Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 20, September, 1877.

by Various

CHAPTER IX.

Mr. Neckart, standing back in the shadow of the scrubby althea-bushes, his hands clasped behind him and his eyes following the skiff as it drifted down the river in the twilight, compelled himself to argue the matter out according to the rulings of common sense, just as he would the appropriation bill.

He had been coming too close of late to this little girl in a brotherly way—of course in a brotherly way. He must stand farther off. She must marry. He had always looked forward to her marrying, and the time, in all probability, had come now. Van Ness was a manly, strong fellow: her father would urge it, and Jane would soon be won. For Neckart, with the majority of men, regarded amiability and high-colored, beefy good looks in his own sex as the irresistible attractions in a woman's eyes.

"They both have youth and personal attractions and culture—everything to make a marriage suitable. I can find no objection to it," proceeded his most reasonable meditation.

"But I can never see it!"

He had not spoken, but it seemed to him as if he had cried out. Then he laughed to think what an egregious ass he was. What was this yellow-haired girl in the boat to him more than any other of the millions of women with whom the world was filled? Nothing. They all were nothing to him.

He turned his back on the river and struck into one of the dusky alleys of the garden, pacing up and down below the old plum trees. He whistled to himself, and ran his hand through his shaggy hair as if to be rid of some cobwebs in his brain. As he brushed against the branches a bird fluttered out of its nest and chirped angrily. Why, women and their love and their homes could no more come into his life than that silly robin or her brood! Two years ago this inexorable necessity did not even give him a moment's chagrin. The newspaper, his army of followers, the policy of the country,—these made life big and full enough. If he wanted little selfish pleasures, there was his arm-chair and open fire, his shelf of old books, or a dinner at Delmonico's with some clever fellow, or a dash to Europe, or across the continent, to pry into the background against which other clever fellows, whether white or yellow or black, lived and worked. He would go back to the office to-night; he could hear the engine puffing at the station now, making ready for the next train; he could finish the evening with his old friends, the books; he could order a dinner to-morrow that would satisfy even his palate,—and he used to be an epicure. He ought to go. He would go.

He walked up the open path leading to the house. Then he stopped, turned and struck directly through the trees and bushes to the river-side. The boat was at some distance: he called once or twice for her to come and take him on board before she heard him. His voice sounded hoarse and strange to himself: he did not know himself in what he did. As for the world, there was nothing in it but that boat yonder which shot through the water, and the woman with eager face rowing swiftly toward him.

There was not a Wall-street banker or a politician among Neckart's confrères who would not have looked upon him as insane for the moment. This dull wisp of a woman to blot out all business, power, place, from his life? But, after all, there is no insanity so practical or long-lived. Why does A bull and bear the market, or B sell himself and his party, but for the sake of some ugly, faded woman and the commonplace children she has borne him? They are not thought worth notice by anybody but himself, but he ignores honesty, death, God himself, for them his life long. A plodding, shrewd fellow too, probably not a whit heroic.

Neckart was tramping along the common road which all of us know, but it seemed to him that he was breaking ground in a new world full of misty splendors and untried action. When he called to her his breath failed him, as it used to do when he was a boy wild with excitement. The sand under his feet, the brambles on the bank, the overarching sky, were not the same they were an hour ago. When the boat darted up to the shore, rocking as she held it fast with the oar, it seemed strange to him that she should speak in her ordinary tone. Did she not know?

She stood up in the bow steadying the skiff as he sprang into it. His hand touched her fingers for an instant, and she noticed that it shrank from hers.

"Did my father call me?"

"No: I wanted to talk to you alone."

She pushed from shore and dipped her oars: in a moment they were out in the current. It was a rippling belt of steely blue, the banks making indistinguishable ramparts of shadow on either side. Overhead was the soft starless twilight of June, through which a nighthawk flapped heavily and vanished. When it was gone they were alone. Could she not understand that they were alone? In this wide dark world that there were only they two, a man and a woman?

He could not distinguish her face, and her figure was but a light dark outline like a silhouette against the air. But the power of her womanhood was upon him, a something which Neckart had never felt before—a terrible, pure passion.

"Give me the oars," he said. "Let me help you," reaching forward to take them. His hand rested on hers accidentally: he did not remove it. Now did she understand? His mouth was closed. It seemed to him as if words were poor to say what was in his blood, in his soul, in the water, the air, the very ground.

She was startled, and turned to him wondering. The moon, rising higher, showed him the childish, sensitive mouth, the dark eyes heavy with tears, for she had been crying. What was that which gleamed through them, half answering him, frightened at itself? It seemed to him in this brief pause that they had been waiting all their lives for this word—he to speak and she to hear.

"Jane!" He took her hand in both of his and held it close, and then he threw it from him, drawing back: "My God! I had forgotten."

"Forgotten?" She closed her eyes once or twice, bewildered, as if suddenly wakened from sleep. "You are in trouble," she said anxiously. "Can I help you?"

The question brought him to sober reason sharply enough. It was precisely the frank, tender tone which she would use to her father; and the truth was, that the girl to herself did not yet distinguish between her father and this friend. A moment before a strange emotion had touched her. But it had passed like a warm gust of summer. There was not a seven-year old child in the city yonder who did not know more about love than Jane. She had never heard servants or schoolmates chatter about it; novels had bored her; the captain, whatever he had left undone, had kept the air pure and cold about her as for a very nun.

"What is this trouble, Mr. Neckart? You have been ill for months, I know. Can I—? Or perhaps father—"

She leaned forward, the oars suspended in her hands, her lips apart, attentive and eager.

He leaned over the edge of the skiff and wet his forehead and eyes, forcing a careless laugh: "One moment, Miss Swendon, and I will explain to you," adding presently, precisely in the manner with which he would have discussed the weather, "We men each have our skeleton to hide, according to popular belief, and mine is no worse than the rest. It is the most practical of facts. Only I am apt to forget it, and then, when it meets me unawares, it is as grim as death."

She nodded, watching him intently as if he were physically ill: she would not let the oars strike on the water, lest the noise might jar on him. All kinds of wild plans for helping him filled her brain. If the trouble were anything which money could help, there was plenty of that, thank God! If it was political difficulty—bills maybe—she could not even understand it. If God had only not made her so stupid! the humble tears rising slowly to her eyes.

Mr. Neckart did not see them. He was careful not to look at her as he spoke, and hurried on with his explanation, as if it were business of small importance. But she was not deceived by that. "I never have talked of this matter, and least of all should I have told it to you. I can bear the trouble when it comes without difficulty. The most ordinary men meet disaster coolly which they know is inevitable. Commonplace fellows who are born with scrofula or consumption march along with them to early death cheerfully. They make no tragedy out of it. There is no reason why I should complain of my lifelong companion." His tone was harder than he had ever used in speaking to Jane before.

"I have never told you of my mother?"

"No," eagerly, hastening to spare him pain. "But I have heard of her from Cornelia Fleming, who was your neighbor in Delaware. I know all that she suffered. You need not tell me."

"She was the last of the Davidge family. There was not one of them for generations who had not inherited disease of the brain. They were either epileptics from youth, or became, as she did, incurably insane. The disease invariably manifested itself in that way after middle age, and from that time they were helpless burdens to their children. Yet there was not a Davidge who refrained from marriage, so entailing the curse on another generation. It would have been more righteous to have put a pistol to their heads and have blown out their brains."

His manner was quiet and cold. Jane made no answer.

"Naturally, I have studied the pathology of insanity closely. I know that I have inherited the disease. The symptoms within the last six months are unmistakable. I know that in five or ten years at the outside I shall be of no more use in the world than any other mindless animal. But I will have no woman, nor child, suffer for me."

When he ceased to speak the silence and the night fell oppressively on them. The boat had drifted down to the edge of the bank and grounded. The moonlight showed her to him sitting in the bow of the boat facing him, her hands clasped on her knees. She was so near that if he but opened his arms he could take her to his breast. Yet he knew that she was separated from him now as though death itself lay between.

"I have known this necessity which lay upon me for years, Miss Swendon," he said quietly, but leaning forward to watch her immovable face. "It is my duty to isolate myself as other men need not do. The more dear"—his voice failed suddenly, but he recovered himself in a moment and went on—"the more dear a woman is to me, the more I must shut her out of my sight. I can never try to win her nor marry her."

Was the girl stone? Had she not even common human sympathy for him?

"You understand why I do this?"

"Yes, I understand."

"And you think I am right?"

She looked up at him with her usual blunt directness: "You are altogether right. An honest man could not do otherwise." Her chin fell on her breast again. Not a moan, not a breath of regret, at the blow which struck them apart. Weaker women would have cried a little at parting from a dog who had been sometimes a companion. This cool-blooded Swede gave her verdict on the right and wrong of the matter as though it had been a sale of goods, and there was the end of it! All the long-latent passion in Neckart's nature revolted and flamed into life. He moved restlessly, watching her sit there stony and immovable. He would have flung away life, as men used to do against the dumb Sphinx, to tear from her some word of pity or life.

The boat rocked in the shallow water. She rose to leave it. Neckart mechanically held out his hand to help her jump ashore. She held it tightly, and when she stood beside him on the grass took it in both her own: "No. You ought never to marry. You ought to hold yourself apart from the world. These strange people would only irritate and wear you out. Now you can give yourself entirely to us. We are your nearest friends. You shall give up the paper and politics: it is the work and anxiety that are telling on your brain. You shall live here with father, in the quiet and country air. I will take care of you both." She stroked his hand as a mother might that of her dying child, trying to believe that it was not growing cold. For a year the girl had fought death back from her father step by step. Now, her one friend, who with the old man filled all the world for her, was to be taken from her.

He seated her on a fallen log and pushed back the hair from her clammy forehead: "Child! child! you do not understand! All I have told you has gone for nothing!"

"I do understand. I can cure you both. Rest and the air—I am dull, but you don't know how good a nurse I can be for my own people," with a pitiful laugh.

He did not speak. The soft golden hair lay in his hand, warm and alive. He looked down at her. He could soon turn this childish affection into love: he could wrench her soul into his own. Why should he not take what God had set before him? All the other men of his race had done it.

One moment he stood irresolute. Then the hair dropped from his hand. "Jane," he said, as if reasoning with a child, "when I remember my mother first she was a pretty, tender little woman, with hardly a thought outside of her boy. For years before she died I was forced to fasten her as one does a wild beast, that she might not kill me. Do you understand what that was to me? Do you think I can bring the misery I knew in those years to any woman? My wife shall never have it to bear."

"But you can have no wife!" she cried. "You said you dared not marry! I can bear the misery. You will come to us—us. Those women in Washington of whom you tell me—how could they know what you need? I have nobody but you and father."

She felt herself so young and strong! Death, a most horrible and certain death, was creeping upon him. In her agony of pity she held his hand to her wet, burning cheeks.

"Jane, you drive me mad!" stooping over her trembling. "It is you—you that I dare not marry!"

She stood erect: "I marry you? I never thought of that," simply.

"You never thought of it?" with a queer uncertain laugh. "You never thought that I loved you?"

"That you loved me, Mr. Neckart? Me?" The blue innocent eyes that had been fixed on his suddenly filled with light; she dropped her face into her hands; her whole body burned with blushes, and she turned away.

Neckart slowly followed her. Jane's thoughts were always transparent as crystal: he had read in that one brief glance all the delight, the tender passion, whose first impulse was to escape from him.

"I have been a damned scoundrel!" he said to himself: "I have ruined her life!"

He was now thoroughly awake to what he had done—saw it as any other practical, honorable man would do, unbiased by his passion or his pity for himself. He walked silently beside her as she went up the steep path to the house.

As for Jane, she did not know that he was silent: she would scarcely have heard if he had spoken to her. She did not know what this was that had come to her, that had lifted her whole life upward as by a touch. She could not look at him. If she could only reach her father and hide from him, that he might never find her—never! She remembered how a minute ago she had held his hand to her face, and the hot flood of shame covered every other thought: the next she glanced shyly at him with a sweet pride;—he loved her, he would understand! The terrible story he had told her had passed out of her mind like a breath of smoke in sunshine. He loved her: she could keep him out of all danger. Even if she had remembered that she could never be his wife, it would not have troubled her. He loved her! She thought no more of marriage than the bird in its first song of dawn thinks of the barred lines and visible notes to which its music might somewhere be written down.

Neckart followed her up the steps and into the wide hall, carrying his hat behind him in his hand. The damp air wet his hair, and it hung lankly back from his haggard face. He felt physically ill. He had acted like a brute, a coward! This was the end of his stern resolve, his lifelong self-denial!

A lamp burned at the foot of the wide staircase. He paused beside it: she had gone up a step or two, and halted, her hand on the rail, looking down. "Good-night!" she said shyly.

The light shone full on the pink glow in her cheeks, the loose hair glistening like a golden mist, the half-frightened, half-triumphant gleam shot down from the blue eyes.

He did not answer her.

The delicate virgin bloom of this love which he had coveted so madly an hour ago scarcely stirred his heart now with pleasure. A man cannot live all the time on the heights of emotion or of religion; the air is too rarefied up there for healthy lungs; he comes down punctually to the ordinary levels of his saner self; and Neckart, on his ordinary level, was an exceedingly practical, honest man. He knew that he had brought irreparable injury to this girl, and that it was his duty now to make amends as best he could.

Rebecca Harding Davis.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

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A WISH.

When thou, O Death! shalt wait
Without my gate—
Call not the porter out
With knock and shout:
But still unnoticed bide
The gate beside,
Till Sleep, my oft-time guest,
Doth come in quest
Of me. Quick after her,
Past bolt and bar,
Enter all silently.
Thenceforth for me
The gate thou mayest keep,
That calm-browed Sleep,
So often missed before,
Pass forth no more.

Henrietta R. Eliot.

---

MADAME PATTERSON-BONAPARTE.

Each year adds fresh interest to this remarkable woman, whose story has been rehearsed in every land, whose personal traits still afford food for social chronicle. Lady Morgan said, "She belongs to history; she lived with kings and princes, philosophers and artists; there is about her a perpetual curiosity and romance." Speeding on to a rounded century of life, she is still moved to eloquent agitation in reciting her wrongs, not merely those sustained at the hands of the Bonapartes, but those inflicted by her father. William Patterson, son of a farmer in Donegal county, Ireland, was at fourteen years of age sent to Philadelphia and placed in the counting-house of Samuel Jackson, a shipping merchant. In 1775 young Patterson embarked his property in vessels trading to France with returning cargoes of powder and arms, for need of which the colonies were crippled. The supply arrived at a critical time, Washington, then before Boston, not having powder wherewithal to fire a salute. Mr. Patterson stopped at the West Indies, where he soon made eighty thousand dollars, coming thence to Baltimore, where he soon acquired a million of dollars and high social position. These facts are minutely set forth in his will, a remarkable document in its complacent personal details. Cataloguing his own virtues, he says: "I have made the fortunes of some, saved others from ruin, and found bread and employment for thousands of my fellow-mortals; and no one could ever say to me, 'Neighbor and friend, you got the advantage of me, you acted ungenerously to me.' The conduct of my daughter Betsey has through life been so disobedient that in no instance has she ever consulted my opinion and feelings: her folly and misconduct have first to last cost me much money;" but yielding to the dictates of his large heart he bequeaths her from his great wealth a few paltry houses and his cellar of wine! De mortuis nil nisi bonum—a humane maxim; but when a man deposits in the public archives his autobiography, we are incited to inquire of what worth may be his self-laudation, and what the animus that winged from the grave so cruel a shaft at his child's good name. That he was of strict integrity in business relations, a citizen of no mean "credit and renown" is true, but beneath this respectable cloak we find on contemporary authority a man close and arbitrary in his family and by no means impeccable in morality. One incident lets in light on his amiable domestic relations. His wife having long expressed a wish for a carriage, he at length imported an English chariot, but no horses were forthcoming, and in answer to her remonstrances he said, "I never promised you any horses;" so the chariot remained in the coach-house for the rest of his life.

Mrs. Patterson came of that sturdy, independent Scotch-Irish race that has peopled Pennsylvania's prosperous valleys. Her grandmother, Mrs. Galbraith, was of remarkable force of character, taking a prominent part in Revolutionary stir, and on one occasion traversing on horseback the then almost wilderness to canvass votes for her husband's election to the Assembly, which she won—whether by robust argument or in the felicitous way of the beautiful duchess of Devonshire is not recorded. To Mrs. Patterson—tender, religious and well cultured—her daughter owes her familiarity with English and French classics, becoming versed in the literature of Queen Anne's Augustan age, and able when ten years old to recite from memory a large portion of that tough morsel, Young's Night Thoughts, a page of which she recently repeated to a friend with the remark that she "had not seen the poem for seventy-five years." She learned Rochefoucauld's Maxims by heart—an unfortunate guide, to whom doubtless she partly owes her cynical appreciation of human motives. She possessed a quick, logical mind and prodigious memory, while passing years developed sparkling wit, fascinating manners and woman's crown of beauty. This gifted child was repressed by her father with strange bitterness, as if unnaturally jealous of her talent. In what consisted her "folly, misconduct and disobedience"? The wayward self-will of a mere girl could hardly merit such stern reprisal. She had barely reached womanhood when she made the marriage on which his heart was set, which he instigated and urged forward, allured by the alliance of his name with that already reechoing through the world, although fully warned of the risk of his daughter being scorned by Napoleon. Previous to her marriage she said to her father, "Suppose the First Consul should refuse to receive me?"—"Do not fear," he replied: "you shall come back to me an honored daughter."

While in Martinique, Jerome Bonaparte said to a former resident of Baltimore, "Ah! il me faut une mariage de convenance." "Not so," rejoined the lady; "and I know the most beautiful woman in the world, whom you must marry—Miss Elizabeth Patterson of Baltimore." And so he first heard her name. Soon after Jerome's arrival in Baltimore one of his suite, M. Rubelle—his father a member of the famous French Directory—married a young lady of that city, to whom Jerome said, "Jamais je n'épouserai une demoiselle Américaine."—"Ne soyez pas si sûr," replied she: "Mademoiselle Patterson est si belle que la voir c'est l'épouser." Mrs. Patterson, with a maternal prevision of misfortune, wishing to prevent their meeting, carried her daughter to her country place, where they remained until November. This enforced exclusion from the festivities consequent on Jerome's arrival naturally excited the young girl, who was found by her brother in tears. "What ails you, Betsey?" Having sobbingly disclosed her woes, she was allowed to return to town. Meanwhile Jerome was saying, "Ma belle femme, pourquoi ne revient-elle de la campagne." One morning, as Mme. Rubelle entered her carriage, in which Miss Patterson awaited her as chaperon to the races, Jerome appeared, was presented and accompanied them, to the annoyance of the fair Betsey, who, irate at his rumored impertinence in calling her his belle femme, turned from him with indifference and even brusquerie, which, if coquetry, could not have been better designed: from that moment he was captive. On this momentous occasion she was attired in buff-colored silk, very scant as to drapery, a lace fichu and a huge Leghorn bonnet trimmed with pink gauze and long ostrich feathers. The wooing was ardent, but growing at one moment lukewarm, Mr. Patterson, wise in his generation, sent Miss Betsey to Virginia; which ruse had the desired effect, piquing the lover into an immediate declaration on her return. Mrs. Patterson yielded a reluctant consent. "Your father," she said, "would probably force you into something detestable for money, so this may be for you a happy escape." The marriage, the preliminaries of which are historically familiar, was celebrated in her father's house on Christmas Eve, 1803, in the presence of ecclesiastical, national and State dignitaries. There were only two bridesmaids, the Misses Brown, great folk of that day, and no groomsman.

Jerome had imported for her a superb trousseau, but her bridal attire was a simple India muslin, costly with old lace, a row of pearls encircling her lovely throat—"a gown I had frequently worn," she said in describing the event to the writer, "for I particularly wished to avoid vulgar display; and, truth to say, there was as little as possible of any gown at all, dress in that day being chiefly an aid in setting off beauty to advantage." These bridal garments are still preserved, as well as Jerome's wedding-suit of laced and embroidered purple satin—the white satin-lined pointed skirts reaching to his heels—knee-breeches and diamond buckles, the powdered hair enhancing his Napoleonic beauty.

In 1804, Aaron Burr wrote from Washington to his daughter: "Jerome Bonaparte and his bride are here. She is a charming little woman—just the figure and nearly the size of Theodosia Burr Alston, by some thought a little like her; perhaps not so well in the shoulders; dresses with taste and simplicity (by some thought too free); has sense, spirit and sprightliness." Jerome now began to quake at Napoleon's fulminations against his marriage, and but for his spirited wife would have longer delayed confronting the imperial wrath. In 1805 they set sail from Philadelphia, but before reaching the Capes a terrific gale drove them on a sandbank, each moment threatening destruction. Mme. Bonaparte's courage saved their lives. Clambering to the deck, she insisted that the sailors should man a boat. "Pray, are you commanding this vessel?" asked the captain.—"Yes, if necessary."—"How do you propose reaching that boat?" he queried when at length it was launched.—"You are to throw me in." He obeyed, but in attempting to lower her from the ship, now nearly on its side, his strength failed and she fell into the waves. Her wadded silk pelisse carried her down, but as she rose the sailors grasped and hauled her into the boat. "Where is Prince Jerome?" was her first question in that perilous moment. They reached land through a dangerous surf, and forgot their drenching in the hospitality of a farm-house. "You irreligious little wretch!" said her aunt: "instead of kneeling in thanksgiving for your deliverance, you are enjoying roast goose and apple sauce!"

Not disheartened by this ominous venture, in a few weeks they again embarked for Lisbon, where, after Jerome's desertion, his wife remained for seven days, and then sailed for Amsterdam. As the Erin lay in Texel Roads, the captain of a French frigate came daily to present "ses hommages à Mademoiselle Patterson," and to ascertain her orders for the day. "Prisoners, sir, have no orders to give," was her reply. Perceiving the futility of opposing the emperor's decrees, and justly apprehensive of personal peril should she force a landing on the Continent, she sailed for Dover, but here again she was immeshed in Bonaparte restrictions, as no member of that family could enter England without permission of the government. Mr. Pitt, then prime minister, sent a military escort, which lined the way, keeping off the crowd that strove to get a glimpse of her as she disembarked and entered her carriage. At Camberwell, her son, Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte, was born, eighteen months after her marriage. Two months later she sailed for the United States. Her father in the marriage contract had guaranteed to her certain property and one thousand dollars per annum, but on her return he declined to redeem his promise, on the plea that her rejection by the First Consul, by invalidating the marriage, had nullified his agreement with his child, whose misfortune he resented as a crime. Prince Jerome at the birth of their son sent her a thousand guineas, and with this paltry sum she began life anew.

Neither poverty nor the humiliating overthrow of her happiness daunted this young creature's spirit, which rose always to the occasion. When King Jerome, after his marriage with the princess of Würtemberg, offered his repudiated wife the principality of Smalcand with forty thousand dollars per annum, her witty reply, that "Westphalia no doubt was a considerable kingdom, but not large enough to hold two queens," so pleased the emperor that he directed the French minister at Washington, M. Serrurier, to intimate his wish to serve her. "Tell the emperor that I am ambitious: I wish to be made a duchess of France." This the emperor promised to do at a later moment, and offered her twenty thousand dollars down and a life annuity of twelve thousand dollars, which she accepted, "proud to be indebted to the greatest man of modern times," but with the proviso that the receipt for payment should be signed by her as Elizabeth Bonaparte, which would be a virtual acknowledgment of the legality of her marriage and her claims on the head of the family. To this stipulation the emperor acceded, and until his abdication the annuity was regularly paid. Jerome was stung to a protest against her acceptance of aid from his brother while rejecting his own, to which she retorted that she "preferred shelter beneath the wing of the eagle to suspension from the pinion of the goose."

Mme. Bonaparte now applied to the Maryland Legislature for a divorce, which was at once granted. This action on her part was natural, but as a matter of policy questionable. His wife by every law human and divine, she could better have guarded her son's interests, and even maintained her own rightful position, by ignoring Jerome's alliance with the princess, which was regarded by Catholic Christendom as illegal, the pope stoutly refusing to nullify the previous marriage.

Mme. Bonaparte always expresses enthusiasm for the emperor, despite the despotism that shivered the fair fabric of her life, seeking its excuse in the exigencies of his anomalous position. During her residence in Paris after the Restoration, Louis Dix-Huit—Des Huitres, the wits styled him from his inordinate love of oysters—fancying that her presence would reflect contemptuously on the late "Corsican usurper," made known his wish to see her at court. This honor she declined, "not wishing to pose as a victim of imperial tyranny: she had accepted the emperor's kindness, and ingratitude was not one of her vices." Marshal Bertrand—"faithful among the faithless" Napoleon called him—who heard the last sigh of the great heart at St. Helena, visited this country thirty years ago and requested an interview with Mme. Bonaparte. "The emperor," he said, "had spoken of her talent with admiration tinged with regret for the shadow he had cast over her life, for he had heard of her generous sentiments toward him, alluding to which he one day said, 'Those whom I so wronged have forgiven me: those I overwhelmed with my bounty have forsaken me.'"

Mme. Bonaparte bore no malice to Jerome, whose nature was not of heroic mould; and yet what touching professions of fidelity he sent her!—letters unsurpassed in manly tenderness. A few months after their separation a gentleman writes of him: "He is always saying, 'My wife! my dear little wife!' He seems much affected, and declares that he 'shall for ever remember the shipwreck they had encountered: how well on that trying occasion did she behave! how, when danger was over, he pressed her in his arms!'" "Jerome loved me to the last," says Mme. Bonaparte: "he thought me the handsomest woman in the world, and the most charming. After his marriage to the princess he gave to the court-painter several miniatures of me from which to make a portrait, which he kept hidden from the good Catherine."

With the return of the Bourbons, Mme. Bonaparte was free to tread the soil of France, and among the throngs of lovely women who entered Paris after Waterloo she was no inconspicuous figure. Portraits and contemporaries represent her as uncommonly beautiful—the spirited head crowned with waving brown hair; large, lustrous, liquid hazel eyes, promising a tender sensibility that did not exist; a nose of delicate Greek outline; mouth and rounded chin nests for Cupid; arms, bust and shoulders to satisfy a sculptor. Surgeon-General Larrey, the medical attendant at St. Helena, meeting Mme. Bonaparte at dinner in Paris, requested their host, Count Rochefoucauld, to intercede with her for the privilege of looking at the back of her neck. After studying her a moment, he said, "It is extraordinary! The bend of the neck, the contour of face, the pose of the head, even the manner of rising from her chair, are singular in their resemblance to the emperor." The duchess D'Abrantes (Mme. Junot) describes in her Memoirs a meeting with Jerome, "who showed us a fine miniature of his wife, the features exquisitely beautiful, with a resemblance to those of the princess Borghese, which Jerome said he and many Frenchmen in Baltimore had remarked. 'Judge,' he said, replacing the portrait in his bosom, 'if I can abandon a being like her! I only wish the emperor would consent to see her, to hear her voice, but for a single moment. For myself, I am resolved not to yield.'" Walpole's friend, Miss Berry, met Mme. Bonaparte in the salon of Mme. Récamier, "who sat on a chaise longue with a headache and twelve or fifteen men, only two ladies being present—Mme. Moreau and Mrs. Patterson, the ex-wife of Jerome Bonaparte, who is exceedingly pretty, without grace and not at all shy.... Mme. Récamier is the beauty of this new world, if she can be called handsome: her manners are doucereuses, thinking much of herself, with perfect carelessness about others, for, besides being a beauty, she has pretensions to bel esprit: they may be as well founded as the other, yet not sufficient to burn her for a witch." Now, Miss Berry—called the black-Berry, in contradistinction to her duller sister, the goose-Berry—was jaundiced in her estimation of both beauties, and Mme. Bonaparte bears tribute to "that rare loveliness of temper and tact in displaying the good qualities even of rivals that were potent weapons in Récamier's quiver of charms." Miss Berry's dictum is also outweighed by the homage of Mme. de Staël's envying sigh, that she "would willingly exchange her genius for Récamier's beauty." Mme. Récamier was anxious that Mme. Bonaparte should know "Corinne." "No, no," she replied: "De Staël est une colosse qui m'écraserait; elle me trouverait une jolie bête et je ne veux pas être tuée à Paris par ce mot-là."

The duke of Wellington succeeded Napoleon in his residence at the Elysée-Bourbon, since then fitted up as the dower-palace of Eugénie, and now the head-quarters of President MacMahon. Gay, fickle Paris, oblivious of disaster, was shouting hosannas to the victor of its erewhile idol, and in this carnival of fêtes those of the duke were surpassingly magnificent. Mme. Bonaparte describes Wellington as "short, erect, spare of figure, with long pale face, thin-lipped, obstinate mouth, small light eyes, high, sharp, angular nose, the head disproportionately large, and as squarely flat as an Indian's, reverence and benevolence being undeveloped. Coldly quiet in voice and greeting, simple and high-bred in manner, there was in this reticence a suggestion of reserved force exceedingly attractive." At one of these balls Mme. Bonaparte was seated in conversation with the handsome and fascinating Lord Castlereagh, when Mme. de Staël approached, and stopping in front of her gazed steadily for a moment, then turning to her son, Baron de Staël-Holstein, on whose arm she leaned, an intimate friend of Mme. Bonaparte, she said, "Oui, elle est bien, bien jolie," and walked off without another word. Near by sat Lady Morgan, whose success, literary and social, was phenomenal. As Sidney Owenson, soon after her Wild Irish Girl made her famous, she sat awestruck opposite to Dr. Johnson at a large London dinner, when suddenly, to the terror of the child, untamed as her own heroine, burly Samuel called across in severe tones, "Little girl! little girl! where did you get so many hard words?"—"Please, sir, in your dictionary," was the naïve reply that disarmed the lexicographer. In Lady Morgan's Memoirs we read: "Mme. Bonaparte, wife of Jerome, who had abandoned her in a cruel and dastardly way, was not of the pâte out of which victims and martyrs are made. She held her difficult position with a scornful courage that excites pity for the woman's nature so scathed and outraged. Her letters bear the impress of a life run to waste: they are clever, mordant and amusing, but the bitter sense of wrong cannot be concealed: there is a dissatisfaction—one might almost call it jealousy—in the topics discussed." Mme. Bonaparte keeps her friend au courant with Paris gossip, but we have only space to glance at the revelation of her weary, empty heart: "Paris, November, 1816. Dear Lady Morgan: I have executed all your commissions except that auprès de Mme. de Genlis. I have been so unwell it has been impossible for me to visit the penitent at the Carmelites. I meet the princess de Beauveau every week at Mme. Rumford's, where there is an assemblage of gens d'esprit—not that I call myself one of them. However, people say that I am very good, which is my passport to these réunions. I have been asking after the Novice of St. Dominic, which has not yet been seen by any of your friends." [William Pitt read this novel for the fifth time a few days before his death.] "I have been very triste: tout m'ennuie dans ce mondeci, et je ne sçais pas pourquoi, unless it be the recollection of what I have suffered. I think the best thing for me is to return to my dear child. I love him so entirely that seeing him may render my feelings less poignant. Any inconveniences are more supportable than being separated from one's children. How much more we love them than our husbands! the latter are often so selfish and cruel; but children cannot force mothers from their affection."... "Paris, 1817 Your kind letter by Tom Moore reached me. He seldom sees me: I did not take with him at all.... How happy you must be at filling the world with your name! Mme. de Staël and Mme. de Genlis are forgotten, and if the love of fame be of any weight, your excursion to Paris was a brilliant success. Your work on France has appeared through a French translation, in which they have suppressed what they thought best. Its truths cannot at this moment be admitted here, but in all other countries it will have complete success. The violent clamor of the Paris gazettes proves it to be too well written. They are publishing it in America, where your talents are justly appreciated.... I have not seen Mme. d'H—— for a long time: she dines at half-past nine—wakes when other persons sleep, which makes it impossible to enjoy her society without paying the price of a night's repose.... Your friend and admirer Mr. S—— is dead of old age. I met him two weeks previous at a party. His widow gave a dinner the next week, because she was afraid of being triste—receives and appears on the Boulevards, because 'bon ami m'a dit qu'il fallait vivre.' Her friends flatter themselves that her sensibility will not kill her, at the same time that it enables them to give agreeable parties.... My desire to see my child is stronger than my taste for Paris. I am of your opinion: the best thing a woman can do is to marry: even quarrels with one's husband are preferable to the ennui of a solitary existence. There are so many hours apart from those appropriated to the world that one cannot get rid of—at least one like myself, having no useful occupation. You never felt ennui, because you cultivate talents which will immortalize you.... Mme. de Staël died regretting a life that she had contrived to render very agreeable. Her most intimate friends were ignorant that a marriage with M. Rocca existed, and unless her will had substantiated the fact they would have treated it as a calumny. Marrying a man twenty years younger than herself, without fortune or name, is in France un ridicule, pire qu'un crime. What think you of the Manuscript of St. Helena being attributed to her and Benjamin Constant? Is it possible to carry the desire of rendering her inconsistent further?... Adieu! Your recollection accompanies me to the New World, where I hope I may meet any one half so agreeable. They write me that my son is pétri d'esprit. I fear that after exciting my hopes he will become, like the generality of people, mediocre and tiresome. Yours affectionately, Eliza Patterson."

The next letter is preceded by Lady Morgan's comment: "Mme. Bonaparte, with her airy manner, beauty and wit, would have made an excellent princess, American as she was. One wonders that Napoleon should have been blind to her capabilities—he whose motto was, 'The tools to him who can use them.'"—"Baltimore, 1818. Dear Lady Morgan:... The demand for your work on France was so great that it went through three editions with us.... My son is intelligent, good and very handsome.... You have a great deal of imagination, but it can give you no idea of the mode of existence inflicted on us. The men are all merchants, and commerce may fill the purse, but clogs the brain: beyond their counting-houses they possess not a single idea; they never visit except when they wish to marry. The women are occupied in les détails du ménage and nursing children—useful occupations that do not render them agreeable to their neighbors. The men, being all bent on marriage, do not attend to me, because they fancy I am not inclined to change the evils of my condition for those they could offer me. I have been thought so ennuyée as to accept very respectable offers, but I prefer remaining as I am to marrying a person to whom I am indifferent. My letters from Paris say that Decaze, the minister of police, is created a peer and is to marry Princess de Beauveau. It appears very strange to my recollections of political feelings, but nothing is too surprising with politicians. He is very handsome at least—not a bad thing in a husband: they say, too, that he has talents and sensibility.... Suppose you were to come to this country: it is becoming the fashion to travel here, and you might find materials for an interesting work.... It is impossible for me to return to Europe: a single woman is exposed to so many disagreeable comments in a foreign land. Besides, I have only eleven hundred pounds a year—not enough to support me out of my own family.... I embroider and read. Do you remember Mme. de Staël's description of the mode of life Corinne found in an English country town, the subjects of conversation limited to births, deaths and marriages? My opinion on these topics has long been decided: that it is a misery to be born and married I have painfully experienced.... Have you a good college in Dublin? I might send my son there in two years, as he cannot go to France, and I do not wish him to be educated in England, where his name would not recommend him to favor."

"Geneva, 1819. Dear Lady Morgan:... I should never have ventured on another voyage to Europe could I have found the means of education for my son.... We have been nearly ruined by commercial speculations, and even I have suffered.... My son's education, too, demands no inconsiderable expense, and his father never has, and never will, contribute a single farthing toward his maintenance. We have no correspondence since the demand that he would pay part of his necessary expenditure, which he positively refused.... This town is intolerably expensive—as much so as Paris: there exists, too, an esprit de coterie appalling to women strangers, for men are les bien venus partout. They have a custom parmi les gens du haut of receiving strangers to board at a very high price seulement pour leur agrément, in which houses there is no feast to be found unless it be of reason: the hosts are too spirituels to fancy that we possess a vulgar appetite for meat, vegetables, tarts and custards; but as I cannot subsist altogether on the contemplation of la belle Nature, I have taken an apartment, hoping to get something to eat.... My health is restored, and I am much less in the genre larmoyant than when you saw me.... I am happy not to have gone to Edinburgh: the climate here is finer, living cheaper and the language French—more desirable for my son. Why do you persist in living in Ireland?"

King Jerome afterward allowed his son one hundred dollars per month for seven years, but with malignant cruelty ignored him in his will, which wrong at once to her son and her own wifely fame Mme. Bonaparte contested in Paris with a spirit that elicited the sympathy of Europe; but Napoleon III., for reasons of policy, permitted her defeat, and also at this time discontinued the annuity of fourteen thousand dollars allowed to her son, Jerome Bonaparte, although recognizing him at court as his cousin; but the six thousand dollars per annum granted to her grandson, Captain Bonaparte, ceased only with the Empire.

"Geneva, 1820. Dear Lady Morgan:... Baron Bonstetten came to see me to-day. You were the subject of our conversation: nothing but admiration. M. Sismondi has made my acquaintance—he is married too: I wonder that people of genius marry. I have been in such a state of melancholy as to wish myself dead a thousand times. What think you of a person advising me to turn Methodist? Have you read Lamartine's Méditations poétiques? There are some fine things in them, but he is too larmoyant and of the bad school of politics. Miss Edgeworth is here: she came to see me, but we have not met. She has a great deal of good sense, which I particularly object to in my companions unless accompanied by genius.... They are so reasonable and unmoved in this place, their mornings devoted to the exact sciences, their evenings to whist! There have been some English, but I have seen little of them: they are cold, formal, affected—just my antipodes; therefore we should not please each other: they require a year to become acquainted, and I have too little left of life to waste on formalities.... In this birthplace of Calvinism I found no trace of its originator, either in actual relics or asceticism: it was rather the centre of folly and license."

Baron Bonstetten, savant and philanthropist—whom Lady Morgan styles "that fresh, frisky old darling"—showed Mme. Bonaparte paternal kindness. In a morning visit she found him in his library examining letters. He said, "Asseyez vous un peu, mon enfant, en attendant que je finisse de ces papiers," and she sat for an hour reading letters from celebrities which he tossed to her—among others, perhaps inadvertently, from Mme. de Staël, proving the good baron's admiration for Corinne to have been "warmer than friendship if colder than love." At a ball at Bonstetten's, as Mme. Bonaparte entered the room, a stout, handsome man covered with orders eagerly exclaimed, "Qui est-ce? qui est-ce?"—"La première femme de Jérome Bonaparte," replied the princess Gallitzin. It was Duke William of Würtemberg, uncle of Jerome's second wife. He requested a presentation, took both hands affectionately, and after conversing half an hour led her to his duchess, to whom he said afterward, "Mais, mon Dieu! que Jérome a manqué son coup. Quelle grâce, quelle beauté, quel esprit! Et ma pauvre nièce! il faut être juste; jamais ne pourrait-elle régner comme cette belle Américaine, qui par tout droit est vraiment la reine. Jérome a été bête de la quitter."—"Ah," said Bonstetten, "si elle n'est pas reine de Westphalie, elle est au moins reine des cœurs."

Jerome sent for his son, then a lad, to visit him at Rome, where he remained several months, treated with affection by his father and with maternal kindness by the princess, who went two leagues to meet him, and taking his face between her hands said tearfully, "Ah! mon enfant, je suis la cause innocente de tous vos malheurs." She evinced always the utmost interest in her predecessor. Mme. Rubelle was appointed lady of honor to her when queen of Westphalia, and was meaningly questioned, "Are all the American ladies as beautiful as yourself?" Prince Woronzow said of these rival wives, "Je suis amoureux des deux reines de Westphalie."

On her arrival in France the princess of Würtemberg halted at Raincy to meet Prince Jerome, "who had sworn to me," says Mme. Junot, "never to forget the mother of his son, the young wife who had given him a paradise in a strange land.... The princess was not pretty; she seldom smiled; her expression was haughty.... Her complexion was fair and fresh, hair light, eyes blue, teeth very white.... As the princess had made up her mind to give her hand to Jerome, it was desirable that she should please him, as he certainly regretted his wife; and Miss Patterson was really his wife and a charming woman.... Her dress was in uncommon bad taste—the gown of bluish-white moire, trimmed in front with badly-worked silver embroidery in a forgotten style; a little train resembling the round tail of a beaver; tight, flat sleeves, pressing the arm above the elbow like a bandage after blood-letting. Her pointed shoes belonged to the era of King John, the hair old-fashioned in style. About her neck were two rows of very fine pearls, to which was suspended the portrait of the prince set in diamonds, and much too large to be ornamental, as it dangled from her neck and bestowed heavy blows at every step.... Marshal Bessières had espoused the princess by proxy.... As Jerome entered she advanced two steps and made him her compliments with grace and dignity.... Jerome seemed to be there because he had been told 'You must go.' After Jerome retired the princess fainted."

The duke of Würtemberg was a mere tool in Napoleon's hands, and his pliancy was rewarded. In 1809 the emperor greeted him as mon frère.—"Comment, Sire? No longer your cousin?"—"You were mon cousin: you are now Monsieur mon frère!" And yet the domestic tragedy of this new frère was known to the imperial king-maker! In 1780 the duke had married Princess Caroline of Brunswick, young and beautiful, who was accused of regarding too favorably a page in her service. Letters inculpating them were found, a family and state council was convened, and the page sentenced to death, while all concurred in the guilt of the duchess. A divorce was proposed, but finally her death was decreed. The page lodged in the palace, his door opening on a corridor beneath which were similar corridors, in each of which a trapdoor was now arranged, one below the other, a slight flooring concealing the one immediately above the apartment of the duchess. As the unsuspicious page stole at midnight to the rendezvous, the trap yielded, and from floor to floor he was dashed, mangled and dead, to the feet of the duchess. The infatuated woman, previously warned, had refused to abandon her lover; but now she sought escape, was intercepted, and the city executioner immediately brought blindfolded to the great hall, where he beheld a fair, noble woman bound hands and feet. He implored to be spared his terrible task, but, sworn to secrecy, he was forced under penalty of instant death to strike the fatal blow. He drew up a detailed account of the double murder and sent it to Baron Bretueil, then French minister of state, who laid the matter before King Louis XVI. Jerome's wife was the daughter of this unfortunate princess. The duke afterward married a daughter of George III. of England.

Mme. Bonaparte's last meeting with Jerome was at the Pitti Palace in Florence in 1822, and, singular to say, these once wedded lovers did not know each other! She chanced to be attired in her most recherché costume—a rich silk halfway to the knee, then the mode, displaying dainty prunella shoes; a gauze hat about three feet in circumference, with high-wired bows; a crimson cashmere shawl and large green velvet reticule. In passing through the gallery she was attracted by the eager, persistent stare of a very handsome man whom she did not recognize, but whose strange likeness to her son enchained her. Suddenly the truth flashed to her heart: "It is Jerome!" He meanwhile, gazing at her, said to one of the ladies with him, "Si belle! si belle! qui est-ce?"—"Vous devriez la connaître, c'est votre première femme," replied Mme. Joseph Bonaparte. Jerome started, and with an agitated whisper to the other lady, the princess Catherine, they left the gallery. For one moment only the two "discrowned queens" were face to face. The next day Mme. Bonaparte was driving in the Cascine, when from a passing carriage Jerome nearly precipitated himself in a last, lingering look at the wife of his youth.

At that period Florence was the focus of continental social brilliancy, and Mme. Bonaparte was received with due distinction at its charming court. "My presentation was special," she relates, "and being superbly dressed, though caring but little for chiffons, I advanced with entire composure and self-satisfaction through the apartments of the Pitti Palace, crowded with the élite of the court and diplomacy. Preceded by the chamberlain, I was welcomed by the grand duke and duchess with such kindness as quite to overcome me, and I nearly burst into tears; but saying to myself, 'Good gracious! I shall spoil my lovely satin gown, and be thought bête to make a scene,' this reflection restored my serenity and enabled me to go through the ceremony with becoming dignity."

"Si elle etait reine avec quelle grâce elle règnerait," said Talleyrand after one of their witty jousts, in which he was not always victor. "She charms by her eyes while she slays with her tongue," said Count Crillon: if her unsparing repartee inspired wholesome fear, she disarmed by her tact, sportive manner and childlike laughter. "Had she been near the throne the Allies would have found it even more difficult to dispose of Napoleon," said Gortschakoff, that brilliant and fascinating Russian, noted even then for the astuteness and diplomatic resource that still steady the Russian helm through Disraelian and Bismarckian breakers, and who now, after fifty years, faithful in friendship, recalls to his belle alliée the guerre spirituelle épigrammatique of their bright spring-time. The duke of Buckingham and Chandos in his Memoirs pays tribute to her talent, piquant charm and "untarnished name," while her enemy, Prince Napoleon—Plon-Plon—thus characterizes her: "Ambitieuse, un esprit indomptable, une réputation sans tâche."

She writes to Lady Morgan from Paris in 1825: "I passed only a few months in Rome, where I saw the most beautiful woman in the world, who has since died in her husband's palace in Florence, conjugally regretted by Prince Borghese. He buried her in the handsomest chapel in Europe. She left my son a legacy of twenty thousand francs.... I have paid a short visit to America. La Fayette was caressed, adored and substantially rewarded. I saw him, and talked to him of you, whom he loves and admires malgré le temps et l'absence. Fanny Wright was with or near him all the time he was in America. She is to write something of which he is to be the hero.... My son has grown up handsome—a classical profile and un esprit juste."

At Rome, Mme. Bonaparte first met her imperial relatives, by all of whom she was affectionately welcomed except Madame Mère. "Qu'est-ce que vous allez faire à son sujet?" questioned Pauline Borghese. "Je n'y ferai rien;" and to this armed neutrality she adhered, though by request sending her son daily to see his grandmother, until at length overtures were made and the spirited daughter-in-law received with cordiality. "She was not tall," says Mme. Bonaparte; "features like her great son; fine mournful eyes; a manner touching and majestic. She was then very dévote. Pauline was empty-headed, selfish and vain, cared only for luxury, but in every line exquisite as Canova's statue represents her. Hortense was not really handsome—irregular features, a wide mouth exposing the gums and defective teeth, a blemish in her mother, whose faultless figure, kindly nature and caressing manner she also inherited. She was lovely at the harp, and sang her own romances in a sweet voice."

Among the few celebrities of her day unknown by Mme. Bonaparte was Byron, who had expressed a great wish to meet her, so his friend Captain Medway told her. "I hate a dumpy woman," says the noble bard; and to that complexion did the Guiccioli come at last. Mme. Bonaparte knew her well—"a shower of golden curls; fair, with blue eyes, unlike the typical Italian; teeth and hands perfect; naïve and sweet of temper. Byron, she said, took a woman's care of his beauty; slept in gloves—he was so proud of his hands—and kept bits of cotton between his teeth to preserve their regularity."

In 1839, Mme. Bonaparte writes to Lady Morgan from Paris: "Death, time and absence have left me hardly an acquaintance here.... I hardly know which is most distressing—to hear that our friends have gone to the other world or have forgotten us in this.... My son is gone from Geneva to Italy to visit his relatives and to see after a legacy which his grand-uncle, Cardinal Fesch, had the goodness to leave him.... I have grown fat, old and dull—good reasons for persons not to think me an intelligent listener. They mistake: I have exactly the talent to appreciate the powers of others. Poor Mme. Junot made a sad end, the natural consequence of her prodigality: her pecuniary difficulties, it is said, caused her death. I liked her very much, and felt pained at the misery caused by her want of judgment. Her heart was generous and warm.... I know not if the late princess Charlotte, daughter of Joseph Bonaparte, was of your acquaintance: she possessed some mental superiority and many noble qualities."

"Lady Morgan," says Mme. Bonaparte, "was brilliant in wit, good-natured and flattering; short, with sparkling eyes; her hair close cut, in dark curls. 'Why is it,' she said to me, 'that you speak French perfectly, but English with such an American drawl?'—'For the same reason probably that yours is a brogue'—one of the miseries of her life."

"Baltimore, 1849.... No one expects me to be grateful for the evil chance of having been born here. Society and conversation belong to older countries: you ought to thank your stars for your European birth.... France, je l'espère, is in a transition state, and will not let her brilliancy be put under an extinguisher called la République. The emperor hurled me back on what I most hated on earth, my Baltimore obscurity: even that shock could not destroy the admiration I felt for his genius and glory. I have ever been an imperial Bonapartist quand même, and am enchanted at the homage paid by six millions of voices to his memory in voting an imperial President: the prestige of the name has elected a prince who has my most ardent wishes for an empire. Dear Lady Morgan, having been cheated out of my inheritance from my late rich and unjust father, I have only ten thousand dollars annually. You speak of my 'princely' income. I have all my life been tortured and mortified by pecuniary difficulties: but for my industry, energy and determination to conquer a decent sufficiency to live on in Europe, I might have remained as poor as you first saw me.... Lamartine and Chateaubriand are giving their memoirs to the public: the first de son vivant. When I knew Lamartine he was chargé d'affaires from Charles X. Florence was then a charming place. I met him every night in society. How little did I foresee that he was to become a poetical republican, and that dear Florence was to be travestied in a republic! Hoping that England may remain steady and faithful to monarchical principles, that at least some refined society may be left in the world, I shall, Dieu permettant, have the satisfaction of seeing you next summer."

Neither the climate nor "the freezing social convenance" of England pleased Mme. Bonaparte, though she was received with distinction. "Abroad, these fair insulars occasionally unbend and are charming" she says, "but at all times I have found Englishmen of birth the best bred and most agreeable men in the world."

Since her withdrawal from European life Mme. Bonaparte has lived secluded from society. Baltimore's shrewdest banker says that he knows "no man capable of creating legitimately, with so small a capital, the large fortune amassed by Mme. Bonaparte." She has no accomplishment in any branch of art, and although her love of study remains, her fast-increasing blindness deprives her of this resource. Her diary, if ever given to the public, will have the effect of a shower of cayenne; but her magnum opus, which discretion will probably forbid seeing the light, is entitled Dialogues of the Dead, the scene being laid in Hades, where her father and King Jerome rehearse her story. Her wit is still incisive, her conversation replete with interest, her memory retaining minutely every incident and figure of the wondrous diorama that has unrolled before her eyes close upon a hundred years. Her birth was nearly coeval with that of our republic, many of whose fathers she knew. She wept as the tidings of Marie Antoinette's tragedy reached our shores; she was a woman when Washington died; Jefferson was her friend; La Fayette has held her hand; and her name is imperishably associated with one "who kept the world at bay, whose game was empires, whose stakes were thrones."

---

A SUMMER EVENING'S DREAM.

It is a village street, with great elms on either side, while along the middle stands another row set in a narrow strip of grassy common, so that the street and roadway are in reality double. The dwellings on either side are not only widely parted by the broad street, but are still further isolated, each in its large garden of ancient fruit trees. It is four o'clock of a sunny August afternoon, and a quiet, Sabbath-like but for its lazy voluptuousness, broods over the scene. No carriage, or even pedestrian, has passed for an hour. The occasional voices of children at play in some garden, the latching of a gate far down the street, the dying fall of a drowsy chanticleer, are but the punctuation of the poem of summer silence that has been flowing on all the afternoon. Upon the tree-tops the sun blazes brightly, and between their stems are glimpses of outlying meadows, which simmer in the heat as if about to come to a boil. But the shadowed street offers a cool and refreshing vista to the eye and a veritable valley of refuge to the parched and dusty traveller along the highway.

On the broad piazza of one of the quaint old-fashioned houses, behind a needless screen of climbing woodbine, two girls are whiling away the afternoon. One of them is lounging in a lazy rocking-chair, while the other sits more primly and is industriously sewing.

"I suppose you'll be glad enough to see George when he comes to-night to take you back to the city? I'm afraid you find it pretty dull here," said the latter with an intonation of uneasy responsibility sufficiently attesting that the brilliant-looking girl opposite was a guest.

That young lady when addressed was indulging in a luxurious country yawn, an operation by no means to be hurried, but to be fully and lazily enjoyed in all its several and long-drawn stages, and as thus practised a wonderfully calming and soporific relaxation wholly unknown to the fretted denizens of cities, whose yawn is one of irritation and not of rest. "I do so enjoy your Plainfield yawns, Lucy," she said when she had quite finished. "Were you saying that it was a little dull? Well, perhaps it is, but then the trees and things seem to be enjoying themselves so hugely that it would be selfish to make a fuss, even if it isn't exactly my kind of fun."

"Your kind of fun is due by the six-o'clock stage, I believe."

The other laughed and said, "I wish you wouldn't make another allusion to George. I think of him so much that I'm ashamed as it is. I'm sure this is a very aggravating place for an engaged girl to be at. One gets so dreadfully sentimental with nothing to take up the mind, especially with such monstrous moons as you have. I got fairly frightened of the one last night. It drew me out through my eyes like a big plaster."

"Mabel French!"

"I don't care: it did. That was just the feeling."

There was no hurry about talking, for the rich, mellow summer silence had a body to it that prevented pauses from seeming empty, and it might have been half an hour afterward that Mabel suddenly leaned forward, putting her face close to the vine-trellis, and cried in a low voice, "Who's that? Do tell me! They're the very first persons who have gone by this afternoon, I do believe."

A pretty phaeton was slowly passing, containing an elderly gentleman and lady.

"Oh, that is only Lawyer Morgan and old Miss Rood," replied Lucy, just glancing up, and then down again. "They go out driving once a week regularly, and always at about this time in the afternoon."

"They look like afternoon sort of people," said Mabel. "But why doesn't Lawyer Morgan take out his wife?"

"He hasn't got any. Miss Rood comes nearest to that. Oh no, you needn't open your eyes: there's not a properer old maid in town, or old bachelor either, for that matter."

"Are they relatives?"

"No, indeed."

"How long has this Platonic romance been going on, pray?"

"Oh, ever since they were young—forty years perhaps. I only know by tradition, you see. It began ages before my day. They say she was very pretty once. Old Aunty Perkins remembers that she was quite the belle of the village as a girl. It seems strange, doesn't it?"

"Tell me the whole story," said Mabel, turning round so as to face Lucy as the phaeton passed out of sight.

"There's not much to tell. Mr. Morgan has always lived here, and so has Miss Rood. He lives alone with a housekeeper in that fine house at the end of the street, and she entirely alone in that little white house over there among the apple trees. All the people who knew them when they were young are dead, gone away or moved off. They are relics of a past generation, and are really about as much shut up to each other for sympathy as an old married couple."

"Well, why on earth aren't they married?"

"People hereabouts got tired of asking that full thirty years ago," replied Lucy with a little shrug. "Even the gossips long since wore out the subject, and I believe we have all of us forgotten that there is anything peculiar about their relations. He calls on her two or three times a week, and takes her out driving on pleasant days; escorts her to places of amusement or social gatherings when either of them cares to go, which isn't often; and wherever they are, people take it for granted they will pair off together. He is never seen with any other lady."

"It's very strange," said Mabel thoughtfully, "and I'm sure it's very romantic. Queer old couple! I wonder how they really feel toward each other, and whether they wouldn't like to be married?"

A while after she suddenly demanded, "Don't you think Miss Rood looks like me?"

Lucy laughed at first, but upon closer inspection of the fair questioner admitted that there might be some such resemblance as the shrivelled apples brought up from the cellar in spring bear to the plump, rosy-cheeked beauties that went down in October.

If Mr. Morgan and Miss Rood, as they rode past, had chanced to overhear Mabel's question why they had not married, it would have affected them very differently. He would have been startled by the novelty of an idea that had not occurred to him in twenty years, but the blush on her cheek would have been one of painful consciousness.

As boy and girl they had been each other's chosen companion, and as young man and maiden their childish preference had bloomed into a reciprocal love. Thanks to the freedom and simplicity of village life, they enjoyed as lovers a constant and easy familiarity and daily association almost as complete in sympathy of mind and heart as anything marriage could offer. There were none of the usual obstacles to incite them to matrimony. They were never even formally engaged, so wholly did they take it for granted that they should marry. It was so much a matter of course that there was no hurry at all about it; and besides, so long as they had it to look forward to the foreground of life was illuminated for them: it was still morning. Mr. Morgan was constitutionally of a dreamy and unpractical turn, a creature of habits and a victim of ruts; and as years rolled on he became more and more satisfied with these half-friendly, half-loverlike relations. He never found the time when it seemed an object to marry, and now, for very many years, the idea had not even occurred to him as possible; and so far was he from the least suspicion that Miss Rood's experience had not been precisely similar to his own, that he often congratulated himself on the fortunate coincidence.

Time cures much, and many years ago Miss Rood had recovered from the first bitterness of discovering that his love had become insensibly transformed into a very tender but perfectly peaceful friendship. No one but him had ever touched her heart, and she had no interest in life besides him. Since she was not to be his wife, she was glad to be his lifelong, tender, self-sacrificing friend. So she raked the ashes over the fire in her heart, and left him to suppose that it had gone out as in his. Nor was she without compensation in their friendship. It was with a delightful thrill that she felt how fully in mind and heart he leaned and depended upon her, and the unusual and romantic character of their relations in some degree consoled her for the disappointment of womanly aspirations by a feeling of distinction. She was not like other women: her lot was set apart and peculiar. She looked down upon her sex. The conventionality of women's lives renders their vanity peculiarly susceptible to a suggestion that their destiny is in any respect unique—a fact that has served the turn of many a seducer before now.

To-day, after returning from his drive with Miss Rood, Mr. Morgan had walked in his garden, and as the evening breeze arose, it bore to his nostrils that first indescribable flavor of autumn which warns us that the soul of Summer has departed from her yet glowing body. He was very sensitive to these changes of the year, and, obeying an impulse that had been familiar to him in all unusual moods his life long, he left the house after tea and turned his steps down the street. As he stopped at Miss Rood's gate, Lucy, Mabel and George Hammond were under the apple trees in the garden opposite.

"Look, Mabel! There's Mr. Morgan going to call on Miss Rood," said Lucy softly.

"Oh, do look, George!" said Mabel eagerly. "That old gentleman has been paying court to an old maid over in that little house for forty years. And to think," she added in a lower tone, intended for his private ear, "what a fuss you make about waiting six months!"

"Humph! You please to forget that it's easier to wait for some things than for others. Six months of my kind of waiting, I take it, require more patience than forty years of his—or any other man's," he added with increased emphasis.

"Be quiet, sir!" replied Mabel, answering his look of unruly admiration with one of half pique. "I'm not a sugar-plum, that's not enjoyed till it's in the mouth. If you haven't got me now, you'll never have me. If being engaged isn't enough, you don't deserve to be married." And then, seeing the blank expression with which he looked down at her, she added with a prescient resignedness, "I'm afraid, dear, you'll be so disappointed when we're married if you find this so tedious."

Lucy had discreetly wandered away, and of how they made it up there were no witnesses. But it seems likely that they did so, for shortly after they wandered away together down the darkening street.

Like most of the Plainfield houses, that at which Mr. Morgan turned in stood well back from the street. At a side window, still further sheltered from view by a syringa-bush at the house corner, sat a little woman with a small pale face, the still attractive features perceptibly sharpened by years, of which the half-gray hair bore further testimony. The eyes, just now fixed absently upon the dusking landscape, were light gray and a little faded, while around the lips there were crowsfeet, especially when they were pressed together, as now, in an unsatisfied, almost pathetic look, evidently habitual to her face when in repose. There was withal something in her features that so reminded you of Mr. Morgan that any one conversant with the facts of his life-romance would have at once inferred—though by just what logic he might not be able to explain—that this must be Miss Rood. It is well known that long-wedded couples often gain at length a certain resemblance in feature and manner; and although these two were not married, yet their intimacy of a lifetime was perhaps the reason why her face bore when in repose something of that seer-like expression which communion with the bodiless shapes of memory had given to his.

The latching of the gate broke up her depressing revery and banished the pinched and pining look from her features. Among the neighbors Miss Rood was sometimes called a sour old maid, but the face she kept for Mr. Morgan would never have suggested that idea to the most ill-natured critic.

He stopped at the window, near which the walk passed to the doorway, and stood leaning on the sill—a tall slender figure, stooping a little, with smooth scholarly face and thin iron-gray hair. His only noticeable feature was a pair of eyes whose expression and glow indicated an imaginative temperament. It was pleasant to observe the relieved restlessness in the look and manner of the two friends, as if at the mere being in each other's presence, though neither seemed in any haste to exchange even the words of formal greeting.

At length she said in a tone of quiet satisfaction, "I knew you would come, for I was sure this deathly autumn's flavor would make you restless. Isn't it strange how it affects the nerves of memory and makes one sad with thinking of all the sweet dear days that are dead?"

"Yes, yes," he answered eagerly: "I can think of nothing else. Do they not seem wonderfully clear and near to-night? To-night, of all nights in the year, if the figures and scenes of memory can be re-embodied in visible forms, they ought to become so to the eyes that strain and yearn for them."

"What a fanciful idea, Robert!"

"I don't know that it is: I don't feel sure. Nobody understands the mystery of this Past, or what are the conditions of existence in that world. These memories, these forms and faces, that are so near, so almost warm and visible that we find ourselves smiling on the vacant air where they seem to be, are they not real and living?"

"You don't mean you believe in ghosts?"

"I am not talking of ghosts of the dead, but of ghosts of the past—memories of scenes or persons, whether the persons are dead or not—of our own selves as well as others. Why," he continued, his voice softening into a passionate, yearning tenderness, "the figure I would give most to see just once more is yourself as a girl, as I remember you in the sweet grace and beauty of your maidenhood. Ah well! ah well!"

"Don't!" she cried involuntarily, while her features contracted in sudden pain.

In the years during which his passion for her had been cooling into a staid friendship his imagination had been recurring with constantly increasing fondness and a dreamy passion to the memory of her girlhood. And the cruellest part of it was that he so unconsciously and unquestioningly assumed that she could not have identity enough with that girlish ideal to make his frequent glowing references to it even embarrassing. Generally, however, she heard and made no sign, but the suddenness of his outburst just now had taken her off her guard.

He glanced up with some surprise at her exclamation, but was too much interested in his subject to take much notice of it. "You know," he said, "there are great differences in the distinctness with which we can bring up our memories. Very well! The only question is, What is the limit to that distinctness, or is there any? Since we know there are such wide degrees in distinctness, the burden of proof rests on those who would prove that those degrees stop short of any particular point. Don't you see, then, that it might be possible to see them?" And to enforce his meaning he laid his hand lightly on hers as it rested on the window-seat.

She withdrew it instantly from the contact, and a slight flush tinged her sallow cheeks. The only outward trace of her memory of their youthful relations was the almost prudish chariness of her person by which she indicated a sense of the line to be drawn between the former lover and the present friend.

"Something in your look just now," he said, regarding her musingly, as one who seeks to trace the lineaments of a dead face in a living one, "reminds me of you as you used to sit in this very window as a girl, and I stood just here, and we picked out stars together. There! now it's gone;" and he turned away regretfully.

She looked at his averted face with a blank piteousness which revealed all her secret. She would not have had him see it for worlds, but it was a relief just for a moment to rest her features in the sad cast which the muscles had grown tired in repressing. The autumn scent rose stronger as the air grew damp, and he stood breathing it in, and apparently feeling its influence like some Delphian afflatus.

"Is there anything, Mary—is there anything so beautiful as that light of eternity that rests on the figures of memory? Who that has once felt it can care for the common daylight of the present any more, or take pleasure in its prosaic groups?"

"You'll certainly catch cold standing in that wet grass: do come in and let me shut the blinds," she said, for she had found cheerful lamplight the best corrective for his vagaries.

So he came in and sat in his special arm-chair, and they chatted about miscellaneous village topics for an hour. The standpoint from which they canvassed Plainfield people and things was a peculiarly outside one. Their circle of two was like a separate planet from which they observed the world. Their tone was like, and yet quite unlike, that in which a long-married couple discuss their acquaintances; for, while their intellectual intimacy was perfect, their air expressed a constant mutual deference and solicitude of approbation not to be confounded with the terrible familiarity of matrimony; and at the same time they constituted a self-sufficient circle, apart from the society around them, as man and wife cannot. Man and wife are so far merged as to feel themselves a unit over against society. They are too much identified to find in each other that sense of support and countenance which requires a feeling of the exteriority of our friend's life to our own. If these two should marry they would shortly find themselves impelled to seek refuge in conventional relations with that society of which now they were calmly independent.

At length Mr. Morgan rose and threw open the blinds. The radiance of the full harvest-moon so flooded the room that Miss Rood was fain to blow out the poor lamp for compassion. "Let us take a walk," he said.

The streets were empty and still, and they walked in silence, spelled by the perfect beauty of the evening. The dense shadows of the elms lent a peculiarly rich effect to the occasional bars and patches of moonlight on the street floor; the white houses gleamed among their orchards; and here and there, between the dark tree-stems, there were glimpses of the shining surface of the broad outlying meadows, which looked like a surrounding sea.

Miss Rood was startled to see how the witchery of the scene possessed her companion. His face took on a set, half-smiling expression, and he dropped her arm as if they had arrived at the place of entertainment to which he had been escorting her. He no longer walked with measured pace, but glided along with a certain stealthiness, peering on this side and that down moony vistas and into shadow-bowers, as if half expecting, if he might step lightly enough, to catch a glimpse of some sort of dream-people basking there.

Nor could Miss Rood herself resist the impression the moony landscape gave of teeming with subtle forms of life, escaping the grosser senses of human beings, but perceptible by their finer parts. Each cosey nook of light and shadow was yet warm from some presence that had just left it. The landscape fairly stirred with ethereal forms of being beneath the fertilizing moon-rays, as the earth-mould wakes into physical life under the sun's heat. The yellow moonlight looked warm as spirits might count warmth. The air was electric with the thrill of circumambient existence. There was the sense of pressure, of a throng. It would have been impossible to feel lonely. The pulsating sounds of the insect world seemed the rhythm to which the voluptuous beauty of the night had spontaneously set itself. The common air of day had been transmuted into the atmosphere of revery and Dreamland. In that magic medium the distinction between imagination and reality fast dissolved. Even Miss Rood was conscious of a delightful excitement, a vague expectancy. Mr. Morgan, she saw, was moved quite beyond even his exaggerated habit of imaginative excitement. His wet, shining, wide-opened eyes and ecstatic expression indicated complete abandonment to the illusions of the scene.

They had seated themselves, as the concentration of the brain upon imaginative activity made the nerves of motion sluggish, upon a rude bench formed by wedging a plank between two elms that stood close together. They were within the shadow of the trees, but close up to their feet rippled a lake of moonlight. The landscape shimmering before them had been the theatre of their fifty years of life. Their history was written in its trees and lawns and paths. The very air of the place had acquired for them a dense, warm, sentient feeling, to which that of all other places was thin and raw. It had become tinctured by their own spiritual emanations, by the thoughts, looks, words and moods of which it had so long received the impression. It had become such vitalized air, surcharged with sense and thought, as might be taken to make souls for men out of.

Over yonder, upon the playground, yet lingered the faint violet fragrance of their childhood. Beneath that elm a kiss had once touched the air with a fire that still warmed their cheeks in passing. Yonder the look of a face was cut on the viewless air as on marble. Surely, death does but touch the living, for the dead ever keep their power over us: it is only we who lose ours over them. Each vista of leafy arch and distant meadow framed in some scene of their youth-time, painted in the imperishable hues of memory that borrow from time an ever-richer and more glowing tint. It was no wonder that to these two old people, sitting on the bench between the elms, the atmosphere before them, saturated with associations, dense with memories, should seem fairly quivering into material forms like a distant mist turning to rain.

At length Miss Rood heard her companion say, in a whisper of tremulous exultation, "Do you know, Mary, I think I shall see them very soon."

"See whom?" she asked, frightened at his strange tone.

"Why, see us, of course, as I was telling you," he whispered—"you and me as we were young—see them as I see you now. Don't you remember it was just along here that we used to walk on spring evenings? We walk here no more, but they do evermore, beautiful, beautiful children. I come here often to lie in wait for them. I can feel them now: I can almost, almost see them." His whisper became scarcely audible and the words dropped slowly. "I know the sight is coming, for every day they grow more vivid. It can't be long before I quite see them. It may come at any moment."

Miss Rood was thoroughly frightened at the intensity of his excitement, and terribly perplexed as to what she should do.

"It may come at any time: I can almost see them now," he murmured. "A—h! look!" With parted lips and unspeakably intense eyes, as if his life were flowing out at them, he was staring across the moonlit paths before them to the point where the path debouched from the shadow.

Following his eyes, she saw what for a moment made her head swim with the thought that she too was going mad. Just issuing from the shadows, as if in answer to his words, were a young man and a girl, his arm upon her waist, his eyes upon her face. At the first glance Miss Rood was impressed with a resemblance to her own features in those of the girl, which her excitement exaggerated to a perfect reproduction of them. For an instant the conviction possessed her that by some impossible, indescribable, inconceivable miracle she was looking upon the resurrected figures of her girlish self and her lover.

At first, Mr. Morgan had half started from his seat, and was between rising and sitting. Then he rose with a slow, involuntary movement, while his face worked terribly between bewilderment and abandonment to illusion. He tottered forward a few steps to the edge of the moonlight, and stood peering at the approaching couple with a hand raised to shade his eyes and a dazed, unearthly smile on his face. The girl saw him first, for she had been gazing demurely before her, while her lover looked only at her. At sight of the gray-haired man suddenly confronting them with a look of bedlam, she shrieked and started back in terror. Miss Rood, recalled to her senses, sprang forward, and catching Mr. Morgan's arm endeavored with gentle force to draw him away.

But it was too late for that. The young man, at first almost as much startled as his companion at the uncanny apparition, naturally experienced a revulsion of indignation at such an extraordinary interruption to his tête-à-tête, and stepped up to Mr. Morgan as if about to inflict summary chastisement. But perceiving that he had to do with an elderly man, he contented himself with demanding in a decidedly aggressive tone what the devil he meant by such a performance.

Mr. Morgan stared at him without seeing him, and evidently did not take in the words. He merely gasped once or twice, and looked as if he had fainted away on his feet. His blank, stunned expression showed that his faculties were momentarily benumbed by the shock. Miss Rood felt as if she should die for the pity of it as she looked at his face, and her heart was breaking for grief as she sought to mollify the young man with some inarticulate words of apology, meanwhile still endeavoring to draw Mr. Morgan away. But at this moment the girl, recovering from her panic, came up to the group and laid her hand on the young man's arm, as if to check and silence him. It was evident that she saw there was something quite unusual in the circumstances, and the look which she bent upon Mr. Morgan was one of sympathy and considerate interrogation. But Miss Rood could see no way out of their awkward situation, which grew more intolerable every moment as they thus confronted each other. It was finally Mr. Morgan's voice, quite firm, but with an indescribable sadness in the tones, which broke the silence: "Young people, I owe you an apology, such as it is. I am an old man, and the past is growing so heavy that it sometimes quite over-balances me. My thoughts have been busy to-night with the days of my youth, and the spell of memory has been so strong that I have not been quite myself. As you came in view I actually entertained the incredible idea for a moment that somehow I saw in you the materialized memories of myself and another as we once walked this same path."

The young man bowed as Mr. Morgan ended in a manner indicating his acceptance of the apology, although he looked both amazed and amused. But the explanation had a very different effect upon the girl at his side. As she listened her eyes had filled with tears and her face had taken on a wonderfully tender, pitiful smile. When he ended speaking, she impulsively said, "I'm so sorry we were not what you thought us! Why not pretend we are, to-night at least? We can pretend it, you know. The moonlight makes anything possible;" and then glancing at Miss Rood, she added, as if almost frightened, "Why, how much we look alike! I'm not sure it isn't true, anyway."

This was, in fact, an unusually marked example of those casual resemblances between strangers which are sometimes seen. The hair of the one was indeed gray and that of the other dark, but the eyes were of the same color by night, and the features, except for the greater fulness of the younger face, were cast in the same mould, while figure and bearing were strikingly similar, although daylight would doubtless have revealed diversities enough that moonlight refused to disclose.

The two women looked at each other with an expression almost of suspicion and fear, while the young man observed, "Your mistake was certainly excusable, sir."

"It will be the easier to pretend," said the girl as with a half-serious, half-sportive imperiousness she laid her hand on Mr. Morgan's arm. "And now it is thirty years ago, and we are walking together." He involuntarily obeyed the slight pressure, and they walked slowly away, leaving the other two after an embarrassed pause to follow them.

For some time they walked in silence. He was deliberately abandoning himself to the illusion, supported as it was by the evidence of his senses, that he was wandering in some of the mysterious between-worlds which he had so often dreamed of, with the love of his youth in her youth-time charm. Did he really believe it to be so? Belief is a term quite irrelevant to such a frame as his, in which the reflective and analytical powers are for a time purposely held in abeyance. The circumstances of her introduction to him had dropped from his mind as irrelevant accidents, like the absurdities which occur in our sweetest and most solemn dreams without marring their general impression in our memories. Every glance he threw upon his companion, while on the one hand it shocked his illusion in that she seemed not likely to vanish away, on the other strengthened it with an indescribable thrill by the revelation of some fresh trait of face or figure, some new expression, that reproduced the Miss Rood of his youth. Not, indeed, that it is likely his companion was thus perfectly the double of that lady, although so much resembling her, but the common graces of maidenhood were in Mr. Morgan's mind the peculiar personal qualities of the only woman he had ever much known.

Of his own accord he would not have dared to risk breaking the charm by a word. But his companion—who, as is tolerably evident by this time, was Mabel French—had meanwhile formed a scheme quite worthy of her audacious temper. She had at once recognized both Mr. Morgan and Miss Rood, and had gone thus far from a mere romantic impulse, without definite intentions of any sort. But the idea now came into her head that she might take advantage of this extraordinary situation to try a matchmaking experiment, which instantly captivated her fancy. So she said, while ever so gently pressing his arm and looking up into his face with an arch smile (she was recognized as the best amateur actress in her set at home), "I wonder if the moon will be so mellow after we are married?"

His illusion was rudely disturbed by the shock of an articulate voice, softly and low as she spoke, and he looked around with a startled expression that made her fear her rôle was ended. But she could not know that the eyes she turned to his were mirrors where he saw his dead youth. The two Miss Roods—the girl and the woman, the past and the present—were fused and become one in his mind. Their identity flashed upon him.

An artesian well sunk from the desert surface through the underlying strata, the layers of ages, strikes some lake long ago covered over, and the water welling up converts the upper waste into a garden. Just so at her words and her look his heart suddenly filled, as if it came from afar, with the youthful passion he had felt toward Miss Rood, but which, he knew not exactly when or how, had been gradually overgrown with the dulness of familiarity and had lapsed into an indolent affectionate habit. The warm voluptuous pulse of this new feeling—new, and yet instantly recognized as old—brought with it a flood of youthful associations, and commingled the far past with the present in a confusion more complete and more intoxicating than ever. He saw double again. "Married!" he murmured dreamily. "Yes, surely, we will be married."

And as he spoke he looked at her with such a peculiar expression that she was a little frightened. It looked like a more serious business than she had counted on, and for a moment if she could have cut and run, perhaps she would have done so. But she had a strain of the true histrionic artist about her, and with a little effort rose to the difficulty of the rôle. "Of course we will be married," she replied with an air of innocent surprise. "You speak as if you had just thought of it."

He turned toward her as if he would sober his senses by staring at her, his pupils dilating and contracting in the instinctive effort to clear the mind by clearing the eyes.

But with a steady pressure on his arm she compelled him to walk on by her side. Then she said, in a soft low voice, as if a little awed by what she were telling, while at the same time she nestled nearer his side, "I had such a sad dream last night, and your strange talk reminds me of it. It seemed as if we were old and white-haired and stooping, and went wandering about, still together, but not married, lonely and broken. And I woke up feeling you can't think how dreary and sad—as if a bell had tolled in my ears as I slept; and the feeling was so strong that I put my fingers to my face to find if it was withered; and when I could not tell certainly, I got up and lit my lamp and looked in the glass; and my face, thank God! was fresh and young; but I sat on my bed and cried to think of the poor old people I had left behind in my dream."

Mabel had so fallen into the spirit of her part that she was really crying as she ended. Her tears completed Mr. Morgan's mental confusion, and he absolutely did not know whom he was addressing or where he was himself, as he cried, "No, no, Mary! Don't cry! It shall not be: it shall never be."

Lightly withdrawing her hand from his arm, she glided like a sprite from his side, and was lost in the shadows, while her whispered words still sounded in his ear, "Good-bye for thirty years!"

A moment after three notes, clear as a bird's call, sounded from the direction whither she had vanished, and Miss Rood's companion, breaking off short a remark on the excessive dryness of the weather, bowed awkwardly and also disappeared among the shadows.

When Miss Rood laid her hand on Mr. Morgan's arm to recall him to the fact that they were now alone together, he turned quickly, and his eyes swept her from head to foot, and then rested on her face with an expression of intense curiosity and a wholly new interest, as if he were tracing out a suddenly-suggested resemblance which overwhelmed him with emotion. And as he gazed his eyes began to take fire from the faded features on which they had rested so many years in mere complacent friendliness, and she instinctively averted her face. Long intimacy had made her delicately sensitive to his moods, and when he drew her arm in his and turned to walk, although he had not uttered a word, she trembled with agitation.

"Mary, we have had an extraordinary experience to-night," he said. The old dreaminess in his voice, as of one narcotized or in a trance, sometimes a little forced, as of one trying to dream, to which she had become accustomed, and of which in her heart of hearts she was very weary, was gone. In its place she recognized a resonance which still further confused her with a sense of altered relations. His polarity had changed: his electricity was no longer negative, but positive.

Her feminine instinct vaguely alarmed, she replied, "Yes, indeed, but it is getting late. Hadn't we better go in?" What lent the unusual intonation of timidity to her voice? Certainly nothing that she could have explained.

"Not quite yet, Mary," he answered, turning his gaze once more fully upon her.

Her eyes dropped before his, and a moment after fluttered up to find an explanation for their behavior, only to fall again in blind panic. For, mingling unmistakably with the curiosity with which he was still studying her features, was a new-born expression of appropriation and passionate complacency. Her senses whirled in a bewilderment that had a suffocating sweetness about it. Though she now kept her eyes on the ground, she felt his constant sidewise glances, and, desperately seeking relief from the conscious silence that enveloped them like a vapor of intoxicating fumes, she forced herself to utter the merest triviality she could summon to her lips: "See that house." The husky tones betrayed more agitation than the ruse concealed.

He answered as irrelevantly as she had spoken, "Yes, indeed, so it is." That was their only attempt at conversation.

For a half hour—it might have been much more or much less—they walked in this way, thrilling with the new magnetism that at once attracted and estranged them with an extraordinary sense of strangeness in familiarity. At length they paused under the little porch of Miss Rood's cottage, where he commonly bade her good-evening after their walks. The timidity and vague alarms that had paralyzed her while they were walking disappeared as he was about to leave her, and she involuntarily returned his unusual pressure of her hand.

A long time after behold her still encircled in his arms, not blushing, but pale and her eyes full of a soft astonished glow! "Oh, Robert!" was all she had said after one first little gasp.

They never met George or Mabel again. Mrs. Morgan learned subsequently that two young people from the city answering their description had been guests at the opposite house, and had left Plainfield the morning after the events hereinbefore set forth, and drew her conclusions accordingly. But her husband preferred to cherish the secret belief that his theory that memories might become visible had proved true in one instance at least.

Edward Bellamy.

BRANDYWINE, 1777.

Toward noon of a September day, the fifth of the week and the eleventh of the month, 1777, a few of the steady meeting-going Friends of Birmingham had collected for their "mid-week" assembly in a wheelwright-shop at Sconnel Town, a roadside group of shops and houses that had disappeared entirely thirty years ago. Their usual place of worship, the low stone structure on the hills of Birmingham, three miles to the south, had been taken for a hospital for the sick of Washington's army, and even on the previous First Day, as they gathered at ten o'clock, they had found it being prepared for such a purpose, and had taken their seats under the shade of the trees outside. The wheelwright-shop had therefore been selected as a temporary place of meeting.

Among those gathered on this day was Joseph Townsend, a young man of twenty-one, who has left us an interesting narrative of the day's events. Much of the battle of Brandywine he saw. The day, he says, was exceedingly warm. It had been foggy in the morning, but later the mists had dissipated—doubtless to the discontent of the husbandmen, for little rain had fallen for a long time except on the 26th of August—and now the September sun was pouring down, so that in the hillside fields roundabout the ploughman, preparing his ground for winter wheat, rested his sweating horses at the end of each furrow and wiped his own beaded face with the handkerchief from his hat. The upland pastures were brown; dust had settled on the forest foliage; the whole face of Nature was athirst; and the Brandywine, flowing from north to south half a mile away, was shrunken and narrow.

As the Friends sat in the shop, hats on heads, the elders and overseers "facing the meeting," women on one side, men on the other, all on hastily-arranged benches of wheelwright planks, their silent serenity must have been inwardly disturbed, for the spiritual ear surely heard wild voices of conflict in the air. The shock of a near battle was impending; the very tread of the advancing invaders could almost be heard; already, indeed, as the Friends gathered in meeting, the fighting had begun six miles down the creek, near the ford at John and Amos Chad's.

On the preceding 20th of July—a Sunday—General David Forman, who had been patiently watching from the shores of New York Bay the embarkation of the British army upon the fleet of Lord Howe, and anxiously wondering from day to day whither the armada, with its eighteen thousand soldiers, would sail, observed an increased activity amongst the ships. One hundred and sixty sail lay inside of Sandy Hook. Next morning fifteen more came down from the city, and in the afternoon yet eighty more—mostly small brigs, schooners and sloops—came out of the Narrows and joined the fleet, so that it numbered two hundred and fifty-five sail.

On Wednesday the wind favored their departure. At half-past six in the morning the admiral's signal-gun was fired, and at seven they began to get under way. All day the vigilant Forman watched them as they passed out of the bay and moved down the Jersey coast. In three divisions they stretched away, steering mostly south-east, and moving like an immense flock of white waterfowl over the placid summer seas. He riding on shore as they sailed on the water, night found him at Shrewsbury, and thence, with all speed, he sent couriers to General Washington and to the Executive Council of Pennsylvania at Philadelphia. The council, in whose archives we find his despatch, at once sent another scout, Captain John Hunn, to the Jersey coast to watch the hostile fleet. Setting off promptly, Hunn had reached the shore, near Little Egg Harbor, by two o'clock of Friday, the 25th, and thence he rode slowly down to Cape May, not seeing any of the ships, however, until the 30th, when, after three days of "thick" weather, some of them came into the view of observers on both capes of the Delaware. From the Delaware side, at ten in the morning, that truculent Sussex Whig, Henry Fisher, had discerned two hundred and twenty-eight sail, and he sent off an express to ride with might and main, up the forest roads by Dover and Cantwell's Bridge, to Wilmington, and so to Philadelphia. Leaving the cape at ten in the morning, the messenger reached Chester at a quarter before six in the afternoon, and thence hurried on.

Hunn, too, saw the ships from his post on Cape May, and only the need of being brief is reason for not giving here his quaint and badly-spelled despatches, which, however, in spite of imperfect orthography, sufficiently told the movements of the fleet.

July 31st the ships were still in the offing, but the next day not one could be seen from the Delaware capes. Howe had sailed away for the ampler waters of the Chesapeake, though the change of plan involved further delay on shipboard and exposure to the dangers of a greatly lengthened voyage. August 7th his ships were seen beating down the coast toward Cape Charles, but, encountering adverse winds, it was some ten days later before they were heard of inside the great bay.

Washington had already moved from New Jersey, and on the 24th of August he set forth from Philadelphia, riding at the head of his troops, who, as they marched through the streets, were decorated with sprays of green and watched by great crowds. With him rode the marquis de la Fayette, and other foreign officers of renown accompanied the march—Pulaski, the gallant Pole, the marquis de la Rouerie, and Louis de Fleury, a young and spirited compatriot of La Fayette, on duty with Stirling's division.

Part of the army, including the division of General Stephen, had preceded the commander's march to Chester, and at that place General Armstrong had been for some days gathering the Pennsylvania militia. There moved with Washington the remaining divisions of the army under Sullivan, Stirling, Wayne and Greene, the artillery alone excepted. This, General Nash was to place upon flatboats at Philadelphia, and so float down to Chester.

By the 26th the whole army was in and about Wilmington, then only a modest town, the larger part gathered on one side along the Christiana, and the other clustered about the great mills upon the Brandywine, whose corn-meal gave the place its chief repute. Washington fixed his head-quarters in the mansion of one of the mill-owners (presumably Joseph Tatnall's spacious house), and the troops occupied the hills around, on which some traces of their lines of defence may still be discovered. The Delaware militia, urgently called upon by Congress, had been aroused, as far as possible, by the ever-faithful Rodney, the Signer of the Declaration—that tall, thin, odd-looking man, with a green patch covering the cancer that consumed his face—and they had taken the field under the command of General Thomas Collins of Belmont Hall in Kent, recently sheriff of that county, and afterward governor of the State. Part of their duty had been an attempt to save from the enemy's hands the stores, including a large quantity of that precious article, salt, which had been gathered at the "Head of Elk."

The British had arrived. Their enormous fleet, proceeding slowly, had kept well together, and now lay anchored in Elk River, the greatest company by far that these quiet estuaries, the home of the wildfowl, fish and crab, had ever seen; and on the 25th the debarkation of the troops began, Cornwallis's command landing first, and Knyphausen's, local chronicles say, not coming ashore until the 31st of the month. The long voyage had been especially trying to the horses: those that survived were almost starved, and in no condition either to carry dragoons or drag cannon. General Howe issued a proclamation to the people declaring that he came only to punish the rebellious, and making all due assurances to those disposed to maintain the royal authority. They were informed they would be paid in gold and silver for all the horses, cattle and produce they would bring in, and the Tories, we are told, thereupon drove in some of the stock of their Whig neighbors. Knyphausen's men destroyed the county buildings of Cecil at Court-house Point, and the public records were carried away, most of them being subsequently recovered in New York. Several thousand bushels of oats and corn were amongst the stores captured.

Heavy rains fell on the 26th, the day after the debarkation began, and no forward movement of importance was made until the 27th, when Cornwallis marched to Elkton (the Head of Elk), and thence issued the proclamation referred to. The next day his advance-guard occupied Gray's Hill, two miles to the east.

The two armies therefore confronted each other at a distance of some fifteen to eighteen miles, and the unhappy people between sustained the usual penalties of such a situation. The American "light-horse," part of which was the famous command of Harry Lee, scoured the country, annoying the British outposts and capturing numbers of prisoners. On the 28th they secured thirty or forty, and the next day twenty-nine were reported, besides twenty deserters who had come in, eight of them from the fleet. General Collins, with his Delaware militia, hung upon the right flank of the British, commanded by Knyphausen, and preserved the lower section of New Castle county from being despoiled. Numerous skirmishes occurred, and amongst them one which, upon the scale of other Revolutionary encounters, almost rises to the dignity of a battle. Should we call it by that name, it was the only battle ever fought in Delaware during the struggle, unless we except some bloody local fights between the Whigs and the Tories of Sussex. This affair took place on the 3d of September. The British were then advancing slowly eastward, and their vanguard, composed of German yagers, supported by light infantry, encountered at Cooch's Bridge, a crossing of the White Clay Creek, the riflemen of Maxwell and some of the Delaware militia. Maxwell's men, posted thinly and under cover, poured a deadly fire into the British ranks as they advanced, but were presently forced back by their superior numbers across the stream. The Americans admitted a loss of forty killed and wounded, and while the casualties on the other side were not known, a woman who came the next day from the British camp declared she had seen nine wagonloads of wounded brought in.

Meanwhile, the American commanders had been choosing a position in which to meet the advance of the enemy. During the rains of the 26th, Washington himself rode down nearly to the British front, and Greene and Weeden, reconnoitring carefully, had selected the high ground of Iron Hill, near the British lines on Gray's Hill, as a strong position. A council of general officers, however, decided against this location, choosing instead an advance of five or six miles out of Wilmington to the east side of Red Clay Creek. To the position thus chosen on September 5th the whole army moved, except a brigade under General Irwin, which was left to occupy the defensive works around Wilmington. On the Red Clay the line extended from near the confluence of that stream with the Christiana on the left up to Hockessin on the right. Greene disapproved altogether of the position. He pointed out that it did not cover Philadelphia, and that it would be easily turned by the march of Howe northward into Pennsylvania—exactly what subsequently occurred.

Three days after the line of the Red Clay had been occupied, the British, having bought and seized horses enough to serve their pressing needs, began their forward movement. Their tents and heavy baggage, the last to be disembarked, had now been landed, and the rear, under General Grant, was ready to follow the onward march. On the 8th, therefore, Cornwallis extended his left flank well up into the country above Newark, far outreaching the American lines, while a strong column of the right wing threatened the American front, moving directly toward it as far as Milltown, only two miles away. This manœuvre developed the untenable character of the Red Clay line, and Washington hastened to extricate himself. On the night of the 8th he broke camp and marched rapidly northward. At two o'clock on the morning of the 9th he crossed the Brandywine at Chad's Ford, and posted his army on the high hill-slopes east of the creek, directly in Howe's path toward Philadelphia. The British commander, disappointed and chagrined when he perceived at daylight the escape of the Americans, moved also, and on the evening of September 10th united his two columns at Kennet Square, directly west some seven miles, by a well-used road, from Washington's position.

The Brandywine Valley, near the battle-ground, then, as now, teemed with agricultural wealth. The fine farms of the thrifty English settlers, many of whom traced their ownership back in a family line of three-quarters of a century, spread out along the creek in fine meadows of natural "green grass," and rolled upward over the hill-slopes, which, though broken and irregular, nowhere rise precipitously or to great height. The invading forces, as they marched up from the Chesapeake, could not but see the richness of the region, and one of their officers, conversed with by Joseph Townsend, exclaimed "in some rapture," Joseph says, "You have got a hell of a fine country here; which we have found to be the case ever since we landed at the Head of Elk."

Along the hill-slopes, on the east side of the Brandywine, from Chad's Ford up to Brinton's, a distance of about three miles, the Americans lay on the night of September 10th. Wayne was posted to guard the lower ford, and Sullivan had his own division and those of Stirling and Stephen stretched up along the stream. Greene's division formed the reserve. Sullivan's duties included the guarding of the fords above Brinton's, and he had become possessed of the unfortunate idea that there were but three of these fordable, and that beyond the three in question there was no place for a distance of twelve miles where the hostile army could cross. He therefore sent detachments on this evening of the 10th to the three fords—the Delaware regiment to Jones's, and battalions of Hazen's regiment to Wistar's and Buffington's. With this he rested content. It is, however, true that the cavalry at his command seems to have been pitifully meagre: he asserts that on the morning of the battle he had four light-horsemen only, two of whom he sent on scouting duty, retaining the other two to serve as couriers to head-quarters.

Below the line of Washington's main army, at Pyle's Ford, were posted the Pennsylvania militia under General Armstrong, and below their position the Brandywine enters rocky hills, flowing between steep banks that forbid the easy passage of an army.

Washington slept on this night at Benjamin Ring's, just east of Chad's Ford, and La Fayette at Gideon Gilpin's, near by. Both the dwellings are still standing and occupied as places of residence. To defend the crossing at the ford a battery of six guns was planted in front of John Chad's house. Its location may yet be distinctly traced. West of the stream, Maxwell's riflemen were posted well out on the road toward Kennet Square, where General Howe occupied Wiley's tavern, an ancient hostelry, as his quarters. He had formed his plan of attack—to engage the attention of the Americans by a sharp attack on the road to the crossing at Chad's with Knyphausen's division of five thousand men, while Cornwallis should proceed, upon roads concealed from the American view by distance and intervening forests, far up the creek to the fords that Sullivan had not guarded, and, crossing there, descend with crushing force upon the American line. Sullivan himself declared, in letters written after the battle, that he had anticipated such an attack: it was the natural plan of battle for Howe to adopt under the circumstances. If, then, our general had only taken sufficient precaution to meet it!

Early on this foggy, warm morning of the 11th the British were in motion. There was no hurry for Knyphausen, but Cornwallis's men had a long, hard march before them. At five o'clock they set off, leaving behind them all encumbering baggage, even their knapsacks. Turning northward, they took the road which, pursuing a direction generally parallel with the Brandywine, reaches the west branch of the creek at Trimble's Ford. Howe himself rode with them. He was mounted, Townsend says, "on a large English horse, much reduced in flesh"—thanks to short rations on shipboard. Thirteen thousand men, the whole left wing of the army, marched in this column. Hidden by the forests and hills, as well as by the mists of the morning, they had moved several miles on their way before any word of their march reached the Americans across the creek, only three miles away.

Cornwallis having gone, Knyphausen presently took up his share of the morning's work. At nine o'clock, or thereabout, he pressed forward on the road toward Chad's. The opposing force between him and that place was mainly Maxwell's command of riflemen and light infantry, whose main body, about a thousand strong, lay upon the high ground a mile west of the ford, but whose scouting-parties the British advance-guard speedily encountered. A party of scouts, indeed, tradition says, had ventured to Johnny Welsh's tavern, almost in the very embraces of Knyphausen, and there, in cheerful disregard of precaution, had tied their horses in front, and were making merry with the apple whiskey and New England rum of the bar-room. Surprised thus, the patriot bacchanals ran for their lives from the back door and escaped through the fields, emptying their guns in one sputtering volley that wounded one of their own horses left in the hands of the enemy.

A little farther, however, the riflemen began to fire upon the advancing British, though, pressed by the heavy column, they fell slowly back toward Maxwell's main body. From behind the clumps of trees, the hedges, the walls and the houses they aimed at the invaders, and harassed, if they did not impede, their march. The "Old Kennet" meeting-house and its graveyard walls gave them another and yet more favorable ambush. But by ten o'clock the fighting had become more serious. Maxwell, pressed by a greatly superior force, resisted stoutly, and the firing on both sides was heavy. Proctor's artillery pounded away across the stream. The riflemen, well under cover, at first threw Knyphausen's men into confusion, though they included some of the best regiments of the British army, the Fourth, Fifth, Twenty-eighth, Forty-ninth and Seventy-first being among them.

As Proctor trained his guns upon the advancing British, the house of William Harvey (Senior—his son William, Junior, lived east of the creek) was directly in the line of fire. William, who was a quiet but firm old Friend, was at his home, intending to protect his goods if possible, though he had sent his family away. His neighbor, Jacob Way, found him at this juncture sitting on his front piazza, which ended to the eastward against his kitchen, a semi-detached building. "Come away!" said Jacob: "thee is in danger here. Thee will surely be killed." But William refused. Jacob expostulated. As they exchanged words, a twelve-pound cannon-ball came from Proctor's battery directly for the house, passed through both walls of the kitchen, and plunged along the piazza floor, tearing up the boards and barely avoiding William's legs, until, a little farther on, it buried itself six feet deep in the earth. It is recorded that William hesitated no longer, but sought a safer place. His house was thoroughly despoiled when the British came up.

Knyphausen, however, steadily pressed the Americans back, forced them from the high ground down to the edge of the creek, and finally drove them across. By half-past ten o'clock this was accomplished, and the British line was then formed half a mile back from the stream, where it lay until half-past four in the afternoon, the artillery keeping up a threatening but not serious fire upon Wayne's position on the east side, which his batteries returned. On the whole, the Americans thought themselves doing fairly well. Washington's secretary sent off a despatch to Congress saying that the British loss must be three hundred killed and wounded, "while ours does not exceed fifty altogether."

Part of the British force at the ford on this morning was a rifle corps commanded by Major Patrick Ferguson, a young Scotchman recently arrived in America, and subsequently killed in the sanguinary fight on King's Mountain. In a letter describing the Brandywine battle he says his men were lying concealed in a skirt of woods when "a rebel officer in a huzzar dress" passed in front, followed by another in dark green and blue "mounted on a good bay horse and wearing a remarkably high cocked hat." Ferguson ordered three men to steal near and fire upon them, but believing that they would surely be killed, so near were they riding, he felt the act to be murder and recalled his men. Again, having first passed to some distance, the officer on the bay horse returned, and rode within easy shooting distance, but Ferguson again restrained himself. The next day he learned from wounded Americans who fell into the hands of the British "that General Washington was all the morning with the light troops, and attended only by a French officer in a huzzar dress, he himself mounted and dressed in every respect as above described."

The Friends whom we left gathered in the wheelwright-shop adjourned with some agitation. "While we were sitting therein," Joseph Townsend says, "some disturbance was discovered near the house and about the door, which occasioned some individuals to go out to know the cause, and they not returning and the uneasiness not subsiding, suspicions arose that something serious was taking place: the meeting accordingly closed."

It was indeed quite time that the heads of the meeting had shaken hands as the signal for adjourning. The "uneasiness" outside had good reason. The cry was that the red-coats were coming. Women were weeping and crying that "they murdered all before them, young and old." The men endeavored to allay their fears, and urged them to be more composed; but while this took place "our eyes were caught, on a sudden, by the appearance of the army coming out of the woods into the fields belonging to Emmor Jefferis, on the west side of the creek, above the fording-place. In a few minutes the fields were literally covered over with them, and they were hastening toward us. Their arms and bayonets, being raised, shone bright as silver, there being a clear sky and the day exceedingly warm."

Howe and Cornwallis, making their long détour, since five in the morning had crossed the western branch at Trimble's Ford, and were here now, at the undefended crossing of the eastern branch, ready to sweep down upon the American line. Emmor Jefferis, who lived at the ford in a substantial house, was surprised at such an arrival of visitors. There lay in his ample cellar great store of wines and other liquors, silks, cloths, etc., the most valuable goods of some of the merchants down at Wilmington, which they had hauled up to this point when they considered their own town threatened. As the British pressed their company upon Emmor with great unreserve, they speedily found the prize in the cellar. The casks were rolled out, the heads knocked in, and the officers, quaffing the old madeira, drank to its rebel owners, whose chagrin may be imagined when they heard of its fate.

To cross the creek, General Howe ordered Jefferis to act as guide and further to direct them down the roads toward the American position. Emmor obeyed with great hesitancy, and later, when the battle was on and a bullet flew uncomfortably near, he flinched so perceptibly that Howe felt called on to say, "Don't be afraid, Mr. Jefferis: they won't hurt you." Notwithstanding which assurance, Emmor still was not happy.

The hour of crossing must have been near noon or a little after. They turned down the road toward Birmingham as they reached the east side, and soon the head of the column passed through Sconnel's, by the meeting-house so lately vacated. "The space occupied by the main body and flanking-parties was near a half mile wide." Sarah Boake, the wife of Abel, whose house stood near, called to Joseph Townsend and his brother William—who since meeting closed had gone home to secure their horses in the stable, but had now returned—to see what fine fellows these were. "They're something like an army!" cried she. As the column passed "one of the most eligible houses" in the little cluster at Sconnel, "divers of the principal officers" entered and soon "manifested an uncommon social disposition," being full of inquiries where the rebels now were, and especially where Mr. Washington was to be found. To this William Townsend answered that he thought if they would have patience they would presently meet with Mr. Washington, as he and his men were not far distant—a dry joke that does great credit, under the circumstances, to Quaker William. Moreover, as they plied the young men with further inquiries, William said he had seen the commander down at his quarters at Chad's the day before, and described him as "a stately, well-proportioned, fine-looking man, of great ability, active, firm and resolute, of a social disposition, and considered to be a good man." This was observed, Joseph says, "to check their ardor for a sight of him," though one rejoined that "he might be a good man, but he was most damnably misled to take up arms against his sovereign." As they sat thus talking, Cornwallis passed the house. He appeared tall and sat very erect, wearing his scarlet uniform, richly trimmed with gold lace and heavy epaulets. Most of the officers, our narrator says, "were rather short, portly men, well dressed and of genteel appearance, and did not look as if they had ever been exposed to any hardship, their skins being as white and delicate as is customary for females brought up in large cities or towns." A halt of the advance-guard had been made a few minutes in the village while the horses were fed on some patches of growing corn. These troops were Germans, "and many of them," Townsend remarks, "wore their beards on their upper lips, which was a novelty in that part of the country."

By two o'clock, or somewhat earlier, the British had reached Osborne's Hill, from which they had a good view to the south and east. The high ground around Birmingham meeting-house, on which a little later the hurrying Americans would appear, was plainly in view. Cornwallis's men had now marched since morning about thirteen miles under the burning sun, wading the two branches of the Brandywine. They were halted here, took out their dinner-rations and ate them, and about three o'clock were rested and ready to fight.

All the fore part of the day Washington had been near the crossing at Chad's, watching the encounter there. It must have been nearly noon when he received intelligence of a startling character. Colonel Bland had been across the creek (the main stream below its "forks"), and now sent word that he had observed at a distance the march north of a large body of the enemy. Two brigades he had distinctly seen, "and the dust appeared to rise in their rear for a considerable distance." While this despatch was in Washington's hand came another from Colonel Ross, who had ridden to a point on "the Great Valley road," in the rear of Howe's column, and sent word confirming Bland's observations. He estimated the moving force at not less than five thousand.

With such intelligence of Howe's strategy, Washington promptly resolved upon a bold and vigorous counter-movement—not hastily, we may presume, for he had doubtless anticipated the contingency and formed the plan in anticipation of such an attempt to outflank him. He now gave orders to his division commanders—Sullivan on the right, Greene in the centre and Wayne on the left—to prepare for an immediate offensive movement against Knyphausen, designing to cross the creek, crush him and capture his baggage before Howe could counter-march and come to his relief. Sullivan says he received orders to cross and attack the enemy's left, while the rest of the army crossed below (at Chad's) and engaged his right. "This I was preparing to do when Major Spear, a militia officer, rode hastily in. He informed me that he was from the upper country, that he had come in the road where the enemy must have passed to attack our right, and that there was not the least appearance of them in that quarter." He added that he had been sent to reconnoitre by General Washington. Sullivan now hesitated: he could not omit to forward such intelligence. It contradicted certainly what Colonel Bland and Colonel Ross had sent, but it was possible that Cornwallis had moved northward only as a feint, and had returned to the support of Knyphausen; so that if the Americans should now cross, they would encounter not merely the British right, but their whole army—not five thousand men, but eighteen thousand. Sullivan therefore sat down, took Spear's statement word for word "from his own mouth," and forwarded it to Washington, sending Spear himself after the messenger to report verbally. "I made no comment and gave no opinion," says Sullivan. Upon the heels of Spear came another keen-eyed scout who had not seen the British. This was "Sergeant Tucker of the Light Horse." He confirmed Spear's story. Washington now recalled his orders and abandoned the intended attack on Knyphausen.

On the hill-slope south of the present road which crosses the Brandywine at Chad's, Washington was resting under the shade of a cherry tree (which fell in a storm a few years ago), when, about half-past one o'clock, there came riding across the hillside fields from above, avoiding the circuitous roads, Squire Thomas Cheyney, his hat gone, his black hair streaming in the wind and his black eyes blazing with excitement. The blooded mare he rode, trained to fox-hunting, carried his two hundred pounds easily, and cleared ditches, fences and hedges. Cheyney had been near the upper fords, and had suddenly come upon the British as they moved down toward Osborne's Hill. They fired upon him as he wheeled and galloped off, but he escaped unhurt. Reporting to Sullivan, that officer received him discourteously, the chroniclers say; as not improbably he might, for the contradictory reports as to the British movement were, upon a subject so terribly momentous, exasperating enough. But as Sullivan hesitated, Cheyney demanded to see Washington himself, and was accordingly sent to him. Washington ordered him to dismount. "Now," said he, "draw me a sketch of the upper roads. Where did the British cross? and where are they now?"

Cheyney alighted and made the plan. Washington seemed to hesitate, as if doubting the information. The ardent squire, in the intensity of the moment, cried, "Take my life, general, if I deceive you!"

If the commander doubted, however, there came on the instant further word. Colonel Bland had sent another despatch to Sullivan, dated at "a quarter-past one o'clock," and saying that the enemy were then arriving in great force on Osborne's Hill, a little to the right of Birmingham meeting-house. This despatch Sullivan sent instantly to Washington, and the word Cheyney had brought was now made sure beyond peradventure.

Bland's confirmation of Cheyney's news aroused the injudicious but brave commander of the right wing, and he moved his troops at once up toward Birmingham. His immediate command, he says in one of the several defensive letters written after the battle, marched a mile from the position it occupied to that in which it met the enemy. On a hill just west of the meeting-house, from which, as they looked north-west, they could see the British on Osborne's Hill, they made their line of battle, and Cornwallis, as he sat upon his horse watching them through his glass, cried out with a round army oath, "The damned rebels form well!"

In what order the American line was formed we know. The division of Stephen occupied the right, that of Stirling the centre, that of Sullivan the left. But many of the details are vaguely and contradictorily stated. Lossing, following the sketch of the battle in the Pennsylvania Historical Society's collections, describes Sullivan's circuitous march to outreach Deborre, both seeking to obtain the right of the line, while Bancroft says that Sullivan posted his division in advance of the extreme left, detached by a half-mile gap from the rest of the line, but that, on being remonstrated with, he moved to close up the space, and was attacked before he had again formed his line of battle. What followed, however, is distinct enough. Rested and fed, the royal army precipitated itself, three to one in strength, and equally disproportionate in discipline and experience, upon the unready line of the Americans. The German and British troops, we are told, "vied with each other in fury" as they ran forward in a superb and irresistible bayonet charge. The struggle began about four o'clock: it lasted perhaps half an hour. As the enemy advanced they were fired upon by a body of outposted riflemen in an orchard near the road on which the attacking column moved; whereupon, says Joseph Townsend, who was near by watching the movement, the Hessians ran up the bank by the roadside, and, levelling their guns through the fence, returned the fire.

Overwhelmed by the attack, the Americans broke on the right. This was the post of honor which Deborre, an old French officer, had obtained for his brigade. Conway, in a letter written a few weeks later to support Sullivan's defence, says the latter, though entitled to the right, took the left in order to save time, and that Deborre, though the ground was much more favorable for the quick formation of his line, was not in order when the enemy attacked. It is agreed that Deborre's brigade broke first, and that then the left, Sullivan's men, gave way, though Sullivan struggled bravely to hold them. "I saw him," says De Fleury, "rallying his men with great ardor," but unsuccessfully; and he then came to Stirling's division, which was fighting on the hill, braving the thick of the fire until the centre too gave way, when, at the last, he was striving to rally the fugitives and encourage them to form a new line behind the fences. Had Sullivan shown vigilance and discretion equal to his courage, the day's history might have been totally different.

Thirty minutes completed this epoch of the battle. The first line was destroyed. Those who had formed it were stretched on the sere pastures or hurrying to the rear. Stirling and Conway, as well as Sullivan, had shown great bravery and coolness, but the resistance, practically, had been totally ineffective. The beaten and demoralized troops streamed into the woods, and sought shelter or escape until they met the reinforcements under Greene.

As the sound of Sullivan's encounter reached him—possibly sooner—Greene had moved from his reserve position to the support of the right flank. He marched, it is asserted, four miles in forty minutes. Washington himself left Chad's Ford, giving the command there to Wayne, and hurried off to the more perilous quarter of the field. Joseph Brown, a resident of the vicinity, was impressed as a guide. He was hurriedly mounted on a fine charger belonging to a staff officer, and Washington bade him ride with all speed in the direction of the firing. Away they went, Joseph's horse clearing fences and ditches gallantly, the commander at his flank urging him on. "Push along, old man! push along, old man!" was his repeated command, remembered and related for many years after by Joseph. They rode, he said, to a point between Dilworthtown and the meeting-house, half a mile away from the former place, and here the sounds of the battle seemed close at hand. Bullets flew thick, the general and his staff turned their attention from the guide, and he, glad to be excused, slipped from his saddle and withdrew.

Precisely when and where Greene met the fugitives from the first rout is another of the uncertainties. The best descriptions of the battle, upon being compared carefully, will be found vague and to some degree conflicting. But there are two points on the road from the meeting-house to Dilworth, marked upon the military map of the field as the "Second Position," where Greene undoubtedly posted his men. These positions are near together: one is south of the road, half a mile east of the meeting-house, on a hill-slope descending toward the west; and the other is north of the road, at a ravine now known as Sandy Hollow.

It is said that Greene opened his lines, received the fugitives from the front, and re-formed. Possibly this took place at this second position. It is certain that here the British advance was sharply checked, and the Americans stubbornly held their ground until late in the afternoon. It was at this turn in the battle that La Fayette was wounded, and not in the first encounter, as the current historical narrative would give us to understand. A survey of the map ascertains very precisely the place where he was shot, according to abundant testimony, and this is more than a mile distant from Sullivan's lines. It is very unlikely that La Fayette was in the first encounter, beyond the meeting-house. He probably arrived on the field with Washington, or he may possibly have accompanied Greene. The place where he was wounded is a field about halfway from the meeting-house to Dilworth, south-west of the road and about a hundred rods away. Trustworthy accounts say he was with Washington at the time, both engaged in rallying the troops; and this is quite likely: the place is only a little distance westward from the point to which Joseph Brown guided the general. In July, 1825, when La Fayette revisited the ground, he drove up from Wilmington in a carriage with the Messrs. Du Pont, whom he had been visiting. Great crowds accompanied him over the historic field, and as he drove along the road near the place already described, the carriage was stopped and the gallant old gentleman rose to his feet to point out the position in which he sustained his wound. "It was," he said, "somewhere on yonder slope. The exact spot I cannot now tell."[A]

[A] The precise nature of La Fayette's wound is differently stated in the chronicles. It was a gun-shot injury in his left leg, and did not immediately disable him. He rode that night to Chester, and thence reached Bristol, from which place Henry Laurens took him to the gentle nursing of the Moravian Sisters at Bethlehem. He remained there two months before he rejoined the army.

Baffled as Howe was by the stubborn resistance after Greene arrived, this check was almost the only American triumph in the day's contest. There was hard fighting from five o'clock until dusk. Posted in strong positions, well supported by the artillery, commanded by Washington himself, the patriot troops displayed their most soldierly qualities. The brigades of Muhlenberg, the Episcopal rector, and of Weeden, the Virginia innkeeper, stood well and fought bravely. History preserves especially the names of three regiments as earning distinction—one from Pennsylvania, under Colonel Stewart; and two from Virginia—the Tenth, under Colonel Stevens, and the Third, commanded by John Marshall, afterward chief-justice of the United States. The Marylanders, under Smallwood, and the Delaware regiment, acquitted themselves with probably equal credit. Amongst the officers, Sullivan, Stirling and Conway had been conspicuous for courage; La Fayette was wounded; De Fleury had his horse shot under him (Congress soon voted him another); Pulaski had rendered gallant service, earning early promotion; the marquis de la Rouerie was a prisoner.

But though resisting so well, the effect was only to cover the needful retreat. Down at Chad's Ford the conflict had been quickly over after the fighting began at Birmingham. The sound of the guns from the hills set Knyphausen in motion in earnest after all his feints and pretences since morning. He pressed forward to cross the creek. Wayne fought him well a little while, Proctor's artillery raking the advancing Hessians as they waded the stream until its placid waters ran crimson with their blood. But while Knyphausen's column was itself too heavy for Wayne to oppose successfully, the catastrophe at Birmingham followed so quickly upon the beginning of the struggle there that the contest at the ford was soon ended. Howe was rapidly gaining his rear when Wayne learned of Sullivan's disaster, and there was now only one resource—to retreat with all speed. Proctor's guns and other munitions were abandoned, and the fragments of the left wing, like those of the right, went drifting toward the Delaware.

As the friendly shades of night came down the British were pressing the fugitive army off the field, though not with a hot pursuit. In the Wilmington road, below Dilworthtown, at dusk, we have a view of Washington riding hastily along and ordering the officers whom he met to gather up the disorganized troops and hurry toward Chester. As the night hid the retreat, the stars came out to shine upon the dead, the dying and the wounded. Howe estimated the American loss at three hundred killed, six hundred wounded and four hundred prisoners—figures which Greene's report did not essentially contradict. The wounded were mostly in Howe's hands: few had escaped, as one did in a "chair" hurriedly driven over to the Black Horse tavern, on the road to Chester, by Robert Mendinhall, a neighboring Quaker farmer. The British loss was reported as five hundred and seventy-eight killed and wounded, including fifty-eight officers. Even if these figures were too low, the day's casualties aggregated fifteen hundred. The little meeting-house was filled with the badly wounded, and Howe sent word to Washington that more surgeons were needed, in response to which message several were sent to the field. The dead, as usual, were hastily buried, and heavy rains after the battle washed out many of the shallow pits, exposing their ghastly occupants to the elements and prowling beasts. The neighboring people were compelled to undertake the work of re-interment, in which, Joseph Townsend says, "it would be difficult to describe the many cases of horror and destruction of human beings" that they encountered. The battle was over, the tide of war had swept past, but these horrid evidences of its slaughter remained as the memorials of the struggle by which, for a time, the British had captured Philadelphia.

Howard M. Jenkins.

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A GREAT DAY.