The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, No. 67, May, 1863 / A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics

by Various

THE HUMAN WHEEL, ITS SPOKES AND FELLOES.

[Illustration]

The starting-point of this paper was a desire to call attention to certain remarkable AMERICAN INVENTIONS, especially to one class of mechanical contrivances, which, at the present time, assumes a vast importance and interests great multitudes. The limbs of our friends and countrymen are a part of the melancholy harvest which War is sweeping down with Dahlgren's mowing-machine and the patent reapers of Springfield and Hartford. The admirable contrivances of an American inventor, prized as they were in ordinary times, have risen into the character of great national blessings since the necessity for them has become so widely felt. While the weapons that have gone from Mr. Colt's armories have been carrying death to friend and foe, the beneficent and ingenious inventions of MR. PALMER have been repairing the losses inflicted by the implements of war.

The study of the artificial limbs which owe their perfection to his skill and long-continued labor has led us a little beyond its first object, and finds its natural prelude in some remarks on the natural limbs and their movements. Accident directed our attention, while engaged with this subject, to the efforts of another ingenious American to render the use of our lower extremities easier by shaping their artificial coverings more in accordance with their true form than is done by the empirical cordwainer, and thus Dr. Plumer must submit to the coupling of some mention of his praiseworthy efforts in the same pages with the striking achievements of his more aspiring compatriot.

We should not tell the whole truth, if we did not own that we have for a long time been lying in wait for a chance to say something about the mechanism of walking, because we thought we could add something to what is known about it from a new source, accessible only within the last few years, and never, so far as we know, employed for its elucidation, namely, the instantaneous photograph.

* * * * *

The two accomplishments common to all mankind are walking and talking. Simple as they seem, they are yet acquired with vast labor, and very rarely understood in any clear way by those who practise them with perfect ease and unconscious skill.

Talking seems the hardest to comprehend. Yet it has been clearly explained and successfully imitated by artificial contrivances. We know that the moist membranous edges of a narrow crevice (the glottis) vibrate as the reed of a clarionet vibrates, and thus produce the human bleat. We narrow or widen or check or stop the flow of this sound by the lips, the tongue, the teeth, and thus articulate, or break into joints, the even current of sound. The sound varies with the degree and kind of interruption, as the "babble" of the brook with the shape and size of its impediments,—pebbles, or rocks, or dams. To whisper is to articulate without bleating, or vocalizing; to coo as babies do is to bleat or vocalize without articulating. Machines are easily made that bleat not unlike human beings. A bit of India-rubber tube tied round a piece of glass tube is one of the simplest voice-uttering contrivances. To make a machine that articulates is not so easy; but we remember Maelzel's wooden children, which said, "Pa-pa" and "Ma-ma"; and more elaborate and successful speaking machines have, we believe, been since constructed.

But no man has been able to make a figure that can walk. Of all the automata imitating men or animals moving, there is not one in which the legs are the true sources of motion. So said the Webers[A] more than twenty years ago, and it is as true now as then. These authors, after a profound experimental and mathematical investigation of the mechanism of animal locomotion, recognize the fact that our knowledge is not yet advanced enough to hope to succeed in making real walking machines. But they conceive that the time may come hereafter when colossal figures will be constructed whose giant strides will not be arrested by the obstacles which are impassable to wheeled conveyances.

[Footnote A: Traité de la Méchanique des Organes de la Locomotion, Translated from the German in the Encyclopédie Anatomique. Paris, 1843.]

We wish to give our readers as clear an idea as possible of that wonderful art of balanced vertical progression which they have practised, as M. Jourdain talked prose, for so many years, without knowing what a marvellous accomplishment they had mastered. We shall have to begin with a few simple anatomical data.

The foot is arched both longitudinally and transversely, so as to give it elasticity, and thus break the sudden shock when the weight of the body is thrown upon it. The ankle-joint is a loose hinge, and the great muscles of the calf can straighten the foot out so far that practised dancers walk on the tips of their toes. The knee is another hinge-joint, which allows the leg to bend freely, but not to be carried beyond a straight line in the other direction. Its further forward movement is checked by two very powerful cords in the interior of the joint, which cross each other like the letter X, and are hence called the crucial ligaments. The upper ends of the thighbones are almost globes, which are received into the deep cup-like cavities of the haunch-bones. They are tied to these last so loosely, that, if their ligaments alone held them, they would be half out of their sockets in many positions of the lower limbs. But here comes in a simple and admirable contrivance. The smooth, rounded head of the thighbone, moist with glairy fluid, fits so perfectly into the smooth, rounded cavity which receives it, that it holds firmly by suction, or atmospheric pressure. It takes a hard pull to draw it out after all the ligaments are cut, and then it comes with a smack like a tight cork from a bottle. Holding in this way by the close apposition of two polished surfaces, the lower extremity swings freely forward and backward like a pendulum, if we give it a chance, as is shown by standing on a chair upon the other limb, and moving the pendent one out of the vertical line. The force with which it swings depends upon its weight, and this is much greater than we might at first suppose; for our limbs not only carry themselves, but our bodies also, with a sense of lightness rather than of weight, when we are in good condition. Accident sometimes makes us aware how heavy our limbs are. An officer, whose arm was shattered by a ball in one of our late battles, told us that the dead weight of the helpless member seemed to drag him down to the earth; he could hardly carry it; it "weighed a ton," to his feeling, as he said.

In ordinary walking, a man's lower extremity swings essentially by its own weight, requiring little muscular effort to help it. So heavy a body easily overcomes all impedimenta from clothing, even in the sex least favored in its costume. But if a man's legs are pendulums, then a short man's legs will swing quicker than a tall man's, and he will take more steps to a minute, other things being equal. Thus there is a natural rhythm to a man's walk, depending on the length of his legs, which beat more or less rapidly as they are longer or shorter, like metronomes differently adjusted, or the pendulums of different time-keepers. Commodore Nutt is to M. Bihin in this respect as a little, fast-ticking mantel-clock is to an old-fashioned, solemn-clicking, upright time-piece.

The mathematical formulae in which the Messrs. Weber embody their results would hardly be instructive to most of our readers. The figures of their Atlas would serve our purpose better, had we not the means of coming nearer to the truth than even their careful studies enabled them to do. We have selected a number of instantaneous stereoscopic views of the streets and public places of Paris and of New York, each of them showing numerous walking figures, among which some may be found in every stage of the complex act we are studying. Mr. Darley has had the kindness to leave his higher tasks to transfer several of these to our pages, so that the reader may be sure that he looks upon an exact copy of real human individuals in the act of walking.

[Illustration: Fig. 1.]

The first subject is caught with his legs stretched in a stride, the remarkable length of which arrests our attention. The sole of the right foot is almost vertical. By the action of the muscles of the calf it has rolled off from the ground like a portion of the tire of a wheel, the heel rising first, and thus the body, already advancing with all its acquired velocity, and inclined forward, has been pushed along, and, as it were, tipped over, so as to fall upon the other foot, now ready to receive its weight.

[Illustration: Fig. 2.]

In the second figure, the right leg is bending at the knee, so as to lift the foot from the ground, in order that it may swing forward.

[Illustration: Fig. 3.]

The next stage of movement is shown in the left leg of figure 3. This leg is seen suspended in air, a little beyond the middle of the arc through which it swings, and before it has straightened itself, which it will presently do, as shown in the next figure.

[Illustration: Fig. 4.]

The foot has now swung forward, and, tending to swing back again, the limb being straightened, and the body tipped forward, the heel strikes the ground. The angle which the sole of the foot forms with the ground increases with the length of the stride; and as this last surprised us, so the extent of this angle astonishes us in many of the figures, in this among the rest.

The heel strikes the ground with great force, as the wear of our boots and shoes in that part shows us. But the projecting heel of the human foot is the arm of a lever, haying the ankle-joint as its fulcrum, and, as it strikes the ground, brings the sole of the foot down flat upon it, as shown in figure 1. At the same time the weight of the limb and body is thrown upon the foot, by the joint effect of muscular action and acquired velocity, and the other foot is now ready to rise from the ground and repeat the process we have traced in its fellow.

No artist would have dared to draw a walking figure in attitudes like some of these. The swinging limb is so much shortened that the toe never by any accident scrapes the ground, if this is tolerably even. In cases of partial paralysis, the scraping of the toe, as the patient walks, is one of the characteristic marks of imperfect muscular action.

Walking, then, is a perpetual falling with a perpetual self-recovery. It is a most complex, violent, and perilous operation, which we divest of its extreme danger only by continual practice from a very early period of life. We find how complex it is when we attempt to analyze it, and we see that we never understood it thoroughly until the time of the instantaneous photograph. We learn how violent it is, when we walk against a post or a door in the dark. We discover how dangerous it is, when we slip or trip and come down, perhaps breaking or dislocating our limbs, or overlook the last step of a flight of stairs, and discover with what headlong violence we have been hurling ourselves forward.

Two curious facts are easily proved. First, a man is shorter when he is walking than when at rest. We have found a very simple way of showing this by having a rod or yardstick placed horizontally, so as to touch the top of the head forcibly, as we stand under it. In walking rapidly beneath it, even if the eyes are shut, to avoid involuntary stooping, the top of the head will not even graze the rod. The other fact is, that one side of a man always tends to outwalk the other, so that no person can walk far in a straight line, if he is blindfolded.

The somewhat singular illustration at the head of our article carries out an idea which has only been partially alluded to by others. Man is a wheel, with two spokes, his legs, and two fragments of a tire, his feet. He rolls successively on each of these fragments from the heel to the toe. If he had spokes enough, he would go round and round as the boys do when they "make a wheel" with their four limbs for its spokes. But having only two available for ordinary locomotion, each of these has to be taken up as soon as it has been used, and carried forward to be used again, and so alternately with the pair. The peculiarity of biped-walking is, that the centre of gravity is shifted from one leg to the other, and the one not employed can shorten itself so as to swing forward, passing by that which supports the body.

This is just what no automaton can do. Many of our readers have, however, seen a young lady in the shop-windows, or entertained her in their own nurseries, who professes to be this hitherto impossible walking automaton, and who calls herself by the Homeric-sounding epithet Autoperipatetikos. The golden-booted legs of this young lady remind us of Miss Kilmansegg, while their size assures us that she is not in any way related to Cinderella. On being wound up, as if she were a piece of machinery, and placed on a level surface, she proceeds to toddle off, taking very short steps like a child, holding herself very stiff and straight, with a little lifting at each step, and all this with a mighty inward whirring and buzzing of the enginery which constitutes her muscular system.

An autopsy of one of her family who fell into our hands reveals the secret springs of her action. Wishing to spare her as a member of the defenceless sex, it pains us to say, that, ingenious as her counterfeit walking is, she is an impostor. Worse than this,—with all our reverence for her brazen crinoline, duty compels us to reveal a fact concerning her which will shock the feelings of those who have watched the stately rigidity of decorum with which she moves in the presence of admiring multitudes. She is a quadruped!. Inside of her great golden boots, which represent one pair of feet, is another smaller pair, which move freely through these hollow casings.

[Illustration]

Four cams or eccentric wheels impart motion to her four supports, by which she is carried forward, always resting on two of them,—the boot of one side, and the foot of the other. Her movement, then, is not walking; it is not skating, which it seems to resemble; it is more like that of a person walking with two crutches besides his two legs. The machinery is simple enough: a strong spiral spring, three or four cog-wheels and pinions, a fly to regulate the motion as in a musical box, and the cams before mentioned. As a toy, it or she is very taking to grown people as well as children. It is a literal fact, that the police requested one of our dealers to remove Miss Autoperipatetikos from his window, because the crowd she drew obstructed the sidewalk.

We see by our analysis of the process, and by the difficulty of imitating it, that walking is a much more delicate, perilous, complicated operation than we should suppose, and well worth studying in a practical point of view, to see what can be done to make it easier and safer. Two Americans have applied themselves to this task: one laboring for those who possess their lower limbs and want to use them to advantage, the other for such as have had the misfortune to lose one or both of them.

Dr. J.C. Plumer, formerly of Portland, now of Boston, has devoted himself to the study of the foot, and to the construction of a last upon which a boot or shoe can be moulded which shall be adapted to its form and accommodated to its action.

Most persons know something of the cruel injustice to which the feet are subjected, and the extraordinary distortions and diseases to which they are liable in consequence. The foot's fingers are the slaves in the republic of the body. Their black leathern integument is only the mask of their servile condition. They bear the burdens, while the hands, their white masters, handle the money and wear the rings. They are crowded promiscuously in narrow prisons, while each of the hand's fingers claims its separate apartment, leading from the antechamber, in the dainty glove. As a natural consequence of all this, their faculties are cramped, they grow into ignoble shapes, they become callous by long abuse, and all their natural gifts are crushed and trodden out of them.

Dr. Plumer is the Garrison of these oppressed members of the body corporeal. He comes to break their chains, to lift their bowed figures, to strengthen their weakness, to restore them to the dignity of digits. To do this, he begins where every sensible man would, by contemplating the natural foot as it appears in infancy, unspoiled as yet by social corruptions, in adults fortunate enough to have escaped these destructive influences, in the grim skeleton aspect divested of its outward disguises. We will give the reader two views of the latter kind, illustrating the longitudinal and transverse arches before spoken of.

[Illustration]

A man who walks on natural surfaces, with his feet unprotected by any artificial defences, calls the action of these arches into full play at every step. The longitudinal arch is the most strikingly marked of the two. In some races and in certain individuals it is much developed, so as to give the high instep which is prized as an evidence of good blood. The Arab says that a stream of water can flow under his foot without touching its sole. Under the conditions supposed, of a naked foot on a natural surface, the arches of the foot will commonly maintain their integrity, and give the noble savage or the barefooted Scotch lassie the elasticity of gait which we admire in the children of Nature.

But as a large portion of mankind tread on artificial hard surfaces, especially pavements, their feet are subjected to a very unnatural amount of wear and tear. How great this is the inhabitants of cities are apt to forget. After passing some months in the country, we have repeatedly found ourselves terribly lamed and shaken by our first walk on the pavement. A party of city-folk who landed on a beach upon Cape Cod complained greatly to one of the natives accompanying them of the difficulty of walking through the deep sand. "Ah," he answered, "it's nothing to the trouble I have walking on your city-sidewalks." To save the feet from the effects of violent percussion and uneven surfaces, they must be protected by thick soles, and thick soles require strong upper-leather. When the foot is wedged into one of these casings, a new boot, a struggle begins between them, which ends in a compromise. The foot becomes more or less compressed or deformed, and the boot more or less stretched at the points where the counter-pressure takes place.

On the part of the foot, the effects of this warfare are liable to show themselves in thickening and inflammation of the integuments, in displacement of the toes, and occasionally in the breaking down of the transverse or longitudinal arches. On the part of the boot or shoe, there is a gradual accommodation which in time fits it to the foot almost as if it had been moulded upon it, so that a little before it is worn out it is invaluable, like other blessings brightening before they take their flight.

Now Mr. Plumer's improvements proceed from two series of data. First, certain theoretical inferences from the facts above named. Finding the arches liable to break down, he supports the transverse arch by making the inner surface of the sole corresponding to it convex instead of concave transversely; he makes the middle portion of the sole convex again in both directions to support the longitudinal arch, and for the same reason extends the heel of the boot or shoe forward, so as to support the anterior portion of the heel of the foot. Secondly, Mr. Plumer takes an old shoe that has done good service, and studies the reliefs and hollows-which the foot has shaped on the inner surface of its sole. Comparing the empirical results of this examination with those based on the anatomical data above given, and finding a general coincidence in them, he constructs his last in accordance with their joint teachings. Theoretically, Mr. Plumer is on somewhat dangerous ground. If the arches of the foot are made to yield like elliptical springs, why support them? But we subject them to such unnatural conditions by pressure from above over the instep, by adding high heels to our boots and shoes, by taking away all yielding qualities from the soil on which we tread, that very probably they may want artificial support as much as the soles of the feet want artificial protection. If, now, we find that an old, easy shoe has worked the inside surface of its sole into convexities which support the arches, we are safe in imitating that at any rate. We shall have a new shoe with some, at least, of the virtues of the old one.

This all sounds very well, and the next question is, whether it works well. We cannot but remember the coat made for Mr. Gulliver by the Laputan tailors, which, though projected from the most refined geometrical data and the most profound calculations, he found to be the worst fit he ever put on his back. We must ask those who have eaten the pudding how it tastes, and those who have worn the shoe how it wears. We have no satisfactory experience of our own, having only within a week or two, by mere accident, stumbled into a pair of Plumerian boots, and being thus led to look into a matter which seemed akin to the main subject of this paper. But the author of "Views Afoot," who ought to be a sovereign authority on all that interests pedestrians, confirms from his own experience the favorable opinions expressed by several of our most eminent physicians, from an examination of the principles of construction. We are informed that the Plumer last has been recently adopted for the use of the army. We add our own humble belief that Dr. Plumer deserves well of mankind for applying sound anatomical principles to the construction of coverings for the feet, and for contriving a last serving as a model for a boot or shoe which is adapted to the form of the foot from the first, instead of having to be broken in by a painful series of limping excursions, too often accompanied by impatient and even profane utterances.

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It is not two years since the sight of a person who had lost one of his lower limbs was an infrequent occurrence. Now, alas! there are few of us who have not a cripple among our friends, if not in our own families. A mechanical art which provided for an occasional and exceptional want has become a great and active branch of industry. War unmakes legs, and human skill must supply their places as it best may.

Our common idea of a wooden leg is realized in the "peg" of the Greenwich pensioner. This humble contrivance has done excellent service in its time, and may serve a good purpose still in some cases. A plain working-man, who has outlived his courting-days and need not sacrifice much to personal appearance, may find an honest, old-fashioned wooden leg, cheap, lasting, requiring no repairs, the best thing for his purpose. In higher social positions, and at an age when appearances are realities, in the condition of the Marquis of Anglesea, for instance, it becomes important to provide the cripple with a limb which shall be presentable in polite society, where misfortunes of a certain obtrusiveness may be pitied, but are never tolerated under the chandeliers.

The leg invented by Mr. Potts, and bearing the name of the "Anglesea leg," was long famous, and doubtless merited the reputation it acquired as superior to its predecessors. But legs cannot remain stationary while the march of improvement goes on around them, and they, too, have moved onward with the stride of progress.

A boy of ten years old, living in a New-Hampshire village, had one of his legs crushed so as to require amputation. The little fellow was furnished with a "Peg" and stumped round upon it for ten years. We can imagine what he suffered as he grew into adolescence under the cross of this unsightly appendage. He was of comely aspect, tall, well-shaped, with well-marked, regular features. But just at the period when personal graces are most valued, when a good presence is a blank check on the Bank of Fortune, with Nature's signature at the bottom, he found himself made hideous by this fearful-looking counterfeit of a limb. It announced him at the threshold he reached with beating heart by a thump more energetic than the palpitation in his breast. It identified him as far as the eye of jealousy could see his moving figure. The "peg" became intolerable, and he unstrapped it and threw himself on the tender mercies of the crutch.

But the crutch is at best an instrument of torture. It presses upon a great bundle of nerves; it distorts the figure; it stamps a character of its own upon the whole organism; it is even accused of distempering the mind itself.

This young man, whose name was "B. FRANK. PALMER," (the abbreviations probably implying the name of a distinguished Boston philosopher of the last century, whose visit to Philadelphia is still remembered in that city,) set himself at work to contrive a limb which should take the place of the one he had lost, fulfilling its functions and counterfeiting its aspect so far as possible. The result was the "Palmer leg," one of the most unquestionable triumphs of American ingenuity. Its victorious march has been unimpeded by any serious obstacle since it first stepped into public notice. The inventor was introduced by the late Dr. John C. Warren, in 1846, to the Massachusetts General Hospital, which institution he has for many years supplied with his artificial limbs. He received medals from the American Institute, the Massachusetts Charitable Association, and the Great Exhibition in New York, and obtained an honorary mention from the Royal Commissioners of the World's Exhibition in London,—being the only maker of legs so distinguished. These are only a few of fifty honorary awards he has received at various times. The famous surgeons of London, the Société de Chirurgie of Paris, and the most celebrated practitioners of the United States have given him their hearty recommendations. So lately as last August, that shrewd and skilful surgeon, Dr. Henry J. Bigelow, who is as cautious in handling his epithets as he is bold in using the implements of his art, strongly advised Surgeon-General Hammond to adopt the Palmer leg, which, after a dozen years' experience, he had found none to equal. We see it announced that the Board of Surgeons appointed by the Surgeon-General to select the best arm and leg to be procured by the Government for its crippled soldiers chose that of Mr. Palmer, and that Dr. Hammond approved their selection.

We have thought it proper to show that Mr. Palmer's invention did not stand in need of our commendation. Its merits, as we have seen, are conceded by the tribunals best fitted to judge, and we are therefore justified in selecting it as an illustration of American mechanical skill.

We give three views of the Palmer leg: an inside view when extended, a second when flexed, a third as it appears externally.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

The Committee on Science and the Arts of the Franklin Institute of
Pennsylvania thus stated the peculiarities of Mr. Palmer's invention:—

"First, An ingenious arrangement of springs and cords in the inside of the limb, by which, when the wearer is in the erect position, the limb is extended, and the foot flexed so as to present a natural appearance.

"Second. By a second arrangement of cords and springs in the inside of the limb, the foot and toes are gradually and easily extended, when the heel is placed in contact with the ground. In consequence of this arrangement, the limping gait, and the unpleasant noise made by the sudden stroke of the ball of the foot upon the ground in walking, which are so obvious in the ordinary leg, are avoided.

"Third. By a peculiar arrangement of the knee-joint, it is rendered little liable to wear, and all lateral or rotary motion is avoided. It is hardly necessary to remark that any such motion is undesirable in an artificial leg, as it renders its support unstable."

Before reporting some of the facts which we have seen, or learned by personal inquiry, we must be allowed, for the sake of convenience, to exercise the privilege granted to all philosophical students, of enlarging the nomenclature applicable to the subject of which we are treating.

Man, according to the Sphinx, is successively a quadruped, a biped, and a triped. But circumstances may change his natural conditions. If he loses a leg, he becomes a uniped. If he loses both his legs, he becomes a nulliped. If art replaces the loss of one limb with a factitious substitute, he becomes a ligniped, or, if we wish to be very precise, a uni-ligniped; two wooden legs entitle him to be called a biligniped. Our terminology being accepted, we are ready to proceed.

To make ourselves more familiar with the working of the invention we are considering, we have visited Mr. Palmer's establishments in Philadelphia and Boston. The distinguished "Surgeon-Artist" is a man of fine person, as we have said. But if he has any personal vanity, it does not betray itself with regard to that portion of his organism which Nature furnished him. There is some reason to think that Mr. Palmer is a little ashamed of the lower limb which he brought into the world with him. At least, if he follows the common rule and puts that which he considers his best foot foremost, he evidently awards the preference to that which was born of his brain over the one which he owes to his mother. He walks as well as many do who have their natural limbs, though not so well as some of his own patients. He puts his vegetable leg through many of the movements which would seem to demand the contractile animal fibre. He goes up and down stairs with very tolerable ease and despatch. Only when he comes to stand upon the human limb, we begin, to find that it is not in all respects equal to the divine one. For a certain number of seconds he can poise himself upon it; but Mr. Palmer, if he indulges in verse, would hardly fill the Horatian complement of lines in that attitude. In his anteroom were unipeds in different stages of their second learning to walk as lignipeds. At first they move with a good deal of awkwardness, but gradually the wooden limb seems to become, as it were, penetrated by the nerves, and the intelligence to run downwards until it reaches the last joint of the member.

Mr. Palmer, as we have incidentally mentioned, has a branch establishment in Boston, to which also we have paid a visit, in order to learn some of the details of the manufacture to which we had not attended in our pleasant interview with the inventor. The antechamber here, too, was the nursery of immature lignipeds, ready to exhibit their growing accomplishments to the inquiring stranger. It almost seems as if the artificial leg were the scholar, rather than the person who wears it. The man does well enough, but the leg is stupid until practice has taught it just what is expected from its various parts.

The polite Boston partner, who, if he were in want of a customer, would almost persuade a man with two good legs to provide himself with a third, carried us to the back part of the building, where legs are organized.

The willow, which furnishes the charcoal for the gunpowder that blows off limbs, is the wood chosen to supply the loss it has helped to occasion. It is light, strong, does not warp or "check" much as many other woods, and is, as the workmen say, healthy, that is, not irritating to the parts with which it is in contact. Whether the salicine it may contain enters the pores and invigorates the system may be a question for those who remember the drugs in the Sultan's bat-handle and the remarkable cure they wrought. This wood is kept in a dry-house with as much care as that intended for the manufacture of pianos. It is thoroughly steamed also, before using.

The wood comes in rudely shaped blocks, as lasts are sent to the factory, seeming to have been coarsely hewed out of the log. The shaping, as we found to our surprise, is all done by hand. We had expected to see great lathes, worked by steam-power, taking in a rough stick and turning out a finished limb. But it is shaped very much as a sculptor finishes his marble, with an eye to artistic effect,—not so much in the view of the stranger, who does not look upon its naked loveliness, as in that of the wearer, who is seduced by its harmonious outlines into its purchase, and solaced with the consciousness that he carries so much beauty and symmetry about with him. The hollowing-out of the interior is done by wicked-looking blades and scoops at the end of long stems, suggesting the thought of dentists' instruments as they might have been in the days of the giants. The joints are most carefully made, more particularly at the knee, where a strong bolt of steel passes through the solid wood. Windows, oblong openings, are left in the sides of the limb, to insure a good supply of air to the extremity of the mutilated limb. Many persons are not aware that all parts of the surface breathe just as the lungs breathe, exhaling carbonic acid as well as water, and taking in more or less oxygen.

One of the workmen, a pleasant-looking young fellow, was himself, we were told, a ligniped. We begged him to give us a specimen of his walking. He arose and walked rather slowly across the room and back. "Once more," we said, not feeling quite sure which was Nature's leg and which Mr. Palmer's. So he walked up and down the room again, until we had satisfied ourselves which was the leg of willow and which that of flesh and bone. It is not, perhaps, to the credit of our eyes or observing powers, but it is a fact, that we deliberately selected the wrong leg. No victim of the thimble-rigger's trickery was ever more completely taken in than we were by the contrivance of the ingenious Surgeon-Artist.

Our freely expressed admiration led to the telling of wonderful stories about the doings of persons with artificial legs. One individual was mentioned who skated particularly well; another who danced with zeal and perseverance; and a third who must needs swim in his leg, which brought on a dropsical affection of the limb,—to which kind of complaint the willow has, of course, a constitutional tendency,—and for which it had to come to the infirmary where the diseases that wood is heir to are treated.

But the most wonderful monuments of the great restorer's skill are the patients who have lost both legs,—nullipeds, as presented to Mr. Palmer, bilignipeds, as they walk forth again before the admiring world, balanced upon their two new-born members. We have before us delineations of six of these hybrids between the animal and vegetable world. One of them was employed at a railway-station near this (Atlantic) city, where he was often seen by a member of our own household, whose testimony we are in the habit of considering superior in veracity to the naked truth as commonly delivered. He walked about, we are assured, a little slowly and stiffly, but in a way that hardly attracted attention.

The inventor of the leg has not been contented to stop there. He has worked for years upon the construction of an artificial arm, and has at length succeeded in arranging a mechanism, which, if it cannot serve a pianist or violinist, is yet equal to holding the reins in driving, receiving fees for professional services, and similar easy labors. Where Mr. Palmer means to stop in supplying bodily losses it would be premature to say. We suppose the accidents happening occasionally from the use of the guillotine are beyond his skill, and spare our readers the lively remark suggested by the contrary hypothesis.

* * * * *

It is one of the signs of our advancing American civilization, that the arts which preserve and restore the personal advantages necessary or favorable to cultivated social life should have reached such perfection among us. American dentists have achieved a reputation which has sent them into the palaces of Europe to open the mouths of sovereigns and princes as freely as the jockeys look into those of horses and colts. Bad teeth, too common among us, help to breed good dentists, no doubt; but besides this there is an absolute demand for a certain comeliness of person throughout all the decent classes of our society. It is the same standard of propriety in appearances which lays us open to the reproach of caring too much for dress. If the national ear for music is not so acute as that of some other peoples, the national eye for the harmonies of form and color is better than we often find in older communities. We have a right to claim that our sculptors and painters prove so much as this for us. American taste was offended, outraged, by the odious "peg" which the Old-World soldier or beggar was proud to show. We owe the well-shaped, intelligent, docile limb, the half-reasoning willow of Mr. Palmer, to the same sense of beauty and fitness which moulded the soft outlines of the Indian Girl and the White Captive in the studio of his namesake at Albany.

As we wean ourselves from the Old World, and become more and more nationalized in our great struggle for existence as a free people, we shall carry this aptness for the production of beautiful forms more and more into common life, which demands first what is necessary and then what is pleasing. It is but a step from the painter's canvas to the weaver's loom, and the pictures which are leaving the easel to-day will show themselves in the patterns that sweep the untidy sidewalks to-morrow. The same plastic power which is showing itself in the triumphs of American sculpture will reach the forms of our household-utensils. The beans of Beverly shall yet be baked in vases that Etruria might have envied, and the clay pipe of the Americanized Milesian shall be a thing of beauty as well as a joy forever. We are already pushing the plastic arts farther than many persons have suspected. There is a small town not far from us where a million dollars' worth of gold is annually beaten into ornaments for the breasts, the fingers, the ears, the necks of women. Many a lady supposes she is buying Parisian adornments, when Attleborough could say to her proudly, like Cornelia, "These are my jewels." The workmen of this little town not only meet the tastes of the less fastidious classes, to whom all that glisters is gold, but they shape the purest metal into artistic and effective patterns. When the Koh-i-noor—the Mountain of Light—was to be fashioned, it was found to be almost as formidable a task as that of Xerxes, when he undertook to hew Mount Athos to the shape of man. The great crystal was sent to Holland, as the only place where it could be properly cut. We have lately seen a brilliant which, if not a mountain of light, was yet a very respectable mound of radiance, valued at some ten or twelve thousand dollars, cut in this virgin settlement, and exposed in one of our shop-windows to tempt our frugal villagers.

Monsieur Trousseau, Professor in the Medical School of Paris, delivered a discursive lecture not long ago, in which he soared from the region of drugs, his well-known special province, into the thin atmosphere of aesthetics. It is the influence that surrounds his fortunate fellow-citizens, he declares, which alone preserves their intellectual supremacy. If a Parisian milliner, he says, remove to New York, she will so degenerate in the course of a couple of years that the squaw of a Choctaw chief would be ashamed to wear one of her bonnets.

Listen, O Parisian cockney, pecking among the brood most plethoric with conceit, of all the coop-fed citizens who tread the pavements of earth's many-chimneyed towns! America has made implements of husbandry which out-mow and out-reap the world. She has contrived man-slaying engines which kill people faster than any others. She has modelled the wave-slicing clipper which outsails all your argosies and armadas. She has revolutionized naval warfare once by the steamboat. She has revolutionized it a second time by planting towers of iron on the elephantine backs of the waves. She has invented the sewing-machine to save the dainty fingers of your virtuous grisettes from uncongenial toil, so that Fifine and Frétillon may have more leisure for self-development. She has taught you a whole new system of labor in her machinery for making watches and rifles. She has bestowed upon you and all the world an anodyne which enables you to cut arms and legs off without hurting the patient; and when his leg is off, she has given you a true artist's limb for your cripple to walk upon, instead of the peg on which he has stumped from the days of Guy de Chauliac to those of M. Nelaton. She has been contriving well-shaped boots and shoes for the very people who, if they were your countrymen, would be clumping about in wooden sabots. In works of scientific industry, hardly to be looked for among so new a people she has distanced your best artificers. The microscopes made at Canastota, in the backwoods of New York, look in vain for their rivals in Paris, and must challenge the best workmanship of London before they can be approached in excellence. The great eye that stares into the celestial spaces from its workshop in Cambridge, dives deeper through their clouds of silvery dust than any instrument mounted in your observatory in face of the Luxembourg. Our artisans produce no Gobelin tapestries or Sèvres porcelain as yet; but when your mobs have looted the Tuileries, our shopkeepers have bought up enough specimens to serve them as patterns by-and-by.

All this is something for a nation which has hardly pulled up the stumps out of its city market-places. It is sad to reflect that milliners, like Burgundy, are spoiled by transportation to the headquarters of American fashion. But as the best bonnet of the Empress's own artist would be exploded with yells a couple of seasons after the time when it was the rage, the Icarian professor's flight into the regions of rhetoric has not led him to any very logical resting-place from which he can look down on the aesthetic possibilities of New York or other Western cities emerging from the semi-barbarous state.

We are not proud, of course, of any of the mechanical triumphs we have won; they are well enough, and show—to borrow the words of a distinguished American, whom, during his too brief career, we held unrivalled by any experimenter in the Old World for the depth as well as the daring of his investigations—that some things can be done as well as others.

Our specialty is of somewhat larger scope. We profess to make men and women out of human beings better than any of the joint-stock companies called dynasties have done or can do it. We profess to make citizens out of men,—not citoyens, but persons educated to question all privileges asserted by others, and claim all rights belonging to themselves,—the only way in which the infinitely most important party to the compact between the governed and governing can avoid being cheated out of the best rights inherent in human nature, as an experience the world has seen almost enough of has proved. We are in trouble just now, on account of a neglected hereditary melanosis, as Monsieur Trousseau might call it. When we recover from the social and political convulsion it has produced, and eliminate the materies morbi,—and both these events are only matters of time,—perhaps we shall have leisure to breed our own milliners. If not, there will probably be refugees enough from the Old World, who have learned the fashions in courts, and will be glad to turn their knowledge to a profitable use for the benefit of their republican patronesses in New York and Boston.

We have run away from our subject farther than we intended at starting; but an essay on legs could hardly avoid the rambling tendency which naturally belongs to these organs.

* * * * *

PAUL BLECKER.

PART I.

"Which serves life's purpose best,
To enjoy or to renounce?"

A thorough American, who comprehends what America has to do, and means to help on with it, ought to choose to be born in New England, for the vitalized brain, finely-chorded nerves, steely self-control,—then to go West, for more live, muscular passion, succulent manhood, naked-handed grip of his work. But when he wants to die, by all means let him hunt out a town in the valley of Pennsylvania or Virginia: Nature and man there are so ineffably self-contained, content with that which is, shut in from the outer surge, putting forth their little peculiarities, as tranquil and glad to be alive as if they were pulseless sea-anemones, and after a while going back to the Being whence they came, just as tranquil and glad to be dead.

Paul Blecker had some such fancy as this, that last evening before the regiment of which he was surgeon started for Harper's Ferry, while he and the Captain were coming from camp by the hill-road into the village (or burgh: there are no Villages in Pennsylvania). Nothing was lost on Blecker; his wide, nervous eyes took all in: the age and complacent quiet of this nook of the world, the full-blooded Nature asleep in the yellow June sunset; why! she had been asleep there since the beginning, he knew. The very Indians in these hills must have been a fishing, drowsy crew; their names and graves yet dreamily haunted the farms and creek-shores. The Covenanters who came after them never had roused themselves enough to shake them off. Covenanters: the Doctor began joking to himself, as he walked along, humming some tune, about how the spirit of every sect came out, always alike, in the temperament, the very cut of the face, or whim of accent. These descendants of the Covenanters, now,—Presbyterian elders and their wives,—going down to camp to bid their boys good-bye, devoted them to death with just as stern integrity, as partial a view of the right, as their ancestors did theirs at Naseby or Drumclog: their religion loved its friends and hated its enemies just as bitterly as when it scowled at Monmouth; the "boys," no doubt, would call themselves Roundheads, as they had done in the three months' service. Paul Blecker, who had seen a good many sides of the world, laughed to himself: the very Captain here, good, anxious, innocent as a baby, as he was, looked at the world exactly through Balfour of Burley's dead eyes, was going to cure the disease of it by the old pill of intolerance and bigotry. No wonder Paul laughed.

The sobered Quaker evening was making ready for night: the yellow warmth overhead thinning into tintless space; the low hills drawing farther off in the melancholy light; the sky sinking nearer; clouds, unsteady all day, softened at last into a thoughtful purple, and couching themselves slowly in the hollows of the horizon; the sweep of cornfields and woods and distant farms growing dim,—daguerreotype-like; the tinkle of the sheep-bells on the meadows, the shouts of the boys in camp yonder, the bass drone of the frogs in the swamp dulling down into the remoteness of sleep. The Doctor slackened his sharp, jerking stride, and fell into the monotonous gait of his companion, glancing up to him. McKinstry, he thought, was going out to battle to-morrow with just as cool phlegm and childlike content as he would set out to buy his merino ewes; but he would receive no pay,—meant to transfer it to his men. And he would be in the thickest of the fight,—you might bet on that. Umph! his quick eyes darting over the big, leisurely frame, the neat yellow hair, and the blue eyes mildly peering through spectacles. Then, having satisfactorily anatomized McKinstry, he turned to the evening again with open senses, the sensitive pulsing of his wide nostrils telling that even the milky scent of the full-uddered cows gave him keen enjoyment. The cows were going home from pasture, up shady barn-lanes, into the grayer shadows about the houses on either side of the road, in whose windows lights were beginning to glimmer. Solid old homesteads they were, stone or brick, never wood. Out in these Western settlements, a hundred years ago, they built durable homes, curiously enough, more than in the Northern States; planted oaks about them, that bore the strength of the earth up to heaven in sturdy arms, shaming the graceful, uncertain elm of shallower soils. Just such old farm-houses as those, Blecker thought, would turn out such old-time moulded men as McKinstry: houses whose orchards still held on to the Waldower and Smoke-house apples; their gardens gay with hollyhocks and crimson prince's-feather; on the book-shelves the "Spectator" and "Gentleman's Magazine." The women of them kept up the old-fashioned knitting-parties, and a donation-visit to the pastor once a year; and the men were all gone to the war, to keep the Union as it was in their fathers' time, and would doubtless vote the conservative ticket next election because their fathers did, which would make the war a horrible farce. The town, Blecker thought, had rooted itself in between the hills with as solid a persistence as the prejudices of its builders. Obstinately steep streets, shaded by gnarled locust-trees; houses drawn back from the sidewalks, in surly dread of all new-comers; the very smoke, vaporing through the sky, had defiance in it of the outer barbarous world and its vulgar newness. Yet the town had an honest country heart in it, if it was a bit gray and crusty with age. Blecker, knowing it as he did, did not wonder the boys who left it named a village for it out in Kansas, trying to fancy themselves at home,—or that one old beggar in it asked to be buried in the middle of the street, "So's I kin hear the stages a-comin' in, an' know if the old place is a-gittin' on."

There seemed to be a migration from it to-night: they met, every minute, buggies, old-fashioned carriages, horsemen.

"Going out to camp," McKinstry said; "the boys all have some one to bid them good-bye."

What a lonely, reserved voice the man had! Blecker had the curiosity of all sensitive men to know the soul-history of people; he glanced again keenly in McKinstry's face. Pshaw! one might as well ask their story from the deaf and dumb. But that they were dumb,—there was hint of a tragedy in that!

Everybody stopped to speak to the Doctor. He had been but a few months in the place; but the old church-goers had found him out as a passionate, free-and-easy, honorable fellow, full of joke and anecdote,—shrewd, too. They "fellowshipped" with him heartily, and were glad when he got the post of surgeon with their sons. If there were anything more astringent below this, any more real self in the man, held back, belonging to a world outside of theirs, they did not see it. They knew him better, they thought, than they did Daniel McKinstry, who had grown up among them, just as mild and silent when he was a tow-haired boy as now, a man of forty-five. He touched his hat to them now, and went on, while Blecker leaned on the carriage-doors, his brown face aglow with fun, his uneasy fingers drumming boyishly on the panel. Not knowing that through the changeful face, and fierce, pitiful eyes of the boy, the man Paul Blecker looked coolly out, testing, labelling them. The boy in him, that they saw, Nature had made; but years of a hand-to-hand fight with starvation came after, crime, and society, whose work is later than Nature's, and sometimes better done.

"Fine girl!" said the Doctor, touching his hat to Miss Mallard, as she cantered past. "Got a head of her own, too. Made a deused good speech, when she presented the flag to-day."

Miss Mallard overheard him, as he intended she should, and blushed a visible acknowledgment. All of her character was visible, well-developed as her body: her timidity showed itself in the unceasing dropping of her eyelid; her arch simplicity in the pouting lips; a coy reserve—well, that everywhere, to the very rosette on her retreating slipper; and her patriotism was quite palpable in the color of her Balmoral. She rode Squire Mallard's gray.

"And very well they turn out," sneered Blecker.

"She is a woman," said the Captain, blushing,—differently from the lady, however.

"And if she is?" turning suddenly. "She has the nature of a Bowery rough. Pah, McKinstry! Sexes stand alike with me. If a woman's flesh is weaker-grained a bit, what of that? Whoever would earn esteem must work for it."

The Captain said nothing, stammered a little, then, hoisting his foot on a stump, tied his shoe nervously.

Blecker smiled, a queer, sorrowful smile, as if, oddly enough, he felt sorry for himself.

"I'd like to think of women as you do, Mac," he said. "You never knew many?"

"Only two, until now,—my mother and little Sarah. They're gone now."

Sarah? The Doctor was silent a moment, thinking. He had heard of a sister of McKinstry's, sick for years with some terrible disease, whom he had nursed until the end. She was Sarah, most likely. Well, that was what his life had been given up for, was it? There was a twitching about McKinstry's wide mouth: Paul looked away from him a moment, and then, glancing furtively back, began again.

"No, I never knew my mother or sister, Mac. The great discovery of this age is woman, old fellow! I've been, knocked about too much not to have lost all delusions about them. It did well enough for the crusading times to hold them as angels in theory, and in practice as idiots; but in these rough-and-tumble days we'd better give 'em their places as flesh and blood, with exactly such wants and passions as men."

The Captain never argued.

"I don't know," he said, dryly.

After that he jogged on in silence, glancing askance at the masculine, self-assertant figure of his companion,—at the face, acrid, unyielding, beneath its surface-heat: ruminating mildly to himself on what a good thing it was for him never to have known any but old-fashioned women. This Blecker, now, had been made by intercourse with such women as those he talked of: he came from the North. The Captain looked at him with a vague, moony compassion: the usual Western vision of a Yankee female in his head,—Bloomer-clad, hatchet-faced, capable of anything, from courting a husband to commanding a ship. (It is all your fault, genuine women of New England! Why don't you come among us, and know your country, and let your country know you? Better learn the meaning of Chicago than of Venice, for your own sakes, believe me.)

They were near the town now, the road crossing a railroad-track, where the hill, chopped apart for the grade, left bare the black stratum of coal, tinged here and there with a bloody brown and whitish shale.

"Hillo! this means iron," said the Doctor, climbing up the bank, cat-like, to break off a bit; "and here an odd formation, Mac. Take it in to old Gurney."

The Captain cleaned his spectacles with piece of chamois-leather, put them on, folded the leather and replaced it in its especial place in his pocket, before he took the bit of rock.

"All that finical ceremony he would go through in the face of the enemy," thought Blecker, jumping down on the track.

"Give it to old Gurney, Mac. It will insure you a welcome."

"It is curious, Doctor Blecker. But you"—

"I never care to gratify anybody. Besides, the old gentleman and I inter-despised. Our instincts cried out, ''Ware dog!' the first day You are a friend of his, eh, Mac?"

The Captain's face grew red, like a bashful woman's. He thought Blecker had divined his secret, would haul it out roughly in another moment. If this slang-talking Yankee should take little Lizzy's name into his mouth! But the Doctor was silent, even looked away until the heat on the poor old bachelor's face had died out. He knew McKinstry's thought of that little girl well enough, but he held the child-hearted man's secret tenderly and charily in his hand. Paul Blecker did talk slang and assert himself; but every impulse in him was clean, delicate, liberal. So, Paul remaining silent, the Captain took heart of grace, going down the street, and ventured back to the Gurney question.

"I thought I would accompany you there, Doctor Blecker. They might only think it seemly in me to bid farewell. I"—

Blecker nodded. The man had not been able to hide an harassed frown that day under his usual vigor of speech and look. It became more palpable after this; his voice, when he did speak, was fretful, irritable,—his lips compressed; he stopped at a village-well to drink, as though his mouth were parched.

"How old is that house,—the Gurneys?" he asked, affecting carelessness, to baffle the curious inspection of McKinstry.

"The Fort? We call it the Fort because it was used for one in Indian times," McKinstry began, chafing his lean whiskers delightedly.

Old houses were his hobby, especially this which they approached,—a narrow, long building of unhewn stone, facing on the street, the lintels and doors worm-eaten, and green with moss.

"Built by Bradford, the new part,—Bradford, of the Whiskey
Insurrection, you know? Carvings on the walls brought over the
mountains, when to bring them by panels was a two-months' journey.
There's queer stories hang about these old Pennsylvania homesteads."

"Bradford? The Gurneys are a new family here, then?"

"Came here but a few years back, from a country farther up the mountains. They're different from us."

"How, different?" with a keen, surprised glance. "I see they are a newer people than the others; but I thought the village accepted them with shut eyes."

The Captain stammered again.

"Old Father Gurney, as we call him, taught school when they first came, but he gave that up. This section is a good geological field, and he wished to devote himself to that," he went on, evading the question. "They live off of those acres at the back of the house since that. You see? Corn, potatoes, buckwheat,—good yield."

"Who oversees the planting?" sharply.

McKinstry wondered vaguely at the little Doctor's curious interest in the Gurneys, but went on with his torpid, slow answers.

"That eldest girl, I believe, Grey. Cow there, you see, and ducks. He's popular, old Father Gurney. People have a liking for his queer ways, help him collect specimens for his cabinet; the boys bring him birds to stuff, and snakes. If it hadn't been for the troubles breaking out, he was on the eve of a most im-por-tant discovery,—the crater of an exhausted volcano in Virginia." McKinstry lowered his voice cautiously. "Fact, Sir. In Mercer County. But the guerrillas interfered with his researches."

"I think it probable. So he stuffs birds, does he?" Blecker's lips closing tighter.

"And keeps the snakes in alcohol. There are shelves in Miss Lizzy's room quite full of them. That lower room it was, but Joseph has taken it for a study. She has the upper one for her flowers and her father's birds."

"And Grey, and the twins, and the four boys bedaubed with molasses, and the dog, and the cooking?"

"Stowed away somewhere," the Captain mildly responded.

Dr. Blecker was testy.

"You know Joseph, her brother? I mean our candidate for Congress next term?"

"Yes. Democratic. J. Schuyler Gurney,—give him his name, Mac. Republican last winter. Joseph trims to wind and tide well. I heard him crow like a barn-yard fowl on the Capitol-steps at Washington when Lincoln called for the seventy-five thousand: now, he hashes up Breckinridge's conservative speech for your hickory-backed farmers. Does he support the family, Mac?"

"His election-expenses are heavy."

"Brandy-slings. I know his proclivities."

McKinstry colored. Dr. Blecker was coarse, an ill-bred man, he suspected,—noting, too, the angry repression in his eyes, as he stood leaning on the gate, looking in at the Fort, for they had reached it by this time. The Captain looked in, too, through the dusky clumps of altheas and plum-trees, at the old stone house, dyed tawny-gray in the evening light, and talked on, the words falling unconscious and simple as a stream of milk. The old plodder was no longer dumb. Blecker had hit on the one valve of the shut-up nature, the obstinate point of self-reliant volition in a life that had been one long drift of circumstance. This old stone house, shaggy with vines, its bloody script of Indian warfare hushed down and covered with modern fruit-trees and sunflowers,—this fort, and the Gurneys within it, stood out in the bare swamped stretch of the man's years, their solitary bit of enchantment. They were bare years,—the forty he had known: Fate had drained them tolerably dry before she flung them to him to accomplish duty in;—the duty was done now. McKinstry, a mild, common-faced man, had gone through it for nearly half a century, pleasantly,—never called it heroism. It was done. He had time now to stretch his nerves of body and soul with a great sigh of relief,—to see that Duty was, after all, a lean, meagre-faced angel, that Christ sends first, but never meant should be nearest and best. Faith, love, and so, happiness, these were words of more pregnant meaning in the gospel the Helper left us. So McKinstry stood straight up, for the first time in his life, and looked about him. A man, with an adult's blood, muscles, needs; an idle soul which his cramped creed did not fill, hungry domestic instincts, narrow and patient habit;—he claimed work and happiness, his right. Of course it came, and tangibly. Into every life God sends an actual messenger to widen and lift it above itself: puerile or selfish the messenger often is, but so straight from Him that the divine radiance clings about it, and all that it touches. We call that love, you remember. A secular affair, according to McKinstry's education, as much as marketing. So when he found that the tawny old house and the quiet little girl in there with the curious voice, which people came for miles to hear, were gaining an undue weight in his life, held, to be plain, all the fairy-land of which his childhood had been cheated, all fierce beauty, aspiration, passionate strength to insult Fate, which his life had never known, he kept the knowledge to himself. It was boyish weakness. He choked it out of thought on Sundays as sacrilege: how could he talk of the Gurney house and Lizzy to that almighty, infinite Vagueness he worshipped? Stalking to and fro, in the outskirts of the churchyard, he used to watch the flutter of the little girl's white dress, as she passed by to "meeting." He could not help it that his great limbs trembled, if the dress touched them, or that he had a mad longing to catch the tired-looking child up to his brawny breast and hold her there forever. But he felt guilty and ashamed that it was so; not knowing that Christ, seeing the pure thrill in his heart, smiled just as he did long ago when Mary brought the beloved disciple to him.

He never had told little Lizzy that he loved her,—hardly told himself. Why, he was forty-five,—and a year or two ago she was sledding down the street with her brothers, a mere yellow-haired baby. He remembered the first time he had noticed her,—one Christmas eve; his mother and Sarah were alive then. There was an Italian woman came to the village with a broken hand-organ, a filthy, starving wretch, and Gurney's little girl went with her from house to house in the snow, singing Christmas carols, and handing the tambourine. Everybody said, "Why, you little tot!" and gave her handfuls of silver. Such a wonderful voice she had even then, and looked so chubby and pretty in her little blue cloak and hood; and going about with the woman was such a pure-hearted thing to do. She danced once or twice that day, striking the tambourine, he remembered; the sound of it seemed to put her in a sort of ecstasy, laughing till her eyes were full of tears, and her tangled hair fell all about her red cheeks. She could not help but do it, he believed, for at other times she was shy, terrified, if one spoke to her; but he wished he had not seen her dance then, though she was only a child: dancing, he thought, was as foul and effective a snare as ever came from hell. After that day she used often to come to the farm to see his mother and Sarah. They tried to teach her to sew, but she was a lazy little thing, he remembered, with an indulgent smile. And he was "Uncle Dan." So now she was grown up, quite a woman: in those years, when she had been with her kinsfolk in New York, she had been taught to sing. Well, well! McKinstry reckoned music as about as useful as the crackling of thorns under a pot; so he never cared to know, what was the fact, that this youngest daughter of Gurney's had one of the purest contralto voices in the States. She came home, grown, but just as shy; only tired, needing care: no one could look in Lizzy Gurney's face without wishing to comfort and help the child. The Gurneys were so wretchedly poor, that might be the cause of her look. She was a woman now. Well, and then? Why, nothing then. He was Uncle Dan still, of whom she was less afraid than of any other living creature; that was all. Thinking, as he stood with Paul Blecker, leaning over the gate, of how she had brought him a badly-made havelock that morning. "You're always so kind to me," she said. "So I am kind to her," he thought, his quiet blue eyes growing duller behind their spectacles; "so I will be."

The Doctor opened the gate, and went in, turning into the shrubbery, and seating himself under a sycamore.

"Don't wait for me, McKinstry," he said. "I'll sit here and smoke a bit.
Here comes the aforesaid Joseph."

He did not light his cigar, however, when the other left him; took off his hat to let the wind blow through his hair, the petulant heat dying out of his face, giving place to a rigid settling, at last, of the fickle features.

A flabby, red-faced man in fine broadcloth and jaunty beaver came down the path, fumbling his seals, and met the Captain with a puffing snort of salutation. To Blecker, whose fancy was made sultry to-night by some passion we know nothing of, he looked like a bloated spider coming out of the cell where his victims were. "Gorging himself, while they and the country suffer the loss," he muttered. But Paul was a hot-brained young man. We should only have seen a vulgar, commonplace trickster in politics, such as the people make pets of. "Such men as Schuyler Gurney get the fattest offices. God send us a monarchy soon!" he hissed under his breath, as the gate closed after the politician. By which you will perceive that Dr. Blecker, like most men fighting their way up, was too near-sighted for any abstract theories. Liberty, he thought, was a very poetic, Millennium-like idea for stump-speeches and college-cubs, but he grappled with the time the States were too chaotic, untaught a mass for self-government; he cursed secession as anarchy, and the government at Washington for those equally anarchical, drunken whims of tyranny; he would like to see an iron heel put on the whole concern, for wholesome discipline. The Doctor was born in one of the Border States; men there, it is said, have a sort of hand-to-mouth politics; their daily bread of rights is all they care for; so Paul seldom looked into to-morrow for anything. In other ways, too, his birth had curdled his blood into a sensuous languor. To-night, after McKinstry had entered the house, and he was left alone, the quaint old garden quiet, the air about him clean, pure, unperfumed, the stars distant and lonely, his limbs bedded in the clinging moss, he was rested for the moment, happy like a child, with no subtile-sensed questionings why. The sounds of the village could not penetrate there; the content, the listless hush of the night was with him; the delicious shimmer of the trees in the starlight, the low call of the pigeon to its mate, even the fall of the catalpa-blossoms upon his hand, thrilled him with unreasoning pleasure: a dull consciousness that the earth was alive and well, and he was glad to live with the rest.

Something in Blecker's nature came into close rapport with the higher animal life. If he had been born with money, and lived here in these stagnating hills, or down yonder on some lazy cotton-plantation, he would have settled down before this into a genial, child-loving, arbitrary husband and master, fond of pictures and horses, his house in decent taste, his land pleasure-giving, his wines good. By this time he would have been Judge Blecker, with a portly voice, flushed face, and thick eyelids. But he had scuffled and edged his way in the thin air of Connecticut as errand-boy, daguerreotypist, teacher, doctor;—so he came into the Gurney garden that night, shrewd, defiant, priding himself on detecting shams. His waistcoat and trousers were of coarser stuff than suited his temperament; a taint of vulgarity in his talk, his whiskers untrimmed, the meaning of his face compacted, sharpened. It was many a year since a tear had come into his black eyes; yet tears belonged there, as much as to a woman's.

Only for a few moments, therefore, he was contented to sit quiet in the soft gloaming: then he puffed his cigar impatiently, watching the house. Waiting for some one: with no fancies about the old fort, like McKinstry. An over-full house, with an unordered, slipshod life, hungry, clinging desperately in its poverty to an old prestige of rank, one worker inside patiently bearing the whole selfish burden. Well, there was the history of the anxious, struggling, middle class of America: why need he have been goaded so intolerably by this instance? Paul's eyes were jaundiced; he sat moodily watching the lighted window off in the darkness, through which he could catch glimpses of the family-room within: he called it a pitiful tragedy going on there; yet it seemed to be a cheerful and hearty life. This girl Grey, whom he looked on as one might on some victim from whose lungs the breath was drawn slowly, was fresh, careless, light-hearted enough. Going to and fro in the room, now carrying one of the children, she sang it to sleep with no doleful ditty, such as young women fresh from boarding-school affect, but with a ringing, cheery song. You might be sure that Baby would wake laughing to-morrow morning after it. He could see her shadow pass and repass the windows; she would be out presently; she was used to come out always after the hot day's flurry,—to say her prayers, he believed; and he chose to see her there in the dark and coolness to bid her good-bye. He waited, not patiently.

Grey, trotting up and down, holding by the chubby legs and wriggling arms of Master Pen, sang herself out of breath with "Roy's Wife," and stopped short.

"I'm sure, Pen, I don't know what to do with you,"—half ready to cry.

"'Dixie,' now, Sis."

Pen was three years old, but he was the baby when his mother died; so Sis walked him to sleep every night: all tender memories of her who was gone clinging about the little fat lump of mischief in his white night-gown. A wiry voice spoke out of some corner,—

"Yer 'd hev a thumpin' good warmin', Mars' Penrose, ef ole Oth hed his will o' yer! It 'ud be a special 'pensation ob de Lord fur dat chile!"

Pen prospected his sister's face with the corner of one blue eye. There was a line about the freckled cheeks and baby-mouth of "Sis" that sometimes agreed with Oth on the subject of dispensations, but it was not there to-night.

"No, no, uncle. Not the last thing before he goes to bed. I always try, myself, to see something bright and pretty for the last thing, and then shut my eyes, quick,—just as Pen will do now: quick! there's my sonny boy!"

Nobody ever called Grey Gurney pretty; but Pen took an immense delight in her now; shook and kicked her for his pony, but could not make her step less firm or light; thrust his hands about her white throat; pulled the fine reddish hair down; put his dumpling face to hers. A thin, uncertain face, but Pen knew nothing of that; he did know, though, that the skin was fresh and dewy as his own, the soft lips very ready for kisses, and the pale hazel eyes just as straightforward-looking as a baby's. Children and dogs believe in women like Grey Gurney. Finally, from pure exhaustion, Pen cuddled up and went to sleep.

It was a long, narrow room where Grey and the children were, covered with rag-carpet, (she and the boys and old Oth had made the balls for it last winter): well lighted, for Father Gurney had his desk in there to-night. He was working at his catalogue of Sauroidichnites in Pennsylvania. A tall, lean man, with hook-nose, and peering, protruding, blue eyes. Captain McKinstry sat by him, turning over Brongniart; his brain, if one might judge from the frequency with which he blew his nose, evidently the worse from the wear since he came in; glancing with an irresolute awe from the book to the bony frame of the old man in his red dressing-gown, and then to the bony carcasses of the birds on the wall in their dusty plumage.

"Like enough each to t' other," old Oth used to mutter; "on'y dem birds done forgot to eat, an' Mars' Gurney neber will, gorry knows dat!"

"If you could, Captain McKinstry,"—it was the old man who spoke now, with a sort of whiffle through his teeth,—"if you could? A chip of shale next to this you brought this evening would satisfy me. This is evidently an original fossil foot-mark: no work of Indians. I'll go with you,"—gathering his dressing-gown about his lank-legs.

"No," said the Captain, some sudden thought bringing gravity and self-reliance into his face. "My little girl is going with Uncle Dan. It's the last walk I can take with her. Go, child, and bring your bonnet."

Little Lizzy (people generally called her that) got up from the door-step where she sat, and ran up-stairs. She was one of those women who look as if they ought to be ordered and taken care of. Grey put a light shawl over her shoulders as she passed her. Grey thought of Lizzy always very much as a piece of fine porcelain among some earthen crocks, she being a very rough crock herself. Did not she have to make a companion in some Ways of old Oth? When she had no potatoes for dinner, or could get no sewing to pay for Lizzy's shoes, (Lizzy was hard on her shoes, poor thing!) she found herself talking it over with Oth. The others did not-care for such things, and it would be mean to worry them, but Oth liked a misery, and it was such a relief to tell things sometimes! The old negro had been a slave of her grandfather's until he was of age; he was quite helpless now, having a disease of the spine. But Grey had brought him to town with them, "because, you know, uncle, I couldn't keep house without you, at all,—I really couldn't." So he had his chair covered with sheepskin in the sunniest corner always, and Grey made over her father's old clothes for him on the machine. Oth had learned to knit, and made "hisself s'ficiently independent, heelin' an' ribbin' der boys' socks, an' keepin' der young debbils in order," he said.

It was but a cheap machine Grey had, but a sturdy little chap; the steel band of it, even the wheel, flashed back a jolly laugh at her as she passed it, slowly hushing Pen, as if it would like to say, "I'll put you through, Sis!" and looked quite contemptuously at the heaps of white muslin piled up beside it. The boys' shirts, you know,—but wasn't it a mercy she had made enough to buy them before muslin went up? There were three of the boys asleep now, legs and arms adrift over the floor, pockets gorged with half-apples, bits of twine instead of suspenders, other surreptitious bits under their trousers for straps. There were the twins, girls of ten, hungering for beaux, pickles, and photographic albums. They were gone to a party in the village. "Sis" had done up their white dresses; and such fun as they had with her, putting them on to hide the darns! She made it so comical that they laughed more than they did the whole evening.

Grey had saved some money to buy them ribbon for sashes, but Joseph had taken it from her work-basket that morning to buy cigars. One of the girls had cried, and even Grey's lips grew scarlet; her Welsh blood maddened. This woman was neither an angel nor an idiot, Paul Blecker. Then—it was such a trifle! Poor Joseph! he had been her mother's favorite, was spoiled a little. So she hurried to his chamber-door with his shaving-water, calling, "Brother!" Grey had a low, always pleasant voice, I remember; you looked in her eyes, when you heard it, to see her laughing. The ex-Congressman was friendly, but dignified, when he took the water. Grey presumed on her usefulness; women seldom did know their place.

There was yet another girl busy now, convoying the lubberly hulks of boys to bed,—a solid, Dutch-built little clipper, Loo by name. Loo looked upon Grey secretly as rather silly; (she did all the counting for her; Grey hardly knew the multiplication-table;) she always, however, kept her opinions to herself. Tugging the boys after her in the manner of a tow-boat, she thumped past her father and "that gype, McKinstry, colloging over their bits of rock," indignation in every twist of her square shoulders.

"Fresh air," she said to Grey, jerking her head emphatically toward the open door.

"I will, Looey."

"Looey! Pish!"

It was no admiring glance she bestowed on the slight figure that came down the stairs, and stood timidly waiting for McKinstry.

"You're going, Captain?" the old man's nose and mind starting suddenly up from his folio. "Lizzy,—eh? Here's the bit of rock. In the coal formation, you say? Impossible, then, to be as old as the batrachian track that"—

A sudden howl brought him back to the present era. Loo was arguing her charge up to bed by a syllogism applied at the right time in the right place. The old man held his hands to his ears with a patient smile, until McKinstry was out of hearing.

"It is hard to devote the mind pure to a search for truth here, my daughter," looking over Grey's head as usual, with pensive, benevolent eyes. "But I do what I can,—I do what I can."

"I know, father,"—stroking his hair as she might a child's, trimming the lamp, and bringing his slippers while he held out his feet for her to put them on,—"I know."

Then, when he took up the pen, she went out into the cool night.

"I do what I can," said he, earnestly, looking at the catalogue, with his head to one side.

It was Oth's time,—now or never.

"Debbil de bit yer do! Ef yer did what yer could, Mars' Si, dar 'ud be more 'n one side o' sparerib in de cellar fur ten hungry mouths. We've gone done eat dat pig o' Miss Grey's from head ter tail. An' pigs in June's a disgrace ter Christians, let alone Presbyterians like us uns."

The old man glanced at him. Oth's spine gave his tongue free license.

"I'll discharge him," faintly.

"'Scharge yerself," growled Oth, under his breath.

So the old man went back to his batrachians, and Oth ribbed Pen's sock in silence: the old fort stood at last as quiet in the moonlight as if it were thinking over all of its long-ago Indian sieges.

Grey's step was noiseless, going down the tan-bark path. She drew long breaths, her lungs being choked with the day's work, and threw back the hair from her forehead and throat. There was a latent dewiness in the air that made the clear moonlight as fresh and invigorating as a winter's morning. Grey stretched out her arms in it, with a laugh, as a child might. You would know, to look at her hair, that there was a strong poetic capacity in that girl below her simple Quaker character; as it lay in curly masses where the child had pulled it down, there was no shine, but clear depth of color in it: her eyes the same; not soggy, black, flashing as women's are who effuse their experience every day for the benefit of by-standers; this girl's were pale hazel, clear, meaningless at times, but when her soul did force itself to the light they gave it fit utterance. Women with hair and eyes like those, with passionate lips and strong muscles like Grey Gurney's, are children, single-natured all their lives, until some day God's test comes: then they live tragedies, unconscious of their deed.

The night was singularly clear, in its quiet: only a few dreamy trails of gray mist, asleep about the moon: far off on the crest of the closing hills, she fancied she could see the wind-stir in the trees that made a feathered shadow about the horizon. She leaned on the stile, looking over the sweep of silent meadows and hills, and slow—creeping watercourses. The whole earth waited, she fancied, with newer life and beauty than by day: going back, it might be, in the pure moonlight, to remember that dawn when God said, "Let there be light." The girl comprehended the meaning of the night better, perhaps, because of the house she had left. Every night she came out there. She left the clothes and spareribs behind her, and a Something, a Grey Gurney that might have been, came back to her in the coolness and rest, the nearer she drew to the pure old earth. She never went down into those mossy hollows, or among the shivering pines, with a soiled, tawdry dress; she wore always the clear, primitive colors, or white,—Grey: it was the girl's only bit of self-development. This night she could see McKinstry's figure, as he went down the path through the rye-field. He was stooping, leading Lizzy by the hand, as a nurse might an infant. Grey thrust the currant-bushes aside eagerly; she could catch a glimpse of the girl's face in the colorless light. It always had a livid tinge, but she fancied it was red now with healthy blushes; her eyes were on the ground: in the house they looked out from under their heavy brows on their daily life with a tired coldness that made silly Grey ashamed of her own light-heartedness. The man's common face was ennobled with such infinite tenderness and pain, Grey thought the help that lay therein would content her sister. It was time for the girl's rest to come; she was sick of herself and of life. So the tears came to Grey's eyes, though to the very bottom of her heart she was thankful and glad.

"She has found home at last!"—she said; and, maybe, because something in the thought clung to her as she sauntered slowly down the garden—alleys, her lips kept moving in a childish fashion of hers. "A home at last, at last!"—that was what she said.

Paul Blecker, too, waiting back yonder among the trees, saw McKinstry and his companion, and read the same story that Grey did, but in a different fashion. "The girl loves him." There were possibilities, however, in that woman's curious traits, that Blecker, being a physician and a little of a soul-fancier, saw: nothing in McKinstry's formal, orthodox nature ran parallel with them; therefore he never would know them. As they passed Blecker's outlook through the trees, his half-shut eye ran over her,—the despondent step, the lithe, nervous limbs, the manner in which she clung for protection to his horny hand. "Poor child!" the Doctor thought. There was something more, in the girl's face, that, people called gentle and shy: a weak, uncertain chin; thin lips, never still an instant, opening and shutting like a starving animal's; gray eyes, dead, opaque, such as Blecker had noted in the spiritual mediums in New England.

"I'm glad it is McKinstry she loves, and not I," he said.

He turned, and forgot her, watching Grey coming nearer to him. The garden sloped down to the borders of the creek, and she stood on its edge now, looking at the uneasy crusting of the black water and the pearly glint of moonlight. Thinking of Lizzy, and the strong love that held her; feeling a little lonely, maybe, and quiet, she did not know why; trying to wrench her thoughts back to the house, and the clothes, and the spareribs. Why! he could read her thoughts on her face as if it were a baby's! A homely, silly girl they called her. He thanked God nobody had found her out before him. Look at the dewy freshness of her skin! how pure she was! how the world would knock her about, if he did not keep his hold on her! But he would do that; to-night he meant to lay his hand upon her life, and never take it off, absorb it in his own. She moved forward into the clear light: that was right. There was a broken boll of a beech—tree covered with lichen: she should sit on that, presently, her face in open light, he in the shadow, while he told her. "Watching her with hot breath where she stood, then going down to her:—

"Is Grey waiting to bid her friend good-bye?"

She put her hand in his,—her very lips trembling with the sudden heat, her untrained eyes wandering restlessly.

"I thought you would come to me, Doctor Blecker."

"Call me Paul," roughly. "I was coarser born and bred than you. I want to think that matters nothing to you."

She looked up proudly.

"You know it matters nothing. I am not vulgar."

"No, Grey. But—it is curious, but no one ever called me Paul, as boy or man. It is a sign of equality; and I've always had, in the mélée, the underneath taint about me. You are not vulgar enough to care for it. Yours is the highest and purest nature I ever knew. Yet I know it is right for you to call me Paul. Your soul and mine stand on a plane before God."

The childish flush left her face; the timid woman-look was in it now. He bent nearer.

"They stand there alone, Grey."

She drew back from him, her hands nervously catching in the thick curls.

"You do not believe that?" his breath clogged and hot. "It is a fancy of mine? not true?"

"It is true."

He caught the whisper, his face growing pale, his eyes flashing.

"Then you are mine, child! What is the meaning of these paltry contradictions? Why do you evade me from day to day?"

"You promised me not to speak of this again,"—weakly.

"Pah! You have a man's straightforward, frank instinct, Grey; and this is cowardly,—paltry, as I said before. I will speak of it again. To-night is all that is left to me."

He seated her upon the beech-trunk. One could tell by the very touch and glance of the man how the image of this woman stood solitary in his coarser thoughts, delicate, pure: a disciple would have laid just such reverential fingers on the robe of the Madonna. Then he stood off from her, looking straight into her hazel eyes. Grey, with all her innocent timidity, was the cooler, stronger, maybe, of the two: the poor Doctor's passionate nature, buffeted from one anger and cheat to another in the world, brought very little quiet or tact or aptitude in language for this one hour. Yet, standing there, his man's sturdy heart throbbing slow as an hysteric woman's, his eyeballs burning, it seemed to him that all his life had been but the weak preface to these words he was going to speak.

"It angers me," he muttered, abruptly, "that, when I come to you with the thought that a man's or a woman's soul can hold but once in life, you put me aside with the silly whims of a schoolgirl. It is not worthy of you, Grey. You are not as other women."

What was this that he had touched? She looked up at him steadily, her hands clasped about her knees, the childlike rose-glow and light banished from her face.

"I am not like other women. You speak truer than you know. You call me a silly, happy child. Maybe I am; but, Paul, once in my life God punished me. I don't know for what,"—getting up, and stretching out her groping arms, blindly.

There was a sudden silence. This was not the cheery, healthful Grey Gurney of a moment before, this woman with the cold terror creeping out in her face. He caught her hands and held them.

"I don't know for what," she moaned. "He did it. He is good."

He watched the slow change in her face: it made his hands tremble as they held hers. No longer a child, but a woman whose soul the curse had touched. Miriam, leprous from God's hand, might have thus looked up to Him without the camp. Blecker drew her closer. Was she not his own? He would defend her against even this God, for whom he cared but little.

"What has been done to you, child?"

She shook herself free, speaking in a fast, husky whisper.

"Do not touch me, Dr. Blecker. It was no school-girl's whim that kept me from you. I am not like other women. I am not worthy of any man's love."

"I think I know what you mean," he said, gravely. "I know your story, Grey. They made you live a foul lie once. I know it all. You were a child then."

She had gone still farther from him, holding by the trunk of a dead tree, her face turned towards the water. The black sough of wind from it lifted her hair, and dampened her forehead. The man's brain grew clearer, stronger, somehow, as he looked at her; as thought does in the few electric moments of life when sham and conventionality crumble down like ashes, and souls stand bare, face to face. For the every-day, cheery, unselfish Grey of the coarse life in yonder he cared but little; it was but the husk that held the woman whose nature grappled with his own, that some day would take it with her to the Devil or to God. He knew that. It was this woman that stood before him now: looking back, out of the inbred force and purity within her, the indignant man's sense of honor that she had, on the lie they had made her live: daring to face the truth, that God had suffered this thing, yet clinging, like a simple child, to her old faith in Him. That childish faith, that worked itself out in her common life, Paul Blecker set aside, in loving her. She was ignorant: he knew the world, and, he thought, very plainly saw that the Power who had charge of it suffered unneeded ills, was a traitor to the Good his own common sense and kindly feeling could conceive; which is the honest belief of most of the half-thinkers in America.

"You were but a child," he said again. "It matters nothing to me, Grey.
It left no taint upon you."

"It did," she cried, passionately. "I carry the marks of it to my grave.
I never shall be pure again."

"Why did your God let you go down into such foulness, then?"—the words broke from his lips irrepressibly. "It was He who put you in the hands of a selfish woman; it was He who gave you a weak will. It is He who suffers marriages as false as yours. Why, child! you call it crime, the vow that bound you for that year to a man you loathed; yet the world celebrates such vows daily in every church in Christendom."

"I know that";—her voice had gone down into its quiet sob, like a little child's.

She sat down on the ground, now, the long shore-grass swelling up around her, thrusting her fingers into the pools of eddying water, with a far-off sense of quiet and justice and cold beneath there.

"I don't understand," she said. "The world's wrong somehow. I don't think God does it. There's thousands of young girls married as I was. Maybe, if I 'd told Him about it, it wouldn't have ended as it did. I did not think He cared for such things."

Blecker was silent. What did he care for questions like this now? He sat by her on the broken trunk, his elbows on his knees, his sultry eyes devouring her face and body. What did it matter, if once she had been sold to another man? She was free now: he was dead. He only knew that here was the only creature in earth or heaven that he loved: there was not a breath in her lungs, a tint of her flesh, that was not dear to him, allied by some fierce passion to his own sense: there was that in her soul which he needed, starved for: his life balked blank here, demanding it,—her,—he knew not what: but that gained, a broader freedom opened behind, unknown possibilities of honor and truth and deed. He would take no other step, live no farther, until he gained her. Holding, too, the sense of her youth, her rare beauty, as it seemed to him; loving it with keener passion because he alone developed it, drawing her soul to the light! how like a baby she was: how dainty the dimpling white flesh of her arms, the soft limbs crouching there! So pure, the man never came near her without a dull loathing of himself, a sudden remembrance of places where he had been tainted, made unfit to touch her,—rows in Bowery dance-houses, waltzes with musk-scented fine ladies: when this girl put her cool little hand in his sometimes, he felt tears coming to his eyes, as if the far-off God or the dead mother had blessed him. She sat there, now, going back to that blot in her life, her eyes turned every moment up to the Power beyond in whom she trusted, to know why it had been. He had seen little children, struck by their mother's hand, turn on them a look just so grieved and so appealing.

"It was no one's fault altogether, Paul," she said. "My mother was not selfish, more than other women. There were very many mouths to feed: it is so in most families like ours."

"I know."

"I am very dull about books,—stupid, they say. I could not teach; and they would not let me sew for money, because of the disgrace. These are the only ways a woman has. If I had been a boy"—

"I understand."

"No man can understand,"—her voice growing shrill with pain. "It's not easy to eat the bread needed for other mouths day after day, with your hands tied, idle and helpless. A boy can go out and work, in a hundred ways: a girl must marry; it's her only chance for a livelihood, or a home, or anything to fill her heart with. Don't blame my mother, Paul. She had ten of us to work for. From the time I could comprehend, I knew her only hope was, to live long enough to see her boys educated, and her daughters in homes of their own. It was the old story, Doctor Blecker,"—with a shivering laugh more pitiful than a cry. "I've noticed it since in a thousand other houses. Young girls like me in these poor-genteel families,—there are none of God's creatures more helpless or goaded, starving at their souls. I couldn't teach. I had no talent; but if I had, a woman's a woman: she wants something else in her life than dog-eared school-books and her wages year after year."

Blecker could hardly repress a smile.

"You are coming to political economy by a woman's road, Grey."

"I don't know what that is. I know what my life was then. I was only a child; but when that man came and held out his hand to take me, I was willing when they gave me to him,—when they sold me, Doctor Blecker. It was like leaving some choking pit, where air was given to me from other lungs, to go out and find it for my own. What marriage was or ought to be I did not know; but I wanted, as every human being does want, a place for my own feet to stand on, not to look forward to the life of an old maid, living on sufferance, always the one too many in the house."

"That is weak and vulgar argument, child. It should not touch a true woman, Grey. Any young girl can find work and honorable place for herself in the world, without the defilement of a false marriage."

"I know that now. But young girls are not taught that. I was only a child, not strong-willed. And now, when I'm free,"—a curious clearness coming to her eye,—"I'm glad to think of it all. I never blame other women. Because, you see,"—looking up with the flickering smile,—"a woman's so hungry for something of her own to love, for some one to be kind to her, for a little house and parlor and kitchen of her own; and if she marries the first man who says he loves her, out of that first instinct of escape from dependence, and hunger for love, she does not know she is selling herself, until it's too late. The world's all wrong, somehow."

She stopped, her troubled face still upturned to his.

"But you,—you are free now?"

"He is dead."

She slowly rose as she spoke, her voice hardening.

"He was my cousin, you know,—the same name as mine. Only a year he was with me. Then he went to Cuba, where he died. He is dead. But I am not free,"—lifting her hands fiercely, as she spoke. "Nothing can wipe the stain of that year off of me."

"You know what man he was," said the Doctor, with a natural thrill of pleasure that he could say it honestly. "I know, poor child! A vapid, cruel tyrant, weak, foul. You hated him, Grey? There's a strength of hatred in your blood. Answer me. You dare speak truth to me."

"He's dead now,"—with a long, choking breath. "We will not speak of him."

She stood a moment, looking down the stretch of curdling black water,—then, turning with a sudden gesture, as though she flung something from her, looked at him with a pitiful effort to smile.

"I don't often think of that time. I cannot bear pain very well. I like to be happy. When I'm busy now, or playing with little Pen, I hardly believe I am the woman who was John Gurney's wife. I was so old then! I was like a hard, tigerish soul, tried and tempted day by day. He made me that."

She could not bear pain, he saw: remembrance of it, alone, made the flesh about her lips blue, unsteadied her brain; the well-accented face grew vacant, dreary; neither nerves nor will of this woman were tough. Her family were not the stuff out of which voluntary heroes are made. He saw, too, she was thrusting it back,—out of thought: it was her temperament to do that.

"So, now, Grey," he said, cheerfully, "the story's told. Shall we lay that ghost of the old life, and see what these healthful new years have for us?"

Paul Blecker's voice was never so strong or pure: whatever of coarseness had clung to him fell off then, as he came nearer to the weak woman whom God had given to him to care for; whatever of latent manhood, of chivalry, slept beneath, some day to make him an earnest husband and father, and helpful servant of the True Man, came out in his eager face and eye, now. He took her two hands in his: how strong his muscles were! how the man's full pulse throbbed healthfully against her own! She looked up with a sudden blush and smile. A minute ago she thought herself so strong to renounce! She meant, this weak, incomplete woman, to keep to the shame of that foul old lie of hers, accepting that as her portion for life. There is a chance comes to some few women, once in their lives, to escape into the full development of their natures by contact with the one soul made in the same mould as their own. It came to this woman to-night. Grey was no theorist about it: all that she knew was, that, when Paul Blecker stood near her, for the first time in her life she was not alone,—that, when he spoke, his words were but more forcible utterances of her own thought,—that, when she thought of leaving him, it was like drawing the soul from her living body, to leave it pulseless, dead. Yet she would do it.

"I am not fit to be any man's wife. If you had come to me when I was a child, it might have been,—it ought to have been,"—with an effort to draw her hands from him.

Blecker only smiled, and seated her gently on the mossy boll of the beech-tree.

"Stay. Listen to me," he whispered.

And Grey, being a woman and no philosopher, sat motionless, her hands folded, nerveless, where he had let them fall, her face upturned, like that of the dead maiden waiting the touch of infinite love to tremble and glow back into beautiful life. He did not speak, did not touch her, only bent nearer. It seemed to him, as the pure moonlight then held them close in its silent bound, the great world hushed without, the light air scarce daring to touch her fair, waiting face, the slow-heaving breast, the kindling glow in her dark hair, that all the dead and impure years fell from them, and in a fresh new-born life they stood alone, with the great Power of strength and love for company. What need was there of words? She knew it all: in the promise and question of his face waited for her the hope and vigor the time gone had never known: her woman's nature drooped and leaned on his, content: the languid hazel eye followed his with such intent, one would have fancied that her soul in that silence had found its rest and home forever.

He took her hand, and drew from it the old ring that yet bound one of her fingers, the sign of a lie long dead, and without a word dropped it in the current below them. The girl looked up suddenly, as it fell: her eyes were wet: the woman whom Christ loosed from her infirmity of eighteen years might have thanked him with such a look as Grey's that night. Then she looked back to her earthly master.

"It is dead now, child, the past,—never to live again. Grey holds a new life in her hands to-night." He stopped: the words came weak, paltry, for his meaning. "Is there nothing with which she dares to fill it? no touch that will make it dear, holy for her?"

There was a heavy silence. Nature rose impatient in the crimson blood that dyed her lips and cheek, in the brilliance of her eye; but she forced back the words that would have come, and sat timid and trembling.

"None, Grey? You are strong and cool. I know. The lie dead and gone from your life, you can control the years alone, with your religion and cheery strength. Is that what you would say?"—bitterly.

She did not answer. The color began to fade, the eyes to dim.

"You have told me your story; let me tell you mine,"—throwing himself on the grass beside her. "Look at me, Grey. Other women have despised me, as rough, callous, uncouth: you never have. I've had no hot-house usage in the world; the sun and rain hardly fell on me unpaid. I've earned every inch of this flesh and muscle, worked for it as it grew; the knowledge that I have, scanty enough, but whatever thought I do have of God or life, I've had to grapple and struggle for. Other men grow, inhale their being, like yonder tree God planted and watered. I think sometimes He forgot me,"—with a curious woman's tremor in his voice, gone in an instant. "I scrambled up like that scraggy parasite, without a root. Do you know now why I am sharp, wary, suspicious, doubt if there be a God? Grey," turning fiercely, "I am tired of this. God did make me. I want rest. I want love, peace, religion, in my life."

She said nothing. She forgot herself, her timid shyness now, and looked into his eyes, a noble, helpful woman, sounding the depths of the turbid soul laid bare for her.

He laid his big, ill-jointed hand on her knee.

"I thought," he said.—great drops of sweat coming out on his sallow lips,—"God meant you to help me. There is my life, little girl. You may do what you will with it. It does not value much to me."

And Grey, woman-like, gathered up the despised hand and life, and sobbed a little as she pressed them to her heart. An hour after, they went together up the old porch-steps, halting a moment where the grape-vines clustered thickest about the shingled wall. The house was silent; even the village slept in the moonlight: no sound of life in the great sweep of dusky hill and valley, save the wreaths of mist over the watercourses, foaming and drifting together silently: before morning they would stretch from base to base of the hills like a Dead Sea, ashy and motionless. They stood silent a moment, until the chirp of some robin, frightened by their steps in its nest overhead, had hummed drowsily down into sleep.

"It is not good-night, but good-bye, that I must bid you, Grey," he said, stooping to see her face.

"I know. But you will come again. God tells me that."

"I will come. Remember, Grey, I am going to save life, not to take it. Corrupt as I am, my hands are clean of this butchery for the sake of interest."

Grey's eyes wandered. She knows nothing about the war, to be candid: only that it is like a cold pain at her heart, day and night,—sorry that the slaves are slaves, wondering if they could be worse off than the free negroes swarming in the back-alleys yonder,—as sorry, being unpatriotic, for the homeless women in Virginia as for the stolen horses of Chambersburg. Grey's principles, though mixed, are sound, as far as they go, you see. Just then thinking only of herself.

"You will come back to me?" clinging to his arm.

"Why, I must come back," cheerfully, choking back whatever stopped his breath, pushing back the curling hair from her forehead with a half-reverential touch. "I have so much, to do, little girl! There is a farm over yonder I mean to earn enough to buy, where you and I shall rest and study and grow,—stronger and healthier, more helpful every day. We'll find our work and place in the world yet, poor child! You shall show me what a pure, earnest life is, Grey, and above us—what there is there," lowering his voice. "And I,—how much I have to do with this bit of humanity here on my hands!"—playfully. "An unhewn stone, with the beautiful statue lying perdu within. Bid you know you were that, Grey? and I the sculptor?"

She looked up bewildered.

"It is true," passing his fingers over the low, broad, curiously moulded forehead. "My girl does not know what powers and subtile forces lie asleep beneath this white skin? I know. I know lights and words and dramas of meaning these childish eyes hold latent: that I will set free. I will teach your very silent lips a new language. You never guessed how like a prison your life has been, how unfinished you are; but I thank God for it, Grey. You would not have loved me, if it had been different; I can grow with you now, grow to your height, if—He helps me."

He took off his hat, and stood, looking silently into the deep blue above,—for the first time in his life coming to his Friend with a manly, humble look. His eyes were not clear when he spoke again, his voice very quiet.

"Good bye, Grey! I'm going to try to be a better man than I've ever been. You are my wife now in His eyes. I need you so: for life and for eternity, I think. You will remember that?"

And so, holding her to his heart a moment or two, and kissing her lips passionately once or twice, he left her, trying to smile as he went down the path, but with a strange clogging weight in his breast, as if his heart would not beat.

Going in, Grey found the old negro asleep over his knitting, the candle with a flaring black crust beside him.

"He waited for me," she said; and as she stroked the skinny old hand, the tears came at the thought of it. Everybody was so kind to her! The world was so foil of love! God was so good to her to-night!

Oth, waking fully as she helped him to his room-door, looked anxiously in her face.

"Er' ye well to-night, chile?" he said. "Yer look as yer did when yer wor a little baby. Peart an' purty yer wor, dat's true. Der good Lord loved yer, I think."

"He loves me now," she said, softly, to herself, as in her own room she knelt down and thanked Him, and then, undressed, crept into the white trundle-bed beside little Pen; and when he woke, and, putting his little arms about her neck, drew her head close to his to kiss her good-night, she cried quietly to herself, and fell asleep with the tears upon her cheek.

Her sister, in the next room to hers, with the same new dream in her heart, did not creep into any baby's arms for sympathy. Lizzy Gurney never had a pet, dog or child. She sat by the window waiting, her shawl about her head in the very folds McKinstry had wrapped it, motionless, as was her wont. But for the convulsive movement of her lips now and then, no gutta-percha doll could be more utterly still. As the night wore down into the intenser sleep of the hours after midnight, her watch grew more breathless. The moon sank far enough in the west to throw the beams directly across her into the dark chamber behind. She was a small-moulded woman, you could see now: her limbs, like those of a cat, or animals of that tribe, from their power of trance-like quiet, gave you the idea of an intense vitality: a gentle face,—pretty, the villagers called it, from its waxy tint and faint coloring,—you wished to do something for her, seeing it. Paul Blecker never did: the woman never spoke to him; but he noted often the sudden relaxed droop of the eyelids, when she sat alone, as if some nerve had grown weary: he had seen that peculiarity in some women before, and knew all it meant. He had nothing for her; her hunger lay out of his ken.

It grew later: the moon hung now so low that deep shadows lay heavy over the whole valley; not a breath broke the sleep of the night; even the long melancholy howl of the dog down in camp was hushed long since. When the clock struck two, she got up and went noiselessly out into the open air. There was no droop in her eyelids now; they were straight, nerved, the eyes glowing with a light never seen by day beneath them. Down the long path into the cornfield, slowly, pausing at some places, while her lips moved as though she repeated words once heard there. What folly was this? Was this woman's life so bare, so empty of its true food, that she must needs go back and drag again into life a few poor, happy moments? distil them slowly, to drink them again drop by drop? I have seen children so live over in their play the one great holiday of their lives. Down through the field to the creek-ford, where the stones lay for crossing, slippery with moss: she could feel the strong grasp of the hand that had led her over there that night; and so, with slow, and yet slower step, where the path had been rocky, and she had needed cautious help. Into the thicket of lilacs, with the old scent of the spring blossoms yet hanging on their boughs; along the bank, where her foot had sunk deep into plushy moss, where he had gathered a cluster of fern and put it into her hand. Its pale feathery green was not more quaint or pure than the delicate love in the uncouth man beside her,—not nearer kin to Nature. Did she know that? Had it been like the breath of God coming into her nostrils to be so loved, appreciated, called home, as she had been to-night? Was she going back to feel that breath again? Neither pain nor pleasure was on her face: her breath came heavy and short, her eyes shone, that was all. Out now into the open road, stopping and glancing around with every broken twig, being a cowardly creature, yet never leaving the track of the footsteps in the dust, where she had gone before. Coming at last to the old-fashioned gabled house, where she had gone when site was a child, set in among stiff rows of evergreens. A breathless quiet always hung about the place: a pure, wholesome atmosphere, because pure and earnest people had acted out their souls there, and gone home to God. He had led her through the gate here, given her to drink of the well at the side of the house. "My mother never would taste any water but this, do you remember, Lizzy?" They had gone through the rooms, whispering, if they spoke, as though it were a church. Here was the pure dead sister's face looking down from the wall; there his mother's worn wicker work-stand. Her work was in it still. "The needle just where she placed it, Lizzy." The strong man was weak as a little child with the memory of the old mother who had nursed and loved him as no other could love. He stood beside her chair irresolute; forty years ago he had stood there, a little child bringing all his troubles to be healed: since she died no hand had touched it. "Will you sit there, Lizzy? You are dearer to me than she. When I come back, will you take their place here? Only you are pure as they, and dearer, Lizzy. We will go home to them hand in hand." She sat in the dead woman's chair. She. Looking in at her own heart as she did it. Yet her love for him would make her fit to sit there: she believed that. He had not kissed her,—she was too sacred to the simple-hearted man for that,—had only taken her little hand in both his, saying, "God bless you, little Lizzy!" in an unsteady voice.

"He may never say it again," the girl said, when she crept home from her midnight pilgrimage. "I'll come here every day and live it all over again. It will keep me quiet until he comes. Maybe he'll never come,"—catching her breast, and tearing it until it grew black. She was so tired of herself, this child! She would have torn that nerve in her heart out that sometimes made her sick, if she could. Her life was so cramped, and selfish, too, and she knew it. Passing by the door of Grey's room, she saw her asleep with Pen in her arms,—some other little nightcapped heads in the larger beds. She slept alone. "They tire me so!" she said; "yet I think," her eye growing fiercer, "if I had anything all my own, if I had a little baby to make pure and good, I'd be a better girl. Maybe—he will make me better."

Paul Blecker, heart-anatomist, laughed when this woman, with the aching brain and the gnawing hunger at heart, seized on the single, Christ-like love of McKinstry, a common, bigoted man, and made it her master and helper. Her instinct was wiser than he, being drifted by God's under-currents of eternal order. That One who knows when the sparrow is ready for death knows well what things are needed for a tired girl's soul.

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