and strains recurrent at short intervals, then, without inspection, we know that its interior has been much shattered, and that it has undergone a progressive dilapidation.’

“Precisely such catastrophes are discovered in the history of the geological region now before us. The islands of the West Indies have been subjected to great changes of elevation. They have risen and fallen during the last geological age—the Tertiary—perhaps four times. In their rise they have gathered to themselves marginal extensions of land, now hidden beneath the ocean at comparatively slight depths, while they have at the same time doubtless become blended and unified into a great Antillean continent. This continent was dominated by volcanic protuberances whose growth upward, over accumulations of ashes, has been again symptomatic of undermining operations threatening later subsidence and submergence.

“In our day we have been called on to deplore the ravages caused by the eruptions of Mt. Pelee and La Soufriere, on the Islands of Martinique and St. Vincent, and it is natural to insist that regions which have a precarious autonomy, in which such volcanoes can exist, must be regarded with diffidence, as permanent geographical areas.

“It was pointed out by Prof. Robert T. Hill that the current, and formerly undisputed, conception that the Rocky Mountains of North America and the Andes of South America were not only analogous physiographically, but univalent in fact; that the continuous elevation of Central America brought them into an oblique alignment; and that their mutual prolongations met in the Isthmus of Panama, was erroneous. It involved a complete misconception. It was a geographical fallacy, and leads to misleading conclusions as to the permanency of this intermedian region, itself pre-eminently individualized and liberated from the circumstances and implications of either the Rocky Mountain Continent or the Andean Continent. This area has a different geological ancestry. To-day it invokes an especial treatment, and possibly expects a future, contrasted with that of the two great Continents whose longitudinal extension it contravenes by its east and west lines, by the prerogatives of a separate origin.

“The Rocky Mountains terminate in the plateau of Mexico, ‘a little south,’ says Hill, ‘of the capital of that republic; and that the mountains have no orographic continuity, or other features in common with those of the Central American region.’

“And the same authority, describing the terminus of the Andes, says, ‘The northern end of the Andean System lies entirely east of the Central American region, and is separated from it by the Rio Atrato—the most western of the great Rivers of Columbia. In fact, the deeply eroded drainage valley of this stream nearly severs the Pacific coast from the republic of Columbia, and the isthmian region, from the South American continent.’

“The Central American volcanoes belong to the type that is repeated along the Caribbean shores of Colombia and Venezuela, and those in the Isthmus of Panama, and those of the great Antilles. The genesis of this American Mediterranean land-aggregate was in an independent geological impulse, and the land aggregate itself impinged by intersection upon the dominant land surfaces of North and South America. To bring together North and South America as a simultaneous geological phenomena is wrong, to make them other than an accidental geographical continuity questionable. It is this intermediate zone—the Antillean continent with lateral elongations, grasping within its continental solidarity the parallel zones of Central America and the Isthmus, that gives them terrestrial unity. Extend the axis of the Rocky Mountains, and it passes almost two thousand miles west of the coast of South America; extend the axis of the Andes and it bisects the western extremity of Cuba, and passes along the seaboard of the United States.

“There is no exact geological identity here, although there is the strictest geographical homology. Each is the backbone of a continent, each upheaved and variously modified, igneously invaded sediments, derived from some pre-existent continent. They may be brought into a just comparison, but they are not strictly parts of one phenomenon. They are, however, more closely related to each other, than the Antillean areas are to either. This Antillean area, I shall here call the Columbian Continent, as the great discoverer landed at its two east and west extremities—the land-fall on San Salvador in the Bermudas, and on the coast of Honduras in Central America, as well as at Cuba, and at the mouths of the Orinoco—and his bones rested for a long time in the soil of San Domingo. It—this Columbean Continent—is a significant intercalation. It unites North and South America, but it unites them subject to the phases of its own generation.

“Let us understand this. There is a system of growth, a law, if I may so term it, of geomorphic sameness in the development of large, or for that matter, small geological territories. The familiar story of the growth of our North American continent has been often told. It is a commonplace of text books. The wide, triangular Archæan nucleus to the north, the oldest rocks—outlines and outliers down the east, and the same in the west—drew the framing limits of the continent at the first, to be filled in, up and out, by the momentous additions through the ages of advancing time. In Europe less well or simply defined boundaries, the growth together rather of divided islands, prevailed, and the picture of development was quite varied, from the picture in this western world. Again in Africa, with edges of uplift and centres of depression another geological tale with its incidents and accessories infinitely modified, comes into view. And in this prevalence of structural style, we, geologically speaking, find a prevalence of certain geological phases or conditions.

“What were these in the growth and disappearance of this Columbian continent? What they have been, we can, with rational probability, assume they will be.

“The Columbian continent, I have called a dismembered, a fractionized continent. If from Cuba through Haiti, Porto Rico, and the lesser Antilles one land surface obtained, and the now submerged and radiating gorges, found only as submarine canyons, were above the ocean, becoming, as Prof. Spencer has laboriously proven, sub-aerial river valleys, we should have one presumable phase of this continent, the phase of its maximum cohesion and extension. And such a phase is measurably or, for purposes of argumentative inference, sensibly established. It is said with careful premeditation by Hill that ‘the numerous islets of its eastern border, the Bahamas and Windward chain, which extend from Florida to the mouth of the Orinoco, are merely the summits of steep submarine ridges, which divide the depths of the Atlantic from those of the Gulf of Mexico, and Caribbean sea; were their waters a few feet lower, these ridges would completely landlock the seas from the ocean.’

“When thus constituted, it afforded a display of physical features of astonishing contrasts, and its mere scenic resources were doubtless of unparalleled splendor, and, as to-day, it was involved in the luxuriant productivity of the tropics. Its mountains measuring now as high as eleven thousand feet above the sea level, were then thrust upward into stupendous peaks, by the addition of the sloping miles which are now below the ocean. We can imagine the extreme wonderfulness of this continent, uniting in an unbroken but marvellously varied expression of physical and vegetable contrast, the plains, valleys, and mountains of Cuba, the towering and draped peaks of Jamaica, the confusion of the gloomy vales and ranges of Hayti and San Domingo, the levels and coastal ranges of Porto Rico, and the manifold picturesque charms of the Lesser Antilles, lifting high into the ceaseless currents of the trade winds the smoking summits of a chain of disturbed volcanoes. All, in the boundless abundance of its natural endowment of loveliness, and productivity, formed an unique and extravagantly ornamented landscape, an area whose highest elevations contemplated the remote waters of the shrunk Atlantic, from pinnacles raised ten to twenty thousand feet above its azure waves. Nor is this all. This hypothetical—the Columbian—continent, may have had connexions with Central America through projecting and peninsulated capes, reaching through Jamaica to Yucatan or Honduras, and wide intervals of dividing gulfs of water, in all probability sundered it from North or South America, and it remained, as I here emphatically insist, it remains to-day, a geographical and geological phenomenon, unrelated to the great continents, to which through their preponderating value, the mind almost unpremeditatingly assigns it.

“But at the period of this greatest elevation, when this tropical region assumed individual independence, and embodied a geognostic importance comparable to the vast continents it lay between—at this time—the Isthmus of Panama did not exist, and through a wide water-way the Atlantic mingled its tides with those of the Pacific.

“We are thus led to believe that as between the West Indian terranes and the neck of land now embraced in the Isthmus of Panama, we have a relation of Isostacy.’”

The speaker, armed with this formidable verbal equipment of attack upon his audience, had walked to the front of the platform, and, harboring some unusual confidence in his powers, had deserted his manuscript. Isostacy, he had realized, possessed probably unqualified novelty, and by way of assurance, lest its terrors might empty the hall, he assumed a colloquial relation to his dazed hearers, and offered an explanation of this unexpected mystery. “Isostacy,” he resumed, “is simply this: Equilibrium. It is the maintenance of average level—as if one part of the earth’s surface was pushed up, above a mean level, then the requirements of Isostacy would depress another part, below it. We can also call it the adjustment of a changing load, as if through depression, from the dumping upon the floor of the ocean of a great amount of sediment, derived from the land surface of the earth, neighboring areas of the land of the oceanic floors were raised. Two contiguous regions might—and,” the lecturer turned directly toward the President, who in his own earnestness of attention had elbowed himself round into a direct line with Mr. Binn, “in the case of the West Indian continent and the Isthmus of Panama, have maintained between them, an up and down reciprocity of movement, as, when one was up, the other was down, and vice versa.”

Mr. Binn looked introspectively at the walls and ceilings of the room, as if engaged in a mental rehearsal and review of his staggering statement, and returned to his desk and manuscript, satisfied that he had thrown the assembly into an uneasy apprehension of danger. He again began his reading: “It is true, if I understand Mr. Spencer correctly, that the Atlantic ocean was cut off by the elevation of the Columbian Continent from even the interior basins of the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico, at least in early pliocene times; that these depressions were then broad plains receiving in part the drainage of the Antillean highlands; this again emptying into the Pacific ocean. But this is not a proven theory, and it involves an extravagant readjustment of the physical features of a region that to my mind more expressively can be considered immemorially permanent, in their general aspects, at least. I reiterate the reciprocity of movement between the Antillean Continent and the Isthmus of Panama. The cause I have suggested may be untenable—but there seems strong geological proof of some such alternating relation between the west and east sides of this inter-related region, the Great Antilles on one side, the Isthmus of Central America on the other.

“Our survey of the question produces one impression, and that very forcibly, viz.: that this narrow ridge of separation is ephemeral, that it is perishable, that under the tests or against the shocks of earth strains, it will succumb, and”—the lecturer raised his voice, half turned deferentially to the chairman, Dr. Smith, who accepted the attention with an assenting nod—“again the waters of the two oceans will unite, and the impetuous violence of the rushing oceanic river, the Gulf Stream, that now races and boils through the Caribbean Sea, will fling its torrential waves across this divide into the Pacific.”

The audience that with manifest absorption had thus far followed the speaker, was disturbed. A movement of chairs, a half audible protest of whispered incredulity, and a sensible emanation around him, of mental repugnance to such a catastrophe, made Leacraft momentarily turn his eyes from Mr. Binn to the frowning countenances at his side.

“But,” the speaker raised his voice with reassuring quickness, as if to stay the emotional resistance he had aroused, “we have no reason to believe that in our lifetime, or the lifetimes of many generations yet to come, so strange a reversal of present conditions should occur. And again, that in this matter, we may be calmly judicial, we have reason at least for a moderate fear. Whatever state of unstable equilibrium, of unadjusted balance is implied, or actually is resident in this section of our earth, a section that has undergone the extremes of hypsometrical displacement, we may conceive that like the explosive cap, or the compressed spring, or the bent bow, it will win instant relief upon the impact of any force, deep-seated enough, and powerful enough, to liberate its tectonic strain.

“I am thus brought to consider that world-wide source of terrestrial deformation—earthquakes; but I should forget the indulgence of your patience up to this point, if I should now undertake any partial review of these astonishing and alarming occurrences. I am deeply impressed, however, with an aspect of the subject that demands attention, that throws into sharp relief the prophecies of disaster, with which, willingly or unwillingly, we have all become familiar.”

The lecturer here rolled forward to the front of the platform, a blackboard on which in colored chalks the earth, looking somewhat like a shortened egg, with its north and south poles situated on the long, flattened sides, was depicted; while a black line or axis drawn through it terminated in the Sahara Desert on one side, and near the Society Islands on the other. Two ominous circles in vermillion were described on it, concentric respectively with the ends of the black line, one sweeping along the western coast of North and South America, and crossing the Isthmus of Panama, the other encircling the coasts of Africa and gathering in their fatal course the Azores, Canaries, and the Cape Verde Islands. And on both these terrifying curves, in black letters, was printed the hypnotic intimation “Belt of Weakness or Earthquake Ring.” The effect on the audience was sufficiently impressive. The staring rude drawing around which a cyclone of blue scratches, purporting to be clouds, was expressively raging, intensely steeped the observers in a spell of wonder and trepidation. Even Leacraft, by the contagion of a common obsession, craned his neck, and fixed his eyes with a stupid absorption upon the crazy and paradoxical diagram.

The speaker continued, noticing with undisguised satisfaction the ocular concentration produced by his obnoxious figure, with its anomalous portents: “It is well known that we have in the boundaries, or shore lines of the Pacific, a surprisingly larger number of earthquakes recorded, than anywhere else in the world, and this seems in some way coincident with the prevalence of active volcanoes in the same region. Prof. Haughton has enumerated for the world 407 volcanoes, 225 of which are active. Of these latter, 172 are on the margin of the Pacific. Prof. Milne, who lived a long time in Japan, for the express purpose of studying the earthquake problem of those islands, has observed the surprising frequency of their earthquakes, and it is a volcanic zone they occupy. We have in contradistinction to this area about the Pacific a reversed circle which envelopes the western coast of Africa, and by this chart,” here the lecturer pushed back the blackboard, and, standing alongside of it, began, with a pointer of elucidation, a direct allocution to that subject of confusion, “we are made immediately cognizant of the opposite and yet symmetrical disposition of these zones. This should have from its simplicity and a quasi-permanency, in its phenomena—its earthquake phenomena—a general explanation. The explanation is not reassuring; it is not proven, but it is accepted by many, and has, for me, a very reasonable probability. Let us at least not recoil from its consideration.”

Under the encouragement of this exhortation, the audience seemed to slide forward in their seats a few inches, with the impetus of a renewed hope.

“This chart,” said the speaker, “presents to you the structural conception of Professors Jeans and Sollas, of the form of the earth. It is the shape more or less familiar to you, commonly known as a pear-shaped earth, the tip carrying the Sahara Desert on its bulging top, and its broader and inferior extremity holding the disturbed Pacific basin.

“Now it makes a very practical difference what the shape of the earth is, because the shape affects the stability, has an important influence upon the fluctuating strains under its surface. Observe that the chart has developed, upon two circles of instability, these lines of weakness,” and the lecturer swept his pointer over the contrasted belts, one around Africa, and the other inflicting the west coast of North America with its ominous intersection. The pointer paused on the latter circle, stopping near the position of San Francisco. “You recall,” the speaker continued, “the terrifying affliction of this great city in 1906, and the pall of discouragement and gloom which it cast over the region in which the city naturally held the sway of mercantile supremacy. Now it was shown by Prof. H. H. Turner, the English astronomer, that San Francisco lies on one of the two great earthquake rings, which surround the end of the pear, as in this chart, like wrinkles produced by the crowding down of the protuberances under the force of gravitation. And, according to this view, such rings, marking lines of weakness and yielding in the rocks would not exist, if the earth was, in its shape, what we most usually assume to be its figure, an oblate spheroid, with the present north and south poles at the ends of its axis of rotation, to which axis of rotation the rest of the earth was symmetrically disposed.

“The existence of these earthquake and volcanic rings was known before the pear theory had been defined, but then of course their relation with any peculiar form of the earth was not understood. The ring surrounding the Pacific, or butt end of the pear includes a large part of the shores of the Pacific Ocean, running from Alaska down to the western coast of South America, then across to the East Indies, and back, around the other side, through Japan. The other ring is somewhat smaller in diameter, including the earthquake regions of West Africa and the Atlantic Islands. Now the point of interest is this, as Garrett P. Serviss has significantly said, ‘If the pear hypothesis is accepted, and the two great earthquake rings are found to be definitely connected with the strains to which the planet is subjected in its effort to attain a state of equilibrium, under the forces of its own gravitation and rotation, which tend to compel it into spheroidal shape, then we have a perfectly rational explanation of the existence of certain places where earthquakes are sure to occur more or less frequently, and of other places, like eastern America, where they are very rare and never of maximum violence.’

“Every one present this evening,” and the lecturer gave an embracing wave of his hand, “knows of the singular aberrancy in the rotational motion of the earth, which has been often geographically described as the ‘wobbling of the poles.’ Astronomers have proven a real tipping of the poles alternately to one side, and then to the other, a swaying of the poles like the recurrent oscillations of a top as it ‘goes to sleep.’ But this swaying in the earth’s case is periodic and unchanging. It is sometimes rather abrupt, and at other times the tipping is regulated and progressive; but it is established, and has had a generally accepted explanation, in the attraction of the swelling equatorial prominence of the earth by the sun and moon, while suggestions have also been made that it was due to internal shiftings of mass, or to changes of exterior weightings, through the alternate and variable formation and melting of polar snows.

“But it has in the light of the present theory of the pear-shaped earth a new and rather startling explanation.

“We are, however, this evening, not so much concerned with the broader cosmic aspects of this state of affairs, as with the immediate consequences to the permanence of our land surfaces.

“The mechanics of this condition and its possible effectiveness in developing contrary placed zones of rupture can be easily conceived. This awkwardly conditioned sphere, revolving upon a shorter diameter—revolving also with astonishing velocity—and bearing at either extremity of its longer axis unequal masses, is obviously in a state of peripheral strain, that is, it is in strain at such distances from either of the disproportioned ends, the one in the south seas, the other in the desert of Sahara, as would represent the more or less sharply sloping surface from its average rotundity, towards these oblique extremities.

“Gentlemen,” the speaker seemed excitedly rushing into danger, but with a fixed expression, aimed somewhere at the blank and uninfluential physiognomies at the back of the hall; like that of an engineer who can neither restrain nor reverse the speed which may either carry him safely over a tottering support or plunge his train to the bottom of the gulch; “Gentlemen, the Isthmus of Panama is in this zone; the Canal is there!” this last reminder uttered with no very reasonable deliberation, “and it is to my mind an absolutely established certainty, that the secular instability of that region, shown by geological investigation, will again become apparent; and”—he raised his voice with a kind of exhalation of defiance, as if he spurned equivocation and invited denial—“and, it will become apparent with increased violence.

“This conclusion is unwelcome; it may seem destructive to those natural hopes which the approaching completion of this wonderful enterprise—the Panama Canal—have so freely and inevitably fostered. Science in the last resource to her councils must be austerely judicial. She cannot take cognizance of man’s projects or respect his hopes. The Panama Canal as part of the Isthmus of Panama participates in all the vicissitudes of the latter, and we know that those vicissitudes mean dislocation and subsidence. When such frightful results will happen, it is impossible to say; that they must happen, we can positively assert.”

The lecture was over. The lecturer retreated, and again repeated his deferential nod to the chairman, Dr. Smith, as if importuning his assistance in corroboration of his mournful vaticination. The audience still remained immobile, coagulated into a sort of mental prostration by this dismal prophecy, and yet again as if contemplating, like a cat’s stagnation, preparatory to its murderous spring, some outward and physical resentment. And the spring came.

In the middle of the hall arose a tall and alert figure, perhaps noticeably bent, as if from the effort of attention, or perchance from forensic habits; for the man, as Dr. M— quickly informed Leacraft, was Senator Tillman, of South Carolina. The face of this sudden expostulant was handsome in the extreme, and the features, strongly marked, were blended together in an expression of youthfulness that seemed to win a strange charm from their association with the white hair, and the just beginning wrinkles of advancing years.

Senator Tillman lost no time. His interruption was decisively intentional. It was part of an impulsive impassioned nature. Shaking his index finger, which, from long practice, pointed undeviatingly at the object of his remarks, the Senator, in a voice harsh and penetrating, began: “My dear sir, we are indebted to you for information. But we stop there. We are not required to credit you with prediction. This scientific discussion will not alter our confidence nor stop the work on the Canal. It can’t. I’m not inclined to think that this nation will be stultified by the oracles of geology; it is a matter of simple determination that science makes mistakes—and I would advise no one in this room within the hearing of your voice, and no one outside of it, to whose eyes your reported views will appear, to allow them a scintilla of serious import.

“In 1906, Mark Smith, a voteless delegate to Congress from Arizona, told this story: ‘Once,’ commented Smith, ‘a couple of my friends were riding through a desolate bit of country in Arizona near the Mexican border. Presently they came upon a man who was hanging by the neck from the limb of a tree. A couple of buzzards were roosting above him, but they made no attack upon him. My friends drove away the buzzards and discovered on the breast of the dead man a placard bearing these words: “This was a very bad man in some respects and a damn sight worse in others.“

“‘My friends accounted for the moderation of the buzzards on the theory that they had read the placard.’

“That was all Smith had to say, but it was assumed that he agreed with the opinion of the other men about the subject of their discussion. Well, I beg to say of science that it is very bad in some respects, and a damn sight worse in others, and its present conclusion in regard to the Isthmus of Panama is one of the latter.”

The audience, long before this denoument to the Senator’s retort was reached, had arisen; the President had arisen also, and stood with his back to the stage, facing the Senator, steadily growing more unrestrained and angry. Leacraft and Dr. M— were half standing, their hands supporting them on the backs of the chairs of the men in front of them. The scene was interesting, and the first movement toward repression of the Senator succumbed to curiosity, and in all directions, the intelligent faces about them were variously disturbed by symptoms of vexation or amusement. It was uncommonly entertaining. Mr. Binn and Dr. Smith, with becoming smiles of moderation, were drawn to the front of the platform, and no one, after the Senator had swung into the torrential flow of his remonstrance, thought of anything else but to catch, almost breathlessly, his words. When he concluded, a wave of laughter, genuine, but a little nervous, went through the assembly. Then the President stepped to the aisle, turned a moment to shake the hand of the lecturer, and offer him his congratulations, and bowed to Dr. Smith. In an instant the aisle way was clear. The President moved on between the applauding people, and as he came opposite Senator Tillman, who had himself pressed toward the egress, as if to intercept him he stopped. There was a quick, instinctive restraint. Everyone waited for his word. “Senator Tillman,” the President spoke with sharp emphasis, “I thank you for restoring our spirits. I remember Mark Smith. I remember he took my advice in accepting the Statehood Bill. You may have misapplied his story, but you have at least furnished us with a novel reason for encouragement.”

Again the applause broke out, and the President disappeared, the audience decorously dispersed and followed him, and Leacraft and Dr. M— soon found themselves on Pennsylvania avenue, walking rapidly and silently.

---

CHAPTER III.
BALTIMORE, MAY 29, 1909.

Leacraft finished his task in the west. The disputes were smoothed out, the differences adjudicated, and a problem or so which had mixed up the overseer and the Mining Superintendent at the mines in an acute wrangle, disposed of. He was back to Washington on his way to Baltimore and Sally Garrett. The invitation from Ned Garrett to visit Baltimore and go with Sally and himself to Gettysburg on the twentieth of May, had been accepted, and every movement he had made, each step he had taken, since that memorable ninth of April when he first learned of the complexion of political affairs in the United States, and had heard Mr. Binn’s remarkable lecture, had been thoughtfully adjusted to getting back in time for the pleasure and the opportunity of seeing Sally.

His own earnest desire to possess her for himself, to compel her wayward and tantalizing spirit to acknowledge his mastery had increased, and like most young men in similar relations to the unknown quantity of susceptibility in a popular young woman’s heart his anxiety grew with every lessening minute between the present and the moment of confession. But at any rate Leacraft felt no indecision. Come what might he had no misgivings about his own feelings, and lingered, with no trepidation, over the thought of asking Miss Garrett to marry him. Defeat was preferable to the hardship of doubt. He would be less miserable after rejection, if rejection it was, than he was now; tormented with an immeasurable uncertainty. And his English heaviness, that semi-sepulchral seriousness which by some amusing compensation in the gifts of Nature is mingled with the very substantial merits of these people, induced a rather grim sadness in his mind, and he reached the door of 72 Monument Square, Baltimore, with no actual palpitation, but with a strained sense of the importance of his own fate which made him grave.

Leacraft had many personal merits. He had an excellent mind, a reasonably fearless heart, a sense of justice, itself the best gift of God to man, and a face, which if not distinguished by remarkable beauty became, under the excitement of feeling, and in the more propitious circumstances of good health, attractive, from a manly comeliness, not handsome perhaps, but certainly not commonplace. And he had physique. He was tall and strong, and his strength acknowledged obedience to an intelligence which made it formidable.

The door of the quiet house before which he stood, opened and there—Leacraft almost stumbled into unconsciousness—as if expecting him, as if flying on the wings of—if not Love, something else uncommonly pleasant—as if impatient to cross the laggard moments which separated them—was Sally Garrett.

It would be difficult to reproduce in words this difficult and puzzling young lady; difficult to impart by any means less effective than painting or have proven ineffective, unless somehow helped out by personal acquaintanceship—the impression which gave both to her active admirers, and to those who, for reasons best known to themselves, had tried to forget her charms. Sally was decidedly pretty, she readily, under the phases of excitement and gayety moved upward into the realms of beauty. She was fair, not large, delicately modelled, with perniciously accomplished eyes that looked out from beneath the pencilled eye-brows, and under their long lashes, with all kinds of provocative invitations, that were no sooner accepted than their desperate little giver revoked them with derision and anger.

Her lips, of course met the most scrupulous requirements of the critic, and her teeth were as fatally perfect. In coloring she furnished an example of protean adaptibility. The emblems of fury were seen in her flushed cheeks, and the tokens of contrition in the same when they grew pale with grief. This was the secret of her compelling art. She bowed to all emotions, and as they controlled her they set upon her face the evidence of their presence, refined by the resistance of a nature which abhorred wrong feelings, improved by the welcome of a spirit which was magnanimous and sympathetic. No wonder that Leacraft loved her. No wonder that a bewildered lot of other young men were in a similar predicament.

I presume at this point I owe some deference to feminine importunity. How was Sally dressed? Well; Sally had good taste, perhaps a trifle insubordinate by nature, but a rigorous subjection to good social usage had made it fairly unimpeachable. At that particular moment in the afternoon of May 27th, 1909, after his extrication from the subterranean embraces of the Baltimore and Ohio tunnel, and an uninspired walk along Charles street, Sally to Leacraft’s eyes presented the acme of sartorial perfection. She wore a white lisseree gown in which were inwoven threads of gray which gave it “atmosphere,” a kind of filmyness quite indescribable, but very inviting—above that, a waist of almost the same color, without the gray threads, and fitting tightly at the wrists with faintly voluminous sleeves—a stock of daffodill yellow encircled by an aqua-marine necklace, and in her clustering golden brown cascades of hair, rushed up into a chaste confinement between pearl-starred combs—she had thrust an amethyst aigrette. It was a willful thought, a vagary of sheer carelessness. But it looked well, and—Leacraft might have danced a jig (if he knew how) of pure ecstacy; and if his impurturbable nature would have permitted so gross a jest—it was one Leacraft had himself given her only last Christmas. You can see or infer ladies that your attractive sister, given, as I have tried to do, her natural adaptibility for embellishment, must have looked more than pleasing, that to a young man approaching her with idolatry in his heart and prayers on his lips she must have looked very nearly like the embodyment of the feminine ideal, like that inscrutable loveliness which first wins from a man his careless notice, and the next moment has him chained to its feet in servitude.

Well; such were the circumstances, and Leacraft hastily removing his hat looked with all his eyes at the fair vision, and found himself embarrassed in speaking his formal salutation:

“How do you do, Miss Garrett?” “Why, Mr. Leacraft,” replied the arch tormenter; “I thought it was Ned. He has just gone to get our tickets for to-morrow. And you, Mr. Leacraft, go with us? You will see our great battle field and hear our President. I’m sure you will find both wonderful. But come in, Mr. Leacraft.”

The vision with intoxicating grace swung back the door and preceded the tongue-tied suitor to the parlor. Mr. Leacraft left his hat and valise in the hall, and followed. Another instant, they were both seated in the deep room from whose walls the portraits of ancient and meagre, or stately and peptic Garretts, looked down upon them, and in looking were amused or distressed, according to their nature, at the display of modern elegance, helped out by a tasteful condescension to antiquities and heirlooms.

The next moment was successfully engaged in greeting Mrs. Garrett, the mother of the vision, a dignified and well preserved lady, who honored all her children’s friends with motherly hospitality, but resented mentally all masculine strategy, whose ulterior aims were the destruction of her daughter’s peace of mind. Her devotion to her daughter was itself part of a devotion which made every thing which bore the Garrett name sacred in her eyes, and which reflected a family pride, unmitigating in its self-exaction, unrelenting in its engrossing enmity to all that offended it.

“Ned will be glad to find you here Mr. Leacraft. It was only last night that Ned said he wondered if you had got rid of the business engagements that took you out west, and expressed himself willing to believe that if you had, you would not forget his invitation for Decoration Day at Gettysburg.” It was the voice of Mrs. Garrett, a little somnolent in quality, with a subdued melodiousness, and monotonously even in tone.

“Indeed, Mrs. Garrett, few things could have less readily escaped my mind. It has been an alleviation to think of it when I got bored with quarrelsome miners. Whatever good luck I have had in settling the mine troubles came from my own eagerness to get back to Baltimore,” and Leacraft turned with, actually, a very grave face towards the meditative Sally.

“Oh, Mr. Leacraft,” said that unconscionable woman, “we have Ned’s old classmate, Brig Barry, to go with us to Gettysburg. He is in the army, a lieutenant, who has fought Indians on the reservations, has lots of medals for bravery and is just the best thing in the way of a man you ever saw. I half think your English prejudices will be a little discouraged when you see him, or else you will love him as well as we do,” and this merciless compound of mischief and bewitching beauty looked out of her blue gray eyes with an absurd intimation of solitude which half made Leacraft forget manners.

“Yes,” acquiesced Mrs. Garrett, “Mr. Barry is a great favorite. I almost fear that Mr. Leacraft will find him unreasonably popular.”

“I am sure,” replied that rapidly aspiring sycophant, “that I ought to feel no inclination to impugn Miss Garrett’s good taste.”

This was so evident an affectation to shield a too obvious chagrin that the wicked object of the inuendo simply laughed outright and was vicious enough to reply that “she had never felt it necessary for her own comfort to have her own personal opinions endorsed by any one,” a cruel barb that lacerated the tender Englishman feelings immensely.

The next instant the front door opened with a rough shake, and a commotion of hurrying feet announced the arrival of Ned Garrett. Ned Garrett was a typical American of the best breed, and with the most unmistakable marks of that American suavity, sweetness and splendid confidence, not a whit tainted with assumption or vanity, which makes the American man the best type of man the world over. He, too, was tall and fair, with fascinating aplomb, and a frank surrender to the claim of friendship, without a too credulous endorsement of all social paper not readily negotiable. As he saw Leacraft he ran to him with a glad welcome of surprise and pleasure. “Good, Burney; I am right glad to see you. I knew you would not forget us, and you will have great reason to be satisfied with yourself for coming. The affair at Gettysburg to-morrow will be splendid. The President will give us something characteristic, the day will be the Nation’s, and the reunion of the veterans of both sides—you know this country once tried to strangle itself with its own hands—will be honored by a tremendous turn-out of people. I know,”—with a laugh,—“that you Englishmen hate crowds, unless they are turned to good account in celebrating the Lord Mayor’s day, or the jubilee of a king, or something swell and uninteresting, but it won’t hurt you to see the meaning of a great land’s reverence for its fallen dead,” and the big fellow full of enthusiasm, his handsome countenance dilated with pride, shook Leacraft’s hand, who was quite as delighted to greet his friend, whom he appreciated on his own account, without considering his influential relations to the desirable Sally.

Sally and her mother were now standing and, with, from the former a smile of approval and from the latter a gesture of satisfaction the two ladies departed, a servant appeared, and the young men ascended the stairs to prepare for dinner.

A variety of intentions had been coursing through Leacraft’s mind, and while ostensibly he was engaged in the commonplaces of address an interior agitation of plans and designs, all indubitably pointed towards the denouement of his visit, were tingling through his cerebral cortex with various success. He felt a sudden pressure of prudence assert itself, as if by some sort of psychological premonition he was made aware of the danger of temerity.

Left by Ned Garrett to assume the conventional apparel for dinner, and lingering with a delighted inspection of the details of his bedroom which he thought just reflected, to the nice point of a modest assertion of feminine adroitness, a really exquisite taste, he ran over the possible and best programme for the short campaign he felt it necessary to devise for the capture of the gentle and ethereal enemy. As he gazed, with increasing uneasiness, and poorly repressed envy at Henry’s piquant and picturesque colored sketches of “A Virginia Wedding,” and “The Departure of the Bride,” which offered themselves so suggestively between the white curtains on the saffron tinted paper, he came to this conclusion. He would that evening, if the occasion presented itself for a really favorable interview, let Sally know how much he thought of her, and how hopelessly unhappy he must become, if she could furnish him with no encouragement. That would do just now; but when they got to Gettysburg he might expect to find a convenient moment to be more explicit, indeed to urge her to the critical extremity of telling him what he might hope for.

This progressive method he fancied promised the best results, and, his thoughts still recalling with infatuation the uncalled for insertion of his aigrette in her hair on the very day when he was expected, he imagined if there was not absolute surrender on Sally’s part now, there might be compromising negotiations for surrender later.

With complacency, he looked at himself in the glass, walked to the hallway and descended. He had reached the broad stairway which entered the centre of the first floor of this sumptuous home, descending on the two sides in a series of separate steps, and then uniting into a wide terrace of steps, expanding upon the hall at the bottom, and guarded by a balustrade, which ended in two newel posts of surprising proportions, each carrying an enormous Rokewood vase, from which sprang a mingled white and red exuberance of sweet alyssum and geranium. As Leacraft stood at the top of the terrace of steps, he commanded a full view of the lower hall. And right beneath him, at the foot of the terrace, under the Rokewood vases, he saw Sally Garrett—the girl whom a moment ago he had with some unction and self-flattery ventured to think was not averse to his attentions—pinning on the lapel of the evening suit of a most offensively good looking young man, a boutonniere of geranium and alyssum, filched (the theft was evident) from the great vase above their heads, and to accomplish which, it seemed to the maddened observation of Leacraft, that the young man must have lifted the young lady. This was a conjunction of agencies too terrible to dwell on with equanimity, and in pure fright Leacraft stopped a moment, and became an involuntary spy upon proceedings evidently not intended for an inspection so inimical as his.

It was Sally’s voice: “Well, Brig, I must confess that as an accomplice in crime you are shockingly cool. It was quite unnecessary for you to expect more than the flowers; and yet”—Leacraft seemed to hit the balustrade with his foot. The interruption was perhaps involuntary. In Leacraft’s condition, human nature could not stand a more excruciating strain. Sally looked up. So did the young man. “Oh, Mr. Leacraft, this is fortunate. I want you and Mr. Barry to be excellent friends. Mr. Barry is wonderfully strong, and you are so wise. With his agility, and your advice, I will have two escorts to-morrow that will save me from any exertion of mind or body. Mr. Barry will help me over the hard places, and you will explain things. Pardon,” with a coquettish glance at her companion and a demure courtesy to Leacraft; “you must go through the usual introductions. My cousin, Mr. Barry, Mr. Leacraft. Remember, I rely upon both of you, and you must be as amicable as doves,” and with that equivocal enforcement of neutrality, this impossible beauty vanished.

Ned Garrett appeared, and saved the situation, or at least diminished an insufferable embarrassment. The three men were the next instant summoned to dinner. They were met at the door of the dining-room by Mr. Garrett, a tall gentleman, still giving evidence of an athletic youth. Mr. Garrett was a man somewhat tormented with impatience, but genial withal, and possessing a singular power of rapid utterance, conjoined also with the power of business-like demonstration. He shook hands with Leacraft cordially, and addressed a salutation of flattering familiarity to Mr. Barry.

Leacraft had suffered a very staggering blow, as he recalled the affair of the stairway, and he fell back, with only a half-satisfied security, upon Sally’s intimation that this unwelcome intruder—the Brig Barry of her previous encomiums—was a cousin. And the plague of it all was that he (Leacraft) was overpoweringly conscious of this same Brig Barry’s indisputable charms. Mr. Brig was a type of physical perfection. He carried on straight, but not too broad, shoulders, a finely shaped head, such which, at their best, are only seen in America; a head which announced to the world its intelligent emotions through the medium of an expressive face, wherein brown eyes, dark, straight eyebrows, a strong, large mouth, an aquiline nose, and blue veined temples, overhung by short, curled hair, combining their mutually enhancing details in making their young owner the target of feminine admiration. Cousins are by no means denied the privileges of marital union, and as there are all kinds of cousins, and the privilege is less and less questionable according to the numerical distance between them, it became a matter of preliminary importance for Leacraft to find out what kind of a cousin Brig Barry was to Sally Garrett.

In pondering sadly over this uncertainty his well formed plans, so agreeably outlined during his toilet, fell into disorder, and, as it were, evaporated. His agony of heart was not relieved when he observed the cruel object of his misgivings. Sally was placed at his side at the dinner table; opposite them sat Mr. Barry and Ned Garrett, and the ends of the table commodiously accommodated Mr. and Mrs. Garrett. Sally was radiant; she was well dressed, and—Leacraft’s eyes first sought its place—the aigrette was gone, and he noticed, acutely conscious of all telltale signals of interference by others with his own designs, a solitaire diamond ring on her right hand. His discomfiture was complete. It was a sad discovery, and Sally, gleaming with a light of happiness it was not his good luck to dispense, relentlessly added to his distress by showering the loathed Brig Barry with glances of commendation and approval.

But when could this engagement—he shuddered at the word—have been made? Leacraft, solicitous from the moment he entered the Baltimore house in the afternoon, had scanned that same hand with a jealous scrutiny, about two hours before, and it was guiltless of rings—quite free—he could have sworn to that. Was it possible that he had witnessed the closing rites of their pre-conjugal union from the top of the stairway? It was most likely. For a moment the unhappy man felt a swinging sensation, a kind of revolting nausea that put an actual pain in his heart, and a sudden impulse almost straightened him upon his legs, and would have sent him flying from the house, seized him, which only an indomitable Spartan furor of resistance, in his English soul, could have conquered.

The next instant he, too, was smiling, even observing with pleasant alacrity that when Brig Barry raised his wine glass to his lips, his eyes fell invitingly upon Sally, and that flattered fairy responded by sipping from her own, not, indeed, that such telegraphy of signals was obvious or unmannerly; no! it required the jealous eyes of an irritable rival to have seen it at all. It certainly was a cruel ordeal. It certainly taxed Leacraft’s self-possession. It was so fathomless and unexpected. Not a word from Ned about it, and Sally had always before appeared austerely impartial. Perhaps it was a sudden fancy, an illusion, hopeless on her part, because she could never marry her own cousin. The Englishman rummaged painfully in his stock of conservative teachings to prove conclusively that so abhorrent a social impropriety could never be permitted. But there was the ring! Well, a ring; what of it? A common gift; nothing more. It was madness for him to jump at conclusions so recklessly. Two cousins admiring each other—yes, loving each other, in a beautiful, domestic family way—and separated for a long time, were naturally rejoicing in reunion. Stupid to attribute so much as he had done, under so slight provocation, to their mutual affection, the affection, doubtless, of a brother and sister; keener indeed, as why not?

Ruminating thus propitiously, and only half conscious that he was going through the formalities of a course dinner, and was but poorly assisting the conversation, which consciously he thought had not yet developed into any consecutive line of talk, he suddenly seemed to come back to his senses, as these words proceeded with celerous distinctness from the lips of the older Garrett:

“A despatch was received in the office this afternoon, about an hour ago, from Colon, which startled us a good deal. Three earthquake shocks have been felt in Colon, and an enormous tidal wave swept over Limon Bay, in the direction of Mindi. There was loss of life at Colon. The coast towards the embouchure of the Chagres river has sunk sensibly, and a rumor prevailed at Colon, at the time the despatch was sent, that the walls of the great Culebra Cut had collapsed. This is bad news, if it is true, bad news for the President, bad news for the country. So enormous a disaster will be known at once, if it to be known at all. The fact that no press accounts have been given out makes me hope that our despatch is a mistake, a canard, perhaps.”

“Oh! the poor President!” exclaimed the sympathetic Sally; “he will need his courage now. It can’t be so horrible. They surely can’t mean, papa, that the canal is destroyed. That would be too shameful.”

“The operations of Nature,” said Ned Garrett, “are not generally susceptible to shame. Nature is about the most shameless thing on the face of the earth,” and they all smiled at the thought.

“Yes,” said Mr. Barry—and Leacraft watched him with eager eyes, and listened with critical ears—“Nature has a happy way of discriminating between shame and compassion. She tries to make up for her cruelties by some new blessing, but she never tells anybody that her cruelties ever made her blush. If this news is a portent of worse; if the canal should be destroyed, if the isthmus is invaded by the oceans, a canal without locks will be given to us free of charge.”

“And we have spent one hundred and thirty million dollars already. As a financial proposition, it is hard to see why we have not paid as much for one as for the other,” dryly commented Mr. Garrett. Leacraft felt it incumbent upon him to say something, and his fatal over-valuation of seriousness allured his tongue into a statement statistical and scientific, something which might impress Sally—but which only afflicted that young degenerate person with an immoderate preference for the way her cousin, Brig Barry, might have said the same thing.

“I am rather curiously reminded,” began Leacraft, “of a lecture which I heard in Washington last April, in which the lecturer, Mr. Binn, ventured to offer a very alarming prediction as to the instability of the Central American zone, and especially the portions of it embraced in the isthmus. He was rebuked at the time in open meeting by a Senator, but if your information turns out to be correct, perhaps he is about to receive a stunning corroboration. It would be of some psychological interest to know whether Mr. Binn in that case preferred his own reputation to his country’s welfare.”

“I heard of Binn’s talk,” remarked Brig Barry. “I was near the Mexican line, and we had had a brush with some greasers which were kicking at Uncle Sam’s tariff. A Washington paper turned up in camp, and there was Binn’s Jeremiad. I think the paper had it ‘Science Butting In,’” and, to Leacraft’s surprise, Sally laughed.

But a moment later she turned to Leacraft with unaffected interest, and said, “But, Mr. Leacraft, do you think Mr. Binn knew?” and her voice was plaintive and concerned.

“It is reserved for astronomy,” said Mr. Garrett, “to have prospective knowledge, to know the future exactly, with a calendar in one hand, and a watch in the other. I think it is not an imputation on the credibility of science to say that in other departments its knowledge of the future is speculative.”

“Mr. Binn,” began Leacraft, “was not at all didactic, as regards time, but he was emphatic in the general scope of his predictions. He regarded the Isthmus and the Central American area as belonging in their geological habits to the West Indies, and he had a very poor opinion of the fidelity of the latter to implied obligations. He regarded it as capricious and wayward, unsubstantial in its composition, and a bit fickle in its attachments.” It was almost impossible not to think that the speaker was not putting a little bit of something more than science in his words. He continued: “His views also involved a curious reference to a rather topsy turvy theory that the earth was pear-shaped, and that the belt of earthquakes and crustal disorders along the borders of the Pacific resulted from this hypothetically crooked figure of the earth.”

Brig Barry was listening with intense attention, and a whimsical glimmer of a smile turned the ends of his lips, while his eyes very gravely, with a slight contraction of their eyelids, watched Leacraft, with half inquisitorial perplexity.

“I think,” he broke in, “that the West Indies will manage to take care of themselves. At least, present indications go to prove, that instead of disappearing, they are on their way to bigger things. Commander Beecham, who has just come from the Isle of Pines, told me yesterday, that the island was rising, that in a short time it might become part of Cuba. The question might then be asked, as we own the Isle of Pines, whether we had not annexed Cuba.”

“I have heard of the Isle of Pines,” said Mrs. Garrett, “but hardly understand what it is. Perhaps a little enlightenment on the subject would not be unwelcome to the rest of you.”

“Do, Brig,” pleaded Sally, “in the role of instructor you may be as successful in geography as in other subjects,” and Leacraft flushed and sat back hard, to resist the harsh blow of this subtle reminder of his worst suspicions.

Mr. Barry looked around, as if to secure the suffrages of the company, and found every eye fixed upon him in expectation. It was his turn to impress Sally. He last looked at her, and as he did, he laughingly began: “I shall have no compunctions in being a trifle the schoolmaster. The Isle of Pines, Mrs. Garrett, lies in a deep bight or bay near the south coast of the western part of Cuba. There are some six hundred and thirty thousand acres in it, and it is but ninety-nine square miles less in extent than our little State of Rhode Island. This island bears a sort of filial relation to Cuba. It is part of the general chain of the insular mainlands of the Antilles. It is not a coral key or a mangrove swamp. It forms a plateau from fifty to one hundred feet above sea level, broken by ridges of hills or cliffs that start out over its surface like the bones on the back of a thin cow.” Sally’s deferential attention to Mr. Barry’s learning was here interrupted by a very audible titter.

“I beg to remonstrate against any levity in my class, and I think, Miss Garrett, you owe me an apology for attempting to disturb my recital.” This mock rebuke completed Sally’s disorder. Her eyes, wet with tears of merriment, looked at Brig Barry, who had assumed himself the amusing expression of offended dignity, and she murmured, “Excuse me, sir,” with such a delicious mockery of piteous appeal that her father laughed aloud, but Leacraft maintained his stern reserve, with eyes uplifted from the face of his rival.

“Small as this island is, it offers room for two mountain ridges at its northern end, which reach the respectable elevation of fifteen hundred feet, and are composed of limestones. There are other ridges in the island, lower and less steep. The whole island is surrounded by swamps, except towards the south, where it is rocky. Commander Beecham says that in the last month strange uplifts have been noticed, almost unaccompanied by any serious seismic—this last word, Miss Garrett, may affect you unpleasantly; it means earthquake,—disturbance and shoals and reefs are now bristling out of the sea, like the teeth on a comb. And another singular circumstance can be mentioned. The island abounds in warm springs, curative—for your benefit, Miss Garrett, I may say that the word means healing—for rheumatism and throat affections, and these springs are sinking; the water seems to recede within the recesses of the earth, while in other cases the subterranean channels have either crushed together, or have become filled up; the springs are simply not there; they have vanished; the Commander has made observations on the coast lines, and it seemed to him that they were all rising. The Cuban coast is rising, too. He came through Havana, and the shipways in the harbor have become so shallow that there was a gloomy prospect that the city would be cut off from the sea. I only heard all this strange news an hour ago, and I fear the excitement caused by meeting Miss Garrett is to be held responsible for my forgetting to mention it before.”

The allusion was noticed by only Leacraft; the next voice was that of Mr. Garrett, whose face had darkened with apprehension. “Extraordinary! It may be that our despatch is correct. It may be that there is a sort of see-saw here, that as the West Indies rise, the Central American coast sinks. But why not a whisper of such occurrences in the papers?”

“The see-saw fancy,” said Leacraft, now thoroughly aroused, and forgetting his immediate disappointment in the face of a formidable physical phenomenon, “was Mr. Binn’s. He gave me the feeling that he thought that, like an inflated surface, where the higher elevation of one part meant the lowering of another part, so the access of height in the West Indies meant the loss of height in the isthmus. And the provocation to any change would be earthquakes.”

“As to the papers not publishing anything,” explained Barry, “there are no newspaper correspondents in the Isle of Pines, and I recall now that Beecham told me that the authorities at Havana were so frightened over the reports of the harbor masters, that that they had prohibited their circulation. The thing may prove grave enough.”

“Let us hope,” said Ned Garrett, “that such rumors do not get abroad before to-morrow. They are only half-proven assertions, based upon some accidental and momentary circumstance. In a few days the Isle of Pines may be the same as it was, with the salt springs thrown in, and the harbor of Havana back again to its old position without so much as a jolt. The sea serpent is now advancing towards our shores at the summer resorts, why not a few nightmares from the tropics? A truce to ghosts. Let us drink to the President and the Canal.” The glasses were raised, their lips, before they touched the sparkling lymphs, offering, as if in silent prayer, to the consecration of the beaded wine, unuttered hopes for the country’s great head, and its great enterprise, had but felt the amber current flowing from the engraved chalices, musical with the tinkling of bits of ice, when,—a sharp cry of voices, a babel of tumultuous and precipitated outcries smote upon their ears, entering the open windows like an execrable assault. It was the shouting, thrilling with an unusual impetus of omen, of the newsboys, as if they had forgotten their mercantile relations to the news, which, whether of joy or grief, they commonly announce in the shrill yells of indifference and gloating expectation. Now their multitudinous voices mingled in a monstrous hoarseness, as if constrained by a personal and immediate sorrow and horror. Even ejaculations from men in the streets buying the papers from the hawkers, entered the room, and brought pallor to the cheeks of the mute company. Ned Garrett pushed back his chair and sprang to the door, followed by Brig Barry, and the rest stayed, immobile, like a stricken throng, waiting the next minute for an impending immolation.

Scarcely thirty seconds had elapsed when the two men came back with the papers of the street, one having the Baltimore Times, the other holding in his hands the Southern Herald. The faces of both men were pale, and on the cheeks of Ned Garrett shone a trace of tears. Barry was the first to enter the room, and as Mr. Garrett, now standing at the head of the table, his body half turned towards the door, his face suffused with unchecked emotion—as Mr. Garrett said, “Well, what is it?” he faltered, and dropping the paper to his side, he faced the convulsed merchant, and was silent. It was Ned Garrett who cried out, “The Isthmus is crumbling to pieces and the Canal is doomed.”

The order of events as we hear any sudden stroke of affliction, as we suddenly confront the inevitable bereavement, as we feel the sharp thrust of calamity penetrate our hearts, varies with temperaments and sex; but for the most part it reflects the order of events under physical attack, the stunned senses, and the reaction. It is in the reaction that the difference among men most visibly appears. Slowly Mrs. Garrett arose and left the room, and Sally, after a pause, during which she had stolen to the side of Brig Barry, and lifted the paper from his side, where it had fallen in his unnerved hands, followed her.

The four men were left behind, and of them only Leacraft was seated. It was Leacraft who first spoke: “This is awful, but the Nation is far greater than any misfortune that can befall it.” The other three turned to him with one accord, as if saved from their own wretchedness, and moved in his direction as if to embrace him. It was the right word. It brought relief, and to one at least as he turned his back to the speaker it brought tears. Mr. Garrett the elder looked intensely at Leacraft, his eyes almost glittering with the sudden joy of consolation, and said, “Thank you, Mr. Leacraft, for that true word. It is the one we need. You are an Englishman, and your confidence in us is part of your own Anglo-Saxon strength, and part of your best knowledge that we are nourished by the same blood. Let us sit down, and you, Brig,” (Ned Garret’s back was still turned to them) “read the papers to us. The first reports may be much exaggerated.”

Some servants had by this time collected in the room at the side of the butler’s pantry and waited there irresolute. Mrs. Garrett and Sally also softly returned, and took their places at the table; with them, as with Ned Garrett, the thought of the President’s misery unnerved them. Barry had spread the paper before him. The dark head lines swept across the sheet in ominous relief. They read:

THE NATION’S LOSS.
EARTHQUAKES AND LAND SUBSIDENCE ENGULF
THE ISTHMUS AND THE CANAL.
The Awful Cataclysm of Nature.
THE PRESIDENT DEEPLY AFFECTED.
THE MOST TERRIBLE CATASTROPHE IN MODERN TIMES.

News from Aspinwall of the most appalling character has been received in Washington, and though an initial effort to conceal or suppress the despatches was made, wiser councils prevailed and the country will know the worst. America must now vindicate her courage and maintain the reputation she justly holds among the nations of the world for self-reliance and self-control.

A long telegram received at the executive mansion in Washington to-day was given to the country by the orders of the President, after unavailing remonstrances from the members of the cabinet, who wanted the news withheld until confirmatory despatches were received. It is believed that these were received, and that the President ordered the distribution of the news. In a word it announces the destruction of the Canal, and the submergence of the Canal zone, through a series of progressive changes in the earth’s surface at that section, accompanied by severe earthquake phenomena. The confluent waters of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans will mingle over the buried structures of the Canal, and one hundred and fifty millions of dollars, representing the labor of three years, and nearly fifty thousand men, with an enormous accumulation of material, will have been spent in vain. The Nation’s credit remains unimpeached and unimpeachable, but the moral effects of this stupendous calamity can scarcely be over-estimated.