THE GALAXY.

A Magazine of Entertaining Reading.

VOL. XXIII.

JANUARY, 1877, TO JUNE, 1877.

NEW YORK:

Sheldon & Company,

1877.

Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1877, by
SHELDON & COMPANY,
in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. C.

Typography of Churchwell & Teall. Electrotyped by Smith & McDougal.

INDEX TO VOLUME XXIII.

		PAGE.
[Administration of Abraham Lincoln]	Gideon Welles	[5], 149
[Almanacs, Some Old]	Charles Wyllys Elliott	[24]
Alnaschar. 1876	Bret Harte	217
Alfred de Musset	Henry James, Jr.	790
[Applied Science]	Charles Barnard	[79], 160
Art's Limitations	Margaret J. Preston	159
Assja	Ivan Tourguéneff	368
Aut Diabolus aut Nihil		218
[Ballad of Constance]	William Winter	[109]
Balzac, Letters of	Henry James, Jr.	183
Battalion, The	J. W. De Forest	817
[Beer]	S. G. Young	[62]
Beethoven, To	Sidney Lanier	394
Cigarettes		471
Cleopatra's Soliloquy	Mary Bayard Clarke	506
Climbing Rose, The		596
Cossacks, An Evening Party with the	David Ker	406
Dead Star, The	John James Piatt	660
Dead Vashti, A	Louise Stockton	428
Defeated	Mary L. Ritter	354
Dramatic Canons, The	Frederick Whittaker	396, 508
[Drift-Wood]	Philip Quilibet	[125], 265, 411, 553, 695, 842

[The Twelve-Month Sermon]; [Ribbons and Coronets at Market Rates]; The Spinning of Literature; Growth of American Taste for Art; The Wills of the Triumvirate; The Duel and the Newspapers; The Industry of Interviewers; Talk about Novels; Primogeniture and Public Bequests; The Times and the Customs; Victor Hugo; Evolutionary Hints for Novelists; The Travellers; Swindlers and Dupes; Pegasus in Harness.

Eastern Question, The	A. H. Guernsey	359
English Peerage, The	E. C. Grenville Murray	293
English Traits	Richard Grant White	520
English Women	Richard Grant White	675
Executive Patronage and Civil Service Reform	J. L. M. Curry	826
Fascinations of Angling, The	George Dawson	818
Fallen Among Thieves		809
Great Seal of the United States	John D. Champlin, Jr.	691
Hard Times	Charles Wyllys Elliott	474
[Head of Hercules, The]	James M. Floyd	[52]
[Heartbreak Cameo]	Lizzie W. Champney	[111]
Home of My Heart	F. W. Bourdillon	543
[Influences]	Charles Carroll	[124]
[Juliet on the Balcony]	Howard Glyndon	[42]
Lassie's Complaint, The	James Kennedy	367
Libraries, Public in the United States	John A. Church	639
Life Insurance		686, 803
[Literature, Current]		[137], 279, 425, 567, 708, 855
[Love's Messengers]	Mary Ainge De Vere	[51]
Love's Requiem	William Winter	182
[Lucille's Letter]		[23]
[Madcap Violet. Chapters XLIV. to End]	William Black	[30]
Margary, The Murder of	Walter A. Burlingame	175
Miss Misanthrope. Chapters I. to XX.	Justin McCarthy	244, 302, 450, 597, 746
Miss Tinsel	Henry Sedley	337
Mohegan-Hudson	James Manning Winchell	637
[Monsieur Delille]	T. S. Fay	[119]
National Bank Notes, How Redeemed	Frank W. Lautz	647
[Nebulæ]	By The Editor	[144], 288, 431, 576, 720, 864
[Normandy and Pyrenees]	Henry James, Jr.	[95]
On Being Born Away from Home	Titus Munson Coan	533
[Our Rural Divinity]	John Burroughs	[43]
Philter, The	Mary B. Dodge	242
Portrait D'une Jeune Femme Inconnue	M. E. W. S.	336
Progressive Baby, A	S. F. Hopkins	581, 727
Punished, The	Ella Wheeler	789
Pythia, The Modern	S. B. Luce	209
Renunciation	Kate Hillard	358
Reflected Light	Mary Ainge De Vere	802
[Romance]	J. W. De Forest	[61]
Roman Picture, A	Mary Lowe Dickinson	674
Saint Lambert's Coal	Margaret J. Preston	519
[Scientific Miscellany]	Prof. John A. Church	[129], 269, 415, 558, 699, 846

[Complications of the Channel Tunnel]; [A Town of Dwarfs]; [Whooping Cough]; [British Association Notes]; [An English Crop]; [Influence of White Colors]; [An Involved Accident]; [An Old Aqueduct System]; [Galvanism Cannot Restore Exhausted Vitality]; [Curious Optical Experiments]; [Ice Machines]; [American Antiquities]; Protection from Lightning; Steam Machinery and Privateering; Man and Animals; The Limbs of Whales; Our Educational Standing; Surface Markings; The Oldest Stone Tools; Origin of the Spanish People; The English Meteorite; The Boomerang; A Western Lava Field; The Principle of Cephalization; Curiosities of the Herring Fishery; Natural Gas in Furnaces; South Carolina Phosphates; Rare Metals from Old Coins; A French Mountain Weather Station; Migration of the Lemming; New Discovery of Neolithic Remains; October Weather; French National Antiquities; The Force of Crystallization; Frozen Nitro-Glycerine; English Great Guns; Ear Trumpets for Pilots; Hot Water in Dressing Ores; Ocean Echoes; The Delicacy of Chemists' Balances; Government Control of the Dead; Microscopic Life; The Sources of Potable Water; Theory of the Radiometer; Tempered Glass in The Household; The New York Aquarium; The Cruelty of Hunting; The Gorilla in Confinement; Instruction Shops In Boston; Moon Madness; The Argument against Vaccination; The Telephone; Damages by an Insect; The Summer Scientific Schools; An Intelligent Quarantine; The "Grasshopper Commission"; Surveying Plans for the Season; The Causes of Violent Death; A New Induction Coil; French Property Owners; Trigonometrical Survey of New York; The Use of Air in Ore Dressing; Polar Colonization; The Survey in California; A German Savant among the Sioux; Ballooning for Air Currents; The Greatest of Rifles; Vienna Bread; Modern Loss in Warfare; A New Treasury Rule; A Hygienic School; Microscopic Comparison of Blood Corpuscles; The Summer Scientific Schools; The Wages Value of Steam Power; The Negro's Color; Scientific Items.

[Shakespeare, On Reading]	Richard Grant White	[70], 233
Shall Punishment Punish?	Chauncey Hickox	355
Sister St. Luke	Constance Fenimore Woolson	489
Sounding Brass	Lizzie W. Champney	671
South, The, Her Condition and Needs	Hon. J. L. M. Curry	544
Story of a Lion	Albert Rhodes	196
Spring	H. R. H.	841
Spring Longing	Emma Lazarus	725
Theatres of London	Henry James, Jr.	661
Three Periods of Modern Music	Richard Grant White	832
Théâtre Français, The	Henry James, Jr.	437
Tried and True	Sylvester Baxter	470
Two Worlds, The	Ellice Hopkins	488
Unknown Persons	Mary Murdoch Mason	657
"Uniformed Militia" Service, The	C. H. M.	776
[Walt Whitman, To]	Joaquin Miller	[29]
Woman's Gifts, A	Mary Ainge De Vere	208
Wordsworth's Corrections	Titus Munson Coan	322
Yosemite Hermit, The	Clara G. Dolliver	782

THE GALAXY.

VOL. XXIII.—JANUARY, 1877.—No. 1.

ADMINISTRATION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

The political differences which have generated parties in this country date back to an early period. They existed under the old confederation, were perceptible in the formation of the Constitution and establishment of "a more perfect union." Differences on fundamental principles of government led to the organization of parties which, under various names, after the adoption of the Federal Constitution, divided the people and influenced and often controlled national and State elections. Neither of the parties, however, has always strictly adhered or been true to its professed principles. Each has, under the pressure of circumstances and to secure temporary ascendancy in the Federal or State governments, departed from the landmarks and traditions which gave it its distinctive character. The Centralists, a name which more significantly than any other expresses the character, principles, and tendency of those who favor centralization of power in a supreme head that shall exercise paternal control over States and people, have under various names constituted one party. On the other hand, the Statists, under different names, have from the first been jealous of central supremacy. They believe in local self-government, support the States in all their reserved and ungranted rights, insist on a strict construction of the Constitution and the limitation of Federal authority to the powers specifically delegated in that instrument.

The broad and deep line of demarcation between these parties has not always been acknowledged. Innovation and change have sometimes modified and disturbed this line; but after a period the distinctive boundary has reappeared and antagonized the people. During the administration of Mr. Monroe, known as the "era of good feeling," national party lines were almost totally obliterated, and local and personal controversies took their place. National questions were revived, however, and contested with extreme violence during several succeeding administrations. Thirty years later, when the issues of bank, tariff, internal improvements, and an independent treasury were disposed of, there was as complete a break up of parties as in the days of Monroe. It was not, however, in an "era of good feeling" that this later dislocation of parties took place; but an attempt was made in 1850 by leading politicians belonging to different organizations to unite the people by a compromise or an arrangement as unnatural as it was insincere—party lines if not obliterated were, as the authors intended, in a measure broken down. This compromise, as it was called, was a sacrifice of honest principles, and instead of allaying disputes, was followed by a terrific storm of contention and violence transcending thing the country had ever experienced, and ended in a civil war.

The time has not yet arrived for a calm and dispassionate review of the acts and actors of that period and the events of the immediately succeeding years; but the incidents that took place and the experience so dearly purchased should not be perverted, misunderstood, or wholly forgotten.

The compromises of 1850, instead of adjusting differences and making the people of one mind on political questions, actually caused in their practical results the alienation of life-long party friends, led to new associations among old opponents, and created organizations that partook more of a sectional character than of honest constitutional differences on fundamental questions relative to the powers and authority of the Government, such as had previously divided the people. The facility with which old political opponents came together in the compromise measures of 1850, and abandoned principles and doctrines for which they had battled through their whole lives, begot popular distrust. Confidence in the sincerity of the men who so readily made sacrifices of principles was forfeited or greatly impaired. The Whig party dwindled under it, and as an organization shortly went out of existence. A large portion of its members, disgusted with what they considered the insincerity if not faithlessness of their leaders, yet unwilling to attach themselves to the Democratic party, which had coalesced in the movement, gathered together in a secret organization, styling themselves "Know Nothings." Democrats in some quarters, scarcely less dissatisfied with the compromises, joined the Know Nothing order, and in one or two annual elections this strange combination, without avowed principles or purpose, save that of the defeat and overthrow of politicians, who were once their trusted favorites, was successful. In this demoralized condition of affairs, the Democrats by the accession of Whigs in the Southern States obtained possession of the Government and maintained their ascendancy through the Pierce administration; and, in a contest quite as much sectional as political, elected Buchanan in 1856.

But these were the expiring days of the old Democratic organization, which, under the amalgamating process of the compromise measures, became shattered and mixed, especially in the Southern States, with former Whigs, and was to a great extent thereafter sectionalized. The different opposing political elements united against it and organized and established the Republican party, which triumphed in the election of Lincoln in 1860. The administration which followed and was inaugurated in 1861 differed in essential particulars from either of the preceding political organizations. Men of opposing principles—Centralists, who like Hamilton and patriots of that class were for a strong imperial national government, with supervising and controlling authority over the States, on one hand, and Statists on the other, who, like Jefferson, adhered to State individuality and favored a league or federation of States, a national republic of limited and clearly defined powers, with a strict observance of all the reserved right of the local commonwealths—were brought together in the elections of 1860. It has been represented and recorded as grave history that the Republican party was an abolition party. Such was not the fact, although the small and utterly powerless faction which, under the lead of William Lloyd Garrison and others, had for years made aggressive war on slavery, was one of the elements which united with Whigs and Democrats in the election of Mr. Lincoln. Nor was that result a Whig triumph, though a large portion of the Whigs in the free States, after the compromises of 1850, from natural antagonism to the Democrats, entered into the Republican organization. While it is true that a large majority of the Whigs of the North relinquished their old organization and became Republicans, it is no less true that throughout the slave States, and in many of the free States, the members of the Whig party to a considerable extent supported Bell or Breckenridge. But Democrats dissatisfied with the measures of the Pierce and Buchanan administrations, in much larger numbers than is generally conceded, took early and efficient part in the Republican organizations—some on account of the repeal of the Missouri compromise, but a much larger number in consequence of the efforts of the central Government at Washington, by what was considered by them an abuse of civil trust, and by military interference, to overpower the settlers in Kansas, denying them the right of self-government, and an attempt arbitrarily and surreptitiously to impose upon the inhabitants against their will a fraudulent Constitution. It was this large contribution of free-thinking and independent Democrats, who had the courage to throw off party allegiance and discipline in behalf of the principles of free government on which our republican system is founded, the right of the people to self-government, and, consequently, the right to form and establish their own constitution without dictation or interference from the central government so long as they violated no provision of the organic law, that gave tone, form, and ascendancy to the Republican party in every free State.

Persistent efforts have been made to establish as historical truths the representations that the civil war had its origin in a scheme or purpose to abolish slavery in the States where it existed, and that the election of Abraham Lincoln was an abolition triumph—a premeditated, aggressive, sectional war upon the South; whereas the reverse is the fact—the Republican party in its inception was a strictly constitutional party, that defended the rights of the people, the rights of the States, and the rights of the Federal Government, which were assailed by a sectional combination that was not satisfied with the Constitution as it was, but proposed to exact new guarantees from the nation for the protection of what they called "Southern rights"—rights unknown to the Constitution. The misrepresentations that the Republicans were aggressive and aimed to change the organic law have not been without their influence, temporarily at least, in prejudicing and warping the public mind. It is true that the slavery question was most injudiciously and unwisely brought into the party controversies of the country; but it was done by the slaveholders or their political representatives in Congress after the failure of the nullifiers to obtain ascendancy in the Government on the subject of free trade and resistance to the revenue laws.

John C. Calhoun, a man of undoubted talents, but of unappeasable ambition, had at an early period of his life, while Secretary of War, and still a young man, aspired to the office of President. By his ability and patriotic course during the war of 1812, and subsequently by a brilliant career as a member of Mr. Monroe's Cabinet, he had acquired fame and a certain degree of popularity which favored his pretensions, particularly with young men and army officers. Schemes and projects of national aggrandizement by internal improvements, protection to home industries, large military expenditures, and measures of a centralizing tendency which were popular in that era of no parties, gave him éclat as Secretary of War. Flattered by his attentions and by his shining qualities, military men became his enthusiastic supporters, and received encouragement from him in return. It was the first attempt to elect so young a man to be Chief Magistrate, and was more personal than political in its character. In the memorable contest for the successorship to President Monroe, Mr. Calhoun at one time seemed to be a formidable candidate; but his popularity being personal was evanescent, and failed to enlist the considerate and reflecting. Even his military hopes were soon eclipsed by General Jackson, whose bold achievements and successes in the Indian and British wars captivated the popular mind. Jackson had also, as a representative and Senator in Congress, Judge of the Supreme Court of Tennessee, and Governor of Florida, great civil experience. Mr. Calhoun was, however, in the political struggle that took place in 1824, elected to the second office of the republic, while in the strife, confusion, and break up of parties no one of the competing candidates for President received a majority of the electoral votes. He and his supporters submitted to, it may be said acquiesced in, the result then and also in 1828, when General Jackson was elected President and Mr. Calhoun was reëlected to the office of Vice-President. This acquiescence, however, was reluctant; but with an expectation that he would in 1833, at the close of General Jackson's term, be the successor of the distinguished military chieftain.

But the arrangements of calculating politicians often end in disappointments. Such was the misfortune of Mr. Calhoun. His ambitious and apparently well contrived plans had most of them an abortive and hapless termination. Observation and experience convinced him, after leaving Mr. Monroe's Cabinet, that the educated and reflective Statists or State rights men of the country, and especially of the South, would never sanction or be reconciled to the exercise of power by the Federal Government to protect the manufacturing interests of New England, or to construct roads and canals in the West, at the expense of the National Treasury. These were, however, favorite measures of a class of politicians of the period who had special interests to subserve, and who carried with them the consolidationists, or advocates of a strong and magnificent central government. The tariff, internal improvements, and kindred subjects became classified and known in the party politics of that day as the "American system"—a system of high taxes and large expenditures by the Federal Government—without specific constitutional authority for either. Parties were arrayed on opposite sides of this system, which, besides the political principles involved, soon partook of a sectional character. High and oppressive duties on importations, it was claimed, were imposed to foster certain industries in the North to the injury of the South.

Henry Clay, a politician and statesman of wonderful magnetic power, was the eloquent champion of the "American system," and enlisted in his favor the large manufacturing interest in the North and the friends of internal improvement in the West. These measures were made national issues, and Mr. Clay, Speaker of the House of Representatives, appropriated them to his personal advancement, and was their recognized leading advocate. Mr. Calhoun could not be second to his Western rival, but abandoned the policy of protection, internal improvements, and great national undertakings, and allied himself to the commercial and plantation interests, which opposed the system, expecting to identify himself with and to receive the support of the Statists. But the strict constructionists of Virginia, Georgia, and other States of the old Jefferson school distrusted him and withheld their confidence and support.

South Carolina, erratic, brilliant, and impulsive, had never fully harmonized with the politicians of Virginia in their political doctrines, but had been inclined to ridicule the rigid and non-progressive principles of her statesmen, who, always cautious, were now slow to receive into fellowship and to commit themselves to the new convert who sought their support. They slighted him, and rejected his nullification remedies. Instead of following the Palmetto State in her fanatical party schemes on the alleged issue of free trade, and supporting her "favorite son" in his theories, they sustained General Jackson, whose Union sentiments they approved, and who, to the disgust of Calhoun, became a candidate for reëlection in 1832 and received the votes of almost the whole South.

In this crisis, when the heated partisans of South Carolina in their zeal for free trade and State rights had made a step in advance of the more staid and reflecting Statists, and undertook to abrogate and nullify the laws of the Federal Government legally enacted, they found themselves unsupported and in difficulty, and naturally turned to their acknowledged leader for guidance. To contest the Federal Government, and pioneer the way for his associates to resist and overthrow the Administration, Mr. Calhoun resigned the office of Vice-President and accepted that of Senator, where his active mind, fertile in resources, could, and as he and they believed would extricate them. There was, however, at the head of the Government in that day a stern, patriotic, and uncompromising Chief Magistrate, who would listen to no mere temporizing expedients when the stability of the Union was involved, and who, while recognizing and maintaining the rights of the States, never forgot the rights that belonged to the Federal Government. In his extremity, when confronting this inflexible President, Mr. Calhoun hastened to make friends with his old opponents, Clay, Webster, and the protectionists, the advocates of the "American system," the authors and champions of the very policy which had been made the pretext or justification for nullification and resistance to Federal law and the Federal authority. This coalition of hostile factions combined in a scheme, or compromise, where each sacrificed principles to oppose the administration of Jackson. It was an insincere and unrighteous coalition which soon fell asunder.

In the mean time, while nullification was hopelessly prostrate, and before the coalition was complete, the prolific mind of the aspiring Carolinian devised a new plan and a new system of tactics which it was expected would sectionalize and unite the South. This new device was a defence of slavery—a subject in which the entire South was interested—against the impudent demands of the abolitionists. Not until the nullifiers were defeated, and had failed to draw the South into their nullification plan, was slavery agitation introduced into Congress and made a sectional party question with aggressive demands for national protection. The abolitionists were few in numbers, and of little account in American politics. Some benevolent Quakers and uneasy fanatics, who neither comprehended the structure of our Federal system nor cared for the Constitution, had annually for forty years petitioned Congress to give freedom to the slaves. But the statesmen of neither party listened to these unconstitutional appeals until the defeated nullifiers professed great apprehension in regard to them, and introduced the subject as a disturbance, and made it a sensational sectional issue in Congress and the elections.

From the first agitation of the subject as a party question, slavery in all its phases was made sectional and aggressive by the South. Beginning with a denial of the right to petition for the abolition of slavery, and with demands for new and more exacting national laws for the arrest and rendition of fugitives, the new sectional party test was followed by other measures; such as the unconditional admission of Texas, the extension of slavery into all the free territory acquired from Mexico, the repeal of the Missouri compromise, a denial to the people of Kansas of the right to frame their own constitution, and other incidental and irritating questions that were not legitimately within the scope of Federal authority. Fierce contentions prevailed for years, sometimes more violent than at others.

In 1850 a budget of compromises, which has already been alluded to, involving a surrender of principles and an enactment of laws that were unwarranted by the Constitution, and offensive in other respects, had been patched up by old Congressional party leaders, ostensibly to reconcile conflicting views and interests, but which were superficial remedies for a cancerous disease, and intended more to glorify the authors than to promote the country's welfare. Both of the great parties were committed by the managers to these compromises, but the effect upon each was different. The Whigs, tired of constant defeat, hoped for a change by the compromises that would give them recognition and power; but instead of these they found themselves dwarfed and weakened, while the Democrats, who yielded sound principles to conciliate their Southern allies, were for a time numerically strengthened in that section by accessions from the Whigs. Old party lines became broken, and in the Presidential contest of 1852 the Democratic candidate, General Pierce, a young and showy, but not profound man, was elected by an overwhelming majority over the veteran General Scott, who was the candidate of the Whigs. From this date the Whig organization dwindled and had but a fragmentary existence. Thenceforward, until the overthrow of the Democratic party, the Government at Washington tended to centralization. Fidelity to party, and adherence to organization with little regard for principle, were its political tests in the free States. Sectional sentiments to sustain Southern aggressions, under the name of "Southern rights," were inculcated, violent language, and acts that were scarcely less so, prevailed through the South and found apologists and defenders at the North. Presidents Pierce and Buchanan, literally "northern men with southern principles," were submissive to these sectional aggressions, acquiesced in the repeal of the Missouri compromise, the extension and nationalizing of slavery, hitherto a State institution, and also to the schemes to prevent the establishment of a free constitution by the people of Kansas. The mass of voters opposed to the policy of these administrations, and who constituted the Republican party, were not entirely in accord on fundamental principles and views of government, but had been brought into united action from the course of events which followed the Mexican war, the acquisition of territory, and the unfortunate compromises of 1850. The sectional strife, for the alleged reason of Lincoln's election and Republican success, which eventuated in hostilities in 1861, and the tremendous conflict that succeeded and shook the foundation of the Government during the ensuing four years, threatening the national existence, absorbed all minor questions of a purely political party character, and made the Cabinet of Mr. Lincoln, though its members entertained organic differences, a unit. There were occasions when the antecedent opinions and convictions of the members elicited discussion in regard to the powers, limitations, and attributes of government; but in the midst of war disagreeing political opinions as well as the laws themselves were silenced. Each and all felt the necessity of harmonious and efficient action to preserve the Union.

This was especially the case during the first two years of the war of secession. Not only the President's constitutional advisers, but the Republican members of Congress, embracing many captious, factious, and theoretical controversialists, acted in harmony and concert. Murmurs were heard among its friends, and dissatisfaction felt that the Administration was not sufficiently energetic or arbitrary, and because it did not immediately suppress the rebellion. A long period of peace which the country had enjoyed rendered the malcontents incapable of judging of the necessities of preparation for war. "On to Richmond" became the cry of the impatient and restless before the armies mustered into service were organized. The violent and impassioned appeals of excited and mischievous speakers and writers created discontent and clamor that could not always be appeased or successfully resisted. Not content with honest if not always intelligent criticism of the Government, some editors, papers, writers, and speakers, at an early period and indeed throughout the war, condemned the policy pursued, assumed to direct the management of affairs, and advanced crude and absurd notions of the manner in which the Government should be administered and military operations conducted. For a period after the rout at Bull Run, which seemed a rebuke to these inconsiderate partisans, there was a temporary lull of complaints and apparent acquiescence by Republicans in the measures of administration.

Military differences and army jealousies existed from the beginning, which were aggravated and stimulated by partisan friends and opponents of the rival officers, and by dissent from the policy pursued in the conduct of military affairs to which many took exception.

General Scott was the military oracle of the Administration in the first days of the war. His ability and great experience entitled him to regard and deference on all questions relating to military operations. No one appreciated his qualities more than the President, unless it was General Scott himself, who with great self-esteem was nevertheless not unconscious that his age and infirmities had impaired his physical energies, and in some respects unfitted him to be the active military commander. It was his misfortune that he prided himself more if possible on his civil and political knowledge and his administrative ability than on his military skill and capacity. As a politician his opinions were often chimerical, unstable, and of little moment; but his military knowledge and experience were valuable. With headquarters at Washington, and for thirty years consulted and trusted by successive administrations of different parties in important emergencies, internal and external, and at one time the selected candidate of one of the great political parties for President, he had reason to feel that he was an important personage in the republic; also that he was competent, and that it was a duty for him to participate in political matters, and to advise in civil affairs when there were threatened dangers. But while he was sagacious to detect the premonitory symptoms of disturbance, and always ready to obey and execute military orders, he was in political and civil matters often weak, irresolute, and infirm of purpose. He had in the autumn of 1860 warned President Buchanan of danger to be apprehended from the secession movement, and wisely suggested measures to preserve peace; but he soon distrusted and abandoned his own suggestions. Without much knowledge of Mr. Lincoln, and believing erroneously, as did many others, that Mr. Seward was to be the controlling mind in the new administration, he early put himself in communication with that gentleman. The two agreed upon the policy of surrendering or yielding to the States in secession the fortresses within their respective limits. It has been said, and circumstances indicate that there was also an understanding by Mr. Seward with certain secession leaders, that the forts, particularly Sumter, if not attacked, should not be reinforced. Of the plans of Mr. Seward and General Scott, and the understanding which either of them had with the secessionists, President Lincoln was not informed; but, while he had a sense of duty and a policy of his own, he attentively and quietly listened to each and to all others entitled to give their opinions.

The reports of Major Anderson and the defence of Sumter being military operations, the President, pursuant to Mr. Seward's advice, referred to General Scott, and it was supposed by those gentlemen that the President acquiesced in their conclusions. Nor were they alone in that supposition, for the President, while cautiously feeling his way, sounding the minds of others, and gathering information from every quarter, wisely kept his own counsel and delayed announcing his determination until the last moment. He was accused of being culpably slow, when he was wisely deliberate.

When his decision to reinforce Sumter was finally made known, the Secretary of State and the General-in-Chief were surprised, embarrassed, and greatly disappointed; for it was an utter negation and defeat of the policy which they had prescribed. The General, like a good soldier, quietly and submissively acquiesced; but Mr. Seward, a man of expedients and some conceit, was unwilling and unprepared to surrender the first place in the Administration, and virtually publish the fact by an Executive mandate which upset his promised and preferred arrangements. It was then that he became aware of two things: first, that neither himself nor General Scott, nor both combined, were infallible with the Administration; and second, that the President, with all his suavity and genial nature, had a mind of his own, and the resolution and self-reliance to form, and the firmness and independence to execute a purpose. They had each overestimated the influence of the other with the President, and underestimated his capacity, will, and self-reliance. When the Secretary became convinced that he could not alter the President's determination, he conformed to circumstances, immediately changed his tactics, and after notifying the authorities at Charleston that the garrison in Sumter was to be supplied, he took prompt but secret measures to defeat the expedition by detaching the flagship, and sending her, with the supplies and reinforcements that had been prepared and intended for Sumter, to Fort Pickens. In doing this he consulted neither the War nor Navy Departments, to which the service belonged; but discarding both, and also the General-in-Chief, his preceding special confidant, and with whom he had until then acted in concert, he took to his counsel younger military officers, secretly advised with them and withdrew them from their legitimate and assigned duties. The discourtesy and the irregularity of the proceeding, when it became known, shocked General Scott. His pride was touched. He felt the slight, but he was too good an officer, too subordinate, and too well disciplined, to complain. The secret military expedition undertaken by the Secretary of State without the knowledge of the proper departments and of himself, was so irregular, such evidence of improper administration, that he became alarmed. He felt keenly the course of Mr. Seward in not consulting him, and in substituting one of his staff as military adviser for the Secretary of State; but he was more concerned for the Government and country.

A native of Virginia, and imbued with the political doctrines there prevalent, but unflinching in patriotism and devotion to the Union and the flag, General Scott hesitated how to act—objected to the hostile invasion of any State by the national troops, but advised that the rebellious section should be blockaded by sea and land. He thought that surrounded by the army and navy the insurgents would be cut off from the outer world, and when exhausted from non-intercourse and the entire prostration of trade and commerce they would return to duty; the "anaconda principle" of exhausting them he believed would be effectual without invading the territory of States. When the mayor of Baltimore and a committee of secessionists waited upon the President on the 20th of April to protest against the passage of troops through that city to the national capital, he, in deference to the local government, advised the President to yield to the metropolitan demand, and himself drew up an Executive order to that effect. The seizure of Harper's Ferry and Norfolk and the threatened attack upon Washington greatly disturbed him, but not so much as the wild cry of the ardent and impulsive which soon followed of "on to Richmond" with an undisciplined army.

Sensible of his inability to take the field, he acquiesced in the selection if he did not propose after the disaster at Bull Run, that General McClellan should be called to Washington to organize the broken and demoralized Army of the Potomac. A thorough reorganization was promptly and effectually accomplished by that officer. In a few days order, precision, and discipline prevailed—the troops were massed and a large army was encamped in and about the national capital. But it was soon evident to the members of the Administration that there was not perfect accord between the two Generals. The cause and extent of disagreement were not immediately understood.

At a Cabinet meeting which took place in September at the headquarters of the General-in-Chief by reason of his physical infirmities, a brief discussion occurred which developed coolness if not dissatisfaction. An inquiry was made by the President as to the exact number of troops then in and about Washington. General McClellan did not immediately respond—said he had brought no reports or papers with him. General Scott said he had not himself recently received any reports. Secretary Seward took from his pocket some memoranda, stating the number that had been mustered in a few days previous, and then went on to mention additional regiments which had arrived several successive days since, making an aggregate, I think, of about ninety-three thousand men. The General immediately became grave.

When the subject matter for which the Cabinet and war officers had been convened was disposed of, some of the gentlemen left, and General McClellan was about retiring, when General Scott requested him to remain, and he also desired the President and the rest of us to listen to some inquiries and remarks which he wished to make. He was very deliberate, but evidently very much aggrieved. Addressing General McClellan, he said:

"You are perhaps aware, General McClellan, that you were brought to these headquarters by my advice and by my orders after consulting with the President. I know you to be intelligent and to be possessed of some excellent military qualities; and after our late disaster it appeared to me that you were a proper person to organize and take active command of this army. I brought you here for that purpose. Many things have been, as I expected they would be, well done; but in some respects I have been disappointed. You do not seem to be aware of your true position; and it was for this reason I desired that the President and these gentlemen should hear what I have to say. You are here upon my staff to obey my orders, and should daily report to me. This you have failed to do, and you appear to labor under the mistake of supposing that you and not I are General-in-Chief and in command of the armies. I more than you am responsible for military operations; but since you came here I have been in no condition to give directions or to advise the President because my chief of staff has neglected to make reports to me. I cannot answer simple inquiries which the President or any member of the Cabinet makes as to the number of troops here; they must go to the State department and not come to military headquarters for that information."

Mr. Seward here interposed to say that the statement he had made was from facts which he had himself collected from day to day as the troops arrived. "Do I understand," asked General Scott, "that the regiments report as they come here to the Honorable Secretary of State?"

"No, no," said Mr. Cameron, who wished to arrest or soften a painful interview. "General McClellan is not to blame; it is Seward's work. He is constantly meddling with what is none of his business, and (alluding to the Pickens expedition) makes mischief in the war and navy departments by his interference."

There was in the manner more than in the words a playful sarcasm which Seward felt and the President evidently enjoyed. General McClellan stood by the open door with one hand raised and holding it, a good deal embarrassed. He said he had intended no discourtesy to General Scott, but he had been so incessantly occupied in organizing and placing the army, receiving and mustering in the recruits as they arrived, and attending to what was absolutely indispensable, that it might seem he omitted some matters of duty, but he should extremely regret if it was supposed he had been guilty of any disrespect.

"You are too intelligent and too good a disciplinarian not to know your duties and the proprieties of military intercourse," said General Scott; "but seem to have misapprehended your right position. I, you must understand, am General-in-Chief. You are my chief of staff. When I brought you here you had my confidence and friendship. I do not say that you have yet entirely lost my confidence. Good day, General McClellan."

A few weeks later General Scott was on his own application placed upon the retired list, and General McClellan became his successor. Disaffection on the part of any of the officers, if any existed, did not immediately show itself; the army and people witnessed with pride the prompt and wonderful reorganization that had taken place, and for a time exulted in the promised efficiency and capabilities of the "young Napoleon." But the autumn passed away in grand reviews and showy parades, where the young General appeared with a numerous staff composed of wealthy young gentlemen, inexperienced, untrained, and unacquainted with military duty, who as well as foreign princes had volunteered their services. Parades and reviews were not useless, and the committal of wealthy and influential citizens who were placed upon his staff had its advantages; but as time wore on and no blow was struck or any decisive movement attempted, complaints became numerous and envy and jealousy found opportunity to be heard.

The expectation that the rebellion would be suppressed in ninety days, and that an undisciplined force of seventy-five thousand men or even five times that number would march to Richmond, clear the banks of the Mississippi, capture New Orleans, and overwhelm the whole South, had given way to more reasonable and rational views before Congress convened at the regular session in December. Still the slow progress that was made by the Union armies, and the immense war expenditures, to which our country was then unaccustomed, caused uneasiness with the people, and furnished food and excitement for the factions in Congress.

The anti-slavery feeling was increasing, but efforts to effect emancipation were not controlling sentiments of the Administration or of a majority of Congress at the commencement or during the first year of Mr. Lincoln's term, although such are the representations of party writers, and to some extent of the historians of the period. Nor did the Administration, as is often asserted and by many believed, commence hostilities and make aggressive war on the slave States or their institutions; but when war began and a national garrison in a national fortress was attacked, it did not fail to put forth its power and energies to suppress the rebellion and maintain the integrity of the Union. Military delays and tardy movements were nevertheless charged to the imbecility of the Government. It is not to be denied that a portion of the most active supporters of the President in and out of Congress and in the armies had in view ulterior purposes than that of suppressing the insurrection. Some were determined to avail themselves of the opportunity to abolish slavery, others to extinguish the claim of reserved sovereignty to the States, and a portion were favorable to both of these extremes and to the consolidation of power in the central Government; but a larger number than either and perhaps more than all combined were for maintaining the Constitution and Union unimpaired.

The President, while opposed to all innovating schemes, had the happy faculty of so far harmonizing and reconciling his differing friends as to keep them united in resisting the secession movement.

Abraham Lincoln was in many respects a remarkable man, never while living fully understood or appreciated. An uncultured child of the frontiers, with no educational advantages, isolated in youth in his wilderness home, with few associates and without family traditions, he knew not his own lineage and connections. Nor was this singular in the then condition of unsettled frontier life. His grandfather, with Daniel Boone, left the settled part of Virginia, crossed the Alleghany mountains, penetrated the "dark and bloody ground," and took up his residence in the wilds of Kentucky near the close of the Revolutionary war. There was little intercourse with each other in the new and scattered settlements destitute of roads and with no mail facilities for communication with relatives, friends, and the civilized world east of the mountains. Abraham Lincoln, the grandfather of the President, was a nephew of Daniel Boone, and partook of the spirit of his brave and subsequently famous relative. But his residence in his secluded home was brief. He was killed by the Indians when his son Thomas, the father of President Lincoln, was only six years old. Four years later the fatherless boy lost his mother. Left an orphan, this neglected child, without kith or kindred for whom he cared or who cared for him, led a careless, thriftless life, became a wandering pioneer, emigrated from Kentucky when the President was but seven years old, took up his residence for several years in the remote solitudes of Indiana, and drifted at a later day to Illinois. This vagrant life, by a shiftless father, and without a mother or female relative to keep alive and impress upon him the pedigree and traditions of his family, left the President without definite knowledge of his origin and that of his fathers. The deprivation he keenly felt. I heard him say on more than one occasion that when he laid down his official life he would endeavor to trace out his genealogy and family history. He had a vague impression that his family had emigrated from England to Pennsylvania and thence to Virginia; but, as he remarked in my presence to Mr. Ashmun of Massachusetts, and afterward to Governor Andrew, there was not, he thought, any immediate connection with the families of the same name in Massachusetts, though there was reason to suppose they had a common ancestry.

Having entered upon this subject, and already said more than was anticipated at the commencment, the opportunity is fitting to introduce extracts from a statement made by himself and to accompany it with other facts which have come into my possession since his death—facts of which he had no knowledge.

In a brief autobiographical sketch of his life, written by himself, he says:

I was born February 12, 1809, in Hardin county, Kentucky. My parents were both born in Virginia, of undistinguished families—second families perhaps I should say. My mother, who died in my tenth year, was of a family of the name of Hanks, some of whom now reside in Adams and others in Macon county, Illinois. My paternal grandfather, Abraham Lincoln, emigrated from Rockingham county, Virginia, to Kentucky, about 1781 or 2, where, a year or two later, he was killed by Indians, not in battle, but by stealth, when he was laboring to open a farm in the forest. His ancestors, who were Quakers, went to Virginia from Berks county, Pennsylvania. An effort to identify them with the New England family of the same name ended in nothing more definite than a similarity of Christian names in both families, such as Enoch, Levi, Mordecai, Solomon, Abraham, and the like.

My father, at the death of his father, was but six years of age; and he grew up literally without education. He removed from Kentucky to what is now Spencer county, Indiana, in my eighth year. We reached our new home about the time the State came into the Union. It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up. There were some schools, so called; but no qualification was ever required of a teacher, beyond reading, writing, and ciphering to the rule of three. If a straggler, supposed to understand Latin, happened to sojourn in the neighborhood, he was looked upon as a wizard. There was absolutely nothing to excite ambition for education. Of course when I came of age I did not know much. Still, somehow, I could read, write, and cipher, to the rule of three; but that was all. I have not been to school since. The little advance I now have upon this store of education I have picked up from time to time under the pressure of necessity.

I was raised to farm work, which I continued till I was twenty-two. At twenty-one I came to Illinois, and passed the first year in Macon county. Then I got to New Salem, at that time in Sangamon, now in Menard county, where I remained a year as a sort of clerk in a store.

In addition to the foregoing I may add that among my acquaintance in central Pennsylvania were several sisters whose maiden name was Winters. Two of these sisters were wives of Judges of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. Another sister was the wife of William Potter, a member of Congress of some note from that State and son of General Potter of the Revolution. These sisters were the great aunts of President Lincoln, and I subjoin an obituary notice of the younger sister, Mrs. Potter, who died in 1875, at the advanced age of eighty-four. There are some incidents not immediately connected with the subject that might be omitted, but I think it best to present the obituary in full:

Died, in Bellefonte, at the residence of Edward C. Humes, on Sunday morning, the 30th of May A. D. 1875, Mrs. Lucy Potter, relict of Hon. William W. Potter, deceased, aged eighty-four years, nine months, and two days.

Mrs. Potter was a member of a large and rather remarkable family; her father having been born in 1728, married in 1747, died in 1794; children to the number of nineteen being born to him, the eldest in 1748, the youngest in 1790—their birth extending over a period of forty-two years. William Winters, the father of the deceased, came from Berks county to Northumberland, now Lycoming county, in the year 1778, having purchased the farm lately known as the Judge Grier farm, near what was called Newberry, but now within the corporate limits of the city of Williamsport. Mr. Winters was twice married. His first wife was Ann Boone, a sister of Colonel Daniel Boone, famous in the early annals of Kentucky. His marriage took place in the year 1747 in the then province of Virginia. By this union there were issue eleven children, four males and seven females. His eldest daughter, Hannah, married in Rockingham county, Virginia, Abraham Lincoln, the grandfather of President Lincoln. Shortly before his death, Lincoln, who was killed by the Indians, visited his father-in-law at what is now Williamsport, and John Winters, his brother-in-law, returned with him to Kentucky, whither Mr. Lincoln had removed after his marriage; John being deputed to look after some lands taken by Colonel Daniel Boone and his father.

They travelled on foot from the farm, by a route leading by where Bellefonte now is, the Indian path "leading from Bald Eagle to Frankstown."

John Winters visited his sister, Mrs. Potter, in 1843, and wandering to the hill upon which the Academy is situated, a messenger was sent for him, his friends thinking he had lost himself; but he was only looking for the path he and Lincoln had trod sixty years before, and pointed out with his finger the course from Spring creek, along Buffalo run, to where it crosses the "Long Limestone Valley," as the route they had travelled.

Upon the death of Mr. Winters's first wife, in 1771, he again, in 1774, married. His second wife was Ellen Campbell, who bore him eight children, three males and five females, of which latter the subject of this notice was the youngest.

The father of Mrs. Potter died in 1794, and in 1795 Mrs. Ellen Winters, his widow, was licensed by the courts of Lycoming county to keep a "house of entertainment" where Williamsport now is—where she lived and reared her own children as well as several of her step children.

Here all her daughters married, Mary becoming the wife of Charles Huston, who for a number of years adorned the bench of the Supreme Court of this State; Ellen, the wife of Thomas Burnside, who was a member of Congress, Judge of the Court of Common Pleas, and finally a Justice of the Supreme Court; Sarah, the wife of Benjamin Harris, whose daughter, Miss Ellen Harris, resides on Spring street in this borough; Elizabeth, the wife of Thomas Alexander, a carpenter and builder, who erected one of the first dwellings in Williamsport, at the corner of what are now Pine and Third streets in that city, and many of whose descendants are still living in Lycoming county; Lucy, the wife of William W. Potter, a leading politician in this county, who died on the 15th day of October, 1888, while a member of our national Congress.

Mrs. Potter continued with her mother's family in Lycoming county, frequently visiting her two sisters, Mrs. Huston and Mrs. Burnside, who resided in Bellefonte, where, in 1815, she was united in marriage, by Rev. James Linn, with William W. Potter, a young and rising lawyer, and son of General James Potter, one of the early settlers of the county. Here, with her husband until his death, and then, upon the marriage of her niece, Miss Lucy Alexander, with Mr. Edward C. Humes, she made her home, living continuously in this town since her marriage, and having survived her husband for the long period of thirty-seven years, being that length of time a widow.

The biographers of President Lincoln have none of them given these facts because they did not know them, nor was the President himself aware of them. Of their authenticity so far as the relationship of Mr. Lincoln with the family of Winters is concerned, I have no doubt. His ancestry in this country, paternal and maternal—Lincoln, Boone, and Winters—is to be traced to the county of Berks, Pennsylvania.

A roving child of the forest, where there were not even village schools, Abraham Lincoln had little early culture, but his vigorous native intellect sought information wherever it could be obtained with limited means and opportunities, and overcame almost insuperable obstacles. His quick perception and powers of observation and reflection, and his retentive memory were remarkable; his judgment was good, his mental grasp and comprehension equal to any emergency, his intentions were always honest, and his skill and tact, with a determination to always maintain the right, begot confidence and made him successful and great. Party opponents imputed his success under difficulties that seemed insurmountable to craft and cunning; but while not deficient in shrewdness, his success was the result not of deceptive measures or wily intrigue, but of wisdom and fidelity with an intuitive sagacity that seldom erred as to measures to be adopted, or the course to be pursued. It may be said of him, that he possessed inherently a master mind, and was innately a leader of men. He listened, as I have often remarked, patiently to the advice and opinions of others, though he might differ from them; treated unintentional errors with lenity, was forbearing, and kind to mistaken subordinates, but ever true to his own convictions. He gathered information and knowledge whenever and wherever he had opportunity, but quietly put aside assumption and intrusive attempt to unduly influence and control him.

Like all his Cabinet, with the exception of Mr. Blair, who had been educated at West Point, he was without military pretension when he entered upon his executive duties and encountered at the very threshold a civil war which had been long maturing, was deeply seated, and in its progress was almost unprecedented in magnitude. Neither he nor any of his advisers had personal, official, practical experience in administering the civil service of the Federal Government. The commencement of hostilities, before they had time to become familiar with their duties, imposed upon each and all labors and cares beyond those of any of their predecessors. To these were added the conduct of military operations as novel as they were responsible. Unprepared as the country was for the sudden and formidable insurrection, the Administration was not less so, yet it was compelled at once to meet it, make preparations, call out immense armies, and select officers to organize and command them.

These commanders were most of them educated military officers, but possessed of limited experience. Their lives had been passed on a peace establishment, and they were consequently without practical knowledge. Many of these, as well as such officers as were selected from civil life, seemed bewildered by their sudden preferment, and appeared to labor under the impression that they were clothed not only with military but civil authority. Some in the higher grades imagined that in addition to leading armies and fighting battles, they had plenary power to administer the Government and prescribe the policy to be pursued in their respective departments. Much difficulty and no small embarrassment was caused by their mistaken assumptions and acts, in the early part of the war.

J. C. Fremont, the western explorer, a political candidate for the Presidency in 1856, and made a major general by President Lincoln at the beginning of the rebellion in 1861, was assigned to the command of the western department. He evidently considered himself clothed with proconsular powers; that he was a representative of the Government in a civil capacity as well as military commander, and soon after establishing his headquarters at St. Louis assumed authority over the slavery question which the President could neither recognize nor permit. General Hunter, at Port Royal, and General Phelps, in the Gulf, each laboring under the same error, took upon themselves to issue extraordinary manifestoes that conflicted with the Constitution and laws, on the subject of slavery, which the President was compelled to disavow. The subject, if to be acted upon, was administrative and belonged to the Government and civil authorities—not to military commanders. But there was a feeling in Congress and the country which sympathized with the radical generals in these anti-slavery decrees, rather than with the law, and the Executive in maintaining it. The Secretary of War, under whom these generals acted, not inattentive to current opinion, also took an extraordinary position, and in his annual report enunciated a policy in regard to the slavery question, without the assent of the President and without even consulting him. Mr. Lincoln promptly directed the assuming portion of the report, which had already been printed, to be cancelled; but the proceeding embarrassed the Administration and contributed to the retirement of Mr. Cameron from the Cabinet. These differences in the army, in the Administration, and among the Republicans in Congress, extended to the people. A radical faction opposed to the legal, cautious, and considerate policy of the President began to crystallize and assume shape and form, which, while it did not openly oppose the President, sowed the seeds of discontent against his policy and the general management of public affairs.

The military operations of the period are not here detailed or alluded to, except incidentally when narrating the action of the Administration in directing army movements and shaping the policy of the Government. Nearly one-third of the States were, during the Presidency of Mr. Lincoln, unrepresented in the national councils, and in open rebellion. A belt of border States, extending from the Delaware to the Rocky mountains, which, though represented in Congress, had a divided population, was distrustful of the President. Yielding the Administration a qualified support, and opposed to the Government in almost all its measures, was an old organized and disciplined party in all the free States, which seemed to consider its obligations to party paramount to duty to the country. This last, if it did not boldly participate with the rebels, was an auxiliary, and as a party, hostile to the Administration, and opposed to nearly every measure for suppressing the insurrection.

There were among the friends of the Administration, and especially during its last two years, radical differences, which in the first stages of the war were undeveloped. The mild and persuasive temper of the President, his generous and tolerant disposition, and his kind and moderate forbearance toward the rebels, whom he invited and would persuade to return to their allegiance and their duty, did not correspond with the schemes and designs of the extreme and violent leaders of the Republican party. They had other objects than reconstruction to attain, were implacable and revengeful, and some with ulterior radical views thought the opportunity favorable to effect a change of administration.

These had for years fomented division, encouraged strife, and were as ultra and as unreasonable in their demands and exactions as the secessionists. Some had welcomed war with grim satisfaction, and were for prosecuting it unrelentingly with fire and sword to the annihilation of the rights, and the absolute subversion of the Southern States and subjection of the Southern people. There was in their ranks unreasoning fanaticism, and ferocity that partook of barbarism, with a mixture of political intrigue fatal to our Federal system. These men, dissatisfied with President Lincoln, accused him of temporizing, of imbecility, and of sympathy with the rebels because he would not confiscate their whole property, and hang or punish them as pirates or traitors. These radical Republicans, as they were proud to call themselves, occupied, like all extreme men in high party and revolutionary times, the front rank of their party, and, though really a minority, gave tone and character to the Republican organization. Fired with avenging zeal, and often successful in their extreme views, though to some extent checked and modified by the President, they were presuming, and flattered themselves they could, if unsuccessful with Mr. Lincoln, effect a change in the administration of the Government in 1864 by electing a President who would conform to their ultra demands. Secret meetings and whispered consultations were held for that purpose, and for a time aspiring and calculating politicians gave them encouragement; but it soon became evident that the conservative sentiment of the Republicans and the country was with Mr. Lincoln, and that the confidence of the people in his patriotism and integrity was such as could not be shaken. Nevertheless, a small band of the radicals held out and would not assent to his benignant policy. These malcontents undertook to create a distinct political organization which, if possessed of power, would make a more fierce and unrelenting war on the rebels, break down their local institutions, overturn their State governments, subjugate the whites, elevate the blacks, and give not only freedom to the slaves, but by national decree override the States, and give suffrage to the whole colored race. These extreme and rancorous notions found no favor with Mr. Lincoln, who, though nominally a Whig in the past, had respect for the Constitution, loved the Federal Union, and had a sacred regard for the rights of the States, which the Whigs as a party did not entertain. War two years after secession commenced brought emancipation, but emancipation did not dissolve the Union, consolidate the Government, or clothe it with absolute power; nor did it impair the authority and rights which the States had reserved. Emancipation was a necessary, not a revolutionary measure, forced upon the Administration by the secessionists themselves, who insisted that slavery which was local and sectional should be made national.

The war was, in fact, defensive on the part of the Government against a sectional insurrection which had seized the fortresses and public property of the nation; a war for the maintenance of the Union, not for its dissolution; a war for the preservation of individual, State, and Federal rights; good administration would permit neither to be sacrificed nor one to encroach on the other. The necessary exercise of extraordinary war powers to suppress the Rebellion had given encouragement and strength to the centralists who advocated the consolidation and concentration of authority in the general Government in peace as well as war, and national supervision over the States and people. Neither the radical enthusiasts nor the designing centralists admitted or subscribed to the doctrine that political power emanated from the people; but it was the theory of both that the authority exercised by the States was by grant derived from the parental or general Government. It was their theory that the Government created the States, not that the States and people created the Government. Some of them had acquiesced in certain principles which were embodied in the fundamental law called the Constitution; but the Constitution was in their view the child of necessity, a mere crude attempt of the theorists of 1776, who made successful resistance against British authority, to limit the power of the new central Government which was substituted for that of the crown. For a period after the Revolution it was admitted that feeble limitations on central authority had been observed, though it was maintained that those limitations had been obstructions to our advancing prosperity, the cause of continual controversy, and had gradually from time to time been dispensed with, broken down, or made to yield to our growing necessities. The civil war had made innovations—a sweep, in fact, of many constitutional barriers—and radical consolidationists like Thaddeus Stevens and Henry Winter Davis felt that the opportunity to fortify central authority and establish its supremacy should be improved.

These were the ideas and principles of leading consolidationists and radicals in Congress who were politicians of ability, had studied the science of government, and were from conviction opponents of reserved rights and State sovereignty and of a mere confederation or Federal Union, based on the political equality and reserved sovereignty of the States, but insisted that the central Government should penetrate further and act directly on the people. Few of these had given much study or thought to fundamental principles, the character and structure of our Federal system, or the Constitution itself. Most of them, under the pressure of schemers and enthusiasts, were willing to assume and ready to exercise any power deemed expedient, regardless of the organic law. Almost unrestrained legislation to carry on the war induced a spirit of indifference to constitutional restraint, and brought about an assumption by some, a belief by others, that Congress was omnipotent; that it was the embodiment of the national will, and that the other departments of the Government as well as the States were subordinate and subject to central Congressional control. Absolute power, the centralists assumed and their fanatical associates seemed to suppose, was vested in the legislative body of the country, and its decrees, arbitrary and despotic, often originating in and carried first by a small vote in party caucus, were in all cases claimed to be decisive, and to be obeyed by the Executive, the judiciary, and the people, regardless of the Constitution. Parliamentary discussions were not permitted, or of little avail. The acts of caucus were despotic, mandatory, and decisive. The several propositions and plans of President Lincoln to reëstablish the Union, and induce the seceding States to resume their places and be represented in Congress, were received with disfavor by the radical leaders, who, without open assault, set in motion an undercurrent against nearly every Executive proposition as the weak and impotent offspring of a well meaning and well intentioned, but not very competent and intelligent mind. It was the difference between President Lincoln and the radical leaders in Congress on the question of reconciliation, the restoration of the States, and the reëstablishment of the Union on the original constitutional basis, which more than even his genial and tolerant feelings toward the rebels led to political intrigue among Republican members of Congress for the nomination of new candidates, and opposition to Mr. Lincoln's reëlection in 1864. At one period this intrigue seemed formidable, and some professed friends lent it their countenance, if they did not actually participate in it, who ultimately disavowed any connection with the proceeding.

Singular ideas were entertained and began to be developed in propositions of an extraordinary character, relative to the powers and the construction of the Government, which were presented to Congress, even in the first year of the war. Theoretical schemes from cultivated intellects, as well as crude notions from less intellectual but extreme men, found expression in resolutions and plans, many of which were absurd and most of them impracticable and illegal. Foremost and prominent among them were a series of studied and elaborate resolutions prepared by Charles Sumner, and submitted to the Senate on the 11th of February, 1862. Although presented at that early day, they were the germ of the reconstruction policy adopted at a later period. In this plan or project for the treatment of the insurrectionary States and the people who resided in them, the Massachusetts Senator manifested little regard for the fundamental law or for State or individual rights. The high position which this Senator held in the Republican party and in Congress and the country, his cultured mind and scholarly attainments, his ardent if not always discreet zeal and efforts to free the slaves and endow the whole colored race, whether capable or otherwise, with all the rights and privileges, socially and politically, of the educated and refined white population whom they had previously served, his readiness and avowed intention to overthrow the local State governments and the social system where slavery existed, to subjugate the whites and elevate the blacks, will justify a special notice; for it was one of the first, if not the very first of the radical schemes officially presented to change the character of the Government and the previously existing distinctions between the races. His theory or plan may be taken as the pioneer of the many wild and visionary projects of the central and abolition force, that took shape and form not only during the war, but after hostilities ceased and the rebels were subdued.

Mr. Sumner introduced his scheme with a preamble which declared, among other things, that the "extensive territory" of the South had been "usurped by pretended governments and organizations"; that "the Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land, cannot be displaced in its rightful operation within this territory, but must ever continue the supreme law thereof, notwithstanding the doings of any pretended governments acting singly or in confederation in order to put an end to its supremacy." Therefore:

Resolved, 1st. That any vote of secession, or other act by which any State may undertake to put an end to the supremacy of the Constitution within its territory, is inoperative and void against the Constitution, and when sustained by force it becomes a practical abdication by the State of all rights under the Constitution, while the treason which it involves still further works an instant forfeiture of all those functions and powers essential to the continued existence of the State as a body politic, so that from that time forward the territory falls under the exclusive jurisdiction of Congress as other territory, and the State, being, according to the language of the law, felo de se, ceases to exist.

2d. That any combination of men assuming to act in the place of such State, attempting to ensnare or coerce the inhabitants thereof into a confederation hostile to the Union, is rebellious, treasonable, and destitute of all moral authority; and that such combination is a usurpation incapable of any constitutional existence and utterly lawless, so that everything dependent upon it is without constitutional or legal support.

3d. That the termination of a State under the Constitution necessarily causes the termination of those peculiar local institutions which, having no origin in the Constitution, or in those natural rights which exist Independent of the Constitution, are upheld by the sole and exclusive authority of the State.

... Congress will assume complete jurisdiction of such vacated territory where such unconstitutional and illegal things have been attempted, and will proceed to establish therein republican forms of government under the Constitution.

It is not shown how a usurpation or illegal act by conspirators in any State or States could justify or make legal a usurpation by the general Government, as this scheme evidently was, nor by what authority Congress could declare that the illegal, inoperative, and void acts of usurpers who might have temporary possession of or be a majority in a State, could constitute a practical abdication by the State itself of all rights under the Constitution, regardless of the rights of a legal, loyal minority, guilty of no usurpation or attempted secession—the innocent victims of a conspiracy; nor where Congress or the Federal Government obtained authority to pronounce "an instant forfeiture of all those functions and powers essential to the continued existence of a State as a body politic, so that from that time forward the territory falls under the exclusive jurisdiction of Congress as other territory, and the State, being, according to the language of the law, felo de se, ceases to exist."

The administration of Mr. Buchanan had laid down as a rule of government that a State could not be coerced. The whole country not in rebellion had declared there should be no secession, division, or destruction of the Federal Union, but here was the most conspicuous leader of the Republican party in the Senate proposing a scheme to punish a State, to annihilate and destroy its government, to territorialize it, to exclude or expel it from the Union, to make no discrimination in its exclusions and denunciations between the loyal and disloyal inhabitants, but to punish alike, without trial or conviction, the just and the unjust. There were, though he was unwilling to admit it, and was perhaps unaware of it, vindictive feelings, venom, and revenge in his resolutions and in his whole treatment of the States and the white people of the South. From the time that he had been stricken down by the bludgeon of Brooks in the Senate, Mr. Sumner waged unrelenting war on the whites in the Southern States, and seemed to suppose it was his special mission—he certainly made it the great object of his life—to elevate the negro race—to give them at least equal rights and privileges with the educated and refined class—and did not conceal his intention and expectation to bring them in as auxiliaries to the Republican party, and thereby give it permanent ascendancy. All this was done in the name of humanity, and with apparent self-convinced sincerity. He was unwilling to acknowledge that he was governed or influenced by personal resentments in his revolutionary plans to degrade the intelligent white and exalt the ignorant black population by tearing down the constitutional edifice. In frequent interviews which I held with him then and at later periods, when he found it impossible to hold his positions under the Constitution, he claimed that he occupied higher ground, and that his authority for these violent measures was the Declaration of Independence, which declared all men were born equal, etc. Mr. Sumner was an idealist—neither a constitutionalist nor a practical statesman. He could pull down, but he could not construct—could declare what he considered humane, right, and proper, and act upon it regardless of constitutional compromises or conventional regulations which were the framework of the Government. No man connected with the Administration, or in either branch of Congress, was more thoroughly acquainted with our treaties, so familiar with the traditions of the Government, or better informed on international law than Charles Sumner; but on almost all other Governmental questions he was impulsive and unreliable, and when his feelings were enlisted, imperious, dogmatical, and often unjust.

Why innocent persons who were loyal to the Government and the Union should be disfranchised and proscribed because their neighbors and fellow citizens had engaged in a conspiracy, he could not explain or defend. By what authority whole communities and States should be deprived of the local governments which their fathers had framed, under which they were born, and with the provisions and traditions of which they were familiar, was never told.

His propositions found no favor with the Administration, nor were they supported at the beginning by any considerable number even of the extremists in Congress. It required much training by the centralizing leaders for years and all the tyranny of caucus machinery after the death of Mr. Lincoln to carry them into effect by a series of reconstruction measures that were revolutionary in their character, and which to a certain extent unsettled the principles on which the Government was founded.

But the counsel and example of the distinguished Senator from Massachusetts were not without their influence. Resolutions by radical Republicans and counter resolutions, chiefly by Democrats, relative to the powers and limitations of the Federal Government and the status of States, followed in quick succession. On the 11th of June, the subject having been agitated and discussed for four months, Mr. Dixon, a Republican Senator from Connecticut, whose views coincided in the main with those of Mr. Lincoln and the Administration, submitted, after consultation and advisement, the following:

Resolved, That all acts or ordinances of secession, alleged to have been adopted by any legislature or convention of the people of any State, are as to the Federal Union absolutely null and void; and that while such acts may and do subject the individual actors therein to forfeitures and penalties, they do not, in any degree, affect the relations of the State wherein they purport to have been adopted to the Government of the United States, but are as to such Government acts of rebellion, insurrection, and hostility on the part of the individuals engaged therein, or giving assent thereto; and that such States are, notwithstanding such acts or ordinances, members of the Federal Union, and as such are subject to all the obligations and duties imposed upon them by the Constitution of the United States; and the loyal citizens of such States are entitled to all the rights and privileges thereby guaranteed or conferred.

The resolution of Dixon traversed the policy of Sumner and was the Executive view of the questions that were agitated in Congress as to the effect of the rebellion and the condition of the States in insurrection. The Administration did not admit that rebellion dissolved the Union or destroyed its federative character; nor did it adopt or assent to the novel theory that the States and the whole people residing in them had forfeited all sovereignty and all reserved State and individual rights, because a portion of the inhabitants had rebelled; nor did it admit that the usurpation of a portion of any community could bring condemnation and punishment on all. The usurpations and acts of the rebels were considered not legal acts, but nullities.

Gideon Welles.

LUCILLE'S LETTER.

Out of the dreary distance and the dark
I stretch forth praying palms—yet not to pray;
Hands fold themselves for heaven, while mine, alas!
Are sundered—held your way.

Brief moments have been ours, yet bright as brief;
Oh! how I live them over, one by one,
Now that the endless days, bereft of you,
Creep slowly, sadly on.

Garnered in memory, those bewildering hours,
A golden harvest of enchantment yield;
Here, like a pale, reluctant Ruth, I glean
A cold and barren field—

Barren without a shelter: and the hedge
Is made of thorns and brambles. If I fain
Would lean beyond the barrier, do you see
The wounding and the stain?

Did God make us to mock us, on the earth?
Why did he fuse our spirits by His word,
Then set His awful Angel in our path,
His Angel with the sword?

Why, when I contrite kneel confessing all,
And seek with tears the way to be forgiven—
Why do your pleading eyes look sadly down
Between my face and heaven?

Why does my blood thrill at your fancied touch—
Stop and leap up at your ideal caress?
Ah, God! to feel that dear warm mouth on mine
In lingering tenderness!

To lie at perfect peace upon your heart,
Your arms close folded round me firm and fast,
My cheek to yours—oh, vision dear as vain!
That would be home at last.

Leon, you are my curse, my blessing too,
My hell, my heaven, my storm that wrecks to save:
Life daunts me, and the shadows lengthen out
Beyond the grave.

Mary L. Ritter.

SOME OLD ALMANACKS.

Do you know, gentle reader, what an interesting, valuable, and useful book an "Almanack" once was? You are gorged with books, and newspapers lie about thick as leaves in Vallambrosa. Do you ever buy an Almanac for five cents? I trow not. Therefore you do not know how much careful calculation, skill, and knowledge are to be had for that small piece of money.

Therefore you cannot sit down in the evening and pore over its mystic signs. Indeed, I fear you do not know what a zodiac is, or what the meaning of "Cancer the Crab" and "Gemini the Twins" may be. It is more than likely you will reply, "Oh, yes; if the Crab had a Cancer, he would cry Gemini to the Twins"—and in that light and flippant way you will try to hide your brutal ignorance, if a male, your shallow understanding, if a female.

Now I have just had a sort of musty satisfaction in looking over some old Almanacs, which dated as far back as 1727. They seem to have been the property of somebody whose letters were W. S. His almanacs were so prized that he had interleaved them, and then he recorded his profound observations. He thus had learned, what I fear you have not, that the moon had many mysterious influences besides making the tides rise and fall, if it does. It seems, if we can believe "A Native of New England," who made B. Greene's Almanack for 1731, that the "Moon has dominion over man's body," and that when she gets into "Cancer the Crab" you must expect every sort of bedevilment in your breast and stomach. When she gets into "Gemini," the same in your arms and shoulders. When she is in "Scorpio" your bowels and belly are in danger, and so on all through your body; so that we might well enough wish the moon were wholly abolished; for the little wishy-washy light she gives to lovers and thieves is not at all a balance for such fearful threatenings.

Who was the "Native of New England" is a secret, and well it is, for in 1727 he graced his title-page with this poem:

——Man—that Noble Creature,
Scanted of time, and stinted by Weak Nature,
That in foretimes saw jubilees of years,
As by our Ancient History appears;
Nay, which is more, even Silly Women then,
Liv'd longer time than our grave Graybeard Men.

"Graced," did I say? May we not put a dis before it? "Silly Women!" "Noble Creature!" Did the Native mean that woman then was silly and man then noble? Well for him is it that our "Mrs. Ward Howes" and "Mrs. Lillie Blakes" cannot make rhymes upon his name; well for him that he went his way holding his mantle before his face.

But he himself did not hold himself lightly. He knew all about Apogé and Perigé (we now spell them Apogée and Perigée). But does the Radical Club itself know anything at all about Apogée and Perigée? He knew when some "fine moderate weather" would come, when "winds enough for several" would blow, when "bad weather for hoop petticoats" would be; and that was on the 29th and 30th of January, 1727. Fearful weather, we may believe; but he, the Native, knew. But alas for us! On the 2d, he puts it down as "sloppy and raw cold." Now it so chances that W. S. has kept his MS. notes against this day, and he has it "Very fine and pleasant," and the next day, "Dry and dusty." Lamentable indeed for the Native! But he is not to be shaken for all that; he prognosticates through all the year just as if all was to come exactly right. One would like to know what W. S. thought of his prognosticator, and if he kept on studying and believing just the same as if all had come right. I do not doubt he did.

And now we come to some positive statements about Eclipses, and learn what we may depend on in that quarter.

The Native goes on to say, "As to the effects, they chiefly affect those Men that live by their Ingenuity; I mean Painters, Poets, Mercurialists, &c." What is a mercurialist? Does he mean the worshippers of Mercury, thieves, and that sort? "But"—and mark the cautious tone here—"but whether it forbodes good or ill to them I shall not now determine; only advise them to prepare for the worst!" Pretty good advice in all times of eclipse; and in these days even when there is no eclipse. Mark his modesty: "I do not pretend to Infallibility in my Conjectures, yet (as I said last year) they many times come out too True to make a jest of." Then he goes on: "I have read of a story which Thaurus is said to relate of Andreas Vesalius, a great Astrologer who lived in the reign of Henry the VIII.; to wit, that he told Maximilian the Day and Hour of his Death, who, giving credit thereto, ordered a great feast to be made, inviting his Friends, sat and Eat [ate?] with them; and afterwards, having distributed his Treasures among them, took leave of them and Dyed at the time predicted." Most kind of this Maximilian, for it must have secured a good patronage to the astrologers.

"Yet it does not from hence follow that a certain rule may be laid down"—a very fine astrologer, you perceive, may fail—"whereby exactly to discover the Divine appointments. But there are many concurring Causes of Mundane Accidents of which Humanity must be content to remain Ignorant, and (as a wise Author affirms) No Index can be found or formed whereby to give us any certain Diary or Destiny saving that of our dear-bought Experience." But how can we learn about our own dying by experience—which is what we die to know about? He continues: "And here I cannot but take notice of our Negro-mancers, who, under pretence of knowledge in the Motions of the Heavens, take upon them to Fore tell the Appointments of Fate with respect to particular Persons, and thereby betray the Ignorant part of the World Inevitably into the Worship of the Devil. But if the Wholesome Laws of the Province were duly executed on such Negro-mancers, I could venture to Fore tell what would soon be their Fortune; You may Read it at large in this Province, New Law Book, page 117.

"Marblehead, Sept. 28, 1726.
"N. Bowen."

Ah, friend Bowen was too alarmingly near the Salem witch times when Minister Parris and Judge Hawthorne had come so nigh putting the Devil to rout by hanging an old woman or two and squeezing poor Giles Cory to death. He knew what the Law could do to those wicked negro-mancers if they went about predicting things in a wicked way. And what a bore it might become to have a negro-mancer foretelling in a rash and miscellaneous way one's death and bringing it to pass too some fine and inconvenient day! Who would not hang a negro-mancer like that?

But suppose they should go on and squeeze the life out of such mild negromancers as N. Bowen, Esq., too. What then?

In 1729 we get an Almanac made by a student with a name—Nathaniel Ames, junior, student in Physick and Astronomy. He does not apply his intellect to such great speculations as Bowen grappled with, but runs easily into poetry of the true Homeric stamp. Listen:

January—

The Earth is white like Neptune's foamy face,
When his proud Waves the hardy Rocks embrace.

February—

Boreas's chilly breath attacks our Nature,
And turns the Presbyterian to a Quaker.

What wicked waggery is here hidden, who can tell? One thing is sure, that Februarys ought to be abolished by the General Court if such is true; for a Quaker then was an abominable thing.

March—

Phœbus and Mars conjoined do both agree,
This month shall Warm (nay, more than usual) be.

We pray that our Almanac makers will conjoin Phœbus and Mars in all our Marches hereafter, so that we too may "Warm (more than usual) be." How melodious that line!

April gives a sweet strain, possibly premature—

The Birds, like Orphans, now all things invite
To come and have Melodious, sweet delight.

Like Orphans! Why? Should Orpheus come in there, or are orphans children of Orpheus? We are perplexed. The words sound alike.

May like a Virgin quickly yields her Charms,
To the Embrace of Winter's Icy Arms.

It is not easy to see how that can be. Does he mean that winter had come back and given May a late frost? And then Virgins do not, so far as I know, yield to the Embrace of Winter's Icy Arms. Do they? I ask persons of experience.

June comes upon us heavily—

Sol's scorching Ray puts Blood in Fermentation,
And is stark raught to acts of Procreation.

That has a terrible sound. What does he mean?

July—

The Moon (this Month), that pale-faced Queen of Night,
Will be disrobed of all her borrowed light.

No month for lover's madness, this. Not a lover can steal forth by the light of the moon, or do any foolish thing this month, thanks be to God!

August—

The Earth and Sky Resound with Thunder Loud,
And Oblique streams flash from the dusky Cloud.

That first line demands many capital letters, and what a fine word Oblique is in the second.

September says—

The burthened earth abounds with various fruit,
Which doth the Epicurean's Palate Suit.

It is to be hoped these wicked Epicureans got no more than their share, and that church members were not converted to the heathen philosophy by such baits.

October—

The Tyrant Mars old Saturn now opposes,
Which stirs up Feuds and may make bloody Noses.

October then was the fighter's month. This begins nobly, but ends waggishly.

November—

Now what remains to Comfort up our lives,
But Cordial Liquor and kind, loving Wives?

"Comfort up," that is good. But the Cordial Liquor is doubtful; and then are there no girls in the sweet bloom of maidenhood left to Comfort up our lives? Sad indeed!

December closes up—

The Chrystal streams, congealed to Icy Glass,
Become fit roads for Travellers to pass.

Excellent for the travellers.

But now in the column of "Mutations of Weather," we find this":

"Christmas is nigh;
The bare name of it
to Rich or Poor
will be no profit."

We are startled. Does he mean to speak ill of Christmas—to stab it? We look again. No—it is that Christmas without roast Turkeys and Mince pies will be very bad. The "bare name"—that is what he will none of. But on the contrary the real thing he will have, with Roasts and bakes, and—possibly—Cordial Liquor to "Comfort up" the day. What a good word that "Comfort up" is. We thank Nathaniel for it.

Now in the volume for 1730 are other interesting items, and the seer and poet seems to be our old friend, Nathan Bowen. He inclines somewhat to poetry also, for he thus sings:

Saturn in Thirty Years his Ring Compleats,
Which Swiftest Jupiter in Twelve repeats;
Mars Three and Twenty Months revolving spends,
The Earth in Twelve her Annual Journey Ends.
Venus thy Race in twice Four Months is run,
For his Mercurius Three demands. The Moon
Her Revolution finishes in One.
If all at Once are Mov'd, and by one Spring,
Why so Unequal in their Annual Ring?"

Here again the sensitive soul, anxiously pondering, asks, Are students of astronomy prone to infidelity, and does this last question mean to convey the faintest shadow of a doubt? If not, why that "Why"?

We gladly pass on to another topic, hoping that Nathan was not damned for skepticism.

"N. B.—The paper Mill mentioned in last year's almanack (at Milton) has begun to go. Any person that will bring Rags to D. Henchman & T. Hancock, shall have from 2d. to 6d. a pound according to their goodness."

"Begun to go." I like that word. "Commenced operations," "started in business": how new and poor those great three-syllabled words seem! "Begun to go"—that is good.

In 1731 he tells us:

Ready money is now
the best of Wares."
"Some gain & some loose."

Dear, dear, how bad! Almost, not quite so miserable, as to-day—all lose now.

Then he informs us officially what salutes are to be fired at Castle William, as follows:

March 1	Queen's Berthday	21 guns.
May 29	Restoration of K. Ch. II.	17 "
June 11	K. George II. accession	21 "
Oct. 11	K. G. II. coronation	33 "
Oct. 30	K. G. II. Berthday	27 "
Nov. 5	Powder Plot	17 "
Jan. 19	Prince of W. Berthday	21 "

In 1732 the Native of New England (if it be Nathan Bowen of Marblehead) takes hold again and breaks into song:

Indulge, and to thy Genius freely give;
For not to live at Ease is not to live.
Death stalks behind thee, and each flying Hour
Does some loose Remnant of thy Life devour.
Live while thou livest, for Death shall make us all
A Name of Nothing, but an Old Wife's Tale.
Speak: wilt thou Avorice or Pleasure Chuse
To be thy Lord? Take One & One Refuse.—Perseus.

We begin to fear indeed that Nathan is little better than one of those wicked Epicureans himself. Avorice or Pleasure. Take one? Must we indeed? Pleasure? It looks as if Nathan was a very naughty man.

Things have evidently not gone quite smoothly with N. Bowen this last year, for, in his "Kind Reader" of 1733, he says: "Having last year finished Twelve of my Annual Papers [he means Almanacks], I proposed to lay down my pen and leave the Drudgery of Calculation to those who have more leisure and a Clearer Brain than I can pretend to. Indeed, the Contempt with which a writer of Almanacks is looked on and the Danger he is in of being accounted a Conjurer"—a negro-mancer—"should seem sufficient to deter a man from publishing anything of this kind. But when I consider that all this is the effect of Ignorance, and, therefore, not worth my Notice or Resentment, and that the most judicious and learned part of the World have always highly valued and esteemed such Undertakings as what are not only great and noble in themselves; but as they are of absolute necessity in the Business and Affairs of Life, I am induced to appear again in the World, and hope this will meet with the same kind acceptance with my former."

With me he meets with the same kind acceptance, for I believe in the Nobility of the Almanac; and it is certain that every man should believe in the Nobility of his work whatever it is—then he is sure of one ardent Admirer. It is sad to think that some carping critic had been riling the sweet soul of Nathan in the year 1732. It is all over now. Let us hope he is not damned for his Epicureanism, but is reaping his crop of praise in a better climate than Marblehead. He gives us more poetry in 1733, and a clear account of why Leap years are necessary, which I do not repeat here, the popular belief being that they were invented in order that maidens might if they wished make love to swains, which belief I would do nothing to shake.

In the next year we have quite a learned discourse about the Julian Æra, Epochs, Olympiads, etc., from which I can only venture to take the following concise and valuable and accurate statement of this astronomer:

"Jesus Christ the Saviour of the World was Incarnate in the 4,713 year of the Julian Period; the 3,949 of the Creation, the 4th of the 194th Olympiad, and the 753 Currant Year of the Roman Foundation."

Persons having any doubts as to the time of our blessed Saviour's appearance had better cut this out and keep it carefully for future reference and for the confusion of "skepticks."

Let us not leave these interesting vestiges of an earlier creation without a few words as to W. S. He, as I have said, was the purchaser and owner of these sacred books. His almanacs were carefully interleaved and evidently were intended to be not only a record of the wisdom of the "Students in Physick and Astronomy," but also of events in the lives of devout owners. We find W. S. begins with fervor and fidelity to record daily interesting facts such as, in February:

"Fine, somewhat cold.

"Very pleasant.

"A storm of snow.

"More snow, but clears away windy.

"A very fine day.

"Idem, but windy."

Aha! here, then, we have a man who knew Latin in the Year of our Lord 1727. "Idem"—that is such a good word that he uses it often, and it has a good sound, too. Through January, February, March he attends daily to this high duty, and tells us how it was:

"A bright morning, but a dull day.

"Windy.

"Cool."

On the 27th, "Much rain, a violent storm, snow'd up."

In April things change. His interest flags. He does not write down his record every day. Has W. S. grown lazy? Is it too warm for assiduous tasks, or has a new element come into his life? Let us see. He begins April:

"1. A clearer day.

"2. Set my clock forward 20 m.

"3. Lethfield arrived from London."

The clock—that, I believe, was the great event, and that it came from London. What may it have been? Clearly one of those tall, stately pieces with the moon and the sun showing their faces on the silver dial, the fine mahogany case worthy to uphold all. Where is that clock now? Who can tell? From this time forth this was the object of interest, for in nearly all the months we have this record, "Set my clock." He grows terribly indifferent to the weather. A clock then was a wonderful thing, and it is a wonderful thing now. Think of it. How these little wheels and springs are so contrived that they tick the seconds and the minutes and the hours day and night, so that Father Time might himself set his watch by some of them. But then it was a rarer and a more interesting thing than now. We can easily fancy the neighbors gathering to see the fine clock standing in its place in the hall, telling its monotonous tale all the nights and days.

But another interesting record now comes in. This, too, is an event—in May:

"17. I bottled cyder."

And then in October again:

"20. Cyder come."

Cyder is not a thing to be despised even by a man who knows Latin. But is not cyder an important thing to everybody? They had neither tea nor coffee then, and man likes to drink. We may know, too, that in those days every good woman made a few bottles of currant wine, made also her rose cakes to sweeten her drawers, gathered and dried lavender to make lavender-water, also sage and hoarhound, "good for sickness." Alas! that people might be sick even in those "Good old Times," we know, and we find that in January, 1727, W. S. puts down carefully this:

"A Recipe for y^e cure of Sciatica pains—viz.:

"Take 2 ounces of flowered brimstone, four ounces of Molasses. Mix y^m together, and take a spoonfull morning and evening, and if y^t do not effect a cure, take another spoonfull at noon also." You continue until you get well, or—something!

Why endure sciatica pains after this? We make no charge for this valuable knowledge.

But in June we find it put down:

"Mr. Davenport Chosen Tutor And confirmed by y^e overseers."

Here we have a clue to the Latin.

And in August is another entry:

"Governor Burnett, upon an invitation, came to visit y^e Coll: besides—— y^e Civil Officers in Cambridge w^th some others, together with y^e Masters of Art in College, were invited to dine w^th him. There was an Oration in y^e hall by Sir Clark, some of y^e neighboring Clergie were present, & about sixty persons in all had a handsome dinner in y^e Library."

Here was an event to be recorded. But was W. S. present? We remain in the dark.

Entries now become more and more uncommon. We learn little more of the clock or of the cyder; and we are at a loss to explain the reason why. But lo! we have it! In November there is but one entry, on the

"21. I was married."

There is the gospel, without note or comment. To whom? We ask in vain. "I was married," and that is all. But is not that enough? No more records about clocks and cyder! What need of those things? Very few entries are made in this year, and these are records of the thermometer. Evidently a new one had come from London. But in October is a short and significant record:

"19. Bille was born at 5 a clock morning."

It was inevitable—cause and effect—a striking example—most philosophic! Had he black eyes or blue? Was he like his father or his mother? Was he little or big? Did he weigh eight pounds or ten? Did he live to be a man? None of these things are recorded, and we shall never know. After this supreme event few entries appear in the diary through the years. Life has become engrossing, important. Let us hope it was sufficing and not full of failure and trouble; let us enjoy the pleasure of believing so, as we well may. The clock, the cyder, the thermometer, the little Bille: what more important matters had he or have we to record? We part with the three, the four faint shadows, Nathaniel, Nathan, W. S., and little Bille, with a mild regret, hoping we may meet them, and especially "little Bille," on the other side. Till then farewell.

Charles Wyllys Elliott.

TO WALT WHITMAN.

O Titan soul, ascend your starry steep
On golden stair to gods and storied men!
Ascend! nor care where thy traducers creep.
For what may well be said of prophets when
A world that's wicked comes to call them good?
Ascend and sing! As kings of thought who stood
On stormy heights and held far lights to men,
Stand thou and shout above the tumbled roar,
Lest brave ships drive and break against the shore.

What though thy sounding song be roughly set?
Parnassus' self is rough! Give thou the thought,
The golden ore, the gems that few forget;
In time the tinsel jewel will be wrought....
Stand thou alone and fixed as destiny;
An imaged god that lifts above all hate,
Stand thou serene and satisfied with fate.
Stand thou as stands that lightning-riven tree
That lords the cloven clouds of gray Yosemite.

Yea, lone, sad soul, thy heights must be thy home.
Thou sweetest lover! love shall climb to thee,
Like incense curling some cathedral dome
From many distant vales. Yet thou shalt be,
O grand, sweet singer, to the end alone.
But murmur not. The moon, the mighty spheres,
Spin on alone through all the soundless years;
Alone man comes on earth; he lives alone;
Alone he turns to front the dark Unknown.

Then range thine upper world, nor stoop to wars.
Walk thou the heights as walked the old Greeks when
They talked to austere gods, nor turned to men.
Teach thou the order of the singing stars.
Behold, in mad disorder these are set,
And yet they sing in ceaseless harmonies.
They spill as jewels spilt through space. They fret
The souls of men who measure melodies
As they would measure slimy deeps of seas.

Take comfort, O uncommon soul. Yet pray
Lest ye grow proud in such exalted worth.
Let no man reckon he excels. I say
The laws of compensation compass earth,
And no man gains without some equal loss:
Each ladder round of fame becomes a rod,
And he who lives must die upon a cross.
The stars are far, but flowers bless the sod,
And he who has the least of man has most of God.

Joaquin Miller.

MADCAP VIOLET.

By William Black.

CHAPTER XLIV.

JOY AND FEAR.

Was this man mad, that he, an invalid, propped up in his chair, and scarcely able to move a wine-glass out of his way, should play pranks with the whole created order of things, tossing about solar systems as if they were no more than juggler's balls, and making universal systems of philosophy jump through hoops as if he were a lion tamer in a den? These poor women did not know where to catch him. Violet used to say that he was like a prism, taking the ordinary daylight of life and splitting it up into a thousand gay and glancing colors. That was all very well as a spectacular exhibition; but how when he was apparently instructing them in some serious matter? Was it fair to these tender creatures who had so lovingly nursed him, that he should assume the airs of a teacher, and gravely lead out his trusting disciples into the desert places of the earth, when his only object was to get them into a bog and then suddenly reveal himself as a will-o'-the-wisp, laughing at them with a fiendish joy?

What, for example, was all this nonsense about the land question—about the impossibility of settling it in England so long as the superstitious regard for land existed in the English mind? They were quite ready to believe him. They deprecated that superstition most sincerely. They could not understand why a moneyed Englishman's first impulse was to go and buy land; they could give no reason for the delusion existing in the bosom of every Englishman that he, if no one else, could make money out of the occupation of a farm that had ruined a dozen men in succession. All this was very well; but what were they to make of his sudden turning round and defending that superstition as the most beautiful sentiment in human nature? It was, according to him, the sublimest manifestation of filial love—the instinct of affection for the great mother of us all. And then the flowers became our small sisters and brothers; and the dumb look of appeal in a horse's eye, and the singing of a thrush at the break of day—these were but portions of the inarticulate language now no longer known to us. What was any human being to make of this rambling nonsense?

It all came of the dress coat, and of his childish vanity in his white wristbands. It was the first occasion on which he had ceremoniously dressed for dinner; and Violet had come over; and he was as proud of his high and stiff collar, and of his white necktie, as if they had been the ribbon and star of a royal order. And then they were all going off the next morning—Miss North included—to a strange little place on the other side of the Isle of Wight; and he had gone "clean daft" with the delight of expectation. There was nothing sacred from his mischievous fancy. He would have made fun of a bishop. In fact he did; for, happening to talk of inarticulate language, he described having seen "the other day," in Buckingham Palace road, a bishop who was looking at some china in a shop window; and he went on to declare how a young person driving a perambulator, and too earnestly occupied with a sentry on the other side of the road, incontinently drove that perambulator right on to the carefully swathed toes of the bishop; and then he devoted himself to analyzing the awful language which he saw on the afflicted man's face.

"But, uncle," said Amy Warrener, with the delightful freshness of fifteen, "how could you see anybody in Buckingham Palace road the other day, when you haven't been out of the house for months?"

"How?" said he, not a whit abashed. "How could I see him? I don't know, but I tell you I did see him. With my eyes, of course."

He lost his temper, however, after all.

"To-morrow," he was saying, "I bid good-by to my doctor. I bear him no malice; may he long be spared from having to meet in the next world the people he sent there before him! But look here, Violet—to-morrow evening we shall be free—and we shall celebrate our freedom, and our first glimpse of a seashore, in Scotch whiskey—in hot Scotch whiskey—in Scotch whiskey with the boilingest of boiling water, just caught at the proper point of cooling. You don't know that point; I will teach you; it is perfection. Don't you know that we have just caught the cooling point of the earth—just that point in its transition from being a molten mass to its becoming a chilled and played out stone that admits of our living——"

"But, uncle," said Amy, "I thought the earth used to be far colder than it is now. Remember the glacial period," added this profound student of physics.

This was too much.

"Dear, dear me!" he exclaimed. "Am I to be brought up at every second by a pert schoolgirl when I am expounding the mysteries of life? What have your twopenny-halfpenny science primers to do with the grand secret of toddy? I tell you we must catch it at the cooling point; and then, Violet—for you are a respectful and attentive student—if the evening is fine, and the air warm, and the windows open and looking out to the south—do you think the doctor could object to that one first, faint trial of a cigarette, just to make us think we are up again in the August nights—off Isle Ornsay—with Aleck up at the bow singing that hideous and melancholy song of his, and the Sea Pyot slowly creeping along by the black islands?"

She did not answer at all; but for a brief moment her lip trembled. Amid all this merriment she had sat with a troubled face, and with a sore and heavy heart. She had seen in it but a pathetic bravado. He would drink Scotch whiskey—he would once more light a cigarette—merely to assure her that he was getting thoroughly well again; his laughter, his jokes, his wild sallies were all meant, and she knew it, to give her strength of heart and cheerfulness. She sat and listened, with her eyes cast down. When she heard him talk lightly and playfully of all that he meant to do, her heart throbbed, and she dared not lift her eyes to his face, lest they should suddenly reveal to him that awful conflict within of wild, and piteous, and agonizing doubt.

Then that reference to their wanderings in the northern seas—he did not know how she trembled as he spoke. She could never even think of that strange time she had spent up there, and of the terrible things that had come of it, without a shudder. If she could have cut it out of her life and memory altogether, that would have been well; but how could she forget the agony of that awful farewell; the sense of utter loneliness with which she saw the shores recede; the conviction then borne in upon her—and never wholly eradicated from her mind—that some mysterious doom had overtaken her, from which there was no escape. The influence of that time, and of the time that succeeded it, still dwelt upon her, and overshadowed her with its gloom. She had almost lost the instinct of hope. She never doubted, when they carried young Dowse into that silent room, but that he would die: was it not her province to bring misery to all who were associated with her? And she had got so reconciled to this notion that she did not argue the matter with herself; she had, for example, no sense of bitterness in contrasting this apparent "destiny" of hers with the most deeply-rooted feeling in her heart; namely, a perfectly honest readiness to give up her own life if only that could secure the happiness of those she loved. She did not even feel injured because this was impossible. Things were so; and she accepted them.

But sometimes, in the darkness of her room, in the silence of the night-time, when her heart seemed to be literally breaking with its conflict of anxious love and returning despair, some wild notion of propitiation—doubtless derived from ancient legends—would flash across her mind; and she would cry in her agony, "If one must be taken, let it be me! The world cares for him. What am I?" If she could only go out into the open place of the city, and bare her bosom to the knife of the priest, and call on the people to see how she had saved the life of her beloved—surely that would be to die happy. What she had done, now that she came to look back over it, seemed but too poor an expression of her great love and admiration. What mattered it that a girl should give up her friends and her home? Her life—her very life—that was what she desired, when these wild fancies possessed her, to surrender freely, if only she could know that she was rescuing him from the awful portals that her despairing dread saw open before him, and was giving him back—as she bade him a last farewell—to health, and joy, and the comfort of many friends.

With other wrestlings in spirit, far more eager and real than these mere fancies derived from myths, it is not within the province of the present writer to deal; they are not for the house-tops or the market-places. But it may be said that in all directions the gloomy influences of that past time pursued her; wherever she went she was haunted by a morbid fear that all her resolute will could not shake off. Where, for example, could she go for sweeter consolation, for more cheering solace than to the simple and reassuring services of the church? But before she entered, eager to hear words of hope and strengthening, there was the graveyard to pass through, with the misery of generations recorded on its melancholy stones.

CHAPTER XLV.

"OH, GENTLE WIND THAT BLOWETH SOUTH."

But if this girl, partly through her great yearning love, and partly through the overshadowing of her past sufferings, was haunted by a mysterious dread, that was not the prevailing feeling within this small household which was now pulling itself together for a flight to the south. Even she caught something of the brisk and cheerful spirit awakened by all the bustle of departure; and when her father, who had come to London Bridge station to see the whole of them off, noticed the businesslike fashion in which she ordered everybody about, so that the invalid should have his smallest comforts attended to, he could not help saying, with a laugh—

"Well, Violet, this is better than starting for America all by yourself, isn't it? But I don't think you would have been much put out by that either."

A smart young man came up, and was for entering the carriage.

"I beg your pardon," said she, respectfully but firmly. "This carriage is reserved."

The young man looked at both windows.

"I don't see that it is," he retorted coolly.

He took hold of the handle of the door, when she immediately rose and stood before him, an awful politeness and decorum on her face, but the fire of Brünhilde the warrior maiden in her eyes.

"You will please call the guard before coming in here. The carriage is reserved."

At this moment her father came forward—not a little inclined to laugh.

"I beg your pardon, sir, but the carriage is really reserved. There was a written paper put up—it has fallen down, I suppose—there it is."

So the smart young man went away; but was it fair, after this notable victory, that they should all begin to make fun of her fierce and majestic bearing, and that the very person for whose sake she had confronted the enemy should begin to make ridiculous rhymes about her, such as these:

"Then out spake Violet Northimus—
Of Euston Square was she—
'Lo, I will stand at thy right hand,
And guard the door with thee!'"

Violet Northimus did not reply. She wore the modesty of a victor. She was ready at any moment to meet six hundred such as he; and she was not to be put out, after the discomfiture of her enemy, by a joke.

Then they slowly rolled and grated out of the station, and by-and-by the swinging pace increased, and they were out in the clearer light and the fresher air, with a windy April sky showing flashes of blue from time to time. They went down through a succession of thoroughly English looking landscapes—quiet valleys with red-tiled cottages in them, bare heights green with the young corn, long stretches of brown and almost leafless woods, with the rough banks outside all starred with the pale, clear primrose. There was one in that carriage who had had no lack of flowers that spring—flowers brought by many a kindly hand to brighten the look of the sick room; but surely it was something more wonderful to see the flowers themselves, growing here in this actual and outside world which had been to him for many a weary week but a dimly imagined dreamland. There were primroses under the hedges, primroses along the high banks, primroses shining pale and clear within the leafless woods, among the russet leaves of the previous autumn. And then the life and motion of the sky, the southwesterly winds, the black and lowering clouds suddenly followed by a wild and dazzling gleam of sunlight, the grays and purples flying on and leaving behind them a welcome expanse of shining April blue.

The day was certainly squally enough, and might turn to showers; but the gusts of wind that blew through the carriage were singularly sweet and mild; and again and again Mr. Drummond, who had been raised by all this new life and light into the very highest spirits, declared with much solemnity that he could already detect the smell of the salt sea air. They had their quarrels of course. It pleased a certain young lady to treat the south coast of England with much supercilious contempt. You would have imagined from her talk that there was something criminal in one's living even within twenty miles of the bleak downs, the shabby precipices, and the muddy sea which, according to her, were the only recognizable features of our southern shores. She would not admit indeed that there was any sea at all there; there was only churned chalk. Was it fair to say, even under the exasperation of continual goading, that the Isle of Wight was only a trumpery toy shop; that its "scenery" was fitly adorned with bazaars for the sale of sham jewelry; that its amusements were on a par with those of Rosherville gardens; that its rocks were made of mud and its sea of powdered lime?

"By heavens," exclaimed her antagonist, "I will stand this no longer. I will call upon Neptune to raise such a storm in the Solent as shall convince you that there is quite enough sea surrounding that pearl of islands, that paradise, that world's wonder we are going to visit."

"Yes, I have no doubt," said she with sweet sarcasm, "that if you stirred the Solent with a teaspoon, you would frighten the yachtsmen there out of their wits."

"Oh, Violet," cried another young lady, "you know you were dreadfully frightened that night in Tobermory bay, when the equinoctial gales caught us, and the men were tramping overhead all night long."

"I should be more frightened down here," was the retort, "because if we were driven ashore I should be choked first and drowned afterward. Fancy going out of the world with a taste of chalk in your mouth."

"Well, at this moment the fierce discussion was stopped by the arrival of the train at Portsmouth; but here a very singular incident occurred. Violet was the first to step out on to the platform.

"You have a tramway car that goes down to the pier, have you not?" she asked of the guard.

"Ain't going to-day, miss," was the answer. "Boats can't come in to Southsea—the sea is very high. You'll have to go to Portsea, miss."

Now, what was this man's amazement on seeing this young lady suddenly burst out laughing as she turned and looked into the carriage.

"Did you hear that?" she cried. "The Solent is raging! They can't come near Southsea! Don't you think, Mrs. Warrener, that it will be very dangerous to go to Portsea?"

"I'll tell you what it is," said Mrs. Warrener with a malicious smile, "if a certain young lady I know were to be ill in crossing, she would be a good deal more civil to her native country when she reached the other side."

But in good truth, when they got down to Portsea there was a pretty stiff breeze blowing; and the walk out on the long pier was not a little trying to an invalid who had but lately recovered the use of his limbs. The small steamer, too, was tossing about considerably at her moorings; and Violet pretended to be greatly alarmed because she did not see half-a-dozen lifeboats on board. Then the word was given; the cables thrown off; and presently the tiny steamer was running out to the windy and gray-green sea, the waves of which not unfrequently sent a shower of spray across her decks. The small party of voyagers crouched behind the funnel, and were well out of the water's way.

"Look there now," cried Mr. Drummond, suddenly pointing to a large bird that was flying by, high up in the air, about a quarter of a mile off—"do you see that? Do you know what that is? That is a wild goose, a gray lag, that has been driven in by bad weather; now can you say we have no waves, and winds, and sea in the south?"

Miss Violet was not daunted.

"Perhaps it is a goose," she said coolly. "I never saw but one flying—- you remember you shot it. What farm-yard has this one left?"

"Oh, for shame, Violet," Mrs. Warrener called out, "to rake up old stories!"

She was punished for it. The insulted sportsman was casting about for the cruelest retort he could think of, when, as it happened, Miss Violet bethought her of looking round the corner of the boiler to see whether they were getting near Ryde; and at the same moment it also happened that a heavy wave, striking the bows of the steamer, sent a heap of water whirling down between the paddle-box and the funnel, which caught the young lady on the face with a crack like a whip. As to the shout of laughter which then greeted her, that small party of folks had heard nothing like it for many a day. There was salt water dripping from her hair; salt water in her eyes; salt water running down her tingling and laughing cheeks; and she richly deserved to be asked, as she was immediately asked, whether the Solent was compounded of water and marl or water and chalk, and which brand she preferred.

Was it the balmy southern air that tempered the vehemence of these wanderers as they made their way across the island, and getting into a carriage at Ventnor, proceeded to drive along the Undercliff? There was a great quiet prevailing along these southern shores. They drove by underneath the tall and crumbling precipices, with wood pigeons suddenly shooting out from the clefts, and jackdaws wheeling about far up in the blue. They passed by sheltered woods, bestarred with anemones and primroses, and showing here and there the purple of the as yet half-opened hyacinth; they passed by lush meadows, all ablaze with the golden yellow of the celandine and the purple of the ground ivy; they passed by the broken, picturesque banks where the tender blue of the speedwell was visible from time to time, with the white glimmer of the starwort. And then all this time they had on their left a gleaming and wind-driven sea, full of motion, and light, and color, and showing the hurrying shadows of the flying clouds.

At last far away, secluded and quiet, they came to a quaint little inn, placed high over the sea, and surrounded by sheltering woods and hedges. The sun lay warm on the smooth green lawn in front, where the daisies grew. There were dark shadows—almost black shadows—along the encircling hedge and under the cedars; but these only showed the more brilliantly the silver lighting of the restless, whirling, wind-swept sea beyond. It was a picturesque little house, with its long veranda half-smothered in ivy and rose bushes now in bud; with its tangled garden about, green with young hawthorn and sweetened by the perfume of the lilacs; with its patches of uncut grass, where the yellow cowslips drooped. There was an air of dreamy repose about the place; even that whirling and silvery gray sea produced no sound; here the winds were stilled, and the black shadows of the trees on that smooth green lawn only moved with the imperceptible moving of the sun.

Violet went up stairs and into her room alone; she threw open the small casements, and stood there looking out with a somewhat vague and distant look. There was no mischief now in those dark and tender eyes; there was rather an anxious and wistful questioning. And her heart seemed to go out from her to implore these gentle winds, and the soft colors of the sea, and the dreamy stillness of the woods, that now they should, if ever that was possible to them, bring all their sweet and curative influences to bear on him who had come among them. Now, if ever! Surely the favorable skies would heed, and the secret healing of the woods would hear, and the bountiful life-giving sea winds would bestir to her prayer! Surely it was not too late!

CHAPTER XLVI.

HOPE'S WINGS.

The long journey had taxed his returning strength to the utmost, and for the remainder of that day he looked worn and fatigued; but on the next morning he was in the best of spirits, and nothing would do but that they should at once set out on their explorations.

"Why not rest here?" said Violet. They were sitting in the shade of their morning room, the French windows wide open, the pillars and roof of the veranda outside framing in a picture of glowing sunlight and green vegetation, with glimpses of the silvery, white sea beyond. "Why not rest here?" she said; "what is the use of driving about to see bare downs, and little holes in the mud that they call chasms, and waterfalls that are turned on from the kitchen of the hotel above? That is what they consider scenery in the Isle of Wight; and then, before you can see it, you must buy a glass brooch or a china doll."

The fact is, he did not himself particularly care about these excursions, but he was afraid of the place becoming tiresome and monotonous to one whom he would insist on regarding as a visitor. She on the other hand affected a profound contempt for the sufficiently pleasant places about the Isle of Wight for the very purpose of inducing him to rest in the still seclusion of this retreat they had chosen. But here was the carriage at the door.

"Violet," said Amy Warrener, as they were leisurely driving along the quiet ways, under the crumbling gray cliffs, where the jackdaws were flying, "where shall we go for a climb? Don't you think we might come upon another Mount Glorioso?"

"No," said the girl rather absently; "I don't think we shall see another Mount Glorioso soon again."

"Not this autumn?" cried Mr. Drummond cheerfully; "not this summer?—for why should we wait for the autumn! Violet, I have the most serious projects with regard to the whole of us. It is high time that I set about recognizing the ends of existence; that is to say, before I die I must have a house in Bayswater and two thousand a year. All nice novels end that way. Now, in order that we shall all reach this earthly paradise, what is to be done? I have two projects. A publisher—the first wise man of his race—I will write an epitaph for him quite different from my universal epitaph—this shrewd and crafty person, determined to rescue at least one mute, inglorious Milton from neglect, has written to me. There! He has read my article on 'The Astronomical Theory with regard to the Early Religions'; he has perceived the profound wisdom, the research, the illuminating genius of that work—by the way, I don't think I ever fully explained to you my notions on that subject?"

"Oh, no, please don't," said Violet meekly. "What does the publisher say?"

"Do you see the mean, practical, commercial spirit of these women?" he said, apparently addressing himself. "It is only the money they think of. They don't want to be instructed!"

"I know the article well enough," said Violet blushing hotly. "I read it—I—I saw it advertised, and bought the review, when I hadn't much money to spend on such things."

"Did you, Violet?" said he, forgetting for a moment his nonsense. Then he continued: "The publisher thinks that with some padding of a general and attractive nature, the subject might be made into a book. Why, therefore, should not our fortune be made at once, and the gates of Bayswater thrown open to the Peri? I do believe I could make an interesting book. I will throw in a lot of Irish anecdotes. I wonder if I could have it illustrated with pictures of 'Charles I. in Prison,' the 'Dying Infant,' 'The Sailor's Adieu,' and some such popular things!"

"I think," said Violet humbly, "we might go on to the other project."

"Ah," said he thoughtfully, "that requires time and silence first. I must have the inspiration of the mountains before I can resolve it. Do you know what it is?"

"Not yet."

"It is the utilizing of a great natural force. That is what all science is trying to do now; and here is one of the mightiest forces in nature of which nothing is made, unless it be that a few barges get floated up and down our rivers. Do you see? The great mass of tidal force, absolutely irresistible in its strength, punctual as the clock itself, always to be calculated on—why should this great natural engine remain unused?"

"But then, uncle," said a certain young lady, "if you made the tide drive machinery at one time of the day, you would have to turn the house round to let it drive it again as it was going back."

"Child, child!" said the inventor peevishly, "why do you tack on these petty details to my grand conception? It is the idea I want to sell; other people can use it. Now, will the government grant me a patent?"

"Certainly," said Violet.

"What royalty on all work executed by utilizing the tidal currents?"

"A million per cent."

"How much will that bring in?"

"Three millions a minute!"

"Ah," said he, sinking back with a sigh, "we have then reached the goal at last. Bayswater, we approach you. Shall the brougham be bottle-green or coffee-colored?"

"A brougham!" cried Violet; "no—a barge of white and gold, with crimson satin sails, and oars of bronze, towed by a company of snow-white swans——"

"Or mergansers"——

"And floating through the canals of claret which we shall set flowing in the streets. Then the Lord Mayor and the corporation will come to meet you, and you will get the freedom of the city presented in a gold snuff-box. As for Buckingham Palace—well, a baronetcy would be a nice thing."

"A baronetcy! Three millions a year and only a baronet! By the monuments of Westminster Abbey, I will become a duke and an archbishop rolled into one, and have the right of sending fifteen people a day to be beheaded at the tower."

"Oh, not that, uncle!"

"And why not?"

"Because there wouldn't be any publishers at the end of the year."

"And here we are at Black Gang Chine!"

Violet would not go down. She positively refused to go down. She called the place Black Gang Sham, and hoped they were pouring enough water down the kitchen pipe of the hotel to make a foaming cataract. But she begged Mrs. Warrener and Amy, who had not seen the place, to go down, while she remained in the carriage with Mr. Drummond. So these two disappeared into the bazaar.

"You are not really going to Scotland, are you?" she said simply, her head cast down.

"I have been thinking of it," he answered. "Why not?"

"The air here is very sweet and soft," she said in a hesitating way. "Of course, I know, the climate on the west coast of Scotland is very mild, and you would get the mountain air as well as the sea air. But don't you think the storms, the gales that blow in the spring——"

"Oh," said he cheerfully, "I shall never be pulled together till I get up to the north—I know that. I may have to remain here till I get stronger, but by-and-by I hope we shall all go up to Scotland together, and that long before the shooting begins."

"I—I am afraid," said she, "that I shall not be of the party."

"You? Not you?" he cried. "You are not going to leave us, Violet, just after we have found you?"

He took her hand, but she still averted her eyes.

"I half promised," she said, "to spend some time with Mr. and Mrs. Dowse. They are very lonely. They think they have a claim on me, and they have been very kind."

"You are not going to Mr. and Mrs. Dowse, Violet," said he promptly. "I pity the poor people, but we have a prior claim on you, and we mean to insist on it. What, just after all this grief of separation, you would go away from us again? No, no! I tell you, Violet, we shall never find you your real self until you have been braced up by the sea breezes. I mean the real sea breezes. You want a scamper among the heather—I can see that; for I have been watching you of late, and you are not up to the right mark. The sooner we all go the better. Do you understand that?"

He had been talking lightly and cheerfully, not caring who overheard. She, on the other hand, was anxious and embarrassed, not daring to utter what was on her mind. At last she said:

"Will you get down for a minute or two, and walk along the road? It is very sheltered here, and the sun is warm."

He did so, and she took his arm, and they walked away apart in the sunlight and silence. When they had gone some distance she stopped and said in a low and earnest voice:

"Don't you know why I cannot go to the Highlands with you? It would kill me. How could I go back to all those places?"

"I understand that well enough, Violet," said he gently, "but don't you think you ought to go for the very purpose of conquering that feeling? There is nothing in that part of the country to inspire you with dread. You would see it all again in its accustomed light."

She shook her head.

"Very well, then," said he, for he was determined not to let these gloomy impressions of the girl overcome him. "If not there, somewhere else. We are not tied to Castle Bandbox. There is plenty of space about the West Highlands or about the Central Highlands, for the matter of that. Shall we try to get some lodging in an inn or farmhouse about the Moor of Rannoch? Or will you try the islands—Jura, or Islay, or Mull?"

She did not answer. She seemed to be in a dream.

"Shall I tell you, Violet," he continued, gravely and gently, "why I want you to come with us? I am anxious that you and I should be together as long—as long as that is possible. One never knows what may happen, and lately—well, we need not speak of it; but I don't wish us to be parted, Violet."

She burst into a violent fit of crying and sobbing. She had been struggling bravely to repress this gathering emotion; but his direct reference to the very thought that was overshadowing her mind was too much for her. And along with this wild grief came as keen remorse, for was this the conduct required of an attendant upon an invalid?

"You must forgive me," she sobbed. "I don't know what it is—I have been very nervous of late—and—and——-"

"There is nothing to cry about, Violet," said he gently. "What is to be, is to be. You have not lost your old courage! Only let us be together while we can."

"Oh, my love, my love!" she suddenly cried, taking his hand in both of hers, and looking up to him with her piteous, tear-dimmed eyes; "we will always be together! What is it that you say?—what is it that you mean? Not that you are going away without me? I have courage for anything but that. It does not matter what comes, only that I must go with you—we two together!"

"Hush, hush, Violet," said he soothingly, for he saw that the girl was really beside herself with grief and apprehension. "Come, this is not like the brave Violet of old. I thought there was nothing in all the world you were afraid to face. Look up, now."

She released his hand, and a strange expression came over her face. That wild outburst had been an involuntary confession; now a great fear and shame filled her heart that she should have been betrayed into it, and in a despairing, pathetic fashion she tried to explain away her words.

"We shall be together, shall we not?" she said, with an affected cheerfulness, though she was still crying gently. "It does not matter what part of the Highlands you go to—I will go with you. I must write and explain to Mrs. Dowse. It would be a pity that we should separate so soon, after that long time, would it not? And then the brisk air of the hills, and of the yachting, will be better for you than the hot summer here, won't it? And I am sure you will get very well there; that is just the place for you to get strong; and when the time for the shooting comes, we shall all go out, as we used to do, to see you missing every bird that gets up."

She tried to smile, but did not succeed very well.

"And really it does not matter to me so very much what part we go to, for, as you say, one ought to conquer these feelings, and if you prefer Castle Bandbox, I will go there too—that is, I shall be very proud to go if I am not in the way. And you know I am the only one who can make cartridges for you."

"I don't think I shall trouble the cartridges very much," said he, glad to think she was becoming more cheerful.

"Indeed," she continued, "I don't know what would have become of your gun if I had not looked after it, for you only half cleaned it, and old Peter would not touch it, and the way the sea air rusted the barrels was quite remarkable. Will you have No. 3 or No. 4 shot this year for the sea birds?"

"Well," he answered gravely, "you see we shall have no yacht this year, and probably no chances of wild duck at all; and it would scarcely be worth while to make cartridges merely to fire away at these harmless and useless sea pyots and things of that sort."

"Oh, but my papa could easily get us a yacht," she said promptly; "he would be delighted—I know he would be delighted. And I have been told you can get a small yacht for about £40 a month, crew and everything included, and what is that? Indeed, I think it is quite necessary you should have a yacht."

"Forty pounds," said he. "I think we could manage that. But then we should deduct something from the wages of the crew on the strength of our taking our own cook with us. Do you remember that cook? She had a wonderful trick of making apricot jam puddings; how the dickens she managed to get so much jam crammed in I never could make out. She was just about as good at that as at making cartridges. Did you ever hear of that cook?"

By this time they had walked gently back to the carriage, and now Mrs. Warrener and her daughter made their appearance. The elder woman noticed something strange about Violet's expression, but she did not speak of it, for surely the girl was happy enough? She was, indeed, quite merry. She told Mrs. Warrener she was ready to go with them to the Highlands whenever they chose. She proposed that this time they should go up the Caledonian canal, and go down by Loch Maree, and then go out and visit the western isles. She said the sooner they went the better; they would get all the beautiful summer of the north; it was only the autumn tourists who complained of the rain of the Highlands.

"But we had little rain last autumn," said Mrs. Warrener.

"Oh, very little indeed," said Violet, quite brightly; "we had charming weather all through. I never enjoyed myself anywhere so much. I think the sooner your brother gets up to the Highlands, the better it will do him a world of good."

CHAPTER XLVII.

DU SCHMERZENSREICHE!

So the long, silent, sunlit days passed, and it seemed to the three patient watchers that the object of their care was slowly recovering health and strength. But if they were all willing and eager to wait on him, it was Violet who was his constant companion and friend, his devoted attendant, his humble scholar. Sometimes when Mrs. Warrener's heart grew sore within her to think of the wrong that had been wrought in the past, the tender little woman tried to solace herself somewhat by regarding these two as they now sat together—he the whimsical, affectionate master, she the meek pupil and disciple, forgetting all the proud dignity of her maidenhood, her fire, and audacity, and independence, in the humility and self-surrender of her love. Surely, she thought, this time was making up for much of the past. And if all went well now, what had they to look forward to but a still closer companionship in which the proud, and loyal, and fearless girl would become the tender and obedient wife? There was no jealousy in the nature of this woman. She would have laughed with joy if she could have heard their marriage bells.

And Violet, too, when the sun lay warm on the daisies and cowslips, when the sweet winds blew the scent of the lilacs about, and when her master and teacher grew strong enough to walk with her along the quiet woodland ways—how could she fail to pick up some measure of cheerfulness and hope? It almost seemed as if she had dropped into a new world; and it was a beautiful world, full of tenderness, and laughter, and sunshine. Henceforth there was to be no more George Miller to bother her; he had gone clean out of existence as far as she was concerned; there was no more skirmishing with Lady North; even the poor Dowses, with their piteous loneliness and solemn house, were almost forgotten. Here was her whole world. And when she noticed the increasing distances that he walked, and the brighter look of his face, and the growing courage and carelessness of his habits—then indeed the world became a beautiful world to her, and she was almost inclined to fall in love with those whirling and gleaming southern seas.

It was in the black night-time, when all the household but herself were asleep, that she paid the penalty of these transient joys. Haunted by the one terrible fear, she could gain no rest; it was in vain that she tried to reason with herself; her imagination was like some hideous fiend continually whispering to her ear. Then she had no friend with whom to share those terrible doubts; she dared not mention them to any human soul. Why should she disturb the gentle confidence of his sister and her daughter? She could not make them miserable merely to lift from her own mind a portion of its anxiety. She could only lie awake, night after night, and rack her brain with a thousand gloomy forebodings. She recalled certain phrases he had used in moments of pathetic confidence. She recalled the quick look of pain with which he sometimes paused in the middle of his speech, the almost involuntary raising the hand to the region of the heart, the passing pallor of the face. Had they seen none of those things? Had they no wild, despairing thoughts about him? Was it possible they could go peacefully to sleep with this dread thing hanging over them, with a chance of awaking to a day of bitter anguish and wild, heart-broken farewell? This cruel anxiety, kept all to herself, was killing the girl. She grew restless and feverish; sometimes she sat up half the night at the window listening to the moaning of the dark sea outside; she became languid during the day, pale, and distraite. But it was not to last long.

One evening these two were together in the small parlor, he lying down, she sitting near him with a book in her hand. The French windows were open; they could hear Mrs. Warrener and her daughter talking in the garden. And, strangely enough, the sick man's thoughts were once more turned to the far Highlands, and to their life among the hills, and the pleasant merry-making on board the Sea Pyot.

"The air of this place does not agree with you at all, Violet," he was saying. "You are not looking nearly so well as you did when we came down. You are the only one who has not benefited by the change. Now that won't do; we cannot have a succession of invalids—a Greek frieze of patients, all carrying phials of medicine. We must get off to the Highlands at once. What do you say—a fortnight hence?"

She knelt down beside him, and took his hand, and said in a low voice—

"Do not be angry with me—it is very unreasonable, I know—but I have a strange dread of the Highlands. I have dreamed so often lately of being up there—and of being swept away on a dark sea—in the middle of the night."

She shuddered. He put his hand gently on her head.

"There is no wonder you should dream of that," he said with a smile. "That is only part of the story which you made us all believe. But we have got a brighter finish for it now. You have not been overwhelmed in that dark flood yet——"

He paused.

"Violet! My love!" he suddenly cried.

He let go her hand, and made a wild grasp at his left breast; his face grew white with pain. What made her instinctively throw her arms round him, with terror in her eyes?

"Violet! What is this? Kiss me!"

It was but one second after that that a piercing shriek rang through the place. The girl had sprung up like a deer shot through the heart; her eyes dilated, her face wild and pale. Mrs. Warrener came running in; but paused, and almost retreated in fear from the awful spectacle before her; for the girl still held the dead man's hand, and she was laughing merrily. The dark sea she had dreaded had overtaken her at last.

But one more scene—months afterward. It is the breakfast room in Lady North's house in Euston Square; and Anatolia is sitting there alone. The door opens, and a tall young girl, dressed in a white morning costume, comes silently in; there is a strange and piteous look of trouble in her dark eyes. Anatolia goes over to her, and takes her hand very tenderly, and leads her to the easy-chair she had herself just quitted.

"There is not any letter yet?" she asks, having looked all round the table with a sad and wearied air.

"No, dear, not yet," says Anatolia, who, unlovely though she may be, has a sympathetic heart; and her lip trembles as she speaks. "You must be patient, Violet."

"It is another morning gone, and there is no letter, and I cannot understand it," says the girl, apparently to herself, and then she begins to cry silently, while her half-sister goes to her, and puts her arm around her neck, and tries to soothe her.

Lady North comes into the room. Some changes have happened within these few months; it is "Mother" and "My child" now between the enemies of yore. And as she bids Violet good morning, and gently kisses her, the girl renews her complaint.

"Mother, why do they keep back his letter? I know he must have written to me long ago; and I cannot go to him until I get the letter! and he will wonder why I am not coming. Morning after morning I listen for the postman—I can hear him in the street from house to house—and they all get their letters, but I don't get this one that is worth all the world to me. And I never neglected anything that he said; and I was always very obedient to him; and he will wonder now that I don't go to him, and perhaps he will think that I am among my other friends now and have forgotten—— No, he will not think that. I have not forgotten."

"My child, you must not vex yourself," says Lady North with all the tenderness of which she is capable—and Anatolia is bitterly crying all the while. "It will be all right. And you must not look sad to-day; for you know Mrs. Warrener and your friend Amy are coming to see you."

She does not seem to pay much heed.

"Shall we go for the flowers to-day?" she asks, with her dark wet eyes raised for the first time.

"My darling, this is not the day we go for the flowers; that is to-morrow."

"And what is the use of it?" she says, letting her head sink sadly again. "Every time I go over to Nunhead I listen all by myself—and I know he is not there at all. The flowers look pretty, because his name is over them. But he is not there at all—he is far away—and he was to send me a message—and every day I wait for it—and they keep the letter back. Mother, are all my dresses ready?"

"Yes, Violet."

"You are quite sure!"

"They are all ready, Violet. Don't trouble about that."

"It is the white satin one he will like the best; and he will be pleased that I am not in black like the others. Mother, Mrs. Warrener and Amy surely cannot mean to come to the wedding in black."

"Surely not, Violet. But come, dear, to your breakfast."

She took her place quite calmly and humbly; but her mind was still wandering toward that picture.

"I hope they will strew the church-yard with flowers as we pass through it—not for me, but for him; for he will be pleased with that; and there is more than all that is in the Prayer-book that I will promise to be to him, when we two are kneeling together. You are quite sure everything is ready?"

"Everything, my darling."

"And you think the message from him will come soon now?"

"I think it will come soon now, Violet," was the answer, given with trembling lips.

The End.

And now to you—you whose names are written in these blurred pages, some portion of whose lives I have tried to trace with a wandering and uncertain pen—I stretch out a hand of farewell. Yet not quite of farewell, perhaps: for amid all the shapes and phantoms of this world of mystery, where the shadows we meet can tell us neither whence they came nor whither they go, surely you have for me a no less substantial existence that may have its chances in the time to come. To me you are more real than most I know: what wonder then if I were to meet you on the threshold of the great unknown, you all shining with a new light on your face? Trembling, I stretch out my hands to you, for your silence is awful, and there is sadness in your eyes; but the day may come when you will speak, and I shall hear—and understand.

JULIET ON THE BALCONY.

O lips that are so lonely
For want of his caress;
O heart that art too faithful
To ever love him less;
O eyes that find no sweetness
For hunger of his face;
O hands that long to feel him,
Always, in every place!

My spirit leans and listens,
But only hears his name,
And thought to thought leaps onward
As flame leaps unto flame;
And all kin to each other
As any brood of flowers,
Or these sweet winds of night, love,
That fan the fainting hours!

My spirit leans and listens,
My heart stands up and cries,
And only one sweet vision
Comes ever to my eyes.
So near and yet so far, love,
So dear, yet out of reach,
So like some distant star, love,
Unnamed in human speech!

My spirit leans and listens,
My heart goes out to him,
Through all the long night watches,
Until the dawning dim;
My spirit leans and listens,
What if, across the night,
His strong heart send a message
To flood me with delight?

Howard Glyndon.

OUR RURAL DIVINITY.

I wonder that Wilson Flagg did not include the cow among his "Picturesque Animals," for that is where she belongs. She has not the classic beauty of the horse, but in picture-making qualities she is far ahead of him. Her shaggy, loose-jointed body, her irregular, sketchy outlines, like those of the landscape—the hollows and ridges, the slopes and prominences—her tossing horns, her bushy tail, her swinging gait, her tranquil, ruminating habits—all tend to make her an object upon which the artist eye loves to dwell. The artists are for ever putting her into pictures too. In rural landscape scenes she is an important feature. Behold her grazing in the pastures and on the hill sides, or along banks of streams, or ruminating under wide-spreading trees, or standing belly deep in the creek or pond, or lying upon the smooth places in the quiet summer afternoon, the day's grazing done, and waiting to be summoned home to be milked; and again in the twilight lying upon the level summit of the hill, or where the sward is thickest and softest; or in winter a herd of them filing along toward the spring to drink, or being "foddered" from the stack in the field upon the new snow—surely the cow is a picturesque animal, and all her goings and comings are pleasant to behold.

I looked into Hamerton's clever book on the domestic animals, also expecting to find my divinity duly celebrated, but he passes her by and contemplates the bovine qualities only as they appear in the ox and the bull.

Neither have the poets made much of the cow, but have rather dwelt upon the steer, or the ox yoked to the plough. I recall this touch from Emerson:

The heifer that lows in the upland farm,
Far heard, lows not thine ear to charm.

But the ear is charmed nevertheless, especially if it be not too near, and the air be still and dense, or hollow, as the farmer says. And again, if it be spring time and she task that powerful bellows of hers to its utmost capacity, how round the sound is, and how far it goes over the hills.

The cow has at least four tones or lows. First, there is her alarmed or distressed low, when deprived of her calf, or separated from her mates—her low of affection. Then there is her call of hunger, a petition for food, sometimes full of impatience, or her answer to the farmer's call, full of eagerness. Then there is that peculiar frenzied bawl she utters on smelling blood, which causes every member of the herd to lift its head and hasten to the spot—the native cry of the clan. When she is gored or in great danger she bawls also, but that is different. And lastly, there is the long, sonorous volley she lets off on the hills or in the yard, or along the highway, and which seems to be expressive of a kind of unrest and vague longing—the longing of the imprisoned Io for her lost identity. She sends her voice forth so that every god on Mount Olympus can hear her plaint. She makes this sound in the morning, especially in the spring, as she goes forth to graze.

One of our rural poets, Myron Benton, whose verse often has the flavor of sweet cream, has written some lines called "Rumination," in which the cow is the principal figure, and with which I am permitted to adorn my theme. The poet first gives his attention to a little brook that "breaks its shallow gossip" at his feet and "drowns the oriole's voice":

But moveth not that wise and ancient cow,
Who chews her juicy cud so languid now
Beneath her favorite elm, whose drooping bough
Lulls all but inward vision, fast asleep:
But still, her tireless tail a pendulum sweep
Mysterious clockwork guides, and some hid pulley
Her drowsy cud, each moment, raises duly.

Of this great, wondrous world she has seen more
Than you, my little brook, and cropped its store
Of succulent grass on many a mead and lawn;
And strayed to distant uplands in the dawn.
And she has had some dark experience
Of graceless man's ingratitude; and hence
Her ways have not been ways of pleasantness,
Nor all her paths of peace. But her distress
And grief she has lived past; your giddy round
Disturbs her not, for she is learned profound
In deep brahminical philosophy.
She chews the cud of sweetest revery
Above your worldly prattle, brooklet merry,
Oblivious of all things sublunary.

The cow figures in Grecian mythology, and in the Oriental literature is treated as a sacred animal. "The clouds are cows and the rain milk." I remember what Herodotus says of the Egyptians' worship of heifers and steers; and in the traditions of the Celtic nations the cow is regarded as a divinity. In Norse mythology the milk of the cow Andhumbla afforded nourishment to the Frost giants, and it was she that licked into being and into shape a god, the father of Odin. If anything could lick a god into shape, certainly the cow could do it. You may see her perform this office for young Taurus any spring. She licks him out of the fogs and bewilderments and uncertainties in which he finds himself on first landing upon these shores, and up on to his feet in an incredibly short time. Indeed, that potent tongue of hers can almost make the dead alive any day, and the creative lick of the old Scandinavian mother cow is only a large-lettered rendering of the commonest facts.

The horse belongs to the fiery god Mars. He favors war, and is one of its oldest, most available, and most formidable engines. The steed is clothed with thunder, and smells the battle from afar; but the cattle upon a thousand hills denote that peace and plenty bear sway in the land. The neighing of the horse is a call to battle; but the lowing of old Brockleface in the valley brings the golden age again. The savage tribes are never without the horse; the Scythians are all mounted; but the cow would tame and humanize them. When the Indians will cultivate the cow, I shall think their civilization fairly begun. Recently, when the horses were sick with the epizoötic, and the oxen came to the city and helped to do their work, what an Arcadian air again filled the streets. But the dear old oxen—how awkward and distressed they looked! Juno wept in the face of every one of them. The horse is a true citizen, and is entirely at home in the paved streets; but the ox—what a complete embodiment of all rustic and rural things! Slow, deliberate, thick-skinned, powerful, hulky, ruminating, fragrant-breathed, when he came to town the spirit and suggestion of all Georgics and Bucolics came with him. Oh, citizen, was it only a plodding, unsightly brute that went by? Was there no chord in your bosom, long silent, that sweetly vibrated at the sight of that patient, Herculean couple? Did you smell no hay or cropped herbage, see no summer pastures with circles of cool shade, hear no voice of herds among the hills? They were very likely the only horses your grandfather ever had. Not much trouble to harness and unharness them. Not much vanity on the road in those days. They did all the work on the early pioneer farm. They were the gods whose rude strength first broke the soil. They could live where the moose and the deer could. If there was no clover or timothy to be had, then the twigs of the basswood and birch would do. Before there were yet fields given up to grass, they found ample pasturage in the woods. Their wide-spreading horns gleamed in the duskiness, and their paths and the paths of the cows became the future roads and highways, or even the streets of great cities.

All the descendants of Odin show a bovine trace, and cherish and cultivate the cow. What were those old Vikings but thick-hided bulls that delighted in nothing so much as goring each other? And has not the charge of beefiness been brought much nearer home to us than that? But about all the northern races there is something that is kindred to cattle in the best sense—something in their art and literature that is essentially pastoral, sweet-breathed, continent, dispassionate, ruminating, wide-eyed, soft-voiced—a charm of kine, the virtue of brutes.

The cow belongs more especially to the northern peoples, to the region of the good, green grass. She is the true grazing animal. That broad, smooth, always dewy nose of hers is just the suggestion of green sward. She caresses the grass; she sweeps off the ends of the leaves; she reaps it with the soft sickle of her tongue. She crops close, but she does not bruise or devour the turf like the horse. She is the sward's best friend, and will make it thick and smooth as a carpet.

The turfy mountains where live the nibbling sheep

are not for her. Her muzzle is too blunt; then she does not bite as do the sheep; she has not upper teeth; she crops. But on the lower slopes, and margins, and rich bottoms, she is at home. Where the daisy and the buttercup and clover bloom, and where corn will grow, is her proper domain. The agriculture of no country can long thrive without her. Not only a large part of the real, but much of the potential wealth of the land is wrapped up in her.

What a variety of individualities a herd of cows presents when you have come to know them all, not only in form and color, but in manners and disposition. Some are timid and awkward and the butt of the whole herd. Some remind you of deer. Some have an expression in the face like certain persons you have known. A petted and well-fed cow has a benevolent and gracious look; an ill-used and poorly-fed one a pitiful and forlorn look. Some cows have a masculine or ox expression; others are extremely feminine. The latter are the ones for milk. Some cows will kick like a horse; some jump fences like deer. Every herd has its ringleader, its unruly spirit—one that plans all the mischief and leads the rest through the fences into the grain or into the orchard. This one is usually quite different from the master spirit, the "boss of the yard." The latter is generally the most peaceful and law-abiding cow in the lot, and the least bullying and quarrelsome. But she is not to be trifled with; her will is law; the whole herd give way before her, those that have crossed horns with her, and those that have not, but yielded their allegiance without crossing. I remember such a one among my father's milkers when I was a boy—a slender-horned, deep-shouldered, large-uddered, dewlapped old cow that we always put first in the long stable so she could not have a cow on each side of her to forage upon; for the master is yielded to no less in the stancheons than in the yard. She always had the first place anywhere. She had her choice of standing room in the milking yard, and when she wanted to lie down there or in the fields the best and softest spot was hers. When the herd were foddered from the stack or barn, or fed with pumpkins in the fall, she was always first served. Her demeanor was quiet but impressive. She never bullied or gored her mates, but literally ruled them with the breath of her nostrils. If any newcomer or ambitious younger cow, however, chafed under her supremacy, she was ever ready to make good her claims. And with what spirit she would fight when openly challenged! She was a whirlwind of pluck and valor; and not after one defeat or two defeats would she yield the championship. The boss cow, when overcome, seems to brood over her disgrace, and day after day will meet her rival in fierce combat.

A friend of mine, a pastoral philosopher, whom I have consulted in regard to the master cow, thinks it is seldom the case that one rules all the herd, if it number many, but that there is often one that will rule nearly all. "Curiously enough," he says, "a case like this will often occur: No. 1 will whip No. 2; No. 2 whips No. 3; and No. 3 whips No. 1; so around in a circle. This is not a mistake; it is often the case. I remember," he continued, "we once had feeding out of a large bin in the centre of the yard six oxen who mastered right through in succession from No. 1 to No. 6; but No. 6 paid off the score by whipping No. 1. I often watched them when they were all trying to feed out of the box, and of course trying, dog-in-the-manger fashion, each to prevent any other he could. They would often get in the order to do it very systematically, since they could keep rotating about the box till the chain happened to get broken somewhere, when there would be confusion. Their mastership, you know, like that between nations, is constantly changing. But there are always Napoleons who hold their own through many vicissitudes; but the ordinary cow is continually liable to lose her foothold. Some cow she has always despised, and has often sent tossing across the yard at her horns' ends, some pleasant morning will return the compliment and pay off old scores."

But my own observation has been that in herds in which there have been no important changes for several years, the question of might gets pretty well settled, and some one cow becomes the acknowledged ruler.

The bully of the yard is never the master, but usually a second or third-rate pusher that never loses an opportunity to hook those beneath her, or to gore the masters if she can get them in a tight place. If such a one can get loose in the stable, she is quite certain to do mischief. She delights to pause in the open bars and turn and keep those at bay behind her till she sees a pair of threatening horns pressing toward her, when she quickly passes on. As one cow masters all, so there is one cow that is mastered by all. These are the two extremes of the herd, the head and the tail. Between them are all grades of authority, with none so poor but hath some poorer to do her reverence.

The cow has evidently come down to us from a wild or semi-wild state; perhaps is a descendant of those wild, shaggy cattle of which a small band still exists in the forests of Scotland. Cuvier seems to have been of this opinion. One of the ways in which her wild instincts still crop out is the disposition she shows in spring to hide her calf—a common practice among the wild herds. Her wild nature would be likely to come to the surface at this crisis if ever; and I have known cows that practised great secrecy in dropping their calves. As their time approached they grew restless, a wild and excited look was upon them, and if left free, they generally set out for the woods or for some other secluded spot. After the calf is several hours old, and has got upon its feet and had its first meal, the dam by some sign commands it to lie down and remain quiet while she goes forth to feed. If the calf is approached at such time, it plays "'possum," assumes to be dead or asleep, till on finding this ruse does not succeed, it mounts to its feet, bleats loudly and fiercely, and charges desperately upon the intruder. But it recovers from this wild scare in a little while, and never shows signs of it again.

The habit of the cow, also, in eating the placenta, looks to me like a vestige of her former wild instincts—the instinct to remove everything that would give the wild beasts a clue or a scent, and so attract them to her helpless young.

How wise and sagacious the cows become that run upon the street, or pick their living along the highway. The mystery of gates and bars is at last solved to them. They ponder over them by night, they lurk about them by day, till they acquire a new sense—till they become en rapport with them and know when they are open and unguarded. The garden gate, if it open into the highway at any point, is never out of the mind of these roadsters, or out of their calculations. They calculate upon the chances of its being left open a certain number of times in the season; and if it be but once and only for five minutes, your cabbage and sweet corn suffer. What villager, or countryman either, has not been awakened at night by the squeaking and crunching of those piratical jaws under the window or in the direction of the vegetable patch? I have had the cows, after they had eaten up my garden, break into the stable where my own milcher was tied, and gore her and devour her meal. Yes, life presents but one absorbing problem to the street cow, and that is how to get into your garden. She catches glimpses of it over the fence or through the pickets, and her imagination or epigastrium is inflamed. When the spot is surrounded by a high board fence, I think I have seen her peeping at the cabbages through a knot-hole. At last she learns to open the gate. It is a great triumph of bovine wit. She does it with her horn or her nose, or may be with her ever ready tongue. I doubt if she has ever yet penetrated the mystery of the newer patent fastenings; but the old-fashioned thumb-latch she can see through, give her time enough.

A large, lank, muley or polled cow used to annoy me in this way when I was a dweller in a certain pastoral city. I more than half suspected she was turned in by some one; so one day I watched. Presently I heard the gate-latch rattle; the gate swung open, and in walked the old buffalo. On seeing me she turned and ran like a horse. I then fastened the gate on the inside and watched again. After long waiting the old cow came quickly round the corner and approached the gate. She lifted the latch with her nose. Then, as the gate did not move, she lifted it again and again. Then she gently nudged it. Then, the obtuse gate not taking the hint, she butted it gently, then harder and still harder, till it rattled again. At this juncture I emerged from my hiding place, when the old villain scampered off with great precipitation. She knew she was trespassing, and she had learned that there were usually some swift penalties attached to this pastime.

I have owned but three cows and loved but one. That was the first one, Chloe, a bright red, curly-pated, golden-skinned Devonshire cow, that an ocean steamer landed for me upon the banks of the Potomac one bright May day many clover summers ago. She came from the north, from the pastoral regions of the Catskills, to graze upon the broad commons of the national capital. I was then the fortunate and happy lessee of an old place with an acre of ground attached, almost within the shadow of the dome of the capitol. Behind a high but aged and decrepit board fence I indulged my rural and unclerical tastes. I could look up from my homely tasks and cast a potato almost in the midst of that cataract of marble steps that flows out of the north wing of the patriotic pile. Ah, when that creaking and sagging back gate closed behind me in the evening, I was happy; and when it opened for my egress thence in the morning, I was not happy. Inside that gate was a miniature farm redolent of homely, primitive life, a tumble-down house and stables and implements of agriculture and horticulture, broods of chickens, and growing pumpkins, and a thousand antidotes to the weariness of an artificial life. Outside of it were the marble and iron palaces, the paved and blistering streets, and the high, vacant, mahogany desk of a government clerk. In that ancient enclosure I took an earth bath twice a day. I planted myself as deep in the soil as I could to restore the normal tone and freshness of my system, impaired by the above mentioned government mahogany. I have found there is nothing like the earth to draw the various social distempers out of one. The blue devils take flight at once if they see you mean to bury them and make compost of them. Emerson intimates that the scholar had better not try to have two gardens; but I could never spend an hour hoeing up dock and red-root and twitch grass without in some way getting rid of many weeds and fungus, unwholesome growths that a petty, in-doors life was for ever fostering in my own moral and intellectual nature.

But the finishing touch was not given till Chloe came. She was the jewel for which this homely setting waited. My agriculture had some object then. The old gate never opened with such alacrity as when she paused before it. How we waited for her coming! Should I send Drewer, the colored patriarch, for her? No; the master of the house himself should receive Juno at the capital.

"One cask for you," said the clerk, referring to the steamer bill of lading.

"Then I hope it's a cask of milk," I said. "I expected a cow."

"One cask it says here."

"Well, let's see it; I'll warrant it has horns and is tied by a rope"; which proved to be the case, for there stood the only object that bore my name, chewing its cud, on the forward deck. How she liked the voyage I could not find out; but she seemed to relish so much the feeling of solid ground beneath her feet once more that she led me a lively step all the way home. She cut capers in front of the White House, and tried twice to wind me up in the rope as we passed the Treasury. She kicked up her heels on the broad avenue and became very coltish as she came under the walls of the capitol. But that night the long-vacant stall in the old stable was filled, and the next morning the coffee had met with a change of heart. I had to go out twice with the lantern and survey my treasure before I went to bed. Did she not come from the delectable mountains, and did I not have a sort of filial regard for her as toward my foster mother?

This was during the Arcadian age at the capital, before the easy-going southern ways had gone out and the prim new northern ways had come in, and when the domestic animals were treated with distinguished consideration and granted the freedom of the city. There was a charm of cattle in the streets and upon the commons: goats cropped your rose bushes through the pickets, and nooned upon your front porch, and pigs dreamed Arcadian dreams under your garden fence or languidly frescoed it with pigments from the nearest pool. It was a time of peace; it was the poor man's golden age. Your cow, or your goat, or your pig led a vagrant, wandering life, and picked up a subsistence wherever they could, like the bees, which was almost everywhere. Your cow went forth in the morning and came home fraught with milk at night, and you never troubled yourself where she went or how far she roamed.

Chloe took very naturally to this kind of life. At first I had to go with her a few times and pilot her to the nearest commons, and then left her to her own wit, which never failed her. What adventures she had, what acquaintances she made, how far she wandered, I never knew. I never came across her in my walks or rambles. Indeed, on several occasions I thought I would look her up and see her feeding in the national pastures, but I never could find her. There were plenty of cows, but they were all strangers. But punctually, between four and five o'clock in the afternoon, her white horns would be seen tossing above the gate and her impatient low be heard. Sometimes, when I turned her forth in the morning, she would pause and apparently consider which way she would go. Should she go toward Kendall Green to-day, or follow the Tiber, or over by the Big Spring, or out around Lincoln Hospital? She seldom reached a conclusion till she had stretched forth her neck and blown a blast on her trumpet that awoke the echoes in the very lantern on the dome of the capitol. Then, after one or two licks, she would disappear around the corner. Later in the season, when the grass was parched or poor on the commons, and the corn and cabbage tempting in the garden, Chloe was loth to depart in the morning, and her deliberations were longer than ever, and very often I had to aid her in coming to a decision.

For two summers she was a well-spring of pleasure and profit in my farm of one acre, when in an evil moment I resolved to part with her and try another. In an evil moment I say, for from that time my luck in cattle left me. Juno never forgave me the execution of that rash and cruel resolve.

The day is indellibly stamped on my memory when I exposed my Chloe for sale in the public market place. It was in November, a bright, dreamy, Indian summer day. A sadness oppressed me, not unmixed with guilt and remorse. An old Irish woman came to the market also with her pets to sell, a sow and five pigs, and took up a position next me. We condoled with each other; we bewailed the fate of our darlings together; we berated in chorus the white-aproned but bloodstained fraternity who prowled about us. When she went away for a moment I minded the pigs, and when I strolled about she minded my cow. How shy the innocent beast was of those carnal market men. How she would shrink away from them. When they put out a hand to feel her condition she would "scrooch" down her back, or bend this way or that, as if the hand were a branding iron. So long as I stood by her head she felt safe—deluded creature—and chewed the cud of sweet content; but the moment I left her side she seemed filled with apprehension, and followed me with her eyes, lowing softly and entreatingly till I returned.

At last the money was counted out for her, and her rope surrendered to the hand of another. How that last look of alarm and incredulity, which I caught as I turned for a parting glance, went to my heart!

Her stall was soon filled, or partly filled, and this time with a native—a specimen of what may be called the cornstalk breed of Virginia: a slender, furtive, long-geared heifer just verging on cowhood, that in spite of my best efforts would wear a pinched and hungry look. She evidently inherited a humped back. It was a family trait, and evidence of the purity of her blood. For the native blooded cow of Virginia, from shivering over half rations of corn stalks, in the open air, during those bleak and windy winters, and roaming over those parched fields in summer, has come to have some marked features. For one thing, her pedal extremities seemed lengthened; for another, her udder does not impede her travelling; for a third, her backbone inclines strongly to the curve; then, she despiseth hay. This last is a sure test. Offer a thorough-bred Virginia cow hay, and she will laugh in your face; but rattle the husks or shucks, and she knows you to be her friend.

The new comer even declined corn meal at first. She eyed it furtively, then sniffed it suspiciously, but finally discovered that it bore some relation to her native "shucks," when she fell to eagerly.

I cherish the memory of this cow, however, as the most affectionate brute I ever knew. Being deprived of her calf, she transferred her affections to her master, and would fain have made a calf of him, lowing in the most piteous and inconsolable manner when he was out of her sight, hardly forgetting her grief long enough to eat her meal, and entirely neglecting her beloved husks. Often in the middle of the night she would set up that sonorous lamentation and continue it till sleep was chased from every eye in the household. This generally had the effect of bringing the object of her affection before her, but in a mood anything but filial or comforting. Still, at such times a kick seemed a comfort to her, and she would gladly have kissed the rod that was the instrument of my midnight wrath.

But her tender star was destined soon to a fatal eclipse. Being tied with too long a rope on one occasion during my temporary absence, she got her head into the meal barrel, and stopped not till she had devoured nearly half a bushel of dry meal. The singularly placid and benevolent look that beamed from the meal-besmeared face when I discovered her was something to be remembered. For the first time also her spinal column came near assuming a horizontal line.

But the grist proved too much for her frail mill, and her demise took place on the third day, not of course without some attempt to relieve her on my part. I gave her, as is usual in such emergencies, everything I "could think of" and everything my neighbors could think of, besides some fearful prescriptions which I obtained from a German veterinary surgeon, but to no purpose. I imagined her poor maw distended and inflamed with the baking sodden mass which no physic could penetrate or enliven.

Thus ended my second venture in live stock. My third, which followed sharp upon the heels of this disaster, was scarcely more of a success. This time I led to the altar a buffalo cow, as they call the "mully" down south—a large, spotted, creamy-skinned cow, with a fine udder, that I persuaded a Jew drover to part with for ninety dollars. "Pag like a dish rack (rag)," said he, pointing to her udder after she had been milked. "You vill come pack and gif me the udder ten tollars" (for he had demanded an even hundred), he continued, "after you have had her a gouple of days." True I felt like returning to him after a "gouple of days," but not to pay the other ten dollars. The cow proved to be as blind as a bat, though capable of counterfeiting the act of seeing to perfection. For did she not lift up her head and follow with her eyes a dog that scaled the fence and ran through the other end of the lot, and the next moment dash my hopes thus raised by trying to walk over a locust tree thirty feet high? And when I set the bucket before her containing her first mess of meal, she missed it by several inches, and her nose brought up against the ground. Was it a kind of far-sightedness and near blindness? That was it, I think; she had genius, but not talent; she could see the man in the moon, but was quite oblivious to the man immediately in her front. Her eyes were telescopic and required a long range.

As long as I kept her in the stall, or confined to the enclosure, this strange eclipse of her sight was of little consequence. But when spring came, and it was time for her to go forth and seek her livelihood in the city's waste places, I was embarrassed. Into what remote corners or into what terra incognita might she not wander! There was little doubt but she would drift around home in the course of the summer, or perhaps as often as every week or two; but could she be trusted to find her way back every night? Perhaps she could be taught. Perhaps her other senses were acute enough to in a measure compensate her for her defective vision. So I gave her lessons in the topography of the country. I led her forth to graze for a few hours each day and led her home again. Then I left her to come home alone, which feat she accomplished very encouragingly. She came feeling her way along, stepping very high, but apparently a most diligent and interested sightseer. But she was not sure of the right house when she got to it, though she stared at it very hard.

Again I turned her forth, and again she came back, her telescopic eyes apparently of some service to her. On the third day there was a fierce thunderstorm late in the afternoon, and old buffalo did not come home. It had evidently scattered and bewildered what little wit she had. Being barely able to navigate those straits on a calm day, what could she be expected to do in a tempest?

After the storm had passed, and near sundown, I set out in quest of her, but could get no clue. I heard that two cows had been struck by lightning about a mile out on the commons. My conscience instantly told me that one of them was mine. It would be a fit closing of the third act of this pastoral drama. Thitherward I bent my steps, and there upon the smooth plain I beheld the scorched and swollen forms of two cows slain by thunderbolts, but neither of them had ever been mine.

The next day I continued the search, and the next, and the next. Finally I hoisted an umbrella over my head, for the weather had become hot, and set out deliberately and systematically to explore every foot of open common on Capitol hill. I tramped many miles, and found every man's cow but my own—some twelve or fifteen hundred, I should think. I saw many vagrant boys and Irish and colored women, nearly all of whom had seen a buffalo cow that very day that answered exactly to my description, but in such diverse and widely separate places that I knew it was no cow of mine. And it was astonishing how many times I was myself deceived; how many rumps or heads, or liver backs or white flanks I saw peeping over knolls or from behind fences or other objects that could belong to no cow but mine!

Finally I gave up the search, concluded the cow had been stolen, and advertised her, offering a reward. But days passed, and no tidings were obtained. Hope began to burn pretty low—was indeed on the point of going out altogether, when one afternoon, as I was strolling over the commons (for in my walks I still hovered about the scenes of my lost milcher), I saw the rump of a cow, over a grassy knoll, that looked familiar. Coming nearer, the beast lifted up her head; and, behold! it was she! only a few squares from home, where doubtless she had been most of the time. I had overshot the mark in my search. I had ransacked the far-off, and had neglected the near-at-hand, as we are so apt to do. But she was ruined as a milcher, and her history thenceforward was brief and touching!

John Burroughs.

LOVE'S MESSENGERS.

Who will tell him? Who will teach him?
Have you voices, merry birds?
Then be voice for me, and reach him
With a thousand pleading words.
Sing my secret, east and west,
Till his answer be confessed!

Roses, when you see him coming,
Light of heart and strong of limb,
Make your lover-bees stop humming;
Turn your blushes round to him—
Blush, dear flowers, that he may learn,
How a woman's heart can burn!

Wind—oh, wind—you happy rover!
Oh that I were half as free—
Leave your honey-bells and clover,
Go and seek my love for me.
Find, kiss, clasp him, make him know
It is I who love him so!

Mary Ainge De Vere.

THE HEAD OF HERCULES.

One of the most curious cases that ever came under my notice in a long course of criminal practice was not brought into any court, and, as I believe, has never been published until now. The details of the affair came under my personal cognizance in the following manner:

In 1858 I went down into the Shenandoah valley to spend my summer vacation among the innumerable Pages, Marshalls, and Cookes who all hailed me as cousin, by right of traditional intermarriages generations back. My first visit was to the house of McCormack Beardsley, a kinsman and school-fellow whom I had not seen since we parted at the university twenty years before.

We were both gray-haired old fellows now, but I had grown thin and sharp in the courts of Baltimore and Washington, while he had lived quietly on his plantation, more fat and jovial and genial with every year.

Beardsley possessed large means then, and maintained the unlimited hospitality usual among large Virginia planters before the war. The house was crowded during my stay with my old friends from the valley and southern countries. His daughter, too, was not only a beauty, but a favorite among the young people, and brought many attractive, well-bred girls about her, and young men who were not so attractive or well bred. Lack of occupation and a definite career had reduced the sons of too many Virginia families at that time to cards and horses as their sole pursuits; the war, while it left them penniless, was in one sense their salvation.

One evening, sitting on the verandah with Beardsley, smoking, and looking in the open windows of the parlor, I noticed a woman who sat a little apart, and who, as I fancied, was avoided by the younger girls. In a Virginia country party there are always two or three unmarried women, past their first youth, with merry blue eyes, brown hair, and delicate features—women "with a history," but who are none the less good dancers, riders, and able to put all their cleverness into the making of a pie or a match for their cousins. This woman was blue-eyed and brown-haired, but she had none of the neat, wide-awake self-possession of her class. She had a more childish expression, and spoke with a more timid uncertainty, than even Lotty Beardsley, who was still in the schoolroom. I called my host's attention to her and asked who she was.

"It is the daughter of my cousin, General George Waring. You remember him surely—of the Henrico branch of Warings?"

"Certainly. But he had only one child—Louisa; and I remember receiving an invitation to her wedding years ago."

"Yes. This is Louisa. The wedding never took place. It's an odd story," he said, after a pause, "and the truth is, Floyd, I brought the girl here while you were with us in the hope that you, with your legal acumen, could solve the mystery that surrounds her. I'll give the facts to you to-morrow—it's impossible to do it now. But tell me, in the mean time, how she impresses you, looking at her as a lawyer would at a client, or a—a prisoner on trial. Do you observe anything peculiar in her face or manner?"

"I observed a very peculiar manner in all those about her—an effort at cordiality in which they did not succeed; a certain constraint in look and tone while speaking to her. I even saw it in yourself just now as soon as you mentioned her name."

"You did? I'm sorry for that—exceedingly sorry!" anxiously. "I believe in Louisa Waring's innocence as I do in that of my own child; and if I thought she was hurt or neglected in this house—— But there's a cloud on the girl, Floyd—that's a fact. It don't amount even to suspicion. If it did, one could argue it down. But——Well, what do you make of her—her face now?"

"It is not an especially clever face, nor one that indicates power of any kind; not the face of a woman who of her own will would be the heroine of any remarkable story. I should judge her to have been a few years ago one of the sensible, light-hearted, sweet-tempered girls of whom there are so many in Virginia; a nice housekeeper, and one who would have made a tender wife and mother."

"Well, well? Nothing more?"

"Yes. She has not matured into womanhood as such girls do. She looks as if her growth in every-day experiences had stopped years ago; that while her body grew older her mind had halted, immature, incomplete. A great grief might have had that effect, or the absorption of all her faculties by one sudden, mastering idea."

"You are a little too metaphysical for me," said Beardsley. "Poor Lou isn't shrewd by any means, and always gives me the feeling that she needs care and protection more than most women, if that is what you mean."

"There is a singular expression in her face at times," I resumed.

"Ah! Now you have it!" he muttered.

"Sitting there in your parlor, where there is certainly nothing to dread, she has glanced behind and about her again and again, as though she heard a sound that frightened her. I observe, too, that when any man speaks to her she fixes on him a keen, suspicious look. She does not have it with women. It passes quickly, but it is there. It is precisely the expression of an insane person, or a guilty one dreading arrest."

"You are a close observer, Floyd. I told my wife that we could not do better than submit the whole case to your judgment. We are all Lou's friends in the neighborhood; but we cannot look at the matter with your legal experience and unprejudiced eyes. Come, let us go into supper now."

The next morning I was summoned to Beardsley's "study" (so called probably from the total absence of either book or newspaper), and found himself and his wife awaiting me, and also a Doctor Scheffer, whom I had previously noticed among the guests—a gaunt, hectic young man, apparently on the high road to death, the victim of an incurable consumption.

"I asked William Scheffer to meet us here," said Mr. Beardsley, "as Louisa Waring was an inmate of his father's house at the time of the occurrence. She and William were children and playmates together. I believe I am right, William. You knew all the circumstances of that terrible night?"

The young man's heavy face changed painfully. "Yes; as much as was known to any one but Louisa, and—the guilty man, whoever he was. But why are you dragging out that wretched affair?" turning angrily on Mrs. Beardsley. "Surely any friend of Miss Waring's would try to bury the past for her!"

"No," said the lady calmly. "It has been buried quite too long, in my opinion; for she has carried her burden for six years. It is time now that we should try to lift it for her. You are sitting in a draught, William. Sit on this sofa."

Scheffer, coughing frightfully, and complaining with all the testiness of a long-humored invalid, was disposed of at last, and Beardsley began:

"The story is briefly this. Louisa, before her father's death, was engaged to be married to Colonel Paul Merrick (Merricks of Clarke county, you know). The wedding was postponed for a year when General Waring died, and Louisa went to her uncle's—your father, William—to live during that time. When the year was over, every preparation was made for the marriage: invitations were sent to all the kinsfolk on both sides (and that included three or four counties on a rough guess), and we—the immediate family—were assembled at Major Scheffer's preparing for the grand event, when——" Beardsley became now excessively hot and flurried, and getting up, thumped heavily up and down the room.

"After all, there is nothing to tell. Why should we bring in a famous lawyer to sit in judgment on her as if the girl were a criminal? She only did, Floyd, what women have done since the beginning—changed her mind without reason. Paul Merrick was as clever and lovable a young fellow as you would find in the State, and Louisa was faithful to him—she's faithful to him yet; but on the night before the wedding she refused to marry him, and has persisted in the refusal ever since, without assigning a cause."

"Is that all of the story?" I asked.

Beardsley was silent.

"No," said his wife gently; "that is not all. I thought McCormack's courage would fail before he gave you the facts. I shall try and tell you——"

"Only the facts, if you please, without any inferences or opinions of others."

The old lady paused for a moment, and then began: "A couple of days before the wedding we went over to Major Scheffer's to help prepare for it. You know we have no restaurateurs nor confectioners to depend upon, and such occasions are busy seasons. The gentlemen played whist, rode about the plantation, or tried the Major's wines, while indoors we, all of us—married ladies and girls and a dozen old aunties—were at work with cakes, creams, and pastry. I recollect I took over our cook, Prue, because Lou fancied nobody could make such wine jelly as hers. Then Lou's trousseau was a very rich one, and she wanted to try on all of her pretty dresses, that we might see how——"

"My dear!" interrupted Mr. Beardsley, "this really appears irrelevant to the matter——"

"Not at all. I wish Mr. Floyd to gain an idea of Louisa's temper and mood at that time. The truth is, she was passionately fond of her lover, and very happy that her marriage was so near; and being a modest little thing, she hid her feeling under an incessant, merry chatter about dresses and jellies. Don't you agree with me, William?"

The sick man turned on the sofa with a laugh, which looked ghastly enough on his haggard face. "I submit, Aunt Sophie, that it is hardly fair to call me in as a witness in this case. I waited on Lou for two or three years, Mr. Floyd, and she threw me over for Merrick. It is not likely that I was an unprejudiced observer of her moods just then."

"Nonsense, William. I knew that was but the idlest flirtation between you, or I should not have brought you here now," said his aunt. "Well, Mr. Floyd, the preparations all were completed on the afternoon before the wedding. Some of the young people had gathered in the library—Paul Merrick and his sisters and—you were there, William?"

"Yes, I was there."

"And they persuaded Lou to put on her wedding dress and veil to give them a glimpse of the bride. I think it was Paul who wished it. He was a hot, eager young fellow, and he was impatient to taste his happiness by anticipation. It was a dull, gusty afternoon in October. I remember the contrast she made to the gray, cold day as she came in, shy and blushing, and her eyes sparkling, in her haze of white, and stood in front of the window. She was so lovely and pure that we were all silent. It seemed as if she belonged then to her lover alone, and none of us had a right to utter a word. He went up to her, but no one heard what he said, and then took her by the hand and led her reverently to the door. Presently I met her coming out of her chamber in a cloak and hat. Her maid Abby was inside, folding the white dress and veil. 'I am going down to Aunty Huldah's,' Lou said to me. 'I promised her to come again before I was married and tell her the arrangements all over once more.' Huldah was an old colored woman, Lou's nurse, who lived down on the creek bank and had long been bedridden. I remember that I said to Louisa that the walk would be long and lonely, and told her to call Paul to accompany her. She hesitated a moment, and then turned to the door, saying Huldah would probably be in one of her most funereal moods, and that she would not have Paul troubled on the eve of his wedding day. She started, running and looking back with a laugh, down the hill." Mrs. Beardsley faltered and stopped.

"Go on," said Dr. Scheffer. "The incidents which follow are all that really affect Louisa's guilt or innocence."

"Go on, mother," said Beardsley hastily. "Louisa's innocence is not called in question. Remember that. Tell everything you know without scruple."

The old lady began again in a lower voice: "We expected an arrival that afternoon—Houston Simms, a distant kinsman of Major Scheffer's. He was from Kentucky—a large owner of blooded stock—and was on his way home from New York, where his horses had just won the prizes at the fall races. He had promised to stop for the wedding, and the carriage had been sent to the station to meet him. The station, as you know, is five miles up the road. By some mistake the carriage was late, and Houston started, with his valise in his hand, to walk to the house, making a short cut through the woods. When the carriage came back empty, and the driver told this to us, some of the young men started down to meet the old gentleman. It was then about four o'clock, and growing dark rapidly. The wind, I recollect, blew sharply, and a cold rain set in. I came out on the long porch, and walked up and down, feeling uneasy and annoyed at Louisa's prolonged absence. Colonel Merrick, who had been looking for her all through the house, had just learned from me where she had gone, and was starting with umbrellas to meet her, when she came suddenly up to us, crossing the ploughed field, not from the direction of Huldah's cabin, but from the road. We both hurried toward her; but when she caught sight of Colonel Merrick she stopped short, putting out her hands with a look of terror and misery quite indescribable. 'Take me away from him! Oh, for God's sake!' she cried. I saw she had suffered some great shock, and taking her in my arms, led her in, motioning him to keep back. She was so weak as to fall, but did not faint, nor lose consciousness for a single moment. All night she lay, her eyes wandering from side to side as in momentary expectancy of the appearance of some one. No anodyne had any effect upon her—every nerve seemed strained to its utmost tension. But she did not speak a word except at the sound of Colonel Merrick's voice or step, when she would beg piteously that he should be kept away from her. Toward morning she fell into a kind of stupor, and when she awoke appeared to be calmer. She beckoned to me, and asked that her uncle Scheffer and Judge Grove, her other guardian, should be sent for. She received them standing, apparently quite grave and composed. She asked that several other persons should be called in, desiring, she said, to have as many witnesses as possible to what she was about to make known. 'You all know,' she said, 'that to-morrow was to have been my wedding day. I wish you now to bear witness that I refuse to-day or at any future time to marry Paul Merrick, and that no argument or persuasion will induce me to do so. And I wish,' raising her hand, to keep silence—'I wish to say publicly that it is no fault or ill doing of Colonel Merrick's that has driven me to this resolve. I say this as in the sight of Almighty God.' Nobody argued, or scarcely, indeed, spoke to her. Every one saw that she was physically a very ill woman; and it was commonly believed that she had received some sudden shock which had unhinged her mind. An hour afterward the searching party came in (for the young men, not finding Houston Simms, had gone out again to search for him). They had found his dead body concealed in the woods by Mill's spring. You know the place. There was a pistol shot through the head, and a leathern pocketbook, which had apparently contained money, was found empty a few feet away. That was the end of it all, Mr. Floyd."

"You mean that Simms's murderer was never found?"

"Never," said Beardsley, "though detectives were brought down from Richmond and set on the track. Their theory—a plausible one enough too—was that Simms had been followed from New York by men who knew the large sum he earned from the races, and that they had robbed and murdered him, and readily escaped through the swamps."

"It never was my belief," said Dr. Scheffer, "that he was murdered at all. It was hinted that he had stopped in a gambling house in New York, and there lost whatever sum he had won at the races; and that rather than meet his family in debt and penniless, he blew out his brains in the first lonely place to which he came. That explanation was plain enough."

"What was the end of the story so far as Miss Waring was concerned?" I asked.

"Unfortunately, it never has had an end," said Mrs. Beardsley. "The mystery remains. She was ill afterward; indeed, it was years before she regained her bodily strength as before. But her mind had never been unhinged, as Paul Merrick thought. He waited patiently, thinking that some day her reason would return, and she would come back to him. But Louisa Waring was perfectly sane even in the midst of her agony on that night. From that day until now she has never by word or look given any clue by which the reason of her refusal to marry him could be discovered. Of course the murder and her strange conduct produced a great excitement in this quiet neighborhood. But you can imagine all that. I simply have given you the facts which bear on the case."

"The first suspicion, I suppose, rested on Merrick?" I said.

"Yes. The natural explanation of her conduct was that she had witnessed an encounter in the woods between Simms and her lover, in which the old man was killed. Fortunately, however, Paul Merrick had not left the house once during the afternoon until he went out with me to meet her."

"And then Miss Waring was selected as the guilty party?"

No one answered for a moment. Young Scheffer lay with his arm over his face, which had grown so worn and haggard as the story was told that I doubted whether his affection for the girl had been the slight matter which he chose to represent it.

"No," said Beardsley; "she never was openly accused, nor even subjected to any public interrogation. She came to the house in the opposite direction from the spot where the murder took place. And there was no rational proof that she had any cognizance of it. But there were not wanting busybodies to suggest that she had met Simms in the woods, and at some proffered insult from him had fired the fatal shot."

His wife's fair old face flushed. "How can you repeat such absurdity, McCormack?" she said. "Louisa Waring was as likely to go about armed as—as I!" knitting vehemently at a woollen stocking she had held idly until now.

"I know it was absurd, my dear. But you know as well as I that though it was but the mere breath of suspicion, it has always clung to the girl and set her apart as it were from other women."

"What effect did that report have on Merrick?" I asked.

"The effect it would have on any man deserving the name," said Beardsley. "If he loved her passionately before, she has been, I believe, doubly dear to him since. But she has never allowed him to meet her since that night."

"You think her feeling is unchanged for him?"

"I have no doubt of it," Mrs. Beardsley said. "There is nothing in Lou's nature out of which you could make a heroine of tragedy. After the first shock of that night was over she was just the commonplace little body she was before, and could not help showing how fond she was of her old lover. But she quietly refused to ever see him again."

"Merrick went abroad three years ago," interposed her husband. "I'll let you into a secret, Floyd. I've determined there shall be an end of this folly. I have heard from him that he will be at home next week, and is as firm as ever in his resolve to marry Miss Waring. I brought her here so that she could not avoid meeting him. Now if you, Floyd, could only manage—could look into this matter before the meeting, and set it to rights, clear the poor child of this wretched suspicion that hangs about her? Well, now you know why I have told you the story."

"You have certainly a sublime faith in Mr. Floyd's skill," said Scheffer with a disagreeable laugh. "I wish him success." He rose with difficulty, and wrapping his shawl about him, went feebly out of the room.

"William is soured through his long illness," Beardsley hastened to say apologetically. "And he cared more for Lou than I supposed. We were wrong to bring him in this morning"; and he hurried out to help him up the stairs. Mrs. Beardsley laid down her knitting, and glanced cautiously about her. I saw that the vital point of her testimony had been omitted until now.

"I think it but right to tell you—nobody has ever heard it before"—coming close to me, her old face quite pale. "When I undressed Louisa that night her shoes and stockings were stained, and a long reddish hair clung to her sleeve. She had trodden over the bloody ground and handled the murdered man."

Every professional man will understand me when I say I was glad to hear this. Hitherto the girl's whim and the murder appeared to me two events connected only by the accident of occurrence on the same day. Now there was but one mystery to solve.

Whatever success I have had in my practice has been due to my habit of boldly basing my theories upon the known character of the parties implicated, and not upon more palpable accidental circumstances. Left to myself now, I speedily resolved this case into a few suppositions, positive to me as facts. The girl had been present at the murder. She was not naturally reticent: was instead an exceptionally confiding, credulous woman. Her motive for silence, therefore, must have been a force brought to bear on her at the time of the murder stronger than her love for Merrick, and which was still existing and active. Her refusal to meet her lover I readily interpreted to be a fear of her own weakness—dread lest she should betray this secret to him. Might not her refusal to marry him be caused by the same fear? some crushing disgrace or misery which threatened her through the murder, and which she feared to bring upon her husband? The motive I had guessed to be strong as her love: what if it were her love? Having stepped from surmise to surmise so far, I paused to strengthen my position by the facts. There were but two ways in which this murder could have prevented her marriage—through Merrick's guilt or her own. His innocence was proven; hers I did not doubt after I had again carefully studied her face. Concealed guilt leaves its secret signature upon the mouth and eye in lines never to be mistaken by a man who has once learned to read them.

Were there but these two ways? There was a third, more probable than either—fear. At the first presentation of this key to the riddle the whole case mapped itself out before me. The murderer had sealed her lips by some threat. He was still living, and she was in daily expectation of meeting him. She had never seen his face, but had reason to believe him of her own class. (This supposition I based on her quick, terrified inspection of every man's face who approached her.) Now what threat could have been strong enough to keep a weak girl silent for years, and to separate her from her lover on their wedding day? I knew women well enough to say, none against herself; the threat I believed hung over Merrick's head, and would be fulfilled if she betrayed the secret or married him, which, with a weak, loving woman, was equivalent, as any man would know, to betrayal.

I cannot attempt to make the breaks in this reasoning solid ground for my readers; it was solid ground for me.

The next morning Beardsley met me on leaving the breakfast table. He held a letter open in his hand, and looked annoyed and anxious.

"Here's a note from Merrick. He sailed a week sooner than he expected—has left New York, and will be here to-night. If I had only put the case in your hands earlier! I had a hope that you could clear the little girl. But it's too late. She'll take flight as soon as she hears he is coming. Scheffer says it's a miserable, bloody muddle, and that I was wrong to stir it up."

"I do not agree with Dr. Scheffer," I said quietly. "I am going now to the library. In half an hour send Miss Waring to me."

"You have not yet been presented to her?"

"So much the better. I wish her to regard me as a lawyer simply. State to her as formally as you choose who I am, and that I desire to see her on business."

I seated myself in the library; placed pen and ink, and some legal-looking documents, selected at random, before me. Red tape and the formal pomp of law constitute half its force with women and men of Louisa's calibre. I had hardly arranged myself and my materials when the door slowly opened, and she entered. She was alarmed, yet wary. To see a naturally hearty, merry little body subjected for years to this nervous strain, with a tragic idea forced into a brain meant to be busied only with dress, cookery, or babies, appeared to me a pitiful thing.

"Miss Waring?" reducing the ordinary courtesies to a curt, grave nod. "Be seated, if you please." I turned over my papers slowly, and then looked up at her. I had, I saw, none of the common feminine shrewdness to deal with; need expect no subtle devices of concealment; no clever doublings; nothing but the sheer obstinacy which is an unintellectual woman's one resource. I would ignore it and her—boldly assume full possession of the ground at the first word.

"My errand to this house, Miss Waring, is in part the investigation of a murder in 1854, of which you were the sole witness—that of Houston Simms——"

I stopped. The change in her face appalled me. She had evidently not expected so direct an attack. In fact, Beardsley told me afterward that it was the first time the subject had been broached to her in plain words. However, she made no reply, and I proceeded in the same formal tone:

"I shall place before you the facts which are in my possession, and require your assent to such as are within your knowledge. On the afternoon of Tuesday, October 5, 1854, Houston Simms left the Pine Valley station, carrying a valise containing a large sum of money. You——"

She had been sitting on the other side of the table, looking steadily at me. She rose now. She wore a blue morning dress, with lace ruffles and other little fooleries in which women delight, and I remember being shocked with the strange contrast between this frippery and the speechless dread and misery of her face. She gained control of her voice with difficulty.

"Who has said that I was a witness of the murder?" she gasped. "I always explained that I was in another part of the wood. I went to aunty Huldah——"

"Pray do not interrupt me, Miss Waring. I am aware that you were the witness—the sole witness—in this matter." (She did not contradict me. I was right in my first guess—she had been alone with the murderer.) "On returning from your nurse's cabin you left the direct path and followed the sound of angry voices to the gorge by Mill's spring——"

"I did not go to play the spy. He lied when he said that," she cried feebly. "I heard the steps, and thought Colonel Merrick had come to search for me."

"That matters nothing. You saw the deed done. The old man was killed, and then robbed, in your sight"—I came toward her, and lowered my voice to a stern, judicial whisper, while the poor girl shrank back as though I were law itself uttering judgment upon her. If she had known what stagy guesswork it all was! "When you were discovered, the murderer would have shot you to insure your silence."

"I wish he had! It was Thad who would have done that. The white man's way was more cruel—oh, God knows it was more cruel!"

(There were two then.) I was very sorry for the girl, but I had a keen pleasure in the slow unfolding of the secret, just as I suppose the physician takes delight in the study of a new disease, even if it kills the patient.

"Yes," I said with emphasis. "I believe that it would have been less suffering for you, Miss Waring, to have died then than to have lived, forced as you were to renounce your lover, and to carry about with you the dread of the threat made by those men."

"I have not said there was a threat made. I have betrayed nothing." She had seated herself some time before by the table. There was a large bronze inkstand before her, and as she listened she arranged a half dozen pens evenly on the rest. The words she heard and spoke mattered more to her than life or death; her features were livid as those of a corpse, yet her hands went on with their mechanical work—one pen did not project a hair's breadth beyond the other. We lawyers know how common such puerile, commonplace actions are in the supreme moments of life, and how seldom men wring their hands, or use tragic gesture, or indeed words.

"No, you have betrayed nothing," I said calmly. "Your self-control has been remarkable, even when we remember that you believed your confession would be followed by speedy vengeance, not on your head, but Colonel Merrick's."

She looked up not able to speak for a minute. "You—you know all?"

"Not all, but enough to assure you that your time of suffering is over. You can speak freely, unharmed."

Her head dropped on the table. She was crying, and, I think, praying.

"You saw Houston Simms killed by two men, one of whom, the negro Thad, you knew. The white man's face was covered. You did not recognize him. But he knew you, and the surest way to compel you to silence. I wish you now to state to me all the details of this man's appearance, voice, and manner, to show me any letters which you have received from him since" (a random guess, which I saw hit the mark)—"in short, every circumstance which you can recall about him."

She did not reply.

"My dear Miss Waring, you need have no fear on Colonel Merrick's account. The law has taken this matter out of your hands. Colonel Merrick is protected by the law."

"Oh! I did not understand," meekly.

To be brief, she told me the whole story. When she reached the spring she had found the old man bleeding and still breathing. He died in her arms. The men, who had gone back into the laurel to open the valise, came back upon her. The negro was a desperate character, well known in the county. He had died two years later. The other man was masked and thoroughly disguised. He had stopped the negro when he would have killed her, and after a few minutes' consultation had whispered to him the terms upon which she was allowed to escape.

"You did not hear the white man's voice?"

"Not once."

"Bring me the letters you have received from him."

She brought two miserably spelled and written scrawls on soiled bits of paper. It was the writing of an educated man, poorly disguised. He threatened to meet her speedily, warned her that he had spies constantly about her.

"That is all the evidence you can give me?"

"All." She rose to go. I held the door open for her, when she hesitated.

"There was something more—a mere trifle."

"Yes. But most likely the one thing that I want."

"I returned to the spring again and again for months afterward. People thought I was mad. I may have been; but I found there one day a bit of reddish glass with a curious mark on it."

"You have it here?"

She brought it to me. It was a fragment of engraved sardonyx, apparently part of a seal; the upper part of a head was cut upon it; the short hairs curving forward on the low forehead showed that the head was that of Hercules.

Some old recollection rose in my brain, beginning, as I may say, to gnaw uncertainly. I went to my room for a few minutes to collect myself, and then sought Beardsley.

He was pacing up and down the walk to the stables, agitated as though he had been the murderer.

"Well, Floyd, well! What chance is there? What have you discovered?"

"Everything. One moment. I have a question or two to ask you. About ten years ago you commissioned me to buy for you in New York a seal—an intaglio of great value—a head of Hercules, as I remember. What did you do with it?"

"Gave it to Job Scheffer, William's father. Will has it now, though I think it is broken."

"Very well. What have Dr. Scheffer's habits been, by the way? Was he as fond of turning the cards as the other young fellows?"

"Oh, yes, poor boy! There was a rumor some years ago that he was frightfully involved in Baltimore—that it would ruin the old man, in fact, to clear off his debts of honor. But it died out. I suppose William found some way of straightening them out."

"Probably. Where is Dr. Scheffer now? I have a message for him."

"In his room. But this matter of Louisa Waring——"

"Presently. Have patience."

I went up to the young man's room. After all, the poor wretch was dying, and to compel him to blast his own honorable name seemed but brutal cruelty. I had to remember the poor girl's wasted face and hopeless eyes before I could summon courage to open the door after I had knocked. I think he expected me, and knew all that I had to say. A man in health would soon have known that I was acting on surmise, and defied me to the proof. Scheffer, I fancied, had been creeping through life for years with death in two shapes pursuing him, step by step. He yielded, cowed submissive at the first touch, and only pleaded feebly for mercy.

The negro had been his body servant—knew his desperate straits, and dragged him into the crime. Then, he had loved Louisa: he was maddened by her approaching marriage. The scheme of ensuring her silence and driving Merrick away was the inspiration of a moment, and had succeeded. He only asked for mercy. His time was short. He could not live beyond a few weeks. I would not bring him to the gallows.

I was merciful, and I think was right to be so. His deposition was taken before his uncle, Mr. Beardsley, who was a magistrate, and two other men of position and weight in the community. It was to be kept secret until after his death, and then made public. He was removed at once to his father's house.

On Colonel Merrick's arrival that evening, this deposition was formally read to him. I do not think it impressed him very much. He was resolved to marry Miss Waring in spite of every obstacle.

"But I never would have married you unless the truth had been discovered—never," she said to him that evening as they stood near me in the drawing-room. Her cheeks were warm, and her dark eyes full of tender light. I thought her a very lovely woman.

"Then I owe you to Mr. Floyd after all?" he said, looking down at her fondly.

"Oh, I suppose so," with a shrug. "But he is a very disagreeable person! Cast-iron, you know. I am so thankful you are not a lawyer, Paul."

James M. Floyd.

ROMANCE.

I would I were mighty, victorious,
A monarch of steel and of gold—
I would I were one of the glorious
Divinities hallowed of old—
A god of the ancient sweet fashion
Who mingled with women and men,
A deity human in passion,
Transhuman in strength and in ken.

For then I could render the pleasure
I win from the sight of your face;
For then I could utter my treasure
Of homage and thanks for your grace;
I could dower, illumine, and gladden,
Could rescue from perils and tears,
And my speech could vibrate and madden
With eloquence worthy your ears.

You meet me: you smile and speak kindly;
One minute I marvel and gaze,
Idolatrous, worshipping blindly,
Yet mindful of decorous ways.
You pass; and the glory is ended,
Though lustres and sconces may glow:
The goddess who made the scene splendid
Has vanished; and darkly I go.

You know not how swiftly you mounted
The throne in the depths of my eyes;
You care not how meekly I counted
Those moments for pearls of the skies;
Or, knowing it, all is forgotten
The moment I pass from your sight—
Consigned to the fancies begotten
Of chaos and slumber and night.

But I—I remember your glances,
Your carelessest gesture and word,
And out of them fashion romances
Man never yet uttered nor heard;
Romances too splendid for mortals,
Too sweet for a planet of dole;
Romances which open the portals
Of Eden, and welcome my soul.

J. W. DeForest.

BEER.

Poets, in every age since the time of Anacreon, have sung odes in praise of wine. The greatest bards of every clime have sought inspiration in its sparkling depths. But the poet, even German, is yet unborn, who, moved by sweet memories of the nectar of his fatherland, shall chant in rhyme the virtues of his national drink. Yet though its merit has inspired neither of the sister graces, poetry and song, to strike the lyre in its honor, it has had, none the less, an important mission to perform. To its plebeian sister beer, as a healthful beverage, wine must yield the palm. As a common drink, suited to human nature's daily need, it has never been surpassed. If it has nerved no hand to deeds of daring, or struck the scintillating sparks of genius from the human brain, it has added immensely to the health, long life, and happiness of many nations, and is destined to still greater triumphs, as life becomes studied more from a hygienic standpoint.

Beer is believed to have been invented by the Egyptians, and is of almost universal use; the zone of the cereals being more extended than that of the grape. Greek writers before Christ mention a drink composed of barley, under the name of zythos. This beverage was not unknown to the Romans, and we find it first mentioned by the historian Tacitus. By the nations of the West it was regarded as a nourishing drink for poor people. They prepared it from honey and wheat. Among the ancient Germans and Scandinavians, however, beer was in former times the national beverage, and was prepared from barley, wheat, or oats, with the addition of oak bark, and later of hops.

The ancients put bitter herbs in beer, and the present use of hops is in imitation. Modern beer was born at the time of Charlemagne, an epoch at which hops were first cultivated. The earliest writing in which one finds mention of hops as an aroma to beer is in a parchment of St. Hildegarde, abbess of the convent of St. Rupert, at Bingen on the Rhine. The art of fabricating beer remained for a long time a privilege of convents. The priests drank Pater's beer, while the lighter or convent beer was used by the laity. Although beer has been manufactured of all the cereals, barley only can be called its true and legitimate father.

Bavaria and Franconia were already in the fourteenth century celebrated for their excellent beer, and the German cities, of which each one soon had its own brewery, vied with their predecessors. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the Upper and Lower Saxony breweries became well known. The Braunschweiger, Einbeker, Göttinger, Bremer, and Hamburger beer, as well as the breweries of the cities of Würzen, Zwickau, Torgau, Merseburg, and Goslar, were far and wide celebrated. Bavarian beer has long made the tour of the world. Bock beer from Bavaria and from the Erzgebirge is exported to Java and China.

German lager beer, as a healthy and lightly stimulating beverage, is welcome in both hot and cold countries. It is liked as well by the Russians and Scandinavians as by the inhabitants of the tropics. It is brewed by Germans in all parts of the globe—in Valenciennes, Antwerp, Madrid, Constantinople, and even in Australia, Chili, and Brazil.

The English commenced later than the Germans to make beer. In 1524, however, they not only brewed beer, but used hops in its fabrication.

The Greek and Latin races, which drank wine, had but little taste for beer, which divided them from the Germanic races as a sharp boundary. Beer and wine seem to have had an influence in forming the temperament of these widely differing races. While wine excites the nervous system, beer tranquillizes and calms it. The action of a particular kind of daily drink, used for centuries, must in this respect have been more or less potent. Hence, perhaps, the Teuton's phlegm and the Gaul's excitability.

There may be said to be three principal types of beer—the Bavarian, Belgian, and English. The Bavarian is obtained by the infusion or decoction of sprouted barley; then by the fermentation of deposit, in tubs painted internally with resin. The varieties most appreciated are the Bock and Salvator beers. The beers of Belgium have the special character of being prepared by spontaneous fermentation, and the process is therefore slow. The principal varieties are the Lambick, the Faro, the March beer, and the Uytzd. In the English beer the must is prepared by simple infusion and the fermentation is superficial. On account of its great alcoholic richness it is easily conserved. The ale, the porter, and the stout are the chief varieties of English beer, which differ among themselves only by the diverse proportion of their ingredients and the different degrees of torrefaction of the barley, rendering it more or less brown. In France only the superficial method of fermentation is employed. In a litre of Strasburg beer one finds 5 1-4 grammes of albumen, 45 grammes of alcohol, and .091 of salts. The ordinary Bavarian beer contains three per cent. of alcohol and six and a half per cent. of nourishing extracts. The beers the most sticky to the touch are the heaviest in volume and the most nutritious. It is historical that in very olden days the Munich city fathers tried the goodness of the beer by pouring it out on a bench and then sitting down in their leather inexpressibles, and approved of it only when they remained glued to the seat.

In Nuremberg there is a school of brewers, where one may learn all the mysteries of beer brewing. Certain breweries, however, pretend to possess secrets pertaining to the art known exclusively to them. For example, one family near Leipsic is said to have possessed for a century the secret which chemistry has tried in vain to discover, of making the famous Gose beer.

"Good beer," says Dr. Paolo Mantegazza, a celebrated Italian writer on medicine, "is certainly one of the most healthy of alcoholic drinks. The bitter tonic, the richness of the alimentary principle which it contains, and its digestibility make it a real liquid food, which, for many temperaments, is medicine. The English beer, which is stronger in spirit than some wines, never produces on the stomach that union of irritating phenomena vulgarly called heat, and for this reason beer is often tolerated by the most weak and irritable persons, and can be drunk with advantage in grave diseases."[A] Laveran, a French physician, counsels it for consumptives, and for nervous thin people in the most diverse climates.

In the intoxication by beer there is always more or less stupidity. Beer is by no means favorable to l'esprit. It is doubtful if it has ever inspired the great poets or the profound thinkers who make Germany, in science, the leading country in Europe. Reich, Voigt, and many great writers have launched their anathemas against it. As a stimulant beer is less potent than wine or tea and coffee. The forces of soldiers have never been sustained on a fatiguing march, nor can they be incited to a battle, by plentiful libations of beer. During the late French-Prussian war nearly every provision train which left Bavaria carried supplies of beer to the Bavarian troops. It was found very favorable for the convalescent soldiers in the hospitals, but inferior to coffee or wine as a stimulant on the eve of battle.

The old chroniclers of Bavaria relate this curious tale of the origin of the celebrated bock beer. There was one day in olden times at the table of the Duke of Bavaria, as guest, a Brunswick nobleman. Now there had long prevailed at the court the custom of presenting to noble guests, after the meal, a beaker of the Bavarian barley juice, not without a warning as to its strength. The Brunswicker received the usual cup, emptied it at a draught, and pronounced it excellent. "But," he continued, "such barley juice as we brew at home in Brunswick is equalled by no other. Our Mumme is the king of beers, so that the bravest drinker cannot take two beakers of it without sinking under the table." The duke listened with displeasure to the haughty words of the knight, for he was not a little proud of the brewings of his country, and commanded his cup-bearer, with a meaning look, to challenge him.

"By your leave, Sir Knight," replied the page, "what you say is not quite true. If it pleases you and my lord Duke, I should like to lay a wager with you."

The duke nodded assent, and the knight, smiling scornfully, challenged the cup-bearer to pledge him.

"Your Brunswick Mumme," continued the page, "may pass as a refreshing drink; but with our beer you cannot compare it, for the best of our brewings is unknown to you. In case, however, you please again to make your appearance at the hospitable court of my gracious lord, I will promise you a beaker of beer which cannot be equalled in any other country of united Christendom. I will drink the greatest bumper that can be found in our court of your Mumme at one draught, if you can take of our beer, even slowly, three beakers. He who a half hour afterward can stand on one leg and thread a needle shall win the wager, and receive from the other a mighty cask of Tokayer Rebensafte."

This speech received loud applause, and the Brunswicker laughingly accepted the challenge.

After the knight had departed the duke tapped the page on the shoulder and said, "Take care that thou dost not repent thy word, and that the Brunswicker does not win the wager."

The first morning in May the Brunswicker rode into the castle and was welcomed by the duke. All eyes were turned on the cup-bearer, who shortly afterward appeared with a suite of pages carrying on a bier two little casks, one bearing the Bavarian arms and the other those of Brunswick. The right to give to the contents of the former a particular name was reserved to the duke. The page produced likewise a monstrous silver bumper and three beakers of the ordinary size. It was long before the bumper was filled to the rim, and then it required two men to raise it to the table. In the mean time another page placed the three beakers before the knight, who could not suppress a sarcastic laugh at the huge bumper which the page, taking in his strong arms, placed to his lips. As the knight emptied the last beaker the cup-bearer turned down the bumper. Two needles and a bundle of silk lay on the table. It wanted a few moments of the half hour, and the Brunswicker ran toward the garden for fresh air. Hardly arrived in the court, a peculiar swimming of the head seized him, so that he fell to the ground. A servant saw him from the window, and hastened out, followed by the court, with the duke in advance. There lay the Brunswicker, and tried in vain to rise.

"By all the saints, Herr Ritter, what has thrown you in the sand?" inquired the duke sympathetically.

"The bock, the bock" (the goat, the goat), murmured the knight with a heavy tongue.

A burst of sarcastic laughter echoed in the courtyard. In the mean time the page stood on one foot, and without swaying threaded the needle.

"The bock, the bock," repeated the duke smiling. "Our beer is no longer without a name. It shall be called bock, that one may take care."

The bock season lasts about six weeks, from May into June. Just before it commences a transparency of a goat, drinking from a tall, slender glass, is placed as a sign before certain beer locals, called in Munich dialect bock stalls, not because goats are kept there, but because wonderful beer, called bock, is dispensed.

He who has not lived in Bavaria can have no idea of what importance beer is in Bavarian life. There are in Munich Germans who exist only for beer, and there have been pointed out to me old gentlemen who have frequented daily the same local for twenty-five or thirty years, and even occupied the same seat, and pounded the same table, by way of enforcing their views, in discussing the politics of the day. They are called Stammgäste (literally stock guests), and are much honored in their respective locals.

The greatest personages do not disdain the meanest locals, provided the beer is good and to their taste. Naked pine tables do not disgust them, nor the hardest benches. Often on the table skins of radishes, crusts of bread, cigar stumps, tobacco ashes, herring heads, and cheese rinds form a fragrant mélange. The inheritors of this precious legacy push it away without undue irritability. Radishes are carried about by old women called radi-weibers, who do a thriving business besides in nuts and herrings. One cannot find in any other country of the world radishes of such size, tenderness, and flavor—a brown variety inherited by the happy Müncheners with their breweries. Nowhere else does cutting and salting them rank as an art. To prepare one scientifically they pare it carefully, slit it in three slices nearly to the end, place salt on the top, and draw the finger over it, as if it were a pack of cards. The salt falls between the slices, and when they are pressed together becomes absorbed.

In a German Bier Local are represented all classes of society. Beer is the great leveller of social distinctions. The foaming glass of King Gambrinus unites all Germans of all states, climates, and professions in a closer brotherhood than the sceptre of the Hohenzollerns, and links that portion of the Teutonic race over which the stars and stripes throws its protecting folds to the dear fatherland.

Fine wines are a perquisite of money. The fortunate aristocrat and the house of Israel, which everywhere waxes fat on the needs of travellers, may sip their champagne, their Lachrymæ Christi, and their Hockheimer, while less favored humanity contents itself with sour vin ordinaire; but beer is the same for all, and in some breweries each one must search for a glass, rinse it, and present himself in his turn at the shank window, to which there is no royal road. "La bière," which a great writer calls "ce vin de la réforme," is essentially a democratic drink. It became popular at a time when a fatal blow had been struck at class privileges and priestly exclusiveness.

Manfully does a true-hearted Bavarian stand by his brewery, in ill as well as good report. If the beer turns out badly, he does not find it a sufficient reason to desert his local for some other, but rather remains with touching devotion, and anticipates the approaching end of the old beer and the advent of new, with implicit trust and confidence in the future. Some years ago the Bavarian post and railway conductors distinguished themselves by the mournful zeal with which they notified to the passengers the nearing of the frontier. At each station they were sorrowfully communicative.

"The last Bairischer [B] but four, gentlemen! Gentlemen, there are only two more real Bairischers! Gentlemen," with tears in the voice, "the last Bairischer."

The passengers rushed to the buffet and drank.

Even now, with that curious affection with which every Bavarian's heart turns to his Mecca of beer, the salutation to a stranger is, "Are you going to Munich? Da werden sie gutes Bier trinken."[C]

"You came from Munich! Ach! da haben sie gutes Bier getrunken."[D]

Even in Beerland there are different kinds of beer, like the federal union, one in many and many in one. Between them are sometimes irreconcilable differences, as for example, between the white and Actiens beer of Berlin. The former is made of wheat, and is exclusively a summer beverage, and a glass of it is fondly termed a "kleine Weisse" (a little white one), perhaps in irony, for it is served in excentric mammoth tumblers, which require both hands to lift.

Then there is the Vienna beer, the antipodes of the Bavarian. The latter must be drunk soon after it is made, while the former must lie many months in the cellar before it is ready for use. In Austria, that forcible union of States of clashing interests and nationalities, which is not a nation, but only a government reposing on bayonets, the population is divided between the partisans of King Gambrinus and those of Bacchus.

As little as an artist could maintain that he was familiar with the works of the great masters when he had not visited Italy, so little could a beer drinker assert that he had seen beer rightly drunk when he had not been in Munich. All over the world beer is regarded as a refreshment, but in Munich it is the elixir of life, the fabled fountain of youth and happiness. It is looked upon as nourishment by the lower classes, who drink for dinner two masses[E] of it, with soup and black bread. For the price of the beer they could procure a good portion of meat, but they universally maintain that they are best nourished with beer and bread.

The Bavarian drinks to satisfy his "thirst, that beautiful German gift of God." If he is healthy, he drinks because it keeps his life juices in their normal state; if he is sick and in pain, because it is a soothing and harmless narcotic; if he is hungry, because beer is nourishment; if he has already eaten, because beer promotes digestion; if he is warm, because it is cooling and refreshing; if he is cold, because it warms him; if he is fatigued, because it is a tonic and sovereign strength renewer; if he is angry, because beer soothes him and gives him time to consider; if he needs courage, because beer is precisely the right stimulant. Where the Americans fly to their bitters "to tone up the system and enliven the secretions," the Germans resort to beer; and many are of opinion that frequent trips to the bock stalls in the spring are more healing than a visit to Carlsbad or Baden Baden, where one drinks disgusting water. In all circumstances and all moods they drink and are comforted.

The Jews believed that the sacred waves of the Jordan were powerful to wash away all human suffering, either of the soul or body. Faith was necessary to this pious healing. To the Münchener beer is the river of health. His faith in it dates from his earliest infancy, and he resorts to its beneficent influence at least seven times a day, and drinks his last Krügl with apparently the same relish as the first. The quantity which Germans drink is something incredible. Bavarian students usually take from five to seven masses per day. (At the German Jesuit seminary in Prague the novices are allowed daily seven, the clericos ten, and the priests twelve pints of beer.)

Beer is considered good not only for men, but for women, for girls and boys, and even unweaned infants.

"Mein Krügl" the Münchener speaks of as of his natural and human rights. He was born with a right to his beer, and his Krügl, as "man is born with a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," and equally with these the State must look after this right. The krügls, or beer mugs, of each brewery are inspected by the police, to see if the measure is correct, and if the ware has no poisonous lead in its composition. The royal K is stamped on them by the King's authority. The police also examine the contents of the beer with the same zeal as the water or the condition of the sewers.

The Germans as a nation are patient of wrong and peace-loving, but the rumor of a tax on beer raises a frightful commotion, and a riot is often the consequence. As well tax air, water, and fire as beer, the fifth element.

In an ancient neighborhood of Munich, behind the post, and best entered from Maximilian street, is a little square remarkable for its ugliness. All the houses are old, and one feels upon entering it as if one had suddenly walked back into the middle ages. On the east side stands a time-gray, low, irregular building, resembling in architecture, or by its want of it, nothing of the present age. This is the royal Hof Brauerei. After 10 A. M. a constant stream of thirsty souls flows along the streets and narrow alleys leading toward its dismal-looking portals. Its beer is celebrated as being the finest in the world, and is the standard by which all other beers are judged. It is the poetry of beer; it is to all other brewings what Shakespeare is to the drama; what the Coliseum is to other antiquities. None of the beer is exported or sold; it is all drunk on the spot, and when it gives out no other brewery can supply a drop comparable with it. The Parisians, who have heaped every luxury, from the poles to the tropics, in their capital of the world, have not enough money in the Bank of France to purchase a cask of it. It is said that Maximilian II. resolved that the best beer in the world should be made at the royal brewery in Munich. It has never been expected that it would yield any revenue, but merely pay its expenses. It is now under the protection of the present King, and the ingredients are inspected by an officer of the royal household.

For its dirt, its darkness, and its utter want of service, the Hof Brauerei is unequalled in the world, and nowhere else can be found such a mixed society. Entering the low-vaulted room, each one looks anxiously about for an empty mug. These are of gray stone, containing a mass, the price of which is seven and a half kreutzers. Spying one, he hastens to secure it from other competitors. The first who reaches it carries it off in triumph to the spring in the anteroom, rinses it, and presents himself behind a queue of predecessors at the shank window, where several pairs of hands are occupied all day long in filling mugs from the great casks within. This accomplished, he returns to the guest room and searches for a seat. If found, it is certainly not luxurious—a wooden bench of pine, stained by time and continual use to a dark dirt color, behind an ancient table. The walls and ceiling are grim with age, and the atmosphere hazy with smoke. The scene baffles description. All classes of society are represented. Side by side with the noble or learned professor, one sees the poorest artisan and the common soldier. Here and there the picturesque face of an artist is in close proximity to a peasant, and through the smoky atmosphere one catches the gleam of the scarlet or sky-blue cap of a German student, or the glitter of an epaulette. The Catholic of the most ultramontane stamp is there, as well as the Jew, the Protestant, and the freethinker. Here stands a pilgrim from far America, armed with a Bädeker, and there an Englishman with the inevitable Murray under his arm, too amazed or disdainful to search for a mass. Remarkable also are the steady habitués of the place, with Albert Dürer-like features which look as if hastily hewn out of ancient wood with two or three blows of a hatchet, or with smoke-dried physiognomies having a tint like that of a meerschaum pipe, acquired by years of exposure to the thick atmosphere of smoky breweries. They are there morning, noon, and night, year in and year out. Some talk over the news of the day, but most sit in silence. Not a few make a meal with bread and radishes, or a sausage brought from the nearest pork shop.

In Munich a singular and ancient custom prevails. If by chance the cover of a mug is left up, any individual who chooses may seize it, and drink the contents. At the Hof Brauerei I once saw a newly arrived Englishman, carrying the usual red guidebook, quit the room for an instant, leaving uncovered his just acquired mass of beer. There came along a seedy-looking old gentleman, evidently a Stammgast. A gleam of satisfaction stole over his wooden features as he espied the open mug. Pausing a moment, he lifted it to his lips and slowly drank the contents. Setting it down empty, with a face mildly radiating satisfaction, he went his way. Presently the owner of the beer returned, took his seat, and lifted the mass, without looking, to his lips. With intense astonishment he put it down again, appeared not to believe the evidence of his senses, applied his glass to his eye, looked with anxiety into his mug, and became satisfied of its emptiness. At his neighbors he cast a quick glance of indignant suspicion—the look of a Briton whose rights were invaded. No one even looked up; apparently the occasion was too common to excite attention. Gradually his face regained its composure. He procured a new supply, and as the wonderful barley juice disappeared became again calm and happy. Miraculous mixture! Who would not, under thy benign influence, forget all rancor and bitterness, even though his deadliest enemy sat opposite?

In the Haupt und Residenz Stadt München, as Munich is always called in official documents, many of the breweries bear the names of orders of monks, because there the friars in olden days made particularly good beer. The breweries borrowed from them the receipt and the name. Hence the brewery to the Augustiner, to the Dominikaner, to the Franciskaner, and the Salvator.

New beer is in all cities of America and Europe a simple fact. In Munich it is an important public and private family event, concerning each house as well as the entire city.

The opening of the Salvator brewery in the suburbs of Munich, for its brief season of a month in the spring, assumes for the inhabitants the importance of a long anticipated holiday. Thither an eager crowd of townspeople make pilgrimage. I was present on one of these auspicious occasions, and found a joyous multitude of more than two thousand persons, filling to overflowing the capacious building gayly trimmed with evergreens interspersed with the national colors. A band discoursed excellent music, that necessary element, without which no German scene is complete. The waiters, more than usually adroit in supplying the wants of the crowd, carried in their hands fourteen glasses at a time with professional dexterity. The peculiar delicacy of the occasion, aside from the beer, seemed to be cheese, plentifully sprinkled with black pepper.

Late in the evening the people became more excited and sympathetic, and then it was proposed to sing "Herr Fisher," a popular German song of the people. A verse was sung by a few voices as a solo; then followed a mighty chorus from all the persons present. Each one raised the cover of his beer mug at the commencement, and let it fall with a clang at the close of the chorus, with startling effect.

In Munich one-half of the inhabitants appear to be engaged in the fabrication of beer and the entire population in drinking it. It impresses one as being the only industry there. The enormous brewery wagons, drawn by five Norman horses, are ever to be seen. On the trains going from the city there is ordinarily a beer car painted in festive white. It bears an inscription, that none may mistake its contents, and perhaps that the peasants may bless it as it passes. It is looked upon with as much reverence as if it bore the ark of the covenant.

All over Germany, among the most ordinary of birthday or holiday presents are the elegantly painted porcelain tops for beer glasses. The works of great masters may be found copied in exquisite style for this purpose, as well as illustrations suited to uncultivated tastes. To these pictures there are appropriate mottoes, and often a verse adapted to the comprehension of the most uneducated peasant. A favorite among the Bavarians, judging from the frequency with which it is met with in all parts of Bavaria, represents a peasant in a balcony waving her kerchief to her lover, departing in a little skiff, on an intensely blue sea. Beneath, in patois, is the doggerel:

Beautifully blue is the sea,
But my heart aches in me,
And my heart will never recover
Till returns my peasant lover.

Equally a favorite is the following:

A rifle to shoot,
And a fighting ring to hit,
And a maiden to kiss,
Must a lively boy have.

The rings to which the rhyme refers are of huge size, of silver, with a sharp-edged square of the same metal. They are heirlooms among the peasants, and are worn on the middle finger. It is the custom in a quarrel to hit one's adversary with the Stozzring on the cheek, which it tears open.

In Germany many of the great breweries have summer gardens in the suburbs of the cities. In Berlin there are magnificent Biergärten, where the two most necessary elements of German existence, beer and music, are united. I need only refer to the Hof Jäger, with its flowers, fountains, miniature lake, and open-air theatre, where popular comedies are performed. Three times per week there is an afternoon concert by one or two regiment bands. Thither the Germans conduct their families. In the winter there are concert rooms in the cities, where "music is married," not "to immortal verse," but to beer; and these classical concerts are patronized by people of high respectability.

Beer is peculiarly suited to the American temperament, too nervous and sensitive. It is certain that the human race always has, and probably always will, resort to beverages more or less stimulating. The preaching of moralists and the efforts of legislators will not exclude them permanently from our use. It is not in the use but in the abuse of these that the difficulty lies. Neither tea nor coffee answers for all temperaments and all occasions as nervous aliments. The extraordinary and increasing diffusion of liquors is one of the social ulcers of modern society, particularly in America. It is unfortunately true that the use of strong alcoholics is increasing every day, to the great detriment of public health and morals. Taken merely to kill time, they often end by killing the individual.

One of the great advantages of beer, too much forgotten even by physicians, is that it reverses the influence of alcohol, by which it loses its irritating properties on the mucous membrane of the stomach. The celebrated Dr. Bock (late professor of pathological anatomy in the university at Leipsic) says, "Beer exercises on the digestion, on the circulation, on the nerves, and above all on the whole system, a beneficial effect."[F]

It would be well if Americans would adopt it instead of the innumerable harmful beverages which ruin the health and poison the peace of society.

S. G. Young.