The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 / Devoted To Literature And National Policy

by Various

V.—THE ADIRONDACS.

This interesting mountain region embraces the triangular plateau lying between Lake Champlain and the St. Lawrence, Lake Ontario and the Mohawk. The name was formerly restricted to the central group containing the highest peaks, but is now applied to the various ranges traversing the northeastern counties of the State of New York. The loftiest points are found in the County of Essex and the neighboring corners of Franklin; but the surfaces of Clinton, St. Lawrence, Herkimer, Hamilton, Warren, and Washington are all diversified by the various branches of the same mountain system. The principal ranges have a general northeasterly and southwesterly direction, and are about six in number. They run nearly parallel with one another, and with the watercourses flowing into Lake Champlain, namely, Lake George and Putnam's Creek, the Boquet, Au Sable, and Saranac Rivers. Recent surveys made by, or under the direction of, Professor A. Guyot, will doubtless furnish us with more accurate information regarding ranges and measurements of heights than any we can now refer to. So far as we have been able to learn from the best authorities within our reach,[2] the situation and names of the most prominent ranges are as follows: The most southerly is that known as the Palmertown or Luzerne Mountains, and embraces the highlands of Lake George, terminating at Mount Defiance, on Lake Champlain. This range has also been called Black Mountain range and Tongue Mountains. The second range, the Kayaderosseras, ends in the high cliff overlooking Bulwagga Bay. The third, or Schroon range, terminates on Lake Champlain in the high promontory of Split Rock. It borders Schroon Lake, and its highest peak is Mount Pharaoh, nearly 4,000 feet above tidewater. The fourth, or Boquet range, finds its terminus at Perou Bay, and contains Dix Peak (5,200 feet), Nipple Top (4,900 feet), Raven Hill, and Mount Discovery. The fifth or Adirondac range (known also as Clinton or Au Sable) meets Lake Champlain in the rocks of Trembleau Point, and embraces the highest peaks of the system, namely, Mount Tahawus (Marcy), 5,379 feet, and Mounts Mc-Intire, McMartin, and San-da-no-na, all above 5,000 feet in elevation. The series nest succeeding on the northwest, does not consist of a single distinguishable range, but of a continuation of groups which may be considered as a sixth range, under the name of Chateaugay or Au Sable. Its highest points are Mount Seward (5,100 feet), and Whiteface, nearly 5,000 feet in height. We have also seen noticed as distinguishable a ridge still exterior to the last mentioned, as Chateaugay, i.e., the range of the St. Lawrence.

The above-named ranges are not always clearly defined, as cross spurs or single mountains sometimes occupy the entire space between two ridges, reducing the customary valley to a mere ravine. The usual uncertainty and redundancy of nomenclature common to mountain regions, adds to the difficulty of obtaining or conveying clear ideas of the local distribution of elevation and depression. On the northern slope, the three rivers, Boquet, Au Sable (with two branches, East and West), and Saranac, furnish to the traveller excellent guides for the arrangement of his conceptions, regarding the general face of the country. To the south, the same office is performed by the various branching headwaters of the Hudson.

These mountains are granitic, and the river bottoms have a light, sandy soil. The Au Sable well deserves its name, not only from the bar at its mouth, but also from the sand fields through which it chiefly flows. Steep, bare peaks, wild ravines, and stupendous precipices characterize the loftier ranges. The waterfalls are numerous and beautiful, and the lakes lovely beyond description. More than one hundred in number, they cluster round the higher groups of peaks, strings of glittering gems about the stately forms of these proud, dark-browed, Indian beauties—mirrors wherein they may gaze upon the softened outlines of their haughty heads, their wind-tossed raiment of spruce fir, pines, and birch.

In the lowest valleys the oak and chestnut are abundant, but as we leave the shores of Lake Champlain and ascend toward the west, the beech and basswood, butternut, elm, ash, and maple, hemlock and arbor vitæ, tamarack, white, black, and yellow pines, white and black birch, gradually disappear, until finally the forest growth of the higher portions of the loftier summits is composed almost exclusively of the various species of spruce or fir. The tamarack sometimes covers vast plains, and, with the long moss waving from its sombre branches, looks melancholy enough to be fancied a mourner over the ring of the axe felling noble pines, the crack of the rifle threatening extermination to the deer once so numerous, or the cautious tread of the fisherman under whose wasteful rapacity the trout are gradually disappearing. We have reason to be thankful that all are not yet gone—that some splendid specimens are left to tell the glorious tale of the primeval forest, that on the more secluded lake shores an occasional deer may yet be seen coming down to drink, and that in the shadier pools the wary and sagacious prince of fishes still disports himself and cleaves the crystal water with his jewelled wedge.

Berries of all sorts spring up on the cleared spots; the wide-spreading juniper, with its great prickly disks, covers the barer slopes; the willow herb, wild rose, clematis, violet, golden rod, aster, immortelle, arbutus, harebell, orchis, linnæa borealis, mitchella, dalibarda, wintergreen, ferns innumerable, and four species of running pine, all in due season, deck the waysides and forest depths.

The climate is intensely cold in winter, and in the summer cool upon the heights, but in the narrow sandy valleys the long days of June, July, and August are sometimes uncomfortably hot. The nights, however, are ordinarily cool. Going west through the middle of the region, from Westport to Saranac, a difference of several weeks in the progress of vegetation is perceptible. Long after the linnæa had ceased to bloom at Elizabethtown, we found its tender, fragrant, pink bells flushing a wooded bank near Lake Placid. Good grass grows upon the hillsides, and in the valleys are found excellent potatoes, oats, peas, beans, and buckwheat. The corn is small, but seems prolific, and occasional fields of flax, rye, barley, and even wheat, present a flourishing appearance. Lumber, charcoal, and iron ore of an excellent quality are, however, the present staples of this mountain region. Bears and panthers are found in some secluded localities, and the farmer still dreads the latter for his sheep. The wolves are said to kill more deer than the hunters. The otter and beaver are found among the watercourses, and the mink or sable is still the prey of the trapper. The horses are ordinarily of a small breed, but very strong and enduring.

The men are chiefly of the Vermont type, most of the original settlers having come from the neighboring State. The school house, court house, church, and town hall are hence regarded as among the necessary elements of life to the well-ordered citizen. Honest dealing, thrift, and cleanliness are the rule, and the farm houses are comfortable and well cared for. The men look intelligent, and the women are handsome, although, indeed, too many pale or sallow complexions give evidence of sedentary habits, and of the almost universal use of saleratus and hot bread [??]. The families of many farmers far in among the mountains rarely taste fresh meat, but subsist chiefly upon salt pork, fish, fresh or salted, as the season will permit, potatoes, wheat, rye, and Indian meal, with berries, dried apples, perhaps a few garden vegetables, plenty of good milk, and excellent butter. Eggs, chickens, and veal are luxuries occasionally to be enjoyed, and, should one of the family be a good shot, venison and partridge may appear upon the bill of fare. Bright flowers ornament the gardens, and gay creepers embower doors and windows. Along the more secluded roads are the log cabins of the charcoal burners, said cabins containing, if apparently nothing else, two or three healthy, chubby, pretty children, and a substantial cooking stove, of elaborate pattern, recently patented by some enterprising compatriot.

Among the most remarkable features of these mountains are the 'Passes,' answering to Gaps, Notches, and Cloves in other parts of the Union. They afford means for excellent roads from end to end of the mountain region, and are, in addition, eminently picturesque. The two most noteworthy are the Indian and Wilmington Passes; the first too rugged for the present to admit of a road; and the latter containing the beautiful Wilmington Fall. Many of the mountains have been burned over, and the bare, gaunt-limbed timber, and contorted folds of gray, glittering rock, afford a spectral contrast to the gentler contours of hills still clad in their natural verdure, bright or dark as deciduous or evergreen trees preponderate. The variety of form is endless; long ridges, high peaks, sharp or blunt, sudden clefts, great bare slides, flowing curves, convex or concave, serrated slopes crowned with dark spruce or jagged as the naked vertebræ of some enormous antediluvian monster, stimulate the curiosity and excite the imagination of the beholder. There is an essential difference in the character of the views obtained, whether looking from the south, or the east. In the former case, the eye, following the axes of the ranges, sees the mountains as a cross ridge of elevated peaks; and in the latter, where the sight strikes the ranges perpendicularly to their axes, one, or, at most, two ridges are all that can be seen from any single point.

This region may be approached from Lake Champlain by way of Ticonderoga, Crown Point, Port Henry, Westport, and Port Kent, the two latter places being the nearer to the higher peaks; or from the lake country in Hamilton County, by way of Racket and Long Lakes.

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The night boat for Albany, June 27th, 1864, was crowded with passengers fleeing from pavements, summer heats, and stifling city air, to green fields, cool shadows of wooded glens, or life-giving breezes from mountain heights. True, there were some who, like Aunt Sarah Grundy, bitterly lamented the ample rooms and choice fare of their own establishments, and whose idea of a 'summer in the country' was limited to a couple of months at Saratoga or Newport, with a fresh toilette for each succeeding day; but even these knew that there were at both places green trees, limpid waters, whether of lake or ocean, and a wide horizon wherein to see sunsets, moonrises, and starlight. Aunt Sarah went to Newport; she found there fewer of such persons as she was pleased to designate as 'rabble,' and the soft, warm fogs were exactly the summer atmosphere for a complexion too delicate to be exposed to the fervent blaze of a July sun.

But the majority were not of Aunt Sarah's stamp. They were men, wearied with nine months' steady work, eager for country sports, for the freedom of God's own workhouse, where labor and bad air and cramped positions need not be synonymous; or women, glad to escape the routine of housekeeping, the daily contest with Bridget or Katrine, with Jean, Williams, or Priscilla. There were young girls, with round hats and thick boots, anxious to substitute grassy lanes or rocky hillsides for the flagstones of avenues; lads, to whom climbing of fruit trees and rowing boats were pleasant reminiscences of some foregone year; and finally, children, who longed for change, and whose little frames needed all the oxygen and exercise their anxious parents could procure for them.

Such, doubtless, was a large portion of the precious freight of our 'floating palace,' whose magnificence proved to us rather of the Dead-Sea-apple sort, as we had arrived upon the scene of action too late to procure comfortable quarters for the night, and, in addition, soon after daybreak found ourselves aground within sight of Albany, and with no prospect of release until after the departure of the train for Whitehall. At a few moments past seven, we heard the final whistle, and knew that our journey's end was now postponed some four and twenty hours. We afterward learned that by taking the boat to Troy we would have run less risk of delay, as the Whitehall and Rutland train usually awaits the arrival of said boat. At nine o'clock we reached Albany, and one of our number spent a dreary day, battling with headache and the ennui of a little four year old, who could extract no amusement from the unsuggestive walls of a hotel parlor. About five in the afternoon we left for Whitehall, where we purposed passing the night. This movement did not one whit expedite the completion of our journey, but offered a change of place, and an additional hour of rest in the morning, as the lake-boat train from Whitehall was the same that left Albany shortly after seven.

We found Whitehall a homely little town, in a picturesque situation, on the side of a steep hill, past which winds the canal, and under which thundered the train that on the following morning bore us to the lake, where the pleasant steamboat 'United States' awaited her daily cargo. The upper portion of Lake Champlain is very narrow, and the channel devious; the shores are sometimes marshy, sometimes rocky, and the bordering hills have softly swelling outlines. Our day was hazy, and the Green Mountains of Vermont seemed floating in some species of celestial atmosphere suddenly descended upon that fair State. We passed the Narrows (a singular, rocky cleft, through which flows the lake), and soon after came to Ticonderoga, with its ruined fort and environing hills.

After leaving Crown Point, the lake becomes much wider, and at Port Henry spreads out into a noble expanse of water. Behind Port Henry, the Adirondac peaks already begin to form a towering background. Westport, however, has a still more beautiful situation. The lake there is very broad, the sloping shores are wooded, the highest peaks of the Green Mountains are visible to the east and northeast, and the Adirondacs rise, tier after tier, toward the west.

On the boat were wounded soldiers going to their homes. Poor fellows! They had left their ploughs and their native hills, to find wounds and fevers in Virginia. When one looked upon the tranquil lake and halo-crowned mountains, it seemed almost impossible that the passions of evil men should have power to draw even that placid region into the vortex, and hurl back its denizens scarred and scathed, to suffer amid its beauty. And yet were these men the very marrow and kernel of the landscape, the defenders of the soil, the patriots who were willing to give themselves that their country might remain one and undivided, that the 'home of the brave' might indeed be the 'land of the free.'

At Westport we left the boat, and found the stage to Elizabethtown, a buckboard, already crowded with passengers. An inn close at hand furnished us the only covered wagon we chanced to see during our ten weeks' sojourn among the Adirondacs. The drive to Elizabethtown (eight miles) was hot and dusty, for we faced the western sun, and the long summer drought was just then commencing to make itself felt. Nevertheless, there was beauty enough by the wayside to make one forget such minor physical annoyances. As the road rose over the first hills, the views back, over the lake and toward those hazy, dreamy-looking Vermont mountains, seemed a leaf from some ancient romance, wherein faultless knights errant sought peerless lady loves with golden locks flowing to their tiny feet, and the dragons were all on the outside, dwellers in dark caverns and noisome dens. In our day, I fear, we have not improved the matter, for the dark caverns seem to have passed within, and the dragons have been adopted as familiars.

By and by, on some arid spots, appeared the low, spreading juniper, which we had previously known only as the garden pet of an enthusiastic tree fancier. And thus, perhaps, the virtues which here we cultivate by unceasing care and watchfulness, will, when we are translated to some wider sphere, nearer to the Creator of all, burst upon us as simple, natural gifts to the higher and freer intelligences native to that sphere.

Raven Hill is the highest point between Westport and Elizabethtown. It is a beautifully formed conical hill, rising some twenty-one hundred feet above the sea level, and contributing the cliffs on the northern side of the 'Pass,' through which leads the road into the valley of the Boquet, that vale known formerly as the 'The Pleasant Valley,' in which was Betseytown, now dignified into Elizabethtown. Does an increase in civilization and refinement indeed destroy familiarity, render us more strange one to another, even, through much complexity, to our own selves? The southern side of the Pass is formed by the slope of the 'Green Mountain,' once so called from its beautiful verdure, now, alas! burnt over, bristling with dead trees and bare rocks, and green only by reason of weeds, brambles, and a bushy growth of saplings. The view, descending from the summit of the Pass into the Pleasant Valley, is charming. The Boquet runs through green meadows and cultivated fields, while round it rise lofty mountains—the 'Giant of the Valley' (alias 'Great Dome' or 'Bald Peak'), being especially remarkable, with its summits, green or bare, round or peaked, glittering with white scars of ancient slides. To the west lies the Keene Pass, a steep, rocky gateway to the Au Sable River and the wonders beyond. This view of the descent into the Pleasant Valley is even more striking from a road passing over the hills some five miles south of Elizabethtown. The vale is narrower, the point of view higher, and the opposite mountains nearer and more lofty. The Giant of the Valley rises directly in the west, and Dix's Peak closes the vista to the south. On a semi-hazy afternoon, with the sunlight streaming through in broad pathways of quivering glory, it would be difficult to imagine a more enchanting scene.

There are in Elizabethtown two inns,[3] one down by the stream, a branch of the Boquet, and the other up on the 'Plain,' near the court house. The latter has decidedly the advantage in situation. Both are owned by the same landlord, and are well kept. We arrived in the midst of court week, and found every place filled with lawyers, clients, witnesses, and even, behind the bars of the brick jail, we could see the prisoners, more fortunate than their city compeers, in that they breathed pure air, and could look out upon the everlasting hills, solemn preachers of the might and the rights, as well as the mercy of their Creator.

From two to three miles from the Valley House is the top of Raven Hill, seemingly a watchtower on the outskirts of the citadel of the Adirondacs. The ascent is easy, and the view panoramic, embracing Lake Champlain and the Green Mountains, Burlington and Westport, the bare, craggy hills to the north, the higher ranges to the west, with the abrupt precipices of the 'Keene Pass' and the lofty 'Dome' and 'Bald Mountain,' Dix's Peak to the south, a clear lake known as 'Black Pond' among the hills toward Moriah, and at the base the Pleasant Valley with the winding Boquet River.

Near the lower hotel is Wood Mountain, about half as high as Raven Hill, and offering a view somewhat similar, although of course not so extended. The distance to the top is but little over a mile, and the pathway, although somewhat steep, is very good.

A visit to the iron mines and works at Moriah can readily be made from Elizabethtown. The distance is from twelve to fourteen miles. One of the mines is quite picturesque, being cut into the solid rock, under a roof supported by great columns of the valuable ore. The workmen, with their picks and barrows, passing to and fro, as seen from the top of the excavation, look like German pictures of tiny gnomes and elves delving for precious minerals. The yield from the ore is about eighty per cent., and of very superior quality. The return road passes down the hill, whence is the splendid view of the 'Valley' before mentioned.

A delightful excursion can also be made to 'Split Rock,' about nine miles up the valley of the Boquet. The little river there, in two separate falls, makes its way through a rocky cleft. The basins of the upper, and the singularly winding chasm of the lower fall, are especially worthy of observation. At Split Rock we first made any extensive acquaintance with a costume which threatens to be immensely popular among the Adirondacs, namely, the Bloomer, and in the agility displayed by some of its fair wearers we beheld the results likely to spring from its adoption as a mountain walking dress. Our private observation was, that moderately full, short skirts, without hoop of course, terminating a little distance above the ankle, and worn with clocked or striped woollen stockings, were more graceful than a somewhat shorter and scantier skirt, with the pantalette extending down to the foot. The former seems really à la paysanne, while the latter, in addition to some want of grace, suggests Bloomer, and the many absurdities which have been connected with that name. It is a great pity that a sensible and healthful change in walking attire should have been caricatured by its own advocates, and thus rendered too conspicuous to be agreeable to many who would otherwise have adopted it in some modified and reasonable form.

Near New Russia, about five miles from Elizabethtown, is a brook flowing among moss-covered stones and rocks, overhung by giant trees of the original forest; and just out of Elizabethtown is a glen, through which pours a pretty stream, making pleasant little cascades under the shadow of a less aged wood, and within a bordering of beautiful ferns, running pines, and bright forest blossoms. We should also not neglect to mention Cobble Hill, a bold pile of rocks, rising directly out of the plain on which a portion of the town is situated.

But we had heard of the 'Walled Rocks of the Au Sable,' and Elsie and I could not rest until our own eyes had witnessed that they were worthy of their reputation. We left Elizabethtown at half past six in the morning, our team a fast pair of ponies, belonging to our landlord. The previous days had been warm and obstinately hazy, but for that especial occasion the atmosphere cooled and cleared, and lent us some fine views back toward the Giant of the Valley and the Keene Pass. The first ten miles of road were excellent. We then crossed a little stream known as Trout Brook, a tributary of the Boquet, and, by a somewhat rough and stony way, began to ascend the high land separating the Boquet from the Au Sable. This ridge includes the 'Poke a Moonshine' Mountain, a rude pile of rocks, burnt over, and with perpendicular precipices of some three or four hundred feet, facing the road which winds along the bottom of the declivity. This cleft thus becomes another 'Pass,' and, with the huge rocks fallen at its base, offers a wild and rather dreary scene. To the north, near the foot of the mountain, are two ponds, Butternut and Auger, which wind fantastically in and out among the hills. As we descended the ridge, we looked toward Canada, far away over rolling plains and hillocks, and soon after reached the sandy stretch of the basin of the Au Sable, in the midst of which is Keeneville, twenty-two miles from Elizabethtown.

By the wayside we passed a solitary grave, the mound and headstone in a patch of corn and potatoes. Was the unknown occupant some dear one whom the dwellers in the humble cabin near by were unwilling to send far away from daily remembrance, or were they too poor to seek the shelter of the common graveyard, or, again, had the buriers of that dead one followed to the 'land of promise,' or departed to some other far country, leaving this grave to the care or rather carelessness of stranger hands, and did the snowy headstone recall no memory of past love to the laborer who ploughed his furrow near that mound, or to the children who played around it?

Ah! thus, not only in the mystical caverns of beauty, poetry, and romance are hidden the graves of buried hopes, but even amid the corn and potatoes of daily life rise the ghostly head and foot stones of aspirations dead and put away out of sight, dead in the body, in daily act, but living yet in spirit, and influencing the commonplace facts to which they have yielded the field, permeating the everyday routine with the ennobling power of lofty desires, and keeping the wayworn traveller from sinking into the slough of materialism or the quicksands of utter weariness. The man who in his youth dreamed of elevating his kind by a noble employment of the gifts of genius, may find that genius apparently useless, a hindrance even to prosperity, but he can nevertheless sow along his way seeds of beauty not lost upon the thinking beings about him, and bearing fruit perhaps in some future generation. The woman whose reveries have pictured her a Joan of Arc, leading her country's armies to victory, and finally yielding her life in the good cause, may sew for sanitary commissions, and, nursing in some hospital, dropping medicines, making soups and teas, die of some deadly fever, a willing sacrifice to her country.

Later in the day we saw the corn and potatoes growing up to the very verge of an exquisite waterfall, reckless strength and glorious poetry side by side with patient utility and humble prose. This union seemed not strange and unnatural, as did that of the solitary grave with the active labor of supplying the living with daily food, the grave the more lonely that the living with their material wants encircled it so closely.

Keeseville is a manufacturing town, situated upon the Au Sable, which here breaks through a layer of Potsdam sandstone, and presents a series of most interesting and wonderful falls and chasms. About a mile below the village is the first fall of eighty feet. The river has here a large body of water, and falls in fan shape over a rapid descent of steps. It takes a sharp turn, so that without crossing the stream, a fine view can be obtained of the dancing, glittering sheet of foam. About half a mile below is Birmingham, another manufacturing town, which has done its best, but without entire success, to destroy the beauty of the second fall, immediately below the bridge, said bridge being erected upon natural piers at the sides and in the centre of the stream.

Here begins a chasm which continues for the distance of about a mile and a half. Wonderfully grand are these Walled Rocks of the Au Sable, through, which rushes the river, pent up between literally perpendicular walls, a hundred or more feet in height, and from eleven to sixty or eighty feet apart, generally from twelve to fourteen. The water sometimes rushes smoothly and deeply below, and sometimes falls over obstructions, roaring, and tumbling, and foaming. The turns in the river are very sudden, and there are great cracks and gullies extending from top to base, pillars of rock standing alone or leaning against their companions. Occasionally, looking down one of these clefts, one sees nothing but the rock walls with a foaming, rapid rushing below. At one of these most remarkable points, a rude stairway has been constructed, by which the traveller can descend to the bottom, and, standing by the water's edge, look up to the top of this singular chasm. The walls finally lower, and the river flows out into a broad basin, whence it ere long finds its way into Lake Champlain. The banks are wooded with pines, hemlocks, spruce, arbor vitaæ, beech, birch, and basswood, and the ground is covered with ferns, harebells, arbutus, linnæa, mitchella, blue lobelia, and other wild flowers.

There is an excellent inn, the Adirondac House, in Keeseville. Our attentive host told us of Professor Agassiz, and the fiery nature of his speculations regarding the probable history of the sandstone, whose strata, laid as at Trenton Falls, horizontally, layer above layer, add such interest and beauty to the stupendous walls, with their unseen, water-covered depths below, and their graceful wreaths of arbor vittæ nodding and swaying above.

He also told us a tale of the war of 1812, when a bridge, known as the 'High Bridge,' crossed the Au Sable at the narrowest point, some eleven feet in width. A rumor was abroad that the British were about to march up from Plattsburg; whereupon the bridge, consisting of three beams, each nine inches wide, was stripped of its planking. A gentleman had left his home in the morning, and, ignorant of the fate of the bridge, returned quite late at night. Urging his steed forward, it refused to cross the bridge, and not until after repeated castigation would it make the attempt. The crossing was safely accomplished, and the rider suspected nothing amiss until he reached home and was asked how he had come. 'By the High Bridge,' was his reply; whereupon he was informed that the planking had been torn away, and he must have crossed upon a string piece nine inches wide, hanging some hundred feet above the surface of the water. His sensations may be imagined.

A venturesome expedition had also been essayed by our host, in the shape of a voyage down the chasm in a boat. We presume he went at high water, when the rapids would be less dangerous.

Keeseville is only four miles from Port Kent, a steamboat landing on Lake Champlain nearly opposite Burlington, and the Adirondacs may then be approached in several ways. A stage runs three times per week from Keeseville through Elizabethtown and Schroon River to Schroon Lake. North Elba and Lake Placid are some thirty-six miles distant, and may be reached by a good road through the Wilmington Pass. Saranac is somewhat farther, but readily accessible. Strong wagons and good teams are everywhere to be found, and the only recommendation we here think needful to make to the traveller is to have a good umbrella, a thick shawl or overcoat, and as little other baggage as he or she can possibly manage to find sufficient. Trunks are sadly in the way, and carpet bags or valises the best forms for stowage under seats or among feet.

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LOIS PEARL BERKELEY.

The fiery July noon was blazing over the unsheltered depot platform, where everybody was in the agony of trying to compress half an hour's work into the fifteen minutes' stop of the long express train. The day was so hot that even the group of idlers which usually formed the still life of the picture was out of sight on the shady side of the buildings. Hackmen bustled noisily about; baggage masters were busier and crosser than ever; there was the usual mêlée of leave-takings and greetings. With the choking dust and scalding glare of the sun, the whole scene might have been an anteroom to Tophet.

From the car window, Clement Moore, brown, hollow-cheeked, and clad in army blue, looked out with weary eyes on all the confusion. Half asleep in the parching heat, visions of cool, green forest depths, and endless ripple of leaves, of the ceaseless wash and sway of salt tides, drifted across his brain, and rapt him out of the sick, comfortless present. But they vanished like a flash with the sudden cessation of motion, and the reality of his surroundings came back with a great shock. Captain George, coming in five minutes after with a glass of iced lemonade in one hand and a half dozen letters in the other, found necessary so much of cheer and comfort as lay in—

'Keep courage, Clement, old fellow, it's only a few hours longer now.'

And then he fell to reading his epistles, testifying his disapprobation of their contents presently by sundry grunts, ending finally in a 'Confound it!' given explosively and an explanation:

'Too bad, Moore! Here am I taking you home to get well in peace and quiet, and Ellen has filled the house up with half a dozen girls, more or less. Writes me to come home and be 'made a lion of;' as sensible as most women!' And the grumble subsided. He broke out again shortly: 'Louise Meller—Lois Berkeley—Susy—' the other names were drowned in the rattle of the starting train. The captain finished his letters, and Clement Moore took up his broken dreams, but this time with a new element.

Lois Berkeley. With the name came back a fortnight of the last summer—perfect bright days, far-off skies filled with drifting fleets of sunny vapor, summer green piled deep over the land, the gurgle of falling waters, the shimmer of near grain fields, deep-hued flowers glowing in the garden borders, all the prodigality of splendor that July pours over the world. And floating through these memories, scarce recognized, but giving hue and tone to them like a far-off, half-heard strain of music—a woman's presence. By some fine, subtile harmony, such as spirits recognize, all the summer glow and depth of color, as it came back to him, came only as part of an exquisite clothing and setting for a slender figure and dark face. All the dainty adaptations of nature were but an expression, in a rude, material way, for those elegances and fitnesses which surrounded her, and which were as natural to her very existence as to the birds and flowers. Only a fortnight, and in that fortnight every look and word of hers, every detail of dress, even to the texture of the garments she wore, were indelibly fixed in his memory. She was so daintily neat in everything, nothing soiled or coarse ever came near her. Careless, too, he thought, remembering how, coming through the parlor in the evening dusk, he had entangled himself in the costly crape shawl left trailing across a chair, of the gloves he had picked up fluttering with the leaves on the veranda, and the handkerchiefs always lying about. Perhaps Clement Moore was over critical in his fancies about ladies' dresses, and felt that inner perfect cleanliness and refinement worked itself out in such little matters as the material and color and fit of garments, and all the trifles of the toilet. A soiled or rumpled article of attire showed a dangerous lack of something that should make up the womanly character. He had not reduced all these unreasonable men's notions to a system by which to measure femininity. He did not even know he had them. An excessive constitutional refinement and keenness of perception made him involuntarily look for such scrupulous delicacy as belonging of course to every woman he was thrown in contact with. He had always been disappointed, at first with a feeling of half disgust with himself and others, that his dreams were so different from the reality. It drove him apart from the sex, and gained him the reputation of being shy or ill natured. After finding that disappointments repeated themselves, he accepted them as the natural order of events, let his fancies go as the beau ideal that he was to seek for through life, and became the polished, unimpressible man of society.

But this little Yankee girl had of a sudden realized his ideal. Something in their first meeting, momentary though it was, and strange according to conventional notions, struck the chord in his heart that was waiting silent for the magic fingers that knew the secret of waking it. If he had fancied that those fingers would never come, or coming, never find it, that something in his unhappy birth set him apart with that strange pain of yearning as his portion in life, and so had tried to forget or choke the want under commonplace attachments and ties, he was no worse than, nor different from, the rest of humanity. But all humanity does not meet trial as unflinchingly and honorably—does not put temptation out of its way as purely and honestly as did this undisciplined life. It is hard to take at once the path that duty orders: we linger to play with possibilities, shed some idle tears, waste life before the necessity, and go back to everyday work weakened and scarred and aching. And once or twice in a lifetime that black, hopeless never drops down, not the less grievous and inexorable because simply a moral obligation.

Well, only babies cry for the moon. Anything clearly impossible and out of our reach we very soon cease sighing for. Men do not cherish a passion which they recognize as utterly hopeless; and Clement Moore, being a man, and moreover an honorable one, put this summer idyl out of his head and heart with all despatch. 'All blundering is sin.' If he had blundered in allowing it to take such hold of his life, he expiated the sin bravely. Sympathies bud and blossom with miraculous quickness in this tropical atmosphere of affinity. He did not know till the excitement of actual presence was over, and he had time to think soberly, in the dead blank and quiet that followed, how it had grown to be a part of his very existence. But whether that part was to be just a pleasant remembrance through the dusty and hot years before him, or whether it was to go deeper and wring his heart with bitterest sense of loss, he did not quite realize. At any rate there was a risk in dwelling on it. He had no more right to be running that risk than he had to be trifling with a cup of deadliest poison; and so he shut away all the golden-winged fancies that had sprung into life with those long, fervid days. Shut them away and sealed their prison place. If they were dead, or pleading for freedom in his still moments, he never asked nor thought. He came back from his lounging summer trip with a certain new, strange drive of purpose in him never seen before. The many events that had crowded themselves into the next year did not smother his prisoners. He never saw their corpses or thought of them sneeringly, and by that sign knew they existed still. But dust and all the desolation of desertion gathered about the hidden chamber that he never recurred to now. Still he kept away from its neighborhood; at first setting a guard of persistent physical action. He was always reading or writing or going somewhere with a kind of hidden, misty aim in his most objectless journeys. After—as the necessity for such occupation wore away, and he lapsed back into the old listless ways of dreaming—his thoughts were always busy with the future; never now did he indulge in those wayward dreams of old. They had a dangerous tendency to take a certain forbidden way. Finally, this self-control became a habit, and he scarcely felt its necessity. The 'might have been' never came back more poignantly than as a vague, shadowy regret, that gave everything a slightly flat and unpalatable taste. But he did not take life any less fully, or with any abatement of whatever earnestness was in him.

Men are not patient under sickness, at least not that unquestioning, unresisting patience which most women and the lower animals show. These especially who are usually well and robust are a trial to the flesh and spirit of those about them. Moore was not the wonderful exception. His first few weeks in the hospital were not so bad; but when the actual racking pain was over, and nothing remained but that halting of the physical machinery to which we never give a thought during perfect action—the weakness hanging leaden weights to every limb, the unwonted nervousness and irritability, the apparently causeless necessity for inaction—he was anything but a resigned man. Captain George, getting his furlough and carrying him off, was blessed from the deepest heart of the ward nurses. He had a kind of feeling that this his first illness was a matter in which the universe should be concerned, and with that fretful self-exaggeration came that other unutterable yearning that attends the first proof that we are coheirs with others to the ills flesh is heir to, weary homesickness and childish desire for sympathy.

So now, weakened physically with that strange new heartsickness, paralyzing his will and giving freer scope to is feverish impatience, George's careless words had rolled away the stone from the sepulchre, and its prisoners were free. Not dead, not having lost a shade of color from their wings, they nestled and gleamed through his heart, filling the summer day with just such intangible perfect witchery as those other days had been full of. Perhaps, too, time and absence had heightened the charm. Imagination has such a way of catching up little scenes and words and looks, and, without altering one of the facts, haloing them with such a golden deceptive atmosphere, adding, day by day, faintest touches, that they grow by and by into a something wholly different. So that fortnight came back to him, an illuminated poem, along rich strains of music, making every nerve thrill with the pleasure-pain of its associations.

And by degrees, as the tide of sensation, thinned itself, lying back with closed eyes, while the long train swept on through the torrid day, separate pictures came before his inner sight. Just as keen and clear were they as when they first fell on his vision. He had not blurred nor dimmed their outlines with frequent recalling and suggestions of difference.

A narrow strip of gray sand, ribbed with the wave wash to the very foot of the reddish brown bowlders that bounded it. Standing thereon a slender woman's figure, clad in quiet gray. The face was turned toward him—a dark, unflushed face, with calm, fixed mouth, and clear gray eyes under straight-drawn brows and long, separate, lashes. Fine, lustreless, silky hair was pushed back into a net glittering with shining specks under the narrow-brimmed straw hat. A face full of a waiting look, not hopeful nor expectant, simply unsettled and watchful, yet fresh, and rounded with the dimples and childlike curves of eighteen. Whatever of yearning and unrest the years had brought lingered only about the shadowy eyes and fine mouth. There were no haggard nor worn outlines, and a baby's skin could not have been softer and finer.

At her feet crisped the shining ripples of the incoming tide. Far beyond, calm and burnished, stretched the summer sea into the dreamy distance, where the white noon sky, stricken through with intensest light and heat, dropped down a palpitating arch to meet it. And in all the dazzle of blue and white and silver and bare shining gray, she stood, a straight, slender, haughty little figure, as indefinite of color as all the rest; all but a narrow strip of scarlet at her throat, falling in a flaming line to her waist. The shimmering atmosphere seemed to pant about her; and through the high noon, over the still waters and sleeping shore, hummed the peering strains of a weird little song. She was singing softly:

'For men must work and women must weep,
And the sooner 'tis over the sooner to sleep.'

In the long parlor, the leaf ghosts that had all day long been flitting in, were darkening with the sunset and filling the room with twilight dimness. Deep in a crimson couch and haloed with the last brightness, lay the long, white outlines of a reclining figure. A handful of Japan lilies burned against the pure drapery, and another handful of tea violets lay crushed in the fleecy handkerchief on the floor. Against the cushions the exquisite contour of the sleeping face showed plainly. Coolest quiet sphered the whole figure; not a suggestion of anything but slowest calm grace disturbed its repose. But with the hushing rustle of leaves with the summer murmur flowing in, seemed to come also the deep monotone of the waves, when this inanimate statue was striking out at his side through the rattle and rush of the surf, the wide eyes filled with fierce light, the whole face fixed and stern with the strain of heart muscle, toward the helpless shape shooting out on the undertow. He had not seen her after, and, coming to seek her that night with words of compliment and thanks, he was met by this white vision that had absorbed all the fire and force of the afternoon into its blankness.

A depot platform—long afternoon shadows fell over the pretty country station—standing alone in the woods. The small, temporary bustle about the waiting train was not discordant with the dreamy, restful look of the whole picture. Then the culminating hurry, the shriek and rattle of the starting train—a little figure poising itself for an instant on the car step—a face flushed a little, and dark eyes brightened with a flash of surprised recognition—a quick gesture of greeting and farewell, and then she was gone into the purple shades of evening.

Once again he had seen her, but from afar off, in the glare and heat of a crowded assembly room. The face was a little thinner now, and the eyes were looking farther away than ever. The blood-red light of rubies flashed in the soft lace at her throat and wrists, and dropped in glittering pendants against the slender neck. She was talking evidently of a brilliant bouquet of pomegranates and daphnes that lay in her lap, swinging dreamily the dainty, glittering white fan. And while he looked, she drew away the heavy brocade she wore, from under a careless tread—a slight, slow motion, wholly unlike the careless sweeps of other women. The imperious nature that thrilled her even to the tips of the long fingers, manifested itself, as inborn natures always do, under the deepest disguises, in just this unconscious, most trifling of acts; and, remembering the gesture, he asked, with words far lighter than the tone or feeling:

'As much of a princess as ever?'

And Captain George answered:

'As much of a princess!' both unmindful that no word had been spoken to token who was in the thought of each.

Very trifling things these were to remember. Very likely he had seen scores of far more graceful and memorable scenes; but just these trifles, coming back so vividly, proved to him, as nothing else could have done, with what a keen, intense sympathy every word and look of hers had been noted.

The spoken words roused him. In the ride that followed, twenty different persons and things came into their talk; but never once the princess. That, arousing himself again from his half-dreamful lapse from the old guarded habit, was put away steadily and quietly. His battle had been fought once. He was not to weaken his victory with fancies of the 'might have been.' He had not been tempted, through all these months; he would not tempt himself, now that real trial was so near at hand. Man as he was, if escape had been possible, he would have fled. But there was nothing to do but to go forward, and he called up that old, mighty, intangible safeguard of honor. The matter was settled beyond any question of surprise—he must avoid the long, sapping days of contact, the wasting, feverish yearnings of absence coming after.

Flying over miles and miles of the summer land, heaped with the red tangled sweets of clover fields, belted with white starry mayweed, blue with marshy growth of wild flag, with hazy lines of far-off hills, fading into purple depths of distance, and near low ones lying green and calm close beside them, with brown clear brooks, famous trout streams, after the New England fashion, went running across their way, the old home pride leaped up in George's eyes and voice, and even Moore forgot his weariness, and talked with a flash of the old, careless spirit.

The hack that brought them to their destination left them, deep in the summer night, at the foot of the long avenue of elms—going up which, with slow steps, on a sudden the house broke on them, ablaze with lights, athrob with music, whereat there was a renewal of explosive utterances, and the captain led his friend to the rear of the house to insure a quiet entrance.

From the dark piazza, where he waited while George summoned some one to receive them, he caught, through the long, open casement, the vista of the parlors, with their glitter and confusion of light drapery and glimpses of bright faces and light forms, and softened hum of voices, as the dancers circled with the music. And through it all, straight down toward him, floating in one of the weird Strauss waltzes, came the princess, swathed in something white, airy, wide-falling. The same dark, unflushed face, the same wide, far-looking eyes, and fixed mouth, the same silky falling hair, but cut short now, and floating back as she moved. It was only for a moment: the perfumed darkness that seemed to throb with a sudden life of its own, the great, slow, summer stars above him, the wailing, passionate music that came trembling out among the heavy dew-wet foliage, the dark, calm earth about him, and the light and color and giddy motion that filled the gleaming square before him, struck in on his senses with staggering force; and then she swayed out of his sight, and Mrs. Morris came forward with words of cheer and welcome.

That night, lying sleepless after the music was hushed and the wheels had done rolling away from the door, as if material enough for all fever fancies had not been given, backward and forward through the corridor a woman's garments trailed with light rustle, and a low voice hummed brokenly the waltz he had heard. Ceasing by and by in a murmur of girls' voices, and the old-remembered air, sung softly:

'For men must work and women must weep,
Though storms be sudden and waters deep.'

After that many days went by unmarked. His wound, aggravated by fatigue, racked him with renewed pain; and when that was over, vitality was at too low an ebb for anything but the most passive quiet. Before listless, unnoting eyes drifted the crystal mornings, the golden hours steeped deep in summer languors, the miracles of sun-settings and star-filled holy nights. From his window he saw and heard always the ocean, blue and calm, lapping the shore with dreamy ripple in bright days—driving ghostly swirls of spray and fog clown the beach in stormy, gray ones. The house itself seemed set in the deepest haunt of summertime. Great trees, draped in the fullest growth of the year, rippled waves of green high about it. All day long the leaf sounds and leaf shadows came drifting in at the windows. Perfectest hush and quiet wrapped its occasional faint strains of music, or chime of voices came up to him, but did not break the silence. A place for a well soul to find its full stature, for a tired or sick one to gather again its lost forces. And by slow degrees the life held at first with so feeble a grasp came back to him.

By and by there came a day when, from his balcony, he witnessed a departure, full of girls' profuse adieux, and then the hush of vacancy fell on the wide halls and airy rooms of the great house. That evening, with slow steps, he came down the staircase. In the twilight of the parlors showed dimly outlined a drift of woman's drapery, and the piano was murmuring inarticulately. Outside, on the broad stone doorstep, showed another drift, resolving itself into the muslins of Miss Nelly Morris, springing up with glad words of welcome as his unsteady frame came into view. Before half the protracted and vehement hand shaking was over, Moore turned at a soft rustle behind him, and Nelly found her introduction forestalled. Moore hoped, with his courtliest reverence, that Miss Berkeley had not forgotten him.

She made two noiseless steps forward, and put out a small, brown band. He took it in his left, with a smiling glance of apology at the sling-fettered right arm. It was not often that Miss Berkeley's broad lids found it worth their while to raise themselves for such a wide, clear look as they allowed with the clasp. And then Nelly broke in:

'Then you two people know each other. Grand! And I've been wondering these two weeks what to do with you! Why didn't you tell me, Leu?'

'How was I to identify Mr. Moore with 'George's friend from the army'? Mr. Moore remembers he was on debatable ground last summer.'

Her soft, slow speech fell on his hearing like the silver ripple of water, clear and fine cut, but without a bit of the New England incisiveness of tone that filled his delicate Southern ear with slight, perpetual irritation.

'But I've made my calling and election sure at last. I was transformed into a mudsill and Northern hireling last spring.'

'In spite of the transformation, I recognized you as soon as you spoke. I was not quite willing to be forgotten, you see, by any one who wore the glorifying army cloth.'

They were out on the veranda now. Nelly was gazing with pitiful eyes at the sleeve fastened away, while the wasted left hand drew forward a great wicker chair into the circle of the moonlight. He caught the look:

'Not so very bad, Miss Nelly; not off, you see, only useless for the present;' and he took a lowly seat at her side, near the princess's feet.

'You are guiltless of shoulder straps. You might have obtained a commission, I think. Why didn't you, I wonder,' she said speculatively.

'Because I knew nothing of military matters, for one thing, and hadn't the assurance to take my first lesson as lieutenant or captain.'

Miss Berkeley's white lids lifted themselves again.

'More nice then wise, sir. Others do it,' was Nelly's comment.

'Yes, but I haven't forgotten the old copy-book instructions, 'Learn to obey before you command,' and began at the beginning. I've taken the first step toward the starred shoulder straps'—he wore the corporal's stripes—' and am hopeful.'

'You'll never attain to them, you lazy Southron. Tell as about your camp life.'

'There's very little to tell. Drill, smoke, loaf—begging your pardon for the rough expression of a rough fact—drill again. As one day is, so is another; they're all alike.'

'Well, tell us about your getting wounded, then, and the fight. George will not get wounded himself, in spite of my repeated requests to that effect.'

And so Moore fought his battle over again, in the midst of which Miss Berkeley dropped out of the talk, folded some soft brilliant net over her light dress, and went down the walk leading to the shore, and he did not see her again that night.

After that he spent much of his time below stairs. Much alone; there were walks and rides in which he could take no part. Despite of George's prediction, he had peace and quiet, and gathered strength hourly. Whatever of graciousness he had seen or fancied in Miss Berkeley's manner in that first unexpected meeting had all vanished. A subtile, unconquerable something shut her out from all friendliness of speech or action. She went about the house in her slow, abstracted way, or in her other mood, with sudden darting motions like a swallow, or dreamed all day beside the summer sea, coming back browner and with mistier looks in her gray eyes, but always alone and unapproachable. So that in half a dozen days he had not received as many voluntary sentences from her.

But one morning the clouds had gathered black and heavy. The sea fogs had pitched their tents to landward, and their misty battalions were driving gray across the landscape. Dim reaches of blank water—lay beyond, weltering with an uneasy, rocking motion against the low, dark sky. White, ghostly sea birds wheeled low, a fretful wind grieved about the house, and a New England northeast storm was in progress. She was standing at the window, looking out with eyes farther away than ever over the haze-draped sea. Some fine, heavy material, the same indistinct hue as the day outside, fell about her in large, sweeping folds. A breath of sudden, penetrating perfume struck across his senses as he approached her. 'And gray heliotrope!' he said; but the heliotrope vanished as she turned and displayed the blaze of carnations at her throat, and the gleam of crimson silk under the jaunty zouave.

'Lois Pearl Berkeley,' he read from the golden thimble he had nearly crushed under foot. He half wondered if she would know what it was. He never saw her do anything. She was never 'engaged,' nor in haste about any occupation. The perfect freedom from the universal Yankee necessity of motion, with which the brown, small hands fell before her, was as thoroughly a part of her as the strange Indian scent which clung to everything she touched, and sphered her like the atmosphere of another world. He never could associate the idea of any kind of personal care-taking with her dainty leisure, more than with the lilies of the field, though they never appeared in as many graceful arrays as she.

'Yes, mine, thank you,' she said, and composedly dropped it into its place in the most orderly of useless conglomerations of silken pockets and puzzling pigeon holes. He watched her fingers, and then looked back at her.

'Lois—such an odd name for you—such a quaint, staid Puritan name.'

'And I am neither quaint nor staid nor Puritan. Thank you. Yes, my mother must have had recollections of her New England home strong on her when she gave it me, down on the Louisiana shores. It always sounded even to me a little strange and frigid among such half-tropical surroundings.'

As she spoke a sudden pang of utter weariness and longing seized him. A rush of the boyish malady of homesickness, concentrated from all the dreary months of his long absence, and none the less poignant because it was involuntary. The wide, cool, shadowy halls of his mother's house, always aglow with blossoms and haunted with their odors, all the superficial lotus-charm of Southern life—and he had lived it superficially enough to catch all its poetry rose before him. It caught away his breath and choked sudden tears into his eyes. Came and went like a flash—for before she had done speaking a sudden new bond of sympathy put away the stranger forevermore, and he was no longer alone.

'Then you are Southern born too,' he said, with a quick step forward, and involuntarily outstretched hand. Hers dropped into it.

'Yes, I am hardly acclimated yet. I shiver under these pale Northern skies from August till June. O my Louisiana, you never made 'life a burden' with such dark, chill days, and sobbing, cruel winds!' She turned to the windows. A sudden uncontrollable quaver of impatience and longing ran through her speech and hurried the words with unusual vehemence.

'I thought you must have liked the day, since you robed yourself in its haze and mist.' He laid his hand lightly on her gray drapery with reverent touch.

'And I thought my carnations would redeem that. Since they didn't—'and she tossed the whole bright, spicy handful on the table.

In a vase on the mantle, gray, passionate, odorous blooms were massed loosely about a cluster of fragile, intense day lilies, and a dash of purple and crimson trailed with the fuchsias over its edge, and gleamed up from the white marble ledge. He went to the vase, shook out the fuchsias, and laid the residue in her lap.

'Heliotrope, finally,' he said.

She brushed it lightly away with a half shudder.

'Not that. I don't like heliotrope. Its perfume is heart-breaking, hopeless. It belongs in coffins, about still, dead faces. If it had a voice, we should hear continual moans. It would be no worse than this, though.'

'You will wear the lilies then, unless the heliotrope scent clings to them too,' he said, gathering up the obnoxious flowers.

'Yes, if it doesn't jar your ideal to see them worn against such a stormy day dress. To me they are the perfection of summer. No color could be more intense than this spotless whiteness. There!' Fastening them, the brittle stems snapped, and the flowers fell at her feet. 'No flowers for me to-day, of your choosing at least. Practically, lilies have such an uncomfortable way of breaking short off.'

A broad, bright ribbon lay drawn through 'Charles Anchester' on the table. She knotted it carelessly at her throat.

'That will do for the now; but, O my carnations, how your mission failed!' hovering over them a minute.

'Then you are not satisfied with the New England mean of perfection, in everything, mentally, morally, and meteorologically?' going back to the weather again.

'Satisfied! I'd exchange this whole pale summer for one hour of broad, torrid noonlight. Deep, far-off tropical skies, great fronds of tropical foliage, drawing their sustenance from the slowest, richest juices of nature, gorgeous depths of color blazing with the very heart of the sun, deep, intoxicating odors poured from creamy white or flaming flower chalices, and always the silver-sprayed wash of the blue sea. I remember that of my home. It is months and months since I have seen a magnolia or jasmine.'

Fate sent Miss Morris to the parlor just then, luckily enough, perhaps, and the first dash of rain from the coming storm struck the windows sharply. Miss Berkeley shivered; a gray shadow swept up over her face, and absorbed all the gleam and unrest. She moved off with her book to a window; shut herself out from the room, and into the storm, with a heavy fall of curtains; and Nelly's voice rippled through a tripping, Venetian barcarole.

It stormed all the next day, and when twilight came, it rained still with desperation. A narrow sphere of light from the flame low down in its alabaster shade held the piano, and through the warm scented gloom that filled the rest of the parlor thrilled echoing chords. Moore, coming in, stopped in the dimness to listen. A troubled uncertainty made itself felt through the strains, a sudden discordant crash jarred through the room, and the performer rose abruptly. He came forward.

'O my prophetic soul, magnolias!' said Nelly, from her lounge, just outside the lighted circle.

It had just come from him, the light, exquisite basket he held filled with great, pink, flushed magnolia blooms. Nelly raved in most fashionably extravagant adjectives. Lois looked at it with hungry eyes, but motionless and speechless. He laid it before her on the table, and turned away. She stood for a moment looking gravely down on it, then buried her face among the cool petals with a sudden caressing motion. Looking up again shortly, 'Thank you,' she said simply to the giver chatting carelessly.

A broad illumination flooded the other end of the parlor a minute after, and the chess board came into requisition. If Miss Morris found little skill necessary to discomfit her opponent, and wondered thereat, she could not see, as he saw, a dark face, bowed on tropic blooms, flushed with unwonted glad color, lips apart and aquiver, wide eyes lustrous with purple light, shining through the tears that gathered in them.

Then the piano began, played dreamily, irregularly, with slender, single threads of tune, and frequent pauses, as if the preoccupied mind let the listless fingers fall away from the keys. They gathered up finally all the broken strains into a low, slow-moving harmony. Through it Moore heard the soft lap of waves, the slow rock of Pacific tidal swells, flowing and ebbing and flowing again through flaming noons, about half-submerged bits of world, palm-shaded, sun-drenched, or swaying white with moonlight under purple midnights, holy with the clear burning stars: heard the gurgle and ripple of falling streams, deepening into the wide flow of mighty rivers, bearing in their calm sweep the secrets of a zone—of ice-choked springs, of the dead stillness of Northern forests, and the overgrowth, and passionate life of endless summers.

The red and white combatants now held truce over a queen check, while the players sat silent, listening.

Suddenly, through the murmur and rhythmic flow of water sounds, struck shrill and sharp the opening strains of a march—not such marches as mark time for dainty figures crowding ballroom floors, but triumphant, cruel, proud, with throbbing drum-beat—steadying the tramp of weary feet over red battle fields. Its unswerving hurry, its terrible, calm excitement, brought before his vision long blue lines—the fixed faces sterner than death, with steady eyes and quickened breath—the nervous clutch of muskets, as the rattle of small arms and boom of cannon came nearer and nearer, the fluttering silken banners, the calm sunshine, and sweet May breath—and the quick, questioning note of a meadow lark dropped down through the silence of the advancing column. As the maddening music stormed and beat about him, his heart throbbed audibly, and the rushing currents of his fiery Southern blood sounded in his ears. Honor, prudence, resolution, everything was swept away in the lava tide of excitement. Before him he saw the crown of his life. All heaven and all earth should not stop him short of it. He rose and began crossing the room, with heavy, resolute tread. In the dimness, the player was hardly visible; he would assure himself of her mortality at least. A sudden, fierce hunger for sight and touch thrilled him.

Midway he stopped. The music dropped with a shock from its fiery enthusiasm. Was it only an echo, or an army of ghosts crossing a dim field, long since fought over—the steady tramp, tramp, the pendulum of time? Unutterably wailing, pitiful, it sent plaintive, piercing cries up to the calm, dead heavens. All the fearful sights he had seen rose before him. Upturned lay faces calm in death as in a child's sleep, with all camp roughnesses swept away in that still whiteness; strong men's, with that terrible scowl of battle or the distortion of agonized death on them—mangled and crushed forms—all the wreck of a fought battle, terrible in its suggestive pathos. It sank away into the minor of water voices, soft, monotonous, agonizing in its utter passivity, a brilliant arpeggio flashed up the keys like a shower of gold, and Miss Berkeley rose with white face and trembling breath, and Nelly was alone in the room, sobbing nervously in her armchair.

The storm passed that night, with great swayings of trees, and dash of broad raindrops, and piled up broken masses of fleecy white clouds, tossed about by the rough, exultant September wind. Bright days followed, mellowing with each one to sunnier, calmer perfection. Moore passed them in his own room. That night had torn away all the disguises that he had put upon his heart. He knew now that he loved this woman—knew it with such a bitter sense of humiliation as such proud spirits writhe under when honor turns traitor and betrays them to the enemy. 'Lead us not into temptation.' If it meant anything in the old habit of child's prayer which clung to him yet, it meant that he should put himself out of its way, since he had proved himself too weak to meet it. His inborn honesty let him build no excuses for his failure. He saw, and acknowledged with a flush of scorn and curling lip, his own treachery to himself in his hour of need. That he had not committed himself—that his self-betrayal was only known to self—was no merit of his—simply a circumstance. And circumstances seemed mighty in their influence upon him, he thought, with a feeling of deepest contempt. All pride and self-reliance were taken out of him. Absence, at least, would be a safeguard, since it would render harmless such impulses as those of that night. However much he might sin in yearning, she; should never know, never be exposed to the risk of being drawn into his guilt and pain. He had come at last to the place where all the old delicate pride was merged in the one anxious fear that she should suffer. He would go away the next day; he would not see her again—never see her voluntarily—putting away fiercely the sudden pang of yearning: not that he came at once to such a conclusion.

Honor, pride, self-respect, having failed him once, were not easily recalled to their allegiance. His was no feeble nature, to sin and repent in an hour. He fought over every inch of his way, and came out at last conqueror, but scarred and weary and very weak in heart, and distrustful of himself.

They had gone to ride that afternoon—he had seen them drive away. He would go down and make the necessary arrangements for his departure. And so it happened that he stood an hour before sunset in the parlor. A sudden heart sickness drove the blood from his lips with the wrench of remembrance. It did not strengthen him to meet her, cool and royal, in filmy purple, putting out her hand with frank friendliness, and with a new quaver of interest in her voice. Those fatal magnolias: all the outside world seemed pressing nearer these two strangers in a strange land.

'How pale you are! You have been ill again.'

'No,' he said, almost harshly. 'You like tiger lilies,' lifting a stem crowded with the flaming whirls.

'Like them? yes—don't you? As I like the fiery, deafening drum-roll and screaming fife, and silver, sweet bugle-calls. Think where they found these wide, free curves of outline—that flaming contrast of color. Indian skies have rounded over them, Indian suns poured their fervor into their hearts. In the depth of forest jungles the velvet-coated tiger has shaken off their petals—glittering, deadly cobras crushed them in their slow coils; gorgeous-winged birds and insects swept them in their flight.'

Some new mental impulse sent a rare, faint flush to the olive cheeks, and filled the uplooking clear eyes with light. This purple-clad shape, with fiery nasturtiums burning on the breast and filling the air with their peculiar odor, with the barbaric splendor of tiger lilies reflecting their lurid glare about her as she stood, bore no more likeness to the ordinary haughty woman than fire to snow. He would have liked to have crowned her with pomegranate blossoms—have dropped the silvery sheen of ermine under her feet, and have knelt there to worship.

She moved away impatiently, trailed her noiseless drapery through the room once or twice, and came back to the window, where he stood looking out. Before them lay the sea, calm in a sheen of blue, gathering faint amethystine vapors, that the sunset would light up in a miracle of bronze and purple and rose.

'You should have been with us last night! A soft, rushing south wind filled all the air with whispers, and drew up a veil of lace round the horizon, very high up in the east. Stars were few; the new moon dropped tender, faint beams down into the gray mist and grayer water that broke in ripples of white fire against the dark in the west, and mingled with the mystery in the east. I want to go again. Mr. Moore, I can manage a boat; will you go with me?'

With every minute he saw his hard-earned victory slipping away. With every minute his reeling sense lost foothold in the strange, new fascination of her excited presence. Will rallied to a last effort; he muttered some broken excuse, that she must have thought an assent, for she dropped a soft, white, clinging shawl over her shoulders, slipped the tie of the jaunty hat beneath her chin, and he could only follow her as she slid through the flicker of shade and sunshine down to the beach, where the summer sea washed lazily.

Low in the west and northwest lay piled ominous clouds; white, angry thunder heads began showing themselves.

'A grand sunset for to-night, and a shower perhaps. We shall be back before it breaks.'

A small boat—a frail thing of white and gilding—floated at anchor. Lois shook out the sail in her character of manager, seated herself at the helm, and they drifted out. No word was spoken; the light in her eyes grew brighter and brighter; the scarlet curves of her mouth more and more intense. Sitting with face turned away from the west, she did not see, as he did, the rising blackness. The wind freshened, skimming in fitful gusts over the waves, and the little craft flung off the spray like rain. Away off in the shadow of the cloud the water was black as death, a faint line of white defining its edge. Was she infatuated? As for him, he grew very calm, with a kind of desperation. Better to die so, with her face the last sight on earth—his last consciousness her clinging arms, sinking down to the dark, still caverns beneath—than to live out the life that lay before him. He leaned forward and looked over into the green depths of the sea. Sunshine still struck down in rippling lines, a golden network. Soft emerald shadows hung far down, breaking up into surface rifts of cool dimness as the waves swung over them.

Her hat had fallen back; her whole face was alive with a proud, exultant delight in the exhilarating motion. Higher and higher rose the veil of cloud, and the blackness in the water was creeping toward them. Sea birds wheeled low about them, with their peculiar quavering cry, and a low swell made itself felt. Miss Berkeley turned her head; a sudden look of affright blanched her face to deadliest whiteness. A hand's breadth of clear sky lay beneath the sun, and down after them, with the speed of a racer, came that great black wave. Before it the blue ripples shivered brightly; behind it the angry water tossed and seethed. In its bosom, lurid, phosphorescent lights seemed to flit to and fro. Its crest was ragged and white with dashes of foam. She took in the whole in a second's glance, and made a movement to bring the boat's head up to the wind. As the white face turned toward him, a quick instinct of self-preservation seized him, and he sprang up to lower the sail. Something caught the halliards. His left arm was of little service; his right hung useless at his side. She reached forward—one hand on the tiller—to help him. The rim of the storm slipped up over the sun—a sudden flaw struck them—the rudder flew sharp round, wrenched out of her slight hold—the top-heavy sail caught the full force of the blow, surged downward with a heavy lurch, and the gale was on them. A great blow, and swift darkness, then fierce currents rushing coldly past him; strange, wild sounds filling his ears; and when his vision cleared itself, he saw Lois, unimpeded by her light drapery, striking out for the sunken ledge, half a dozen yards away, over which the spray was flying furiously. He ground his teeth with impatience as his nerveless arm fell helpless; but he reached her side at last. A narrow shelf, with barely sufficient standing room for two. Great, dark waves, with strange lights flashing through them, whirled blinding deluges high above their heads, as he held her close. With the instinct of the weaker toward the stronger, she grasped and clung to him; and the fierce exultation that thrilled through his veins with actual contact, made him strong as a giant. And then, close on the gale, came the rain, beating down the waves with its heavy pour. In the thunder and tramp of the storm no human voice could have made itself audible, if speech had been needed.

The storm passed as suddenly as it had risen. Through a rift in the clouds a dash of blood-red light burst over the troubled waters, and with it a sudden quiet fell about them. They were to have their 'grand sunset' finally.

'We are too far from the mainland to reach it without help; no boats are likely to pass this way after this storm; the tide is at its lowest now; it rises high over this ledge.'

In his quiet voice a half-savage triumph made itself heard. This near-coming fate, that he believed inevitable, put away completely all claims of that world that lay behind him—shut out everything but their own individuality. Time had narrowed to a point; all landmarks were swept away.

Miss Berkeley's face had lost none of its whiteness; but the pallor was not of fear. The great eyes burned star-like, and the mouth was like iron. She looked up as his even tones fell on her ear. Something in his gaze fixed hers; through fearless, unveiled eyes, the soul looked straight out to his. What he saw there dazzled and blinded him. He caught her up to his heart suddenly and fiercely. His lips crushed hers in a long, clinging kiss, that seemed to drink up her very life. For them, the brightness that for others is dissipated over long years of the future, was concentrated into the single intense moment of the present—this one moment, that seemed to burst into bud and blossom, the fruition of a lifetime. The sky lifted away and poured down fuller floods of light; the air vibrated with strange, audible throbs. When he released her, she did not move away. Never again, though they lived out a century, could the past be quite what it had been before; through it they had come to this, the crowning perfection of their lives. Through the future would run the memory of a caress in which—she was not a woman who measured her gifts—she had dissolved all the hope and promise of that future for him. Desperation was no small element in the whirl. Only into the eternities could he carry the now pure and loyal. It had nothing to do with time; only through the shadow of the coming death had he attained to it.

The fancy that had always haunted him with her peculiar name and dainty presence, prompted the 'Marguerite!'

She was not a woman to whom people give pet names. A rested, loving smile gleamed over her face, and her lips sought his again.

'My darling!'

'Mine!' and then time drifted on, unbroken by the speech which would have jarred the new, perfect harmony. Neither thought—the life currents that had met so wildly and suddenly, left space in their full, disturbed flow, for just the one consciousness of delirious, satisfying love. While the fiery sunset paled, he held the little drenched figure close, her warm breath flowing across his cheek.

Out of the gathering dimness shoreward, came a hail. It struck him with an icy chill that death could never have brought. She raised her head, listening. The longing and temptation to hold her to his breast, and sink down through the green, curling waves, came back stronger than ever. Only so could he hope to keep her. That inexorable future of time reaching out to grasp him back again, would put them apart so hopelessly. His voice was hoarse—broken up with the heart wrench.

'Marguerite, will you die here with me, or go back again to the life that will separate us?'

She did not understand him. Why should she? Did she not love him, and he her? and what could come between them? For her a future burst suddenly into hope with that faint call. In it lay untried, unfathomable sources of happiness.

Another breathless kiss—this time crowded with the agony of a parting for him—and then, as the hail came again, nearer and more distinct, the white shawl, that still clung about her, floated in the air as a signal.

They lifted her into the rescuing boat shortly, white and breathless, and wrapped her in heavy shawls. Not senseless, lying against his breast, the dark eyes opened once to meet his, and the pallid face nestled a little closer to its resting place. He could not tell if the time were long or short, before Nelly's voice broke on his ear.

'Only a comedy, instead of the tragedy which mother is arranging up at the house!'

The half-hysterical quaver broke into the woman's refuge of tears, and sobs with that; and Moore gave up his burden to stronger arms.

'Up at the house,' Mrs. Morris, busied with her blazing fires and multitudinous appliances for any stage of disaster, met them with the quiet tears that mothers learn to shed, and the reverent 'Thank God!' that comes oftenest from mothers' lips.

And the bustle being over, he looked reality and duty straight in the face. The man was in no sense a coward—flinch was not in him. He came out on the upper balcony two hours later, with the face of a man over whom ten years more of life had gone heavily. A dozen steps away sat Marguerite—the white heart of a softened glow of light. She came out at his call quiet and stately, but with a kind of shy happiness touching eye and cheek with light and flame. At sight of her, all the mad passion in his heart leaped up—a groan came in place of the words he had promised himself. He strode away with heavy, hard footfalls. Not strange, since he was trampling Satan and his own heart under his feet. He came back again, quickly, eagerly, as a man forcing himself forward to a mortal sacrifice, who feels that resolution may fail. The words that came finally were half a groan, half an imprecation, hissed through clenched teeth.

'Three years ago, a Louisiana lady promised to be my wife. She is not dead; the engagement is not broken.'

There were no words beyond the plain statement of facts that he had any right to use—harsh and brutal though they seemed. Seen in the earth-light that had broken on him with that rescuing hail, he had acted the coward and villain. If she thought him so, he had no right to demur.

There was no need of other words. The eyes, after their first terrified glance, had fixed themselves out on the night, and then the lids fell, and the wondering, stunned look changed slowly into one of perfect comprehension. Not a muscle moved. The present, leaping forward, laid before her the future, scorched and seared, beyond possibility of bloom again. She looked into it with just the same attitude—even to the tapering fingers laid lightly on the railing—as five minutes before she had dreamed over a land of promise. He, looking down on her white face—whiter in the silver powder of the moonlight—saw a look of utter, hopeless quiet settle there—such quiet as one sees in an unclosed coffin, such marble, impassive calm, neither reproachful nor grieving, as covers deadly wounds—settle never again to rise till Death shall sweep it off. Some lives are stamped at once and forever; and faces gather in an hour the look that haunts them for a lifetime.

Then he knew that no one ever bears the consequences of a sin alone. On this woman, for whom he would have gone to death, he had drawn down the curse. He was powerless to help her; all that he could give—the promise of lifelong love and tenderness—was itself a deadly wrong—would blast his life in giving, hers in receiving. In the minutes that he stood there, gazing into her face, all the waves and billows of bitterest realization of helplessness went over his heart.

She turned to go away. 'Marguerite!' The man's despairing soul, his bitter struggles and failures, atoned for in this last agony, made itself utterance in that one cry. She turned back, without looking up; even his eager gaze could not force up the heavy lids. Then, with that sweet, miraculous woman's grace of patience and pity, she put out her hand, and as he bowed his head over it, touched her lips to his cheek with quick, light contact, and glided away.

Earliest morning shimmered lances of gray, ghostly light on the horizon, and across the sea to the waiting shore. They struck grayest and ghostliest on a high balcony, where a woman's figure crouched, swathed in damp, trailing drapery, with silky, falling hair about a still face, and steadfast eyes that had burned just as steadfastly through the long hours gone by. Great, calm stars, circling slowly, had slipped out of sight into the waves; the restless, grieving ocean had swayed all night with heavy beat against the beach; mysterious whisperings had stirred the broad summer leaves, heavy with dew and moonlight; faint night noises had drifted up to her, leaving the silence unrippled by an echo; till the old moon dropped a wasted, blood-red crescent out of sight, and the world, exhausted with the passion of the yearning night, shrouded itself in the gloom and quiet that comes before the dawn.

To the watcher, who, with strained, unconscious attention, had taken in every change of the night, the promise of the day came almost as a personal wrong. That the glare of the sunshine should fall on her pain—that the necessity for meeting mere acquaintances with the same face as yesterday should exist, now that her life lay so scorched and sere before her, filled her with rebellious impatience.

But when, with the growing light, the first sounds of household waking came to her, she rose wearily, and went, with tired, heavy steps to her own room. And Nelly, coming in half an hour later, with an indefinite sense of uneasiness, found an older face than last evening's on the pillow, with harder lines about the mouth, and with a wearier droop of the eyelids. The voice, too, that answered her good morning, had a kind of echoing dreariness in it. But such traces are not patent to many eyes or ears, and Nelly did not realize them.

There are a few women, mostly of this dark, slender type, who bear these wrenching heart agonies as some animals bear extremest suffering of body—not a sound or struggle testifies to pain—receiving blow after blow without hope or thought of appeal—going off by and by to die, or to suffer back to life alone. Not much merit in it, perhaps—a passive, hopeless endurance of an inevitable torture; but such tortures warp or shape a lifetime. Rarely ever eyes that have watched out such a night see the sun rise with its old promise.

Clement Moore, coming slowly back to life after a fortnight of delirium, found the woods ablaze with October, and Miss Berkeley gone. Another fortnight, and he was with his regiment. Captain George—off on some scouting expedition—was not in camp to meet him. But stretched out on the dry turf a night or two after, through the clash of the band on the hillside above broke Captain George's sonorous voice, and straightway followed such a catalogue of questions as dwellers in camps have always ready to propound to the latest comer from the northward. Concluding finally with—

'And you didn't fall in love with 'the princess'?' Poor Captain George! The prodigious effort ought to have kept the heart throb out of his voice, though it didn't. Moore's quick ear caught it (sympathy has a wonderfully quickening effect on the perceptions sometimes), and he took refuge in a truth that in no way touched the past few months—feeling like a coward and traitor meanwhile, and yet utterly helpless to save either himself or his friend from coming evil. Another item added to retributive justice.

'I thought you knew'—flashing the diamond on his hand in the moonlight—'somewhere beyond the lines yonder a lady wears the companion to this—or did, last spring.'

And George's spirits rose immensely thereupon.

The old, miserable monotony of camp life began again. It wore on him, this machine-like existence, this blind, unquestioning obedience, days and nights of purposeless waiting, brightened by neither hope nor memory. He had hated it before; now he loathed it with the whole strength of his unrestful soul. But it did him good. Brought face to face with his life, he met the chances of his future like the man he was, and at last, out of the blackness end desolation, came the comfort of conquering small, every-day temptations, more of a comfort than we are willing to admit at first thought.

This bare, unbroken life cuts straight down to the marrow of a man. Stripped of all conventionalities, individuals come out broadly. The true metal shows itself grandly in this strange, impartial throwing together of social elements—this commingling on one level of all ranks and conditions of men in the same broad glare of every-day trial, unmodified by any of society's false lights. The factitious barriers of rank once broken over, all early associations, whether of workshop or college, go for nought, or, rather, for what they are worth. The man gravitates to his proper place, whether he makes himself known with the polished sentences of the school, or in terse, sinewy, workman's talk. And through the months Moore learned to respect humanity as it showed itself, made gentler to every one, driven out from himself, perhaps, by the bitterness and darkness that centred in his own heart. It was a new phase of life for him, but he bated his haughty Southern exclusiveness to meet it. Before, he had kept himself aloof as far as the surroundings allowed from those about him—now, his never-failing good nature, his flow of song and story, his untiring physical endurance, all upborne by a certain proud delicacy and reticence, made him a general favorite. But he hailed as a relief the long, exhausting marches that came after a while. Bodily weariness stood in the place of head or heart exercise, and men falling asleep on the spot where they halted for the night, after a day in the clinging Virginia mud, had little time for the noisy outbreaks that filled the evenings in days of inaction. So he did his private's duty bravely, with cheery patience, relieving many a slender boy's arms of his gun, helping many another with words of cheer as he slumped on at his side, always with some device for making their dreary night-stops more endurable. Thanksgiving came and went. George went home on furlough. Moore refused one, and ate the day's extra allowance of tough beef and insipid rice with much fought-against memories of his New England festivals. The winter went on. Christmas days came. The man's brown face was getting positively thinner with homesick recollections of the Southern carnival. This brilliant, ready spirit, who never grew sour nor selfish under any circumstances, actually spent two good hours, the afternoon before Christmas day, in a brown study, and with a suspicious, tightened feeling in his throat, and mistiness in his eyes. Coming in at nightfall from his picket duty, tired and hungry, Jim Murphy, stretching his long length before the fire, rose on his elbow to find half a dozen epistles he had brought down to camp that day.

'Yer letthers, Musther Moore.' Jim, even with his sudden accession of independence as an American citizen, paid unconscious deference to the world-old subtile difference between gentleman and 'rough,' and used the title involuntarily.

He opened them sitting by the same fire, munching his hard tack as he read. Murphy, watching him, saw his lips quiver and work over one bearing half a dozen postmarks—a letter from his mother, conveyed across the lines by some sleight-of-hand of influence or pay, and mailed and remailed from place to place, till weeks had grown into months since it was written. Noncommittal as it had need to be—filled with home items to the last page—there his heart stood still, to bound again furiously back, and his breath came sharp and hot. He rose blinded and staggering. Jim Murphy, seeing how white and rigid his face had grown, came toward him, putting out his hand with a dumb impulse of sympathy, not understanding how the shock of a great hope, springing full grown into existence, sometimes puts on the semblance of as great a loss.

Private Moore's application for a furlough being duly made, that night was duly granted.

'Just in time—the last one for your regiment!' said the good-natured official, registering the necessary items.

In another hour he was whirling away, and in early evening two days later he stepped out into the clear moonlight and crisp air of a Northern city.

A New England sleighing season was at its height. The streets were crowded with swift-flying graceful vehicles, the air ringing with bell music and chimes of voices. Out through the brilliant confusion he went to the quiet square where the great trees laid a dark tracery of shadow upon the snow beneath. No thought of the accidents of absence or company, or any of the chances of everyday life, had occurred to him before. A carriage stood at the door. He almost stamped with impatience till the door opened and he was admitted. The change to the warm, luxurious gloom of the parlors quieted him a little, but he paced up and down with long strides while he waited. The strong stillness that he had resolutely maintained was broken down now with a feverish restlessness.

She came at length—it seemed to him forever first—with the rustle and shimmer of trailing lengths of silk down the long room. A fleecy mist covered neck and arms, and some miracle of a carriage wrapping lay white and soft about her face. She did not recognize him in the obscurity; his message of 'a friend' had not betrayed him. But his voice, with its new, proud hopefulness, its under vein triumphant and eager, struck her into a blinding, giddy whirl, in which voice and words were lost. It passed in a moment, and he was saying, 'And I am free now—honorably free—and have come where my heart has been, ever since that month on the seaside. Most gracious and sovereign lady,'—he broke into sudden, almost mirthful speech, dropping on one knee with a semblance of humility proved no mockery by the diamond light in the brown eyes and the reverent throb that came straight from his voice.

She bent over him as he knelt, and drew her cool, soft hands across his forehead and down his face, and her even, silvery syllables cut like death:

'Mr. Moore, last night I promised to marry your friend, Captain Morris.'

For the space of a minute stillness like the grave filled the room, and then all the intense strain of heart and nerve gave way, as the bitter tide of disappointment broke in and rolled over his future; and without word or sound he dropped forward at her feet.

She knelt down beside him with a low, bitter cry. It reached his dulled sense; he rose feebly.

'Forgive me; I have not been myself of late, I think; and this—this was so sudden,' and he walked away with dull, nerveless tread.

On the table, near her, lay her handkerchief. It breathed of heliotrope. Her words came back to him: 'Only in coffins, about still, dead faces.' He stopped in his walk and looked down on her. Forever he should remember all that ghostly sheen of silvery white about a rigid face with unutterably sad fixed mouth and drooping lids. He thrust the fleecy handful into his breast.

'I may keep this?' and took permission from her silence.

'Good-by;' the words came through ashy lips, a half sob. She knelt as impassive as marble, as cold and white. He waited a moment for the word or look that did not come, turned away, the hall door fell heavily shut, and he was gone.

Fifteen minutes after, Miss Berkeley was whirling to the house where she was to officiate as bridesmaid, and where she was haughtier, and colder, and ten times more attractive than ever.

Private Moore, waiting for the midnight return train, found life a grim prospect.

Three weeks after, a summons came from the captain's tent. George had just returned from his own furlough, and this was their first meeting. Even while their hands clasped, his new, happy secret told itself.

'Congratulate me, Clement Moore! You remember Lois Berkeley? She has promised to be Lois Berkeley Morris one day!' and, with happy lover's egotism, did not notice the gray shade about his hearer's lips.

Various items of news followed.

'A truce boat goes over to-morrow,' remembering the fact suddenly; 'there will be opportunity to send a few letters; so, if you wish to write to that lady 'beyond the lines'—

The voice that replied was thin and harsh:

'Miss Rose declined alliance with a 'Yankee hireling,' and was married last October.'

Honest George wrung his friend's hand anew, and heaped mental anathemas on his own stupidity for not seeing how haggard and worn the dark face had grown—anathemas which were just enough, perhaps, only he hardly saw the reason in quite the right light. But he spared all allusions to his own prospects thereafter, and finding that Moore rather avoided than sought him, measured and forgave the supposed cause by his own heart.

At length came a time when a new life and impulse roused into action even that slowly moved great body, the officers of the Potomac Army, and that much-abused and sorely tried insignificant item, the army itself. On every camp ground reigned the confusion of a flitting. All the roads were filled with regiments hurrying southward, faces growing more and more hazard with fatigue and privation, weak and slender forms falling from the ranks, cowards and traitors skulking to the rear, till at length on the banks of the river stood an army, hungry, footsore, marchworn, but plucky, and ready for any service that might be required of them, even if that service were but to 'march up the hill and then march down again'—what was left of them.

An atom in the moving mass of blue, Clement Moore shared the pontoon crossing, was silent through the storms of cheers that greeted each regiment as they splashed over and up the bank, and, drawn up in line of battle at last, surveyed the field without a pulsation of emotion. Other men about him chafed at the restraint; he stood motionless, with eyes a thousand miles away. And when the advance sounded, and the line started with a cheer, no sound passed his lips. A half-unconscious prayer went up that he might fall there, and have it over with this life battle, that had gone so sorely against him. He moved as in a dream. The whirl and roar of battle swept around and by him; he charged with the fiercest, saw the blue lines reel and break only to close up and charge again, took his life in his hand a dozen times, and stood at length with the few who held that first line of rifle pits, gazing in each other's faces in the momentary lull, and wondering at their own existence. Then came a shock, shivers of red-hot pain ran through every nerve, and then—blissful, cool unconsciousness. Captain George, galloping by, with the red glare of battle on his face, saw the fall, and halted. A half dozen ready hands swung the body to his saddle. For a little the tide of battle eddied away, and in the comparative quiet, George tore down the hill to a spring bubbling out under the cedars.

The darkness that wrapped the wounded man dissolved gradually. The thunder and crash of guns, the mad cheers, the confusion of the bands withdrew farther and farther, and drifted away from his failing senses. He was back in his Southern home; the arm under his head was his mother's; and he murmured some boyish request. Jasmine and clematis oppressed him with their oversweetness; overhead the shining leaves of the magnolia swung with slow grace. So long since he had seen a magnolia, not since that evening—a life time ago, it seemed; the sight and fragrance fell on him as her cool touch did that last time. The heart throbs choked him then; he was choking again. 'Water, mother—a drink!' and something wet his lips and trickled down his throat, not cool and sweet as the rippling water he longed for, and he turned away with sickly fretfulness; but a new strength thrilled through his limbs. He opened his eyes; a face, battle-stained, but tear-wet like a woman's, bent over him.

'O Clement, dear old fellow, do you know me?'

He smiled faintly, with stiffening lips. 'Yes, I know. I've prayed for it, George. I couldn't live to see her your wife. Good-by, dear boy. Tell mother—' He wandered again. 'Kiss me, mother—now Lois, my Marguerite. Into thy hands, O Lord—' A momentary struggle for breath, and then Morris laid back the grand head, and knelt, looking down on the beautiful face, over which the patient strength of perfect calm had settled forever.

'So that was it, after all,' he said, bitterly. 'Fool not to see; and he was worth a generation of such as I.'

He turned away, tightened his saddle girths, cast a look on the pandemonium before him, looked back with one foot already in the stirrup.

'I sha'n't see him again in this hell, even if I come out of it myself.' And going back, with gentle fingers he removed the few trinkets on the body. In an inner pocket of the blouse he found a small packet. He opened it on the spot. A lady's handkerchief, silky fine, white as ever. No need of the delicate tracery in the corners to tell him whose. The perfume that haunted it still called back too vividly that evening when he had wondered at and loved her more for the strange, perfect calm that chilled a little his outburst of happiness. He folded it back carefully, touched his lips as a woman might have done to the cold forehead, and mounted, plunging up the hill to the fight that had recommenced over the trench. Later in the day, the ball that fate moulded for Captain George found him. He gave one low, pitiful cry as it crashed through his bridle arm, and then a merciful darkness closed about him.

Two months after, white and thin, with one empty sleeve fastened across his chest, he stood where another had stood waiting for the same woman. Through the window drifted in the early spring fragrance; a handful of early spring flowers lay on the table. A soft rustle and slow step through the hall, and he rose as Lois came in. She glanced at the empty sleeve with grave, wide eyes, and sat down near him. He would not have known the face before him, it had so altered; the hair pushed back from hollow, blue-veined temples, the sharpened, angular outlines, and an old, suffering look about the mouth and sunken eyes.

Few words were spoken—nothing beyond the most commonplace greetings. Then she said:

'I should have come to you, but I have been ill myself; near death, I believe,' she added, wearily.

She gave the explanation with no throb of feeling. She would have apologized for a careless dress with more spirit once.

He rose and laid a packet before her.

'A lady's handkerchief—yours, I think. I was with him when he died, though his body was not found afterward. I was hurt myself, you know, and could not attend to it,' he said, deprecatingly.

She did not touch it, looking from it up to him with eyes filled with just such a grieved, questioning look as might come into the eyes of some animal dying in torture. He could not endure it. He put out his white, wasted left hand.

'My poor child!' She shivered, caught her breath with a sob, and, burying her face in the pillows of a couch, gave way to her first tears in an agony of weeping. And he sat apart, not daring to touch her, nor to speak—wishing, with unavailing bitterness, that it had been he who was left lying stark and still beneath the cedars.

The storm passed. She lay quiet now, all but the sobs that shook her whole slight frame. He said, at last, very gently:

'If I had known—you should have told me. He was my best friend.' His voice trembled a little. 'I know how I must seem to you. His murderer, perhaps; surely the murderer of your happiness.' A deeper quaver in the sorrowful tones. 'It is too late now, I know; but if it would help you ever so little to be released from your promise—'

There was no reply.

'You are free. I am going now.' He bent over her for a breath, making a heart picture of the tired face, the closed eyes, and grieved mouth. Only to take her up for a moment, with power to comfort her—he would have given his life for that—and turned away with a great, yearning pain snatching at his breath. In the hall he paused a moment, trying to think. A light step, a frail hand on his arm, a wistful face lifted to his.

'Forgive me; I have been very unkind. You are so good and noble. I will be your wife, if you will be any happier.'

He looked down at her pityingly. 'You are very tired. Shall you say that when you are rested again? Remember, you are free.'

'If not yours, then never any one's.'

His arm fell about her, his lips touched her forehead quietly; he led her back to her couch, and arranged her pillow, smiling a little at his one awkward hand.

'I shall not see you again before I go back, unless you send for me.'

She put out her hand and touched the bowed face quickly and lightly; and with that touch thrilling in his veins he went away.

Through Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and the Charleston siege, Captain George, no longer captain, now twice promoted for cool bravery, has borne a charmed life—a grave, calm man, remembering always a still face, 'pathetic with dying.'

Out from the future is turned toward him another face, no less pathetic in its unrest of living. The soldiers in the Capital hospitals, dragging through the weary weeks of convalescence, know that face well. For hours of every day she goes about busied with such voluntary service as she is permitted to do. She sees tired faces brighten at her coming—is welcomed by rough and gentle voices. Always patient, ready, thoughtful, she is 'spending' herself—waiting for the end.

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THE SCIENTIFIC UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE: ITS CHARACTER AND RELATION TO OTHER LANGUAGES.

ARTICLE TWO.

CORRESPONDING FIRST DISCRIMINATIONS IN THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE.

The purpose of these papers, as announced and partially carried forward in the preceding one, is to explain the nature of the New Scientific Universal Language, a component part of the new Science of Universology, and to exhibit its relation to the Lingual Structures hitherto extant. For this purpose we entered upon the necessary preliminary consideration of the fundamental question of the Origin of Speech. We found that the latest developments of Comparative Philology upon this subject, as embodied in Prof. Müller's recent work, 'Lectures on the Science of Language,' brought us no farther along to the goal of our investigation than Compound Roots—one-, two-, three-, four-, five—(or more) letter Roots—some four or five hundred of which are the insoluble residuum which the Philologists furnish as the Ultimate Elements of Language. It was pointed out that these Roots are not, however, the Ultimate Elements of Language, any more than Compound Substances are the Prime Constituents of Matter; and that, as Chemistry, as a Science, could begin its career, only after a knowledge of the veritable Ultimate Elements of the Physical Constitution of the Globe was obtained, so a True Science of Language must be based upon an understanding of the value and meaning of the True Prime or Ultimate Elements of Speech—the Vowels and Consonants.

It is with the exposition of the nature of these Fundamental Constituents of Language, and of their Correspondential Relationship or Analogy with the Fundamental Constituents of Thought, the Ultimate Rational Conceptions of the Mind, that the New Universal Language begins its developments. Through its agency we may hope to find, therefore, a satisfactory solution to the problem of the Origin of Speech, which Comparative Philology abandons at the critical point, and so to be able to pass to the consideration of the more specific objects of our present inquiry.

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Universology establishes the fact that there is Analogy or Repetition of Plan throughout the various Departments of the Universe. It demonstrates, in other words, that the same Principles which generate, and the same Laws which regulate, the Phenomena of the Universe as a whole, fulfil the same functions in connection with the Phenomena of every one of its parts. The Mathematical, Psychological, or any other specific Domain is, therefore, an expression or embodiment of the same System of Principles and Laws, with reference to both Generals and Details, which is otherwise exhibited in Mechanics, Physics, Chemistry, and elsewhere universally; just as the same Architectural Plan may be variously employed in constructions of different size, material, color, modes of ornamentation, etc.; and may be modified to suit the requirements of each individual construction. To every Elementary Form of Thought there is, consequently, a corresponding and related Law of Number, of Form, of Color, of Chemical Constitution, and of Oral Sound or Speech. Every Basic Idea, to state it otherwise, pertaining to the Universe at large or to any of its Divisions, has its counterpart or double in every other Division. Or, to express it yet another way: the manifold, diverse, and unlike Appearances or Phenomena which the Universe presents to our understanding, are not radically and essentially different; but are the same Typal Ideas or Thoughts of God or of Nature, arrayed in various garbs, and, hence, assuming varying presentations. The Numerical Unit, the Geometrical Point, the Written Dot, the Globule, the Chemical Atom, the Physical Molecule, the Physiological Granule, the Yod or Iota, the least Element of Sound, are, for example, Identical Types, differently modified or clothed upon in accordance with the medium through which they are to be phenomenally presented. It is with this Echo or Repetitory Relationship, existing between all the Domains of the Universe, but more particularly as exhibited between the two Domains of Ideas and Language, that we are at present concerned.

It is sufficiently obvious that Analogy should be sought for first, in the Generals of any department under examination, and, subsequently, through them, in the Particulars. In respect to the two Domains now under special consideration, this relation is between the Fundamental Elements of Thought, including those called by the Philosophers the Categories of the Understanding, and the Fundamental Elements of Language. In pointing out the Correspondence subsisting between the Elements of these two Domains, I shall use, partly by way of condensation, and partly by copious extracts, the Elaborate Expositions contained in the yet unpublished text books of Universology. And, as what follows relating to this subject will consist, almost wholly, of this material, I do not deem it essential to encumber the page with numerous and unnecessary quotation marks. It is advisable to caution the Reader, however, that as my present purpose is explanation and illustration only, and not formal demonstration, what is about to be given will be mostly in the nature of mere statement, unaccompanied by any other evidence of its truthfulness than may be found in the self-supporting reasonableness of the statements themselves.

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It was the basic and axiomatic proposition of Hegel's Philosophy, that the first discrimination of Thought and Being in any sphere is into two factors, a Something and a Nothing;—that which constitutes the main or predominant element of the Conception or Creation, and that which we endeavor to exclude from contemplation or activity, but which, nevertheless, by virtue of the impossibility of perfect or absolute abstraction, inevitably becomes a minor or subordinate element in the Idea or the Act which may be engaging the attention. Something and Nothing are also averred to be equal factors in the Constitution of Thoughts or Things, because both are alike indispensable to the cognition of either; because, in other words, it is only by the presence of the Nothing as a background or contrasting element, that the Something has an independent or cognizable existence. If there were no blank space, for instance, there could be no Moon, relatively, or so far as our ability to perceive it is concerned. For the Moon is, in this illustration, a Something which is visible to us, and of which we have a knowledge, only by reason of the fact that it is surrounded by and contrasted with that which is not Moon, and which, in reference to the particular aspect under consideration is, therefore, a Nothing; though it in turn may be a Something or main object of attention in some other view or conception, where some other factor shall be the Nothing.

That this Relationship of Antithesis and Rank existed, as between the Constituents of some Thoughts or Things, was known from the earliest times, and gave rise to the terms Positive and Negative, expressive of it. But Hegel was the first—of modern Philosophers, at least—to point out its necessarily Universal and fundamental character, and to assume it as the starting-point in the development of all Philosophy and Science.

So far as concerns the investigation of the Universe from the Philosophical point of view (which is the less precise and definite aspect), Hegel is right in affirming that the first discrimination of all Thought and Being is that between Something and Nothing. But he is wrong in regarding the starting-point or first differentiation of Science, as being identical with that of Philosophy. Science considers, primarily and predominantly, the more exact and rigorous relations of Phenomena; and the existence of an exact and definite point of departure in Thought and Being, more fundamental, from the Scientific or rigorously precise point of view, than that of Hegel, is the initiatory proposition of Universology.

A full explanation of the nature of this Starting-point is not, however, in place here. And as the discrimination into Something and Nothing serves all the purposes of our present inquiry, a single word respecting the character of the Universological Point of Departure in question is all that it is now necessary to say concerning it.

This Starting-point of Thought and Action has reference to the Ideas of Oneness (Primitive Unity) and Twoness (Plurality). These conceptions give rise to two Primordial Principles, which form the basis of the development of Universology, and which are fundamental in every Department of the Universe and in the Universe as a whole, namely: The Principle of Unism (from the Latin unus, one), the Spirit of the Number One, the Principle of Undifferentiated, Unanalyzed, Agglomerative Unity; and The Principle of Duism (from the Latin duo, two), the Spirit of the Number Two, the Principle of Differentiation, Analysis, Separation, Apartness, or Plurality, typically embodied in Two, the first division of the Primitive Unity, and especially representative of the Principle of Disunity, the essence of all division or plurality. One, in the Domain of Number, and Unism, in the Department of Primordial Principles, correspond, it must be added, with The Absolute (the Undifferentiated and Unconditioned), as one of the Aspects of Being; while Two, in the Domain of Number, and Duism, among Primordial Principles, are allied with The Relative (the Differentiated and Conditioned), of which latter Domain Something and Nothing are the two Prime Factors. The distinction between One and Two, or their analogous Aspects of Being, Absolute and Relative, is, therefore, prior to that between Something and Nothing, because Something and Nothing are two terms of The Relative (Two), which has first to be itself discriminated from The Absolute (One) before it can be sub-divided into these two factors.

While the nature of this discrimination into Something and Nothing may be sufficiently intelligible to the student of Metaphysics, it may not be so to the Reader unaccustomed to Philosophical Speculation. For the purpose, therefore, of rendering it somewhat clearer, I will point out the manner in which it exhibits itself in respect to the Constitution of the External World and elsewise.

The Totality of all material objects and substances is the Positive Material Universe. This is contained in Space, which is the Negative Material Universe. Compoundly the two, Matter and Space, are the whole Material Universe, as to the Parts or Constituent Factors of which it consists.

Theoretically, and in one, and by no means an unimportant sense, the Zero-Element or Nothing-side of the Universe or of a given Department of Being, is one whole half, or an equal hemisphere of the Totality of Being. Thus, for example, Zero (0) in the usage of the Arabic Numbers, while it is represented in an obscure way merely by a single figure below the nine digits, yet stands over, in a sense, against all the digits, and all their possible combinations, as equal to them all in importance. For it is by means of this Zero (0) that the One (1) for instance, becomes 10, 100, 1000, etc.; and that all the Positive Numbers acquire their relative values, according to the places or positions in space which they occupy.

In another sense, however, the Negative Ground of Being, in the Universe at large, or in any given Domain, quickly sinks out of view, and Positive Being becomes the whole of what is commonly regarded. It is in this sense that, ordinarily, in speaking of The Digits of Number, the Zero is left out of the count.

In the same manner, when speaking or thinking of the Material Universe, while the notion of Space is ever present, and is, in the absolute sense, an equal half of the whole conception, still it is Matter, the total congeries of objects and substances in Space, of which we mainly think; the Space, as such, being understood and implied, but subordinated as a mere negative adjunct of the positive idea.

In strictness, Matter and Space are so mutually dependent on each other, that either without the other is an impossible conception. The notion of Space permeates that of Matter; passing through it, so to speak, as well as surrounding it; so that it needs no proof that Matter cannot be conceived of as existing without Space. But, on the other hand, Space is only the negation of Matter; the shadow, as it were, cast by Matter; and, so, dependent on Matter for the very origin of the idea in the mind.

If Space, therefore, be the analogue of Nothing; Matter, wholly apart from Space, is only a theoretical Something, really and actually as much a Nothing as Space itself, when abstractly considered in its equally impossible separation from Matter. But Matter, completely separated from Space, is the exact external analogue of the Something opposed to the Nothing of abstract Metaphysical Thinking. Here, then, is a lucid exposition, by virtue of these analogies, of the famous Metaphysical Axiom of Hegel, which, at its announcement, threw all Europe into amazement:

Something = (equal to) Nothing.

It is the logic of this statement that all Reality or Relative Being is a product of two factors, each of which is a Nothing. The strangeness of this proposition will disappear when it is recognized that these two Nothings are mere aspects or sides of presentation of the Product, which is itself the only Reality. In respect to the Real Being, those two sides are Nothings. But, as appearances or ideal views of the Reality under the process of analytical abstraction in the mind, they are so far Somethings as to receive names and to be treated of and considered as if they were Realities. Reality in the Absolute aspect, the aspect of Undifferentiated Unity, (Unismal), contains these two factors interblended and undiscriminated. In the Relative aspect, that of Duality, (Duismal), it is the compound of these two factors separated and distinguished. Finally, in the Integral aspect of Compound Unity (Trinismal), it consists of the Unismal and the Duismal aspects contrasted—the only real state, or possible condition of actual existence. And this is the Type of all Reality or Real Existence in every department of Being in the Universe.

But practically and ordinarily, these strictly analytical views of the question of existence are abandoned. Reality, compounded, as we have seen that it is when viewed in this way, of a Positive and a Negative Factor, is assumed as itself a Simple Element and set over against the grand residuum of Negation in the Universe of Being. This is what Kant, less analytical than Hegel, has done, when, in distributing the Categories of Thought, he has contrasted Reality with Negation.

This is, as if, in respect to the External Material World, we were to divide Matter—the Planets, for example, first assigning to them the portions of Space which they bodily and respectively fill as if it were a part of themselves—from the remaining ocean or grand residuum of Space which surrounds them and in which they float. This residuum of Space would then be spoken of as Space, and the Planetary Bodies, along with and including the spaces which they fill, would be spoken of as Matter. This is a kind of division, less analytical, but more convenient, obvious, and practical, than the other which would attempt to separate the whole of Space from the Matter within Space. It is in this more practical manner that we ordinarily think of the division of the Heavens into the Domains of Matter and Space.

Between Reality, then, including a subordinate portion of Space—the content and volume of the Planet—and the grand ocean of Space, outlying and surrounding the Planet, there is Limitation, the outline of the Planet, the Limit or dividing surface between the space within it and the space without.

It is this Congeries of the Aspects of Being which Kant denominates Quality, as a name of a Group of the Categories of the Understanding; and which he divides into

• 1. Reality.
• 2. Negation.
• 3. Limitation.

He then treats Reality as synonymous with the Affirmative (Positive), and Negation as synonymous with the Negative; although, as we have seen, this Affirmative is not strictly equivalent to the Something of Hegel, nor this Negative to his Nothing. For Reality we may, in a general sense, put Substance, and for Limitation we may put Form, Omitting Negation which repeats the Nothing, as Reality repeats the Something, it may now be said that the next Grand Division of the Elements of Universal Being (after that into Something and Nothing) is into

1. Substance.
	= 3. Existence.
2. Form.

That is to say: The Relative (The Domain of Cognizable Being) is first made known to us through the differentiation and discrimination of the two Factors Something and Nothing which lie undifferentiated and indistinguishable in The Absolute (The Primitive Ground of Being). The Relative then subdivides into 1. Substance (Reality), and, 2. Form (Limitation), which reunite to constitute that actualized Being which we denominate Existence. Or, tabulated, thus:

THE ABSOLUTE (The Primitive Ground of Being)
CONTAINS UNDIFFERENTIATED AND INDISTINGUISHABLE THE TWO FACTORS
SOMETHING and NOTHING WHICH CONSTITUTE THE FIRST TERMS
AND DISCRIMINATIONS OF
THE RELATIVE (The Domain Of Cognizable Being);
WHICH ITSELF DIVIDES INTO
SUBSTANCE (Reality) and FORM (Limitation),
THE PRIME CONSTITUENTS OF EXISTENCE.

To comprehend the vast importance of these discriminations, it is necessary to understand that precisely those Principles of Distribution which are applicable to the Universe at large are found to be applicable to every minor sphere or domain of the Universe; in the same manner as the same Geometrical Laws which prevail in the largest circle prevail equally in the smallest. It is the prevalence of Identical Principles in diverse spheres which is the source of that Universal Analogy throughout all spheres that lies at the basis of Universology, and gives the possibility of such a Science. The nature of this Analogy, as well as the value of the discriminations themselves, will be more clearly seen by glancing at corresponding discriminations in other spheres.

In the Constitution of the External World, Something is represented, as we have seen, by the solid and tangible substance which we call Matter, and Nothing by the Expanse of Space.

In the Science of Acoustics, Sound, the pure Phonos, is the Something, the Reality, as it is denominated by Kant, the Positive Factor of Speech. Silence is the relative Nothing, the Negation, so called by Kant, the Negative Factor of Speech. The Silences, or Intervals of Rest which intervene between Sounds (and also between Syllables, Words, Sentences, and still larger divisions of Speech), are only so many successive reappearances of this negative element. Silence, the Nothing of Sound, is, in fact, in the most radical aspect of the subject, one entire half or hemisphere or equal Factor of the whole of Speech or Music. Josiah Warren, the author of a work entitled 'Music as an Exact Science,' is the only writer I have noticed who has had the discrimination distinctively to recognize Silence as one of the Elements of the Musical Structure.

Impliedly it is, however, always so recognized. The Silences intervening between tones tunewise, or in respect to altitude, are, in Musical Nomenclature, denominated Intervals. Timewise Silences, or those which intervene between Tones rhythmically considered, are called Rests. The Intervals of Silence between Syllables and Words, in Oral Speech, are represented in the printed book by what the Printer calls Spaces, which are blank or negative Types interposed between the positive Types expressive of Sounds. This term Space or Spaces carries us to the analogous Total Space or Blank Space and intervening reaches of Space between the Planets, Orbs or Material Worlds, the former the corresponding Nothing of the total Material Universe of which these worlds are the Something; as exhibited in the demonstrations of Universology.

In the Domain of Optics, covering the Phenomena of Light, Shade and Color, Light is the Positive Factor or Something, and Darkness the Negative Factor or Nothing. Light is, therefore, the analogue of Sound, and Darkness the analogue of Silence. That is to say, each of these two, Silence and Darkness, denote the absence, the lack, the want or the negation of the opposite and Positive Element or Factor.

So in Thermotics, the Science of Heat, Heat itself is the Positismus or Something of the Domain; and Cold the Negatismus or Correlative Nothing. Heat is, consequently, the analogue of Sound and Light; while Cold is the analogue of Silence and Darkness.

In respect to the Domain of Mind, Positive Mental Experience (Feelings, Thoughts, and Volitions, including self-consciousness) are the Positive Factor, the Something of Mentality. Inexperience, the lack of mental exercitation, hence Ignorance, is the Negative Factor, or Nothing. The Correspondential Relationship or Analogy existing between this Domain of the Universe and others already mentioned is testified to in a remarkable manner by our use of Language. We denominate the want of Feeling Cold or Frigidity—in respect to the Mind or the individual character. The absence of Thought and Knowledge, or, in other words, Intellectual Barrenness, is called Darkness or Obscurity of the Mind. While the lack of Will or Purpose in the Mind is said to be the absence of Tension or Strain (the great Musical term); and the Stillness or quiet hence resulting may be appropriately designated as the Silence of the Mind; Musical Silences being, as pointed out above, technically termed Rests.

With this superficial exhibition of the most radical aspect of the Echo of Idea or Repetition of Type which subsists between all the departments of the Universe, I pass to the more specific consideration of this Analogy as concerning the Domain of Thought and the Domain of Language.

Setting aside from our present consideration Silence, the Negative factor or Negatismus of Language, and fixing our attention upon Sound, the Positive factor or Positismus of Language, we discover it to be composed of two constituents, Vowels and Consonants.

The Vowel is the Substance, the Reality of Language, and the Consonant is the Form, the Limitation.

By Vowel sound is meant the free or unobstructed, and as such unlimited flow of the vocalized or sounding breath. Vowels are defined in the simplest way as those sounds which are uttered with the month open; as a (ah) in Father, o in roll, etc.

Consonants are, on the contrary, those sounds which are produced by the crack of commencing or by obstructing, breaking, or cutting off the sounding breath, by completely or partially closing the organs of speech; as, for instance, by closing the lips, as when we pronounce pie, by, my, etc.; or by pressing the point of the tongue against the gums and teeth, as when we say tie, die, etc.; or by lifting the body of the tongue against the hard palate or roof of the mouth, as when we give the k or hard g sound, as in rack, rag, or in any other similar way.

Consonants are, therefore, the breaks or limitations upon the otherwise unbroken and continuous vocality, voice, or vocalized breath. In other words, as already said, Vowel-Sound is the Elemental Substance, and Consonant-Sound the Elemental Form of Language, or Speech. (By Vowels and Consonants are here meant, the Reader should closely observe, Vowel-Sounds and Consonant-Sounds, as produced by the Organs of Speech, and as they address themselves to the Ear, distinguished and wholly apart from the letters or combinations of letters by which they are diversely represented to the Eye in different languages.)

By a valid but somewhat remote analogy, the Vowel-Sounds of Language may be regarded collectively as the Flesh, and the Consonant-Sounds as the Bone or Skeleton of the Lingual Structure. Flesh is an Analogue or Correspondential Equivalent of Substance. Bone or Skeleton, which gives outline or shape to the otherwise soft, collapsing, and lumpy flesh-mass of the Human or Animal Body, is an Analogue of Correspondential Equivalent of Limitation or Form; as the framework of a house is the shaping or form-giving factor or agent of the entire structure.

Vowel-Sounds are soft, fluent, changeful, and evanescent. One passes easily into another by slight deviations of pronunciation, resulting from trivial differences in National and Individual condition and culture; like the Flesh of the animal, which readily decays from the Bony Skeleton, while the last remains preserved for ages as a fossil. The Vowel-Sounds so readily lose their identity, that they are of slight importance to the Etymologist or Comparative Philologist, who is, in fact, dealing in the Paleontology of Language.

The Consonants are, on the contrary, the Fossils of Speech; bony and permanent representatives of Framework, of Limitation, of Form. Consonant-Sounds are also sometimes denominated Articulations. This word means joinings or jointings. It is from the Latin articulus, a Joint, and is instinctually applied to the Consonant-Sounds in accordance with their analogy with the Skeleton of the Human or Animal System.

By an easy and habitual slide in the meaning of Words, a term like Joint is sometimes used to denote the break or opening between parts, and sometimes to denote one of the parts intervening between such breaks; as when we speak of a joint of meat, meaning thereby what a Botanist would signify by the term Internode, the stretch or reach or shaft of bone extending from one joint (break) to another, with the meat attached to it.

Consonants have, in like manner, a double aspect as Articulations or Joints. In a rigorous and abstract sense, the Consonant has no sound of its own. It is simply a break or interruption of Sound. Etymologically, it is from the Latin con, WITH, and sonans, SOUNDING; as if it were a mere accessory to a (vowel) Sound; the Vowels being, in that sense, the only sounds. In this sense, the Consonants are analogous with the mere cracks or opening joints, which intervene between the bones of the Skeleton. In other words, they are no sounds, but mere nothings; the analogy, in that case, of Abstract Limitation.

Practically, on the contrary, the Consonant takes to itself such a portion of the vocalized or sounding breath which it serves primarily to limit, that it becomes not merely a sound ranking with the Vowel; but the more prominent and abiding sound of the two. It is in this latter sense, that it is the Analogue of the Bone.

In Phonography, as in Hebrew and some other Languages, the letters representing the Consonant-Sounds only are written or printed; the Vowel-Sounds being either represented by mere points added to the Consonant characters, or left wholly unrepresented, to be supplied by the intelligence of the Reader. The written words so constructed, represent the real words with about the degree of accuracy with which a skeleton represents the living man; so that the meaning can be readily gathered by the practised reader, by the aid of the context. In Phonography, the Consonant-Sounds, which are simple straight or curved lines, are joined together at their ends, forming an outline shape, somewhat like a single script (written) letter of our ordinary writing. These outline words are then instinctually and technically called Skeleton-words, from the natural perception of a genuine Scientific Analogy.

Consonants constitute, then, what may be denominated the Limitismus (Limiting Domain) of Language. The Limit is primarily represented by the Line (a line, any line); then by the Line embodying Substance as seam, ridge, bar, beam, shaft, or bone; and, finally, by a System of Lines, Shafts or Bones which may then be jointed or limited in turn among themselves, forming a concatenation of Lines, Bars or Shafts, the framework of a machine or house or other edifice, or the ideal columnar and orbital structure of the Universe itself. All these conceptions or creations belong to the practical Limitismus, the Form Aspect or Framework of Being in Universals and in Particulars in every Sphere and Department of the Universe.

The Limitismus of Being so defined then stands over against or contrasted with the Substancismus (Substance-Domain) of Being which embraces the Substances, Materials or Stuffs of creation of whatsoever name that infill the interstices of the Framework or are laid upon it, and constitute the richness and fulness and plumpness of the Structure, as the Flesh does of the Body.

The wholeness or Integrality of the structure then consists of the composity of these Two (Limitismus and Substancismus), as the wholeness of the Body consists of the Flesh and the Bone. The Consonants being the Limitismus, and the Vowels the Substancismus of Language; the Two united and coordinated comprise the Trinismal Integrality or Integralismus of Speech.

The Vowels denote, then, Reality, as distinguished from Limitation, or, what is nearly the same thing, Substance, as distinguished from Form.

There are in all Seven (7); or if we include one somewhat more obscure than the rest, a kind of semi-tone, there are Eight (8) full-toned, perfectly distinct and primary Vowel-Sounds, which constitute the Fundamental Vowel Scale of the Universal Alphabet. Their number and nature is governed by the Mechanical Law of their organic production in the mouth. And the number can only be increased by interposing minor shades of sound, as we produce minor shades of color by blending the Seven (7) Prismatic Colors. The new Sound will then belong, in predominance and as a mere variety, to one of these Seven (7) Primary Sounds.

These Seven (7) Sounds constitute the Leading Vowel-System of all Languages; with certain irregularities of omission in the Vowel-System of some Languages.

By the addition of Five (5) equally leading Diphthongs (or Double Vowels) the number of leading Vowel representations is carried up to Twelve (12) or Thirteen (13)—which may then be regarded as the Completed Fundamental Vowel Scale of the Universal Lingual Alphabet.

There are, in like manner, Seven (7)—or Eight (8)—Leading Realities of the Universe, and of every Minor Sphere or Domain of Being in the Universe, which correspond with, echo or repeat, and are therefore the Scientific Analogues of, these Seven (7) Leading Vowel-Sounds, as they occur among the Elements of Speech.

In representing the Vowel-Sounds, it is better, for numerous reasons, to use the letters with their general European Values, than it is to conform to their altered or corrupted English Values. For instance, the Vowel I (i) is pronounced in nearly every language of Europe, and in all those languages which the Missionaries have reduced to writing, as we pronounce e or ee, or as i in machine, or pique; E (e) is pronounced as we enunciate a in paper; and A is reserved for the full Italian sound of a (ah), as in father; U is pronounced like oo, as in German, Spanish, Italian and many other languages.

The Seven (7) Vowels in question are then as follows:

• 1. I, i (ee in feel).
• 2. E, e (a in mate).
• 3. A, a (a in fa-ther).
• 4. o, o (aw in awful).
• 5. u, u (u in curd).
• 6. o, o (o in no-ble).
• 7. u, u (oo in fool).

These sounds are produced in the middle, at the back, and at the front of the mouth respectively. These localities, and something of the nature of the sounds themselves, as slender or full, will be plainly illustrated by the annexed figure:

The following description of the organic formation or production of these sounds now becomes important.

The Vowel-Sound I (ee) is the most slender and condensed of the Vowel-Scale. It is produced at the middle or central part of the mouth, by forcing a slight, closely-squeezed current of Sounding Breath, through a small, smooth channel or opening made by forming a gutter or scoop of the flattened point of the tongue; while, at the same time, the tongue is applied at the edges to the teeth and gums. This sound has, therefore, an actual form resembling that of a thread or line; or still better, like that of a wire drawn through one of the iron openings by means of which wire is manufactured. It resembles also a slight, smooth, roundish stream of fluid escaping through a tube or trough.

This sound has relation, therefore, in the first place, to Centrality or Centre; and then to Length (or Line), which is the First Dimension of Extension. The I-sound continued or prolonged gives the idea of Length. But broken into Least Units of the same quality of Sound, we have individualized Vowel-Sounds of this quality, each one of which is a new Centre; like the successive Points of which a Line is composed.

An individual sound, I, has relation, therefore, to Centre and to Point generally. As such it stands representatively for the Soul or Identity or Central Individuality of Being—for that which gives to anything its distinctive character, as existing in the Point or the Unit, or the Atom, or in any Individual Object or Thing from the Atom up to a World and to the Universe as a whole. Identity is, perhaps, the best single term furnished by our Language to signify this basic idea. Individuality approximates the meaning. It is the pivotal notion of Being itself, and has relation, therefore, to Ontology, the Science of Abstract Being. Essence and Essential Being are terms which may also be used in defining it. The Reader should understand, however, that with reference to this Sound, as to those to be hereafter considered, there is no term or terms in any Language which will indicate their meaning exactly. The analysis of Ideas upon which Universology is based is more fundamental than any which has preceded it. Its Primary Conceptions are, therefore, broader and more inclusive than any former ones which existing terms are employed to denote. In explaining the meaning of these First Elements of Sound, then, as related to the First Elements of Thought, all that is now attempted is to convey as clear a notion of this meaning as is possible with our present terminology, without any expectation that the precise meaning intended will be at once or entirely apprehended.

The sound E (a in mate) is likewise a slender, abstract-like, middle-mouth sound; but differs from I in the fact that it is produced by flattening the opening for the Sounding Breath instead of retaining it in a roundish position. The angles of the mouth are drawn asunder, as if pointing outward to the sides of the head, and the sound is, as it were, elongated in the crosswise direction, as if a stick or a quill were held in the teeth, the extremities extending outward to the sides. A line, in this direction, is the measurer of Breadth, which is the Second Dimension of Extension, crossing the Length-line represented by I at right angles. Side-wise-ness is synonymous with Relation, as one of the Sub-divisions of Reality, or, in other words, of the Realities of Being. Re-lation is, etymologically, from the Latin re, BACK or REFLECTED, and latus, SIDE; that which mutually and reciprocally re-sides the Centre, or furnishes it with sides or wings. The Vowel-Sound E (a, in mate) is, therefore, the Analogue or Corresponding Representative or Equivalent in the Domain of Sound of that Fundamental Conception which, in respect to Thought, is denominated Relation, in respect to Position Collaterality or Sideness, and in respect to Dimension Breadth or Width.

The Sound A (a in father) is made farther back in the mouth, with the mouth stretched quite open, and is the richest and most harmonious of the Vowel Sounds—the Queen of the Vowels. It is the Italian A, the sound most allied with Music and Euphony, and yet a sound which is greatly lacking in the English Language.

The English Reader must guard himself from confounding the Vowel-Sound of which we are here speaking, with the Consonant R, the alphabetical name of which is by a lax habit of pronunciation made to be nearly identical with this Vowel-Sound; while for this beautiful and brilliant and leading Vowel in the Alphabet of Nature we have no distinct letter in English, and reckon it merely as one of the values or powers of the Letter A, to which we ordinarily give the value of E (a in mate, ai in pain).

This Vowel A (ah, a in father) is made with the mouth so open that the form of its production suggests the insertion of a stick or other elongated object in a perpendicular direction to retain the jaws in their position; a practice said sometimes to be resorted to by the Italian Music Teacher, in order to correct the bad habit of talking through the teeth, common among his English pupils.

This height and depth involved in the Sound of the Vowel A (ah) relates it to Thickness, the Third Dimension of Extension; as the Sound I is related to Length, the First of these Dimensions, and the Sound E to Breadth, the Second of them.

Thickness is again related to richness and sweetness, to fulness and fatness, as of the good condition of an Animal in flesh, or of rich and productive soils. And these ideas are again related to wealth or to riches generally; and, hence, again to Substance. The objects of wealth are called goods, and a wealthy man is said to be a 'man of substance.' A (ah) is the representative or pivotal Vowel; that one which embodies most completely the Vowel Idea. Its inherent meaning is especially, therefore, that of Substance or Reality, which, is, in a more general way, as we have seen, the meaning of all the Vowels. The most real, tangible, sensible substance from an ordinary point of view being. Matter, this Vowel-Sound allies itself also with Matter or Materiality as contrasted with Spiritual Substance.

There is, it must now be observed, a flattened variety of A (ah), which will here be represented by the same letter italicized, thus, A, a, which is the so-called flat sound of A (ah) as when heard prolonged in mare, pear, etc., or when stopped, in man, mat, etc. This sound is intermediate in position between E and A (ah). That is to say, it is produced farther back in the mouth and with the mouth somewhat more open than when we say E, and not so far back as when we say A (ah); and with the mouth less open. As contrasted with the A (ah), it is a thin, flat, and slightly unsatisfactory and disagreeable sound, analogically related to the natural semitone fa of the Diatonic Scale of Musical Tones. This Sound signifies accordingly, Thinness, Attenuated Matter, the Ghost or Spirit of Nature, related to Odic Force, Magnetisms, Electricity, etc.; still not, however, Spirit in the sense of Mind, or in the Religio-Spiritual sense of the word. This is the exceptional or bastard Vowel-Sound which has but an imperfect or half claim to be inserted in the Leading Vowel Scale. When inserted, its natural position is between the E and the A (ah), although for certain reasons it sometimes changes position with the A (ah), following instead of preceding it.

The next two Vowel-Sounds, o (aw in awful), and u (u in curd), are somewhat like the a (a in mare), exceptional or bastard Sounds. They are unheard in many Languages, and unrecognized as distinct sounds in many Languages where they are, in fact, heard. Very few Languages have distinct Letter-Signs for them. In using the Roman Alphabet, I am compelled to adopt a contrivance to represent them; which is, as in the case of the a, to print them in italic types, for which, when the remainder of the word is in italic, small capitals are substituted, thus: Oful (awful); Urgent; or, in case the whole word is intended to be italicized, for the sake of emphasis, Oful, Urgent. In script or handwriting, the italic Letter is marked by underscoring a single line, and the small capital by underscoring two lines.

O (aw) is the fullest of the Vowel-Sounds. It is made with the mouth still farther open than when we say A (ah), and somewhat farther back; or, rather, with the cavity enlarged in all directions, and especially deepened. The mouth is stretched in all ways to its utmost capacity, giving a hollow, vacant effect to the voice, instead of the rich, mellow and substantial sound of the A (ah). The Sound so produced is, nevertheless, on the one hand, a broader quality of the A (ah), and there is a strong tendency on the part of the A (ah) to degenerate into it, as when the uneducated German, says Yaw for Ja (yah). On the other hand, this sound has something of the quality of O. It is, therefore, intermediate in quality between A (ah) and O. In respect to meaning, it is the Type, Analogue, Equivalent, or Representative of Volume or Space, whether filled or unfilled by Substance. That is to say, it is the Analogue of Space, not in the sense in which we formerly regarded Space as the negation of Matter; but in the sense of Infinite Dimensionality, or of Dimensionality in all directions, as a vague generalization from the three special dimensions Length, Breadth, and Thickness. It is, therefore, round or ball-like, and huge, and, in respect to the nature of the tone, vague and vacant.

Space as mere nothing has no Letter-Sign in the Alphabet; but is represented by the blank types or spaces used by the printer to separate his syllables and words, as shown heretofore. Space as a Department of Reality, as one of the Realities of the Universe, a bastard or semi-Reality it is true, but nevertheless, belonging to that Domain, is denoted by the Vowel-Sound o (aw).

The Sound u (uh, u in curd), the fifth of the Scale, is called among Phoneticians, the Natural Vowel. It is the simple, unmodulated or unformed vocal breath permitted to flow forth from the throat or larynx with no effort to produce any specific sound. It is the mere grunt, a little prolonged; the unwrought material out of which the other and more perfect Vowel Sounds are made by modulation, or, in other words, by the shapings and strains put upon the machinery of utterance. The Hebrew scheva, the French eu, and e mute, are varieties of this easily-flowing, unmodulated, unstable, unsatisfactory sound. Like the o (aw), this sound u (uh) has a vacant, unfinished, and inorganic character as a sound, while yet, from its great fluency, its frequent occurrence tends, more than that of any other sound, to give to Language that conversational fluency, rapidity and ease which are especially characteristic of the French Tongue. From this same easy laxity of its nature all the other Vowel Sounds tend, in English particularly, when they are not accented, to fall back into this Natural Vowel; as in the following instances: Roman, broken, mirth, martyr, Boston, curd, etc.; words which we pronounce nearly Romun, brokun, murth, martur, Bostun, curd, etc.

This Sound, as to inherent meaning, is, by its alliance with the idea of flux, flow and continuity, the Type, Analogue, Equivalent or Representative in the Domain of Oral Sound of that Fundamental Conception which, in respect to Idea, we denominate Time; and of Stream-like or Currental Being of all kinds.

Space, denoted by o (aw), has relation to the Air as an atmosphere, and to the Ocean of Ether in filling the Great Spheral Dome of Empyrean or Firmament. The Vowel-Sound u (uh) has a similar relation to Fluidity or Liquidity, and, hence, to Water as a typical fluid, to the Ocean Flux or Tide, to the Flowing Stream, etc. This Time-like idea is uni-dimensional or elongate in a general or fluctuating sense; not specifically like I. It is in view of this characteristic, that it is broadly and primarily contrasted with the Spacic significance of o (aw), which is omnidimensional.

The two remaining Vowel-Sounds, the O and U (oo), repeat the o (aw) and u (uh), in a sense, but in a new and more refined stage or degree of development. The sound O is made at the front mouth—the locality the most openly in sight of any at which Sound is produced—by rounding the lips into an irregularly-circular, face-like, or disk-like presentation. The O Sound so produced denotes Presence, as of an object by virtue of its reflection of Light; and, hence, Light, Clearness, Purity, Reflection.

The U (oo in fool) is an obscured or impure pronunciation of the O. The lips are protruded as if to say O; but not being sufficiently so for the production of the pure Sound, the Sound actually given is mixed, or made turbid or thick. The U-Sound denotes accordingly Retiracy, Obscurity, Shade, Turbidity, Mixedness, or Impurity, as of Colors in a dim light, or as of Materials in a slime or plasma, etc.

Metaphysically, O denotes Pure Theory, the Abstract; and U (oo) signifies the Actual or Practical, the Tempic, the Concrete (the Temporal or Profane), which is always mixed with contingency.

Other Vowel-Sounds, shades more or less distinct of some one of these Leading Sounds, are interspersed by nature between these diatonic Sounds, like the half tones and quarter tones in Music. Two of these French eu and e muet modifications of u (uh) have been mentioned. Eu is modulated at the lips, and e muet at the middle mouth, but both have the general character of u (uh). The French U is a modification of the U (oo), of the Scale just given, but made finer, and approximating I (ee). The Italian O is a modification of o (aw). These four are the Leading Semi-tone Sounds; which along with a carry the Scale from Seven (7) diatonic up to twelve (12) chromatic. As they will be passed over for the present with this mere mention, the points of the Scale at which they intervene will not be now considered.

Discarding these minor shades of Sounds, the Leading Scale of Vowel-Sounds is augmented from Seven (7) or Eight (8) to Twelve (12) or Thirteen (13), by the addition of the following five (5) Diphthongs or Double Vowels. In respect to the quality of Sound, they are pronounced just as the Vowels of which they are composed would be if separated and succeeding each other. To make the Diphthong long, the two Sounds are kept quite distinct. To make it short, they are closely blended; as, AU (ah-oo), long; A[)U] (ahoo), short. With no diacretical mark they are pronounced ad libidum, or neither very long nor short.

The following are the five (5) Diphthongs which complete the Vowel Scale:

The IU is composed of the first Vowel I (ee) and the last U (oo). The I-sound, so placed before another Vowel-Sound, tends readily to be converted into or more properly to prefix to itself the weak Consonant-Sound represented in English by Y (in German and Italian by J); thus YIU for IU. The whole of the three Sounds so involved (a real Triphthong) are represented by the English U long—which is never a simple Vowel-Sound—as in union, pronounced yioonyun.

This Diphthong IU (or yiu) denotes Conjunction, Conjuncture, Event (the two ends meeting); and also Coupling or Unition; a central point between extremes.

The next and the most important of the Diphthongs (except AU) is AI, compounded of the third (A) and the first (I) of the simple Vowel-Sounds. It is pronounced very nearly like the English long I, as in pine, fine, etc., which is not a simple Vowel; but is compounded of the two simple Vowels above mentioned (A and I, ahee) in a very close union with each other; or, as it were, squeezed into each other. The Tikiwa (Tee-kee-wah) combination (this is the name of the Scientific Universal Language), AI, is not ordinarily quite so close, and when pronounced long, is quite open, so that each Vowel is distinctly heard (ah-ee).

This Diphthong AI may be regarded as embracing and epitomizing the lower or ground wing or half of the Simple Vowel-Scale (I E a A); its meaning is, therefore, that of Basic or Substantial Reality: the Ground of Existence.

Contrasted with this is the next Diphthong, OI (aw-ee), compounded of the fifth (o) and the first (I) Vowel-Sounds. It is the Sound of oy in boy. The I contained in this Diphthong may be regarded as standing in the place of U at the other extremity of the Scale. This last Sound has a tendency to return into I through the French slender U, illustrating the Principle of the Contact of Extremes. The Diphthong OI may, therefore, be viewed as embracing and epitomizing the upper or ethereal wing or half of the Simple Vowel Scale (o u O U); its meaning is, therefore, that of Aerial or Ascending Reality; Loftiness or Loft.

Next there occurs a Diphthong OI, pronounced as the same letters in the English word going, which has a half claim to be ranked with the Leading Diphthongs. It is sometimes reckoned into, and sometimes out of, the Scale—like a among the Simple Vowels. Its meaning is that of Frontness, Prospect.

Finally, the great Focal Diphthong, that which includes and epitomizes the whole Vowel Scale, is AU (ah-oo), compounded of the third Vowel-Sound (A) and the Seventh (or Eighth) U. It is the sound heard in our, or in the Spanish causa. The meaning of this Supreme Diphthong and general Vowel Representative is Universal Reality. It stands practically in the place of all the Vowels, in the Composition of Words of an inclusive meaning. That is to say, it integrates in its signification, all that is inherently signified by all the other Vowels.

While, however, AU is practically and usually the Representative, Analogue or Equivalent, in the Domain of Language, of Universal Reality among the Elements of Being, this is so only in practice. Theoretically, the Diphthong best adapted to represent this Idea is AO; the A and the O being, in a supreme sense, the two most prominent or leading Vowels. But it is a little difficult to retain the Organs of Utterance in the position which they must assume in order to pronounce these two Vowel-Sounds in conjunction. The organs readily and naturally slide into the easier position in which they utter AU. This is correspondential with the difficulty always experienced in adhering to Pure Theory (O); and the natural tendency to glide from it, as ground too high for permanent occupation, into the more accommodating Domain of the Practical (U).

The Full Scale of Vowel Sounds coupled with the Full Scale of the (Indeterminate) Realities of Universal Being is, therefore, as follows:

1. Sounds.	2. Realities of Being.
1. I, i (ee as in feel).	Entity or Identity (Centre, Least Element, Essential Being, Individuality).
2. E, e (a as in mate).	Relation (Sideness, Collaterality, Adjectivity).
3. A, a (a as in mare).	Unsubstantiality (Thinness, Ghost, Apparition).
4. A, a (a as in fa-ther).	Substance (Thickness, Materiality, Richness, Goodness).
5. O, o (aw as in awful).	Space (Volume, Expansion).
6. U, u (u as in curd).	Time (Flux, Flow).
7. O, o (o as in noble).	Light (Reflection, Parity, Clearness, Theory).
8. U, u (oo as in fool).	Shade (Retiracy, Turbidity, Mixture, Practice).
9. IU, iu (YIU), (u in union, use).	Conjunction (Event, Joining).
10. AI, ai (ah-ee, i in fine).	Basic Reality (Ground of Existence).
11. Oi, oi (aw-ee, oy in boy).	Aerial or Ascending Reality (Loft, Loftiness).
12. OI, oi (o-ee, oi in going).	Frontness, Prospect.
13. AU, au (ou in our).	Universal Reality.

The Vowels and Diphthongs of this Basic Scale may be Long or Short, without any change of quality. This difference is indicated by diacritical marks, which it is not now necessary to exhibit.

In addition to these merely quantitative differences in the Vowel-Sounds, there is a corresponding difference of Quality, which produces a Counter-Scale of Vowel-Sounds; an echo or repetition of the Basic Scale throughout its entire length. This new Scale is a Series of Sounds predominantly short in quantity. They are called by Mr. Pitman the Stopped Vowels. (In German they are denominated the Sharp Vowels.) These Sounds are nearly always followed by a Consonant-Sound in the same syllable, by which they are stopped or broken abruptly off, and the purity of their quality as Vowels affected or disturbed.

It is not essential for our present purpose to give a detailed list of these Vowels; more especially as every Reader will readily recall them; as I, in pIn; E, in pEt; A in pAt; o, in not; u, in but; O, in stOne, cOAt; U, in fUll.

In respect to the Vowel Diphthongs, the Stopped Sounds are not materially different from the short quantities of the corresponding Full ones; and no effort need be made to distinguish the two former varieties of Sound. The same is true of the Short and Stopped Sounds of A (ah). But the difference is very marked in the remaining Seven (7) Simple Vowels; the Stopped Sounds of which are given above. For the ordinary purposes of Language it is not necessary to distinguish these Stopped Sounds by any diacritical mark. But in the short Root-Words, where a difference of meaning depends upon the difference between the full and stopped Vowel, the so-called grave accent is employed to denote the stopped quality, as pique, pick, for example, written thus: pik, pik.

The meaning of the Stopped Vowel-Sounds is merely the broken or fractionized aspect of the same ideas which are symbolized by the corresponding Full Vowel-Sounds.

The nature and meaning of the Vowels being thus explained with sufficient amplitude for the uses now in view, we are prepared to advance, in a subsequent paper, to the consideration of the individual Consonant-Sounds, their character and inherent signification.

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THE TWO PLATFORMS.

It was the opprobrium of the Republican party in the Presidential campaign of 1860, that the Southern States were not, in any but a limited degree, represented in its ranks; and so it was called a sectional party. The Presidential campaign of 1864 is not less remarkable, on the other hand, because the party which now appropriates the honored name of Democratic seems to ignore the crime of rebellion on the part of those Southern States, and thus invites an even more obnoxious appellation. History will record with amazement, as among the strange phenomena of a war the most wicked of all the wicked wars with which ambition has desolated the earth (phenomena that will perplex men and women of loyal instincts and righteous common sense to the latest day), the resolutions of the Chicago Convention of 1864.

It is the purpose of this article to consider as dispassionately as may be, those Chicago resolutions, as well as the ones previously adopted at Baltimore; desiring to look at them both from the standpoint of a patriotism which loves the whole country as one indivisible nation—the gift of God, to be cherished as we cherish our homes and our altars.

A convention called of all those, without respect to former political affinities, who believed in an uncompromising prosecution of the war for the Union till the armed rebellion against its authority should be subdued and brought to terms, met at Baltimore on the 7th of June last, and nominated Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois, for reëlection as President, and Andrew Johnson, of Tennessee, for election as Vice-President. The convention, with exceeding good sense, and obedient to the just and patriotic impulses of the people, disregarded all party names of the past, and called itself simply a National Union Convention. Two months later, and on the 29th of August last, obedient to the call of Democratic committees, a convention met at Chicago, composed of men whose voices were for peace, and nominated for President General George B. McClellan, of New Jersey, and for Vice-President George H. Pendleton, of Ohio. This convention took the name of Democratic, indicating thereby not the idea of the equal rule of all the people, as the name imports, but the traditions and policies of those degenerate days before the war, when Democracy had strangely come to mean the rule of a few ambitious men. In other words, it ignored the crime of those men (who have sacrificed their country to their ambition), and assumed that the country could also overlook the crime. It supposed the people ready to strike hands with rebellion and elevate the authors of rebellion to power again.

Perhaps the difference between the two conventions may be concisely stated thus: The Chicago Convention was for peace first, and Union afterward; the Baltimore Convention for Union first, then peace. Let us see.