The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 48, October, 1861 / A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics

by Various

A NIGHT IN A WHERRY.

As the summer vacation drew near, and the closed shutters and comparative quiet of the west end made one for a moment believe in the phrase, "Nobody in town," I had, after some thought, determined to resist the many temptations of a walking tour, and, instead of trusting to shoe-leather, try what virtue lay in a stout pair of oars, and make a trip by water instead of land.

But first, in what direction? The careful search of a huge chart and some knowledge of the Northern and Eastern seaboard led me to mark out a course along the shore of Massachusetts and among the beautiful islands which stud the coast of Maine.

The cruise was at that time a novel one, and many were the doubts expressed as to the seaworthiness of my boat. She was twenty-two feet long, nine inches high, and thirty-two wide,—canvas-covered, except about four feet of the middle section, with sufficient space to stow two days' food and water, and to carry all the baggage necessary for a week's voyage. The oars were made especially strong for the occasion, of spruce, ten feet three inches in length, and nicely balanced. In addition to provision and clothes, a gun, a couple of hundred feet of stout line, and a boat-hook were stowed in the bottom.

The day fixed for departure rose clear. An east wind tempered the heat of the sun; but the tide, which by starting earlier would have been in my favor, was dead low, and would turn before I could round the northern point of the city. After all my traps had been put on board, seating myself carefully, the oars were handed in, and a few strokes sent me ahead of the raft. The tide was low, dead low, in the fullest meaning of the word; the sea-weed slowly circled and eddied round, floating neither up nor down; while the unrippled surface of the Back Bay reflected the city and bridges so perfectly that it was hard to tell where reality ended and seeming began. Passing beneath the Cambridge draw, I turned the boat's head for the next one, and kept close to the northern point of the city. Seven bridges must be passed ere the bay opened before me. The boat had just cleared the last, when, remembering that no matches had been provided, and not knowing where a landing might be made, I decided to lay in a stock before putting to sea. With a narrow shave past the Chelsea ferry-boat, I backed water, and came alongside a raft of ship-timber seasoning near one of the docks, tenanted by a score or more of semi-amphibious urchins, who were running races over the half-sunken logs, and taking all sizes of duckings, from the slight spatter to the complete souse. Engaging the services of one of these water-rats, by a judicious promise of a larger sum as payment than the one intrusted to him for the purchase, I had soon a sufficient supply, and, resting the boat-hook on one of the logs, pushed off. East Boston ferry was quickly passed, my boat lifting and falling gracefully in the swell of the steamer, and I began to feel the flow of the rising tide setting steadily against her. Governor's Island showed rather hazy three miles off; Apple Island, tufted with trees, looked in the shimmering light like one of the palm-crowned Atolls of the Pacific; and, just discernible through the foggy air, Deer Island and the Hospital loomed up. A straight course would have saved at least two miles and avoided the strength of the tide; but, though my boat drew only three inches, and there was water enough and to spare on the flats, the sea-weed, growing thick as grain in the harvest-field, and half floating where the depth was three or four feet, collecting round the sharp bow as a long tress of hay gathers round a tooth of a rake, and burying the oar-blade, impeded all progress, and obliged me to pull almost double the distance against the rapid tide-set of the circuitous channels. I worked through the bends and reaches, till the deep, strong current of Shirley Gut was to be stemmed, where the tide runs with great force,—nearly fifty feet in depth of pure green water, eddying and whirling round, all sorts of ripples and small whirlpools dimpling its surface,—with the rushing sound which deep and swift water makes against its banks. A few moments' tough pulling brought me through, and, once outside Deer Island, nothing lay between me and Nahant. The well-known beach and the sandy headland called "Grover" stood out at the edge of Lynn Bay, and the rise and fall of the white surf, too distant to be heard, marked the long reef stretching seaward. After dining, and allowing the boat to drift while rearranging my provisions, I took my place, and, getting the proper bearings astern, bent on the oars.

To those who have rowed only clumsy country-boats, with their awkward row-locks and wretched oars, slimy, dirty, and leaking, trailing behind tags and streamers of pond-weed, or who have only experimented with that most uncivilized style of digging up the water called paddling, the real pleasure of rowing is unknown.

Grover's Head went astern; Nahant grew more and more distinct. There was but little wind, and the boat went rocking over the long roll of the huge waves, cutting smoothly through their wrinkled surface. In sight to the south and the east were the Brewsters, the outer light, and the sails of vessels of all sizes and shapes which were slowly making their way into the harbor. The afternoon was cloudy; but now and then a brilliant ray of sunshine would fall on islands and vessels, lighting them up for an instant, and then closing over again. My route took me about three miles outside Nahant and in full view of the end of the promontory. There was now a clear course, except that occasionally a huge patch of floating seaweed would suddenly deaden and then stop the boat's headway, compelling me to back water and clear the bow of the long strands. It was at first very startling to be thus checked when running at full speed; the sensation being that some one has grasped the boat and is pushing her back. With the resistance come the rush and ripple, as the sharp stem plunges through the floating mass of weed. The wind, which had been light and baffling all the forenoon, after I had passed Nahant, and was abreast of Egg Rock with its little whitewashed light-house, freshened, and, veering to the southeast, blew across my track. The vessels began to lean to its force, and the waves to rise. I was then outside Swampscott Bay, about eight miles from land. The shore was plainly visible, with the buildings dotted along like specks of white, and the outlying reefs showing by the sparkle of the foam upon them. Phillips's Beach, and the island called by the romantic name of Ram, were now opposite. Half-Way Rock, so named from being half way from Boston to Gloucester, was the point towards which I had been pulling for two hours, and it could now for the first time be seen. It came in sight as the boat was rising on a huge wave which broke under her and went rushing shoreward, roaring savagely, with long streaks of foam down its green back. The elevation of the eyes above the water was so small, that, when my boat sank away in the trough of the sea, nothing could be seen above the top of the advancing wave. I had, therefore, to watch my chance, and when she rose, get my bearings.

Half-Way Rock is a water-washed mass of porphyritic stone, the top about twenty feet above high tide, shaped much like a pyramid, and a few years since was capped with a conical granite beacon, strongly built and riveted down, but which had been two-thirds washed away by the tremendous surf of the easterly storms. The rock stands at the outer edge of a long sand-shoal, and is east of Salem. To the northward, a dim blue line on the horizon, lay Cape Ann, by my reckoning, about eighteen miles distant. I kept on pulling over the swell, which was growing larger, not quite in the trough of the sea,—but when a particularly large wave came easing up a little, so as to take the boat more on the bow, the motion was not a pleasant one. It was a sort of half rolling, half pitching,—very unlike the even, smooth slide of the early part of the afternoon. The rock soon became plainer, and at last I rested on my oars to watch the waves as they broke on its furrowed face. The great rollers, which became higher as the water shoaled toward its foot, fell upon it bursting into foam, and jetting the spray high above the half-broken beacon. It was a beautiful sight as the spray broke under the shadow of the seaward face and was thrown up into the sunlight.

Not heeding whither I was drifting, a nasal hail suddenly roused me to the fact that there were other navigators in those seas. "Bo-oat ahoy! Whar' ye bo-ound?" Giving a stroke with the larboard oar, I saw, hove to, a fishing-schooner,—her whole crew of skipper, three men, and a boy standing at the gangway and looking with all their ten eyes to make out, if possible, what strange kind of sea-monster had turned up. My boat could not have seemed very seaworthy, only seven inches above water, disappearing in the trough of every sea that passed, then lifting its long and slender bow of brilliant crimson above the white foam, and the occupant apparently on a level with the water. The hail was repeated. The answer, "Cape Ann," did not satisfy them; and the question, "Wa-ant any he-elp?" was next bawled out. My only reply was by a shake of the head; and settling back into my place, I gave way on the oars, and left my fishing friends still looking and evidently very uncertain whether it were not better to make an attempt at a rescue.

I now kept on about a mile farther toward the Cape, but found that the time before sundown was too short to reach it. About seven miles distant, perched on a cliff overlooking the sea, was the hospitable mansion of Mr. T., where I was sure of a welcome and a good berth for my boat, and which snug harbor could just be reached by nightfall. The way lay straight across Gooseberry Shoal, on the outside of which stands Half-Way Rock. The sea for my small boat was very heavy; but, having full confidence in her buoyancy, I drove straight on. Upon the shoal the color of the water changed from deep to light green; the sea was shorter, much higher, and broke quicker; the waves washed over the stern of the boat, burying it two feet or more, and coming almost into the seat-room. Then she would lift herself free, and ride high and clear on the backs of the great rollers, which would break and crush down under her, sending her well ahead. The sunlight, falling from behind, shone through the body of each wave, making it of the most transparent brilliant emerald, and tinting the foam with every hue of the rainbow. Pulling with the sea is very easy work, if the boat be long enough to keep from broaching to,—that is, swinging sideways and rolling over, a performance which dories are apt to indulge in. There are on the shoal several reefs, whose black ridges are just awash at high tide; past these the inner edge of the water deepens and the sea becomes smoother. About an hour brought me inside what is called by the dwellers thereabout the "outer island,"—its gray-red rocks tufted here and there with patches of coarse grass, and weather-worn and seamed by surf and storm, with the usual accompaniment of mackerel-gulls screaming and soaring aloft at the approach of a stranger. When within about a quarter of a mile of the shore, I backed round to come upon the beach stern foremost through the surf. If the surf be high, coming ashore is a delicate operation; for, should the boat be turned broadside on, she would be thrown over upon the oarsman, and both washed up the beach in a flood of sandy salt-water; so it requires some little steadiness to sit back to the coming wave, hear the increasing roar, and feel the sudden lift and toss shoreward which each roller gives you as it plunges down upon the sand. Just before coming to the outer edge of the surf, I was seen by my friends, who hastened down the cliff-road to receive me. Resting on my oars, I waited, till, hearing a large roller coming, whose voice gained in strength and depth as it drew nearer to the shore, I looked behind. The crest was already beginning to curl, as it dashed under the boat and swept me in-shore, breaking, as the stern passed, the top of the sea, and carrying me in, full speed, with the flood of foam and spray. After three or four quick strokes I jerked the oars out of the row-locks, jumped into the water knee-deep, and wading dragged the boat backwards as far as she would float, when the receding surf let her gently down upon the sand, and before the next wave the servant had taken the bow and I the stern and lifted her high and dry upon the beach. And so my afternoon's pull of thirty miles was safely and successfully finished, my boat having proved herself thoroughly seaworthy, though my friends could hardly believe that such a craft could be safely trusted. After removing the stores and arranging other matters, we took her up, placed her quietly upon the grass, and left her for the night.

The next morning was rather hazy. About nine o'clock I took my way to the beach, and began to prepare for departure. Mr. T.'s house lies several miles to the south and west of Cape Ann. Eastern Point, on the Cape, was therefore the place to be steered for in a straight line,—perhaps six miles distant. Two miles on, the white light-house on the Point can be plainly seen. The tide was rising, and the two lines of ripple met across the sand-bar which connects a little island with the beach. My boat was now carried down from her night's resting-place and set at the edge of the water. The oars being placed in readiness, two of us waded out with her till she would just float, when, quickly and cautiously stepping in, I met the advancing wave in time to ride over it. The line of surf is hard to cross, unless one can catch the roller before it begins to crest. Once outside the line, I turned and pulled swiftly across the bar, over which the tide had risen a few inches, and, bidding good-morning to my hospitable entertainers, set off for Eastern Point. There was considerable swell, though not much wind. The shore being familiar to me, I was rowing along leisurely, recognizing one well-known cliff after another, as they came in sight, and was between Kettle Island and the main, when a slight dampness in the air caused me to turn my face to the eastward, and I saw coming in from the sea, preceded by an advance guard of feathery mist, a dense bank of fog. It swept in, blotting out sea, shore, everything but the view a few feet around the boat. Fortunately knowing the place, and guided by the sound of the surf, I soon neared the wet, brown rocks at the inner edge of Kettle Island. Backing up into a little cove between two huge sea-weedy boulders I waited, hoping that a turn in the wind might drive the mist seaward and allow me to keep on. There I sat a full hour, watching the star-fish, and the crabs scrambling about among the loose strands of the olive-green and deep purple rock-weed, which looked almost black in the shadow, while here and there, as it waved to and fro with the sea, disclosing patches of yellow sand. Very beautiful was this natural aquarium; but time was flying, and "The Shoals" were more than thirty miles distant. The mist began to drive in long rifts, and a gleam of sunshine came out, but only for a moment. I took advantage of it at once, and pushed out from port.

The opposite shore of the cove, in the mouth of which the island lies, was dimly discernible, and the dense foliage of the willows surrounding the fishermen's houses loomed up in the distance, while at the extreme end of the Point the sea broke heavily on the long protruding reef which slanted eastward. I made rapidly for the Point, and reached the outside line of rollers just in time; for the fog, which had been drifting backwards and forwards and torn in long rents, now closed over again, shutting down darker than ever. It was with the utmost difficulty that I could make out the faint gray line of cliff and surf. On the whole, however, it appeared best to keep on and feel my way along the coast, navigating rather by sound than by sight. The shore grows higher as you go northward towards Gloucester harbor, and is, if possible, more rugged and broken than to the south. The chief danger was from sunken rocks, which every wave submerged three or four feet, and which in the hollow of the sea were wholly above water. I came upon one very suddenly, as the wave was swelling above it, and the rock-weed afloat on its sunken head looked, for the instant, like the hair of a drowning person. My boat went directly over it, and the next moment its black crest rose in the trough of the wave. One such chance of wreck was enough, and so I kept farther out, losing sight almost entirely of the cliffs. The sun, meanwhile, was pouring down an intense heat, making the fog luminous, but not rendering the coast any more visible. I knew that before me, somewhere, lay the reef of Norman's Woe. The huge rock on the inside of the reef, separated from the shore by a narrow strait, I judged must be right ahead, but not knowing how near, I kept on, cautiously looking behind, every few strokes, and began to think I must have passed it in the fog, when suddenly, as if it had stepped in the way, it rose before me, its top lost in the mist, and with the sullen drip and splash of the sea on its almost perpendicular sides. I had to back water with some force, and, skirting the reef, stood on till fairly outside,—when, turning shoreward again, I went on to the edge of the surf.

Resuming my former style of navigation, almost twisting my head off to keep a sharp look-out for rocks and reefs, I came to what seemed to be the mouth of Gloucester harbor, and there stopped for a moment. There was no use in pulling up one side of the harbor and down the other, four miles, while in a straight line to the Point it was only one and a half. I had almost decided on rowing the longer distance, however, when I heard a bell ringing somewhere in the direction of Eastern Point. It was striking in measured time, and the sound came across the water with great distinctness. It puzzled me a little, till I remembered there was a fog-bell as well as a light-house on the Point. Hoping that the tolling would continue, I aimed for the bell as straight as possible. With a couple of strokes the shore vanished, and nothing could be seen but fog. Rowing where there is plenty of light and yet nothing visible is embarrassing business. One must rely wholly upon the sense of hearing, as eyes are of no use in such a case. Fearing that the bell might cease before I got across, I bent with a will upon the oars and went racing through the fog. The sound grew more and more distinct with each peal, when, suddenly as the apparition of Norman's Woe, right before me sprang up the black dripping hull of a fishing-schooner, becalmed, and rocking with the roll of the sea; one turn and I shot beneath her bows, passed her, and was lost in the fog before the fat darkey who was lazily fishing by the bowsprit could shift from one side of the deck to the other to keep me in sight. The creaking of blocks and the heavy flap of wet sails warned me of the neighborhood of other vessels. In a short time I could hear the rusty grating of the pivot as the bell turned; then my boat glided close under the rock on which the light-house stands. At that moment the fog opened half across the bay, showing clearly my track with more than a dozen vessels lying close by it. The lifting was but for a moment; back rolled the cloud and all was invisible again. I rounded the Point, however, and went ahead, pulling along the eastern coast of the Cape in the fog.

It was hard work, this groping through the mist, and made me wish for the Janus power of gazing out of the back of my head to save the trouble of continually turning. The look-out was now necessarily more vigilant than when on the lower shore, as I was entirely ignorant of the coast and could not see twenty feet before me. The sea was calm, save the ever-swinging ground-swell, which does not show its power till it meets with some resistance; and though without crest, the surf on the rocks was very high. There was nothing to deaden the force of the sea, and it came on in huge green masses, sliding bodily up on the rocks with a sound like distant thunder, making one feel that a boat would be shivered to splinters, should she fall into its power. Once the breakers nearly caught me broadside on, as I had begun to pull along the shore, compelling me to keep outside the line of surf and thus follow it till the rocky headland loomed up on the other side of the bay, then past the reefs again till another bay curved inward,—nothing to be seen but fog, dim white surf, and dimmer rocks. Once, when passing an outlying point, I saw, for a moment, a couple of men fishing; they shouted something which the surf rendered inaudible; then rock and fishers melted away into the mist. After rowing in this manner for about an hour, the water shoaled, the fog lightened, and an island appeared to the east, with the sea rippling over the sand-bar which joined it to the shore. I pulled on and found the depth but a few inches, just enough to cross without touching. The island was very picturesque, and the end towards the west was broken into ledges, on which were perched eight or ten small weather-beaten houses. Half floating by the beach under the cliff, or drawn up on it, were a number of dories, while a troop of little children were wading, splashing, and shouting in the shallow water on the bar. They stopped when they saw me, clustered together watching as I passed, and when I was fairly over set up a shout and resumed their play. I rowed on until two in the afternoon, when the fog became thinner, and finding myself between two rocky headlands, in "Milk Island Strait," as I conjectured, and it being dinner-time, I went ashore in a little inlet, took out my provisions, and dined.

The mist, meanwhile, had disappeared, leaving the sky perfectly clear. It was nearly three when dinner was finished. The Isles of Shoals were full twenty-one miles distant, and if they were to be reached before night, there was no time to be lost. So I backed out of the inlet, and, getting the bearings, aimed for a point on the horizon where I supposed the islands to be, and pulled without stopping for three hours. The wind was fresh from the southeast, the sea high, and there was not the least trace of the fog. The hills of Cape Ann, as I went on, changed from green to blue, and the color grew fainter in the distance. The land, which was ten miles inside to the westward, had now come nearer, and the dark line of the woods was just visible.

It was time to see the Shoals. I turned, but the heavy sea tossed the boat about so that it was not at all certain whether they were or were not in sight. The only objects in view were a few small white clouds about the horizon and the distant sails of a schooner; so again bringing the Cape astern, I rowed on till sunset. The hills had then almost sunk below the water, and it was full time to see White Island and the light which would be kindled in a few moments. The boat swung into the trough of the sea, and when on the top of a wave I looked up to the northward. The sight was not a pleasant one for an evening pull: the sky was covered with the dark clouds of a gathering storm rapidly rolling up, and my old friend the fog was again working in, as the wind had shifted to the east and north. In the distance nothing could be seen but black sky and blacker water, while nearer crept on the line of mist, shutting out all prospect. The Shoals were doubtless somewhere in the darkness, but just where I could not determine. Something must be done at once before the fog reached me. Calling a council of war, I debated. There was no certainty of hitting the Shoals, and if I did come on them in any other than the exact spot, my boat would be beaten into chips in five minutes on some of the reefs which abound in that region. It would be entirely dark when I reached the islands, and the wind and sea were rising; it looked very much like the beginning of an easterly gale. So the council concluded to let the Shoals go for that night, and stay out at sea till morning. Should the gale come on, the boat could be beached on the coast to the westward; and if the wind lulled, as it probably would for a few hours on the next day, there was time enough to get ashore. I was from eight to ten miles at sea, and six miles east and south of the Shoals, as nearly as I could reckon. It was necessary to get more to the westward to clear the islands in the night, when the tide set in. Rowing for half an hour brought me far enough in to stop. The fog was again all around me, and the thick clouds made it so dark that it was impossible to see twice my boat's length. Resting on my oars for a moment, I began to stow a few things more closely in the seat-room, when a huge sea broke just ahead, and, striking the bow a little on one side, whirled the boat round and rolled her half over, pitching the crest into the seat-room and filling it with water. I caught her with the oars barely in time to save her, and turned her again head to the sea, keeping a watchful eye to windward. Then baling out the seat-room, I took some crackers and a draught of water, and turned the boat stern foremost to the sea.

It was, by guess, about nine o'clock; and there was no light except the phosphorescence of the water. When a wave came rushing through the fog, its black body invisible in the darkness, the crest glanced like quicksilver and broke into ten thousand coruscations as the boat balanced on the top,—pouring a flood of glittering water past the stern and over the canvas cover, and dripping from the sides in sparkling drops. Wherever a foam-bubble burst or oar dipped, it was like opening a silver-lined casket. The boat left a luminous track, which rose with the waves as they swelled behind her, and disappeared in the night. It required a strong hand to keep her in her course; had she broached to, I should have been rolled out and obliged to swim for it. A quick eye was necessary to watch, lest, in spite of the oars, she might swing round and turn over. The utter darkness and the storm so threatening at sundown had come in full force. It was raining and blowing heavily, and the strong wind driving the rain and mist in sheets across the water deepened the hoarse roar of the sea. I was very wet, and not so fresh, after my forty miles or more of hard, steady pulling, as in the morning; I was also very sleepy, so that it was not easy to keep even one eye open to look out for passing coasters,—the chief danger. My craft was so slender they could have gone over her in the darkness and storm and never have known it. The tide was still setting out, the sea was very high, and there was not a ray of light from White Island. My best course seemed to be to continue pulling slowly and keep the boat stern to the sea till after midnight, when the tide would change and the wind would lull for a short time,—unless it should prove to be the beginning of the gale, and not its forerunner, as I had thought. The hours passed slowly. There was much to do in heading straight and in easing up when the great waves loomed through the fog. Midnight would decide whether at day-dawn I must pull for it, and run, if possible, the line of breakers on Rye Beach, with rather less than an even chance of coming out right-end uppermost, or whether the wind and sea would go down so that I could slip quietly ashore before the gale returned.

Midnight came at last; the rain ceased and the wind began to shift to the south, and I knew that now the probability of going ashore decently was good. The tide having turned, the wind moderated, and the sea, though still high, was longer and did not break so quickly. Still farther to the south veered the wind, and a little after three, as well as I could tell by my watch, the fog thinned, so that, looking up, I caught the faint glimmer of a star; then another peeped through the cloud. The mist broke in several places, then drifted over, then broke again; and, chancing to look seaward, a light flared into full blaze for a moment, swung smaller, then vanished. There was no mistaking it,—White Island light at last!

Backing with one oar, pulling with the other, I rose on the top of a great sea, and caught the light again just as it began to come into sight. Off I went, at a splendid pace, driving along in the trough and over the crest of the waves, steering by a star behind me, for about ten minutes; then light and stars sank back into the mist, and all was black again. I waited a few moments, and again the light shone out; but meantime the boat's bow had veered several points. Turning toward it, I was off full speed this time for about five minutes, before the fog swept in again. Then another rest on my oars. The fog drifted out and drifted in backwards and forwards, now thinning here, then thinning there; but no other glimpse of the light did I get that night. For a moment, a shadowy-looking schooner glided slowly along a few hundred feet ahead of me, and directly across my track,—then melted out into the darkness. After waiting some time longer, finding no chance of another glimpse of the light, I secured my oars, and, as the wind and sea had decreased, got ready to turn in. The seat-room was only four feet long,—two feet short of my length; and the washboard, which was three inches in height, surrounded the seat-room and obliged me to use the boat-sponge as a pillow. But trusting to chance that my craft would come across nothing either fixed or floating, I retreated at once to the land of Nod. What the weather was during the rest of that night, or what might have been seen, I cannot say; for I did not wake till my watch told seven in the morning. Then my eyes opened to, or rather in, as choice a specimen of mist as had yet been met with.

It was perfectly calm; the sea was undulating slightly, and not a breath of wind stirring. I sat up and looked around. Nothing visible but misty atmosphere and leaden-colored water; the phosphorescent sparkle had quite gone out of it. I listened, and with the low dull roar of the surf on Rye Beach on one side came the break of the waves on the Shoals, but so faint that it was doubtful whether it were really audible, when another most unmistakable sound assured me Landlord Laighton was blowing his breakfast-horn on Appledore Island. The familiar notes of that very peculiar performance came clearly through the fog. Had he kept on blowing twenty minutes longer, he would have had another guest; but he stopped before ten strokes could be taken. So, reluctantly turning my boat for the other shore, I pulled for the sound of the surf, which increased as I approached it. The beach was still several miles distant, when the short, quick rap of oars came to my ears. I knew at once the fisherman's stroke, and, supposing that he had put out from the shore and did not mean to stay out long, I gave chase at once, and pulled till he stopped rowing and was apparently near. Then I hailed, and after a twenty minutes' hunt caught a glimpse of his dory and immediately introduced myself. He was fishing with two lines, one on each side of the boat, and was about returning when I came up. He had never before beheld such a craft as mine, and did not know what to make of her as she came through the fog. He soon, however, drew in his lines, and, acting as pilot, set out for the beach, from which we were then three miles distant. After various twistings and circlings through the mist, the row of sandy hillocks which backs Rye Beach appeared, and in a few moments we pulled through the surf and landed, thus ending one part of my summer's cruise.

* * * * *

A STORY OF TO-DAY.

PART I.

Let me tell you a story of To-Day,—very homely and narrow in its scope and aim. Not of the To-Day whose significance in the history of humanity only those shall read who will live when you and I are dead. Let us bear the pain in silence, if our hearts are strong enough, while the nations of the earth stand far off pitying. I have no word of this To-Day to speak. I write from the border of the battle-field, and I find in it no theme for shallow argument or flimsy rhymes. The shadow of death has fallen on us; it chills the very heaven. No child laughs in my face as I pass down the street. Men have forgotten to hope, forgotten to pray; only in the bitterness of endurance they say "in the morning, 'Would God it were even!' and in the evening, 'Would God it were morning!'" Neither I nor you have the prophet's vision to see the age as its meaning stands written before God. Those who shall live when we are dead may tell their children, perhaps, how, out of anguish and darkness such as the world seldom has borne, the enduring morning evolved of the true world and the true man. It is not clear to us. Hands wet with a brother's blood for the Right, a slavery of intolerance, the hackneyed cant of men or the bloodthirstiness of women, utter no prophecy to us of the great To-Morrow of content and right that holds the world. Yet the To-Morrow is there; if God lives, it is there. The voice of the meek Nazarene, which we have deafened down as ill-timed, unfit to teach the watchword of the hour, renews the quiet promise of its coming in simple, humble things. Let us go down and look for it. There is no need that we should feebly vaunt and madden ourselves over our self-seen lights, whatever they may be, forgetting what broken shadows they are of eternal truths in that calm where He sits and with His quiet hand controls us.

Patriotism and Chivalry are powers in the tranquil, unlimited lives to come, as well as here, I know; but there are less partial truths, higher hierarchies who serve the God-man, that do not speak to us in bayonets and victories,—Humility, Mercy, and Love. Let us not quite neglect them, however humble the voices they use may be. Why, the very low glow of the fire upon the hearth tells me something of recompense coming in the hereafter,—Christmas-days, and heartsome warmth; in these bare hills trampled down by armed men, the yellow clay is quick with pulsing fibres, hints of the great heart of life and love throbbing within; God's slanted sunlight would show me, in these sullen smoke-clouds from the camp, walls of amethyst and jasper, outer ramparts of the Promised Land. Do not call us traitors, then, who choose to be cool and silent through the fever of the hour,—who choose to search in common things for auguries of the hopeful, helpful calm to come, finding even in these poor sweet-peas, thrusting their tendrils through the brown mould, a deeper, more healthful lesson for the eye and soul than warring evils or truths. Do not call me a traitor, if I dare weakly to hint that there are yet other characters besides that of Patriot in which a man may appear creditably in the great masquerade, and not blush when it is over; or if I tell you a story of To-Day, in which there shall be none of the red glare of war,—only those homelier, subtler lights which we have overlooked. If it prove to you that the sun of old times still shines, and the God of old times still lives, is not that enough?

My story is very crude and homely, as I said,—only a rough sketch of one or two of those people whom you see every day, and call "dregs" sometimes,—a dull, plain bit of prose, such as you might pick for yourself out of any of these warehouses or back-streets. I expect you to call it stale and plebeian, for I know the glimpses of life it pleases you best to find here: New England idyls delicately tinted; passion-veined hearts, cut bare for curious eyes; prophetic utterances, concrete and clear; or some word of pathos or fun from the old friends who have indenizened themselves in everybody's home. You want something, in fact, to lift you out of this crowded, tobacco-stained commonplace, to kindle and chafe and glow in you. I want you to dig into this commonplace, this vulgar American life, and see what is in it. Sometimes I think it has a new and awful significance that we do not see.

Your ears are openest to the war-trumpet now. Ha! that is spirit-stirring!—that wakes up the old Revolutionary blood! Your manlier nature had been smothered under drudgery, the poor daily necessity for bread and butter. I want you to go down into this common, every-day drudgery, and consider if there might not be in it also a great warfare. Not a serfish war; not altogether ignoble, though even its only end may appear to be your daily food. A great warfare, I think, with a history as old as the world, and not without its pathos. It has its slain. Men and women, lean-jawed, crippled in the slow, silent battle, are in your alleys, sit beside you at your table; its martyrs sleep under every green hill-side.

You must fight in it; money will buy you no discharge from that war. There is room in it, believe me, whether your post be on a judge's bench, or over a wash-tub, for heroism, for knightly honor, for purer triumph than his who falls foremost in the breach. Your enemy, Self, goes with you from the cradle to the coffin; it is a hand-to-hand struggle all the sad, slow way, fought in solitude,—a battle that began with the first heart-beat, and whose victory will come only when the drops ooze out, and sudden halt in the veins,—a victory, if you can gain it, that will drift you not a little way upon the coasts of the wider, stronger range of being, beyond death.

Let me roughly outline for you one or two lives that I have known, and how they conquered or were worsted in the fight. Very common lives, I know,—such as are swarming in yonder market-place; yet I dare to call them voices of God,—all!

My reason for choosing this story to tell you is simple enough.

An old book, which I happened to find to-day, recalled it. It was a ledger, iron-bound, with the name of the firm on the outside,—Knowles & Co. You may have heard of the firm: they were large woollen manufacturers: supplied the home market in Indiana for several years. This ledger, you see by the writing, has been kept by a woman. That is not unusual in Western trading towns, especially in factories where the operatives are chiefly women. In such establishments, women can fill every post successfully, but that of overseer: they are too hard with the hands for that.

The writing here is curious: concise, square, not flowing,—very legible, however, exactly suited to its purpose. People who profess to read character in chirography would decipher but little from these cramped, quiet lines. Only this, probably: that the woman, whoever she was, had not the usual fancy of her sex for dramatizing her soul in her writing, her dress, her face,—kept it locked up instead, intact; that her words and looks, like her writing, were most likely simple, mere absorbents by which she drew what she needed of the outer world to her, not flaunting helps to fling herself, or the tragedy or comedy that lay within, before careless passers-by. The first page has the date, in red letters, October 2, 1860, largely and clearly written. I am sure the woman's hand trembled a little when she took up the pen; but there is no sign of it here; for it was a new, desperate adventure to her, and she was young, with no faith in herself. She did not look desperate, at all,—a quiet, dark girl, coarsely dressed in brown.

There was not much light in the office where she sat; for the factory was in one of the close by-streets of the town, and the office they gave her was only a small square closet in the seventh story. It had but one window, which overlooked a back-yard full of dyeing vats. The sunlight that did contrive to struggle in obliquely through the dusty panes and cobwebs of the window had a sleepy odor of copperas latent in it. You smelt it when you stirred. The manager, Pike, who brought her up, had laid the day-books and this ledger open on the desk for her. As soon as he was gone, she shut the door, listening until his heavy boots had thumped creaking down the rickety ladder leading to the frame-rooms. Then she climbed up on the high office-stool (climbed, I said, for she was a little, little thing) and went to work, opening the books, and copying from one to the other as steadily, monotonously, as if she had been used to it all her life. Here are the first pages: see how sharp the angles are of the blue and black lines, how even the long columns: one would not think, that, as the steel pen traced them out, it seemed to be lining out her life, narrow and black. If any such morbid fancy were in the girl's head, there was no tear to betray it. The sordid, hard figures seemed to her the types of the years coming, but she wrote them down unflinchingly: perhaps life had nothing better for her, so she did not care. She finished soon: they had given her only an hour or two's work for the first day. She closed the books, wiped the pens in a quaint, mechanical fashion, then got down and examined her new home.

It was soon understood. There were the walls with their broken plaster, showing the laths underneath, with here and there, over them, sketches with burnt coal, showing that her predecessor had been an artist in his way,—his name, P. Teagarden, emblazoned on the ceiling with the smoke of a candle; heaps of hanks of yarn in the dusty corners; a half-used broom; other heaps of yarn on the old toppling desk covered with dust; a raisin-box, with P. Teagarden done on the lid in bas-relief, half full of ends of cigars, a pack of cards, and a rotten apple. That was all, except an impalpable sense of dust and worn-outness pervading the whole. One thing more, odd enough there: a wire cage, hung on the wall, and in it a miserable pecking chicken, peering dolefully with suspicious eyes out at her, and then down at the mouldy bit of bread on the floor of his cage,—left there, I suppose, by the departed Teagarden. That was all inside. She looked out of the window. In it, as if set in a square black frame, was the dead brick wall, and the opposite roof, with a cat sitting on the scuttle. Going closer, two or three feet of sky appeared. It looked as if it smelt of copperas, and she drew suddenly back.

She sat down, waiting until it was time to go; quietly taking the dull picture into her slow, unrevealing eyes; a sluggish, hackneyed weariness creeping into her brain; a curious feeling, that all her life before had been a silly dream, and this dust, these desks and ledgers, were real, —all that was real. It was her birthday; she was twenty. As she happened to remember that, another fancy floated up before her, oddly life-like: of the old seat she made for herself under the currant-bushes at home when she was a child, and the plans she laid for herself when she should be a woman, sitting there,—how she would dig down into the middle of the world, and find the kingdom of the griffins, or would go after Mercy and Christiana in their pilgrimage. It was only a little while ago since these things were more alive to her than anything else in the world. The seat was under the currant-bushes still. Very little time ago; but she was a woman now,—and, look here! A chance ray of sunlight slanted in, falling barely on the dust, the hot heaps of wool, waking a stronger smell of copperas; the chicken saw it, and began to chirp a weak, dismal joy, more sorrowful than tears. She went to the cage, and put her finger in for it to peck at. Standing there, if the life coming rose up before her in that hard, vacant blare of sunlight, she looked at it with the same still, waiting eyes, that told nothing.

The door opened at last, and a man came in,—Dr. Knowles, the principal owner of the factory. He nodded shortly to her, and, going to the desk, turned over the books, peering suspiciously at her work. An old man, overgrown, looking like a huge misshapen mass of flesh, as he stood erect, facing her.

"You can go now," he said, gruffly. "To-morrow you must wait for the bell to ring, and go—with the rest of the hands."

A curious smile flickered over her face like a shadow; but she said nothing. He waited a moment.

"So!" he growled, "the Howth blood does not blush to go down into the slime of the gutter? is sufficient to itself?"

A cool, attentive motion,—that was all. Then she stooped to tie her sandals. The old man watched her, irritated. She had been used to the keen scrutiny of his eyes since she was a baby, so was cool under it always. The face watching her was one that repelled most men: dominant, restless, flushing into red gusts of passion, a small, intolerant eye, half hidden in folds of yellow fat,—the eye of a man who would give to his master (whether God or Satan) the last drop of his own blood, and exact the same of other men.

She had tied her bonnet and fastened her shawl, and stood ready to go.

"Is that all you want?" he demanded. "Are you waiting to hear that your work is well done? Women go through life as babies learn to walk,—a mouthful of pap every step, only they take it in praise or love. Pap is better. Which do you want? Praise, I fancy."

"Neither," she said, quietly brushing her shawl. "The work is well done,
I know."

The old man's eye glittered for an instant, satisfied; then he turned to the books. He thought she had gone, but, hearing a slight clicking sound, turned round. She was taking the chicken out of the cage.

"Let it alone!" he broke out, sharply. "Where are you going with it?"

"Home," she said, with a queer, quizzical face. "Let it smell the green fields, Doctor. Ledgers and copperas are not good food for a chicken's soul, or body either."

"Let it alone!" he growled. "You take it for a type of yourself, eh? It has another work to do than to grow fat and sleep about the barnyard."

She opened the cage.

"I think I will take it."

"No," he said, quietly. "It has a master here. Not P. Teagarden. Why, Margaret," pushing his stubby finger between the tin bars, "do you think the God you believe in would have sent it here without a work to do?"

She looked up; there was a curious tremor in his flabby face, a shadow in his rough voice.

"If it dies here, its life won't have been lost. Nothing is lost. Let it alone."

"Not lost?" she said, slowly, refastening the cage. "Only I think"——

"What, child?"

She glanced furtively at him.

"It's a hard, scraping world where such a thing as that has work to do!"

He vouchsafed no answer. She waited to see his lip curl bitterly, and then, amused, went down the stairs. She had paid him for his sneer.

The steps were but a long ladder set in the wall, not the great staircase used by the hands: that was on the other side of the factory. It was a huge, unwieldy building, such as crowd the suburbs of trading towns. This one went round the four sides of a square, with the yard for the vats in the middle. The ladders and passages she passed down were on the inside, narrow and dimly lighted: she had to grope her way sometimes. The floors shook constantly with the incessant thud of the great looms that filled each story, like heavy, monotonous thunder. It deafened her, made her dizzy, as she went down slowly. It was no short walk to reach the lower hall, but she was down at last. Doors opened from it into the ground-floor ware-rooms; glancing in, she saw vast, dingy recesses of boxes piled up to the dark ceilings. There was a crowd of porters and draymen cracking their whips, and lounging on the trucks by the door, waiting for loads, talking politics, and smoking. The smell of tobacco, copperas, and burning logwood was heavy to clamminess here. She stopped, uncertain. One of the porters, a short, sickly man, who stood aloof from the rest, pushed open a door for her with his staff. Margaret had a quick memory for faces; she thought she had seen this one before, as she passed,—a dark face, sullen, heavy-lipped, the hair cut convict-fashion, close to the head. She thought, too, one of the men muttered "jail-bird," jeering him for his forwardness. "Load for Clinton! Western Railroad!" sung out a sharp voice behind her, and, as she went into the street, a train of cars rushed into the hall to be loaded, and men swarmed out of every corner,—red-faced and pale, whiskey-bloated and heavy-brained, Irish, Dutch, black, with souls half asleep somewhere, and the destiny of a nation in their grasp,—hands, like herself, going through the slow, heavy work, for, as Pike the manager would have told you, "three dollars a week,—good wages these tight times." For nothing more? Some other meaning may have fallen from their faces into this girl's quiet intuition in the instant's glance,—cheerfuller, remoter aims, hidden in the most sensual face,—homeliest home-scenes, low climbing ambitions, some delirium of pleasure to come,—whiskey, if nothing better: aims in life like yours, differing in degree, needing only to make them the same——did you say what?

She had reached the street now,—a back-street, a crooked sort of lane rather, running between endless piles of ware-houses. She hurried down it to gain the suburbs, for she lived out in the country. It was a long, tiresome walk through the outskirts of the town, where the dwelling-houses were,—long rows of two-story bricks drabbled with soot-stains. It was two years since she had been in the town. Remembering this, and the reason why she had shunned it, she quickened her pace, her face growing stiller than before. One might have fancied her a slave putting on a mask, fearing to meet her master. The town, being unfamiliar to her, struck her newly. She saw the expression on its face better. It was a large trading city, compactly built, shut in by hills. It had an anxious, harassed look, like a speculator concluding a keen bargain; the very dwelling-houses smelt of trade, having shops in the lower stories; in the outskirts, where there are cottages in other cities, there were mills here; the trees, which some deluded dreamer had planted on the flat pavements, had all grown up into abrupt Lombardy poplars, knowing their best policy was to keep out of the way; the boys, playing marbles under them, played sharply "for keeps"; the bony old dray-horses, plodding through the dusty crowds, had speculative eyes, that measured their oats at night with a "you-don't-cheat-me" look. Even the churches had not the grave repose of the old brown house yonder in the hills, where the few field-people—Arians, Calvinists, Churchmen— gathered every Sunday, and air and sunshine and God's charity made the day holy. These churches lifted their hard stone faces insolently, registering their yearly alms in the morning journals. To be sure, the back-seats were free for the poor; but the emblazoned crimson of the windows, the carving of the arches, the very purity of the preacher's style, said plainly that it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a man in a red warm-us to enter the kingdom of heaven through that gate.

Nature itself had turned her back on the town: the river turned aside, and but half a river crept reluctant by; the hills were but bare banks of yellow clay. There was a cinder-road leading through these. Margaret climbed it slowly. The low town-hills, as I said, were bare, covered at their bases with dingy stubble-fields. In the sides bordering the road gaped the black mouths of the coal-pits that burrowed under the hills, under the town. Trade everywhere,—on the earth and under it. No wonder the girl called it a hard, scraping world. But when the road had crept through these hills, it suddenly shook off the cinders, and turned into the brown mould of the meadows,—turned its back on trade and the smoky town, and speedily left it out of sight contemptuously, never looking back once. This was the country now in earnest.

Margaret slackened her step, drawing long breaths of the fresh cold air. Far behind her, panting and puffing along, came a black, burly figure, Dr. Knowles. She had seen him behind her all the way, but they did not speak. Between the two there lay that repellant resemblance which made them like close relations,—closer when they were silent. You know such people? When you speak to them, the little sharp points clash. Yet they are the people whom you surely know you will meet in the life beyond death, "saved" or not. The Doctor came slowly along the quiet country-road, watching the woman's figure going as slowly before him. He had a curious interest in the girl,—a secret reason for the interest, which as yet he kept darkly to himself. For this reason he tried to fancy how her new life would seem to her. It should be hard enough, her work,—he was determined on that; her strength and endurance must be tested to the uttermost. He must know what stuff was in the weapon before he used it. He had been reading the slow, cold thing for years,—had not got into its secret yet. But there was power there, and it was the power he wanted. Her history was simple enough: she was going into the mill to support a helpless father and mother; it was a common story; she had given up much for them;—other women did the same. He gave her scanty praise. Two years ago (he had keen, watchful eyes, this man) he had fancied that the poor homely girl had a dream, as most women have, of love and marriage: she had put it aside, he thought, forever; it was too expensive a luxury; she had to begin the life-long battle for bread and butter. Her dream had been real and pure, perhaps; for she accepted no sham love in its place: if it had left an empty hunger in her heart, she had not tried to fill it. Well, well, it was the old story. Yet he looked after her kindly, as he thought of it; as some people look sorrowfully at children, going back to their own childhood. For a moment he half relented in his purpose, thinking, perhaps, her work for life was hard enough. But no: this woman had been planned and kept by God for higher uses than daughter or wife or mother. It was his part to put her work into her hands.

The road was creeping drowsily now between high grass-banks, out through the hills. A sleepy, quiet road. The restless dust of the town never had been heard of out there. It (the road) went wandering lazily through the corn-fields, down by the river, into the very depths of the woods,—the low October sunshine slanting warmly down it all the way, touching the grass-banks and the corn-fields with patches of russet gold. Nobody in such a road could be in a hurry. The quiet was so deep, the free air, the heavy trees, the sunshine, all so full and certain and fixed, one could be sure of finding them the same a hundred years from now. Nobody ever was in a hurry. The brown bees came along there, when their work was over, and hummed into the great purple thistles on the roadside in a voluptuous stupor of delight. The cows sauntered through the clover by the fences, until they wound up by lying down in it and sleeping outright. The country-people, jogging along to the mill, walked their fat old nags through the stillness and warmth so slowly that even Margaret left them far behind. As the road went deeper into the hills, the solitude and quiet grew even more penetrating and certain,—so certain in these grand old mountains that one called them eternal, and, looking up to the peaks fixed in the clear blue, grew surer of a world beyond this where there is neither change nor death.

It was growing late; the evening air grew more motionless and cool; the russet gold of the sunshine mottled only the hill-tops now; in the valleys there was a duskier brown, deepening every moment. Margaret turned from the road and went down the fields. One did not wonder, feeling the silence of these hills and broad sweeps of meadow, that this woman, coming down from among them, should be strangely still, with dark questioning eyes dumb to their own secrets.

Looking into her face now, you could be sure of one thing: that she had left the town, the factory, the dust far away, shaken the thought of them off her brain. No miles could measure the distance between her home and them. At a stile across the field an old man sat waiting. She hurried now, her cheek coloring. Dr. Knowles could see them going to the house beyond, talking earnestly. He sat down in the darkening twilight on the stile, and waited half an hour. He did not care to hear the story of Margaret's first day at the mill, knowing how her father and mother would writhe under it, soften it as she would. It was nothing to her, he knew. So he waited. After a while he heard the old man's laugh, like that of a pleased child, and then went in and took her place beside him. She went out, but came back presently, every grain of dust gone, in her clear dress of pearl gray. The neutral tint suited her well. As she stood by the window, listening gravely to them, the homely face and waiting figure came into full relief. Nature had made this woman in a freak of rare sincerity. There were no reflected lights about her: no gloss on her skin, no glitter in her eyes, no varnish on her soul. Simple and dark and pure, there she was, for God and her master alone to conquer and understand. Her flesh was cold and colorless,—there were no surface tints on it,—it warmed sometimes slowly from far within; her voice was quiet,—out of her heart; her hair, the only beauty of the woman, was lustreless brown, lay in unpolished folds of dark shadow. I saw such hair once, only once. It had been cut from the head of a man, who, quiet and simple as a child, lived out the law of his nature, and set the world at defiance,—Bysshe Shelley.

The Doctor, talking to her father, watched the girl furtively, took in every point, as one might critically survey a Damascus blade which he was going to carry into battle. There was neither love nor scorn in his look,—a mere fixedness of purpose to make use of her some day. He talked, meanwhile, glancing at her now and then, as if the subject they discussed were indirectly linked with his plan for her. If it were, she was unconscious of it. She sat on the wooden step of the porch, looking out on the melancholy sweep of meadow and hill range growing cool and dimmer in the dun twilight, not hearing what they said, until the sharpened, earnest tones roused her.

"You will fail, Knowles."

It was her father who spoke.

"Nothing can save such a scheme from failure. Neither the French nor German Socialists attempted to base their systems on the lowest class, as you design."

"I know," said Knowles. "That accounts for their partial success."

"Let me understand your plan practically," eagerly demanded her father.

She thought Knowles evaded the question,—wished to leave the subject. Perhaps he did not regard the poor old schoolmaster as a practical judge of practical matters. All his life he had called him thriftless and unready.

"It never will do, Knowles," he went on in his slow way. "Any plan, Phalanstery or Community, call it what you please, founded on self-government, is based on a sham, the tawdriest of shams."

The old schoolmaster shook his head as one who knows, and tried to push the thin gray hairs out of his eyes in a groping way. Margaret lifted them back so quietly that he did not feel her.

"You'll call the Republic a sham next!" said the Doctor, coolly aggravating.

"The Republic!" The old man quickened his tone, like a war-horse scenting the battle near at hand. "There never was a thinner-crusted Devil's egg in the world than democracy. I think I've told you that before?"

"I think you have," said the other, dryly.

"You always were a Tory, Mr. Howth," said his wife, in her placid, creamy way. "It is in the blood, I think, Doctor. The Howths fought under Cornwallis, you know."

The schoolmaster waited until his wife had ended.

"Very true, Mrs. Howth," he said, with a grave smile. Then his thin face grew hot again.

"No, Dr. Knowles. Your scheme is but a sign of the mad age we live in. Since the thirteenth century, when the anarchic element sprang full-grown into the history of humanity, that history has been chaos. And this republic is the culmination of chaos."

"Out of chaos came the new-born earth," suggested the Doctor.

"But its foundations were granite," rejoined the old man with nervous eagerness,—"granite, not the slime of yesterday. When you found empires, go to work as God worked."

The Doctor did not answer; sat looking, instead, out into the dark indifferently, as if the heresies which the old man hurled at him were some old worn-out song. Seeing, however, that the schoolmaster's flush of enthusiasm seemed on the point of dying out, he roused himself to gibe it into life.

"Well, Mr. Howth, what will you have? If the trodden rights of the human soul are the slime of yesterday, how shall we found our empire to last? On despotism? Civil or theocratic?"

"Any despotism is better than that of newly enfranchised serfs," replied the schoolmaster.

The Doctor laughed.

"What a successful politician you would have made! You would have had such a winning way to the hearts of the great unwashed!"

Mrs. Howth laid down her knitting.

"My dear," she said, timidly, "I think that is treason."

The angry heat died out of his face instantly, as he turned to her, without the glimmer of a covert smile at her simplicity. She was a woman; and when he spoke to the Doctor, it was in a tone less sharp.

"What is it the boys used to declaim, their Yankee hearts throbbing under their roundabouts? 'Happy, proud America!' Somehow in that way. 'Cursed, abased America!' better if they had said. Look at her, in the warm vigor of her youth, most vigorous in decay! Look at the dregs of nations, creeds, religions, fermenting together! As for the theory of self-government, it will muddle down here, as in the three great archetypes of the experiment, into a puling, miserable failure!"

The Doctor did not hear. Some sharper shadow seemed to haunt him than the downfall of the Republic. What help did he seek in this girl? His keen, deep eyes never left her unconscious face.

"No," Mr. Howth went on, having the field to himself,—"we left Order back there in the ages you call dark, and Progress will trumpet the world into the ditch."

"Comte!" growled the Doctor.

The schoolmaster's cane beat an angry tattoo on the hearth.

"You sneer at Comte? Because, having the clearest eye, the widest sweeping eye ever given to man, he had no more? It was to show how far flesh can go alone. Could he help it, if God refused the prophet's vision?"

"I'm sure, Samuel," interrupted his wife with a sorrowful earnestness, "your own eyes were as strong as a man's could be. It was ten years after I wore spectacles that you began. Only for that miserable fever, you could read short-hand now."

Her own quiet eyes filled with tears. There was a sudden silence. Margaret shivered, as if some pain stung her. Holding her father's bony hand in hers, she patted it on her knee. The hand trembled a little. Knowles's sharp eyes darted from one to the other; then, with a smothered growl, he shook himself, and rushed headlong into the old battle which he and the schoolmaster had been waging now, off and on, some six years. That was a fight, I can tell you! None of your shallow, polite clashing of modern theories,—no talk of your Jeffersonian Democracy, your high-bred Federalism! They took hold of the matter by the roots, clear at the beginning.

Mrs. Howth's breath fairly left her, they went into the soul of the matter in such a dangerous way. What if Joel should hear? No doubt he would report that his master was an infidel,—that would be the next thing they would hear. He was in the kitchen now: he finished his wood-chopping an hour ago. Asleep, doubtless; that was one comfort. Well, if he were awake, he could not understand. That class of people——And Mrs. Howth (into whose kindly brain just enough of her husband's creed had glimmered to make her say, "that class of people," in the tone with which Abraham would not have spoken of Dives over the gulf) went tranquilly back to her knitting, wondering why Dr. Knowles should come ten times now where he used to come once, to provoke Samuel into these wearisome arguments. Ever since their misfortune came on them, he had been there every night, always at it. She should think he might be a little more considerate. Mr. Howth surely had enough to think of, what with his—his misfortune, and the starvation waiting for them, and poor Margaret's degradation, (she sighed here,) without bothering his head about the theocratic principle, or the Battle of Armageddon. She had hinted as much to Dr. Knowles one day, and he had muttered out something about its being "the life of the dog, Ma'am." She wondered what he meant by that! She looked over at his bearish figure, snuff-drabbled waistcoat, and shock of black hair. Well, poor man, he could not help it, if he were coarse, and an Abolitionist, and a Fourierite, and——She was getting a little muddy now, she was conscious, so turned her mind back to the repose of her stocking. Margaret took it very quietly, seeing her father flaming so. But Margaret never had any opinions to express. She was not like the Parnells: they were noted for their clear judgment. Mrs. Howth was a Parnell.

"The combat deepens,—on, ye brave!"

The Doctor's fat, leathery face was quite red now, and his sentences were hurled out in a sarcastic bass, enough to wither the marrow of a weak man. But the schoolmaster was no weak man. His foot was entirely on his native heath, I assure you. He knew every inch of the ground, from the domination of the absolute faith in the ages of Fetichism, to its pseudo-presentment in the tenth century, and its actual subversion in the nineteenth. Every step. Our politicians might have picked up an idea or two there, I should think! Then he was so cool about it, so skilful! He fairly rubbed his hands with glee, enjoying the combat. And he was so sure that the Doctor was savagely in earnest: why, any one with half an ear could hear that! He did not see how, in the very heat of the fray, his eyes would wander off listlessly. But Mr. Howth did not wander; there was nothing careless or two-sided in the making of this man,—no sham about him, or borrowing. They came down gradually, or out,—for, as I told you, they dug into the very heart of the matter at first,—they came out gradually to modern times. Things began to assume a more familiar aspect. Spinoza, Fichte, Saint Simon,—one heard about them now. If you could but have heard the schoolmaster deal with these his enemies! With what tender charity for the man, what relentless vengeance for the belief, he pounced on them, dragging the soul out of their systems, holding it up for slow slaughter! As for Humanity, (how Knowles lingered on that word, with a tenderness curious in so uncouth a mass of flesh!)—as for Humanity, it was a study to see it stripped and flouted and thrown out of doors like a filthy rag by this poor old Howth, a man too child-hearted to kill a spider. It was pleasanter to hear him when he defended the great Past in which his ideal truth had been faintly shadowed. How he caught the salient tints of the feudal life! How the fine womanly nature of the man rose exulting in the free picturesque glow of the day of crusader and heroic deed! How he crowded in traits of perfected manhood in the conqueror, simple trust in the serf, to color and weaken his argument, not seeing that he weakened it! How, when he thought he had cornered the Doctor, he would color and laugh like a boy, then suddenly check himself, lest he might wound him! A curious laugh, genial, cheery,—bubbling out of his weak voice in a way that put you in mind of some old and rare wine. When he would check himself in one of these triumphant glows, he would turn to the Doctor with a deprecatory gravity, and for a few moments be almost submissive in his reply. So earnest and worn it looked then, the poor old face, in the dim light! The black clothes he wore were so threadbare and shining at the knees and elbows, the coarse leather shoes brought to so fine a polish! The Doctor idly wondered who had blacked them, glancing at Margaret's fingers.

There was a flower stuck in the buttonhole of the schoolmaster's coat, a pale tea-rose. If Dr. Knowles had been a man of fine instincts, (which his opaque shining eyes would seem to deny,) he might have thought it was not unapt or ill-placed even in the shabby, scuffed coat. A scholar, a gentleman, though in patched shoes and trousers a world too short. Old and gaunt, hunger-bitten even it may be, with loose-jointed, bony limbs, and yellow face; clinging, loyal and brave, to the knightly honor, to the quaint, delicate fancies of his youth, that were dust and ashes to other men. In the very haggard face you could find the quiet purity of the child he had been, and the old child's smile, fresh and credulous, on the mouth.

The Doctor had not spoken for a moment. It might be that he was careless of the poetic lights with which Mr. Howth tenderly decorated his old faith, or it might be that even he, with the terrible intentness of a real life-purpose in his brain, was touched by the picture of the far old chivalry, dead long ago. The master's voice grew low and lingering now. It was a labor of love, this. Oh, it is so easy to go back out of the broil of dust and meanness and barter into the clear shadow of that old life where love and bravery stand eternal verities,—never to be bought and sold in that dusty town yonder! To go back? To dream back, rather. To drag out of our own hearts, as the hungry old master did, whatever is truest and highest there, and clothe it with name and deed in the dim days of chivalry. Make a poem of it,—so much easier than to make a life!

Knowles shuffled uneasily, watching the girl keenly, to know how the picture touched her. Was, then, she thought, this grand dead Past so shallow to him? These knights, pure, unstained, searching until death for the Holy Greal, could he understand the life-long agony, the triumph of their conflict over Self? These women, content to live in solitude forever because they once had loved, could any man understand that? Or the dead queen, dead that the man she loved might be free and happy,—why, this was life,—this death! But did pain, and martyrdom, and victory lie back in the days of Galahad and Arthur alone? The homely face grew stiller than before, looking out into the dun sweep of moorland,—cold, unrevealing. It baffled the man that looked at it. He shuffled, chewed tobacco vehemently, tilted his chair on two legs, broke out in a thunder-gust at last.

"Dead days for dead men! The world hears a bugle-call to-day more noble than any of your piping troubadours. We have something better to fight for than a vacant tomb."

The old man drew himself up haughtily.

"I know what you would say,—Liberty for the low and vile. It is a good word. That was a better which they hid in their hearts in the old time,—Honor!"

Honor! I think, Calvinist though he was, that word was his religion. Men have had worse. Perhaps the Doctor thought this; for he rose abruptly, and, leaning on the old man's chair, said, gently,—

"It is better, even here. Yet you poison this child's mind. You make her despise To-Day; make honor live for her now."

"It does not," the schoolmaster said, bitterly. "The world's a failure. All the great old dreams are dead. Your own phantom, your Republic, your experiment to prove that all men are born free and equal,—what is it to-day?"

Knowles lifted his head, looking out into the brown twilight. Some word of pregnant meaning flashed in his eye and trembled on his lip; but he kept it back. His face glowed, though, and the glow and strength gave to the huge misshapen features a grand repose.

"You talk of To-Day," the old man continued, querulously. "I am tired of it. Here is its type and history," touching a county newspaper,—"a fair type, with its cant, and bigotry, and weight of uncomprehended fact. Bargain and sale,—it taints our religion, our brains, our flags,—yours and mine, Knowles, with the rest. Did you never hear of those abject spirits who entered neither heaven nor hell, who were neither faithful to God nor rebellious, caring only for themselves?"

He paused, fairly out of breath. Margaret looked up. Knowles was silent. There was a smothered look of pain on the coarse face; the schoolmaster's words were sinking deeper than he knew.

"No, father," said Margaret, hastily ending his quotation, "'io non averei creduto, che [vita] tanta n' avesse disfatta.'"

Skilful Margaret! The broil must have been turbid in the old man's brain which the grand, slow-stepping music of the Florentine could not calm. She had learned that long ago, and used it as a nurse does some old song to quiet her pettish infant. His face brightened instantly.

"Do not believe, then, child," he said, after a pause. "It is a noble doubt in Dante or in you."

The Doctor had turned away; she could not see his face. The angry scorn was gone from the old master's countenance; it was bent with its usual wistful quiet on the floor. A moment after he looked up with a flickering smile.

"'Onorate l' altissimo poeta!'" he said, gently lifting his finger to his forehead in a military fashion. "Where is my cane, Margaret? The Doctor and I will go and walk on the porch before it grows dark."

The sun had gone down long before, and the stars were out; but no one spoke of this. Knowles lighted the schoolmaster's pipe and his own cigar, and then moved the chairs out of their way, stepping softly that the old man might not hear him. Margaret, in the room, watched them as they went, seeing how gentle the rough, burly man was with her father, and how, every time they passed the sweet-brier, he bent the branches aside, that they might not touch his face. Slow, childish tears came into her eyes as she saw it; for the schoolmaster was blind. This had been their regular walk every evening, since it grew too cold for them to go down under the lindens. The Doctor had not missed a night since her father gave up the school, a month ago: at first, under pretence of attending to his eyes; but since the day he had told them there was no hope of cure, he had never spoken of it again. Only, since then, he had grown doubly quarrelsome,—standing ready armed to dispute with the old man every inch of every subject in earth or air, keeping the old man in a state of boyish excitement during the long, idle days, looking forward to this nightly battle.

It was very still; for the house, with its half-dozen acres, lay in an angle of the hills, looking out on the river, which shut out all distant noises. Only the men's footsteps broke the silence, passing and repassing the window. Without, the October starlight lay white and frosty on the moors, the old barn, the sharp, dark hills, and the river, which was half hidden by the orchard. One could hear it, like some huge giant moaning in his sleep, at times, and see broad patches of steel blue glittering through the thick apple-trees and the bushes. Her mother had fallen into a doze. Margaret looked at her, thinking how sallow the plump, fair face had grown, and how faded the kindly blue eyes were now. Dim with crying,—she knew that, though she never saw her shed a tear. Always cheery and quiet, going placidly about the house in her gray dress and Quaker cap, as if there were no such things in the world as debt or blindness. But Margaret knew, though she said nothing. When her mother came in from those wonderful foraging expeditions in search of late pease or corn, she could see the swollen circle round the eyes, and hear her breath like that of a child which has sobbed itself tired. Then, one night, when she had gone late into her mother's room, the blue eyes were set in a wild, hopeless way, as if staring down into years of starvation and misery. The fire on the hearth burned low and clear; the old worn furniture stood out cheerfully in the red glow, and threw a maze of twisted shadow on the floor. But the glow was all that was cheerful. To-morrow, when the hard daylight should jeer away the screening shadows, it would unbare a desolate, shabby home. She knew; struck with the white leprosy of poverty; the blank walls, the faded hangings, the old stone house itself, looking vacantly out on the fields with a pitiful significance of loss. Upon the mantel-shelf there was a small marble figure, one of the Dancing Graces: the other two were gone, gone in pledge. This one was left, twirling her foot, and stretching out her hands in a dreary sort of ecstasy, with no one to respond. For a moment, so empty and bitter seemed her home and her life, that she thought the lonely dancer with her flaunting joy mocked her,—taunted them with the slow, gray desolation that had been creeping on them for years. Only for a moment the morbid fancy hurt her.

The red glow was healthier, suited her temperament better. She chose to fancy the house as it had been once,—should be again, please God. She chose to see the old comfort and the old beauty which the poor schoolmaster had gathered about their home. Gone now. But it should return. It was well, perhaps, that he was blind, he knew so little of what had come on them. There, where the black marks were on the wall, there had hung two pictures. Margaret and her father religiously believed them to be a Tintoret and Copley. Well, they were gone now. He had been used to dust them with a light brush every morning, himself, but now he said,—

"You can clean the pictures to-day, Margaret. Be careful, my child."

And Margaret would remember the greasy Irishman who had tucked them under his arm, and flung them into a cart, her blood growing hotter in her veins.

It was the same through all the house; there was not a niche in the bare rooms that did not recall a something gone,—something that should return. She willed that, that evening, standing by the dim fire. What women will, whose eyes are slow, attentive, still, as this Margaret's, usually comes to pass.

The red fire-glow suited her; another glow, warming her floating fancy, mingled with it, giving her quiet purpose the trait of heroism. The old spirit of the dead chivalry, of succor to the weak, life-long self-denial,—did it need the sand waste of Palestine or a tournament to call it into life? Down in that trading town, in the thick of its mills and drays, it could live, she thought. That very night, perhaps, in some of those fetid cellars or sunken shanties, there were vigils kept of purpose as unselfish, prayer as heaven-commanding, as that of the old aspirants for knighthood. She, too,—her quiet face stirred with a simple, childish smile, like her father's.

"Why, mother!" she said, stroking down the gray hair under the cap, "shall you sleep here all night?" laughing.

A cheery, tender laugh, this woman's was,—seldom heard,—not far from tears.

Mrs. Howth roused herself. Just then, a broad, high-shouldered man, in a gray flannel shirt, and shoes redolent of the stable, appeared at the door. Margaret looked at him as if he were an accusing spirit,—coming down, as every woman must, from heights of self-renunciation or bold resolve, to an undarned stocking or an uncooked meal.

"Kittle's b'ilin'," he announced, flinging in the information as a general gratuity.

"That will do, Joel," said Mrs. Howth.

The tone of stately blandness which Mrs. Howth erected as a shield between herself and "that class of people" was a study: a success, I think; the résumé of her experience in the combat that had devoured half her life, like that of other American housekeepers. "Be gentle, but let them know their place, my dear!" The class having its type and exponent in Joel stopped at the door, and hitched up its suspenders.

"That will do, Joel," with a stern suavity.

Some idea was in Joel's head under the brush of red hair,—probably the "anarchic element."

"Uh was wishin' toh read the G'zette." Whereupon he advanced into the teeth of the enemy and bore off the newspaper, going before Margaret, as she went to the kitchen, and seating himself beside a flaring tallow-candle on the table.

Reading, with Joel, was not the idle pastime that more trivial minds find it: a thing, on the contrary, to be gone into with slow spelling, and face knitted up into savage sternness, especially now, when, as he gravely explained to Margaret, "in his opinion the crissis was jest at hand, and ev'ry man must be seein' ef the gover'ment was carryin' out the views of the people."

With which intent, Joel, in company with five thousand other sovereigns, consulted, as definitive oracle, "The Daily Gazette" of Towbridge. The schoolmaster need not have grumbled for the old time: feudality in the days of Warwick and of "The Daily Gazette" was not so widely different as he and Joel thought.

Now and then, partly as an escape-valve for his overcharged conviction, partly in compassion to the ignorance of women in political economics, he threw off to Margaret divers commentaries on the text, as she passed in and out.

If she had risen to the full level of Joel's views, she might have considered these views tinctured with radicalism, as they consisted in the propriety of the immediate "impinging of the President." Besides, (Joel was a good-natured man, too, merciful to his beast,) Nero-like, he wished, with the tiger drop of blood that lies hid in everybody's heart, that the few millions who differed with himself and the "Gazette" had but one neck for their more convenient hanging. "It's all that'll save the kentry," he said, and believed it, too.

If Margaret fell suddenly from the peak of outlook on life to the homely labor of cooking supper, some of the healthy heroic flush of the knightly days and the hearth-fire went down with her, I think. It brightened and reddened the square kitchen with its cracked stove and meagre array of tins; she bustled about in her quaint way, as if it had been filled up and running over with comforts. It brightened and reddened her face when she came in to put the last dish on the table,—a cozy, snug table, set for four. Heroic dreams with poets, I suppose, make them unfit for food other than some feast such as Eve set for the angel. But then Margaret was no poet. So, with the kindling of her hope, its healthful light struck out, and warmed and glorified these common things. Such common things! Only a coarse white cloth, redeemed by neither silver nor china, the amber coffee, (some that Knowles had brought out to her father,—"thrown on his hands; he couldn't use it,—product of slave-labor!—never, Sir!") the delicate brown fish that Joel had caught, the bread her mother had made, the golden butter,—all of them touched her nerves with a quick sense of beauty and pleasure. And more, the gaunt face of the blind old man, his bony hand trembling as he raised the cup to his lips, her mother and the Doctor managing silently to place everything he liked best near his plate. Wasn't it all part of the fresh, hopeful glow burning in her consciousness? It brightened and deepened. It blotted out the hard, dusty path of the future, and showed warm and clear the success at the end. Not much to show, you think. Only the old home as it once was, full of quiet laughter and content; only her mother's eyes clear shining again; only that gaunt old head raised proudly, owing no man anything but courtesy. The glow deepened, as she thought of it. It was strange, too, that, with the deep, slow-moving nature of this girl, she should have striven so eagerly to throw this light over the future. Commoner natures have done more and hoped less. It was a poor gift, you think, this of the labor of a life for so plain a duty; hardly heroic. She knew it. Yet, if there lay in this coming labor any pain, any wearing effort, she clung to it desperately, as if this should banish, it might be, worse loss. She tried desperately, I say, to clutch the far, uncertain hope at the end, to make happiness out of it, to give it to her silent hungry heart to feed on. She thrust out of sight all possible life that might have called her true self into being, and clung to this present shallow duty and shallow reward. Pitiful and vain so to cling! It is the way of women. As if any human soul could bury that which might have been in that which is!

The Doctor, peering into her thought with sharp, suspicious eyes, heeded the transient flush of enthusiasm but little. Even the pleasant cheery talk that pleased her father so was but surface-deep, he knew. The woman he must conquer for his great end lay beneath, dark and cold. It was only for that end he cared for her. Through what cold depths of solitude her soul breathed faintly mattered little. Yet an idle fancy touched him, what a triumph the man had gained, whoever he might be, who had held the master-key to a nature so rare as this, who had the kingly power in his hand to break its silence into electric shivers of laughter and tears,—terrible subtle pain, or joy as terrible. Did he hold the power still, he wondered? Meanwhile she sat there quiet, unread.

The evening came on, slow and cold. Life itself, the Doctor thought, impatiently, was cool and tardy here among the hills. Even he fell into the tranquil tone, and chafed under it. Nowhere else did the evening gray and sombre into the mysterious night impalpably as here. The quiet, wide and deep, folded him in, forced his trivial heat into silence and thought. The world seemed to think there. Quiet in the dead seas of fog, that filled the valleys like restless vapor curdled into silence; quiet in the listening air, stretching gray up to the stars,—in the solemn mountains, that stood motionless, like hoary-headed prophets, waiting with uplifted hands, day and night, to hear the Voice, silent now for centuries; the very air, heavy with the breath of the sleeping pine-forests, moved slowly and cold, like some human voice weary with preaching to unbelieving hearts of a peace on earth. This man's heart was unbelieving; he chafed in the oppressive quiet; it was unfeeling mockery to a sick and hungry world,—a dead torpor of indifference. Years of hot and turbid pain had dulled his eyes to the eternal secret of the night; his soul was too sore with stumbling, stung, inflamed with the needs and suffering of the countless lives that hemmed him in, to accept the great prophetic calm. He was blind to the prophecy written on the earth since the day God first bade it tell thwarted man of the great To-Morrow.

He turned from the night in-doors. Human hearts were his proper study. The old house, he thought, slept with the rest. One did not wonder that the pendulum of the clock swung long and slow. The frantic, nervous haste of town-clocks chorded better with the pulse of human life. Yet life in the veins of these people flowed slow and cool; their sorrows and joys were few and life-long. The slow, enduring air suited this woman, Margaret Howth. Her blood could never ebb or flow with sudden gusts of passion, like his own, throbbing, heating continually: one current, absorbing, deep, would carry its tide from one eternity to the other, one love or one hate. Whatever power was in the tide should be his, in its entirety. It was his right. Was not his aim high, the highest? It was his right.

Margaret, looking up, saw the man's intolerant eye fixed on her. She met it coolly. All her short life, this strange man, so tender to the weak, had watched her with a sort of savage scorn, sneering at her apathy, her childish, dreamy quiet, driving her from effort to effort with a scourge of impatient contempt. What did he want now with her? Her duty was light; she took it up,—she was glad to take it up; what more would he have? She put the whole matter away from her.

It grew late. She sat down by the lamp and began to read to her father, as usual. Her mother put away her knitting; Joel came in half-asleep; the Doctor put out his everlasting cigar, and listened, as he did everything else, intently. It was an old story that she read,—the story of a man who walked the fields and crowded streets of Galilee eighteen hundred years ago. Knowles, with his heated brain, fancied that the silence without in the night grew deeper, that the slow-moving air stopped in its course to listen. Perhaps the simple story carried a deeper meaning to these brooding mountains and this solemn sky than to the purblind hearts within. It was a dim, far-off story to them,—very far off. The old schoolmaster heard it with a lowered head, with the proud obedience with which a cavalier would receive his leader's orders. Was not the leader a knight, the knight of truest courage? All that was high, chivalric in the old man sprang up to own him Lord. That he not only preached to, but ate and drank with publicans and sinners, was a requirement of his mission; nowadays——. Joel heard the "good word" with a bewildered consciousness of certain rules of honesty to be observed the next day, and a maze of crowns and harps shining somewhere beyond. As for any immediate connection between the teachings of this book and "The Daily Gazette," it was pure blasphemy to think of it. The Lord held those old Jews in His hand, of course; but as for the election next month, that was quite another thing. If Joel thrust the history out of the touch of common life, the Doctor brought it down, and held it there on trial. To him it was the story of a Reformer who had served his day. Could he serve this day? Could he? The need was desperate. Was there anything in this Christianity, freed from bigotry, to work out the awful problem which the ages had left for America to solve? People called this old Knowles an infidel, said his brain was as unnatural and distorted as his body. God, looking down into his heart that night, saw the fierce earnestness of the man to know the truth, and judged him with other eyes than ours.

When the girl had finished reading, she went out and stood in the cool air. The Doctor passed her without notice. The story stood alive in his throbbing brain, demanding a hearing; it stood there always, needing but a touch to waken it. All things were real to this man, this uncouth mass of flesh that his companions sneered at; most real of all the unhelped pain of life, the great seething mire of dumb wretchedness in our streets and alleys, the cry for aid from the starved souls of the world. You and I have other work to do than to listen,—pleasanter. But this man, coming out of the mire, his veins thick with the blood of a despised race, had carried up their pain and hunger with him: it was the most real thing on earth to him,—more real than his own share in the unseen heaven or hell. By the reality, the peril of the world's instant need, he tried the offered help from Calvary. It was the work of years, not of this night. Perhaps, if they who preach Christ crucified had first doubted and tried him as this man did, their place in the coming heaven might be higher,—and ours, who hear them.

He went, in his lumbering way, down the hill into the city. He was glad to go back; the trustful, waiting quiet oppressed, taunted him. It sent him back more mad against Destiny, his heart more bitter in its great pity. Let him go back into the great city, with its stifling gambling-hells, its negro-pens, its foul cellars. It is his place and work. If he stumble blindly against unconquerable ills, and die, others have so stumbled and so died. Do you think their work is lost?

* * * * *