TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES

In the plain text version words in Italics are denoted by _underscores_ and bold text like =this=.

The book cover was modified by the Transcriber and has been added to the public domain.

A number of words in this book have both hyphenated and non-hyphenated variants. For the words with both variants present the one more used has been kept.

Obvious punctuation and other printing errors have been corrected.

“Havelok had all he wanted to eat.”

MODERN ESSAYS
AND STORIES

A BOOK TO AWAKEN APPRECIATION OF
MODERN PROSE, AND TO DEVELOP
ABILITY AND ORIGINALITY IN WRITING

EDITED, WITH INTRODUCTION, NOTES, SUGGESTIVE
QUESTIONS, SUBJECTS FOR WRITTEN IMITATION, DIRECTIONS
FOR WRITING, AND ORIGINAL ILLUSTRATIONS

BY

FREDERICK HOUK LAW, Ph.D.

Head of the Department of English in the Stuyvesant High School,
New York City, Editor of Modern Short Stories, etc.

NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.

COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY THE CENTURY CO.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THE
RIGHT TO REPRODUCE THIS BOOK, OR
PORTIONS THEREOF, IN ANY FORM. 3120

PREFACE

In all schools pupils are expected to write “essays” but, curiously enough, essay-reading and essay-writing are taught but little. In spite of that neglect, the essay is so altogether natural and spontaneous in spirit, so intensely personal in expression, and so demanding of excellence of prose style, that it is the form, par excellence, for consideration in school if teachers are to show pupils much concerning the art of writing well. The essay is to prose what the lyric is to poetry—complete, genuine and beautiful self-expression, or better still, self-revelation.

Most of the writing done in schools is straightforward narration of events, without much, if any, attempt to show personal reactions on those events—mere diary-like accounts, at best; mechanical descriptions that aim to present exterior appearance without attempting to reveal inner meanings or to show awakened emotions; and stereotyped explanations and arguments drawn, for the most part, from books of reference or from slight observation.

Beyond all this mechanical work lies a field of throbbing personal life, of joyous reactions on all the myriads of interests that lie close at hand, of meditations on the wonders of plant and animal life, of humorous or philosophic comments on human nature, and of all manner of vague dreams and aspirations aroused by

“Such sights as youthful poets dream
On summer eves by haunted stream.”

Without the slightest question, it is the duty of the school, and of the teacher in particular, to lead pupils to appreciate honesty and originality in unapplied, unpragmatic self-expression, and to show pupils how they themselves may gain the very real pleasure of putting down on paper permanent records of their own intimate thinking.

Joseph Addison's The Sir Roger de Coverley Papers and Washington Irving's Sketch Book have for many years made valiant but unsuccessful efforts to fill the places that should be filled by more modern representatives of the essay. Macaulay's Essay on Johnson is a biographical article for an encyclopedia; his essays on Clive and on Hastings are polemics; and Carlyle's Essay on Burns is a critical disquisition. With the exception of The Sir Roger de Coverley Papers, all these so-called essays are of considerable length and are unfitted to serve as the best examples of the essay form;—for the essay, like the lyric, demands brevity: it is, after all, only a quick flash of self-revelation,—not a sustained effort.

Then again, who would wish to learn to write like Addison, like Washington Irving, like Macaulay, or like Carlyle! Those great writers couched their thoughts in the language-fashions of their days, just as they clothed their bodies in the garments of their times. To imitate either their style of expression or their costumes would be to make one's self ridiculous, or to take part in a species of masquerade.

The extremely Latinized vocabulary of 1711, or the resonant periods and marked antitheses of 1850, are as old-fashioned to-day as are the once highly respected periwigs, great-coats and silver shoe buckles of the past.

The thoughts of yesterday are not the thoughts of to-day. There is, in serious reality, such a thing as “an old-fashioned point of view.” With all due reverence for the past, the best teachers of to-day believe that it is just as necessary for students to use present-day methods of expression and to cultivate present-day interests as it is to take advantage of the railroad, the telegraph, the telephone, the automobile, and the thousand other mechanical contrivances that aid life to-day, but which were unknown in 1711 or in 1850.

The type of essay that should be studied in school should concern modern interests; represent the modern point of view; discuss subjects in which young students are interested; be expressed in present-day language and, in general, should set forward an example that pupils may directly and successfully imitate.

In order to do all this to the best advantage the essays chosen for study should be exceedingly short. To a young student essays of any considerable length, unless the subject matter is of unusually intensive interest, present insuperable difficulties. Short essays, on the other hand, appear to him exactly what they are,—charmingly delightful expressions of personal opinion.

The essays in this book, instead of telling about coffee houses or stage coaches, Scotch peasants or literary circles in London or Edinburgh, tell about such subjects as Christmas crowds, church bells, walking, dogs, the wind, children, the streets of New York, school experiences, and various modern ideals in work, in literature, and in life. Most of the essays are exceedingly short, only one or two being more than a few pages in length.

The essays here given represent various types, including not only the chatty, familiar essay but also informational essays, critical essays, biographical essays, story essays, and one or two examples of highly poetic prose.

An informal introduction, paving the way to a sympathetic understanding, precedes every essay. Notes below the pages of text explain immediately all the literary or historical allusions with which a young reader might not be familiar, their close position to the text making it unnecessary for a student to hunt for an explanation.

Suggestive questions given immediately after every essay make it possible for the teacher to assign lessons quickly; they also enable the student to study by himself and to feel assured that he will not miss any important point.

Twenty subjects, suitable as subjects for essays to be written by the student in direct imitation of the essay that immediately precedes them, follow every selection. In addition to this great number of appropriate modern subjects, more than 500 in number, on which young students can express their real selves, there are given, in connection with every list of subjects, directions for writing,—such as a teacher might give a class when assigning written work.

The subject-lists and the directions for writing give the teacher a remarkable opportunity to stimulate a class as never before; to awaken a spirit of genuine self-expression; and to teach English composition in a way that he can not possibly do through the medium of any of our present-day rhetorics.

For the advantage of those teachers who wish to combine the teaching of the essay and of the short story, and who may not have at hand any suitable collection of short stories, the book includes not only introductory material concerning the nature of the short story and the development of the short story form, but also a series of stories of unusual interest for young readers, so chosen and so arranged that they represent the development of the short story through the legendary tale, the historical story, and the romantic story of adventure, to the story of realism and of character. In every case the story chosen is one that any student will enjoy and will understand immediately, as well as one that he can imitate both with pleasure and with success.

Introductions, foot notes, suggestive questions, subjects for written imitation, and directions for writing, follow every story.

If the book is used both as a means of awakening literary appreciation and developing honesty, originality, and power in written self-expression it will give pleasure to teachers and students alike.

INTRODUCTION

I
THE WRITING OF ESSAYS

“The plowman, near at hand,
Whistles o'er the furrowed land,
And the milkmaid singeth blithe....”

Why? Simply because they are happy; because they are healthy and vigorous, and at work; because they are doing something that interests them; because their hearty enjoyment in life must express itself in some other way than in work alone: in fact, they whistle and sing just for the doing of it,—not that they wish any other person to hear them, and not that they wish to teach anything to anyone. Their whistling and singing are spontaneous, and for the sake of expression alone.

Many of the best English essays were written just for the joy of self-expression. Serious workers in life, in their leisure moments, have let their pens move, as it were, automatically, in a sort of frank and full expression somewhat akin to the plowman's whistling and the milkmaid's singing.

Certainly in that joyous spirit Michel de Montaigne, in the sixteenth century, wrote the delightfully familiar essays that have charmed readers for over three hundred years, and that established the essay as a literary type. In a like vein, frankly and personally, Charles Lamb, who died in the first half of the nineteenth century, wrote intimate confessions of his thoughts,—his memories of schooldays and of early companionships and familiar places,—writing with all the warmth and color of affectionate regard. Happily, and because he was glad to be alive, Robert Louis Stevenson, almost in our own days, wrote of his love of the good outdoor world with its brooks and trees and stars, of his love of books and high thought, and his admiration of a manly attitude toward life.

For such people writing for the sake of expression was just as pure joy as the plowman's whistling and the milkmaid's singing.

Ordinary people write at least the beginnings of essays when they write letters,—not business letters in which they order yards of cloth, or complain that goods have not been delivered,—not letters that convey any of the business of life,—but rambling, gossipy, self-revealing letters, so illuminated with personality that they carry the very spirit of the writers.

Everyone, at times, talks or writes in a gossipy way of the things that interest him. He likes to escape from the world of daily tasks, of orders, directions, explanations and arguments, and to talk or write almost without purpose and just for the sake of saying something. In that sense everyone is a natural essayist.

The true essayist, like the pleasant conversationalist, expresses himself because it gives him pleasure. Out of his rich experience and wide observation he speaks wisely and kindly. He has no one story to tell and no one picture to present. He follows no rules and he aims at no very serious purpose. He does not desire to instruct nor to convince. Like the conversationalist, he is ready to leave some things half-said and to emphasize some subjects, not because it is logical to do so but because he happens to like them. He is ready at any moment to tell an anecdote, to introduce humor or pathos, or to describe a scene or a person—if so doing fits his mood. In general, the true essayist is like the musician who improvises: he

“Lets his fingers wander as they list,
And builds a bridge from dreamland.”

Of all possible kinds of prose writing, the essay, therefore, gives the greatest freedom. The essayist may reveal himself completely and in any manner that he pleases. He may tell of his delight in wandering by mountain streams, or in mingling with the crowds in city streets; he may tell of his thoughts as he meditated by ancient buildings or in the solemn half-darkness of age-old churches; he may dream of a long-gone childhood or look ahead into a roseate future; he may talk of people whom he has known, of books that he has read, or of the ideals of life. Any subject is his, and any method of treatment is his,—just so long as his first thought is the frank and full expression of himself.

To write an essay,—even though it be only a paragraph,—is to gain the pleasure of putting at least a little of one's real self down on paper—just because to do so is pleasure.

II
THE NATURE OF THE ESSAY

The essay, then, instead of being a formal composition, is characterized by a lack of formality. It is a species of very friendly and familiar writing. Like good conversation, it turns in any direction, and drops now and then into interesting anecdotes or pleasant descriptions, but never makes any attempt to go to the heart of a subject. However serious an essay may be it never becomes extremely formal or all-inclusive.

A chapter in a textbook includes all that the subject demands and all that the scope of treatment permits. It presents well-organized information in clear, logical form. It aims definitely to explain or to instruct. It may reveal nothing whatever concerning its writer. An essay, on the other hand, includes only those parts of the subject that interest the writer; it avoids logical form, and is just as chatty, wandering, anecdotal and aimless as is familiar talk. It focuses attention, not on subject-matter but on the personality of the writer.

The essay does not reveal a subject: it reveals personal interests in a subject. It touches instead of analyzing. It comments instead of classifying.

Truth may sparkle in an essay as gold sparkles in the sand of an Alaskan river, but the presentation of the truth in a scientific sense is no more the purpose of the essay than is the presentation of the gold the purpose of the river. In the eighteenth century, essayists like Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Oliver Goldsmith and Samuel Johnson, commented freely upon eighteenth century manners and customs, but they made no attempt to present a careful survey of the subject. Every writer wrote of what happened to interest him. To-day it is possible to draw from the great body of eighteenth century essays material for an almost complete survey of manners and customs in that period—but that result is only an accident. The writers did not intend it.

The essayist is not concerned with giving accurate and logically-arranged information. He thinks only of telling how his subject appeals to him, of telling whether or not he likes it, and why. The more personally he writes, the better we like his work. In his revelation of himself we find a sort of revelation of ourselves as well,—and we like his work in proportion to that revelation.

Naturally, a good essay is short; for self-revelation is given in flashes, as it were,—in sparkles of thought that gleam only for a moment. Many so-called essays of great length are either only partly essays, or else are made up of a number of essays put together. Stevenson's An Inland Voyage is partly a straightforward story of a canoe trip, and partly a series of essays on subjects suggested by the trip. It is possible to draw from a self-revealing book of considerable length a great number of essays on a wide variety of subjects. The essays gleam in the pages of ordinary material as diamonds gleam in their settings of gold.

The essay, as a literary type, is written comment upon any subject, highly informal in nature, extremely personal in character, and brief in expression. It is also usually marked by a notable beauty of style.

III
TYPES OF THE ESSAY

Just as there are many kinds of houses and many kinds of boats so there are many kinds of essays. Some essays tend to emphasize the giving of information, lean very strongly toward formality, and place comparatively little weight on personality,—and yet even such essays, as compared with other and more serious writings, are discursive and personal. They are like some people who seem to favor extreme formality without ever quite attaining it.

Other essays are critical. They point out the good and the bad, and they set forward ideals that should be reached. The criticism they give is not measured and accurate like the criticism a cabinet-maker might make concerning the construction of a desk. It is more or less personal and haphazard like the remarks of one who knows what he likes and what he does not like but who does not wish to bother himself by going into minute details.

Many essays tell stories, but never for the sake of the stories alone. They use the stories as frameworks on which to hang thought, or as illustrations to emphasize thought. The essays hold beyond and above everything the personality of the one who writes.

Almost all essays are in some sense biographical, but they reveal stories of lives, instead of telling the stories in organized form. The little of biography that essays tell is just enough to permit the writers to recall the memories of childhood, and the varied affections and interests of life. For real biography one must go elsewhere than to essays.

Some essays lift one into a fine and close communion with their writers, and give intimate companionship with a human soul. They are the best of all essays. Such essays are always extremely familiar, and deeply personal, like the essays of Michel de Montaigne and Charles Lamb. About such essays is an aroma, a fascination, a delight, that makes them a joy forever. As one reads such essays he feels that he is walking and talking with the writers, and that he hears them express noble and uplifting thoughts.

The terse style of Francis Bacon; the magical phrases of Sir Thomas Browne; the well-rounded sentences of Joseph Addison, Sir Richard Steele and Oliver Goldsmith; the poetic prose of Thomas de Quincey; the charm of the pages of Charles Lamb and Robert Louis Stevenson,—all this is in no sense accidental. The intimate revelation of self, such as is always made by the best essayists, creates the most pleasing style. Genuine self-expression, whether it be the fervor of an impassioned orator, the ardor of a lyric poet, or the meditative mood of the essayist, always tends to embody itself in an appropriate style. For that reason much of the best prose of the language is to be found in the works of the great essayists.

Some writers, like Thomas de Quincey, have so felt the significance of beauty of style, and have so appreciated its relationship to the revelation of mood and personality, that they seem, in some cases, to have written for style alone. Their essays are unsurpassed tissues of prose and poetry.

IV
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ESSAY

Through the medium of spoken or written meditations men have always expressed their personalities, and thereby have approached the writing of essays. Many sections of the Bible are practically essays, especially those passages in Ecclesiastes that speak concerning friendship, wisdom, pride, gossip, vengeance, punishment and topics of similar type. In the ancient Greek and Roman orations are essay-like sections in which the speakers paused for a moment to express their innermost thoughts about life, patriotism, duty, or the great fact of death. Cicero, one of the most remarkable Romans, wrote admirably and with a spirit of familiarity and frankness, on friendship, old age, and immortality. In all ages, in speeches, in letters, and in longer works, essay-like productions appeared.

The invention of the modern essay,—that is, of the extremely informal, intimate and personal meditation,—came in 1571, in France. The inventor of the new type of literature was Michel de Montaigne, a retired scholar, counsellor and courtier, who found a studious refuge in the old tower of Montaigne, where he meditated and wrote for nine years. His essays, which were first published in 1580, are so delightfully informal, so frankly personal, so clever and well-aimed in humor, and so wise, that they are almost without parallel. In 1601 an Italian, Giovanni Florio, translated Montaigne's essays into English. Immediately the essays became popular and they have deeply influenced the writing of essays in English. In 1597 Francis Bacon published the first of his essays, but he did not write with the familiarity that characterized Montaigne. Nevertheless, his work, together with that of Montaigne, is to be regarded as representing the beginning of the modern essay.

It was not until the development of the newspaper in the eighteenth century that the essay found its real period of growth as a literary type. In the first half of the eighteenth century The Tatler and The Spectator, and similar periodicals, gave an opportunity for the publication of short prose compositions of a popular nature. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, writing with kindly humor on the foibles of the day, did much to establish the popularity of the essay. Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith and other writers, in other periodicals, continued the writing of essays, and made the power of the essay known.

Until the time of Charles Lamb, in the first half of the nineteenth century, no English writer had even approached the familiar charm of Montaigne. Bacon had written in a formal manner; his followers had held before them the thought of teaching rather than the thought of self-revelation; the eighteenth century writers had delighted in character studies and in observations on social life and customs. Lamb, on the other hand, wrote not to instruct but to communicate; not about the world but about himself. He restored the essay to its position as a means of self-revelation. The most notable fact about Lamb's essays is that they reveal him to us as one of the persons whom we know best. At the same time humor, pathos and beauty of expression are so remarkable in Lamb's essays that they alone give them permanent value.

Other writers of the essay, like Leigh Hunt, Sydney Smith, William Hazlitt, and Francis Jeffrey, wrote powerfully but none of them with a charm equal to that of Lamb. Thomas de Quincey, writing in a highly poetic style, did much to stimulate poetic prose. Lord Macaulay, in a number of critical and biographical essays, wrote forcefully, logically, and with a high degree of mastery of style but he paid slight attention to self-revelation.

It is evident, then, that there are two marked types of the essay,—one, the formal, purposive composition; and the other informal and intensely personal in nature. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, and James Russell Lowell represent the first type. Many excellent articles in periodicals, and many of the best of editorial articles in newspapers are in reality essays of the formal kind. Washington Irving, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry D. Thoreau, George William Curtis and many others represent the second type.

In modern times the world has been blessed by the writing of a number of essays of the charming, familiar type. John Burroughs has revealed his love for the world of nature; Henry Van Dyke has taken us among the mountains and along the rivers; and Gilbert K. Chesterton, Arnold Bennett, Samuel M. Crothers, Charles Dudley Warner, Hamilton Wright Mabie, Brander Matthews, Agnes Repplier and a host of others have written on many and varied subjects.

Great essayists, like great novelists or great poets or great dramatists, are rare. It is only now and then that a Montaigne, a Charles Lamb, or a Robert Louis Stevenson appears. It is to the glory of literature, however, that there are so many who write in the field of the essay, and who approach true greatness, even if they do not attain it.

V
ESSAYS WELL WORTH READING

VI
THE WRITING OF SHORT STORIES

You cross a street and narrowly escape being run over by an automobile; or you go on a picnic and have delightful experiences; or you return from travel, with the memory of happy adventures—at once an uncontrollable impulse besets you to tell some one what you experienced. That desire to interest some one else in the series of actions that interested you, is the basis of all story-telling.

In one of its simplest forms story-telling is personal and concerns events that actually occurred to the story-teller. Such narration uses the words “I,” “me” and “mine,” seeks no development, aims at no climax, and strikes at interest only through telling of the unusual.

When you stand before an abandoned farm-house and see its half-fallen chimney, its decayed boards, its gaping windows, and the wild vines that clamber into what was once a home your imagination takes fire, and you think of happier days that the house has seen. You imagine the man and woman who built it; the children who played in its doorways; and the happy gatherings or sad scenes that marked its story. That quick imagination of the might-be and the might-have-been is the beginning both of realism and of romance. The story you would tell would use the third person, in all probability; would seek an orderly development, and would aim at climax.

When you stand in your window on a winter day and watch thousands of snow-flakes float down from the sky, circling in fantastic whirls, you see them as so many white fairies led by a master spirit in revel and dance. You are ready to tell, with whatever degree of fancy and skill you can command, the story of the-world-as-it-is-not and as-it-never-will-be. A story of that kind is pure romance.

Whenever you tell what happened to you or to some one else; or what might have been or might be; or of what could not possibly be, your object is to interest some one else in what interests you. You use many expedients to capture and to hold interest: you make a quick beginning, or careful preparation for the climax; you make your story as real or as striking as you can make it; you cut it short or you tell it at length; or you hold the reader's attention on some point of interest that you do not reveal in full until the last. Whatever you do to capture and to hold interest makes for art in story-telling.

When an airplane descends unexpectedly in a country town every one in the place wishes, as soon as possible, to learn whence the aviator came and what experiences he had. Human curiosity is insatiable, and for that reason people love to hear stories as well as to tell them.

In fact, people gain distinct advantages by reading stories. They become acquainted with many types of character; they see all sorts of interesting events that they could never see in reality; they see what happens under certain circumstances, and thereby they gain practical lessons. Through their reading they gain such vivid experiences that they are likely to have a larger outlook upon life.

VII
NATURE OF THE SHORT STORY

Brevity is the first essential of a short story, and yet under the term, “brief,” may be included a story that is told in one or two paragraphs, and a story that is told in many pages. A story that is so long that it cannot be read easily at a single sitting is not a short story.

To make one strong impression on the mind of the reader, and to make that impression so powerfully that it will leave the reader pleased, convinced and emotionally moved is the principal aim of a good short story. To the production of that one effect everything in the story,—characters, action, description, and exposition,—points with the definiteness of an established purpose. All else is omitted, and thus all the parts of the story are both necessary and harmonious.

Centralizing everything on the production of one effect makes every short story complete in itself. The purpose having been accomplished there is nothing more to be said. The end is the end.

A convincing sense of reality characterizes every excellent short story. The author himself appears only as one who narrates truth, not at all as one who has moved the puppets of imagination. The story seems a transcript from real experience. The characters,—not the author,—make the plot. Their personalities reveal themselves in action. The entire story is founded substantially upon life and appears as a photographic glimpse of reality.

As in all other writing, the greater the art of the writer in adapting style to thought, in using language effectively, the better production. Word-choice, power of phrasing, and skill in artistic construction count for as much in the short story as in any other type of literature.

VIII
TYPES OF THE SHORT STORY

Since the short story represents life, it has as many types as there are interests in life. It may confine itself to the ordinary events of life in city or country, at home or abroad; it may concern past events in various regions; or it may look with a prophetic glance into the distant future. It may concern nothing but verifiable truth or be highly imaginative, delicately fanciful, or notably grotesque. It may draw interest from quaint places and odd characters, or it may appeal through vividness of action. It may aim to do nothing more than to arouse interest and to give pleasure for a moment, or it may endeavor to teach a truth.

Among the many types of the short story, a few are especially worthy of note.

Folk-lore stories are stories that have been told by common people for ages. They come direct from the experience and the common sense of ordinary people. They represent the interests, the faith and the ideals of the race from which they come.

Fables are very short stories that point out virtues and defects in human character presented in the guise of animal life.

Legends are stories that have come down to us from a time beyond our own. They are less simple and direct than the ordinary folk-lore story. Undoubtedly founded on actual occurrences they have tinged fact with a poetic beauty that ennobles them and often gives them highly ethical values.

Stories of adventure emphasize startling events rather than character.

Love stories emphasize courtship and the episodes of romantic love.

Local color stories reveal marked characteristics of custom and language, and the oddities of life notable in a particular locality.

Dialect stories make use of the language peculiarities found in common use by a particular type of people.

Stories of the supernatural deal with ghostly characters and uncanny forces.

Stories of mystery present puzzling problems, and slowly, step by step, lead the readers to satisfactory solutions.

Animal stories, whether realistic or romantic, concern the lives of animals.

Stories of allegory, through symbolic characters and events, reveal moral truths.

Stories of satire, by ridiculing types of character, social customs, or methods of action, tend to awaken a spirit of reform.

Stories of science present narratives based upon the exposition and the actual use of scientific facts.

Stories of character emphasize notable personalities, place stress upon motive and the inner nature rather than upon outer action, and clarify the reader's understanding of human character.

IX
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE SHORT STORY

Although the beginnings of the short story existed in the past, and although tales were told in all ages, the short story, in its present form, is a comparatively new type of literature. The short, complete, realistic narrative designed to produce a single strong impression, came into being in the first half of the nineteenth century. The first writer to point out and to exemplify the principles of the modern short story was Edgar Allan Poe, 1809-1849.

As early as 4000 B.C. the Egyptians composed the Tales of the Magicians, and in the pre-Christian eras the Greeks and other peoples wrote short prose narratives. Folk-lore tales go back to very early times. The celebrated Gesta Romanorum is a collection of anecdotes and tales drawn from many ages and peoples, including the Greeks, the Egyptians and the peoples of Asia. In the early periods of the history of Europe and of England many narratives centered around the supposed exploits of romantic characters like the ancient Greeks and Trojans, Alexander the Great, Charlemagne and King Arthur.

In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the Italians became skilful in the telling of tales called novelle. Giovanni Boccaccio, 1313-1375, brought together from wide and varied sources a collection of one hundred such tales in a volume called Il Decamerone. He united the tales by imagining that seven ladies and three gentlemen who had fled from Florence to avoid the plague, pass their time in story-telling. His work had the deepest influence on many later writers, including particularly the English poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, 1340-1400, whose Canterbury Tales re-tell some of Boccaccio's stories. Chaucer imagines that a number of people, representing all the types of English life, tell stories as they journey slowly to the shrine of Thomas à Becket at Canterbury. His stories intimately reveal the actual England of his day. He is the first great realist.

In the sixteenth century many writers, particularly in Italy, France and Spain, told ingenious stories that developed new interest in story-telling and story-reading.

The writing of character studies and the development of periodicals led, in the eighteenth century, to such essays as The Sir Roger de Coverley Papers, written for The Spectator by Joseph Addison, 1672-1719, and Sir Richard Steele, 1672-1729. The doings of Sir Roger de Coverley are told so realistically and so entertainingly that it was evident that such material could be used not only to illustrate the thought of an essayist but also for its own sake in stories founded on character.

About the beginning of the nineteenth century stories of an uncanny nature,—of ghosts and strange events,—the so-called “Gothic” stories,—became widely popular. Two German writers, E. T. A. Hoffmann, 1776-1822, and Ludwig Tieck, 1773-1853, wrote with such peculiar power that they led other writers to imitate them. Among the followers of Tieck and Hoffmann the most notable name is that of Edgar Allan Poe.

Poe's contemporaries, Washington Irving, 1783-1859, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1804-1864, likewise showed the influence of the “Gothic” school of writing. Irving turned the ghostly into humor, as in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow; Hawthorne wrote of the mysterious in terms of fancy and allegory, as in Ethan Brand, The Birth Mark, and Rappaccini's Daughter; Poe directed all his energy to the production of single effect,—frequently the effect of horror, as in The Cask of Amontillado, The Black Cat and The Pit and the Pendulum. Poe's natural ability as a constructive artist, and his genuine interest in story-telling, led him to formulate the five principles of the short story:—brevity, single effect, verisimilitude, the omission of the non-essential, and finality.

From the time when Poe pointed the way the short story has had an unparalleled development. French writers like Guy de Maupassant; British writers like Rudyard Kipling; Russian writers like Count Leo Tolstoi, and American writers like O. Henry, Richard Harding Davis, Frank R. Stockton, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, F. Hopkinson Smith, Jack London, and a thousand others, have carried on the great tradition.

X
AUTHORS OF SHORT STORIES WELL WORTH READING

Volumes containing short stories by the following writers will be found in any public library. Any one who wishes to gain an understanding of the principles of the short story should read a number of stories by every writer named in the list.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

MODERN ESSAYS AND STORIES

THE FAMILIAR ESSAY

THE PUP-DOG

By ROBERT PALFREY UTTER

(1875—). Associate Professor of English in the University of California. He taught for a time at Harvard and also at Amherst. He is a delightful essayist, and contributes frequently to various magazines.

The writer of a familiar essay selects any subject in which he is interested. Sometimes the more trifling the subject seems to be, the more delightful is the essay. Trifles, in fact, make up life, and around them center many of our deepest interests. The very charm of the familiar essay lies in its ability to call attention to the value of trifles,—to the little things in life, to little events, and to all the odds and ends of human interests.

The familiar essay is nothing more than happy talk that gives us, as it were, a walk or a chat with one who has a keen mind, a ready wit, and a pleasant spirit.

The Pup-Dog is an unusually excellent illustration of the familiar essay. We all love him,—the pup-dog,—the good friend about whom Mr. Utter has written so amusingly, so understandingly, and so sympathetically. As we read we can see the dog jumping and hear him barking; we laugh at his antics; we are, in fact, taking a walk with Mr. Utter while he talks to us about his dog,—or our dog.

Any dog is a pup-dog so long as he prefers a rat, dead or alive, to chocolate fudge, a moldy bone to sponge cake, a fight with a woodchuck to hanging round the tea-table for sweet biscuit. Of course he will show traits of age as years advance, but usually they are physical traits, not emotional. For the most part dogs’ affections burn warmly, and their love of life and experience brightly, while life lasts. They remain young, as poets do. Every dog is a pup-dog, but some are more so than others.

Most so of all is the Irish terrier. To me he stands as the archetype of the dog, and the doggier a dog is, the better I like him. I love the collie; none better. I have lived with him, and ranged the hills with him in every kind of weather, and you can hardly tell me a story of his loyalty and intelligence that I cannot go you one better. But the collie is a gentleman. He has risen from the ranks, to be sure, but he is every inch the gentleman, and just now I am speaking of dogs. The terrier is every inch a dog, and the Irish is the terrier par excellence.

The man who mistakes him for an Airedale, as many do, is one who does not know an Irishman from a Scot. The Airedale has a touch of the national dourness; I believe that he is a Calvinist at heart, with a severe sense of personal responsibility. The Irish terrier can atone vicariously or not at all for his light-hearted sins. The Airedale takes his romance and his fighting as seriously as an Alan Breck. The Irish terrier has all the imagination and humor of his race; he has a rollicking air; he is whimsical, warm-hearted, jaunty, and has the gift of blarney. He loves a scrimmage better than his dinner, but he bears no malice.

His fellest earthly foes,
Cats, he does but affect to hate.

The terrier family is primarily a jolly, good-natured crowd whose business it is to dig into the lairs of burrowing creatures and fight them at narrow quarters. The signal for the fight is the attack on the intrusive nose. You can read this family history in the pup-dog's treatment of the cat. The cat of his own household with whom he is brought up he rallies with good-humored banter, but he is less likely to hurt her than she him. He will take her with him on his morning round of neighborhood garbage-pails, and even warm her kittens on his back as he lies in the square of sunshine on the kitchen floor, till they begin to knead their tiny claws into him in a futile search for nourishment; then he shakes them patiently off and seeks rest elsewhere. He will chase any cat as long as she will run; if she refuses to run, he will dance round her and bark, trying to get up a game. “Be a sport!” he taunts her. “Take a chance!” But if she claws his nose, she treads on the tail of his coat, and no Irish gentleman will stand for that.

Similar are his tactics with human creatures. First he tries a small bluff to see if he can start anything. If his victim shows signs of fear, he redoubles his effort, his tail the while signaling huge delight at his success. If the victim shows fight, he may develop the attack in earnest. The victim who shows either fear or fight betrays complete ignorance of dog nature, for the initial bluff is always naïvely transparent; the pup-dog may have a poker face, but his tail is a rank traitor. A nest of yellow-jackets in a hole in the ground challenges his every instinct. He cocks his ear at the subterranean buzzing, tries a little tentative excavation with cautious paw. Soon one of the inmates scores on the tip of his nose, and war is declared in earnest. There are leaping attacks with clashing of teeth, and wildly gyrating rear-guard actions. Custom cannot stale the charm of the spot; all summer, so long as there is a wing stirring, hornets shall be hot i' the mouth.

The degree of youth which the pup-dog attains and holds is that of the human male of eleven or twelve years. He nurses an inextinguishable quarrel with the hair-brush. His hatred of the formal bath is chronic, but he will paddle delightedly in any casual water out of doors, regardless of temperatures and seasons. At home he will sometimes scoff at plain, wholesome food, but to the public he gives the impression that his family systematically starve him, and his dietetic experiments often have weird and disastrous results. You can never count on his behavior except on formal occasions, when you know to a certainty that he will disgrace you. His curiosity is equaled only by his adroitness in getting out of awkward situations into which it plunges him. His love of play is unquenchable by weariness or hunger; there is no time when the sight of a ball will not rouse him to clamorous activity.

For fine clothes he has a satiric contempt, and will almost invariably manage to land a dirty footprint on white waist-coat or “ice-cream pants” in the first five minutes of their immaculacy. He is one hundred per cent. motor-minded; when he is “stung with the splendor of a sudden thought,” he springs to immediate action. In the absence of any ideas he relaxes and sleeps with the abandon of a jute door-mat.

Dog meets dog as boy meets boy, with assertions of superiority, challenge, perhaps fight, followed by friendship and play. No wonder that with pup-boys the pup-dog is so completely at one; his code is their code, and whither they go he goes—except to school. With September come the dull days for him. No more the hordes of pirates and bandits with bandanas and peaked hats, belts stuck full of dirks and “ottermaticks,” sweep up and down the sidewalk on bicycles in open defiance of the law, raiding lawns and gardens, scattering shrieking tea-parties of little girls and dolls, haling them aboard the lugger in the next lot and holding them for fabulous ransom. There is always some one who will pay it with an imposing check signed “Theodore Wilson Roosevelt Woodrow Rockefeller.” He prances with flopping ears beside the flying wheels, crouches in ambush, gives tongue in the raid, flies at the victims and tears their frocks, mounts guard in the cave, and shares the bandits' last cookie.

But when the pirates become orderly citizens, his day begins after school and ends with supper. With his paws on the window-sill, his nose making misty spots on the glass, he watches them as they march away in the morning, then he makes a perfunctory round of the neighborhood, inspecting garbage-pails and unwary cats. After that there is nothing to do but relax in the September sunshine and exist in a coma till the pirates return and resume their normal functions, except for his routine attempt to intimidate the postman and the iceman. Perhaps he might succeed some happy day; who knows?

The pup-dog in the open is the best of companions; his exuberant vitality and unquenchable zest for things in general give him endless variety. There are times, perhaps, when you see little of him; he uses you as a mobile base of operations, and runs an epicycloidal course with you as moving center, showing only a flash of his tail on one horizon or the flop of his ears on the other. You hear his wild cries of excitement when he starts a squirrel or a rabbit. By rare luck you may be called in time to referee a fight with a woodchuck, or once in a happy dog's age you may see him, a khaki streak through the underbrush, in pursuit of a fox.

At last you hear the drumming of his feet on the road behind you; he shoots past before he can shift gears, wheels, and lands a running jump on your diaphragm by way of reporting present for duty. Thereafter he sticks a little closer, popping out into the road or showing his tousled face through the leaves at intervals of two or three hundred yards to make sure that you are still on the planet. Then you may enjoy his indefatigable industry in counting with his nose, his tail quivering with delight, the chinks of old stone walls. You may light your pipe and sit by for an hour as he energetically follows his family tradition in digging under an old stump, shooting the sand out behind with kangaroo strokes, tugging at the roots with his teeth, and pausing from time to time to grin at you with a yard of pink tongue completely surrounded by leaf mold. You may admire his zeal as inspector of chipmunks, mice, frogs, grasshoppers, crickets, and such small deer. Anything that lives and tries to get away from him is fair game except chickens. If round the turn of the road he plumps into a hen convention, memories of bitter humiliations surge up within him, and he blushes, and turns his face aside. Other dogs he meets with tentative growling, bristling, and tail-wagging, by way of asserting that he will take them on any terms they like; fight or frolic, it is all one to him.

You cannot win his allegiance by feeding him, though he always has his bit of blarney ready for the cook. He loves all members of the family with nice discrimination for their weaknesses: the pup-boy who cannot resist an invitation to romp; the pup-girl who cannot withstand begging blandishments of nose and paw, but will subvert discipline and share food with him whenever and wherever she has it. He will welcome with leapings and gyrations any one of them after a day's absence or an hour's, but his whole-souled allegiance is to the head of the house; his is the one voice that speaks with authority; his the first welcome always when the family returns in a group. That loyalty, burning bright and true to the last spark of life, that unfailing welcome on which a man can count more surely than on any human love—indeed, there is no secret in a man's love for a dog, however we may wonder at the dog's love for the man. Let Argos and Ulysses[1] stand as the type of it, though to me it lacks something of the ideal, not in the image of the dog, but in the conduct of the man. Were I disguised for peril of my life, and my dog, after the wanderings and dangers of many years, lifted his head and knew me and then died, I think no craft could withhold my feelings from betraying me.

“Dogs know their friends,” we say, as if there were mystery in the knowledge. The password of the fraternity is not hidden; you may hear it anywhere. It was spoken at my own hearth when the pup-dog, wet with autumn rain, thrust himself between my guest and the andirons and began to steam. My guest checked my remonstrance. “Don't disturb him on my account, you know. I rather like the smell of a wet dog,” he added apologetically. The word revealed a background that made the speaker at once and forever my guest-friend. In it I saw boy and dog in rain and snow on wet trails, their camp in narrow shelter, where they snuggle together with all in common that they have of food and warmth. He who shared his boyhood with a pup-dog will always share whatever is his with members of the fraternity. He will value the wagging of a stubby tail above all dog-show points and parlor tricks. He will not be rash to chide affectionate importunity, nor to set for his dog higher standards than he upholds for himself. Do you never nurse a grouch and express it in appropriate language? Do you never take direct action when your feelings get away with you? When the like befalls the pup-dog, have ready for him such sympathy as he has always ready for you in your moods. Treat him as an equal, and you will get from him human and imperfect results.

You will never know exactly what your pup-dog gets from you; he tries wistfully to tell you, but leaves you still wondering. But you may have from him a share of his perennial puphood, and you do well to accept it gratefully whenever he offers it. Take it when it comes, though the moment seem inopportune. You may be roused just as you settle for a nap by a moist nose thrust into your hand, two rough brown paws on the edge of your bunk, a pair of bright eyes peering through a jute fringe. Up he comes, steps over you, and settles down between you and the wall with a sigh. Then, if you shut your eyes, you will find that you are not far from that place up on the hill—the big rock and the two oaks—where the pup-boy that used to be you used to snuggle down with that first old pup-dog you ever had.

SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS

1. What is the effect of the title?
2. How does Mr. Utter make us love the dog?
3. What knowledge of dog life does the writer show?
4. Point out words or expressions that are usually applied only to human beings, that are here applied to dogs.
5. Point out adjective effects.
6. How does the writer make the dog seem amusing?
7. How does the writer make the dog seem admirable?
8. What human characteristics are attributed to the dog?
9. Point out noteworthy examples of humor.
10. Show how the writer employs detail as a means of emphasis.
11. Point out examples of especially effective metaphor.
12. What is said concerning the pup-boy and the pup-girl?
13. How does the essay make us feel toward dogs?
14. What is the effect of the closing sentences?

SUBJECTS FOR WRITTEN IMITATION

DIRECTIONS FOR WRITING

Select for your subject some animal with which you are intimately familiar, and in which you are especially and sympathetically interested. Write about that animal in such a way that you will bring to the surface its most humorous qualities and its most admirable qualities. Give a great number of details concerning the animal's habits, but give those details in a gossipy manner. Use quotations, if you can, or make allusions to books. Make all your work emphasize goodness. Make your closing paragraph your most effective paragraph,—one that will appeal to sentiment.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] According to Homer's Odyssey when Ulysses returned after many years of wandering, his old dog “Argos” recognized him, even in disguise.

CHEWING GUM[2]

By CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER

(1829-1900). A celebrated American essayist and editor. For many years he wrote brilliant papers for Harper's Magazine in the departments called “The Editor's Drawer” and “The Editor's Study.” He became the first President of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He was a great influence for good. Among his books are My Summer in a Garden; Back-Log Studies; In the Wilderness; The Relation of Literature to Life; As We Were Saying; Their Pilgrimage. He edited the valuable “American Men of Letters Series,” and the remarkable work called Library of the World's Best Literature, a collection of extracts from the world's literature, with which every student should be acquainted.

The familiar essay takes for its subject anything that awakens the interest of the essayist. Charles Dudley Warner wrote with freedom and humor on a great number of subjects that in themselves suggest light and humorous treatment rather than serious thinking. Among his many informal essays is the one that follows, entitled Chewing Gum.

What Mr. Warner says in the essay is by no means serious. It is like the spoken reflections of an amused observer who has had his attention attracted to the common American habit of chewing gum in public. At the same time, under the kindly and facetious remarks, is an undercurrent of satire—and satire means criticism.

In language that is unfortunately understood by the greater portion of the people who speak English, thousands are saying on the first of January, a far-off date that it is wonderful any one has lived to see—“Let us have a new deal!” It is a natural exclamation, and does not necessarily mean any change of purpose. It always seems to a man that if he could shuffle the cards he could increase his advantages in the game of life, and, to continue the figure which needs so little explanation, it usually appears to him that he could play anybody else's hand better than his own. In all the good resolutions of the new year, then, it happens that perhaps the most sincere is the determination to get a better hand. Many mistake this for repentance and an intention to reform, when generally it is only the desire for a new shuffle of the cards. Let us have a fresh pack and a new deal, and start fair. It seems idle, therefore, for the moralist to indulge in a homily about annual good intentions, and habits that ought to be dropped or acquired, on the first of January. He can do little more than comment on the passing show.

It will be admitted that if the world at this date is not socially reformed it is not the fault of the Drawer,[3] and for the reason that it has been not so much a critic as an explainer and encourager. It is in the latter character that it undertakes to defend and justify a national industry that has become very important within the past ten years. A great deal of capital is invested in it, and millions of people are actively employed in it. The varieties of chewing gum that are manufactured would be a matter of surprise to those who have paid no attention to the subject, and who may suppose that the millions of mouths they see engaged in its mastication have a common and vulgar taste. From the fact that it can be obtained at the apothecary's, an impression has got abroad that it is medicinal. This is not true. The medical profession do not use it, and what distinguishes it from drugs—that they also do not use—is the fact that they do not prescribe it. It is neither a narcotic nor a stimulant. It cannot strictly be said to soothe or to excite. The habit of using it differs totally from that of the chewing of tobacco or the dipping of snuff. It might, by a purely mechanical operation, keep a person awake, but no one could go to sleep chewing gum. It is in itself neither tonic nor sedative. It is to be noticed also that the gum habit differs from the tobacco habit in that the aromatic and elastic substance is masticated, while the tobacco never is, and that the mastication leads to nothing except more mastication. The task is one that can never be finished. The amount of energy expended in this process if capitalized or conserved would produce great results. Of course the individual does little, but if the power evolved by the practice in a district school could be utilized, it would suffice to run the kindergarten department. The writer has seen a railway car—say in the West—filled with young women, nearly every one of whose jaws and pretty mouths was engaged in this pleasing occupation; and so much power was generated that it would, if applied, have kept the car in motion if the steam had been shut off—at least it would have furnished the motive for illuminating the car by electricity.

This national industry is the subject of constant detraction, satire, and ridicule by the newspaper press. This is because it is not understood, and it may be because it is mainly a female accomplishment: the few men who chew gum may be supposed to do so by reason of gallantry. There might be no more sympathy with it in the press if the real reason for the practice were understood, but it would be treated more respectfully. Some have said that the practice arises from nervousness—the idle desire to be busy without doing anything—and because it fills up the pauses of vacuity in conversation. But this would not fully account for the practice of it in solitude. Some have regarded it as in obedience to the feminine instinct for the cultivation of patience and self-denial—patience in a fruitless activity, and self-denial in the eternal act of mastication without swallowing. It is no more related to these virtues than it is to the habit of the reflective cow in chewing her cud. The cow would never chew gum. The explanation is a more philosophical one, and relates to a great modern social movement. It is to strengthen and develop and make more masculine the lower jaw. The critic who says that this is needless, that the inclination in women to talk would adequately develop this, misses the point altogether. Even if it could be proved that women are greater chatterers than men, the critic would gain nothing. Women have talked freely since creation, but it remains true that a heavy, strong lower jaw is a distinctively masculine characteristic. It is remarked that if a woman has a strong lower jaw she is like a man. Conversation does not create this difference, nor remove it; for the development of the lower jaw in women constant mechanical exercise of the muscles is needed. Now, a spirit of emancipation, of emulation, is abroad, as it ought to be, for the regeneration of the world. It is sometimes called the coming to the front of woman in every act and occupation that used to belong almost exclusively to man. It is not necessary to say a word to justify this. But it is often accompanied by a misconception, namely, that it is necessary for woman to be like man, not only in habits, but in certain physical characteristics. No woman desires a beard, because a beard means care and trouble, and would detract from feminine beauty, but to have a strong and, in appearance, a resolute underjaw may be considered a desirable note of masculinity, and of masculine power and privilege, in the good time coming. Hence the cultivation of it by the chewing of gum is a recognizable and reasonable instinct, and the practice can be defended as neither a whim nor a vain waste of energy and nervous force. In a generation or two it may be laid aside as no longer necessary, or men may be compelled to resort to it to preserve their supremacy.

SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS

1. Why does the writer make use of some very colloquial expressions?
2. Why did he use a number of long and somewhat formal words?
3. In what sense is the essay a New Year's essay?
4. Show how the author produces humor.
5. Show how the author avoids harshness of criticism.
6. What makes the essay forceful?
7. In what respects is the essay fantastic?
8. What advantage does the writer gain by appearing to support the habit of chewing gum?
9. Point out examples of kindly satire.
10. What is the author's purpose?

SUBJECTS FOR WRITTEN IMITATION

DIRECTIONS FOR WRITING

You are to write of some habit that is common and that is more or less annoying to well-bred people. Make your words, in mock seriousness, appear to defend the habit that you ridicule. Make your style of writing somewhat ponderous, as though you were writing with the utmost gravity, but be sure to write in such a way that your essay will convey your sense of the ridiculous. Let your whole essay so ridicule the annoying habit that you will tend to destroy it.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] From As We Were Saying, by Charles Dudley Warner. Copyright by Harper and Brothers.

[3] Drawer. The Editor's Drawer of Harper's Magazine for which Mr. Warner wrote many of his best essays.

THE MYSTERY OF AH SING

By ROBERT L. DUFFUS

An editorial writer for the New York Globe, to which, on October 5, 1921, he contributed the following humorous editorial article.

As we go about in daily life various people attract our attention; their peculiarities amuse us, and we make semi-humorous but kindly remarks concerning them. Such remarks are the germs of essays like the following.

In the essay, The Mystery of Ah Sing, there is humor but not a single unkind word. The essay makes us smile, but with sympathy and understanding. Such essays, trivial as they may be, are restful and pleasing.

Ah Sing comes on Tuesdays to get the washing and on Saturdays to bring it back. He is an urbane, smiling person, who appears to view life impersonally and dispassionately. One would say that he realized that the career of Ah Sing was not of prime importance in a population so numerous and a universe so extensive. He loves to ask questions. How old is the mistress of the house? Where did she come from? How much does the master of the house earn? What does he do? Why haven't they any children? Where did they get all the books and pictures?

Ah Sing always wants to know about the vacations, both before and after taking, and looks intelligent when places like Nantucket and the Thousand Islands are mentioned. He follows the family fortunes like an old retainer, and seems to possess a kind of feudal loyalty. It would be morally impossible, not to say physically, to give the washing to any one but Ah Sing. He would come for it, and the mistress of the house would sink through the floor with contrition and embarrassment. He may die out of his job, or go back to China out of it, there to live like a mandarin, but he will not be fired out of it. Never will he join the army of unemployed; never will he stand humbly asking work. He is a monopoly, an institution, a friend.

So far one gets with Ah Sing. To lose him would be like losing a beloved pipe or a comfortable pair of slippers. He belongs amid the furniture of living, and is as simple, homely, and admirable as grandpa's picture on the wall. But what is Ah Sing thinking about? What is going on across that gulf which separates him from us? How many transmigrations must we all go through before we could know Ah Sing as well as we know the family from Indiana which moved in next door last week? How shall we penetrate to the soul of Ah Sing?

If we could answer these questions we could present ourselves forthwith at Washington with the solution of the world's most vexatious problem. But the answers are dark, Ah Sing is remote, and the East and the West have not yet met.

SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS

1. In what respects is Ah Sing a mystery?
2. Why did the author write about Ah Sing?
3. What are Ah Sing's amusing characteristics?
4. What are Ah Sing's best characteristics?
5. Show that the author's language is original.
6. Show that the essay increases in effect toward the end.
7. How does the author avoid unkindness or satire?
8. How does the essay affect the reader?

SUBJECTS FOR WRITTEN IMITATION

DIRECTIONS FOR WRITING

Write, with all kindness, about some one who amuses you. Do not include in your essay anything that will be in the nature of fault-finding or complaint. Point out, in a humorous way, the admirable and praiseworthy characteristics of the person about whom you write. Instead of writing a list of characteristics use original expressions that will indicate the real spirit of the character.

OLD DOC

By OPIE READ

(1852—). An American journalist, noted for his work as Editor of The Arkansas Traveller. Among his books, most of which concern life in Arkansas, are: Len Gansett; My Young Master; An Arkansas Planter; Up Terrapin River; A Kentucky Colonel; On the Suwanee River; Miss Polly Lop; The Captain's Romance; The Jucklins.

The character sketch is interesting for the same reason that gossip is interesting: we notice our neighbors and are curious to learn more about them. We are all sharp observers of our fellows. We see their oddities, their cranks, and their amusing habits just as clearly as we see their virtues. We laugh and we admire—in much the same spirit that a mother laughs at her baby, however much she loves it.

Character sketches have been popular for many centuries. Chaucer's Prologue to The Canterbury Tales is really a series of shrewdly-true character sketches keenly tipped with humor, and full of genuine respect for goodness. Sir Thomas Overbury (1581-1613) wrote a number of strongly pointed sketches of character. A hundred years later Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steele conceived the whimsical, good-hearted Sir Roger de Coverley and his company of associates.

Out of such work grew not only the character sketch of to-day but also material for the short story and the novel.

Mr. Read's presentation of the country doctor of the Old South is a striking example of the character sketch. Following the example set by Addison in 1711 Mr. Read first describes the character and then tells an anecdote that reveals personality. The entire sketch is redolent with good-humor.

His house was old, with cedar-trees about it, a big yard, and in the corner a small office. In this professional hut there was only one window, the glass of which was dim with dust blown from the road. In the gentle breeze the lilacs and the roses swopped their perfume, while the guinea-hen arose from her cool nest, dug beneath the dahlias, to chase a katydid along the fence, and then with raucous cry to shatter the silence. The furnishings of the office were less than modest. In one corner a swayed bed threatened to fall, in another a wash-stand stood epileptic on three legs. Nailed against the wall was a protruding cabinet, giving off sick-room memories. The village druggist, compounder of the essences of strange and peculiar “yarbs,” might have bitter and pungent medicines, but Old Doc, himself an extractor of wild juices, had discovered the secret of the swamp. To go into his office and to come forth with no sign was a confession of the loss of smell. Sheep-shearing fills the nostrils with woolly dullness, but sheep-shearers could scent Old Doc as he drove along the road.

In every country the rural doctor is a natural sprout from the soil. His profession is almost as old as the daybreak of time. He bled the ancient Egyptian, blistered the knight of the Middle Ages, and poisoned the arrow of the Iroquois. He has been preserved in fiction, pickled in the drama, spiced in romance, and peppered in satire; but nowhere was he so pronounced a character as in America, in the South. He knew politics, but was not a politician. He looked upon man as a machinist viewing an engine, but was not an atheist. He cautioned health and flattered sickness. He listened with more patience to an old woman harping on her trouble than to a man in his prime relating his experience. His books were few, and the only medical journal found in his office was a sample copy. When his gathered lore failed him, he was wise in silence. To confess to any sort of ignorance would have crippled his trade. It was an art to keep loose things from rattling in his head when he shook it, and of this art he was a perfect master. In raiment he was not over-adorned, but near him you felt that you were in the presence of clothes. Philosophy's trousers might bag at the knees, theology's black vestment might be shy a button, art might wear a burr entangled in its tresses, and even the majesty of the law might go forth in slippers gnawed by a playful puppy; but old doc's “duds,” strong as they were in nostril penetration, must hug the image of neatness. He was usually four years behind the city's fashion, but this was shrewdly studied, for to dress too much after the manner of the flowing present would have branded him a foppish follower. The men might carp at his clean shirt every day, but it won favor with the women; and while robust medicine may steal secret delight from seeing two maul-fisted men punch each other in a ring, it must openly profess a preference for the scandals that shock society.

At no place along the numerous roads traversed by old doc was there a sign-post with a finger pointing toward the attainment of an ultimate ambition. No senate house, no woolsack of greatness, waited for him. The chill of foul weather was his most natural atmosphere; and should the dark night turn from rain to sleet, it was then that he heard a knock and a “Hello!” at his door. Down through the miry bottom-land and up the flint hillside flashed the light of his gig-lamp, striking responsive shine from the eye of the fascinated wolf. The farther he had to travel, the less likely was he to collect his bill. Usury might sell the widow's cow, for no one expected business to have a daintiness of touch; but if Doc sued for his fee, he was met even by the court with a sour look.

A summons to court as an expert witness in a murder trial gold-starred the banner of his career. It was then that he turned back to his heavy book, used mainly to prop the door open. Out of this lexicon he dug up words to confound the wise lawyer. It was in vain that the judge commanded him to talk not like the man in the moon, but like a man of this earth; he was not to be shaken from a pedestal that had cost him sweat to mount. The jury sat amazed at his learning. Asked to explain the meaning of a term, he would proceed to heap upon it a pile of incomprehensible jargon. It was like cracking the bones of the skeleton that stood behind his door, and giving to each splinter a sesquipedalian name. When told that he might “stand down,” he walked off to enjoy his victory. At the tavern, in the evening, he might be invited to sit in the game, done with the hesitating timidity of awed respect; but at cards it was discovered that he was an easy dabbler in common talk, not to say the profanity of the flat-boatmen.

Out of this atmosphere there arises the vision of old Doctor Rickney of Mississippi. He had appeared in court as an expert witness, and the county newspaper had given him a column of monstrous words, written by the doctor himself. He had examined the judge for life insurance, and it was hinted that he had been invited to attend a meeting of the medical convention, away off in Philadelphia. His professional cup was now about to foam over, when there fell an evil time.

Bill Saunders, down with a sort of swamp fever, was told by Dr. Rickney that his recovery was impossible. Bill was stubborn, and declined to accept Doc's verdict.

“Why, you poor old sot,” said Doc, “you must be nearer the end than I thought, since you have so little mind as to doubt my word. Here's your fever so high that it has almost melted my thermometer, and yet you question my professional forecast. And, besides, don't you know that you have ruined your constitution with liquor?”

Bill blew a hot breath.

“I don't know nothin' about constitutions nur the statuary of limitations, but I'm snickered if I'm goin' to die to please you nur nobody. All I need right now is possum baked along with about a peck of yams.”

“Possum! Why, by eleven-thirty to-night you'll be as dead as any possum.”

Bill drew another hot breath, and the leaves on a branch of honeysuckle peeping in at the open window were seen to wither with heat.

“I've got a hoss out thar in the stable, Doc, an' he's jes as good as any hoss you ever rid. An' I tell you whut I'll do: I'll bet him ag'in yo' hoss that I'll be up an' around in five weeks.”

Doc gave him a pitying look.

“All right; I'll just take that bet.”

Doc told it about the neighborhood, and along toward midnight, sitting in the rear room of a drug-store, he took out his watch, looked at it, and remarked:

“Well, by this time Bill Saunders is dead, and his horse belongs to me.”

The druggist spoke.

“I know the horse, and would like to have him. What'll you take for him, Doc?”

“Take for him! That horse is worth a hundred and fifty of as bright gold dollars as was ever dug out of the earth. Take for him!” says he. “Ain't he worth it, Nick?”

Nick, a yellowish lout, was sitting on the floor, with his back against the wall. For the most part his requirement of society was a mouthful of tobacco and a place to spit, and of the latter he was not over-careful. He added no more to civilization than worm-blight adds to a grape-vine, but without him no native drama could have been written. He was as native to the neighborhood as a wrinkle is to a ram's horn. In the absence of all other wit, he knew where his interest lay. Therefore he haggled not to respond to Doc's appeal. Doc had steadied his wife down from the high shakes of ague, had time and again reminded Nick of that fact, but had not yet received the five bushels of corn and the four pumpkins of average size, the physician's legitimate levy. Here was a chance on Nick's part to throw off at least two bushels. He arose, and dusted the seat of his brown jeans.

“Doc,” said he, “nobody don't know no mo' about nobody's hoss nur I do. An' I'm sayin' it without the fear of bein' kotch in a lie that Bill's hoss is wuth two hundred an' seventy-fi' dollars of as good money as ever built a church.”

“You've heard him,” was Doc's triumphant turn to the druggist. “But let me tell you. About a half-hour from now I've got to catch the Lady Blanche for Memphis, on my way to attend the medical convention in Philadelphia. I've got to read a paper on snake-bite.”

Nick broke in upon him.

“I'll bet it's the Guv'ment that is a axin' you to do it.”

“Well, we won't discuss that,” was Doc's dismissal of the subject. Then he turned again to the druggist. “Got to get to that convention; and as I'll have a good deal of entertaining to do, I'll need a hundred extra. So you just give me a hundred dollars and take the horse. But you'll have to be quick about it, for I just heard the Lady Blanche blowing around the bend.”

The druggist snatched at the knob or his safe, swung the door open, and seized a hundred dollars.

One afternoon, five weeks later, when the Lady Blanche touched the shore on her way down, Old Doc stepped off. There on a bale of cotton, smoking a cob pipe, sat Bill Saunders.

“W'y, hello, Doc!”

Doc dropped his carpet-bag, caught up the tail of his coat, and with it blotted the sweat on his brow.

“Fine day,” said Bill. “'Lowed we'd have a little rain, but the cloud looked like it had business summers else. An' by the way, Doc, up whar you been what's that liquor as distroys the constitution wuth by the gallon?”

Doc reached down and took up his carpet-bag.

“Bill Saunders, sir, I don't want anything to do with you. I gave you my confidence, but you have deceived me. And now, sir, your lack of integrity——”

“Gives me a hoss,” Bill interrupted. “An' say, Doc, I seed the druggist man jest now, an' he said suthin' about a hundred dollars you owed him.”

Doc walked up to the cotton-bale and placed his carpet-bag on it, close beside Bill.

“Saunders,” said he, “in this thing is a pistol nearly a foot and a half long. Now I'll give you my horse all right, even if you are the most unreliable man I ever saw, and I'll pay the druggist his hundred; but if you go around the neighborhood boasting that you got well after I gave you up, something is going to flash, and it won't be out of a black bottle, either, but right out of Old Miss Betsy, here in this carpet-bag. I don't blame you for getting well, as a sort of a lark, you understand; but when you make a serious affair of it, you hurt my professional pride. Old Miss Betsy is right in here. Do you gather me?”

“I pick up yo' threads putty well, Doc, I think.”

“All right; and see that with them threads you sew up your mouth. You may be proof against the pizen of the swamp, but you ain't proof against the jolt of a lead-mine. That's all.”

SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS

1. How does the description of the doctor's home emphasize character?
2. What was the doctor's ability?
3. How does the writer make the doctor a universal character as well as a local character?
4. How does the writer produce humor?
5. How does the writer arouse our respect for the doctor?
6. How does the writer arouse our sympathy?
7. What character trait does the anecdote reveal?
8. Why does the writer use so much conversation in telling the anecdote?
9. What advantage does the writer gain by ending the sketch so abruptly?
10. How does the sketch affect the reader?

SUBJECTS FOR WRITTEN IMITATION

DIRECTIONS FOR WRITING

Select for your subject a person in whom you see many laughable traits, but whom you really admire. Sum up his characteristics briefly and suggestively. Make your humor the kind that will awaken smiles but not ridicule. Use exaggeration in moderation. Be particularly careful to select words that will convey the half-humorous, half-serious thought that you wish to communicate. End your sketch by telling an anecdote that will emphasize one or more of the characteristics that you have mentioned. Tell the anecdote in a “snappy” way, with crisp dialogue.

CHRISTMAS SHOPPING

By HELEN DAVENPORT

(1882—). Mrs. Helen Davenport Gibbons is a graduate of Bryn Mawr. Her literary work appears in various publications. Among her books are The Red Rugs of Tarsus; Les Turcs ont Passe Là!; A Little Gray Home in France; Paris Vistas.

A good essay is much like part of a conversation,—the part spoken by an interesting speaker. It is breezy, unconventional, and free in its use of familiar terms. How well all this is brought out in the following extract from an essay on Christmas.

My husband and I would not miss that day-before-Christmas last-minute rush for anything. And even if I risk seeming to talk against the sane and humane “shop-early-for-Christmas” propaganda, I am going to say that the fun and joy of Christmas shopping is doing it on the twenty-fourth. Avoid the crowds? I don't want to! I want to get right in the middle of them. I want to shove my way up to counters. I want to buy things that catch my eye and that I never thought of buying and wouldn't buy on any day in the year but December twenty-fourth. I want to spend more money than I can afford. I want to experience that panicky feeling that I really haven't enough things, and to worry over whether my purchases can be divided fairly among my quartet. I want to go home after dark, reveling in the flare of lamps lighting up mistletoe, holly wreaths, and Christmas-trees on hawkers' carts, stopping here and there to buy another pound of candy or a box of dates or a foolish bauble for the tree. I want to shove bundle after bundle into the arms of my protesting husband and remind him that Christmas comes but once a year until he becomes profane. And, once home, on what other winter evening would you find pleasure in dumping the whole lot on your bed, adding to the jumble of toys and books already purchased or sent by friends, and, all other thoughts banished, calmly making the children's piles despite aching back and legs, impatient husband, cross servants, and a dozen dinner-guests waiting in the drawing-room?

SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS

1. By what rhetorical means does the writer communicate her emotion?
2. Show how the writer makes detail contribute to effect.

SUBJECTS FOR WRITTEN IMITATION

DIRECTIONS FOR WRITING

Write on a subject in which you think you are, perhaps, excusably foolish. Be frankly honest and genuinely enthusiastic. Write in such a way that you will make your readers sympathize with you in your “foolishness.”

SUNDAY BELLS

By GERTRUDE HENDERSON

At different times Miss Henderson has lived in Indiana, California and New York. During the World War she gave active patriotic service. She contributes to various publications.

The bells of Sunday have given subjects to many poets and to many essayists. Their sound is full of suggestions of peace, calm and the solemnity of worship.

The writer of the following essay expresses, as she says, the emotions of many people. It is that seizing upon what is, at the same time, intensely personal and yet universal that gives the essay its power.

Although the essay is written in a gossipy style it has a quiet spirit entirely in harmony with its subject.

Are all of us potentially devotees, I wonder. When the bells ring and I look up to the aspiring steeples against the sky in the middle of a Sunday morning, or when I hear them sounding upon the quiet of the Sunday evening dusk or sending their clear-toned invitation out through the secular bustle of the mid-week streets and in at doors and windows, summoning, summoning, there is that in me that hears them and starts up and would obey. It must be something my grandmothers left there—my long line of untraceable grandmothers back, back through the hundreds of years. I wonder if in all the other people of this questioning generation whose thoughts have separated them from the firm, sustaining certainties of the past the same ghostly allegiance rises, the same vague emotions stir and quiver at the evoking of the Sunday bells. I should think it altogether likely, for I have never found that in anything very real in me I am at all different from everybody else I meet.

The Sunday bells! I sit in the morning quiet and I hear them ringing near. They are not so golden-voiced, those first bells, as if they had been more lately made; but I think it may be they go the deeper into my feelings for that. Some people pass, leisurely at first, starting early and strolling at ease through the peaceful Sunday morning on the way to church, talking together as they go: ladies, middle-aged and elderly, the black-dressed Sunday ladies whose serene wontedness suggests that they have passed this very way to that very goal one morning in seven since their lives began; a father with his boy and girl; three frolicsome youngsters together in their Sunday clothes loitering through the sunny square with many divagations, and chattering happily as they go,—I am not so sure their blithe steps will end at the church door,—but yet they may; a young girl, fluttering pink ruffles and hurrying. I think she is going to sing in the choir and must be there early. She has the manner of one who fears she is already the least moment late for flawless earliness. Other young girls with their young men are walking consciously together in tempered Sunday sweethearting. And so on and on till the bell has rung a last summons, and the music has risen, and given way to silence, and the last belated comers have hurried by, looking at accusing watches, and gone within, to lose their consciousness of guilt in that cool interior whose concern is with eternity, not time. Along all the other streets of the diverse town I fancy them streaming, gathering in at the various doors on one business bent, obeying one impulse in their many ways, one common, deep-planted instinct that not one of them can philosophize back to its ultimate, sure source, though it masters them all—the source that is deeper than lifelong habit or childhood teaching or the tradition of the race; the source out of which all these came in their dim beginnings.

SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS

1. How does the writer show that her subject has universal appeal?
2. Why does she describe people on their way to church?
3. What types of people does she mention?
4. How does the writer give the essay a quiet spirit?
5. Point out examples of repetition.
6. What is the effect of the last sentence?

SUBJECTS FOR WRITTEN IMITATION

DIRECTIONS FOR WRITING

Show that your subject is one that appeals to almost every person, and that it appeals to you in particular. Show the connection between your subject and various types of people. Give your essay a serious note, especially at the close.

DISCOVERY

By GEORGES DUHAMEL

(1884—). A surgeon in the service of the French army during the World War. He turned to authorship as a means of distraction from the horrors of war. His work entitled Civilization won the Goncourt Prize for Fiction. Among his other works are The New Book of Martyrs; Combat; Heart's Domain.

An open eye and an attentive ear do much to make life enjoyable,—that is the thought of Georges Duhamel's essay on Discovery. It is evident that the writer deeply appreciates the pleasure of exploration, even though the exploration be among the humblest and least-noticed objects. Perhaps some recent experience turned his attention to the thought, “Discovery is delightful.” At any rate, he has seized upon the idea,—as though it were one of the things that he has discovered,—and writes his meditation on it with the easy interest with which he observes the gravel in a bubbling brook or a lily floating on the surface of the water.

Discovery! It seems as if this word were one of a cluster of magic keys—one of those keys that make all doors open before our feet. We know that to possess is to understand, to comprehend. That, in a supreme sense, is what discovery means.

To understand the world can well be compared to the peaceful, enduring wealth of the great landowner; to make discoveries is, in addition to this, to come into sudden, overflowing riches, to have one of these sudden strokes of fortune which double a man's capital by a windfall that seems like an inspiration.

The life of a child who grows up unconstrainedly is a chain of discoveries, an enriching of each moment, a succession of dazzling surprises.

I cannot go on without thinking of the beautiful letter I received to-day about my little boy. It said:

Your son knows how to find extraordinary riches, inexhaustible treasures, even in the barrenest fields, and when I set him on the grass, I cannot guess the things he is going to bring out of it. He has an admirable appreciation of the different kinds of soil; if he finds sand, he rolls in it, buries himself in it, grabs up handfuls, and flings them delightedly over his hair. Yesterday he discovered a mole-hole, and you cannot imagine all the pleasure he took in it. He also knows the joys of a slope which one can descend on one's feet or head over heels, or by rolling, and which is also splendid for somersaults. Every rise of ground interests him, and I wish you could see him pushing his cart up them. There is a little ditch where on the edge he likes to lie with his feet at the bottom and his body pressed tight against the slope. He played interminably the other day on top of a big stone. He kept stroking it; he had truly found a new pleasure there. And as for me, I find my wealth in watching him discover all these things.

It is thus a child of fifteen months gives man lessons in appreciation.

Unfortunately, most systems of education do their best to substitute hackneyed phrases for the sense of discovery. A series of conventions are imposed on the child; he ceases to discover and experience the objects in the world in pinning them down with dry, formal labels by the help of which he can recognize them. He reduces his moral life little by little to the dull routine of classifying pins and pegs and in this fashion begins the journey to maturity.

Discover! You must discover in order to be rich. You must not be satisfied to accept the night good humoredly, to go to sleep after a day empty of all discovery. There are no small victories, no negligible discoveries; if you bring back from your day's journey the memory of the white cloud of pollen the ripe plantain lets fall in May at the stroke of your switch, it may be little, but your day is not lost. If you have only encountered on the road the tiny urn of jade which the moss delightedly balances at the end of its frail stem, it may seem little, but be patient. To-morrow will perhaps be more fruitful. If for the first time you have seen a swarm of bees go by in search of a hive, or heard the snapping pods of the broom scattering its seeds in the heat, you have nothing to complain of, and life ought to seem beautiful to you. If, on that same day, you have also enriched your collection of humanity with a beautiful or an interesting face, confess that you will go to sleep upon a treasure.

There will be days when you will be like a peaceful sovereign seated under a tree: the whole world will come to render homage to you and bring you tribute. Those will be your days of contemplation.

There will be days when you will have to take your staff and wallet and go and seek your living along the highways. On these days you must be contented with what you gain from observing, from hunting. Have no fear: it will be beautiful.

It is sweet to receive; it is thrilling to take. You must by turns charm and compel the universe. When you have gazed long at the tawny rock, with its lichens, its velvety mosses, it is most amusing to lift it up. Then you will discover its weight and the little nest of orange-bellied salamanders that live there in the cool.

You have only to lie among the hairy mints and the horse-tails to admire the religious dance of the dragon-fly going to lay its eggs in the brook, or to hear in early June the clamorous orgy of the tree-toads, drunk with love; and it is very pleasant, too, to dip one's hands in the water, to stir the gravel at the bottom, whence bubble up a thousand tiny, agile existences or to pick the fleshy stalk of the water-lily that lifts its tall head out of the depths.

There are people who have passed a plant a thousand times without ever thinking of picking one of its leaves and rubbing it between their fingers. Do this always, and you will discover hundreds of new perfumes. Each of these perfumes may seem quite insignificant, and yet when you have breathed it once, you wish to breathe it again; you think of it often, and something has been added to you.

It is an unending game, and it resembles love, this possession of a world that now yields itself, now conceals itself. It is a serious, divine game.

Marcus Aurelius,[4] whose philosophy cannot be called futile, does not hesitate, amid many austere counsels, to urge his friends to the contemplation of those natural spectacles that are always rich in meaning and suggestion. He writes:

Everything that comes forth from the works of nature has its grace and beauty. The face wrinkles in middle age, the very ripe olive is almost decomposed, but the fruit has, for all that, a unique beauty. The bending of the corn toward the earth, the bushy brows of the lion, the foam that drips from the mouth of the wild boar and many other things, considered by themselves, are far from being beautiful; nevertheless, since they are accessory to the works of nature, they embellish them and add a certain charm. Thus a man who has a sensitive soul, and who is capable of deep reflection, will see in whatever exists in the world hardly anything that is not pleasant in his eyes, since it is related in some way to the totality of things.

This philosopher is right, as the poets are right. As our days permit us, let us reflect and observe; let us never cease to see in each fragment of the great whole a pure source of happiness. Like children drawn into a marvelous dance, let us not relax our hold upon the hand that sustains us and directs us.

SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS

1. Point out examples of figurative language.
2. Define what the writer means by “discovery.”
3. What is the value of discovery?
4. What joy does a child possess that many grown people do not have?
5. What criticism of modern education does the writer make?
6. What is the writer's ideal of education?
7. What sort of discoveries does the writer wish people to make?
8. What powers does the writer wish people to cultivate?
9. What sort of life does the writer admire?
10. What is the advantage of quoting from Marcus Aurelius?

SUBJECTS FOR WRITTEN IMITATION

DIRECTIONS FOR WRITING

Think of something you do that gives you real pleasure: that is your subject. Your object is to lead other people to share in what pleases you.

Intimate, as the author does, what various thrills may be experienced. Write enthusiastically, and, if possible, with charm. Do not command your reader, but entice him into the joys that you possess. Give a supporting quotation from some one whose words will be respected.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] Marcus Aurelius (121-180). A Roman emperor and soldier, author of The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, a book of such wise and kindly philosophy that it is still widely popular.

THE FURROWS[5]

By GILBERT K. CHESTERTON

(1874). One of the greatest of living English essayists. He is notable for originality of thought and expression. His habit of turning ideas, as it were, “upside-down,” makes his work peculiarly challenging. He has written under many types of literature. Among his books are Robert Browning; Charles Dickens; Heretics; Tremendous Trifles; Alarms and Discursions; The Victorian Age in Literature.

Many essays are like poems: from some subject that lies well within common experience they spring to a height of emotion. Such is the case with the essay that follows. Mr. Chesterton looked upon an ordinary plowed field. At once his imagination took fire and he saw in the field a significance, a beauty, that the everyday observer might not note. It is the interpretation of what Carlyle calls “the ideal in the actual” that makes Mr. Chesterton's essay so appealing.

As I see the corn grow green all about my neighborhood, there rushes on me for no reason in particular a memory of the winter. I say “rushes,” for that is the very word for the old sweeping lines of the plowed fields. From some accidental turn of a train-journey or a walking tour, I saw suddenly the fierce rush of the furrows. The furrows are like arrows; they fly along an arc of sky. They are like leaping animals; they vault an inviolable hill and roll down the other side. They are like battering battalions; they rush over a hill with flying squadrons and carry it with a cavalry charge. They have all the air of Arabs sweeping a desert, of rockets sweeping the sky, of torrents sweeping a watercourse. Nothing ever seemed so living as those brown lines as they shot sheer from the height of a ridge down to their still whirl of the valley. They were swifter than arrows, fiercer than Arabs, more riotous and rejoicing than rockets. And yet they were only thin straight lines drawn with difficulty, like a diagram, by painful and patient men. The men that plowed tried to plow straight; they had no notion of giving great sweeps and swirls to the eye. Those cataracts of cloven earth; they were done by the grace of God. I had always rejoiced in them; but I had never found any reason for my joy. There are some very clever people who cannot enjoy the joy unless they understand it. There are other and even cleverer people who say that they lose the joy the moment they do understand it. Thank God I was never clever, and could always enjoy things when I understood them and when I didn't. I can enjoy the orthodox Tory, though I could never understand him. I can also enjoy the orthodox Liberal, though I understand him only too well.

But the splendor of furrowed fields is this: that like all brave things they are made straight, and therefore they bend. In everything that bows gracefully there must be an effort at stiffness. Bows are beautiful when they bend only because they try to remain rigid; and sword-blades can curl like silver ribbons only because they are certain to spring straight again. But the same is true of every tough curve of the tree-trunk, of every strong-backed bend of the bough; there is hardly any such thing in Nature as a mere droop of weakness. Rigidity yielding a little, like justice swayed by mercy, is the whole beauty of the earth. The cosmos is a diagram just bent beautifully out of shape. Everything tries to be straight; and everything just fortunately fails.

The foil may curve in the lunge; but there is nothing beautiful about beginning the battle with a crooked foil. So the strict aim, the strong doctrine, may give a little in the actual fight with facts; but that is no reason for beginning with a weak doctrine or a twisted aim. Do not be an opportunist; try to be theoretic at all the opportunities; fate can be trusted to do all the opportunist part of it. Do not try to bend, any more than the trees try to bend. Try to grow straight, and life will bend you.

Alas! I am giving the moral before the fable; and yet I hardly think that otherwise you could see all that I mean in that enormous vision of the plowed hills. These great furrowed slopes are the oldest architecture of man; the oldest astronomy was his guide, the oldest botany his object. And for geometry, the mere word proves my case.

But when I looked at those torrents of plowed parallels, that great rush of rigid lines, I seemed to see the whole huge achievement of democracy. Here was more equality; but equality seen in bulk is more superb than any supremacy. Equality free and flying, equality rushing over hill and dale, equality charging the world—that was the meaning of those military furrows, military in their identity, military in their energy. They sculptured hill and dale with strong curves merely because they did not mean to curve at all. They made the strong lines of landscape with their stiffly driven swords of the soil. It is not only nonsense, but blasphemy, to say that man has spoilt the country. Man has created the country; it was his business, as the image of God. No hill, covered with common scrub or patches of purple heath, could have been so sublimely hilly as that ridge up to which the ranked furrows rose like aspiring angels. No valley, confused with needless cottages and towns, can have been so utterly valleyish as that abyss into which the down-rushing furrows raged like demons into the swirling pit.

It is the hard lines of discipline and equality that mark out a landscape and give it all its mold and meaning. It is just because the lines of the furrow are ugly and even that the landscape is living and superb. As I think I have remarked before, the Republic is founded on the plow.

SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS

1. Explain the figures of speech that occur in the essay.
2. Why did Mr. Chesterton use so many figures of speech?
3. How can you account for his poetic language?
4. What leads him to think the furrows beautiful?
5. What meaning does the writer find in the plowed field?
6. Explain in full the last paragraph of the essay.
7. In what respect is the Republic, “founded on the plow”?
8. What does the essay show concerning Mr. Chesterton's personality?
9. In what respects is his style original?
10. By what means does he gain emphasis?

SUBJECTS FOR WRITTEN IMITATION

DIRECTIONS FOR WRITING

Take for your subject anything that is extremely familiar. Show your reader both the physical beauty that any one may observe and also the inner beauty that the average person is not so likely to note. Write in such a way that you will show your real emotions towards your subject. Make your essay rise steadily in power and let your last paragraph present the thought that you wish to leave with your reader.

FOOTNOTES:

[5] From “Alarms and Discursions,” by Gilbert K. Chesterton. Copyright, 1911, by Dodd, Mead and Company.

MEDITATION AND IMAGINATION[6]

By HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE

(1846-1916). An American essayist and journalist, for many years editor of The Outlook. His literary work was so important that he was made a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Among his books are Nature in New England; My Study Fire; Short Studies in Literature; Essays on Books and Culture; The Life of the Spirit; Japan To-day and To-morrow.

Essayists are natural lovers of books. In the records of human experience they find subjects that stimulate the imagination, arouse the sentiments, and lead to meditation.

Almost every essayist draws largely, for the better illustration of his thought, from the field of literature. To him the characters of history or of fiction are almost as real as those of to-day. In the realm of books the essayist sees an expansion of the world in which he lives. In addition, he makes the acquaintance of others who have meditated on the many interests of life. He looks upon authors, living or dead, as upon a company of friends. In their companionship he gains unceasing delight.

Mr. Hamilton Wright Mabie sets forward very pleasingly the way in which a reader may gain the most from books.

There is a book in the British Museum which would have, for many people, a greater value than any other single volume in the world; it is a copy of Florio's translation of Montaigne,[7] and it bears Shakespeare's autograph on a flyleaf. There are other books which must have had the same ownership; among them were Holinshed's “Chronicles,”[8] and North 's translation of Plutarch.[9] Shakespeare would have laid posterity under still greater obligations, if that were possible, if in some autobiographic mood he had told us how he read these books; for never, surely, were books read with greater insight and with more complete absorption. Indeed, the fruits of this reading were so rich and ripe that the books from which their juices came seem but dry husks and shells in comparison. The reader drained the writer dry of every particle of suggestiveness, and then recreated the material in new and imperishable forms. The process of reproduction was individual, and is not to be shared by others; it was the expression of that rare and inexplicable personal energy which we call genius; but the process of absorption may be shared by all who care to submit to the discipline which it involves. It is clear that Shakespeare read in such a way as to possess what he read; he not only remembered it, but he incorporated it into himself. No other kind of reading could have brought the East out of its grave, with its rich and languorous atmosphere steeping the senses in the charm of Cleopatra, or recalled the massive and powerfully organized life of Rome about the person of the great Cæsar. Shakespeare read his books with such insight and imagination that they became part of himself; and so far as this process is concerned, the reader of to-day can follow in his steps.

The majority of people have not learned this secret; they read for information or for refreshment; they do not read for enrichment. Feeding one's nature at all the sources of life, browsing at will on all the uplands of knowledge and thought, do not bear the fruit of acquirement only; they put us into personal possession of the vitality, the truth, and the beauty about us. A man may know the plays of Shakespeare accurately as regards their order, form, construction, and language, and yet remain almost without knowledge of what Shakespeare was at heart, and of his significance in the history of the human soul. It is this deeper knowledge, however, which is essential for culture; for culture is such an appropriation of knowledge that it becomes a part of ourselves. It is no longer something added by the memory; it is something possessed by the soul. A pedant is formed by his memory; a man of culture is formed by the habit of meditation, and by the constant use of the imagination. An alert and curious man goes through the world taking note of all that passes under his eyes, and collects a great mass of information, which is in no sense incorporated into his own mind, but remains a definite territory outside his own nature, which he has annexed. A man of receptive mind and heart, on the other hand, meditating on what he sees, and getting at its meaning by the divining-rod of the imagination, discovers the law behind the phenomena, the truth behind the fact, the vital force which flows through all things, and gives them their significance. The first man gains information; the second gains culture. The pedant pours out an endless succession of facts with a monotonous uniformity of emphasis, and exhausts while he instructs; the man of culture gives us a few facts, luminous in their relation to one another, and freshens and stimulates by bringing us into contact with ideas and with life.

To get at the heart of books we must live with and in them; we must make them our constant companions; we must turn them over and over in thought, slowly penetrating their innermost meaning; and when we possess their thought we must work it into our own thought. The reading of a real book ought to be an event in one's history; it ought to enlarge the vision, deepen the base of conviction, and add to the reader whatever knowledge, insight, beauty, and power it contains. It is possible to spend years of study on what may be called the externals of the “Divine Comedy,” and remain unaffected in nature by this contact with one of the masterpieces of the spirit of man as well as of the art of literature. It is also possible to so absorb Dante's[10] thought and so saturate one's self with the life of the poem as to add to one's individual capital of thought and experience all that the poet discerned in that deep heart of his and wrought out of that intense and tragic experience. But this permanent and personal possession can be acquired by those alone who brood over the poem and recreate it within themselves by the play of the imagination upon it. A visitor was shown into Mr. Lowell's[11] room one evening not many years ago, and found him barricaded behind rows of open books; they covered the table and were spread out on the floor in an irregular but magic circle. “Still studying Dante?” said the intruder into the workshop of as true a man of culture as we have known on this continent. “Yes,” was the prompt reply; “always studying Dante.”

A man's intellectual character is determined by what he habitually thinks about. The mind cannot always be consciously directed to definite ends; it has hours of relaxation. There are many hours in the life of the most strenuous and arduous man when the mind goes its own way and thinks its own thoughts. These times of relaxation, when the mind follows its own bent, are perhaps the most fruitful and significant periods in a rich and noble intellectual life. The real nature, the deeper instincts of the man, come out in these moments, as essential refinement and genuine breeding are revealed when the man is off guard and acts and speaks instinctively. It is possible to be mentally active and intellectually poor and sterile; to drive the mind along certain courses of work, but to have no deep life of thought behind these calculated activities. The life of the mind is rich and fruitful only when thought, released from specific tasks, flies at once to great themes as its natural objects of interest and love, its natural sources of refreshment and strength. Under all our definite activities there runs a stream of meditation; and the character of that meditation determines our wealth or our poverty, our productiveness or our sterility.

This instinctive action of the mind, although largely unconscious, is by no means irresponsible; it may be directed and controlled; it may be turned, by such control, into a Pactolian stream,[12] enriching us while we rest and ennobling us while we play. For the mind may be trained to meditate on great themes instead of giving itself up to idle reverie; when it is released from work it may concern itself with the highest things as readily as with those which are insignificant and paltry. Whoever can command his meditations in the streets, along the country roads, on the train, in the hours of relaxation, can enrich himself for all time without effort or fatigue; for it is as easy and restful to think about great things as about small ones. A certain lover of books made this discovery years ago, and has turned it to account with great profit to himself. He thought he discovered in the faces of certain great writers a meditative quality full of repose and suggestive of a constant companionship with the highest themes. It seemed to him that these thinkers, who had done so much to liberate his own thought, must have dwelt habitually with noble ideas; that in every leisure hour they must have turned instinctively to those deep things which concern most closely the life of men. The vast majority of men are so absorbed in dealing with material that they appear to be untouched by the general questions of life; but these general questions are the habitual concern of the men who think. In such men the mind, released from specific tasks, turns at once and by preference to these great themes, and by quiet meditation feeds and enriches the very soul of the thinker. And the quality of this meditation determines whether the nature shall be productive or sterile; whether a man shall be merely a logician, or a creative force in the world. Following this hint, this lover of books persistently trained himself, in his leisure hours, to think over the books he was reading; to meditate on particular passages, and, in the case of dramas and novels, to look at characters from different sides. It was not easy at first, and it was distinctively work; but it became instinctive at last, and consequently it became play. The stream of thought, once set in a given direction, flows now of its own gravitation; and reverie, instead of being idle and meaningless, has become rich and fruitful. If one subjects “The Tempest,”[13] for instance, to this process, he soon learns it by heart; first he feels its beauty; then he gets whatever definite information there is in it; as he reflects, its constructive unity grows clear to him, and he sees its quality as a piece of art; and finally its rich and noble disclosure of the poet's conception of life grows upon him until the play belongs to him almost as much as it belonged to Shakespeare. This process of meditation habitually brought to bear on one's reading lays bare the very heart of the book in hand, and puts one in complete possession of it.

This process of meditation, if it is to bear its richest fruit, must be accompanied by a constant play of the imagination, than which there is no faculty more readily cultivated or more constantly neglected. Some readers see only a flat surface as they read; others find the book a door into a real world, and forget that they are dealing with a book. The real readers get beyond the book, into the life which it describes. They see the island in “The Tempest”; they hear the tumult of the storm; they mingle with the little company who, on that magical stage, reflect all the passions of men and are brought under the spell of the highest powers of man's spirit. It is a significant fact that in the lives of men of genius the reading of two or three books has often provoked an immediate and striking expansion of thought and power. Samuel Johnson,[14] a clumsy boy in his father's book-shop, searching for apples, came upon Petrarch,[15] and was destined henceforth to be a man of letters. John Keats,[16] apprenticed to an apothecary, read Spenser's “Epithalamium”[17] one golden afternoon in company with his friend, Cowden Clarke,[18] and from that hour was a poet by the grace of God. In both cases the readers read with the imagination, or their own natures would not have kindled with so sudden a flash. The torch is passed on to those only whose hands are outstretched to receive it. To read with the imagination, one must take time to let the figures reform in his own mind; he must see them with great distinctness and realize them with great definiteness. Benjamin Franklin[19] tells us, in that “Autobiography” which was one of our earliest and remains one of our most genuine pieces of writing, that when he discovered his need of a larger vocabulary he took some of the tales which he found in an odd volume of the “Spectator”[20] and turned them into verse; “and after a time, when I had pretty well forgotten the prose, turned them back again. I also sometimes jumbled my collections of hints into confusion, and after some weeks endeavoured to reduce them into the best order before I began to form the full sentences and compleat the paper.” Such a patient recasting of material for the ends of verbal exactness and accuracy suggests ways in which the imagination may deal with characters and scenes in order to stimulate and foster its own activity. It is well to recall at frequent intervals the story we read in some dramatist, poet, or novelist, in order that the imagination may set it before us again in all its rich vitality. It is well also as we read to insist on seeing the picture as well as the words.

It is as easy to see the bloodless duke before the portrait of “My Last Duchess,” in Browning's[21] little masterpiece, to take in all the accessories and carry away with us a vivid and lasting impression, as it is to follow with the eye the succession of words. In this way we possess the poem, and make it serve the ends of culture.

SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS

1. What did Shakespeare gain from the reading of books?
2. What wrong ways of reading does Mr. Mabie point out?
3. What is the difference between a pedant and a man of culture?
4. What does Mr. Mabie mean by the expression, “To get at the heart of books”?
5. What should a book do for a reader?
6. Why does Mr. Mabie tell the anecdote of Mr. Lowell?
7. Explain the difference between helpful meditation and idle reverie.
8. What characteristics may be gained from great writers?
9. What does Mr. Mabie mean by saying that one should read imaginatively?
10. What does the essay show concerning the personality of Mr. Mabie?

SUBJECTS FOR WRITTEN IMITATION

DIRECTIONS FOR WRITING

You have noticed that Mr. Mabie began his essay by telling about Shakespeare's reading. He then set forward the ideal that Shakespeare's method of reading represents. You must follow the same plan. Begin your essay by telling of some one person who represents in some way the ideal of which you write. That very specific example will lead your reader into the thought that you wish to emphasize,—that there is, in connection with your subject, an ideal method of proceeding, and a method that is less ideal. After you have made this specific introduction, set forward your own ideas. Do as Mr. Mabie did, and give many specific examples that will make your thought clear and emphatic.

FOOTNOTES:

[6] From “Books and Culture” by Hamilton Wright Mabie. Copyright by Dodd, Mead and Co.

[7] Florio's Montaigne. John Florio (1553-1625). A teacher of French and Italian in Oxford University, who in 1603 translated the essays of Montaigne, one copy of which, autographed by Shakespeare, is in the British Museum in London. From him Shakespeare perhaps learned French and Italian. In all probability many of the passages of wit and wisdom in plays like Hamlet and The Tempest, as well as in other plays, were suggested by Florio's translation of Montaigne.

[8] Holinshed's Chronicles. Ralph Holinshed (?-1580?). Author of Chronicles of Englande, Scotlande, and Irelande, a book published in 1577, from which Shakespeare drew material for many of his historical plays.

[9] North's Plutarch. Sir Thomas North (1535?-1601?), translated from the French Plutarch's Lives, originally written in Greek in the first century A.D. From these remarkable biographies Shakespeare learned the stories that he embodied in such plays as Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus.

[10] Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), an Italian poet, author of The Divine Comedy, a work of such surpassing merit that its author is regarded as one of the five greatest writers of all time.

[11] James Russell Lowell (1819-1891). An American poet and essayist, noted for his love of books.

[12] Pactolian Stream, a river in Asia Minor in which gold was found.

[13] The Tempest, one of Shakespeare's most poetic comedies, written about 1611.

[14] Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), the great literary leader of the eighteenth century, noted for his work as an essayist.

[15] Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374), one of the most noted Italian poets.

[16] John Keats (1795-1821), an English poet especially noted for the rich beauty of his style.

[17] Edmund Spenser (1552?-1599), the celebrated author of The Faërie Queen and of other poems noted for rich imaginative power. His Epithalamium, perhaps his best poem, was written in honor of his marriage to Elizabeth Boyle.

[18] Cowden Clarke (1787-1877), an English publisher and Shakespearian scholar, a friend of John Keats.

[19] Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), a great American philosopher and patriot whose life story is told in his Autobiography.

[20] The Spectator, a daily paper published by Joseph Addison, Sir Richard Steele and others from March 1, 1711, to December 6, 1712.

[21] Robert Browning (1812-1889). One of the greatest of English poets. My Last Duchess is one of his many powerful dramatic monologues.

WHO OWNS THE MOUNTAINS?[22]

By HENRY VAN DYKE

(1852—). One of the most popular American essayists. After many years of service as a Presbyterian minister he became Professor of English Literature in Princeton University. During the early part of the World War he was U. S. Minister to the Netherlands and Luxembourg, where his services were notably patriotic. His poems, essays and short stories have won wide and well-deserved popularity. Among them are The Poetry of Tennyson; The Other Wise Man; The First Christmas Tree; Fisherman's Luck; The Blue Flower; Out of Doors in the Holy Land; The Unknown Quantity; Collected Poems. Dr. Van Dyke was at one time President of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

Something of the spirit of sunset and of the quietness of the woods and mountains has crept into Dr. Van Dyke's essay. We sit with him and look off at the ridges and hollows of forest. We find our own thoughts about the beauty of earth expressed as we can not express them. We are lifted in meditation as Dr. Van Dyke was lifted when he looked off at the great hills.

Power to reveal inner meanings in the world of outdoors and of man, and to ennoble the soul, is one of the reasons why the essay has such a high place in the affections of those who love literature.

Who Owns the Mountains? shows both the felicity of Dr. Van Dyke's style and the nobility of his thought.

It was the little lad that asked the question; and the answer also, as you will see, was mainly his.

We had been keeping Sunday afternoon together in our favorite fashion, following out that pleasant text which tells us to “behold the fowls of the air.” There is no injunction of Holy Writ less burdensome in acceptance, or more profitable in obedience, than this easy out-of-doors commandment. For several hours we walked in the way of this precept, through the untangled woods that lie behind the Forest Hills

Lodge,[23] where a pair of pigeon-hawks had their nest; and around the brambly shores of the small pond, where Maryland yellow-throats and song-sparrows were settled; and under the lofty hemlocks of the fragment of forest across the road, where rare warblers flitted silently among the tree-tops. The light beneath the evergreens was growing dim as we came out from their shadow into the widespread glow of the sunset, on the edge of a grassy hill, overlooking the long valley of the Gale River, and uplooking to the Franconia Mountains.

It was the benediction hour. The placid air of the day shed a new tranquillity over the consoling landscape. The heart of the earth seemed to taste a repose more perfect than that of common days. A hermit-thrush, far up the vale, sang his vesper hymn; while the swallows, seeking their evening meal, circled above the riverfields without an effort, twittering softly, now and then, as if they must give thanks. Slight and indefinable touches in the scene, perhaps the mere absence of the tiny human figures passing along the road or laboring in the distant meadows, perhaps the blue curls of smoke rising lazily from the farm-house chimneys, or the family groups sitting under the maple-trees before the door, diffused a sabbath atmosphere over the world.

Then said the lad, lying on the grass beside me, “Father, who owns the mountains?”

I happened to have heard, the day before, of two or three lumber companies that had bought some of the woodland slopes; so I told him their names, adding that there were probably a good many different owners, whose claims taken all together would cover the whole Franconia range of hills.

“Well,” answered the lad, after a moment of silence, “I don't see what difference that makes. Everybody can look at them.”

They lay stretched out before us in the level sunlight, the sharp peaks outlined against the sky, the vast ridges of forest sinking smoothly towards the valleys, the deep hollows gathering purple shadows in their bosoms, and the little foothills standing out in rounded promontories of brighter green from the darker mass behind them.

Far to the east, the long comb of Twin Mountain extended itself back into the untrodden wilderness. Mount Garfield lifted a clear-cut pyramid through the translucent air. The huge bulk of Lafayette ascended majestically in front of us, crowned with a rosy diadem of rocks. Eagle Cliff and Bald Mountain stretched their line of scalloped peaks across the entrance to the Notch. Beyond that shadowy vale, the swelling summits of Cannon Mountain rolled away to meet the tumbling waves of Kinsman, dominated by one loftier crested billow that seemed almost ready to curl and break out of green silence into snowy foam. Far down the sleeping Landaff valley the undulating dome of Moosilauke trembled in the distant blue.

They were all ours, from crested cliff to wooded base. The solemn groves of firs and spruces, the plumed sierras of lofty pines, the stately pillared forests of birch and beech, the wild ravines, the tremulous thickets of silvery poplar, the bare peaks with their wide outlooks, and the cool vales resounding with the ceaseless song of little rivers,—we knew and loved them all; they ministered peace and joy to us; they were all ours, though we held no title deeds and our ownership had never been recorded.

What is property, after all? The law says there are two kinds, real and personal. But it seems to me that the only real property is that which is truly personal, that which we take into our inner life and make our own forever by understanding and admiration and sympathy and love. This is the only kind of possession that is worth anything.

A gallery of great paintings adorns the house of the Honorable Midas Bond,[24] and every year adds a new treasure to his collection. He knows how much they cost him, and he keeps the run of the quotations at the auction sales, congratulating himself as the price of the works of his well-chosen artists rises in the scale, and the value of his art treasures is enhanced. But why should he call them his? He is only their custodian. He keeps them well varnished, and framed in gilt. But he never passes through those gilded frames into the world of beauty that lies behind the painted canvas. He knows nothing of those lovely places from which the artist's soul and hand have drawn their inspiration. They are closed and barred to him. He has bought the pictures, but he cannot buy the key. The poor art student who wanders through his gallery, lingering with awe and love before the masterpieces, owns them far more truly than Midas does.

Pomposus Silverman[25] purchased a rich library a few years ago. The books were rare and costly. That was the reason why Pomposus bought them. He was proud to feel that he was the possessor of literary treasures which were not to be found in the houses of his wealthiest acquaintances. But the threadbare Bücherfreund,[26] who was engaged at a slender salary to catalogue the library and take care of it, became the real proprietor. Pomposus paid for the books, but Bücherfreund enjoyed them.

I do not mean to say that the possession of much money is always a barrier to real wealth of mind and heart. Nor would I maintain that all the poor of this world are rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom. But some of them are. And if some of the rich of this world (through the grace of Him with whom all things are possible) are also modest in their tastes, and gentle in their hearts, and open in their minds, and ready to be pleased with unbought pleasures, they simply share in the best things which are provided for all.

I speak not now of the strife that men wage over the definition and the laws of property. Doubtless there is much here that needs to be set right. There are men and women in the world who are shut out from the right to earn a living, so poor that they must perish for want of daily bread, so full of misery that there is no room for the tiniest seed of joy in their lives. This is the lingering shame of civilization. Some day, perhaps, we shall find the way to banish it. Some day, every man shall have his title to a share in the world's great work and the world's large joy.

But meantime it is certain that, where there are a hundred poor bodies who suffer from physical privation, there are a thousand poor souls who suffer from spiritual poverty. To relieve this greater suffering there needs no change of laws, only a change of heart.

What does it profit a man to be the landed proprietor of countless acres unless he can reap the harvest of delight that blooms from every rood of God's earth for the seeing eye and the loving spirit? And who can reap that harvest so closely that there shall not be abundant gleaning left for all mankind? The most that a wide principality can yield to its legal owner is a living. But the real owner can gather from a field of goldenrod, shining in the August sunlight, an unearned increment of delight.

We measure success by accumulation. The measure is false. The true measure is appreciation. He who loves most has most.

How foolishly we train ourselves for the work of life! We give our most arduous and eager efforts to the cultivation of those faculties which will serve us in the competitions of the forum and the market-place. But if we were wise, we should care infinitely more for the unfolding of those inward, secret, spiritual powers by which alone we can become the owners of anything that is worth having. Surely God is the great proprietor. Yet all His works He has given away. He holds no title-deeds. The one thing that is His, is the perfect understanding, the perfect joy, the perfect love, of all things that He has made. To a share in this high ownership He welcomes all who are poor in spirit. This is the earth which the meek inherit. This is the patrimony of the saints in light.

“Come, laddie,” I said to my comrade, “let us go home. You and I are very rich. We own the mountains. But we can never sell them, and we don't want to.”

SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS

1. In what does real ownership consist?
2. Why is it wrong to “measure success by accumulation”?
3. What is “spiritual poverty”?
4. How may you truly own a book?
5. How may you truly own a beautiful scene?
6. How may you become a really rich person?
7. How may you truly own a beautiful picture?
8. How does Dr. Van Dyke introduce his principal thought?
9. What is the spirit of the essay?
10. Make a list of the most beautiful sentences.

SUBJECTS FOR WRITTEN IMITATION

DIRECTIONS FOR WRITING

Show, in your essay, that all people have at their command some wealth, or some wonderful power, that they little suspect. Show how they may make use of the opportunity that lies before them. In order to do this, lead into your thought as naturally as Dr. Van Dyke leads into his. You will write more wisely and more sincerely if you set your thoughts in motion from some real experience,—from some time when you were genuinely impressed and uplifted in spirit.

FOOTNOTES:

[22] From “Fisherman's Luck,” by Henry Van Dyke. Copyright, 1905, by Charles Scribner's Sons.

[23] The scene mentioned in the essay is in the White Mountain region in New Hampshire, one of the most beautiful regions in the United States.

[24] Midas Bond. Greek legend tells of Midas, king of Phrygia, who had the power of turning into gold everything that he touched. “Bond” is of course, a modern synonym for wealth.

[25] Pomposus Silverman. Another combination of a classical and a modern expression,—a haughty lord of silver.

[26] Bücherfreund. Lover of books.

THE LEGENDARY STORY

RUNNING WOLF

By ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

(1869—). An English author and journalist. He is a graduate of the University of Edinburgh. For a time he was on the staff of the New York Sun, and of the New York Times. He is the author of The Lost Valley; Paris Garden; A Prisoner in Fairyland; The Starlight Express. He writes with strongly suggestive power.

The legend and its origin and development, are well illustrated in the story of Running Wolf. Some hundred years before the story begins, so the author says, certain tragic events had occurred in the Canadian backwoods. From those events had grown beliefs held by all who lived within the region. The author very cleverly makes his story a continuation of the legend.

Running Wolf deals not only with the beliefs of a primitive people but also with the supernatural. It suggests an unhappy, wandering spirit unable to escape from the chains of earth. In its treatment of the supernatural the story is surpassingly powerful. It gains every effect through the power of suggestion. At no time does the story, in so many words, say that the supernatural is present. Instead, it places the reader in a position where it is natural to infer something beyond the ordinary. In other words, the story does what life does: it presents facts and leaves people to draw their own conclusions.

Over the entire story hangs an atmosphere entirely in keeping with the events narrated. The reader feels drawn into the solemn silence of the vast forest; he knows the loneliness of little-visited lakes, and the black terror that surrounds a wilderness camp-fire at night.

The story is rich with foreshadowing, sentence after sentence pointing toward the climax and emphasizing the single effect that is produced.

Because of its hauntingly suggestive power Running Wolf is a remarkable story of the supernatural.

“Loneliness in a backwoods camp brings charm, pleasure, and a happy sense of calm until, and unless, it comes too near. Once it has crept within short distance, however, it may easily cross the narrow line between comfort and discomfort.”

The man who enjoys an adventure outside the general experience of the race, and imparts it to others, must not be surprised if he is taken for either a liar or a fool, as Malcolm Hyde, hotel clerk on a holiday, discovered in due course. Nor is “enjoy” the right word to use in describing his emotions; the word he chose was probably “survive.”

When he first set eyes on Medicine Lake he was struck by its still, sparkling beauty, lying there in the vast Canadian backwoods; next, by its extreme loneliness; and, lastly—a good deal later, this—by its combination of beauty, loneliness, and singular atmosphere, due to the fact that it was the scene of his adventure.

“It 's fairly stiff with big fish,” said Morton of the Montreal Sporting Club. “Spend your holiday there—up Mattawa way, some fifteen miles west of Stony Creek. You'll have it all to yourself except for an old Indian who's got a shack there. Camp on the east side—if you'll take a tip from me.” He then talked for half an hour about the wonderful sport; yet he was not otherwise very communicative, and did not suffer questions gladly, Hyde noticed. Nor had he stayed there very long himself. If it was such a paradise as Morton, its discoverer and the most experienced rod in the province, claimed, why had he himself spent only three days there?

“Ran short of grub,” was the explanation offered; but to another friend he had mentioned briefly, “flies,” and to a third, so Hyde learned later, he gave the excuse that his half-breed “took sick,” necessitating a quick return to civilization.

Hyde, however, cared little for the explanations; his interest in these came later. “Stiff with fish” was the phrase he liked. He took the Canadian Pacific train to Mattawa, laid in his outfit at Stony Creek, and set off thence for the fifteen-mile canoe-trip without a care in the world.

Traveling light, the portages did not trouble him; the water was swift and easy, the rapids negotiable; everything came his way, as the saying is. Occasionally he saw big fish making for the deeper pools, and was sorely tempted to stop; but he resisted. He pushed on between the immense world of forests that stretched for hundreds of miles, known to deer, bear, moose, and wolf, but strange to any echo of human tread, a deserted and primeval wilderness. The autumn day was calm, the water sang and sparkled, the blue sky hung cloudless over all, ablaze with light. Toward evening he passed an old beaver-dam, rounded a little point, and had his first sight of Medicine Lake. He lifted his dripping paddle; the canoe shot with silent glide into calm water. He gave an exclamation of delight, for the loveliness caught his breath away.

Though primarily a sportsman, he was not insensible to beauty. The lake formed a crescent, perhaps four miles long, its width between a mile and half a mile. The slanting gold of sunset flooded it. No wind stirred its crystal surface. Here it had lain since the red-skin's god first made it; here it would lie until he dried it up again. Towering spruce and hemlock trooped to its very edge, majestic cedars leaned down as if to drink, crimson sumachs shone in fiery patches, and maples gleamed orange and red beyond belief. The air was like wine, with the silence of a dream.

It was here the red men formerly “made medicine,” with all the wild ritual and tribal ceremony of an ancient day. But it was of Morton, rather than of Indians, that Hyde thought. If this lonely, hidden paradise was really stiff with big fish, he owed a lot to Morton for the information. Peace invaded him, but the excitement of the hunter lay below.

He looked about him with quick, practised eye for a camping-place before the sun sank below the forests and the half-lights came. The Indian's shack, lying in full sunshine on the eastern shore, he found at once; but the trees lay too thick about it for comfort, nor did he wish to be so close to its inhabitant. Upon the opposite side, however, an ideal clearing offered. This lay already in shadow, the huge forest darkening it toward evening; but the open space attracted. He paddled over quickly and examined it. The ground was hard and dry, he found, and a little brook ran tinkling down one side of it into the lake. This outfall, too, would be a good fishing spot. Also it was sheltered. A few low willows marked the mouth.

An experienced camper soon makes up his mind. It was a perfect site, and some charred logs, with traces of former fires, proved that he was not the first to think so. Hyde was delighted. Then, suddenly, disappointment came to tinge his pleasure. His kit was landed, and preparations for putting up the tent were begun, when he recalled a detail that excitement had so far kept in the background of his mind—Morton's advice. But not Morton's only, for the storekeeper at Stony Creek had reinforced it. The big fellow with straggling mustache and stooping shoulders, dressed in shirt and trousers, had handed him out a final sentence with the bacon, flour, condensed milk, and sugar. He had repeated Morton's half-forgotten words:

“Put yer tent on the east shore. I should,” he had said at parting.

He remembered Morton, too, apparently. “A shortish fellow, brown as an Indian and fairly smelling of the woods. Traveling with Jake, the half-breed.” That assuredly was Morton. “Didn't stay long, now, did he?” he added in a reflective tone.

“Going Windy Lake way, are yer? Or Ten Mile Water, maybe?” he had first inquired of Hyde.

“Medicine Lake.”

“Is that so?” the man said, as though he doubted it for some obscure reason. He pulled at his ragged mustache a moment. “Is that so, now?” he repeated. And the final words followed him down-stream after a considerable pause—the advice about the best shore on which to put his tent.

All this now suddenly flashed back upon Hyde's mind with a tinge of disappointment and annoyance, for when two experienced men agreed, their opinion was not to be lightly disregarded. He wished he had asked the storekeeper for more details. He looked about him, he reflected, he hesitated. His ideal camping-ground lay certainly on the forbidden shore. What in the world, he wondered, could be the objection to it?

But the light was fading; he must decide quickly one way or the other. After staring at his unpacked dunnage and the tent, already half erected, he made up his mind with a muttered expression that consigned both Morton and the storekeeper to less pleasant places. “They must have some reason,” he growled to himself; “fellows like that usually know what they're talking about. I guess I'd better shift over to the other side—for to-night, at any rate.”

He glanced across the water before actually reloading. No smoke rose from the Indian's shack. He had seen no sign of a canoe. The man, he decided, was away. Reluctantly, then, he left the good camping-ground and paddled across the lake, and half an hour later his tent was up, firewood collected, and two small trout were already caught for supper. But the bigger fish, he knew, lay waiting for him on the other side by the little outfall, and he fell asleep at length on his bed of balsam boughs, annoyed and disappointed, yet wondering how a mere sentence could have persuaded him so easily against his own better judgment. He slept like the dead; the sun was well up before he stirred.

But his morning mood was a very different one. The brilliant light, the peace, the intoxicating air, all this was too exhilarating for the mind to harbor foolish fancies, and he marveled that he could have been so weak the night before. No hesitation lay in him anywhere. He struck camp immediately after breakfast, paddled back across the strip of shining water, and quickly settled in upon the forbidden shore, as he now called it, with a contemptuous grin. And the more he saw of the spot, the better he liked it. There was plenty of wood, running water to drink, an open space about the tent, and there were no flies. The fishing, moreover, was magnificent; Morton's description was fully justified, and “stiff with big fish” for once was not an exaggeration.

The useless hours of the early afternoon he passed dozing in the sun, or wandering through the underbrush beyond the camp. He found no sign of anything unusual. He bathed in a cool, deep pool; he reveled in the lonely little paradise. Lonely it certainly was, but the loneliness was part of its charm; the stillness, the peace, the isolation of this beautiful backwoods lake delighted him. The silence was divine. He was entirely satisfied.

After a brew of tea, he strolled toward evening along the shore, looking for the first sign of a rising fish. A faint ripple on the water, with the lengthening shadows, made good conditions. Plop followed plop, as the big fellows rose, snatched at their food, and vanished into the depths. He hurried back. Ten minutes later he had taken his rods and was gliding cautiously in the canoe through the quiet water.

So good was the sport, indeed, and so quickly did the big trout pile up in the bottom of the canoe that, despite the growing lateness, he found it hard to tear himself away. “One more,” he said, “and then I really will go.” He landed that “one more,” and was in the act of taking it off the hook, when the deep silence of the evening was curiously disturbed. He became abruptly aware that some one watched him. A pair of eyes, it seemed, were fixed upon him from some point in the surrounding shadows.

Thus, at least, he interpreted the odd disturbance in his happy mood; for thus he felt it. The feeling stole over him without the slightest warning. He was not alone. The slippery big trout dripped from his fingers. He sat motionless, and stared about him.

Nothing stirred; the ripple on the lake had died away; there was no wind; the forest lay a single purple mass of shadow; the yellow sky, fast fading, threw reflections that troubled the eye and made distances uncertain. But there was no sound, no movement; he saw no figure anywhere. Yet he knew that some one watched him, and a wave of quite unreasoning terror gripped him. The nose of the canoe was against the bank. In a moment, and instinctively, he shoved it off and paddled into deeper water. The watcher, it came to him also instinctively, was quite close to him upon that bank. But where? And who? Was it the Indian?

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“The feeling stole over him without the slightest warning. He was not alone.”

Here, in deeper water, and some twenty yards from the shore, he paused and strained both sight and hearing to find some possible clue. He felt half ashamed, now that the first strange feeling passed a little. But the certainty remained. Absurd as it was, he felt positive that some one watched him with concentrated and intent regard. Every fiber in his being told him so; and though he could discover no figure, no new outline on the shore, he could even have sworn in which clump of willow bushes the hidden person crouched and stared. His attention seemed drawn to that particular clump.

The water dripped slowly from his paddle, now lying across the thwarts. There was no other sound. The canvas of his tent gleamed dimly. A star or two were out. He waited. Nothing happened.

Then, as suddenly as it had come, the feeling passed, and he knew that the person who had been watching him intently had gone. It was as if a current had been turned off; the normal world flowed back; the landscape emptied as if some one had left a room. The disagreeable feeling left him at the same time, so that he instantly turned the canoe in to the shore again, landed, and, paddle in hand, went over to examine the clump of willows he had singled out as the place of concealment. There was no one there, of course, or any trace of recent human occupancy. No leaves, no branches stirred, nor was a single twig displaced; his keen and practised sight detected no sign of tracks upon the ground. Yet, for all that, he felt positive that a little time ago some one had crouched among these very leaves and watched him. He remained absolutely convinced of it. The watcher, whether Indian, hunter, stray lumberman, or wandering half-breed, had now withdrawn, a search was useless, and dusk was falling. He returned to his little camp, more disturbed perhaps than he cared to acknowledge. He cooked his supper, hung up his catch on a string, so that no prowling animal could get at it during the night, and prepared to make himself comfortable until bed-time. Unconsciously, he built a bigger fire than usual, and found himself peering over his pipe into the deep shadows beyond the firelight, straining his ears to catch the slightest sound. He remained generally on the alert in a way that was new to him.

A man under such conditions and in such a place need not know discomfort until the sense of loneliness strikes him as too vivid a reality. Loneliness in a backwoods camp brings charm, pleasure, and a happy sense of calm until, and unless, it comes too near. It should remain an ingredient only among other conditions; it should not be directly, vividly noticed. Once it has crept within short range, however, it may easily cross the narrow line between comfort and discomfort, and darkness is an undesirable time for the transition. A curious dread may easily follow—the dread lest the loneliness suddenly be disturbed, and the solitary human feel himself open to attack.

For Hyde, now, this transition had been already accomplished; the too intimate sense of his loneliness had shifted abruptly into the worse condition of no longer being quite alone. It was an awkward moment, and the hotel clerk realized his position exactly. He did not quite like it. He sat there, with his back to the blazing logs, a very visible object in the light, while all about him the darkness of the forest lay like an impenetrable wall. He could not see a foot beyond the small circle of his camp-fire; the silence about him was like the silence of the dead. No leaf rustled, no wave lapped; he himself sat motionless as a log.

Then again he became suddenly aware that the person who watched him had returned, and that same intent and concentrated gaze as before was fixed upon him where he lay. There was no warning; he heard no stealthy tread or snapping of dry twigs, yet the owner of those steady eyes was very close to him, probably not a dozen feet away. This sense of proximity was overwhelming.

It is unquestionable that a shiver ran down his spine. This time, moreover, he felt positive that the man crouched just beyond the firelight, the distance he himself could see being nicely calculated, and straight in front of him. For some minutes he sat without stirring a single muscle, yet with each muscle ready and alert, straining his eyes in vain to pierce the darkness, but only succeeding in dazzling his sight with the reflected light. Then, as he shifted his position slowly, cautiously, to obtain another angle of vision, his heart gave two big thumps against his ribs and the hair seemed to rise on his scalp with the sense of cold that shot horribly up his spine. In the darkness facing him he saw two small and greenish circles that were certainly a pair of eyes, yet not the eyes of Indian, hunter, or of any human being. It was a pair of animal eyes that stared so fixedly at him out of the night. And this certainty had an immediate and natural effect upon him.

For, at the menace of those eyes, the fears of millions of long dead hunters since the dawn of time woke in him. Hotel clerk though he was, heredity surged through him in an automatic wave of instinct. His hand groped for a weapon. His fingers fell on the iron head of his small camp ax, and at once he was himself again. Confidence returned; the vague, superstitious dread was gone. This was a bear or wolf that smelt his catch and came to steal it. With beings of that sort he knew instinctively how to deal, yet admitting, by this very instinct, that his original dread had been of quite another kind.

“I'll damned quick find out what it is,” he exclaimed aloud, and snatching a burning brand from the fire, he hurled it with good aim straight at the eyes of the beast before him.

The bit of pitch-pine fell in a shower of sparks that lit the dry grass this side of the animal, flared up a moment, then died quickly down again. But in that instant of bright illumination he saw clearly what his unwelcome visitor was. A big timber wolf sat on its hindquarters, staring steadily at him through the firelight. He saw its legs and shoulders, he saw its hair, he saw also the big hemlock trunks lit up behind it, and the willow scrub on each side. It formed a vivid, clear-cut picture shown in clear detail by the momentary blaze. To his amazement, however, the wolf did not turn and bolt away from the burning log, but withdrew a few yards only, and sat there again on its haunches, staring, staring as before. Heavens, how it stared! He “shoed” it, but without effect; it did not budge. He did not waste another good log on it, for his fear was dissipated now, and a timber wolf was a timber wolf, and it might sit there as long as it pleased, provided it did not try to steal his catch. No alarm was in him any more. He knew that wolves were harmless in the summer and autumn, and even when “packed” in the winter, they would attack a man only when suffering desperate hunger. So he lay and watched the beast, threw bits of stick in its direction, even talked to it, wondering only that it never moved. “You can stay there forever, if you like,” he remarked to it aloud, “for you cannot get at my fish, and the rest of the grub I shall take into the tent with me.”

The creature blinked its bright green eyes, but made no move.

Why, then, if his fear was gone, did he think of certain things as he rolled himself in the Hudson Bay blankets before going to sleep? The immobility of the animal was strange, its refusal to turn and bolt was still stranger. Never before had he known a wild creature that was not afraid of fire. Why did it sit and watch him, as with purpose in its dreadful eyes? How had he felt its presence earlier and instantly? A timber wolf, especially a solitary timber wolf, was a timid thing, yet this one feared neither man nor fire. Now as he lay there wrapped in his blankets inside the cozy tent, it sat outside beneath the stars, beside the fading embers, the wind chilly in its fur, the ground cooling beneath its planted paws, watching him, steadily watching him, perhaps until the dawn.

It was unusual, it was strange. Having neither imagination nor tradition, he called upon no store of racial visions. Matter of fact, a hotel clerk on a fishing holiday, he lay there in his blankets, merely wondering and puzzled. A timber wolf was a timber wolf and nothing more. Yet this timber wolf—the idea haunted him—was different. In a word, the deeper part of his original uneasiness remained. He tossed about, he shivered sometimes in his broken sleep, he did not go out to see, but he woke early and unrefreshed.

Again, with the sunshine and the morning wind, however, the incident of the night before was forgotten, almost unreal. His hunting zeal was uppermost. The tea and fish were delicious, his pipe had never tasted so good, the glory of this lonely lake amid primeval forests went to his head a little; he was a hunter before the Lord,[27] and nothing else. He tried the edge of the lake, and in the excitement of playing a big fish, knew suddenly that it, the wolf, was there. He paused with the rod, exactly as if struck. He looked about him, he looked in a definite direction. The brilliant sunshine made every smallest detail clear and sharp—boulders of granite, burned stems, crimson sumach, pebbles along the shore in neat, separate detail—without revealing where the watcher hid. Then, his sight wandering farther inshore among the tangled undergrowth, he suddenly picked up the familiar, half-expected outline. The wolf was lying behind a granite boulder, so that only the head, the muzzle, and the eyes were visible. It merged in its background. Had he not known it was a wolf, he could never have separated it from the landscape. The eyes shone in the sunlight.

There it lay. He looked straight at it. Their eyes, in fact, actually met full and square. “Great Scot!” he exclaimed aloud, “why, it's like looking at a human being!” And from that moment, unwittingly, he established a singular personal relation with the beast. And what followed confirmed this undesirable impression, for the animal rose instantly and came down in leisurely fashion to the shore, where it stood looking back at him. It stood and stared into his eyes like some great wild dog, so that he was aware of a new and almost incredible sensation—that it courted recognition.

“Well! well!” he exclaimed again, relieving his feelings by addressing it aloud, “if this doesn't beat everything I ever saw! What d' you want, anyway?”

He examined it now more carefully. He had never seen a wolf so big before; it was a tremendous beast, a nasty customer to tackle, he reflected, if it ever came to that. It stood there absolutely fearless and full of confidence. In the clear sunlight he took in every detail of it—a huge, shaggy, lean-flanked timber wolf, its wicked eyes staring straight into his own, almost with a kind of purpose in them. He saw its great jaws, its teeth, and its tongue, hung out, dropping saliva a little. And yet the idea of its savagery, its fierceness, was very little in him.

He was amazed and puzzled beyond belief. He wished the Indian would come back. He did not understand this strange behavior in an animal. Its eyes, the odd expression in them, gave him a queer, unusual, difficult feeling. Had his nerves gone wrong? he almost wondered.

The beast stood on the shore and looked at him. He wished for the first time that he had brought a rifle. With a resounding smack he brought his paddle down flat upon the water, using all his strength, till the echoes rang as from a pistol-shot that was audible from one end of the lake to the other. The wolf never stirred. He shouted, but the beast remained unmoved. He blinked his eyes, speaking as to a dog, a domestic animal, a creature accustomed to human ways. It blinked its eyes in return.

At length, increasing his distance from the shore, he continued fishing, and the excitement of the marvelous sport held his attention—his surface attention, at any rate. At times he almost forgot the attendant beast; yet whenever he looked up, he saw it there. And worse; when he slowly paddled home again, he observed it trotting along the shore as though to keep him company. Crossing a little bay, he spurted, hoping to reach the other point before his undesired and undesirable attendant. Instantly the brute broke into that rapid, tireless lope that, except on ice, can run down anything on four legs in the woods. When he reached the distant point, the wolf was waiting for him. He raised his paddle from the water, pausing a moment for reflection; for this very close attention—there were dusk and night yet to come—he certainly did not relish. His camp was near; he had to land; he felt uncomfortable even in the sunshine of broad day, when, to his keen relief, about half a mile from the tent, he saw the creature suddenly stop and sit down in the open. He waited a moment, then paddled on. It did not follow. There was no attempt to move; it merely sat and watched him. After a few hundred yards, he looked back. It was still sitting where he left it. And the absurd, yet significant, feeling came to him that the beast divined his thought, his anxiety, his dread, and was now showing him, as well as it could, that it entertained no hostile feeling and did not meditate attack.

He turned the canoe toward the shore; he landed; he cooked his supper in the dusk; the animal made no sign. Not far away it certainly lay and watched, but it did not advance. And to Hyde, observant now in a new way, came one sharp, vivid reminder of the strange atmosphere into which his commonplace personality had strayed: he suddenly recalled that his relations with the beast, already established, had progressed distinctly a stage further. This startled him, yet without the accompanying alarm he must certainly have felt twenty-four hours before. He had an understanding with the wolf. He was aware of friendly thoughts toward it. He even went so far as to set out a few big fish on the spot where he had first seen it sitting the previous night. “If he comes,” he thought, “he is welcome to them. I've got plenty, anyway.” He thought of it now as “he.”

Yet the wolf made no appearance until he was in the act of entering his tent a good deal later. It was close on ten o'clock, whereas nine was his hour, and late at that, for turning in. He had, therefore, unconsciously been waiting for him. Then, as he was closing the flap, he saw the eyes close to where he had placed the fish. He waited, hiding himself, and expecting to hear sounds of munching jaws; but all was silence. Only the eyes glowed steadily out of the background of pitch darkness. He closed the flap. He had no slightest fear. In ten minutes he was sound asleep.

He could not have slept very long, for when he woke up he could see the shine of a faint red light through the canvas, and the fire had not died down completely. He rose and cautiously peeped out. The air was very cold; he saw his breath. But he also saw the wolf, for it had come in, and was sitting by the dying embers, not two yards away from where he crouched behind the flap. And this time, at these very close quarters, there was something in the attitude of the big wild thing that caught his attention with a vivid thrill of startled surprise and a sudden shock of cold that held him spellbound. He stared, unable to believe his eyes; for the wolf's attitude conveyed to him something familiar that at first he was unable to explain. Its pose reached him in the terms of another thing with which he was entirely at home. What was it? Did his senses betray him? Was he still asleep and dreaming?

Then, suddenly, with a start of uncanny recognition, he knew. Its attitude was that of a dog. Having found the clue, his mind then made an awful leap. For it was, after all, no dog its appearance aped, but something nearer to himself, and more familiar still. Good heavens! It sat there with the pose, the attitude, the gesture in repose of something almost human. And then, with a second shock of biting wonder, it came to him like a revelation. The wolf sat beside that camp-fire as a man might sit.

Before he could weigh his extraordinary discovery, before he could examine it in detail or with care, the animal, sitting in this ghastly fashion, seemed to feel his eyes fixed on it. It slowly turned and looked him in the face, and for the first time Hyde felt a full-blooded, superstitious fear flood through his entire being. He seemed transfixed with that nameless terror that is said to attack human beings who suddenly face the dead, finding themselves bereft of speech and movement. This moment of paralysis certainly occurred. Its passing, however, was as singular as its advent. For almost at once he was aware of something beyond and above this mockery of human attitude and pose, something that ran along unaccustomed nerves and reached his feeling, even perhaps his heart. The revulsion was extraordinary, its result still more extraordinary and unexpected. Yet the fact remains. He was aware of another thing that had the effect of stilling his terror as soon as it was born. He was aware of appeal, silent, half-expressed, yet vastly pathetic. He saw in the savage eyes a beseeching, even a yearning, expression that changed his mood as by magic from dread to natural sympathy. The great gray brute, symbol of cruel ferocity, sat there beside his dying fire and appealed for help.

This gulf betwixt animal and human seemed in that instant bridged. It was, of course, incredible. Hyde, sleep still possibly clinging to his inner being with the shades and half-shapes of dream yet about his soul, acknowledged, how he knew not, the amazing fact. He found himself nodding to the brute in half-consent, and instantly, without more ado, the lean gray shape rose like a wraith and trotted off swiftly, but with stealthy tread into the background of the night.

When Hyde woke in the morning his first impression was that he must have dreamed the entire incident. His practical nature asserted itself. There was a bite in the fresh autumn air; the bright sun allowed no half-lights anywhere; he felt brisk in mind and body. Reviewing what had happened, he came to the conclusion that it was utterly vain to speculate; no possible explanation of the animal's behavior occurred to him: he was dealing with something entirely outside his experience. His fear, however, had completely left him. The odd sense of friendliness remained. The beast had a definite purpose, and he himself was included in that purpose. His sympathy held good.

But with the sympathy there was also an intense curiosity. “If it shows itself again,” he told himself, “I'll go up close and find out what it wants.” The fish laid out the night before had not been touched.

It must have been a full hour after breakfast when he next saw the brute; it was standing on the edge of the clearing, looking at him in the way now become familiar. Hyde immediately picked up his ax and advanced toward it boldly, keeping his eyes fixed straight upon its own. There was nervousness in him, but kept well under; nothing betrayed it; step by step he drew nearer until some ten yards separated them. The wolf had not stirred a muscle as yet. Its jaws hung open, its eyes observed him intently; it allowed him to approach without a sign of what its mood might be. Then, with these ten yards between them, it turned abruptly and moved slowly off, looking back first over one shoulder and then over the other, exactly as a dog might do, to see if he was following.

A singular journey it was they then made together, animal and man. The trees surrounded them at once, for they left the lake behind them, entering the tangled bush beyond. The beast, Hyde noticed, obviously picked the easiest track for him to follow; for obstacles that meant nothing to the four-legged expert, yet were difficult for a man, were carefully avoided with an almost uncanny skill, while yet the general direction was accurately kept. Occasionally there were windfalls to be surmounted; but though the wolf bounded over these with ease, it was always waiting for the man on the other side after he had laboriously climbed over. Deeper and deeper into the heart of the lonely forest they penetrated in this singular fashion, cutting across the arc of the lake's crescent, it seemed to Hyde; for after two miles or so, he recognized the big rocky bluff that overhung the water at its northern end. This outstanding bluff he had seen from his camp, one side of it falling sheer into the water; it was probably the spot, he imagined, where the Indians held their medicine-making ceremonies, for it stood out in isolated fashion, and its top formed a private plateau not easy of access. And it was here, close to a big spruce at the foot of the bluff upon the forest side, that the wolf stopped suddenly and for the first time since its appearance gave audible expression to its feelings. It sat down on its haunches, lifted its muzzle with open jaws, and gave vent to a subdued and long-drawn howl that was more like the wail of a dog than the fierce barking cry associated with a wolf.

By this time Hyde had lost not only fear, but caution, too; nor, oddly enough, did this warning howl revive a sign of unwelcome emotion in him. In that curious sound he detected the same message that the eyes conveyed—appeal for help. He paused, nevertheless, a little startled, and while the wolf sat waiting for him, he looked about him quickly. There was young timber here; it had once been a small clearing, evidently. Ax and fire had done their work, but there was evidence to an experienced eye that it was Indians and not white men who had once been busy here. Some part of the medicine ritual, doubtless, took place in the little clearing, thought the man, as he advanced again toward his patient leader. The end of their queer journey, he felt, was close at hand.

He had not taken two steps before the animal got up and moved very slowly in the direction of some low bushes that formed a clump just beyond. It entered these, first looking back to make sure that its companion watched. The bushes hid it; a moment later it emerged again. Twice it performed this pantomime, each time, as it reappeared, standing still and staring at the man with as distinct an expression of appeal in the eyes as an animal may compass, probably. Its excitement, meanwhile, certainly increased, and this excitement was, with equal certainty, communicated to the man. Hyde made up his mind quickly. Gripping his ax tightly, and ready to use it at the first hint of malice, he moved slowly nearer to the bushes, wondering with something of a tremor what would happen.

If he expected to be startled, his expectation was at once fulfilled; but it was the behavior of the beast that made him jump. It positively frisked about him like a happy dog. It frisked for joy. Its excitement was intense, yet from its open mouth no sound was audible. With a sudden leap, then, it bounded past him into the clump of bushes, against whose very edge he stood and began scraping vigorously at the ground. Hyde stood and stared, amazement and interest now banishing all his nervousness, even when the beast, in its violent scraping, actually touched his body with its own. He had, perhaps, the feeling that he was in a dream, one of those fantastic dreams in which things may happen without involving an adequate surprise; for otherwise the manner of scraping and scratching at the ground must have seemed an impossible phenomenon. No wolf, no dog certainly, used its paws in the way those paws were working. Hyde had the odd, distressing sensation that it was hands, not paws, he watched. And yet, somehow, the natural, adequate surprise he should have felt, was absent. The strange action seemed not entirely unnatural. In his heart some deep hidden spring of sympathy and pity stirred instead. He was aware of pathos.

The wolf stopped in its task and looked up into his face. Hyde acted without hesitation then. Afterward he was wholly at a loss to explain his own conduct. It seemed he knew what to do, divined what was asked, expected of him. Between his mind and the dumb desire yearning through the savage animal there was intelligent and intelligible communication. He cut a stake and sharpened it, for the stones would blunt his ax-edge. He entered the clump of bushes to complete the digging his four-legged companion had begun. And while he worked, though he did not forget the close proximity of the wolf, he paid no attention to it; often his back was turned as he stooped over the laborious clearing away of the hard earth; no uneasiness or sense of danger was in him any more. The wolf sat outside the clump and watched the operations. Its concentrated attention, its patience, its intense eagerness, the gentleness and docility of the gray, fierce, and probably hungry brute, its obvious pleasure and satisfaction, too, at having won the human to its mysterious purpose—these were colors in the strange picture that Hyde thought of later when dealing with the human herd in his hotel again. At the moment he was aware chiefly of pathos and affection. The whole business was, of course, not to be believed, but that discovery came later, too, when telling it to others.

The digging continued for fully half an hour before his labor was rewarded by the discovery of a small whitish object. He picked it up and examined it—the finger-bone of a man. Other discoveries then followed quickly and in quantity. The cache was laid bare. He collected nearly the complete skeleton. The skull, however, he found last, and might not have found at all but for the guidance of his strangely alert companion. It lay some few yards away from the central hole now dug, and the wolf stood nuzzling the ground with its nose before Hyde understood that he was meant to dig exactly in that spot for it. Between the beast's very paws his stake struck hard upon it. He scraped the earth from the bone and examined it carefully. It was perfect, save for the fact that some wild animal had gnawed it, the teeth-marks being still plainly visible. Close beside it lay the rusty iron head of a tomahawk. This and the smallness of the bones confirmed him in his judgment that it was the skeleton not of a white man, but of an Indian.

During the excitement of the discovery of the bones one by one, and finally of the skull, but, more especially, during the period of intense interest while Hyde was examining them, he had paid little, if any, attention to the wolf. He was aware that it sat and watched him, never moving its keen eyes for a single moment from the actual operations, but of sign or movement it made none at all. He knew that it was pleased and satisfied, he knew also that he had now fulfilled its purpose in a great measure. The further intuition that now came to him, derived, he felt positive, from his companion's dumb desire, was perhaps the cream of the entire experience to him. Gathering the bones together in his coat, he carried them, together with the tomahawk, to the foot of the big spruce where the animal had first stopped. His leg actually touched the creature's muzzle as he passed. It turned its head to watch, but did not follow, nor did it move a muscle while he prepared the platform of boughs upon which he then laid the poor worn bones of an Indian who had been killed, doubtless, in sudden attack or ambush, and to whose remains had been denied the last grace of proper tribal burial. He wrapped the bones in bark; he laid the tomahawk beside the skull; he lit the circular fire round the pyre, and the blue smoke rose upward into the clear bright sunshine of the Canadian autumn morning till it was lost among the mighty trees far overhead.

In the moment before actually lighting the little fire he had turned to note what his companion did. It sat five wards away, he saw, gazing intently, and one of its front paws was raised a little from the ground. It made no sign of any kind. He finished the work, becoming so absorbed in it that he had eyes for nothing but the tending and guarding of his careful ceremonial fire. It was only when the platform of boughs collapsed, laying their charred burden gently on the fragrant earth among the soft wood ashes, that he turned again, as though to show the wolf what he had done, and seek, perhaps, some look of satisfaction in its curiously expressive eyes. But the place he searched was empty. The wolf had gone.

He did not see it again; it gave no sign of its presence anywhere; he was not watched. He fished as before, wandered through the bush about his camp, sat smoking round his fire after dark, and slept peacefully in his cozy little tent. He was not disturbed. No howl was ever audible in the distant forest, no twig snapped beneath a stealthy tread, he saw no eyes. The wolf that behaved like a man had gone forever.

It was the day before he left that Hyde, noticing smoke rising from the shack across the lake, paddled over to exchange a word or two with the Indian, who had evidently now returned. The redskin came down to meet him as he landed, but it was soon plain that he spoke very little English. He emitted the familiar grunts at first; then bit by bit Hyde stirred his limited vocabulary into action. The net result, however, was slight enough, though it was certainly direct:

“You camp there?” the man asked, pointing to the other side.

“Yes.”

“Wolf come?”

“Yes.”

“You see wolf?”

“Yes.”

The Indian stared at him fixedly a moment, a keen, wondering look upon his coppery, creased face.

“You 'fraid wolf?” he asked after a moment's pause.

“No,” replied Hyde, truthfully. He knew it was useless to ask questions of his own, though he was eager for information. The other would have told him nothing. It was sheer luck that the man had touched on the subject at all, and Hyde realized that his own best rôle was merely to answer, but to ask no questions. Then, suddenly, the Indian became comparatively voluble. There was awe in his voice and manner.

“Him no wolf. Him big medicine wolf. Him spirit wolf.”

Whereupon he drank the tea the other had brewed for him, closed his lips tightly, and said no more. His outline was discernible on the shore, rigid and motionless, an hour later, when Hyde's canoe turned the corner of the lake three miles away, and landed to make the portages up the first rapid of his homeward stream.

It was Morton who, after some persuasion, supplied further details of what he called the legend. Some hundred years before, the tribe that lived in the territory beyond the lake began their annual medicine-making ceremonies on the big rocky bluff at the northern end; but no medicine could be made. The spirits, declared the chief medicine man, would not answer. They were offended. An investigation followed. It was discovered that a young brave had recently killed a wolf, a thing strictly forbidden, since the wolf was the totem animal of the tribe. To make matters worse, the name of the guilty man was Running Wolf. The offense being unpardonable, the man was cursed and driven from the tribe:

“Go out. Wander alone among the woods, and if we see you, we slay you. Your bones shall be scattered in the forest, and your spirit shall not enter the Happy Hunting Grounds till one of another race shall find and bury them.”

“Which meant,” explained Morton, laconically, his only comment on the story, “probably forever.”

SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS

1. Show that the suggestions of the supernatural rise with cumulative power.
2. How does the author make the setting contribute to the effect of the story?
3. What is the character of the hero?
4. Why did the author make the hero a solitary character?
5. Why is the author so slow in introducing the wolf?
6. What is the hero's attitude toward the supernatural?
7. How does the hero's attitude toward the supernatural affect the reader?
8. Point out the various means by which the author makes the story seem true.
9. What is the character of the wolf?
10. Why does the author hold the story of the legend until the last?
11. Did Hyde believe the wolf was a “spirit-wolf”?
12. Divide the story into a series of important incidents.
13. Show how style contributes to effect.

SUBJECTS FOR WRITTEN IMITATION

DIRECTIONS FOR WRITING

If you are to imitate Running Wolf successfully you must first think of a story of the supernatural, a simple, easily-understood story that will have a foundation of fact, and that will appear to be reasonable in its use of the supernatural. Then, without introducing your story immediately, show how a person who knows nothing of it takes part in a series of events that lead him to understand the story.

Make the setting of your story one that will contribute strongly to the central effect. Do not give any definite explanation of the events that you narrate. Give your reader such an abundance of suggestion that he will be led to infer a supernatural explanation.

Hold until the last the basic story on which you found your entire narration.

FOOTNOTES:

[27] A reference to Genesis 10:9, where Nimrod is called “a mighty hunter before the Lord.”

THE BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY

HOW I FOUND AMERICA

By ANZIA YEZIERSKA

In 1896 Miss Yezierska came from Plotzk in Russian Poland, where she was born. After hard experiences in a “sweat shop” she became a teacher of cooking. She is the author of Hungry Hearts. Her dialect stories, strongly realistic and touching, appear in many magazines.

An autobiography is a straightforward story of the life of the writer. An autobiographical essay is a meditation on the events in one's own life.

How I Found America is an autobiographical essay. It does not tell the story of the writer's life: it tells the writer's thoughts preceding and after her arrival in America. As in all good essays, the subject is much greater than the writer. The meditation is purely personal, but it stirs a response in every thoughtful reader. It asks and answers the questions: “What do oppressed foreigners think America to be?” “What do immigrants find America to be?” “How can we make immigrants into the most helpful Americans?”

The anecdotes that make the parts of the essay are as graphic as so many bold drawings. The principal sections of the essay are as distinct as the chapters of a book. At all times this essay concerns the question, “What is it to be an American?”

In some respects this particular essay is like a musical composition; for it begins with a sort of prelude, rises through a series of movements, and culminates in a triumphant close, the whole composition being marked by the presence of a strong motif—the exaltation of the true spirit of America.

Every breath I drew was a breath of fear, every shadow a stifling shock, every footfall struck on my heart like the heavy boot of the Cossack. On a low stool in the middle of the only room in our mud hut sat my father, his red beard falling over the Book of Isaiah, open before him. On the tile stove, on the benches that were our beds, even on the earthen floor, sat the neighbors' children, learning from him the ancient poetry of the Hebrew race. As he chanted, the children repeated:

The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness,
Prepare ye the way of the Lord.
Make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

Every valley shall be exalted,
And every mountain and hill shall be made low,
And the crooked shall be made straight,
And the rough places plain,
And the glory of God shall be revealed,
And all flesh shall see it together.

Undisturbed by the swaying and chanting of teacher and pupils, old Kakah, our speckled hen, with her brood of chicks, strutted and pecked at the potato-peelings that fell from my mother's lap as she prepared our noon meal.

I stood at the window watching the road, lest the Cossack come upon us unawares to enforce the ukase of the czar, which would tear the last bread from our mouths: “No chadir [Hebrew school] shall be held in a room used for cooking and sleeping.”

With one eye I watched ravenously my mother cutting chunks of black bread. At last the potatoes were ready. She poured them out of an iron pot into a wooden bowl and placed them in the center of the table.

Instantly the swaying and chanting ceased. The children rushed forward. The fear of the Cossack was swept away from my heart by the fear that the children would get my potato, and deserting my post, with a shout of joy I seized my portion and bit a huge mouthful of mealy delight.

At that moment the door was driven open by the blow of an iron heel. The Cossack's whip swished through the air. Screaming, we scattered. The children ran out—our livelihood with them.

“Oi weh!” wailed my mother, clutching at her breast, “is there a God over us and sees all this?”

With grief-glazed eyes my father muttered a broken prayer as the Cossack thundered the ukase: “A thousand-ruble fine, or a year in prison, if you are ever found again teaching children where you're eating and sleeping.”

“Gottunieu!” then pleaded my mother, “would you tear the last skin from our bones? Where else should we be eating and sleeping? Or should we keep chadir in the middle of the road? Have we houses with separate rooms like the czar?”

Ignoring my mother's protests, the Cossack strode out of the hut. My father sank into a chair, his head bowed in the silent grief of the helpless.

My mother wrung her hands.

“God from the world, is there no end to our troubles? When will the earth cover me and my woes?”

I watched the Cossack disappear down the road. All at once I saw the whole village running toward us. I dragged my mother to the window to see the approaching crowd.

“Gevalt! what more is falling over our heads?” she cried in alarm.

Masheh Mindel, the water-carrier's wife, headed a wild procession. The baker, the butcher, the shoemaker, the tailor, the goatherd, the workers in the fields, with their wives and children pressed toward us through a cloud of dust.

Masheh Mindel, almost fainting, fell in front of the doorway.

“A letter from America!” she gasped.

“A letter from America!” echoed the crowd as they snatched the letter from her and thrust it into my father's hands.

“Read, read!” they shouted tumultuously.

My father looked through the letter, his lips uttering no sound. In breathless suspense the crowd gazed at him. Their eyes shone with wonder and reverence for the only man in the village who could read. Masheh Mindel crouched at his feet, her neck stretched toward him to catch each precious word of the letter.

To my worthy wife, Masheh Mindel, and to my loving son, Sushkah Feivel, and to my darling daughter, the apple of my eye, the pride of my life, Tzipkeleh!

Long years and good luck on you! May the blessings from heaven fall over your beloved heads and save you from all harm!

First I come to tell you that I am well and in good health. May I hear the same from you!

Secondly, I am telling you that my sun is beginning to shine in America. I am becoming a person—a business man. I have for myself a stand in the most crowded part of America, where people are as thick as flies and every day is like market-day at a fair. My business is from bananas and apples. The day begins with my push-cart full of fruit, and the day never ends before I can count up at least two dollars' profit. That means four rubles. Stand before your eyes, I, Gedalyah Mindel, four rubles a day; twenty-four rubles a week!

“Gedalyah Mindel, the water-carrier, twenty-four rubles a week!” The words leaped like fire in the air.

We gazed at his wife, Masheh Mindel, a dried-out bone of a woman.

“Masheh Mindel, with a husband in America, Masheh Mindel the wife of a man earning twenty-four rubles a week! The sky is falling to the earth!”

We looked at her with new reverence. Already she was a being from another world. The dead, sunken eyes became alive with light. The worry for bread that had tightened the skin of her cheek-bones was gone. The sudden surge of happiness filled out her features, flushing her face as with wine. The two starved children clinging to her skirts, dazed with excitement, only dimly realized their good fortune in the envious glances of the others. But the letter went on:

Thirdly, I come to tell you, white bread and meat I eat every day, just like the millionaires. Fourthly, I have to tell you that I am no more Gedalyah Mindel. Mister Mindel they call me in America. Fifthly, Masheh Mindel and my dear children, in America there are no mud huts where cows and chickens and people live all together. I have for myself a separate room, with a closed door, and before any one can come to me, he must knock, and I can say, “Come in,” or “Stay out,” like a king in a palace. Lastly, my darling family and people of the village of Sukovoly, there is no czar in America.

My father paused. The hush was stifling. “No czar—no czar in America!” Even the little babies repeated the chant, “No czar in America!”

In America they ask everybody who should be the President. And I, Gedalyah Mindel, when I take out my citizen's papers, will have as much to say who shall be our next President as Mr. Rockefeller, the greatest millionaire. Fifty rubles I am sending you for your ship-ticket to America. And may all Jews who suffer in Golluth from ukases and pogroms live yet to lift up their heads like me, Gedalyah Mindel, in America.

Fifty rubles! A ship-ticket to America! That so much good luck should fall on one head! A savage envy bit us. Gloomy darts from narrowed eyes stabbed Masheh Mindel. Why should not we, too, have a chance to get away from this dark land! Has not every heart the same hunger for America, the same longing to live and laugh and breathe like a free human being? America is for all. Why should only Masheh Mindel and her children have a chance to the New World?

Murmuring and gesticulating, the crowd dispersed. Every one knew every one else's thought—how to get to America. What could they pawn? From where could they borrow for a ship-ticket?

Silently, we followed my father back into the hut from which the Cossack had driven us a while before. We children looked from mother to father and from father to mother.

“Gottunieu! the czar himself is pushing us to America by this last ukase.” My mother's face lighted up the hut like a lamp.

“Meshugeneh Yideneh!” admonished my father. “Always your head in the air. What—where—America? With what money? Can dead people lift themselves up to dance?”

“Dance?” The samovar and the brass pots reëchoed my mother's laughter. “I could dance myself over the waves of the ocean to America.”

In amazed delight at my mother's joy, we children rippled and chuckled with her. My father paced the room, his face dark with dread for the morrow.

“Empty hands, empty pockets; yet it dreams itself in you—America,” he said.

“Who is poor who has hopes on America?” flaunted my mother.

“Sell my red-quilted petticoat that grandmother left for my dowry,” I urged in excitement.

“Sell the feather-beds, sell the samovar,” chorused the children.

“Sure, we can sell everything—the goat and all the winter things,” added my mother. “It must be always summer in America.”

I flung my arms around my brother, and he seized Bessie by the curls, and we danced about the room, crazy with joy.

“Beggars!” said my laughing mother. “Why are you so happy with yourselves? How will you go to America without a shirt on your back, without shoes on your feet?”

But we ran out into the road, shouting and singing:

“We'll sell everything we got; we're going to America. White bread and meat we'll eat every day in America, in America!”

That very evening we brought Berel Zalman, the usurer, and showed him all our treasures, piled up in the middle of the hut.

“Look! All these fine feather-beds, Berel Zalman!” urged my mother. “This grand fur coat came from Nijny[28] itself. My grandfather bought it at the fair.”

I held up my red-quilted petticoat, the supreme sacrifice of my ten-year-old life. Even my father shyly pushed forward the samovar.

“It can hold enough tea for the whole village,” he declared.

“Only a hundred rubles for them all!” pleaded my mother, “only enough to lift us to America! Only one hundred little rubles!”

“A hundred rubles! Pfui!” sniffed the pawnbroker. “Forty is overpaid. Not even thirty is it worth.”

But, coaxing and cajoling, my mother got a hundred rubles out of him.

Steerage, dirty bundles, foul odors, seasick humanity; but I saw and heard nothing of the foulness and ugliness about me. I floated in showers of sunshine; visions upon visions of the New World opened before me. From lip to lip flowed the golden legend of the golden country:

“In America you can say what you feel, you can voice your thoughts in the open streets without fear of a Cossack.”

“In America is a home for everybody. The land is your land, not, as in Russia, where you feel yourself a stranger in the village where you were born and reared, the village in which your father and grandfather lie buried.”

“Everybody is with everybody alike in America. Christians and Jews are brothers together.”

“An end to the worry for bread, an end to the fear of the bosses over you. Everybody can do what he wants with his life in America.”

“There are no high or low in America. Even the President holds hands with Gedalyah Mindel.”

“Plenty for all. Learning flows free, like milk and honey.”

“Learning flows free.” The words painted pictures in my mind. I saw before me free schools, free colleges, free libraries, where I could learn and learn and keep on learning. In our village was a school, but only for Christian children. In the schools of America I'd lift up my head and laugh and dance, a child with other children. Like a bird in the air, from sky to sky, from star to star, I'd soar and soar.

“Land! land!” came the joyous shout. All crowded and pushed on deck. They strained and stretched to get the first glimpse of the “golden country,” lifting their children on their shoulders that they might see beyond them. Men fell on their knees to pray. Women hugged their babies and wept. Children danced. Strangers embraced and kissed like old friends. Old men and old women had in their eyes a look of young people in love. Age-old visions sang themselves in me, songs of freedom of an oppressed people. America! America!

Between buildings that loomed like mountains we struggled with our bundles, spreading around us the smell of the steerage. Up Broadway, under the bridge, and through the swarming streets of the Ghetto, we followed Gedalyah Mindel.

I looked about the narrow streets of squeezed-in stores and houses, ragged clothes, dirty bedding oozing out of the windows, ash-cans and garbage-cans cluttering the sidewalks. A vague sadness pressed down my heart, the first doubt of America.

“Where are the green fields and open spaces in America?” cried my heart. “Where is the golden country of my dreams?” A loneliness for the fragrant silence of the woods that lay beyond our mud hut welled up in my heart, a longing for the soft, responsive earth of our village streets. All about me was the hardness of brick and stone, the smells of crowded poverty.

“Here's your house, with separate rooms like a palace,” said Gedalyah Mindel, and flung open the door of a dingy, airless flat.

“Oi weh!” cried my mother in dismay. “Where's the sunshine in America?” She went to the window and looked out at the blank wall of the next house. “Gottunieu! Like in a grave so dark!”

“It ain't so dark; it's only a little shady,” said Gedalyah Mindel, and lighted the gas. “Look only!”—he pointed with pride to the dim gas-light—“No candles, no kerosene lamps, in America. You turn on a screw, and put to it a match, and you got it light like with sunshine.”

Again the shadow fell over me, again the doubt of America. In America were rooms without sunlight; rooms to sleep in, to eat in, to cook in, but without sunshine, and Gedalyah Mindel was happy. Could I be satisfied with just a place to sleep in and eat in, and a door to shut people out, to take the place of sunlight? Or would I always need the sunlight to be happy? And where was there a place in America for me to play? I looked out into the alley below, and saw pale-faced children scrambling in the gutter. “Where is America?” cried my heart.

My eyes were shutting themselves with sleep. Blindly I felt for the buttons on my dress; and buttoning, I sank back in sleep again—the dead-weight sleep of utter exhaustion.

“Heart of mine,” my mother's voice moaned above me, “father is already gone an hour. You know how they'll squeeze from you a nickel for every minute you're late. Quick only!”

I seized my bread and herring and tumbled down the stairs and out into the street. I ate running, blindly pressing through the hurrying throngs of workers, my haste and fear choking every mouthful. I felt a strangling in my throat as I neared the sweat-shop prison; all my nerves screwed together into iron hardness to endure the day's torture.

For an instant I hesitated as I faced the grated windows of the old building. Dirt and decay cried out from every crumbling brick. In the maw of the shop raged around me the roar and the clatter, the merciless grind, of the pounding machines. Half-maddened, half-deadened, I struggled to think, to feel, to remember. What am I? Who am I? Why am I here? I struggled in vain, bewildered and lost in a whirlpool of noise. “America—America, where was America?” it cried in my heart.

Then came the factory whistle, the slowing down of the machines, the shout of release hailing the noon hour. I woke as from a tense nightmare, a weary waking to pain. In the dark chaos of my brain reason began to dawn. In my stifled heart feelings began to pulse. The wound of my wasted life began to throb and ache. With my childhood choked with drudgery, must my youth, too, die unlived?

Here were the odor of herring and garlic, the ravenous munching of food, laughter and loud, vulgar jokes. Was it only I who was so wretched? I looked at those around me. Were they happy or only insensible to their slavery? How could they laugh and joke? Why were they not torn with rebellion against this galling grind, the crushing, deadening movements of the body, where only hands live, and hearts and brains must die?

I felt a touch on my shoulder and looked up. It was Yetta Solomon, from the machine next to mine.

“Here's your tea.”

I stared at her, half-hearing.

“Ain't you going to eat nothing?”

“Oi weh, Yetta! I can't stand it!” The cry broke from me. “I didn't come to America to turn into a machine. I came to America to make from myself a person. Does America want only my hands, only the strength of my body, not my heart, not my feelings, my thoughts?”

“Our heads ain't smart enough,” said Yetta, practically. “We ain't been to school, like the American-born.”

“What for did I come to America but to go to school, to learn, to think, to make something beautiful from my life?”

“'Sh! 'Sh! The boss! the boss!” came the warning whisper.

A sudden hush fell over the shop as the boss entered. He raised his hand. There was breathless silence. The hard, red face with the pig's eyes held us under its sickening spell. Again I saw the Cossack and heard him thunder the ukase. Prepared for disaster, the girls paled as they cast at one another sidelong, frightened glances.

“Hands,” he addressed us, fingering the gold watch-chain that spread across his fat stomach, “it's slack in the other trades, and I can get plenty girls begging themselves to work for half what you're getting; only I ain't a skinner. I always give my hands a show to earn their bread. From now on I'll give you fifty cents a dozen shirts instead of seventy-five, but I'll give you night-work, so you needn't lose nothing.” And he was gone.

The stillness of death filled the shop. Every one felt the heart of the other bleed with her own helplessness. A sudden sound broke the silence. A woman sobbed chokingly. It was Balah Rifkin, a widow with three children.

“Oi weh!”—she tore at her scrawny neck,—“the bloodsucker! the thief! How will I give them to eat, my babies, my hungry little lambs!”

“Why do we let him choke us?”

“Twenty-five cents less on a dozen—how will we be able to live?”

“He tears the last skin from our bones.”

“Why didn't nobody speak up to him?”

Something in me forced me forward. I forgot for the moment how my whole family depended on my job. I forgot that my father was out of work and we had received a notice to move for unpaid rent. The helplessness of the girls around me drove me to strength.

“I'll go to the boss,” I cried, my nerves quivering with fierce excitement. “I'll tell him Balah Rifkin has three hungry mouths to feed.”

Pale, hungry faces thrust themselves toward me, thin, knotted hands reached out, starved bodies pressed close about me.

“Long years on you!” cried Balah Rifkin, drying her eyes with a corner of her shawl.

“Tell him about my old father and me, his only bread-giver,” came from Bessie Sopolsky, a gaunt-faced girl with a hacking cough.

“And I got no father or mother, and four of them younger than me hanging on my neck.” Jennie Feist's beautiful young face was already scarred with the gray worries of age.

America, as the oppressed of all lands have dreamed America to be, and America as it is, flashed before me, a banner of fire. Behind me I felt masses pressing, thousands of immigrants; thousands upon thousands crushed by injustice, lifted me as on wings.

I entered the boss's office without a shadow of fear. I was not I; the wrongs of my people burned through me till I felt the very flesh of my body a living flame of rebellion. I faced the boss.

“We can't stand it,” I cried. “Even as it is we're hungry. Fifty cents a dozen would starve us. Can you, a Jew, tear the bread from another Jew's mouth?”

“You fresh mouth, you! Who are you to learn me my business?”

“Weren't you yourself once a machine slave, your life in the hands of your boss?”

“You loafer! Money for nothing you want! The minute they begin to talk English they get flies in their nose. A black year on you, trouble-maker! I'll have no smart heads in my shop! Such freshness! Out you get! Out from my shop!”

Stunned and hopeless, the wings of my courage broken, I groped my way back to them—back to the eager, waiting faces, back to the crushed hearts aching with mine.

As I opened the door, they read our defeat in my face.

“Girls,”—I held out my hands—“he's fired me.” My voice died in the silence. Not a girl stirred. Their heads only bent closer over their machines.

“Here, you, get yourself out of here!” the boss thundered at me. “Bessie Sopolsky and you, Balah Rifkin, take out her machine into the hall. I want no big-mounted Americanerins in my shop.”

Bessie Sopolsky and Balah Rifkin, their eyes black with tragedy, carried out my machine. Not a hand was held out to me, not a face met mine. I felt them shrink from me as I passed them on my way out.

In the street I found I was crying. The new hope that had flowed in me so strongly bled out of my veins. A moment before, our unity had made me believe us so strong, and now I saw each alone, crushed, broken. What were they all but crawling worms, servile grubbers for bread?

And then in the very bitterness of my resentment the hardness broke in me. I saw the girls through their own eyes, as if I were inside of them. What else could they have done? Was not an immediate crust of bread for Balah Rifkin's children more urgent than truth, more vital than honor? Could it be that they ever had dreamed of America as I had dreamed? Had their faith in America wholly died in them? Could my faith be killed as theirs had been?

Gasping from running, Yetta Solomon flung her arms around me.

“You golden heart! I sneaked myself out from the shop only to tell you I'll come to see you to-night. I'd give the blood from under my nails for you, only I got to run back. I got to hold my job. My mother—”

I hardly saw or heard her. My senses were stunned with my defeat. I walked on in a blind daze, feeling that any moment I would drop in the middle of the street from sheer exhaustion. Every hope I had clung to, every human stay, every reality, was torn from under me. Was it then only a dream, a mirage of the hungry-hearted people in the desert lands of oppression, this age-old faith in America?

Again I saw the mob of dusty villagers crowding about my father as he read the letter from America, their eager faces thrust out, their eyes blazing with the same hope, the same faith, that had driven me on. Had the starved villagers of Sukovoly lifted above their sorrows a mere rainbow vision that led them—where? Where? To the stifling submission of the sweat-shop or the desperation of the streets!

“God! God!” My eyes sought the sky, praying, “where—where is America?”

Times changed. The sweat-shop conditions that I had lived through had become a relic of the past. Wages had doubled, tripled; they went up higher and higher, and the working-day became shorter and shorter. I began to earn enough to move my family uptown into a sunny, airy flat with electricity and telephone service. I even saved up enough to buy a phonograph and a piano.

My knotted nerves relaxed. At last I had become free from the worry for bread and rent, but I was not happy. A more restless discontent than ever before ate out my heart. Freedom from stomach needs only intensified the needs of my soul.

I ached and clamored for America. Higher wages and shorter hours of work, mere physical comfort, were not yet America. I had dreamed that America was a place where the heart could grow big with giving. Though outwardly I had become prosperous, life still forced me into an existence of mere getting and getting.

Ach! how I longed for a friend, a real American friend, some one to whom I could express the thoughts and feelings that choked me! In the Bronx, the uptown Ghetto, I felt myself farther away from the spirit of America than ever before. In the East Side the people had yet alive in their eyes the old, old dreams of America, the America that would release the age-old hunger to give; but in the prosperous Bronx good eating and good sleeping replaced the spiritual need for giving. The chase for dollars and diamonds deadened the dreams that had once brought them to America.

More and more the all-consuming need for a friend possessed me. In the street, in the cars, in the subways, I was always seeking, ceaselessly seeking for eyes, a face, the flash of a smile that would be light in my darkness.

I felt sometimes that I was only burning out my heart for a shadow, an echo, a wild dream, but I couldn't help it. Nothing was real to me but my hope of finding a friend. America was not America to me unless I could find an American that would make America real.

The hunger of my heart drove me to the night-school. Again my dream flamed. Again America beckoned. In the school there would be education, air, life for my cramped-in spirit. I would learn to think, to form the thoughts that surged formless in me. I would find the teacher that would make me articulate.

I joined the literature class. They were reading “The De Coverley Papers.” Filled with insatiate thirst, I drank in every line with the feeling that any moment I would get to the fountain-heart of revelation. Night after night I read with tireless devotion. But of what? The manners and customs of the eighteenth century, of people two hundred years dead.

One evening, after a month's attendance, when the class had dwindled from fifty to four, and the teacher began scolding us who were present for those who were absent, my bitterness broke.

“Do you know why all the girls are dropping away from the class? It's because they have too much sense than to waste themselves on 'The De Coverley Papers.' Us four girls are four fools. We could learn more in the streets. It's dirty and wrong, but it's life. What are 'The De Coverley Papers'? Dry dust fit for the ash-can.”

“Perhaps you had better tell the principal your ideas of the standard classics,” she scoffed, white with rage.

“All right,” I snapped, and hurried down to the principal's office.

I swung open the door.

“I just want to tell you why I'm leaving. I—”

“Won't you come in?” The principal rose and placed a chair for me near her desk. “Now tell me all.” She leaned forward with an inviting interest.

I looked up, and met the steady gaze of eyes shining with light. In a moment all my anger fled. “The De Coverley Papers” were forgotten. The warm friendliness of her face held me like a familiar dream. I couldn't speak. It was as if the sky suddenly opened in my heart.

“Do go on,” she said, and gave me a quick nod. “I want to hear.”

The repression of centuries rushed out of my heart. I told her everything—of the mud hut in Sukovoly where I was born, of the czar's pogroms, of the constant fear of the Cossack, of Gedalyah Mindel's letter, of our hopes in coming to America, and my search for an American who would make America real.

“I am so glad you came to me,” she said. And after a pause, “You can help me.”

“Help you?” I cried. It was the first time that an American suggested that I could help her.

“Yes, indeed. I have always wanted to know more of that mysterious, vibrant life—the immigrant. You can help me know my girls. You have so much to give—”

“Give—that's what I was hungering and thirsting all these years—to give out what's in me. I was dying in the unused riches of my soul.”

“I know; I know just what you mean,” she said, putting her hand on mine.

My whole being seemed to change in the warmth of her comprehension. “I have a friend,” it sang itself in me. “I have a friend!”

“And you are a born American?” I asked. There was none of that sure, all-right look of the Americans about her.

“Yes, indeed. My mother, like so many mothers,”—and her eyebrows lifted humorously whimsical,—“claims we're descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers, and that one of our lineal ancestors came over in the Mayflower.”

“For all your mother's pride in the Pilgrim Fathers, you yourself are as plain from the heart as an immigrant.”

“Weren't the Pilgrim Fathers immigrants two hundred years ago?”

She took from her desk a book and read to me.

Then she opened her arms to me, and breathlessly I felt myself drawn to her. Bonds seemed to burst. A suffusion of light filled my being. Great choirings lifted me in space. I walked out unseeingly.

All the way home the words she read flamed before me: “We go forth all to seek America. And in the seeking we create her. In the quality of our search shall be the nature of the America that we create.”

So all those lonely years of seeking and praying were not in vain. How glad I was that I had not stopped at the husk, a good job, a good living! Through my inarticulate groping and reaching out I had found the soul, the spirit of America.

SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS

1. What is the effect of the abrupt beginning? Where else in the essay is abruptness made a means of producing literary effect?
2. Point out excellent use of local color.
3. Divide the essay into its principal parts.
4. Show that the essay rises in power.
5. How does the writer arouse the reader's sympathy for the characters?
6. How does the writer awaken the reader's patriotism?
7. What opinion of America do oppressed foreigners have? To what extent is their opinion well founded? To what extent is their opinion not well founded?
8. What impressions does a sea-coast city make upon immigrants?
9. What sort of people oppress the immigrants after arrival in America?
10. To what false beliefs is such oppression due?
11. What opportunities does America present?
12. What spirit should meet the aspirations of immigrants?
13. What will do most to make immigrants into good Americans?
14. Explain how the Sir Roger de Coverley Papers may be taught so that they will apply to the present as well as to the past.
15. How may we help immigrants to do work that will make them into good Americans?
16. Show that the conclusion of the essay emphasizes its entire thought.
17. Show what rhetorical methods are employed in the essay.

SUBJECTS FOR WRITTEN IMITATION

DIRECTIONS FOR WRITING

Write down some worthy thought that you have concerning America. Then write a series of extremely personal incidents that will show graphically how you arrived at the thought you have in mind. Make the incidents short, condensed, and highly emphatic. Employ realistic characters, and give realistic quotations from their speech. Use the incorrect grammar, the slang, and the foreign words that the characters employ daily. Arrange the incidents so that they will rise more and more to your principal thought. Make your last incident reveal that thought.

FOOTNOTES:

[28] Nijny-Novgorood. A Russian city on the Volga, the scene of a great annual fair.

MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD

By WILLIAM HENRY SHELTON

(1840-). An American patriot and author. He served in many battles in the Civil War, and had thrilling experiences as a prisoner of war, escaping no less than four times. He is author of A Man Without a Memory; The Last Three Soldiers; The Three Prisoners.

Every one has happy memories of childhood. He loves to conjure up the old familiar scenes, the kindly people, and the days that were days of wonder.

The two sketches by Mr. Shelton are extracts from a long essay called Our Village, in which he recalls delightfully all his early surroundings and all his old companionships.

In these extracts, as in the entire essay, Mr. Shelton avoids formal autobiography. He merely recalls the things that impressed him most. As far as possible he lifts himself back into the spirit of the past, and sees once again, but with added love, the things that have gone forever.

My First School

One day in the summer when I was four years old I was taken to the village school at the foot of the hill below the tavern. I have no recollection of how I got there, but my return to my grandmother's was so dramatic that it has impressed itself indelibly on my memory. Perhaps I was taken to school by the sentimental schoolmistress herself, who was a girl of sixteen and an intimate friend of my aunt, to whom, in after years, when she became a famous novelist, she used to send her books. Her maiden name was Mary Jane Hawes, but there was a red-haired, freckle-faced boy in one of the pretty houses facing the side of the church, who went to Yale College and gave her another name.

The school-house consisted of one room, with an entry without any floor where the wood was cut and stored. The school-room was square, with a box-stove in the center. A form against the wall extended around three sides of the room, affording seats for the larger pupils, and in front of these a row of oak desks for slates and books was fantastically carved by generations of jack-knives, and made against the backs of a second row of desks was a low front form for the A-B-C children. On the fourth side, flanking the door, were a blackboard on one hand and on the other the schoolma'am's desk, usually decorated with a bunch of wild flowers or a red apple, either the gifts of a sincere admirer or the would-be bribe of some trembling delinquent.

On the occasion of my first visit to the school I wore a blue-and-white dress of muslin-de-laine that was afterward made into a cushion for a rocking-chair in my mother's parlor. I was evidently dressed in my very best in honor of the occasion, and all went well until recess came. There was a rumble of thunder, and the sky had been growing dark with portent of storm, and the leaves and dust were flying on the wind when the children were released for play. I wanted to do everything that the other boys did, and so, when they scampered out with a rush, I followed without fear. Just as we came into the open the thunder-storm burst upon us. The wind blew off one boy's hat and whirled it in the direction of the village, and all the other boys joined in the chase. As I started to follow them a gust of wind and rain beat me to the ground, and drenched my dress with mud and water.

I was promptly rescued by the schoolma'am and taken into the entry, where she undressed me on the wood-pile and wrapped me in her own woolen shawl, which was a black-and-red pattern of very large squares. Thus bundled up and rendered quite helpless except as to my lungs, I was laid on the floor near the stove, where I remained for the amusement of the children until the shower was over, when a bushel-basket was sent for to the nearest house, which was the house of shoemaker Talmadge. Into this basket, commonly used for potatoes and corn, I was put, wrapped in the black-and-red shawl and packed around with my soiled clothes, and two of the big boys, John Pierpont and John Talmadge, carried me up the hill and through the village to my grandmother's house.

In the summer following I went to school again, and again to the sentimental schoolma'am, who loved to teach, but abhorred to punish. Her gentle punishments rarely frightened the youngest children.

She would say, “Henry, you have disobeyed me, and I shall have to cut off your ear,” and with these ominous words she would draw the back of her penknife across the threatened ear. I must have been very small, for on one occasion she threatened to shut me up in one of the school desks.

Our mad recreation out of school was “playing horse.” We drove each other singly and in pairs by means of wooden bits and reins of sheep-twine, and some prancing horses were led, chewing one end of a twine string, and neighing and prancing almost beyond the control of the infant groom.

In the congressman's woods, close by the school-house, we built stalls and mangers against logs and in fence corners, and gathered horse-sorrel and sheep-sorrel for hay. The stalls were bedded with grass and protected from the sun by a roof of green boughs, and the horses were watered and curried and groomed in imitation of that service at the stage stables, and the steeds themselves kicked and bit like the vicious leaders.

Other teachers followed the young and sentimental one, and the surplus of the dinner-baskets, thrown out of the window or cast upon the wood-pile, bred a colony of gray rats that lived under the school-house and came out to take the air in the quiet period after the door was padlocked at night and even ventured to come up into the school-room and look over the books and otherwise nibble at learning. When I had advanced to the dignity of pictorial geography, as set forth in a thin, square-built, dog-eared volume, which not having been opened for a whole day by a certain prancing horse, he was left to learn his lesson while the teacher went to tea at the house below the tavern, and the wheat stubble under the window was soon alive with gray rodents that looked like the colony of seals in the geography.

About this time the rats, having taken formal possession of the old school-house, a new school-house was built in our village just beyond my grandmother's house and facing her orchard.

(page 97)

“My great-grandmother.”

My Great-Grandmother

My great-grandmother was the widow of an Episcopal clergyman, the Rev. Titus Welton, whose son was the first rector of the village church. My only acquaintance with my great-grandfather was connected with the white headstone that bore his name in the graveyard. With the exception of a quaint water-color portrait in profile of my grandmother in a mob-cap bound with a black ribbon, which was equally a portrait of the flowered back of the rocking-chair in which she sat, she survives in my memory in a series of pictures. I see her sitting before the open fire, knitting, with one steel needle held in a knitting-sheath pinned to her left side, or taking snuff from a flat, round box that contained a vanilla bean to perfume the snuff. Her hands were twisted with rheumatism, and she walked with a cane. On one occasion I trotted by her side to church and carried her tin foot-stove, warm with glowing coals.

She slept in a high post bed in her particular room over the sitting-room, which was warmed in winter by a sheet-iron drum connected with the stove below, and in one corner was a copper warming-pan with a long handle. When I sat at table in my high-chair eating apple-pie in a bowl of milk, she sat on the side nearest the fire eating dipped toast with a two-tined fork. The fork may have had three tines, but silver forks had not yet made their appearance.

My great-grandmother lived just long enough to have her picture taken on a plate of silvered copper by the wonderful process of Daguerre,[29] a process so like something diabolical that she protected her soul from evil, as all sitters in that part of the country did, by resting her hand on a great Bible, the back turned to the front, so that the letters “Holy Bible” could be read, proving that the great book was not a profane dictionary. The operator who took her daguerreotype traveled from town to town, hiring a room in the village tavern furnished with a chair, a stand on tripod legs, a brown linen table-cloth, and the aforesaid Bible, and when such of the people as had the fee to spare, the courage to submit to a new-fangled idea, and no fear that the face on the magical plate would fade away like any other spirit face when they opened the stamped-leather case with the red plush lining after it had lain overnight in the darkened parlor, he moved on like the cracker baker or any other itinerant showman.

My great-grandmother had never sent or received a message by telegraph or ridden in a railway-carriage, and died in peace just before those portentous inventions came to destroy forever the small community life in which she had lived.

SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS

1. Why does the writer employ such simple language?
2. What sort of events does he narrate?
3. Why does he give so few details concerning his early schooldays?
4. How does he look upon his early misfortunes?
5. Why does he do little more than present the picture of his great-grandmother?
6. Point out examples of gentle humor.
7. What do the sketches reveal concerning life in the past?
8. What spirit characterizes both sketches?

SUBJECTS FOR WRITTEN IMITATION

DIRECTIONS FOR WRITING

Throw yourself back into the past. Conjure up the people with whom you used to associate. See once again the places where you played and where you lived. Think how happy it all was, and how good it is to look at it once more. Then put down on paper the things that you remember with the greatest interest. Write in such a way that you will give the reader the very spirit that you have. Remember: you are not to communicate facts; you are to communicate emotion.

FOOTNOTES:

[29] Louis Daguerre (1789-1859). A French painter who perfected one of the earliest methods of photography.

A VISIT TO JOHN BURROUGHS

By SADAKICHI HARTMANN

Author of the first History of American Art, and also of a History of Japanese Art. His poems, short stories, and essays appear in many magazines.

John Burroughs was a delightful essayist and a delightful man. Although he preferred to live the most simple of lives and to spend his time in meditation on the beauties of natural scenery, and the wonders of animal life, he attracted to himself the companionship of some of the greatest in the land, and the love of all people. To visit him would, indeed, have been a delight.

A Visit to John Burroughs is not a dull narrative of the events of a visit, nor is it the report of an interview with the nature-lover. It is an article that admits one into the charm of Burroughs' spirit. We are with the man in his simple, book-filled home; we learn his love for pasture and mountain-side, for birds and for gardening; and we gain some of that spirit of contentment and peace that made him, in his gray old age, appear like a prophet in the midst of an over-hurrying generation.

In some places time passes without making any change. The little village on the Hudson where John Burroughs made his home half a century ago has shown no ambition of expansion. There is no building activity, and the number of inhabitants has scarcely increased. The little church stands drowsily on the hill, and the same old homesteads grace the road. More freight-trains may rattle by, and more automobiles pass on the main road, but the physiognomy of the town has remained unchanged. It is as if time had stood still. The mist shuts out the rest of the world, river and hills disappear, the stems of the grape-vines look like a host of goblins, and the wet trees make darker silhouettes than usual.

I knocked at a door and entered, and there sat John Burroughs stretched at full length in a Morris chair before some glowing beech-sticks in the open fireplace. There was not much conversation. What is most interesting in an author's life he expresses in his books, and so we indulged only in an exchange of phrases about his health, of the flight of time, and a few favored authors. The questioning of the interviewer can produce only forced results, and in particular when the interviewed person has reached an age when taciturnity becomes natural, and one prefers to gaze at the dying embers and listen to the drip of the rain outside. That his interest in literature did not lag was shown by a set of Fabre,[30] whom he pronounced the most wonderful exponent in his special line.

A quaint interior was this quiet little room. Conspicuous were the portraits of Whitman,[31] Carlyle,[32] Tolstoy,[33] Roosevelt,[34] and Father Brown of the Holy Order of the Cross, men who in one way or another must have meant something to his life. On the mantelpiece stood another portrait of Whitman and a reproduction of “Mona Lisa.”[35] There were windows on every side, and the rest of the walls consisted of shelves filled with nature books. One shelf displayed the more scientific works, and one was devoted entirely to his own writings. It was the same room in which several years ago, on a summer day in the vagrom days of youth, I had read for the first time “Wake Robin,”[36] that classic of out-of-door literature, and “The Flight of the Eagle,” an appreciation of Walt Whitman.

John Burroughs was fifty then, and had just settled down seriously to his literary pursuits. He had risen brilliantly from youthful penury to be the owner of a large estate. His latest achievement was “Signs and Seasons”; “Riverby,” a number of essays of out-of-door observations around his stone house by the Hudson, was in the making.

There is a wonderful fascination in these books. They reveal a man who has lived widely and intimately, who has made nature his real home. All day long he is mingled with the heart of things; every walk along the river, into the woods, or up the hills is an adventure. He exploits the teachings of experience rather than of books. His essays are always fused with actions of the open. One feels exhilaration in making the acquaintance of a man with an unnarrowed soul who has burst free from the shackles of intellectual authority, who joyfully and buoyantly interprets the beauties about him, shunning no such pleasures as jumping a fence, wading a brook, or climbing a tree or mountain-side.

American literature has always abounded with nature speculation and research. Bryant[37] was a true poet of nature; he loved woods, mountain, and river, and his “To the Yellow Wood Violet,” and “The Blue Gentian” are gems of pictorial nature-writing. Whittier[38] transfigured the beauty of New England life in one poem “Snowbound,” and in his “Autumn Walk” leisurely strolled to the portals of immortality. Whitman stalked about on the open road like a pantheist.[39]

Yet none had the faculties of discovery and interpretation like John Burroughs, the intimate knowledge, the warm vision, to which a wood-pile can become a matter of contemplation, and a back yard or a garden patch become as interesting as any scenery in the world. None of them could have lectured on apple-trees or gray squirrels with such intimacy as Burroughs. Burroughs has never any sympathy with the “pathetic fallacy of endowing inanimate objects with human attributes,” nor would he indorse Machin's propaganda idea of the antagonism of animals against their human masters.

A trout leaping in a mountain stream, the lively whistle of a bird high in the upper air, a bird's nest in an old fence post—these are some of the topics nearest his heart. No nature-writer has ever shown such diversity of interest. Even Rip Van Winkle did not know the mountains as well as does this camper and tramper for a lifetime on the same familiar grounds; over and over again he makes the round from Riverby to Slabsides, to Roxbury in the western Catskills, and back again to the rustic studio near the river. He knows every pasture, mountain-side, and valley of his chosen land. He even named some of the hills. One of them, much frequented by bees, he named “Mount Hymettus,”[40] because there “from out the garden hives, the humming cyclone of humming bees” liked to congregate.

But is his minute observation of weed seeds in the open field or insect eggs on tree-trunks not disastrous to literary expression? Can this style of writing soar above straightforward nature-writing of men like Wilson,[41] Muir,[42] White,[43] and Chapman?[44] Burroughs is capable of making a long-winded analysis of the downward perch of the head of the nut-hatch, but he is no Audubon.[45] As a literary man he is an essayist who etches little vignettes, one after the other, with rare precision. How fine is his sentence about the unmusical song of the blackbirds! “The air is filled with crackling, splintering, spurting, semi-musical sounds which are like salt and pepper to the ear.” Here the poetic temperament finds an utterance far beyond the broad knowledge of nature.

And there is his fine appreciation of Walt Whitman, his grasp of literary values despite working in a comparatively smaller field of activity. John Burroughs has a good deal of Whitman about him, whom he called “the one mountain in our literary landscape.” The man of Riverby is not large of stature, but has the same nonchalance of deportment, the flowing beard, and the ruddy face, a few shades darker than that of the good gray poet; for Whitman was, after all, a city man, while Burroughs always lived his life out of doors.

We talked about the looks of Whitman, whom he had known in Washington in the sixties.

“Yes, he had a decided vitality, although he was already gray and bent at that time. Yes, he would talk if one could draw him out.”

“I believe he talked only for Traubel,”[46] I dryly remarked, at which Burroughs was greatly amused.

Emerson[47] was the god of Burroughs's youth, but Whitman undoubtedly exercised the more lasting influence. This, however, never touched Burroughs's own peculiar nature-fresh-and-homespun style. It lingered only as a vague inspiration in the under rhythm of his work. Whitman had the macrocosmic vision,[48] while Burroughs is an adherent of microcosm. Few can combine both qualities.

Burroughs is an amateur farmer and gardener. He prunes his cherrytrees, cures hay, and thinks of new methods of mowing grain. He experimented with grape-vines, a rather futile occupation at this period of social evolution. He has been a great cherry-picker all his life, and I remember with keen pleasure how delicious those wild raspberries tasted that I shared with him one summer day. He has a celery farm at Roxbury, his birthplace, and when I was last at Slabsides, his bungalow in the hills near West Park, I saw nothing but beets for cattle. I was astonished at this peculiar, indeed, prosaic pastime. And still more so that he had chosen for residence a site in a hollow of the mountain-side, while only a few steps above one can enjoy a most gorgeous view of the surrounding country. Did he make the selection because the place is more sheltered? No, I believe he chose the place intuitively, because it expresses his particular point of view of life. The keen breeze and the wide view serve only for occasional inspiration; but the undergrowth vegetation, the crust of soil, the hum of insects, the little flowers—these are the true stimulants of his eloquent simplicity of style.

Burroughs professed to have a great admiration for Turguenieff's[49] “Diary of a Sportsman.” These exquisite prose poems represent nature at its best, but they are purely poetic, pictorial, with a big cosmic swing to them. This is out of the reach of Burroughs, and he never attempted it. His poems contain, as he says himself, more science and observation than poetry. A few beautiful lines everybody can learn to write, and unless they are fragments of a torso of the most intricate and beautiful construction, they will drop like the slanting rain into the dark wastes of oblivion.

His lessons of nature, accepted as text-books in the public schools, have a true message to convey. They represent the socialization of science. He loves the birds and learned their ways; he could run his course aright, as he has placed his goal rightly. He stirred the earth about the roots of his knowledge deeply, and thereby entered a new field of thought. He became interested in final causes, design in nature.

The transcendentalist[50] of the Emersonian period at last came to his own. There is something of the bigness of Thoreau[51] in his recent writings, Thoreau who in his “Concord and Merrimac River” had a mystical vision, a grip on religious thought, and who, like a craftsman in cloisonné, hammered his philosophic speculations upon the frugal shapes of his observations. In “Ways of Nature” and “Leaf and Tendril” Burroughs has reached out as far as it is possible for a nature writer without becoming a philosopher. He now no longer contemplates the outward appearance of things, but their organic structure, the geological formation of the earth's crust, and the evolution of life. And some ledge of rock will now give him the prophetic gaze into the past and into the future.

And so John Burroughs at eighty-five, still chopping the wood for his own fireside, writing, lecturing, giving advice about phases of farm-work, strolling over the ground, still interested in literature, can serenely fold his hands and wait.

Indeed, this white-bearded man, in his bark-covered study amidst veiled heights and blurred river scenes, furnishes a wonderful intimate picture which will linger in American literature and in the minds of all who yearn for a more intimate knowledge of nature, unaffectedly told, like the song of the robin of his first love, “a harbinger of spring thoughts carrying with it the fragrance of the first flowers and the improving verdure of the fields.”

SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS

1. How does the first paragraph indicate the key-note of the article?
2. What do Burroughs' pictures and books show concerning his character?
3. What sort of life did Burroughs lead?
4. What is meant by “exploiting the teaching of experience rather than of books”?
5. How did Burroughs find happiness?
6. What is said concerning Burroughs' faculties of discovery and interpretation?
7. What diversity of interests did Burroughs show?
8. What is said concerning Burroughs' work as an essayist?
9. Why was Burroughs fond of Walt Whitman?
10. How did Burroughs gain literary style?
11. What is meant by the “socialization of science”?
12. What makes Burroughs such a charming person?
13. Into what sections may the article be divided?
14. What does the article reveal concerning its author?

SUBJECTS FOR WRITTEN IMITATION

DIRECTIONS FOR WRITING

Write about an actual visit or interview. In all your work pay most attention to presenting the spirit of the person whom you talk with. The events of your visit, and the remarks that are made, are of less importance than the things that reveal spirit,—the surroundings, the costume, the habits, the work done and the various things that show character. The essay is in no sense to be the story of a visit; it is to give an intimate picture of the person in whom you are interested. Your object is to show character.

FOOTNOTES:

[30] Jean Henri Fabre (1823-1915). A French entomologist who wrote many volumes on insect life, among them being The Life and Love of the Insects; The Life of the Spider; The Life of the Fly.

[31] Walt Whitman (1819-1892). An American poet, noted for highly original poems marked by absence of rhyme and metre. Whitman loved the outdoor world, and had great philosophic insight.

[32] Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881). A brilliant English essayist and historian, strikingly original and unconventional, and a firm upholder of stalwart manhood.

[33] Count Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910). A great Russian novelist, reformer and philosopher,—a bold and original thinker.

[34] Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919). Ranchman, author, soldier, explorer, and President of the United States, a man of sterling manhood and great personal fearlessness.

[35] Mona Lisa. A picture of a lady of Florence, painted about 1504 by Leonardo da Vinci, an Italian painter. The face has a peculiarly tantalizing expression.

[36] Wake Robin. One of John Burroughs' delightful outdoor books, written in 1870.

[37] William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878). The first great American poet; author of Thanatopsis; noted for his love of nature.

[38] John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892). An American poet who wrote lovingly of New England life and scenery. He is noted for his poems against slavery.

[39] Pantheist. One who sees God in everything that exists.

[40] Mount Hymettus. A mountain in Greece from which most excellent honey was obtained in classic times.

[41] Alexander Wilson (1766-1813). Born in Scotland and died in Philadelphia; author of a remarkable study of American birds, published in nine volumes.

[42] John Muir (1838-1914). An American naturalist and explorer of the west and of Alaska.

[43] Gilbert White (1720-1793). An English naturalist, noted for his Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne.

[44] Frank M. Chapman (1864—). An American writer on bird life. He is especially noted for excellent work in photographing birds.

[45] John James Audubon (1780-1851). A great American student of birds; noted for his exact drawings of birds.

[46] Horace Traubel (1858-1919). An American editor who was the literary executor of Walt Whitman.

[47] Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882). An American poet and philosopher; a man of marked individuality and power.

[48] Macrocosmic. The sentence means that Whitman looked upon the world and upon the universe as a whole, while Burroughs studied little or individual things in order to understand the whole.

[49] Ivan Turguenieff (1818-1883). A Russian novelist whose Diary of a Sportsman aided in bringing about the freeing of Russian serfs.

[50] Transcendentalist. One who believes in principles that can not be proved by experiment.

[51] Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862). An American essayist, naturalist and philosopher.

WASHINGTON ON HORSEBACK

By H. A. OGDEN

(1856—). An illustrator, particularly of American historical subjects, on which he is an authority. His most noted work is 71 color plates of uniforms of the U. S. Army, 1775-1906. He made the original cartoons for the Washington memorial window in the Valley Forge memorial. He is the author and illustrator of The Boys Book of Famous Regiments; Our Flag and Our Songs; The Voyage of the Mayflower; Our Army for Our Boys (joint author); and numerous magazine articles of a historical nature.

The ordinary magazine article, lacking the personal note, is not an essay. As a rule, such an article endeavors to present a subject in its entirety, to follow a strictly logical order, and to avoid any expression of personal reaction on the part of the writer.

Some magazine articles, however, are written in such an easy, chatty style, without any hint of attempt to cover a subject either completely or logically, that they approach the essay form.

Washington on Horseback is an article that closely resembles an essay. It is discursive, anecdotal, wandering and is much like a pleasant talk about Washington and his love of horses. Although the writer keeps himself entirely behind the scenes it is evident that he is a man who admires horses as well as manliness and courage.

“The best horseman of his age, and the most graceful figure that could be seen on horseback,” was Thomas Jefferson's opinion of his great fellow-Virginian, George Washington. From his early boyhood, a passionate fondness for the horse was a strong and lasting trait of our foremost American.

When a little boy of eight, he was given his first riding-lessons on his pony Hero by Uncle Ben, an old servant (perhaps a slave) of his father's.

On one occasion, when under the paternal eye, he tried over and over again to leap his pony. When he finally succeeded in doing so, both rider and pony fell; but jumping up, the boy was quickly in the saddle again, his father, a masterful man who hated defeat, exclaiming, “That was ill ridden; try it again!” This happening near their home, his mother rushed out, greatly alarmed, and begged them to stop. Finding her entreaties were unheeded, she returned to the house protesting that her boy would “surely be murdered!” And during all of her long life this dread of the dangers her son incurred was one of her striking characteristics.

This early training in riding, however, was greatly to the boy's advantage; for his satisfaction in conquering horses and training them made him a fine horseman and prepared him for the coming years when he was to be so much in the saddle.

A notable instance of early intrepidity in the tall and athletic boy, in his early teens, in mastering a wild, unmanageable colt is related by G. W. P. Custis,[52] Washington's adopted son. The story goes that this colt, a thoroughbred sorrel, was a favorite of Washington's mother, her husband having been much attached to him. Of a vicious nature, no one had thus far ventured to ride him; so before breakfast one morning, George, aided by some of his companions, corraled the animal and succeeded in getting bit and bridle in place.

Leaping on his back, the venturesome youth was soon tearing around the enclosure at breakneck speed, keeping his seat firmly and managing his mount with a skill that surprised and relieved the fears of the other boys. An unlooked-for end to the struggle came, however, when, with a mighty effort, the horse reared and plunged with such violence that he burst a blood-vessel and in a moment was dead.

Looking at the fallen steed, the boys asked “What's to be done? Who will tell the tale?” The answer soon had to be given; for when they went in to the morning meal, Mrs. Washington asked if they had seen her favorite horse. Noting their embarrassment, she repeated the question; when George spoke up and told the whole story of the misadventure. “George, I forgive you, because you have had the courage to tell the truth at once,” was her characteristic reply.

Upon their father's death, his accomplished brother Lawrence took an active interest in George's education and development. The boy had taken a strong hold on Lawrence's affection, which the younger brother returned by a devoted attachment. Among other accomplishments, George was encouraged to perfect his horsemanship by the promise of a horse, together with some riding clothes from London—especially a red coat and a pair of spurs, sure to appeal to the spirit and daring of the youth.

His first hunting venture, as told by Dr. Weir Mitchell[53] in “The Youth of Washington,” occurred on a Saturday morning,—a school holiday even in those days,—when, there being none to hinder, George having persuaded an old groom to saddle a hunter, he galloped off to a fox-hunting “meet” four miles away. Greatly amused, the assembled huntsmen asked if he could stay on, and if the horse knew he had a rider? To which George replied that the big sorrel he rode knew his business; and he was in at the kill of two foxes. On the way back the horse went lame, and on arriving at the stable the rider saw an overseer about to punish Sampson, the groom, for letting the boy take a horse that was about to be sold. He quickly dismounted and snatched the whip from the overseer's hand, exclaiming that he was to blame and should be whipped first. The man answered that his mother would decide what to do; but the boy never heard of the matter again. The anger he showed on this occasion caused old Sampson to admonish him never to “get angry with a horse.”

When about sixteen, George lived a great part of the time at Mount Vernon, Lawrence's home, where he made many friends among the “Old Dominion” gentry, the most prominent of them being Thomas, Lord Fairfax, an eccentric old bachelor, residing with his kindred at Belvoir, an adjoining estate on the Potomac. As this had been the home of Anne Fairfax, Lawrence's wife, the brothers were ever welcome guests. Attracted to each other by the fact that both were bold and skilful riders and by their love of horses, a lifelong friendship was formed between the tall Virginian, a stripling in his teens, and the elderly English nobleman, and many a hard ride they took together, with a pack of hounds, over the rough country, chasing the gray foxes of that locality.

Settled at Mount Vernon, in the years following his marriage and up to the beginning of the War for Independence, Washington found great pleasure in his active, out-of-door life, his greatest amusement being the hunt, which gratified to the full his fondness for horses and dogs.

His stables were full, numbering at one time one hundred and forty horses, among them some of the finest animals in Virginia. Magnolia, an Arabian, was a favorite riding-horse; while Chinkling, Valiant, Ajax, and Blue-skin were also high-bred hunters. His pack of hounds was splendidly trained, and “meets” were held three times a week in the hunting season.

After breakfasting by candle-light, a start was made at daybreak. Splendidly mounted, and dressed in a blue coat, scarlet vest, buckskin breeches, and velvet cap, and in the lead,—for it was Washington's habit to stay close up with the hounds,—the excitement of the chase possessed a strong fascination for him.

These hunting parties are mentioned in many brief entries in his diaries. In 1768, he writes: “Mr. Bryan Fairfax, Mr. Grayson, and Phil Alexander came home by sunrise. Hunted and catched a fox with these: Lord Fairfax, his brother, and Colonel Fairfax and his brother; all of whom with Mr. Fairfax and Mr. Wilson of England dined here.” Again, on November 26 and 29: “Hunted again with the same party.” 1768,—January 8: “Hunting again with the same company—started a fox and run him four hours.” Thus we learn from his own pen how frequently this manly sport, that kept him young and strong, was followed by the boldest rider in all Virginia.

A seven-years absence during the war caused the hunting establishment of Mount Vernon to run down considerably; but on returning in 1783, after peace came, the sport was renewed vigorously for a time.

Blue-skin, an iron-gray horse of great endurance in a long run, was the general's favorite mount during those days. With Billy Lee, the huntsman, blowing the big French horn, a present from Lafayette,—the fox was chased at full speed over the rough fields and through such tangled woods and thickets as would greatly astonish the huntsmen of to-day.

What with private affairs, official visits, and the crowd of guests at his home, Washington felt obliged to give up this sport he so loved, for his last hunt with the hounds is said to have been in 1785.

To return to his youthful days. At sixteen he was commissioned to survey Lord Fairfax's vast estates, and soon after was appointed a public surveyor. The three years of rough toil necessitated by his calling were spent continually in the saddle. Those youthful surveys, being made with George's characteristic thoroughness, stand unquestioned to this day.

The beginning of his active military career started with a long, difficult journey of five hundred miles to the French fort on the Ohio, most of which was made in the saddle. It was hard traveling for the young adjutant general of twenty-one accompanied by a small escort. On the return journey, the horses were abandoned, and it was when traveling on foot that his miraculous escapes from a shot fired by a treacherous Indian guide and from drowning, occurred.

When, in 1755, the British expedition against the French fort on the Monongahela, commanded by General Braddock, started out from Alexandria, Washington, acting as one of the general's aides, was too ill to start with it; but when the day of action came, the day that the French and Indians ambushed the “red-coats,” the young Virginia colonel, although still weak, rode everywhere on the field of slaughter, striving to rally the panic-stricken regulars; and although two horses had been shot under him, he was the only mounted officer left at the end of the fight.

On the occasion of Washington's first visit to Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, in 1756, he rode the whole distance, with two aides and servants, to confer with Governor Shirley of Massachusetts and settle with him the question of his army rank. He was appropriately equipped for his mission, and the description of the little cavalcade is very striking. Washington, in full uniform of a Virginia colonel, a white-and-scarlet cloak, sword-knot of red and gold, his London-made holsters and saddle-cloth trimmed with his livery “lace” and the Washington arms, his aides also in uniform, with the servants in their white-and-scarlet liveries, their cocked hats edged with silver, bringing up the rear, attracted universal notice. Everywhere he was received with enthusiasm, his fame having gone before him. Dined and fêted in Philadelphia and New York, he spent ten days with the hospitable royal governor of Massachusetts. The whole journey was a success, bringing him, as it did, in contact with new scenes and people.

It seems noteworthy that in accounts of the campaigns and battles of the Revolution such frequent mention is made of the commander-in-chief on horseback. From the time he rode from Philadelphia to take command of the army at Cambridge, in 1775, down to the capitulation of Yorktown in 1783, his horses were an important factor in his campaigns. Among many such incidents, a notable one is that which occurred when, after the defeat of the Americans at Brooklyn and their retreat across the river to New York, Washington in his report to Congress wrote: “Our passage across the East River was effected yesterday morning; and for forty-eight hours preceding that I had hardly been off my horse and never closed my eyes.” He was, in fact, the last to leave, remaining until all his troops had been safely ferried across.

An all-night ride to Princeton, in bitter cold, over frozen roads, and, when day dawned, riding fearlessly over the field to rally his men, reining in his charger within thirty yards of the enemy, forms another well-known incident.

At the battle of Brandywine an old farmer was pressed into service to lead the way to where the battle was raging, and he relates that as his horse took the fences Washington was continually at his side, saying repeatedly: “Push along, old man; push along!” Shortly after the defeat at Brandywine, General Howe's advance regiments were attacked at Germantown; and here, as at Princeton, Washington, in spite of the protests of his officers, rode recklessly to the front when things were going wrong.

After the hard winter at Valley Forge, and when in June of 1778 the British abandoned Philadelphia he took up the march to Sandy Hook, Washington resolved to attack them on their route. On crossing the Delaware in pursuit of the enemy, Governor William Livingston of New Jersey presented to the commander-in-chief a splendid white horse, upon which he hastened to the battle-field of Monmouth.

Mr. Custis in his “Recollections of Washington,” states that on the morning of the twenty-eighth of June, he rode, and for that time only during the war, a white charger. Galloping forward, he met General Charles Lee,[54] with the advanced guard, falling back in confusion. Indignant at the disobedience of his orders, Washington expressed his wrath in peremptory language, Lee being ordered to the rear. Riding back and forth through the fire of the enemy, animating his soldiers, and recalling them to their duty he reformed the lines and turned the battle tide by his vigorous measures. From the overpowering heat of the day, and the deep and sandy soil, his spirited white horse sank under him and expired. A chestnut mare, of Arabian stock, was quickly mounted, this beautiful animal being ridden through the rest of the battle. Lafayette, always an ardent admirer of Washington, told in later years of Monmouth, where he had commanded a division, and how his beloved chief, splendidly mounted, cheered on his men. “I thought then as now,” said the enthusiastic Frenchman, “that never had I beheld so superb a man.”

Of all his numerous war-horses, the greatest favorite was Nelson—a large, light sorrel, with white face and legs, named after the patriot governor of Virginia. In many battles,—often under fire,—Nelson had carried his great master and was the favored steed at the crowning event of the war—the capitulation of Yorktown.

Living to a good old age, and never ridden after Washington ceased to mount him, the veteran charger was well taken care of, grazing in a paddock through the summers. And often, as the retired general and President made the rounds of his fields, the old war-horse would run neighing to the fence, to be caressed by the hand of his former master.

During the eight years of his Presidency, Washington frequently took exercise on horseback, his stables containing at that time as many as ten coach- and saddle-horses.

When in Philadelphia, then the seat of government, the President owned two pure white saddle-horses, named Prescott and Jackson, the former being a splendid animal, which, while accustomed to cannon-fire, waving flags, or martial music, had a bad habit of dancing about and shying when a coach, especially one containing ladies, would stop to greet the President. The other white horse, Jackson, was an Arab, with flowing mane and tail, but, being an impetuous and fretful animal, he was not a favorite.

A celebrated riding-teacher used to say that he loved “to see the general ride; his seat is so firm, his management of his mount so easy and graceful, that I, who am a professor of horsemanship, would go to him and learn to ride.”

Since his early boyhood, the only recorded fall from a horse that Washington had was once on his return to Mount Vernon from Alexandria. His horse on this occasion, while an easy-gaited one, was scary. When Washington was about to mount and rise in the stirrup, the animal, alarmed by the glare of a fire by the roadside, sprang from under his rider, who fell heavily to the ground. Fearing that he was hurt, his companions rushed to his assistance, but the vigorous old gentleman, getting quickly on his feet, assured them that, though his tumble was complete, he was unhurt. Having been only poised in his stirrup and not yet in the saddle, he had a fall no horseman could prevent when a scary animal sprang from under him. Vicious propensities in horses never troubled Washington; he only required them to go along.

An amusing anecdote is told of one of Washington's secretaries, Colonel David Humphreys. The colonel was a lively companion and a great favorite, and on one of their rides together he challenged his chief to jump a hedge. Always ready to accept a challenge of this sort, Washington told him to “go ahead,” whereupon Humphreys cleared the hedge, but landed in the ditch on the other side up to his saddle-girth. Riding up and smiling at his mud-bespattered friend, Washington observed, “Ah, Colonel, you are too deep for me!”

On the Mount Vernon estates, during the years of retirement from all public office, his rides of inspection were from twelve to fourteen miles a day, usually at a moderate pace; but being the most punctual of men, he would, if delayed, display the horsemanship of earlier days by a hard gallop so as to be in time for the first dinner-bell at a quarter of three.

A last glimpse of this great man in the saddle, is as an old gentleman, in plain drab clothes, a broad-brimmed white hat, carrying a hickory switch, with a long-handled umbrella hung at his saddle-bow—such was the description given of him by Mr. Custis to an elderly inquirer who was in search of the general on a matter of business.

SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS

1. What is the effect of the opening quotation?
2. Point out all the ways in which the article resembles an essay.
3. Show that the article does not follow a strictly logical plan.
4. Show in what respects the article differs from ordinary magazine articles.
5. What characterizes the style of the article?
6. How does the writer make the article interesting?
7. What hints of the writer's personality does the article give?
8. What does the article say concerning the character of Washington?
9. Summarize what is said concerning Washington as a horseman.
10. How much is said about the biography of Washington?

SUBJECTS FOR WRITTEN IMITATION

(page 116)

Colonel Humphreys landed in the ditch.

DIRECTIONS FOR WRITING

Select both a subject and a theme in which you are interested. Take your note-book and consult encyclopedias, histories, and books of biography, noting down everything that has relation to your particular subject and theme. Hunt especially for interesting anecdotes; if they are humorous,—so much the better.

You will do well to introduce your article with an appropriate quotation. Make your writing as conversational and as anecdotal as possible. Don't be in the least bit encyclopedic. Be gossipy.

FOOTNOTES:

[52] George Washington Parke Custis (1781-1857). The adopted son of George Washington.

[53] Dr. S. Weir Mitchell (1829-1914). An American physician and novelist. His novel, Hugh Wynne, concerns the life of Washington.

[54] General Charles Lee (1731-1782). An American Revolutionary General court-martialed for disobedience at the battle of Monmouth, 1778.

THE HISTORICAL STORY

HAVELOK THE DANE

By GEORGE PHILIP KRAPP

(1872—). Professor of English in Columbia University. He is a member of many scholarly societies, and has written much on English. Among his books are The Elements of English Grammar; In Oldest England; The Rise of English Literary Prose.

The story of Havelok the Dane is one of the oldest of English stories; for the story that is here told is only a re-telling of a narrative that originated nearly a thousand years ago. The first story of Havelok was probably written in Anglo-Saxon in the eleventh century or in the first half of the twelfth century. It was told in French about 1150, and re-told in English about 1300. Some critics find close relation between the story of Havelok and the story of Hamlet.

In all probability there was a real Havelok who may have lived in the latter part of the tenth century, and who may have participated in events like those told in the story. It is probable that as stories of his romantic career were repeated they increased,—just as gossip increases. The facts became lost in a body of romantic events. The Havelok of the story is therefore a character of fiction.

The story is interesting in many ways. First of all, it is a remarkably good story, very human and capable of awakening sympathy, full of quick event, centered around the fascinating subjects of youth, adventure and love, and picturesque in its details and episodes. Then it is an old story,—ten centuries old,—and is interesting as a relic of the past. In addition, it shows remarkably well what sort of stories preceded the short stories and the novels of to-day, and how the old stories sometimes grew from a mingling of fact and imagination.

In reading the story of Havelok the Dane we stand, as it were, in the presence of one of the story tellers of the extreme past. Around us we feel castle walls and the presence of rough fighting men. The flames of the great fireplace flare on our faces, and we listen with childlike interest.

Many years ago, in the days of the Angles and Saxons, there was once a king of England whose name was Athelwold. In that time a traveler might bear fifty pounds of good red gold on his back throughout the length and breadth of England, and no one would dare molest him. Robbers and thieves were afraid to ply their calling, and all wrong-doers were careful to keep out of the way of King Athelwold's officers. That was a king worth while.

Now this good King Athelwold had no heir to his throne but one young daughter, and Goldborough was her name. Unhappily, when she was just old enough to walk, a heavy sickness fell upon King Athelwold, and he saw that his days were numbered. He grieved greatly that his daughter was not old enough to rule and to become queen of England after him, and called all the lords and barons of England to come to him at Winchester to consult concerning the welfare of his kingdom and of his daughter.

Finally it was decided that Godrich, Earl of Cornwall, who was one of the bravest, and, everybody said, one of the truest, men in all England, should take charge of the child Goldborough and rule the kingdom for her until she was old enough to be made queen. On the Holy Book, Earl Godrich swore to be true to this trust which he had undertaken, and he also swore, as the king commanded, that when Goldborough reached the proper age, he would marry her to the highest, the fairest, and the strongest man in the kingdom. When all this was done, the king's mind was at rest, for he had the greatest faith in the honor of Earl Godrich. It was not long thereafter that the end came. There was great grief at the death of the good king, but Godrich ruled in his stead and was the richest and most powerful of all the earls in England. We shall say no more about him while Goldborough is growing older, and in the end we shall see whether Earl Godrich was true to his trust and to the promises he had given to Goldborough's father.

Now it happened, at this same time, that there was a king in Denmark whose name was Birkabeyn. Three children he had, who were as dear to him as life itself. One of these was a son of five years, and he was called Havelok. The other two were daughters, and one was named Swanborough and the other Elflad. Now when King Birkabeyn most wished to live, the hand of death was suddenly laid upon him. As soon as he realized that his days in this life were over, he looked about for some one to take care of his three young children, and no one seemed so fit for this office as the Earl Godard. To Godard, therefore, he intrusted the care of his three children, and Godard faithfully promised to guard them until the boy Havelok was old enough to become king of Denmark.

Scarcely, however, was the body of King Birkabeyn laid away in the grave, before the faithless Godard began to plot evil, and he determined to be himself king of Denmark. So he took Havelok and his two sisters and cast them into prison in a great stone castle.

In this prison the poor little children almost perished from cold and hunger, but they little knew that still worse misfortune was in store for them. For one day Earl Godard went to the castle where they were imprisoned, and Havelok and his sisters fell on their knees before him and begged for mercy. “What do you want?” said Godard. “Why all this weeping and howling?” And the children said they were very hungry. “No one comes to give us of food and drink the half part that we need. We are so hungry that we are well nigh dead.”

When Godard heard this, his heart was not touched, but, on the contrary, it grew harder within him. He led the two little girls away with him, and took away the lives of these innocent children; and he intended to do the same with young Havelok. But the terrified boy again fell on his knees before Godard and cried: “Have pity upon me, Earl Godard! Here I offer homage to you. All Denmark I will give to you if you will but let me live. I will be your man, and against you never raise spear nor shield.”

Now when Godard heard this and when he looked down at young Havelok, the rightful heir to the throne of Denmark, his arm grew weak, though his heart was as hard as ever. He knew that if he was ever to become king, Havelok must die; but he could not bring himself to the point of taking the life of his lawful sovereign.

So he cast about in his mind for some other way to get rid of him. He sent for a poor fisherman whose name was Grim. Now Grim was Godard's thrall, or slave, and was bound to do whatever Godard asked of him. When Grim had come to him, Godard said: “Thou knowest, Grim, thou art my thrall, and must do whatever I bid thee. To-morrow thou shalt be free and a rich man if thou wilt take this boy that I give thee and sink him to-night deep down in the sea. All the sin I will take upon myself.”

Grim was not a bad man, but the promise of his freedom was a sore temptation, and besides, Godard, his master, had said that he would be responsible for the deed. So Grim took Havelok, not knowing, of course, who he was, and put him in a sack and carried him off to his little cottage by the seashore, intending that night to row out to deep water and throw him overboard.

Now when it came midnight, Grim got up from his bed, and bade his wife, Dame Leve, bring a light for he must go out and keep his promise to Earl Godard. But when Leve went into the other room, where Havelok was lying bound and gagged, what was her surprise to see that there was already a light in the room. Right over Havelok's head it seemed to stand; but where it came from, she could not guess.

“Stir up, Grim,” she cried, “and see what this light is here in our cot!”

And Grim came running in, and he too saw the strange light and was as surprised as Leve had been. Then he uncovered Havelok, and there on his right shoulder he saw a birthmark, bright and fair, and knew from this, right away, that this boy was Havelok, the son of King Birkabeyn. When Grim realized this, he fell on his knees before Havelok and said, “Have mercy on me and on Leve, my wife, here by me! For thou art our rightful king and therefore in everything we should serve thee.” Then when Grim had unbound him and had taken the gag out of his mouth, Havelok was a happy boy again; and the first thing he asked for was something to eat. And Dame Leve brought bread and cheese, and butter and milk and cookies and cakes, and for the first time in many a long day Havelok had all he wanted to eat. Then when Havelok had satisfied his hunger, Grim made a good bed for him and told him to go to sleep and to fear nothing.

Now the next morning, Grim went to the wicked traitor Godard and claimed his reward. But little he knew the faithlessness of Godard.

“What!” cried Godard, “wilt thou now be an earl? Go home, and be as thou wert before, a thrall and a churl. If I ever hear of this again, I will have thee led to the gallows, for thou hast done a wicked deed. Home with you, and keep out of my way, if you know what is good for you!”

When Grim saw this new proof of the wickedness of Earl Godard, he ran home as fast as he could. He knew that his life was not safe in Godard's hands, especially if the earl should ever find out that Havelok was still alive. Grim had hoped to get money from Earl Godard with which to escape to some other country, but now he saw that he would have to depend on his own means. Secretly he sold all that he had and when he had got the ready money for it, he bought him a ship and painted it with tar and pitch, and fitted it out with cables and oars and a mast and sail. Not a nail was lacking that a good ship should have. Last of all Grim put in this ship his good wife Dame Leve, and his three sons and two daughters and Havelok, and off they sailed to the open ocean. They had not been sailing very long, however, before a wind came out of the north and drove them toward England. At the river Humber they finally reached land, and there on the sand near Lindesey, Grim drew his ship up on the shore. A little cot he straightway built for his family; and since this was Grim's home, the town that gradually grew up there in later days came to be named Grimsby, and if you will look on the map, you will find that so it is called to this very day.

Now Grim was a very good fisherman, and he decided to make his living here in England by fishing. Many a good fish he took from the sea, with net and spear and hook. He had four large baskets made, one for himself and one for each of his three sons, and when they had caught their fish, off they carried them to the people in the towns and country, to sell them. Sometimes they went as far inland as the good town of Lincoln.

Thus they lived peacefully and happily for ten years or more, and by this time Havelok was become a youth full grown. But Grim never told Havelok who he was, nor did he tell any of his three sons or two daughters. And Havelok soon entirely forgot all about what had happened to him in Denmark. And so he grew up, happy as the days were long, and astonishingly healthy and strong. He was big of bone and broad of shoulder and the equal of a man in strength.

Now after a time, Havelok began to think to himself that Grim was working very hard to make a living, while he was amusing himself in ease and idleness. “Surely,” said he to himself, “I am no longer a boy. I am big and strong, and alone I eat more than Grim and his five children. It's high time for me to bear baskets and work for my living. No longer will I stay at home, but to-morrow I too shall go forth and sell fish.” And so in the morning, as soon as it was light of day, he put a basket on his back, as the others did, piled high with fish, as much as a good strong man might carry. But Havelok bore the burden well, and he sold the fish well, and the money he brought back home to Grim, every penny of it. Thus Havelok became a fisherman; he went forth every day with his basket on his back and sold fish, and was the tallest and strongest monger of them all.

Now it happened after a time that Grim fared not so well With his fishing. The fish would not come to his nets, and with no fish in the nets, there was none for the baskets and for market. To make matters worse, at this same time there was a great famine in the land, and poor people suffered greatly from lack of food to eat. These were hard times for Grim and his houseful of children. Yet less for his own did Grim grieve than for the sturdy Havelok. Moreover, Grim had long thought that this work of fishing and fish-selling, though good enough for himself and his three sons, was hardly the right life for Havelok, who, though he knew nothing about it, was nevertheless a king's son.

“Havelok, my boy,” said he, at length, “it is not well for thee to dwell here too long with us. Though it will grieve us sorely to have thee go, out into the world thou must venture, and perhaps there thou shalt make thy fortune. Here thou seest we are but miserable fisher-folk; but at Lincoln, the fine city, there thou mayst find some great man whom thou canst serve. But, alas!” he added, “so poor are we that thou hast not even a coat wherein to go.”

Then Grim took down the shears from the nail and made Havelok a coat out of the sail to his boat, and this was Grim's last gift to Havelok. No hose and no shoes had Havelok to wear, but barefoot and naked, except for his long coat of sail-cloth, he left his good friends Grim and Dame Leve and their five children and set out for the town of Lincoln.

When Havelok reached Lincoln, he wandered about bewildered in the streets of the city. But nobody seemed to have any use for him; nobody wanted to exchange the strength of his powerful arms for food to eat. As he wandered from one street to another, Havelok grew hungrier and hungrier. By great good chance, however, he passed by the bridge where the market was, and there stood a great earl's cook, who was buying fish and meat and other food for the earl's table. Now he had just finished buying when Havelok happened along, and the cook shouted, “Porter, porter!” for somebody to come to carry his marketing home. Instantly ten or a dozen jumped for the chance, for there were plenty of men looking for work in Lincoln. But Havelok got ahead of them all; he pushed them this way and that and sent them sprawling head over heels, and seized hold of the cook's baskets, without so much as a “By your leave.” Rough and ready was the young Havelok, as strong as a bear and as hungry as a savage. He made quick time of the journey to the cook's kitchen, and there he was well fed as pay for his labor.

By the next day, however, Havelok's stomach was again empty. But he knew the time at which the earl's cook came to the market, and he waited there for him. Again when the cook had finished buying, he called out “Porter, porter!” and again the husky Havelok shoved the rest right and left and carried off the cook's baskets. He spared neither toes nor heels until he came to the earl's castle and had put down his burden in the kitchen.

Then the cook, whose name was Bertram, stood there and looked at Havelok and laughed. “This is certainly a stalwart fellow enough,” he thought. “Will you stay with me?” he said finally to Havelok. “I will feed you well, and well you seem to be able to pay for your feeding.”

And Havelok was glad enough to take the offer. “Give me but enough to eat,” he answered, “and I will build your fires and carry your water, and I can make split sticks to skin eels with, and cut wood and wash dishes, and do anything you want me to do.”

The cook told Havelok to sit down and eat as much as he wanted, and you can be sure Havelok was not slow in accepting this invitation. When he had satisfied his hunger, Havelok went out and filled a large tub of water for the kitchen, and, to the cook's great astonishment, he carried it in, without any help, in his own two hands. Such a cook's knave had never been seen in that kitchen before!

So Havelok became a kitchen-boy in a great earl's castle. He was always gay and laughing, blithe of speech and obliging, for he was young and thoughtless and healthy, and happy so long as he had something to put into his stomach. He played with the children and they all loved him, for, with all his great strength and stature, he was as gentle as the gentlest child among them. And Bertram, the cook, seeing that Havelok had nothing to wear except his old sail-cloth coat that Grim had made for him, bought Havelok a brand-new coat and hose and shoes; and when Havelok was dressed up in his new clothes, there was not a finer fellow in the whole country. He stood head and shoulders above the rest when the youths came together for their games at Lincoln, and no one ever tried a round at wrestling with Havelok without being thrown almost before he knew it. He was the tallest and strongest man in all that region, and, what was better, he was as good and gentle as he was strong.

Now, as it happened, the earl in whose kitchen Havelok served as kitchen-boy to Bertram the cook was that very Earl Godrich to whom old King Athelwold had entrusted his daughter, Goldborough, for protection. Goldborough was now a beautiful young princess, and Godrich realized that something must soon be done for her. But Godrich had become the strongest baron in all England; and though he had not forgotten his promises to Athelwold, little did he think to let the power, to which he had grown so accustomed, pass into the hands of another. For though the beautiful Goldborough was now old enough to be made queen, the traitorous Godrich had decided in his heart that queen she should never be, but that when he died, his son should be made king after him.

Just about this time it happened that Earl Godrich summoned a great parliament of all the nobles of England to meet at Lincoln. When the parliament met, there was a great throng of people there from all over England, and the bustling city was very gay and lively. Many young men came thither with their elders, bent on having a good time, strong lads fond of wrestling and other such games. Now these young men were amusing themselves one day in one way and another, and finally they began to “put the stone.” The stone was big and heavy, and it was not every man who could lift it even as high as his knees. But these strong fellows who had come to Lincoln in the train of the mighty barons could lift it up and put it a dozen or more feet in front of them; and the one who put it the farthest, if it was only an inch ahead of the rest, he was counted the champion at putting the stone.

Now these stout lads were standing around and boasting about the best throws, and Havelok stood by listening. He knew nothing about putting the stone, for he had never done it or seen it done before. But his master, Bertram the cook, was also there, and he insisted that Havelok should have a try at it. So Havelok took up the great stone, and at the first throw, he put it a foot and more beyond the best throw of the others.

The news of Havelok's record throw in some way spread abroad, how he had beaten all these strong lads, and how tall and powerful he was. And finally the knights in the great hall of the castle began speaking of it, and Earl Godrich listened, for he had suddenly thought of a way to keep his promise. In a word, it was this: King Athelwold had made him swear on the Holy Book that he would give his daughter in marriage to the highest and strongest in the realm of England. Now where could he find a higher and stronger than this Havelok? He would marry the king's daughter to this kitchen-boy, and thus, though in a way that the old king never dreamed of, he would keep his promise and still leave the road free for himself and his son after him.

Godrich straightway sent for Goldborough, and told her that he had found a husband for her, the tallest and fairest man in all England. And Goldborough answered that no man should wed her unless he was a king or a king's heir.

At this Godrich grew very angry. “Thou shalt marry whom I please!” he commanded. “Dost thou think thou shalt be queen and lady over me? I will choose a husband for thee. To-morrow shalt thou wed my cook's kitchen-boy and none other, and he shall be lord over thee.”

Goldborough wept and prayed; but she could not turn Godrich from his shameful purpose.

Then Godrich sent for Havelok, and when he had come before him, he said, “Fellow, do you want a wife?”

“Nay, truly,” said Havelok, “no wife for me! What should I do with a wife? I have neither clothing nor shoes nor food for her, neither house nor home to put her in. I own not a stick in the world, and even the coat I bear on my back belongs to Bertram the cook.”

But Godrich told Havelok he must marry the wife he had chosen for him, willy-nilly, or he should suffer for it. And finally Havelok, for fear of his life, consented, and Goldborough was sent for, and the Archbishop of York came, and soon they were married, one as unwilling as the other.

But when the wedding was over, and gifts had been given to Goldborough, rich and plenty, Havelok was perplexed. He beheld the beauty of Goldborough and was afraid to remain at Godrich's castle for fear of treachery that might befall her. For Goldborough now had only Havelok to protect her, since the kitchen-boy had become her lord and master, and Havelok, with a man's courage, determined to defend her to the best of his ability. The first thing to do, as it seemed to him, was to go back to Grim's cottage, there to think over the matter carefully before acting further. And straightway, in company with Goldborough, he set out secretly for the little cot by the seashore.

When Havelok and Goldborough came to Grim's house, he found that there had been many sad changes during the time he had been living in Lincoln. In the first place, the good Grim had died, and also his wife, Dame Leve. But the three sons of Grim and his two daughters were still living at Grimsby, and they still caught the fish of the sea and carried them about in baskets to sell them. The oldest of these sons was called Robert the Red, and, of the remaining two, one was named William Wendout, and Hugh the Raven the other. They were filled with joy when they found that their foster-brother, Havelok, had come back to them, and they prepared a fine dinner for him and Goldborough. And Robert the Red begged Havelok now to stay with them at Grimsby and be their chief and leader. They promised to serve him faithfully, and their two sisters were eager to care for all the needs of Goldborough, his wife. But for the time being, Havelok put them off, for he had not yet decided what would be the best course for him to follow.

Now that night, as Goldborough lay awake, sad and sorrowful, she was suddenly aware of a bright light, surrounding, as it seemed, the head of the sleeping Havelok. Then at the same time, there came a voice, she could not tell whence, which said to her: “Goldborough, be no longer sorrowful, for Havelok, who hath wedded thee, is a king's son and heir. Upon his shoulder he bears a royal birthmark to prove it. The day shall come when he will be king both in Denmark and in England, and thou shalt be of both realms queen and lady.”

Now just at this same time, Havelok dreamed a strange dream; and when he awoke, he told his dream to Goldborough. He dreamed that he was sitting on a high hill in Denmark, and when he stretched out his arms, they were so long that they reached to the farthest limits of the land; and when he drew his arms together to his breast, everything in Denmark, all the towns, and the country, and the lordly castles, all cleaved to his arms and were drawn into his embrace. Then he dreamed that he passed over the salt sea with a great host of Danish warriors to England, and that all England likewise came into his power.

When Goldborough heard this dream, she thought straightway of the strange light she had seen over Havelok's head and the voice that she had heard, and she interpreted it to mean that Havelok should be king over Denmark and afterward over England.

She knew not how this should come to pass, but unhesitatingly advised Havelok to prepare to set sail for Denmark. Her plan was this: that they should buy a ship, and take Grim's three sons, Robert the Red, William Wendout, and Hugh the Raven, with them, and, when they came to Denmark, pretend that they were merchants until they could find out what course to follow. And when this plan was told to the three sons of Grim, they immediately agreed to it, for they were ready to follow Havelok wherever he went. And now, also, Havelok for the first time learned who his father was, and that he was really heir to the throne of Denmark. For Grim, before he left Denmark, had told all of Havelok's story to a cousin of his, and she now, for she was still alive and had come to stay with Grim's family at Grimsby, told Havelok all about Earl Godard's treachery. Happy indeed was Goldborough when she heard this story, and they were all more anxious than ever to set out for Denmark. They got a good ship ready, and it was not long before all were well on their way.

When the ship reached Denmark, they all went up on land and journeyed forth until they came to the castle of the great Danish baron, Earl Ubbe. Now Ubbe had been a good friend of Havelok's father, the former King Birkabeyn, and a good man and true was he. When they reached Ubbe's castle, Havelok sent word that they were merchants, come to trade in Ubbe's country, and, as a present, he sent in to Ubbe a gold ring with a precious stone in the setting.

When Ubbe had received this generous gift, he sent for Havelok to come to see him. When the young man came, Ubbe was greatly struck by Havelok's broad shoulders and sturdy frame, and he said to himself: “What a pity that this chapman is not a knight! He seems better fitted to wear a helmet on his head and bear a shield and spear than to buy and sell wares.” But he said nothing of this to Havelok, and only invited him to come and dine in the castle and to bring his wife, Goldborough, with him. And Ubbe promised that no dishonor should be done either to one or the other, and pledged himself as their protector. And when the dinner was over, Ubbe, who had taken a great liking to both Havelok and Goldborough, entrusted them to the safe-keeping of one of his retainers, a stout and doughty warrior whose name was Bernard the Brown. To Bernard's house, therefore, Havelok and Goldborough went, and there too were lodged Robert the Red and William Wendout and Hugh the Raven.

Now when they had reached Bernard's house, and Bernard and Havelok and Goldborough were sitting there peacefully at supper, the house was suddenly attacked by a band of fierce robbers. Travelers were not as safe in Denmark as they were in England in the days of the strong King Athelwold, and these robbers, thinking that Havelok must be a very rich man, since he had given so valuable a ring to the Earl Ubbe, were come now, a greedy gang, to see if they could get hold of some of his treasure. Before Bernard and his guests were aware of them, the robbers had reached the door, and they shouted to Bernard to let them in or they would kill him. But the valiant Bernard recalled that his guests were in his safe-keeping; and shouting back that the robbers would have to get in before they could kill him, he jumped up and put on his coat of mail and seized an ax and leaped to the doorway. Already the robbers were battering at the door, and they took a huge boulder and let it fly against the door, so that it shivered to splinters. Then Havelok mixed in the fray. He seized a heavy wooden door-tree, which was used to bar the door, and when the robbers tried to break through the door, he laid on right and left. It was not long before Robert and William and Hugh, in the other part of the house, heard the din and came rushing up; and then the fight was on, fast and furious. Robert seized an oar and William and Hugh had great clubs, and these, with Bernard's ax and Havelok's door-tree, made it lively enough for the robbers. But especially Havelok and his door-tree made themselves felt there. The robbers, for all they were well armed with shields and good long swords, were compelled to give way before the flail-like strokes of Havelok's door-tree. When they saw their comrades falling right and left, those that were still able to do so took to their legs and ran away. Some harm they did, however, while the fray lasted, for Havelok had a severe sword-wound in his side, and from several other gashes the blood was flowing freely.

In the morning, when Bernard the Brown told Ubbe of the attacks of the robbers, Ubbe swore that he would bring them to punishment; and he also took further measures to protect Havelok. When he heard that Havelok was wounded, he had him brought to his own castle and gave him a room right next to his own.

Now that night, when Havelok lay asleep in his room and Ubbe in the room next to it, about the middle of the night Ubbe was awakened, and thought he saw a light on the other side of the door. “What's this?” he said to himself. “What mischief are they up to in there?” And he got up to see if everything was all right with his new friend the chapman.

Now when Ubbe peeped through a crack in the door, he saw a strange sight. For there was Havelok peacefully sleeping, and over his head there gleamed the miraculous light that Goldborough had seen and that had caused Grim to spare his life when he was a little child. And looking closer, Ubbe saw something more. For the cover was thrown back, and he saw on Havelok's shoulder the royal birthmark, and he knew immediately that this was the son of his old friend and king, Birkabeyn, and the rightful heir to the throne of Denmark. Eagerly he broke open the door and ran in and fell on his knees beside Havelok, acknowledging him as his lawful lord.

As soon as Havelok realized that he was not dreaming, he saw that good fortune had at last put him in the way of winning back his rights.

And it had indeed, for Ubbe immediately set to work getting together an army for Havelok. It was not long before Havelok had a fine body of fighters ready to follow wherever he led them, and then he thought it was time to seek out his old enemy, Earl Godard. Before this, however, there was another thing to be done, and that was to make knights of Robert and William and Hugh. They were given the stroke on the shoulder with the flat of the sword by Earl Ubbe and thus were dubbed knights. They were granted land and other fee, and they became as brave and powerful barons as any in Denmark.

When Havelok had his plans all made, he set out to find Earl Godard. It was Robert the Red who had the good fortune first to meet with him. But Godard was no coward, and was not to be taken without struggle for his freedom. He defended himself as best he could, but his followers soon became frightened and took to their heels, leaving the wretched Godard a helpless prisoner in the hands of Robert. Havelok was glad enough to have Godard in his power at last, but he made no effort to punish Godard for the injuries he had done to him personally. It was as a traitor to his king and his country that Godard was now held prisoner. When the time of the trial came, by the judgment of his peers, Godard was convicted of treason and sentence of death was passed upon him.

When peace had again been restored throughout Denmark, then the people all joyfully accepted Havelok as their king and the beautiful Goldborough as their queen.

One thing still remained for Havelok to do in England after affairs had all been settled in Denmark—there still remained an accounting with Earl Godrich. And so, as soon as he had got his army together, Havelok and Goldborough went on board ship and sailed over the sea, and soon they were again back at Grimsby. The earl was ready for him, too, for he had heard of Havelok's arrival in England, and he thought he could make quick work of his former kitchen-boy. But Havelok the man, with a Danish army at his back, was a quite different person from Havelok the boy, who carried the cook's baskets from market and distinguished himself only by his record at putting the stone. And this difference Earl Godrich was soon to discover.

It was Ubbe, this time, who had the first meeting with Godrich. Ubbe claimed Godrich as his prisoner, but Godrich immediately drew his sword in self-defense. They fought long and fiercely, and Godrich was decidedly getting the better of it, when Havelok fortunately appeared upon the scene. Havelok demanded that Godrich should yield himself as his prisoner, but for answer Godrich only rushed at Havelok all the more fiercely with his drawn sword, and so violent was his attack, that he succeeded in wounding Havelok. At this, Havelok's patience gave out, and exerting all his powerful strength, in a short time he overcame Godrich and disarmed him and bound him hand and foot. Then Havelok had Godrich carried before a jury of his peers in England, where he was made to answer to the charge of treason, just as Godard had been made to do in Denmark.

All the English barons acknowledged that Goldborough was their true queen, and that Godrich was a tyrant and usurper. And since not only plain justice, but also the welfare of the kingdom, demanded it, the barons passed the sentence of death upon the traitorous Earl Godrich. With much feasting and celebration, Havelok and Goldborough were taken in triumph to London, and there were crowned king and queen of England. Thus Goldborough's dream had come to pass, for she was now queen and lady and Havelok was lord and king over both Denmark and England.

But since Havelok could not be in both countries at one time, and since his Danish friends were eager to get back again to Denmark, now that their work in England was finished, Havelok made Ubbe ruler over Denmark in his place, and he remained in England. Moreover there were other old friends who were also richly deserving of reward. Of these, one was Bertram the cook, Havelok's former master, who had fed him when he was starving. Bertram was made a rich baron, and he was married to one of Grim's daughters, who were still living at Grimsby, but who, of course, had now become great ladies. The other daughter was married to Reynes, Earl of Chester, who was a brave young bachelor and glad enough to get so beautiful and so highly favored a wife as Havelok gave him. Robert the Red and William Wendout and Hugh the Raven all remained in England, where they married rich and beautiful wives, and became Havelok's right-hand men in the good government of the country.

And you can be sure the country was now again well governed. As in the days of the good King Athelwold, a traveler might bear a bag full of red gold on his shoulder from one end of England to the other, and be as safe as though he were guarded by an army of soldiers. Loved by their subjects and feared by their enemies, thus in peace and contentment King Havelok and Queen Goldborough dwelt together many a long year in England, and their children grew up around them. They had passed through their trials and tribulations, and at last only good days were in store for them.

This is the end.

SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS

1. What advantage does the author gain by using a somewhat archaic style?
2. Why does he tell the story with almost the same simplicity that marks the original story?
3. What events show the character of Havelok?
4. What is the character of Grim?
5. What is the character of Goldborough?
6. In what respects are Earl Godrich and Earl Godard alike?
7. Show that the story is like some of the familiar nursery legends.
8. Outline the principal events of the narrative.
9. Which events are most impressive?
10. Point out local allusions in the story.
11. In what respects is Havelok truly royal?
12. Point out any uses of the supernatural.
13. Is Bertram a realistic or a romantic character?
14. Point out exceedingly human touches in the story.
15. Point out the emphasis of noble characteristics.
16. Show how description adds to the effectiveness of the story.
17. Show how the story resembles other stories you have read.
18. What reasons have made the story live for a thousand years?

SUBJECTS FOR WRITTEN IMITATION

DIRECTIONS FOR WRITING

You are to re-tell an old story. Select one with which you are entirely familiar. Tell it very simply and plainly, but try very hard to give it the quality of human interest. Make your readers sympathize with your hero and heroine. Tell a number of dramatic episodes, selecting those that do most to emphasize character. Make your story move very quickly, and make its action very vivid and intense. Give emphasis to good characteristics.

THE STORY ESSAY

POLITICS UP TO DATE

By FREDERICK LEWIS ALLEN

(1890-). A contributor to many magazines. At different times he served as Instructor in English at Harvard, and as a member of the editorial staff of The Atlantic Monthly, and of The Century.

The short story and the essay may be combined in what may be called the story-essay or the dialogue-essay. Many of Addison's Sir Roger de Coverley essays illustrate such a combination.

Politics Up To Date is really a critical essay, directed against certain tendencies in political campaigns in the United States, but it is presented in the form of a dialogue between a young politician and an old politician. It is very effective in its satire.

“So you've come to me for advice, have you?” said the Old Politician to the Young Politician. “You want to know how to succeed in politics, do you?”

The Young Politician inclined his head.

“I do,” he replied. “Will you tell me?”

The Old Politician was silent for a moment.

“Times change,” he said at last, “and I dare say there are new issues now in politics that there weren't in the good old days. The technic is somewhat different, too. However, the basic principles remain the same, and, after all, the issues don't really matter; it's what you say about them that counts, and I can tell you what to say about them. Very well, I'll advise you. First of all, if you're running for office in these days, you must run as a hundred-per-cent. American candidate.”

The Young Politician's eye clouded with perplexity.

“What is Americanism,” he asked, “and how does one figure it on a percentage basis?”

The Old Politician brought down his fist on the table with a crash.

“You aspire to political office, and ask questions like that!” he exclaimed in a voice of wrath. “Never question what hundred-per-cent. Americanism is, even to yourself. If you do, somebody else will question, too. Nothing could be more fatal. Don't try to define it; assert it. Say you're hundred per cent. and your opponent isn't. Intimate that if George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln went over your opponent with a slide rule and an adding-machine, they couldn't make him add up to more than ninety-nine per cent. If he's out for a seven-cent fare or a new set of municipal waterworks, tell the people that such things are un-American. Say that he's dodging the issue, and the issue is Americanism.” He paused. “If you were my opponent, and asked what Americanism is, I'd double you up. 'Think of it, my fellow-citizens! He doesn't even know what Americanism is! Is that the kind of man to hold office in the country of Washington and Lincoln?'”

The Young Politician looked round uneasily to make sure that they were indeed alone, for the Old Politician was almost shouting.

“Please,” said the Young Politician, “not so loud. I won't ask that question again. I see your point. What else do you advise?”

“You must learn,” continued the Old Politician, “to be a good denouncer.”

“A good what?”

“Denouncer. Keep your eyes open for objects of popular disapproval, and when you're sure you've got hold of something that is heartily disapproved by the great majority of the people, denounce it. At present I should advise you to denounce the high cost of living, the profiteers, and the Bolshevists. Next year, of course, the list may be quite different, but for the present those three are the best objects of denunciation.”

“What bothers me,” suggested the Young Politician in a hesitating voice, “is that it may be rather hard to drag those things into the campaign. Suppose, for example, I'm pledged to broaden the Main Street of the city upon my election to the city council. Won't it be rather hard to tie the Main Street and the Bolshevists together?”

The Old Politician looked upon the troubled face of the Young Politician with disgust.

“You're a great politician, you are,” he said wearily. “Tie them together? Don't be so ridiculously logical.” He rose to his feet, and as he did so he smote the table once more with his fist. “Gen-tle-men,” he cried hoarsely, surveying an imaginary audience with his glittering eye, “there is a movement on foot in this very county, this very State, nay, this very city, to undermine our Congress, to topple over the Constitution, to put a bomb under our President! Confronted by such a menace to our democratic institutions, what, gentlemen, shall be our answer? Let us broaden Main Street, as Washington would have broadened it, as Lincoln would have broadened it, and let us put down the red flag wherever it shows its head!”

“Its mast,” corrected the Young Politician, visibly moved. “Thank you for those courageous, those hundred-per-cent. words. I shall try to strike that note. But there is something else I want to ask. Suppose I am elected. What shall I do while I hold office in order that I may become ultimately eligible for still higher office?”

“In that case,” replied the old man, who by this time had subsided into his chair, “you must not merely denounce the high cost of living, the profiteers, and the Bolshevists; you must campaign against them.”

“But suppose I am a commissioner of roads or an attorney-general,” queried the Young Politician. “In that case, clearly such things lie outside my province. How can I campaign against them?”

“My dear young man,” said the Old Politician, with a weary smile, “don't bother about your province, as you call it. Your job will undoubtedly be uninteresting and the public won't know anything about it or care anything about it, and the test of your success will be your ability to conduct campaigns which have nothing to do with your job, and therefore stand some chance of interesting the public. There is no reason why even an attorney-general shouldn't campaign against anything, provided he handle his campaign right.

“The principal thing to bear in mind is that you must begin your campaigns noisily and end them so quietly that the sound of their ending is drowned in the noise of the next campaign's beginning. Let's say you begin with a campaign against the high cost of living. First come out with a statement that you, as attorney-general or commissioner of roads or what not, are going to knock the high cost of living to bits, and the whole force of the Government will be behind you. That will put you on the front page once. Then send out telegrams calling a conference to take steps against the cost of living. That will put you on the front page again. Then when the conference meets, address them, and tell them they've got to make conditions better, simply got to. By the way, you ought to have a couple of able secretaries to help you with these speeches, or, better still, to do the routine work of your office so that there will be nothing to divert your mind from your campaigns. Then, after you have the conference well started, step out. Don't stay with them; they may begin asking you for constructive ideas. Step clear of the thing, and start a new campaign.

“I can't over-emphasize the fact that when the conference is well started, you must help the public to forget about it, and stir up interest in something new. Flay the profiteer for a month or two, and get a conference going on profiteers. Rap the Bolshevists, and telegraph for a crowd of citizens to come and probe the Bolshevists while you're deciding what your next campaign shall be. Don't let the people's minds run back to the high cost of living, or they'll be likely to notice that it hasn't gone down. Refer constantly to the success of your own campaigns, and keep the public mind moving.”

The Young Politician was visibly impressed, but apparently a doubt still lingered in his mind.

“There's one thing I'm afraid I don't quite understand,” he said at last. “All this denouncing and rapping and probing—isn't it likely to look rather destructive? Will people want to vote for a man whose pleasantest mood is one of indignation?”

“My dear young man,” replied the Old Politician, “I fear that you misunderstood me. A politician must be always pleasant to the people who are about him, and denounce only persons who are not present. You should compliment your audience when speaking. Be sure to make the right speech in the right place; don't get off your profiteer speech to the Merchants' Association, or they may begin to wonder whether they agree with you, but draw their hearts to yours with your anti-Bolshevik speech; assure them that you and they are going to save the nation from red ruin. Denunciation is pleasant if it's somebody else who is getting denounced. Tell the merchants or the newspaper publishers or the party committeemen, or whoever it is that you are addressing, that they are the most important element in the community and that the war could not have been won if they had not stepped forward to a man and done their duty. That's good to hear.

“Finally, give them a little patriotic rapture. Tell them this is a new age we're in. Picture to them the capitalist and working-man walking hand in hand with their eyes on the flag. Make the great heart of America throb for them. Unpleasant? Why, if you top off with a heart-throb, you can make the most denunciatory speech delightful for one and all.”

The Young Politician rose.

“I see,” he said. “Thank you. Have you any other advice?”

“Merely one or two minor hints,” said the Old Politician. “If the photographers want to take your picture teaching your baby to walk, let them do it; the public loves the home life of its leader. Always be affable to the reporters, but never state your views explicitly, or you may find them embarrassing at some later date. Stick to generalities. I think that's all.”

“Thank you again,” said the Young Politician, putting out his hand. “You are very good. You're—” An idea seemed to seize his mind, and his bearing perceptibly altered. “You, sir, are a good American. I'm always delighted to have an evening with a man who is absolutely one-hundred-per-cent. patriotic American to the core.”

“Good night,” said the Old Politician. “You're getting it very nicely. I think you'll do well.”

SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS

1. What advantage is gained by presenting the thought through the medium of dialogue?
2. What is the character of the Old Politician?
3. Explain the writer's satire of the use of “Americanism.”
4. What are the Old Politician's principles concerning denunciation?
5. What are the writer's principles?
6. In what ways does the writer satirize the American public?
7. How does the writer satirize political campaigns?
8. How does the writer satirize hypocrisy in political life?
9. How would the writer have a political campaign conducted?
10. How would the writer have an office holder act?

SUBJECTS FOR WRITTEN IMITATION

DIRECTIONS FOR WRITING

Think of a series of principles in which you strongly believe. Imagine two people who will represent definite attitudes toward the principles that you have in mind. Write a dialogue between the two people, presenting your real thought in the disguise of satire. Let your work represent both the beginning and the ending of the conversation. As in all other writing, make the ending effective.

FREE!

By CHARLES HANSON TOWNE

(1877—). Managing editor of McClure's Magazine. He has written many delightful books, among which are: The Quiet Singer, and Other Poems; Jolly Jaunts with Jim; Autumn Loiterers; Shaking Hands with England.

Over two hundred years ago Joseph Addison imagined a character whom he called “The Spectator” meeting with various friends and discussing with them the life of the times. Through what was said by these imaginary beings Addison gave his own shrewd comments on foibles and follies. Mr. Towne's “young-old philosopher” is a sort of modern “Spectator.” He talks of the drudgery of work, and the glowing joy of a holiday, and comes to the sudden realization that the world is a world of work in which every one must play his part if he is to have real contentment. The essay is Mr. Towne's comment both on a life of unvaried drudgery and on a life of idleness.

“I have wondered what it would seem like to be ... jogging along with nowhere to go save where one pleased.”

The young-old philosopher was speaking.

“I had a strange experience yesterday. To have spent twenty years or so at office work, and then suddenly to arrange one's affairs so that a portion of the week became one's own—that is an experience, isn't it?”

We admitted that it was an achievement to be envied.

“How did you manage it?” was the natural question.

“That is a detail of little importance,” he replied. “Let the fact of one's sudden liberty be the point dwelt upon. I found myself walking up the avenue at the miraculous hour of eleven in the morning, and not going to a desk! I was headed for the park, where I knew the trees had long since loaded their branches with leaves, and the grass was so green that it made the heart ache with its loveliness. You know how perfect yesterday was, a summer day to remember and to be grateful for.

“To you who have never known what it is to drudge day in and day out, this may seem a trifling thing to speak of. For myself, a miracle had happened. I could not believe that this golden hour was mine completely. I had never seen shop-windows with quite this slant of the sun on them. Always I had viewed them early or late, or wistfully at noon, when the streets were so crowded with other escaped office men that I could take no pleasure in what I beheld. Shop-windows at eleven in the morning were for the elect of the earth. That hour had always heretofore meant for me a manuscript to be read or edited, a conference to be attended, a telephone call to be answered, a visit from some one seeking advice—something, at any rate, that made it impossible for me to call it my own. I have looked often from a high window at that hour, and seen the people in the streets as they trailed like ribbons round and round the vast city, and I have wondered what it would seem like to be one of them, not hurrying on some commercial errand, but jogging along with nowhere to go save where one pleased.

“At last my dream had come true, and when I found myself projected upon that thrilling avenue, and realized that I had nothing, absolutely nothing, to do until luncheon-time, and I could skip that if I wished, I could scarcely believe that it was I who had thus broken the traces.

“The green of the park greeted me, and, like Raleigh's cloak,[55] a gay pattern of flowers was laid at the entrance for even my unworthy feet metaphorically to tread. And to think that these bright blooms unfolded here day after day and I had so seldom seen them! An old man dozed on a bench near at hand, oblivious to the beauty around him; and a septuagenarian gardener leaned over the circular border, just as Narcissus[56] looked into the pool. Perhaps he saw some image of his youth in the uplifted face of a flower.

“I know that I saw paths and byways everywhere that reminded me of my vanished boyhood; for I am one of those who have always lived in Manhattan, and some of the happiest days I ever spent were those in the park as a child, seeing the menagerie, feeding the squirrels, and rolling a hoop on a graveled pathway.

“I remembered Rossetti's line,[57] 'I have been here before,' as I walked along on this exultant morning; and it indeed seemed as if in some previous incarnation, and not in this life, I had known my footsteps to take this perfumed way. For in the hurry of life and in the rush of our modern days we forget too soon the leisure of childhood, plunging as we do into the rough-and-tumble of an agonized manhood.

“And all this was while the park, like a green island set in a throbbing sea, had waited for me to come back to it! No lake isle of Innesfree[58] could have beguiled the poet more. Anchored at a desk, I had dreamed often of such an hour of freedom; and now that it was really mine, I determined that I would not analyze it, but that I would simply drink in its wonder. It would have been as criminal as to pluck a flower apart.

“Policemen went their weary rounds, swinging their sticks, and it suddenly came to me that even in this sylvan retreat there was stern labor to be done. Just as some one, some time, must sweep out a shrine,—possibly nowadays with a vacuum-cleaner!—so papers must be picked from God's grass, and pick-pockets must be diligently looked for in holiday crowds. Men on high and practical sprinkling-carts must keep the roadways clean, and emissaries of the law must see to it that motorists do not speed too fast. You think of ice-cream as being miraculously made in a park pavilion, and unless you visit the city woodland at the hour of eleven or so in the morning, you may keep your dream. But I beheld a common ice-wagon back up to the door of that cherished house of my childhood, and a strong, rough fellow proved himself the connecting-link between the waitress and her eager little customers.

“At this hour it was as though I had gone behind the scenes of a theater while the stage-hands were busy about their necessary labors. Wiring had to be done,—I had forgotten that they have telephones even in the park,—and a mason was repairing a crumbling wall. How much better to let it crumble, I thought. But all my practicality, through my sense of strange freedom, had left me, and I was ardent for a mad, glad world, where for a long time there would be nothing for anybody to do. I wanted masons and policemen and icemen and nurse-maids and electricians and keepers of zoölogical gardens to be as free as I, forever and ever.

“You see, my unexpected holiday had gone to my head, and it was a summer morning, and I felt somehow that I ought to be working rather than loitering here.

“I suppose I shall be sane to-morrow, but I wonder if I want to be.”

And we all wondered if we didn't like him better when he was just this way, a child with a new toy, or, rather, a child with an old toy that he had almost but not quite forgotten how to play with.

SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS

1. What advantage does the essayist gain by using characters to express his own thoughts?
2. What made the philosopher's holiday so notable?
3. What had been his daily life?
4. Comment on the various thoughts and fancies that came to the philosopher on his holiday.
5. What is meant by the expression, “An Agonized Manhood”?
6. What joys does the philosopher find?
7. Show how his thoughts come back to the idea of work.
8. In what did his lack of “sanity” consist?
9. Does the expression, “I suppose I shall be sane to-morrow,” mean that he will wish to work, or wish to have a holiday, or wish for something else?
10. What was the toy that he had almost forgotten how to play with?
11. What is the author's purpose?
12. What evils in modern life does the essay criticize?

SUBJECTS FOR WRITTEN IMITATION

DIRECTIONS FOR WRITING

When you have selected a subject that interests you, write out, in a single sentence, your one most important thought on that subject. Then plan to write an essay that will embody that thought.

If you are to imitate Mr. Towne's method you will think of a typical character who will express your own thought. As soon as you have introduced your character—notice how quickly Mr. Towne introduced the “young-old philosopher”—lead him to relate an experience that made him think about the subject. Write his meditations in such a way that they will show all view-points. Let the end of your essay indicate, rather than state, the view-point that you wish to emphasize.

Mr. Towne gives his essay many elements of originality and much beauty of thought and expression. Imitate his style as well as you can.

FOOTNOTES:

[55] Sir Walter Raleigh is said to have laid his cloak in the mud so that Queen Elizabeth might pass without soiling her garments.

[56] Narcissus. A Greek myth tells of a young man named Narcissus who, leaning over a pool, fell in love with his own reflection, and changed into a flower.

[57] Dante Gabriel Rosetti (1828-1882). An English poet of Italian and English descent. His poems are marked by beauty of form, symbolism and color.

[58] Innesfree. The Irish poet, William Butler Yeats (1864—) wrote The Lake Isle of Innisfree in which he imagines Innisfree as an island of perfect peace, a place for which he longs when “on the roadway, or on the pavements gray.”

THE STORY OF ADVENTURE

PRUNIER TELLS A STORY

By T. MORRIS LONGSTRETH

An American author and lover of natural scenery. His books on The Adirondacks, and The Catskills are enticements into the mountain world. He is a writer for many periodicals.

The romantic story of adventure deals with events that are far from being the events of daily life. Usually such a story has for its setting an unusual scene.

Prunier Tells a Story deals with events that come into very few lives; its setting is a region into which very few people penetrate. The principal character, the French-Canadian Prunier, is likewise a type of person with whom few are acquainted.

At the same time, the story is told with a degree of naturalness that makes it seem real. The French-Canadian is brought into touch with daily life by the presence of his two listeners, who are people of the ordinary world, and one of whom is a boy.

The story is not told merely for wild event: it hangs upon character and upon noble purpose. It emphasizes courage, ability, self-sacrifice and faith.

The setting of the story is so used that it contributes in a marked degree to the entire effect. As one reads he feels himself in the icy north, in the grip of cold and darkness where wild events are altogether probable.

PART I

THE PILLAR OF CLOUD BY DAY

It was after supper one November evening, at Wilderness House, with the sleet dancing on the eaves and the great forest of Wildyrie closing us about with its dark presence, when Essex Lad and I stumbled by chance on the fact that we didn't have to read books for adventure, but merely touch Prunier in some-story-telling place, and then—listen.

Prunier, you remember, is the blue-shirted, black-hatted French-Canadian who lives with us and thinks he works. He is a broad-shouldered, husky, simple-faced man of forty, who never opens his mouth unless it be to point out a partridge we are overlooking or to put in his black pipe. He spent his youth in the great Northland, where adventures are as common as black flies in a swamp, and yet he had never even explained the scar across his cheek, or the white patch on his scalp where some other excitement had been registered, until that evening when I had closed the Bible.

“Tink dat true?” he had suddenly asked.

I had been reading them how the Lord God had led Moses and the children of Israel across that other wilderness by a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. It had roused him strangely.

“I know it true,” he said, “for le bon Dieu show me way by pillars of cloud and fire aussi. If you want story, I tole you dat wan, moi-même.”

It was our turn to be excited. Here was luck—a vacant evening, a hearth fire, and Prunier promising une longue histoire, as he called it. We formed a semi-circle before the blazing birch, and, with the dull beat of the sleet above us for accompaniment, listened for the first word that would launch the black-eyed man upon his tale. It was long coming. He relit the pipe, recrossed his legs, muttered once “Pore ole Pierre,” and stopped. We ceased to breathe; for though I could command him to cut wood and wash dishes, I could not force from him a syllable about “Pore ole Pierre” until he was good and ready.

“Monsieur Moses et moi, we have purty hard times in wilderness widout doze pillars,” he said.

The Lad and I gave a nervous laugh. I could not fancy myself personally conducting forty thousand Hebrews, even through Wildyrie, without much assistance.

“Yaas,” he said, “purty hard. I now begin.”

And begin he did, slowly and with his quaint talk seasoned with his habitant French, which I'll have to omit in my retelling.

“It was a night just like this, in my little cabin on Wolf River. It had rained and then frozen, and the dark closed in with sleet. A very good night to be indoors, thought ole Pierre and I. Ole Pierre was my best friend, an old husky, who had been trapping with me four—five years. He knew all that men know, I think, as well as all that dogs understand, and he could smell a werewolf in the twilight.”

“A werewolf, what's that?” was on the very opening of the Lad's lips, but he held back the question.

“A werewolf, you know,” went on Prunier, “is worse than real wolf, for it is in the air—a ghost-wolf. That is why ole Pierre sometimes howled in his sleep and kept her from visiting us. That is why I put a candle in the window every dusk-time. As you shall see, it was lucky habit.

“Eh bien, that night I was sorting over my traps, for I thought it would turn cold after the storm. Then I would cross Breknek Place and begin the winter's trapping.

“Breknek Place is its name, because the sides of Wolf River come very close together, almost so near a man can jump. Indeed its name is really because a trapper like me was surprised by the wolves and ran for it. But he was too scared, and missed. They never got his body, the wolves, because the river runs so fast down to the Smoky Pool. Smoky Pool is a warm cove in the St. Lawrence that freezes last, and from which clouds of vapor rise on still days into the colder air.

“I never intended to be washed down that way, and in the summer I felled a tree from bank to bank, a broad hemlock, big enough to run a sledge over, almost; and that save many miles walking up river to Portage du Loup. I never intended, either, to be run by the wolves, you bet! And ole Pierre and I were pretty-very careful to be inside at the candle-lighting time.

“That night our cabin was very quiet, like this, for the sleet was a little pleasant sound, and ole Pierre was dreaming of old hunts, and I was on the floor with the traps, when both the dog and I were brought out of our thoughts by a wild cry, very faint and far away, but as sharp and sudden as a cut of lightning on a summer night.

“The hair on the back of my neck rises just like ole Pierre's, for I know it is the werewolf. And he looks at me and whines, for he knows it, too. I rush and light a second candle, though I have not too many, and look out the pane. But of course, there is nothing to be seen, nothing to be heard, except the moaning of wind in the dark. Yet later I hear a noise, very weak, very unsteady, as if a person was approaching.

“Ole Pierre howls low in his throat and scratches on the door. I reprove him: 'Are you possessed, ole Pierre? There is no soul within sixty—seventy miles. And you and I have done nothing that should let the werewolf in.'

“But it was fearful hearing that stealthy approach, stopping long, then many steps, and a groan. I get out the Bible and read fast. But there comes a tap-tap at the door, and I tremble so the book almost falls from my hand, and ole Pierre, he calls to his saints, too.

“What is the use of looking out, for who can see a werewolf?

“Presently there is no noise. The tap-tap stops; and except for a noise as of a bundle of something dropping against the door, there is nothing to hear except the dull sleet on the eaves, ole Pierre crying in his throat, and the trip-trip of my heart that goes like a werewolf pounding on my ribs. A voice inside me says open the door. But another voice says 'That is a werewolf trick and you will be carried away, Prunier.' Twenty times my hand is on the bolt.

“At last I can stand it no longer,—that voice inside saying to me to open,—and I rush to it and throw it open before I have time to think, and a body falls in, against my legs. A long, thin body it is, and I hesitate to touch it, for a werewolf can take any form. But a groan comes from it, and I have not the heart to push it out into the dark. I prop it by the fire and its eyes droop open. 'Food—tie up food.' That is the first word it says.

“I push some medicine for weakness into his mouth, and his life comes back little by little. 'You must take food to her,' he says; and soon again, 'The ship by Smoky Pool—she starves in it—my sister.'

“Indeed, I soon saw that he was faint from long travel and no feeding, and perhaps a sickness past thrown in, for he faints much between parts of his account. But I gather the news that he had come very far from some deserted ship in which a sister was starving to death; and alone, since his three partners had cleared out. He begged of me to leave him and take food for her. He cried out that he was dying, and I had to believe him; for death's shadows sat at the entrance to his eyes. I made him glad by placing bread beside him, and by putting on my Mackinaw and the pack after it, in which I had put food.

“A fever of uneasiness stirred him between faints until I had lit a lantern and called to ole Pierre to follow. Then joy shone in his worn eyes, and a blessing on us both followed us out into the icy night.

“With a last look through the window at the stranger, who had now, as I thought, closed his eyes in surrender to the end, ole Pierre and I turned into the endless forest on our long trail to the Smoky Pool. The sleet was freezing as it fell, and the rays of my lantern lit the woods, which seemed made of marble, the dark trunks glistening, the laden boughs hanging down like chandeliers in a cathedral, and the shrubs glittering like ten million candles as we passed. In such a place, I thought, no werewolf dare attack us.

“Instead, I thought of the trail ahead, the long miles till we come to Breknek Place, the long miles after to the ice-locked arm of the St. Lawrence near by the Smoky Pool. On such an errand we had nothing to fear, though outside the lantern-shine it was as dark as the one of Monsieur Moses' bad plagues you have read to the Lad so lately.

“We had got within three—four miles of Wolf River, ole Pierre slip-slipping on the ice in front of me, the lantern swinging, my pack beginning to feel like a rest, when for the second time that night a cry shivers across the distance, an awful sound for a lonely man to hear in the night forest.

“It is a long howl, fierce and almost gladsome, like when the evil one is clutching a new victim. And it is answered from the other side of the night by another howl, and then a chorus from both sides at once. And then the trail turns, and I know the pack of them is not chasing deer far away, but chasing me, us. For ole Pierre knows it, too, and crouches whining at my feet. Ole Pierre knows there is no escape, like me.

“Have you ever seen a wolf-pack run down a deer by turns, leap at its throat, and pull it down? I have once, near Trois Rivières, from a safe place on a mountain. And it was bad enough to be in the safe place, only watching. But that night how much worse! I pat ole Pierre on the head and tell him to cheer up, there is no use dying three—four times ahead of time. And as I say that, I think of that other man chased by wolves who had tried to leap at Breknek Place.

“'Tiens! ole Pierre,' I cry, 'let us do better!' And off I start at a dead run, feet slipping sideways, lantern swinging, pack rising, falling, like a rabbit's hind leg, with ole Pierre chasing after. It is less than a mile to the narrow gorge. Could we make that, perhaps I could throw the big hemlock in and stop them from crossing after us. A revolver is no good against a pack, and going up a tree is only putting off till to-morrow their big feast on habitant.

“The quick motion of our running put courage in our blood, and after a little while even ole Pierre's brush waves higher in the air, as if he had remembered some fight of old, and we gallop. We gallop, but the wolves they gallop too. First on one side far off, then on the other nearer, and ever as the trail winds in a new direction they sound like pack on pack of them, although there might have been less than ten. It is only late in the winter with us, when the snow is deep, that they gather into big packs to pull down the moose.

“At length, breathless, very tired, but still ahead of them, ole Pierre and I come out into the clear space just before the river. It was very slippery with frozen sleet, and I fall once—twice; and ole Pierre slide here—there, like a kitten on new ice. Ahead of us roars the river through the deep gorge. Behind on two sides the howling comes from the forest, and once, when I look back, I see them. But that can't be, for it is so dark. Yet I imagine I see them—black, racing forms, tongues out, muzzles sharp and red, and a green-yellow fire from the eyes.

“And it was so. For before we reach the fallen hemlock, our bridge to safety, two come between us and the river. With a yell, I fire straight where they were, but it is too dark, too slippery to hit, and they only circle back to wait till their partners come up. I fling myself down breathless, weak, for just two seconds' wind.

“'Cross ole Pierre, cross over, mon enfant!' And he trotted to the long log, but crawled back with his tail dragging, and whined about me. Black shadows, five, ten, twelve maybe, circled outside the ring of my lantern-light, and the green-yellow eyes were no imagination now. But they were quiet, intent on closing in. With the lantern, which was our only salvation from their fangs, in one hand and my revolver in the other, I backed to the hemlock, calling to ole Pierre to follow. He is trembling, and I soon know why; for when I put my foot on our bridge to safety, it cannot stay, and I nearly plunge headlong into the rocky stream thirty feet below. The log was slippery with frozen mist. We were trapped. At our backs, a river not to be crossed; about us, a crew of wolves getting bolder every minute.