Transcriber’s Notes

This e-text is based on ‘The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine,’ from November, 1912. Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation have been retained, but punctuation and typographical errors have been corrected. Passages in English dialect and in languages other than English have not been altered. Footnotes have been moved to the end of the corresponding article.

THE CENTURY
ILLUSTRATED MONTHLY
MAGAZINE

VOL. LXXXV

NEW SERIES: VOL. LXIII

NOVEMBER, 1912, TO APRIL, 1913

THE CENTURY CO., NEW YORK

HODDER & STOUGHTON, LONDON

Copyright, 1912, 1913, by THE CENTURY CO.

THE DE VINNE PRESS

INDEX
TO
THE CENTURY MAGAZINE

VOL. LXXXV NEW SERIES: VOL. LXIII

VOL. LXXXV, NO. 1 NOVEMBER, 1912 PRICE, 35 CENTS

THE CENTURY
ILLUSTRATED

MONTHLY

MAGAZINE

Beginning

THE CENTURY’S

“AFTER THE WAR”

Series

with

“The Humor & Tragedy
of the
Greeley Campaign”

by
Henry Watterson

THE CENTURY CO UNION SQUARE NEW YORK

FRANK H. SCOTT, PRESIDENT. WILLIAM W. ELLSWORTH, VICE-PRESIDENT AND SECRETARY. DONALD SCOTT, TREASURER. UNION SQUARE, NEW YORK.

Copyright, 1912, by The Century Co.]  (Title Registered U. S. Pat. Off.)  [Entered at N. Y. Post Office as Second Class Mail Matter.

Original Advertisement

TIMOTHY COLE’S
WOOD ENGRAVINGS
OF
MASTERPIECES
IN
AMERICAN GALLERIES

WOMAN WITH A LAMP

BY

JEAN FRANÇOIS MILLET

Owned by Mr. Henry Clay Frick

WOMAN WITH A LAMP. BY JEAN FRANÇOIS MILLET

(TIMOTHY COLE’S WOOD ENGRAVINGS OF MASTERPIECES IN AMERICAN GALLERIES—XIII)

THE CENTURY MAGAZINE

VOL. LXXXV

NOVEMBER, 1912

NO. 1

Copyright, 1912, by THE CENTURY CO. All rights reserved.

MR. WELLAWAY’S HOST

BY ELLIS PARKER BUTLER

Author of “Pigs is Pigs,” “The Man Who was Some One Else,” etc.

I

“NO, sir,” said Mr. Wellaway, positively, “this is not the club at all. This is not the sort of club. The club I mean has a heavier head—heavier and flatter.”

The clerk looked here and there among the racks of golf-clubs, but his general manner was that of hopelessness. There seemed to be thousands of golf-clubs in the racks, and he had shown Mr. Wellaway club after club, each seeming to fit the description Mr. Wellaway had given, but in vain. Mr. Wellaway looked up and down the shop.

“If I could remember the name of the clerk,” he said, “he would know the club. He sold one of them to Mr. ——” He hesitated. “Now I can’t remember his name. A rather large man with a smooth face. He has a small wart or a wen just at the side of his nose. You didn’t wait on such a man last week, did you?”

“I can’t recall him by the description,” said the clerk.

“Pshaw, now!” said Mr. Wellaway, with vexation. “I know his name as well as I know my own! I would forget my own if people didn’t mention it to me once in a while. It is peculiar how a man can remember faces and forget names, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is,” said the clerk. “If you just look through these clubs yourself, you may be able to find what you want. Was the name of the clerk you had in mind Mills? Or Waterson? Or Frazer?”

“It might be Frazer,” said Mr. Wellaway, doubtfully.

“If it was Frazer,” said the clerk, “he left here last Saturday.”

“But couldn’t you look up Frazer’s sales and see what kind of driver he sold? But of course you can’t if I don’t remember the name of the man he sold it to, can you?”

“Not very well,” admitted the clerk, with a polite smile. “Now, if you like a heavy club—”

He was interrupted by another customer. The golf goods were on the basement floor, and a short flight of steps led to the basement from the main floor, and the new customer had come down the stairs. He was a big, bluff, hearty man, with a cheerful manner and a rather red face, and Mr. Wellaway immediately remembered having met him sometime and somewhere. He nodded his head with the ready comradeship of a fellow-golfer.

“Hello!” exclaimed the new-comer, heartily. “Well! well! so you are at it too, are you? Got the golf fever?” Then to the clerk: “Got my brassy mended?”

“What name, sir?” asked the clerk.

“Didn’t leave any name,” said the big man. “It’s a mahogany brassy, the only real mahogany brassy you ever saw. I had it made to order,” he said to Mr. Wellaway, as the clerk hurried away to the repair department. “So you’ve taken up golf, have you? It’s a great game.”

“It is a great game,” said Mr. Wellaway; “but I’ve been at it a long time. Not that I’m much good at it.”

“No one is ever any good at it except the crack players,” said the other. “I’m as bad as they make ’em; but I love it. Where do you play?”

“Van Cortlandt,” said Mr. Wellaway.

“Ever play Westcote?”

“No,” said Mr. Wellaway. “I’ve been in the village, but I didn’t know there was a course there.”

“Best little course you ever saw,” said the hearty man. “Nine holes, but all beauties. I want you to play it sometime. Look here,” he added suddenly, “what have you got on for this afternoon?”

“Well, I was going up to Van Cortlandt,” said Mr. Wellaway, hesitatingly.

“That’s all off now! You’re coming out with me and have a try at our Westcote course. Yes, you are. You know I never take ‘No’ for an answer when I make up my mind. And, look here, we have just time to get a train.”

Mr. Wellaway’s host beckoned violently to the clerk.

“But my clubs—” protested Mr. Wellaway.

“That’s all right, too. Our professional can fit you out.”

“I ought to telephone my wife.”

“Oh, do it from the club.”

The temptation was too much for Mr. Wellaway. It was a hot day, and he knew the public links at Van Cortlandt would be crowded to the limit. He imagined the cool green of the little course at Westcote and let himself be persuaded, and in four minutes he was aboard the commuters’ train, being whirled under the East River.

It was not until the train was out of the tunnel and speeding along over the Long Island right of way that he felt the first qualm of uneasiness; but it was a very slight qualm. He was ashamed that he could not remember the name of his host. The man’s face was certainly familiar enough, and the man evidently knew Mr. Wellaway well enough to invite him to play golf, or Mr. Wellaway would not have been invited; but the name would not make itself known. But, after all, that was an easily remedied matter. The first friend they met would call Mr. Wellaway’s host by name.

At Woodside they left the electric train and boarded the steam train, but no one had spoken to Mr. Wellaway’s host on the platform. One or two men had nodded to him in a manner that showed they liked him, but none mentioned his name. Mr. Wellaway smiled. He would use a little very simple Sherlock Holmes work when the conductor came through for the fares.

Mr. Wellaway had noticed that his host used a fifty-trip ticket-book when the conductor asked for the fare on the electric, and now he waited until the new conductor tore the trip leaves from the book and returned the book to its owner.

“I see you use a book,” said Mr. Wellaway. “Do you find it cheaper than buying mileage?”

He held out his hand for the book. It was an ordinary gesture of curiosity, and his host surrendered the book.

“No, I don’t, not usually,” he said. “And a commutation-ticket is cheaper than either. Now, a commutation-ticket costs—”

He entered into the commuter’s usual closely computed average of cost per trip, and Mr. Wellaway nodded his acquiescence in the figures; but his mind was elsewhere. He read as though interested the face of the book, and then turned it over. There on the back, in a bold hand, under the contract the thrifty railroads make book-holders sign, was the signature, “Geo. P. Garris.” Mr. Wellaway stared at the name while he ransacked his memory to recall a George P. Garris. He not only could not recall a George P. Garris, but he could not remember ever having heard or seen the name of Garris. If the second “r” was meant for a “v,” the name might be “Garvis,” but that did not help. He could not recall a Garvis. At any rate, it was some satisfaction to know his host was George P. Garris or George P. Garvis. When and how he had met him would probably soon appear.

Drawn by Henry Raleigh

“‘LOOK HERE,’ HE ADDED SUDDENLY, ‘WHAT HAVE YOU GOT ON FOR THIS AFTERNOON?’”

“I see you are looking at that name,” said Mr. Wellaway’s host, “and I don’t wonder. Matter of fact, I have no business to have that book; but Garvis was a good fellow, and he needed the money, so I bought it of him when he left Westcote.”

“Oh,” said Mr. Wellaway, blankly, and then: “So that’s why you are not using a commutation-ticket this month.” He had to say something.

“That’s the reason,” said his host; “and this is Westcote.”

II

THE Westcote Country Club was all Mr. Wellaway’s host had boasted. The greens rolled away from the small club-house in graceful beauty, small groves of elms and maples studded the course, and picturesque stone walls and sodded bunkers provided sufficient hazards. Everything was as neat as a new pin. It was a sight to make any golfer happy, but when the station cab rolled up to the club-house door, Mr. Wellaway was not entirely happy. He was beginning to feel like an interloper. The more he studied the face of his host, the surer he became that he had no business to be a guest. As a word in print, when studied intensely, becomes a mere jumble of meaningless letters, so the face of his host grew less and less familiar, until Mr. Wellaway had decided his familiarity was with the type of face and not with this particular face. One thing alone comforted him: his host seemed to know Mr. Wellaway.

As they left the cab, Mr. Wellaway made a desperate effort to learn the name of his host; for he felt that if he did not learn it now he was in for a most unpleasant five minutes. Mr. Wellaway was a small, gentle little man, but he was almost rude in his insistence that he be permitted to pay the cabby.

“Yes, I will,” he insisted. “I certainly will. If you don’t let me, I’ll be downright angry. You paid my fare, and you offer me an afternoon’s sport; but I am going to pay this cabman.”

“But this is my party,” said his host.

“You go right into the club-house, and let me pay,” said Mr. Wellaway. “I want to do this, and you ought to let me.” With a laugh the host turned away. Mr. Wellaway fumbled in his pocket until he was alone with the cabman.

“What is the charge?” he asked.

“Quarter,” said the cabby, briefly.

“Here’s a dollar,” said Mr. Wellaway. “Now, can you tell me the name of that man—the man who drove up with me?”

“No, sir,” said the cabman; “I don’t know what his name is.”

“I just wanted to know,” said Mr. Wellaway.

When he entered the club-house his host was alone.

“You wanted to telephone,” he said to Mr. Wellaway. “There’s the booth. It’s a money-in-the-slot machine. I’ll get a greens-ticket and a bag of clubs for you while you are in there, and we will not lose any time. When you come out, come up to the locker-room.”

Mr. Wellaway entered the booth and closed the door. He called for his number and waited while the connection was made. It was hot in the booth with the door closed, but not for the world would Mr. Wellaway have opened it.

“Hello, is that you, Mary?” he asked, when he had dropped the requisite coins in the slot at the request of the central. “This is Edgar. Yes. I’m out at Westcote, on Long Island. I’m going to play golf. I met a friend, and he insisted that I come out here and try his course. I say I met a friend. Yes, a friend. An old acquaintance. He lives out here.”

For a few seconds Mr. Wellaway listened.

“No, listen!” said Mr. Wellaway. “I don’t know what his name is, but I’ll find out. I just met him, you know, and he asked me, and I couldn’t say, ‘Thank you, I’ll accept; but what is your name?’ I couldn’t say that, could I? When he knew me so well? Oh, nonsense, Mary! I tell you it’s a man.”

As he listened to what Mary had to say to this, Mr. Wellaway sighed deeply.

“No, it is not funny that I don’t know his name,” he said. “You know I can’t remember names, and I know thousands of men, and speak to them, and can’t recall their names. Listen! There’s no reason in the world for your jealousy to get stirred up. Not the least. I’ll know his name inside half an hour, and if you are going to act that way about it, I’ll telephone you the minute I learn it. Yes, I will! Well, that’s all right, too; but since you take that attitude, I’m going to telephone you. Good-by.” He waited half a minute for an answering “Good-by,” and then hung up the receiver softly. Mary’s jealousy was a real annoyance. Mr. Wellaway stepped out of the booth and wiped his forehead.

The small sitting-room of the club was deserted. In the adjacent butler’s pantry he could hear the steward at work, and above the low ceiling he could hear his host changing his shoes. On the bulletin-board, among the announcements of competitions and new rules, was a list of members posted for dues or house-accounts. It was a very short list, and Mr. Wellaway recognized none of the names. On the opposite wall was a framed list of the club-members, perhaps one hundred and twenty-five, and Mr. Wellaway ran his eye down them. Only one of the names was familiar, that of George C. Rogers, and the host was not Rogers, for Mr. Wellaway knew Rogers well. Not another name was even faintly familiar. Mr. Wellaway was still poring over the list when his host descended the stairs.

“I see,” said Mr. Wellaway, “that George Rogers is a member of the club.”

“That so?” said his host. “I don’t know him. I don’t know many of the fellows yet. Rankin and Mallows are putting me up for membership, but I’m playing on a temporary card until the next meeting of the board of governors. They say there’s no doubt I’ll be admitted; but I don’t take chances. I pay as I go until I’m a full member. When I’m in, I’ll sign checks like the rest of them; but until I am in, I’ll pay cash. Now, you run up and shuck your coat, if you want to, while I get you a bag of clubs and a greens-ticket. I left my locker open—Number 43.”

Mr. Wellaway ascended the stairs. All about the locker-room were the lockers, two high, and on each was the name of the holder. The door of 43 stood open, and Mr. Wellaway darted for it, and looked for the name of his host. There was no name on the locker.

Drawn by Henry Raleigh

“‘NOW, CAN YOU TELL ME THE NAME OF THAT MAN—THE MAN WHO DROVE UP WITH ME?’”

III

IN the locker was the usual accumulation of golfer’s odds and ends. A few badly scarred golf-balls lay on the floor, along with a pair of winter golf-shoes. A couple of extra clubs stood in one corner. A sweater hung from a hook, and from another hook hung the coat and waistcoat his host had just removed. From one pocket, the inside pocket, of the coat protruded the tops of three or four letters. Mr. Wellaway stared at the letters and perspired profusely. He had only to put out his hand and raise the letters partly from the pocket to know the name of his host. Then he could make an excuse to telephone his wife again. Assuredly there was nothing dishonorable in merely glancing at the address of the letters. But he stood very still and listened intently before he put out his hand. He could hear the soft tread of rubber-soled shoes on the floor below. Very gently Mr. Wellaway raised the letters from the pocket just as he heard the rubber-soled shoes touch the zinc treads of the stairs. He slid the letters back into the pocket in a panic, and jerked off his coat, but he had seen the address of the outermost letter. It was an unmailed letter, and it was addressed to “Mrs. Edgar Wellaway, Rimmon Apartments, West End Avenue, New York.”

“All ready!” said his host, cheerfully.

“Just a moment,” said Mr. Wellaway. He was taking his papers from his coat-pockets and putting them in the hip-pocket of his trousers. A man cannot be too careful.

IV

MR. WELLAWAY’S host used a Scotch-plaid golf-bag, without initials painted on it, and when the two men issued from the club-house the bag was leaning against the wall immediately under the outside bulletin-board. One list on the board was headed “Applications for Membership,” but there were no names entered later than a month and a half old, and all these had the word “Elected” written after them. When Mr. Wellaway caught sight of the other list his face brightened.

“My handicap is eighteen,” he said, looking through the list of members with the handicaps set opposite the names.

“Two better than mine,” said his host. “I play at twenty.”

“Twenty?” said Mr. Wellaway, running his finger up and down the handicap list.

“But I haven’t been given a handicap here yet,” said his host. “They don’t give you a handicap here until you are a member.”

“Oh,” said Mr. Wellaway, and turned away. He had no further interest in the handicap-list.

The course was clear for the entire first hole. Mr. Wellaway got away with a clean drive, but sliced his second into the rough, while his host sliced his first into a sand-pit, got out with a high niblick shot, and lay on the putting-green in three. Mr. Wellaway wasted a stroke chopping out of the rough, and put his ball on the green with a clean iron shot in four, close enough to putt out in one, making the hole a five. His host took two to hole out, doing another five, but winning the hole on his handicap, which gave him one stroke on the first hole. It was good golf, par golf, and Mr. Wellaway was elated. To do a hole in par on a strange course, after getting into the rough, was better golf than he knew how to play, and the loss of the hole after such playing made him only the more eager to play his best. He forgot Mary’s jealousy and his annoyance at not knowing the name of his host, and played golf as he had never played it before. The professional’s clubs seemed to work magic in his hands. At the ninth hole he was still one down, but his host did the first hole on the second round in eight, to Mr. Wellaway’s seven, and it was seesaw around the course the second time, with all even when eighteen holes had been played.

“I guess we can play it off before the storm hits us,” said Mr. Wellaway’s host, and for the first time Mr. Wellaway noticed the black clouds piling up in the west. They started the nineteenth hole with a rush of wind whirling the dust from the road across the course, and before they had walked to where their balls lay after their drives, the forward edge of the storm-clouds, low, ragged, and an ugly yellow, was full over them, and a glare of lightning, followed by a tremendous crash, blinded them both. Mr. Wellaway’s host threw his bag of clubs on the grass as though it were red hot, and started at a full run for the club-house. Mr. Wellaway followed him.

Except for the steward and his wife, the club-house was already deserted, the last automobile tearing down the club roadway as Mr. Wellaway reached the veranda. The lightning exceeded anything Mr. Wellaway had ever seen, and crash followed crash in deafening explosions, as though the electrical storm had centered near the club-house. A fair-sized hickory-tree, half dead from the depredations of the hickory-bark beetle, fell crashing across the sleeping-room annex of the club-house. For half an hour after the rain began to fall in sheets the lightning continued, while Mr. Wellaway and his host stared at the storm through the windows of the club-house; but about six o’clock the worst of the storm had passed on, and the rain had become a steady, heavy downpour.

“There’s one thing sure,” said Mr. Wellaway’s host: “there’s no going home for you to-night.”

“But I must go home,” said Mr. Wellaway.

“If you must, of course you must,” said his host; “but there would be no sense in going in this rain. We will have dinner right here. I suppose you can get us up a couple of chops or something?”

“Yes, sir,” said the steward, who had returned from a survey of his sleeping-quarters. “Chops or steak.”

“Then I’ll just ’phone my wife that I’ll not be home,” said Mr. Wellaway’s host, and he entered the telephone-booth. In a few minutes he came out again. “Can’t get central,” he said with annoyance. “The thing is either cut off or burned out. Probably a tree has fallen across the wires. I hate to drag you out through all this rain, but my wife will be distracted if I don’t get home. She’ll imagine I’m killed. You will have to come home with me and take pot-luck.”

Drawn by Henry Raleigh

“VERY GENTLY MR. WELLAWAY RAISED THE LETTERS FROM THE POCKET JUST AS HE HEARD THE RUBBER-SOLED SHOES TOUCH THE ZINC TREADS OF THE STAIRS”

“Why, that’s very kind of you,” said Mr. Wellaway, “but I could not think of it. My own wife will be worrying. I’ll just scoot through the rain to the station and get the first train home.”

“Of course, if you think best,” said the host. “We have to pass the station on the way to my house. But Sarah would be glad to put you up for the night.”

The station was not as far as Mr. Wellaway had feared, for it was not necessary to walk to the main station; there was another nearer, and they reached it a few minutes before a train for the city was due. Mr. Wellaway’s host walked to the ticket-window.

“I presume the train is late,” he asked.

“You presume exactly right,” said the young man in the ticket-office. “She’s not only late, but she’s going to be later before she ever gets to New York. The lightning struck the Bloom Street bridge, and the bridge went up like fireworks. It will be about twenty-four hours before anybody from this town gets to New York.”

“Twenty-four hours!” exclaimed Mr. Wellaway, aghast. “But I can telegraph.”

“If you can, you can do more than I can do,” said the young man. “I’ve tried, and I can’t do it, and I’m a professional.”

“Well!” said Mr. Wellaway.

“All right,” said his host. “Now there’s nothing for you to do but accept my invitation, and I make it doubly warm. Sarah will be delighted. You are the first guest we’ve had for the night since we moved out here. She’ll be delighted, I tell you. And so will I.”

Drawn by Henry Raleigh

“‘A TALL, THIN FELLOW, WITH SANDY SIDEBURNS. PROBABLY A FLOOR-WALKER IN SOME SHOP, WITH A PERPETUAL SMILE’”

“But I ought to go home,” insisted Mr. Wellaway.

“But you can’t go home,” laughed his host. “Come right along. Sarah will be delighted. She’s—she’s fond of company. Perhaps our ’phone will be working. You can telephone your wife from our house. Really, Sarah will be glad—she’ll be delighted, I tell you.”

So Mr. Wellaway accompanied his host. The house to which he was led was an average suburban dwelling, a frame house of ample size, with wide verandas, a goodly lawn, and the usual clumps of shrubbery. At the screen door the host paused.

“If you don’t mind,” he said, “I’ll let you wait here while I step inside and tell Sarah we are coming. Sarah is the most hospitable of women, and that’s the reason I want to tell her. She’ll welcome you with open arms, but—you know how these hospitable women are, don’t you? They like a minute or two to get into a more than casual mood. It will be all right. Only a minute.”

“Certainly,” said Mr. Wellaway, feeling rather uncomfortable, and his host opened the door with a latch-key and entered. If Mr. Wellaway could have heard what passed inside that door, he would have turned and run.

“Darling!” exclaimed his host’s wife when she saw him. “How wet you are! Go right up-stairs and get into a hot bath this minute! You’ll die of cold!”

“In a minute, Sarah,” said her husband; “but, first, I’ve got a man out there. He’s going to stay for dinner and sleep here.”

“Oh!” exclaimed Sarah, letting her mind jump to her larder. “But we didn’t expect any one. Really I don’t know. Perhaps I can make what I have do. Is—is it any one important?”

“Don’t know,” said Mr. Wellaway’s host, hastily. “I’ll tell you all about it when I’m dressing. I don’t know the fellow’s name, but he knows me as well as I know you. I ought to know his name as well as I know yours, but I don’t. I met him somewhere, and I remember he was a good fellow. We’ll get his name out of him somehow before he’s in the house very long, but, for Heaven’s sake! don’t let him know I don’t know. He may be some one important. He looks as if he might be somebody. I’ll bring him in. Don’t give me away.”

“But you don’t know who he is. He may be a thief—”

“Hope not. I can’t let him stand out there any longer, anyway. Be pleasant to him.”

He threw open the door.

“Come right in!” he exclaimed heartily. “I’ve bearded the lioness, and told her the story of our lives. I don’t believe you have met before.”

“I have not had that pleasure,” said Mr. Wellaway, making his best bow, “but I am delighted, although I’m sorry to come unannounced.”

“Announced or unannounced, you might know you are always welcome,” said Sarah, charmingly. “And the first thing is to get on some dry clothes. You’ll both of you take cold. Run along, and I’ll see what we have for dinner.”

The garments given him by his host did not fit Mr. Wellaway specially well. They were considerably too large, but he was glad to get into anything dry. What dissatisfied him with them more than aught else was that they were the sort of garments of which the newspapers remark, “There were no marks of identification.” The spare room into which he was put offered no more aid. Three or four recent magazines lay on the small table, but bore no names except their own titles. For the rest, the spare room was evidently a brand-new spare room, fresh from the maker. For purposes of identification it might as well have been a hotel bedroom. Mr. Wellaway dressed hastily and hurried down-stairs.

The parlor, to the right of the stairs, stood open, and Mr. Wellaway entered. A large fireplace occupied one end of the room, and the furnishings and pictures bespoke a home of fair means, but no great wealth. Magazines lay on a console table, but what attracted Mr. Wellaway was a book-case. The case was well filled with books in good bindings, and Mr. Wellaway stepped happily across the carpet and laid his hand on the book-case door. It was locked.

V

MR. WELLAWAY’S host and his host’s wife descended the stairs together just as the maid issued from the dining-room to announce dinner, and once seated, the conversation turned to the storm, to the utter disruption of the telephone service, and to the game of golf the two men had been unable to finish. In the midst of the conversation Mr. Wellaway studied the monogram on the handles of his fork and spoon. It was one of those triumphs of monogrammery that are so beautiful as to be absolutely illegible. The name on the butter-knife handle was legible, however. It was “Sarah.”

The soup had been consumed, and the roast carved when Mr. Wellaway’s host looked at his wife and raised his eyebrows. She smiled in acknowledgment of the signal.

“Don’t you think some names are supremely odd?” she asked Mr. Wellaway. “My husband was telling me of one that came under his notice to-day. What was it, dear?”

“Oh, I shouldn’t have noticed it but for the circumstances,” said Mr. Wellaway’s host; “but it was a rather ridiculous name for a human being. Can you imagine any one carrying around the name of Wellaway?”

Mr. Wellaway gasped.

“Imagine being a Wellaway!” said Sarah. “Isn’t it an inhospitable name? It seems to suggest ‘Good-by; I’m glad you’re gone.’ Doesn’t it?”

“I can see the man with my mind’s eye,” said Mr. Wellaway’s host. “A tall, thin fellow, with sandy sideburns. Probably a floor-walker in some shop, with a perpetual smile.”

“But tell him the rest,” said Sarah, chuckling.

“Oh, the rest—that’s too funny!” said Mr. Wellaway’s host. “I had a letter this morning from this Mrs. Wellaway—”

Mr. Wellaway turned very red and moved uneasily in his chair.

“I ought to tell you that—that I know Mrs. Wellaway,” he stammered. “I—I know her quite well. In fact—”

“Then you’ll appreciate this,” said his host, merrily. “You know the business I’m in. Every one knows it. So you can imagine how I laughed when I read this letter.”

From the inside pocket of his coat Mr. Wellaway’s host took a letter. He removed the envelop and placed it on the table, address down.

“Listen to this,” he said: “‘Dear Sir: Only the greatest anguish of mind induces me to write to you and ask your assistance. It may be that I am the victim of an insane jealousy, but I fear the explanation is not so innocent. I distrust my husband, and anything is better than the pangs of uncertainty I now suffer. If your time is not entirely taken, I wish, therefore, to engage you to make certain that my fears are baseless or well founded. Please consider the matter as most confidential, for I am only addressing you because I know that when a matter is put in your hands it never receives the slightest publicity. Yours truly, Mrs. Edgar Wellaway.’”

When he had read the letter, Mr. Wellaway’s host lay back in his chair and laughed until the tears ran from his eyes, and his wife joined him, and their joy was so great they did not notice that Mr. Wellaway turned from red to white and choked on the bit of food he had attempted to swallow. When they observed him, he was rapidly turning purple, and with one accord they sprang from their chairs and began thumping him vigorously on the back. In a minute they had thumped so vigorously that Mr. Wellaway was pushing them away with his hands. He was still gasping for breath when they half led, half carried him to the parlor and laid him on a lounge.

“By George!” said his host, self-accusingly, “I shouldn’t have read you that letter. But I didn’t know you would think it so funny as all that. Do you feel all right now?”

“I feel—I feel—” gasped Mr. Wellaway. He could not express his feelings.

“Well, it was funny, writing that to me, of all people, wasn’t it?” said Mr. Wellaway’s host. “‘Not the slightest publicity.’ I suppose she looked up the name in the telephone directory, and got the wrong address. I know the fellow she was writing to. Same name as mine. Same middle initial. Think you can finish that dinner now?”

“No, thank you,” said Mr. Wellaway. “I think I’d like to rest here.”

“Just as you wish,” said his host. “Hello! There’s the telephone bell. You can ’phone your wife now, if you wish.”

“No, thank you,” said Mr. Wellaway, meekly. “I’ll not. It’s of no importance—no importance whatever.”

VI

“WELL, what do you think!” exclaimed Mr. Wellaway’s host’s wife a few minutes later, as she entered the parlor. “Of all the remarkable things! You would never guess it. Who do you think just called me on the ’phone? That Mrs. Wellaway!”

“No!” exclaimed Mr. Wellaway’s host, and Mr. Wellaway sat straight up on the lounge.

“But she did,” said Sarah. “And she’s hunting that distrusted husband! She telephoned the country club, and the steward told her there had been no strangers there except your guest, so she telephoned here! Imagine the assurance of the—”

She stopped short and stared at Mr. Wellaway. He was going through all the symptoms of intense pain accompanied by loss of intelligence. Then he asked feebly,

“What—what did you tell her?”

“I told her he wasn’t here, and hadn’t been here, of course,” said Mr. Wellaway’s hostess, “and that we did not know any such man, and that I didn’t believe he had come to Westcote at all, and that if I had a husband I couldn’t trust, I’d keep better track of him than she did.”

“Did you—did you tell her all that?” asked Mr. Wellaway with anguish.

They stared at him in dismay.

“See here,” said his host, suddenly, “are you Mr. Wellaway?”

For answer Mr. Wellaway dropped back on the lounge and covered his face with his hands.

“Now, I’ll never, never be able to make Mary believe I was here,” he said, and then he groaned miserably.

VII

“OH, I’m so sorry!” said Mr. Wellaway’s hostess in real distress. “We were absolutely unaware, Mr. Wellaway. We meant no harm. Roger did not know your name. But you can fix it all right. You can telephone Mrs. Wellaway that you are here. Telephone her immediately.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Wellaway. “I’ll do that. That’s what I must do,” and he went up the stairs to the telephone. He returned in ten minutes and found his host and hostess sitting opposite each other, staring at each other with sober faces. They looked at him eagerly as he entered. His face showed no relief.

“She says,” he said, “she says she don’t believe I’m here. She says I could telephone from anywhere, and say I was anywhere else. She says she just telephoned here, and knows I’m not here. And then she asked me where I was telephoning from, and—”

Mr. Wellaway broke down and hid his face in his hands.

“And I didn’t know where I was telephoning from!” he moaned. “I didn’t know the street or the house number, or—or the name!”

“You didn’t know the name!” cried Mr. Wellaway’s host. “You didn’t know my name was Murchison?”

“Murchison?” said Mr. Wellaway, blankly. “Not the—not the Murchison? Not Roger P. Murchison, the advertising agent, the publicity man?”

“Of course,” said Mr. Wellaway’s host. For a full minute Mr. Wellaway stared at Mr. Murchison.

“I know,” said Mr. Wellaway. “You eat at the Fifth Avenue! You sit by the palm just to the left of the third window every noon.”

“By George!” exclaimed Mr. Murchison. “I knew your face was familiar. And you sit at the end table right by the first window. Why, I’ve seen you there every day for a year.”

“Of course you have,” said Mr. Wellaway, cheerfully. “That explains everything. It makes it all as simple as—” His face fell suddenly. “But it doesn’t make it any easier about Mary.”

Mr. Murchison might have said that Mary was none of his concern, but he creased his brow in thought.

“Sarah,” he said at length, “run up-stairs and telephone Mrs. Wellaway that her husband is here. Tell her he means to stay over Sunday, and that he wants her to hire a taxicab and come out immediately and stay over Sunday. Tell her our game of golf was a tie, and I insist that Mr. Wellaway play off the tie to-morrow afternoon.”

Mrs. Murchison disappeared.

“And now,” said Mr. Murchison, genially, “you know my name, and you know my business, and I know your name, and everything is all right, and I’m mighty glad to know you as long as you are not a floor-walker. Oh, pardon me!” he added quickly, “you are not a floor-walker, are you? You didn’t say what your business was.”

Mr. Wellaway blushed.

“Names,” he said. “I’m a genealogist. My business is looking up names.”

Drawn by Henry Raleigh

“MR. WELLAWAY’S HOST THREW HIS BAG OF CLUBS ON THE GRASS AS THOUGH IT WERE RED HOT, AND STARTED AT A FULL RUN FOR THE CLUB-HOUSE”

STELLA MARIS

BY WILLIAM J. LOCKE

Author of “The Beloved Vagabond,” “The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne,” “Septimus,” “The Glory of Clementina,” etc.

CHAPTER XXII

THEY found him lying on the sofa, a pitiable object, the whole of his head from the back of his neck to his eyebrows swathed in bandages. His clothes were mere limp and discolored wrappings. They looked as though they had been wet through, for the red of his tie had run into his shirt-front and collar. The coarse black sprouts on pallid cheek and upper lip gave him an appearance of indescribable grime. His eyes were sunken and feverish.

Unity uttered a little cry as she saw him, but checked it quickly, and threw herself on her knees by his side.

“Thank God you’re alive!”

He put his hand on her head.

“I’m all right,” he said faintly; “but you shouldn’t have come. That’s why I didn’t go straight home. I didn’t want to frighten you. I’m a ghastly sight, and I should have scared your aunt out of her wits.”

“But how, in Heaven’s name, man,” said Herold, “did you get into this state?”

“Something hit me over the head, and I spent the night in rain and sea-water on the rocks.”

“On the rocks? Where? At Southcliff?”

“Yes,” said John, “at Southcliff. I was a fool to go down, but I’ve been a fool all my life, so a bit more folly doesn’t matter.” He closed his eyes. “Give me a drink, Wallie—some brandy.”

Herold went into the dining-room, which adjoined the library, and returned with decanter, syphon, and glasses. He poured out a brandy and soda for John and watched him drink it; then he realized that he, too, would be the better for stimulant. With an abstemious man’s idea of taking brandy as medicine, he poured out for himself an extravagant dose, mixed a little soda-water with it, and gulped it down.

“That’ll do me good,” said John; but on saying it he fell to shivering, despite the heat of the summer afternoon.

“You’ve caught a chill,” cried Unity. She counseled home and bed at once.

“Not yet,” he murmured. “It was all I could do to get here. Let me rest for a couple of hours. I shall be all right. I’m not going to bed,” he declared with sudden irritability; “I’ve never gone to bed in the daytime in my life. I’ve never been ill, and I’m not going to be ill now. I’m only stiff and tired.”

“You’ll go to bed here right away,” said Herold.

John protested. Herold insisted.

“Those infernal clothes—you must get them off at once,” said he. John being physically weak, his natural obstinacy gave way. Unity saw the sense of the suggestion; but it was giving trouble.

“Not a bit,” said Herold. “There’s a spare bedroom. John can have mine, which is aired. Mrs. Ripley will see to it.”

He went out to give the necessary orders. Unity busied herself with unlacing and taking off the stiffened boots. Herold returned, beckoned to Unity, and whispered that he had telephoned for a doctor. Then he said to John:

“How are you feeling, dear old man?”

“My head’s queer, devilish queer. Something fell on it last night and knocked me out of time. It was raining, and I was sheltering under the cliff on the beach, the other side of the path, where you can see the lights of the house, when down came the thing. I must have recovered just before dawn; for I remember staggering about in a dazed way. I must have taken the road round the cliff, thinking it the upper road, and missed my footing and fallen down. I came to about nine this morning, on the rocks, the tide washing over my legs. I’m black and blue all over. Wonder I didn’t break my neck. But I’m tough.”

“Thank God you’re alive!” said Unity again.

He passed his hands over his eyes. “Yes. You must have thought all manner of things, dear. I didn’t realize till Ripley told me that I hadn’t let you know. I went out, meaning to catch the 7:15 and come back by the last train. But this thing knocked all memory out of me. I’m sorry.”

Herold looked in bewilderment at the stricken giant. Even now he had not accounted for the lunatic and almost tragic adventure. What was he doing on the beach in the rain? What were the happenings subsequent to his recovering consciousness at nine o’clock?

“Does it worry you to talk?” he asked.

“No. It did at first—I mean this morning. But I’m all right now—nearly all right. I’d like to tell you. I picked myself up, all over blood, a devil of a mess, and crawled to the doctor’s—not Ransome; the other chap, Theed. He’s the nearest; and, besides, I didn’t want to go to Ransome. I don’t think any one saw me. Theed took me in and fixed me up and dried my clothes. Of course he wanted to drag me to the Channel House, but I wouldn’t let him. I made him swear not to tell them. I don’t want them to know. Neither of you must say anything. He also tried to fit me out. But, you know, he’s about five foot nothing; it was absurd. As soon as I could manage it, he stuck me in a train, much against his will, and I came on here. That’s all.”

“If only I had known!” said Herold. “I was down there all the morning.”

“You?”

“I had a letter from Julia, summoning me.”

“So had I.” He closed his eyes again for a moment. Then he asked, “How is Stella?”

“I had a long talk with her. I may have straightened things out a bit. She’ll come round. There’s no cause for worry for the present. Julia is a good soul, but she has no sense of proportion, and where Stella is concerned she exaggerates.”

When a man has had rocks fall on his head, and again has fallen on his head upon rocks, it is best to soothe what is left of his mind. And after he had partly soothed it,—a very difficult matter, first, because it was in a troubled and despairing state, and, secondly, because John, never having taken Unity into his confidence, references had to be veiled,—he satisfied the need of another brandy and soda. Then Ripley came in to announce that the room was ready.

“Ripley and I will see to him,” said Herold to Unity. “You had better go and fetch him a change of clothes and things he may want.”

“Mayn’t I wait till the doctor comes?” she pleaded.

“Of course, my dear. There’s no hurry,” said Herold.

The two men helped Risca to his feet, and, taking him to the bedroom, undressed him, clothed him in warm pajamas, and put him into the bed, where a hot-water bottle diffused grateful heat. Herold had seen the livid bruises on his great, muscular limbs.

“Any one but you,” said he, with forced cheeriness, “would have been smashed to bits, like an egg.”

“I tell you I’m tough,” John growled. “It’s only to please you that I submit to this silly foolery of going to bed.”

As soon as Ripley was dismissed, he called Herold to his side.

“I would like to tell you everything, Wallie. I couldn’t in the other room. Unity, poor child, knows nothing at all about things. Naturally. I had been worried all the afternoon. I thought I saw her—you know—hanging about outside the office. It was just before I met you at the club. I didn’t tell you,—perhaps I ought to,—but that was why I was so upset. But you’ll forgive me. You’ve always forgiven me. Anyway, I thought I saw her. It was just a flash, for she, if it was she, was swallowed up in the traffic of Fleet Street. After leaving the club, I went back to the office—verification in proofs of something in Baxter’s article. I found odds and ends to do. Then I went home, and Julia’s letter lay on my table. I’ve been off my head of late, Wallie. For the matter of that, I’m still off it. I’ve hardly slept for weeks. I found Julia’s letter. I looked at my watch. There was just time to catch the 7:15. I ran out, jumped into a taxi, and caught it just as it was starting. But as I passed by a third-class carriage,—in fact, I realized it only after I had gone several yards beyond; one rushes, you know,—I seemed to see her face—those thin lips and cold eyes—framed in the window. The guard pitched me into a carriage. I looked out for her at all the stations. At Tring Bay the usual crowd got out. I didn’t see her. No one like her got out at Southcliff. What’s the matter, Wallie?” He broke off suddenly.

“Nothing, man; nothing,” said Herold, turning away and fumbling for his cigarette-case.

“You looked as if you had seen a ghost. It was I who saw the ghost.” He laughed. And the laugh, coming from the haggard face below the brow-reaching white bandage, was horrible.

“Your brain was playing you tricks,” said Herold. “You got to Southcliff. What happened?”

“I felt a fool,” said John. “Can’t you see what a fool a man feels when he knows he has played the fool?”

Bit by bit he revealed himself. At the gate of the Channel House he reflected. He had not the courage to enter. Stella would be up and about. He resolved to wait until she went to bed. He wandered down to the beach. The rain began to fall, fine, almost imperceptible. The beacon-light in the west window threw a vanishing shaft into the darkness.

“We saw it once—don’t you remember?—years ago when you gave her the name—Stellamaris. I sat like a fool and watched the window. How long I don’t know. My God! Wallie, you don’t know what it is to be shaken and racked by the want of a woman—”

“By love for a woman, you mean,” said Herold.

“It’s the same thing. At last I saw her. She stood defined in the light. She had changed. I cried out toward her like an idiot,”—the rugged, grim half face visible beneath the bandage was grotesque, a parody of passion,—“and I stayed there, watching, after she had gone away. How long I don’t know. It was impossible to ring at the door and see Oliver and Julia.”

He laughed again. “You must have some sense of humor, my dear man. Fancy Oliver and Julia! What could I have said to them? What could they have said to me? I sat staring up at her window. The rain was falling. Everything was still. It was night. You know how quiet everything is there. Then I seemed to hear footsteps and I turned, and a kind of shape—a woman’s—disappeared. I know I was off my head, but I began to think. I had a funny experience once—I’ve never told you. It was the day she came out of prison. I sat down in St. James’s Park and fell half asleep,—that sort of dog sleep one has when one’s tired,—and I thought I saw her going for Stella—Stella in her bed at the Channel House—going to strangle her. This came into my mind, and then something hit me,—a chunk of overhanging cliff loosened by the rain, I suppose,—and, as I’ve told you, it knocked me out. But it’s devilish odd that she should be mixed up in it.”

“As I said, your brain was playing you tricks,” said Herold, outwardly calm; but within himself he shuddered to his soul. The woman was like a foul spirit hovering unseen about those he loved.

Presently the doctor, a young man with a cheery face, came in and made his examination. There was no serious damage done. The only thing to fear was the chill. If the patient’s temperature went down in the morning, he could quite safely be moved to his own home. For the present rest was imperative, immediate sleep desirable. He wrote a prescription, and with pleasant words went away. Then Unity, summoned to the room, heard the doctor’s comforting opinion.

“I’ll be with you to-morrow,” said John.

“You don’t mind leaving him to Mrs. Ripley and me just for one night?” asked Herold.

“He’s always safe with you,” Unity replied, her eyes fixed not on him, but on John Risca. “Good-by, Guardian dear.”

John drew an arm from beneath the bedclothes and put it round her thin shoulders. “Good-by, dear. Forgive me for giving you such a fright, and make my peace with auntie. You’ll be coming back with my things, won’t you?”

“Of course; but you’ll be asleep then.”

“I shouldn’t wonder,” said John.

She made him cover up his arm again and tucked the bedclothes snugly about him, her finger-tips lingering by his cheeks.

“I’ll leave you, too. Try and get to sleep,” said Herold.

They went together out of the room and back to the library.

“Has he said anything more?”

He stood before her trembling all over.

“What is the matter?”

He burst into an uncontrollable cry. “It’s that hellish woman again! He saw her spying on him outside his office, he saw her in a railway carriage on the train he took. Because she disappeared each time, he thinks it was an hallucination; and somehow he was aware of her presence just before the piece of rock came down.”

Unity’s face beneath the skimpy hair and rubbishy tam-o’-shanter was white and strained.

“She threw it. I knew she threw it.”

“So do I. He saw her. She disappeared as she did that night in the fog. A woman like that isn’t human. She has the power of disappearing at will. You can’t measure her cunning.”

“What did he go down for?”

He told her. Unity’s lips twitched.

“And he sat there in the rain just looking at her window?”

She put out her hand. “Good-by, Mr. Herold. When you see Miss Stellamaris, you’ll tell her I’m a good girl—in that way, you know—and that I love her. She has been a kind of beautiful angel to me—has always been with me. It’s funny; I can’t explain. But you understand. If you’d only let her see that, I’d be so happy—and perhaps she’d be happier.”

“I’ll do my utmost,” said Herold.

He accompanied her down-stairs, and when she had gone, he returned to the library and walked about. The horror of the woman was upon him. He drank another brandy and soda. After a while Ripley came in with a soiled card on a tray. He looked at it stupidly—“Mr. Edwin Travers”—and nodded.

“Shall I show the gentleman up?”

He nodded again, thinking of the woman.

When the visitor came in he vaguely recognized him as a broken-down actor, a colleague of early days. As in a dream he bade the man sit down, and gave him cigarettes and drink, and heard with his outer ears an interminable tale of misfortune. At the end of it he went to his desk and wrote out a check, which he handed to his guest.

“I can’t thank you, old man. I don’t know how to. But as soon as I can get an engagement—hello, old man,” he cried, glancing at the check, “you’ve made a funny mistake—the name!”

Herold took the slip of paper, and saw that he had made the sum payable not to Edwin Travers, but to Louisa Risca. It was a shock, causing him to brace his faculties. He wrote out another check, and the man departed.

He went softly into John’s room and found him sleeping peacefully.

Soon afterward Ripley announced that dinner was ready. It was past six o’clock.

“Great Heavens!” he cried aloud, “I’ve got to play to-night.”

After a hurried wash he went into the dining-room and sat down at the table, but the sight and smell of food revolted him. He swallowed a few mouthfuls of soup; the rest of the dinner he could not touch. The horror of the woman had seized him again. He drank some wine, pushed back his chair, and threw down his table-napkin.

“I don’t want anything else. I’m going for a walk. I’ll see you later at the theater.”

The old-fashioned Kensington street, with its double line of Queen Anne houses slumbering in the afternoon sunshine, was a mellow blur before his eyes. Whither he was going he knew: what he was going to do he knew not. The rigid self-control of the day, relaxed at times, but always kept within grip, had at last escaped him. Want of food and the unaccustomed drink had brought about an abnormal state of mind. He was aware of direction, aware, too, of the shadow-shapes of men and women passing him by, of traffic in the roadway. He walked straight, alert, his gait and general demeanor unaffected, his outer senses automatically alive. He walked down the narrow, shady Church Street, and paused for a moment or two by the summer greenery of Kensington Churchyard until there was an opportunity of crossing the High Street, now at the height of its traffic. He strode westward past the great shops, a lithe man in the full vigor of his manhood. Here and there a woman lingering in front of displays of millinery recognized the well-known actor and nudged her companion.

The horror within him had grown to a consuming thing of flame. Instead of the quiet thoroughfares down which he turned, he saw picture after shuddering picture—the woman and Stellamaris, the woman and John Risca. She attacked soul as well as body. The pictures took the forms of horrible grotesques. Within, his mind worked amazingly, like a machine escaped from human control and running with blind relentlessness. He had said years ago that he would pass through his hell-fire. He was passing through it now.

The destroyer must be kept from destroying or be destroyed. Which of these should be accomplished through his agency? One or the other. Of one thing he was certain, with an odd, undoubting certainty: that he would find her, and finding her, that he would let loose upon her the wrath of God. She should be chained up forever or he would strangle her. Shivering thrills diabolically delicious ran through him at the thought. Supposing he strangled her as he would a mad cat? That were better. She would be out of the world. He would be fulfilling his destiny of sacrifice. For the woman he loved and for the man he loved why should he not do this thing? What but a legal quibble could call it murder? Stellamaris’s words rang in his ears: “You say you love me like that?”

“Yes, I love you like that. I love you like that,” he cried below his breath as he walked on.

He knew where she lived, the name by which she passed. John had told him many times. There were few things in John’s life he did not know. He knew of the Bences, of Mrs. Oscraft, the fluffy-haired woman who lived in the flat below. Amelia Mansions, he was aware, were in the Fulham Road. But when he reached that thoroughfare, he stood dazed and irresolute, realizing that he did not know which way to turn. A passing postman gave him the necessary information. The trivial contact with the commonplace restored in a measure his mental balance. He went on. By Brompton Cemetery he felt sick and faint and clung for a minute or two to the railings. He had eaten nothing since early morning, and then only a scrap of bacon and toast; he had drunk brandy and wine, and he had lived through a day in which the maddening stress of a lifetime had been concentrated.

One or two passers-by stared at him, for he was as white as a sheet. A comfortable, elderly woman, some small shopkeeper’s wife, addressed him. Was he ill? Could she do anything for him? The questioning was a lash. He drew himself up, smiled, raised his hat, thanked her courteously. It was nothing. He went on, loathing himself as men do when the flesh fails beneath the whip of the spirit.

He was well now, his mind clear. He was going to the woman. He would save those he loved. If it were necessary to kill her, he would kill her. On that point his brain worked with startling clarity. If he did not kill her, she would be eventually killed by John; for John, he argued, could not remain in ignorance forever. If John killed her, he would be hanged. Much better that he, Walter Herold, whom Stellamaris did not love, should be hanged than John—much better. And what the deuce did it matter to anybody whether he were hanged or not? He laughed at the elementary logic of the proposition. The solution of all the infernally intricate problems of life is, if people only dared face it, one of childish simplicity. It was laughable. Walter Herold laughed aloud in the Fulham Road.

It was so easy, so uncomplicated. He would see her. He would do what he had to do. Then he would take a taxicab to the theater. He must play to-night. Of course he would. There was no reason why he shouldn’t. Only he hoped that, Leonora Gurney wouldn’t worry him. He would manage to avoid her during that confounded wait in the first act, when she always tried to get him to talk. He would play the part all right. He was a man and not a stalk of wet straw. After the performance he would give himself up. No one would be inconvenienced. He would ask the authorities to hurry on matters and give him a short shrift and a long rope; but the length of the rope didn’t matter these days, when they just broke your neck. There was no one dependent on him. His brothers and sisters, many years his seniors,—he had not seen them since he was a child,—had all gone after their father’s death to an uncle in New Zealand. They were there still. The mother, who had remained with him, the Benjamin, in England, had died while he was at Cambridge. He was free from family-ties. And women? He was free, too. There had only been one woman in his life, the child of cloud and sea foam.

Stellamaris, star of the sea, now dragged through the mire of mortal things! She should go back. She should go back to her firmament, shining down upon, and worshiped by, the man she loved. And he, God!—he should be spared the terrifying agony of it.

Thus worked the brain which Walter Herold told himself was crystal clear.

It was clear enough, however, to follow the postman’s directions. He took the turning indicated and found the red-brick block, with the name “Amelia Mansions” carved in stone over the entrance door. The by-street seemed to be densely populated. He went into the entrance-hall and mechanically looked at the list of names. Mrs. Rawlings’s name was followed by No. 7. He mounted the stairs. On the landing of No. 7 there were a couple of policemen, and the flat door was open, and the length of the passage was visible. Herold was about to enter when they stopped him.

“You can’t go in, sir.”

“I want Mrs. Rawlings.”

“No one can go in.”

He stood confused, bewildered. An elderly, buxom woman, with a horrified face, who just then happened to come out of a room near the doorway, saw him and came forward.

“You are Mr. Herold,” she asked.

“Yes; I want to see Mrs. Rawlings.”

“It’s all right, constable,” she said in a curiously cracked voice. “Let this gentleman pass. Come in, sir. I am Mrs. Bence.”

He entered the passage. She spoke words to him the import of which he did not catch. His brain was perplexed by the guard of policemen and the open flat. She led him a short distance down the passage. He stumbled over a packed kit-bag. She threw open a door. He crossed the threshold of a vulgarly furnished drawing-room, the electric lights turned on despite the daylight of the July evening. There were four figures in the room. Standing and scribbling in note-books were two men, one in the uniform of a sergeant of police, the other in a frock-coat, obviously a medical man. On the floor were two women, both dead. One was John Risca’s wife, and the other was Unity. And near by them lay a new, bright revolver.

CHAPTER XXIII

IN after time Herold’s memory of that disastrous night and the succeeding days was that of a peculiarly lucid nightmare in which he seemed to have acted without volition or consciousness of motive. He ate, dressed, drove through the streets on unhappy missions, gave orders, directions, consoled, like an automaton, and sometimes slept exhaustedly. So it seemed to him, looking back. He spared John the first night of misery. The man with his bandaged head slept like a log, and Herold did not wake him. All that could be done he himself had done. It was better for John to gather strength in sleep to face the tragedy on the morrow. And when the morrow came, and Herold broke the news to him, the big man gave way under the shock, and became gentle, and obeyed Herold like a child. Thereafter, for many days, he sat for the hour together with his old aunt, curiously dependent on her; and she, through her deep affection for him, grew singularly silent and practical.

In her unimaginative placidity lay her strength. She mourned for Unity as for her own flesh and blood; but the catastrophe did not shake her even mind, and when John laid his head in her lap and sobbed, all that was beautiful in the woman flowed through the comforting tips of her helpless fingers.

From Herold he learned the unsuspected reason of Unity’s crime and sacrifice; and from Unity, too, for a poor little pencil scrawl found in her pocket and addressed to him told him of her love and of her intention to clear the way for his happiness. And when the inquest was over and Unity’s body was brought to Kilburn and laid in its coffin in her little room, he watched by it in dumb stupor of anguish.

Herold roused him now and then. Action—nominal action at least—had to be taken by him as surviving protagonist of the tragedy. The morning after the deed the newspapers shrieked the news, giving names in full, raking up memories of the hideous case. They dug, not deep, for motive, and found long-smoldering vengeance. Unity was blackened. John responded to Herold’s lash. This must not be. Unity must not go to her grave in public dishonor; truth must be told. So at the inquest, John, wild, uncouth, with great strips of sticking-plaster on his head, told truth, and gave a romantic story to a hungry press. It was hateful to lay bare the inmost sacredness and the inmost suffering of his soul to the world’s cold and curious gaze, but it had to be done. Unity’s name was cleared. When he sat down by Herold’s side, the latter grasped his hand, and it was clammy and cold, and he shook throughout his great frame.

Then Herold, driven to mechanical action, as it seemed to him afterward, by a compelling force, dragged John to an inquiry into the evil woman’s life. It was Mrs. Oscraft, the full-blown, blowzy bookmaker’s wife, the woman’s intimate associate for many years, who gave the necessary clue. Horrified by the discovery of the identity of her friend and by the revelation of further iniquities, she lost her head when the men sternly questioned her. She had used her intimacy with Mrs. Risca to cover from her own husband an intrigue of many years’ standing. In return, Mrs. Risca had confessed to an intrigue of her own, and demanded, and readily obtained, Mrs. Oscraft’s protection. The women worked together. They were inseparable in their outgoings and incomings, but abroad each went her separate way. That was why, ignorant of the truth, Mrs. Oscraft had lied loyally when John Risca had burst into her flat long ago. She had thought she was merely shielding her fellow-sinner from the wrath of a jealous husband. Thus for years, with her cunning, Mrs. Risca had thrown dust in the eyes both of her friend and of the feared and hated wardress whom John had set over her. Under the double cloak she had used her hours of liberty to carry out the set, relentless purpose of her life. To spy on him with exquisite craft had been her secret passion, to strike when the time came the very meaning of her criminal existence.

“And for the last two or three years she gave no trouble and was as gentle as a lamb, so how could I suspect?” Mrs. Bence lamented.

“It’s all over,” said John, stupidly; “it’s all over. Nothing matters now.”

To Herold, in after time, the memories of these days were as those of the doings of another man in his outer semblance. His essential self had been the crazy being who had marched through the mellow Kensington streets with fantastic dreams of murder in his head. At the sight of Unity and the woman lying ghastly on the floor something seemed to snap in his brain, and all the cloudy essence that was he vanished, and a perfect mechanism took its place. When John with wearisome reiteration said: “God bless you, Wallie! God knows what I should have done without you,” it was hard to realize that he had done anything deserving thanks. He was inclined to regard himself—when he had a fugitive moment to regard himself—with abhorrence. He had talked; Unity had acted. And deep down in his soul, only once afterward in his life to be confessed, dwelt an awful remorse for his responsibility in the matter of Unity’s death. But in simple fact no man in times of great convulsion knows himself. He looks back on the man who acted and wonders. The man, surviving the wreck of earthquake, if he be weak, lies prone and calls on God and man to help him; if he be strong, he devotes the intensity of his faculties to the work of rescue, of clearing up debris, of temporary reconstruction, and has no time for self-analysis. It is in reality the essential man in his vigor and courage and nobility and disdain who acts, and the bruised and shattered about him who profit by his help look rightly upon him as a god.

It was only after John had visited the house of death, where, according to law, the bodies both of slayer and slain had to lie, and had seen the pinched, common face, swathed in decent linen, of the girl who for his sake had charged her soul with murder and taken her own life, and after he had driven away, stunned with grief and carrying with him, at his feet in the taxicab, the useless kit-bag packed by the poor child with Heaven knows what idea of its getting to its destination, and had staggered to the comfort of the foolish old lady’s outstretched arms and received her benediction, futilely spoken, divinely unspoken—it was only then that, raising haggard eyes, all the more haggard under the brow-reaching bandage he still wore, he asked the question:

“What about Stella? She is bound to learn.”

“I wrote to her last night,” said Herold. “I prepared her for the shock as best I could.”

A gleam of rational thought flitted across John Risca’s mind.

“You remembered her at such a time, with all you had to do? You’re a wonderful man, Wallie. No one else would have done it.”

“Are you in a fit state of mind,” said Herold, “to understand what has happened? I tried to tell you this morning,”—as he had done fitfully,—“but it was no use. You grasped nothing.”

“Go on now,” said John. “I’m listening.”

So Herold, amid the fripperies of Miss Lindon’s drawing-room, told the story of his summons to the Channel House some time ago—Good God!—He caught himself up sharply—it was only yesterday! and of his talk with Stellamaris in the garden, and of her encounter with the evil woman, and of the poison that had crept to the roots of Stella’s being.

John shivered, and clenched impotent fists. Stella left alone on the cliff-edge with that murderous hag! Stella’s ears polluted by that infamous tale! If only he had known it! Why did she hide it from him? It was well the murderess was dead, but, merciful Heaven, at what a price!

“Listen,” said Herold, gravely, checking his outburst; and he told of his meetings with Unity,—it was essential that John should know,—of her almost mystical worship of Stellamaris, of their discovery of the revolver—

“Poor child!” cried John, “I bought it soon after I went to Kilburn. I took it out the other day and played with a temptation I knew I shouldn’t succumb to. I should never have had the pluck.”

Herold continued, telling him all he knew—all save that of which he stood self-accused, and which for the present was a matter between him and his Maker. And Miss Lindon, fondling on her lap a wheezy pug, the successor to the Dandy of former days, who had been gathered to his fathers long ago, listened in placid bewilderment to the strange story of love and crime.

“I’m sure I don’t understand how people think of such things, let alone do them,” she sighed.

“You must accept the fact, dear Miss Lindon,” said Herold, gently.

“God’s will be done,” she murmured, which in the circumstances was as relevant a thing as the poor lady could have uttered. But John sat hunched up in a bamboo chair that creaked under his weight, and scarcely spoke a word. He felt very unimportant by the side of Unity—Unity with whose strong, passionate soul he had dwelt in blind ignorance. And Unity was dead, lying stark and white in the alien house.

After a long silence he roused himself.

“You wrote to Stella, you said?”

“Yes,” replied Herold.

“What will happen to her?”

“I don’t know.”

John groaned. “If only I had protected her as I ought to have done! If only I had protected both of them!”

He relapsed again into silence, burying his face in his hands. Presently Miss Lindon put the pug tenderly on the ground, rose, and stood by his chair.

“My poor boy,” she said, “do you love her so much?”

“She’s dead,” said John.

Herold shook him by the shoulder. “Nonsense, man. Pull yourself together.”

John raised a drawn face.

“What did you ask? I was thinking about Unity.”

THAT day, the day after the tragedy, Stellamaris faced life in its nakedness, stripped, so it appeared to her, of every rag of mystery.

She had breakfasted as usual in her room, bathed and dressed, and looked wistfully over her disowning sea. Then, as she was preparing to go down-stairs, Morris had brought in Herold’s letter, scribbled so nervously and shakenly that at first she was at a loss to decipher it. Gradually it became terribly clear: Unity was dead; the woman was dead; Unity had killed the woman and then killed herself.

“Details of everything but the truth will be given in the morning papers,” Herold wrote; “but you must know the truth from the first—as I know it. Unity has given her life to save those she loved—you and John—from the woman. She has laid down her life for you. Never forget that as long as you live.”

She sat for some moments quite still, paralyzed by the new horror that had sprung from this false, flower-decked earth to shake her by the throat. The world was terrifyingly relentless. She read the awful words again. Bit by bit feeling returned. Her flesh was constricted in a cold and finely wrought net. She grew faint, put her hand to her brow and found it damp. She stumbled to her bed by the great west window and threw herself down. Constable, lying on the hearth-rug, staggered to his feet and thrust his old head on her bosom and regarded her with mournful and inquiring eyes. She caressed him mechanically. Suddenly she sprang up as a swift memory smote her. Once she lay there by the window, and the dog was there by the bed, and there by the door stood the ungainly figure of a girl of her own age. Was it possible that that ungainly child whom she had seen and talked to then, whom a few weeks ago she had kissed, could have committed this deed of blood? She rose again to her feet, pushed the old dog aside blindly, and hid her eyes from the light of day. The girl was human, utterly human, at those two meetings. Of what unknown, devastating forces were human beings, then, composed?

She took up the letter again. “Unity has given her life to save those she loved—you and John—from the woman. She has laid down her life for you. Never forget that as long as you live.”

Walter Herold said that. It must be true. Through all of yesterday’s welter of misery, after he had left her, she had clung despairingly to him. There was no God, but there was Walter Herold. Her pride had dismissed him with profession of disbelief, but in her heart she had believed him. Not that she had pardoned John Risca, not that she had recovered her faith in him, not that she had believed in Unity. Her virginal soul, tainted by the woman, had shrunk from thoughts of the pair; but despite her fierce determination to believe in neither God nor man, she had been compelled to believe in Herold. She had stood up against him and fought with him and had bitten and rent him, and he had conquered, and she had felt maddenedly angered, triumphantly glad. The whole world could be as false as hell, but in it there was one clear spirit speaking truth.

She went to the southern window, rested her elbows on the sill, and pressed the finger-tips of both hands against her forehead. The soft southwest wind, bringing the salt from the dancing sea, played about her hair. Unity had laid down her life to save those she loved. So had Christ done—given his life for humanity. But Christ had not killed a human being, no matter how murderous, and had not taken his own life. No, no; she must not mix up things irreconcilable. She faced the room again. What did people do when they killed? What were the common, practical steps that they took to gain their ends? Her mind suddenly grew vague. Herold had spoken of newspapers. She must see them; she must know everything. Life was a deadly conflict, and knowledge the only weapon. For a few seconds she stood in the middle of the room, her young bosom heaving, her dark eyes wide with the diamond glints in their depths. Life was a deadly conflict. She would fight, she would conquer. Others miserably weaker than herself survived. Pride and race and splendid purity of soul sheathed her in cold armor. A jingle, separated from context, came into her mind, and in many ways it was a child’s mind:

Then spake Sir Thomas Howard,

“’Fore God, I am no coward,”

“‘’Fore God, I am no coward,’” she repeated, and with her delicate head erect she went out and down the stairs and entered the dining-room.

There she found Sir Oliver and Lady Blount sitting at a neglected breakfast. The old faces strove pitifully to smile. Stella kissed them in turn, and with her hand lingering on the old man’s arm, she gave him Herold’s letter.

“Is it in the newspapers?” she asked.

“What, what, my dear?” said Sir Oliver, adjusting his glasses on his nose with fumbling fingers.

She looked from one to the other. Then her eyes fell on the morning papers lying on the table. They were folded so that a great head-line stared hideously.

“Oh, darling, don’t read it—for Heaven’s sake don’t read it!” cried Lady Blount, clutching the nearer newspaper.

But Stella took up the other. “I must, dearest,” she said very gently. “Walter has written to me; but he could not tell me everything.”

She moved to the window that overlooked the pleasant garden, and with steady eyes read the vulgar and soul-withering report, while the two old people, head to head, puzzled out Herold’s scrawl.

When she had finished, she laid the paper quietly at the foot of the table and came and stood between them, revolted by the callous publication of names, almost physically sickened by the realistic picture of the scene, her head whirling. She caught hold of the back of Sir Oliver’s chair.

“The newspaper lies,” she said, “but it doesn’t know any better. Walter tells us why she did it.”

Sir Oliver, elbow on table, held the letter in his shaking grasp. It dropped, and his head sank on his hand.

“It’s too horrible!” he said in a weak voice. “I don’t understand anything at all about it. I don’t understand what Walter means. And all that old beastly story revived! It’s damnable!”

He looked quite broken, his querulous self-assertion gone. Lady Blount, too, gave way, and stretched out an imploring and pathetic arm, which, as Stella moved a step or two toward her, fell around the slim, standing figure. She laid her cheek against Stella and cried miserably.

“O my darling, my precious one, if we could only spare you all this! Walter shouldn’t have written. O my darling, what are we to do! What are we to do!”

And then Stellamaris saw once more that Great High Excellency and Most Exquisite Auntship, for all their love of her, were of the weak ones of the world, and she looked down with a new and life-giving feeling of pity upon the bowed gray heads. Once,—was it yesterday or weeks or months or years ago? She could not tell,—but once, to her later pain and remorse, she had commanded, and they had obeyed; now she knew that she had to comfort, protect, determine. And in a bewildering flash came the revelation that knowledge was a weapon not only to fight her own way through the evil of the world, but to defend the defenseless.

“I wish Walter was here,” she whispered, her hand against the withered, wet cheek.

“Why Walter, dear?”

“He is strong and true,” said Stellamaris.

“Why not John, darling?”

Yes, why not John? Stella drew a sharp breath. Sir Oliver saved her an answer.

“John has enough to look to, poor chap. He has got everything about his ears. Stella’s right. We want Walter. He’s young. He’s a good fellow is Walter. I must be getting old, my dear,—” He raised his face, and, with a sudden forlorn hope of dignity, twirled his white mustache,—“A year ago I shouldn’t have wanted Walter or anybody. It’s only you, my child, that your aunt and I are thinking of. We’ve tried to do our duty by you, haven’t we, Julia? And God knows we love you. You’re the only thing in the world left to us. It isn’t our fault that you are drawn into this ghastliness. It isn’t, God knows it isn’t. Only, my dear,”—there was a catch in his voice,—“you’re not able to bear it. For us old folks who have knocked about the world—well, we’re used to—to this sort of thing. I’ve had to send men to the gallows in my time—once twenty men to be shot. The paltry fellows at the Colonial Office didn’t see things as I did, but that’s another matter. We’re used to these things, dear; we’re hardened—”

“If I have got to live in the world, dear Excellency,” said Stella, feeling that there were some sort of flood-gates between the tumultuous flow of her being and the still waters of pity in which for the moment her consciousness acted, “it seems that I’ve got to get used to it, like every one else.”

“But what shall we do, darling?” cried Lady Blount, clinging pathetically to the child of sea-foam, from whom all knowledge of the perilous world had been hidden.

“Anything but worry Walter to come down here.”

“I thought you wanted him?”

“I do,” said Stella, with her hand on her bosom; “but that is only selfishness. He is needed more in London. I think we ought to go up and see if we can help in any way.”

“Go up to London!” echoed Sir Oliver.

“Yes, if you’ll take me, Uncle dear.”

The old man looked at his wife, who looked helplessly at him. Through the open window came the late, mellow notes of a thrush and the sunshine that flooded the summer garden.

“I am going to send Walter a telegram,” said Stella, moving gently away.

She left the room with the newly awakened consciousness that she was absolute mistress of her destiny. Love, devotion, service, anything she might require from the two old people, were hers for the claiming—anything in the world but guidance and help. She stood alone before the dragons of a world, no longer the vague Threatening Land, but a world of fierce passions and bloody deeds. Herold’s words flamed before her: “Unity has given her life for those she loved.” Had she, Stellamaris, a spirit so much weaker than Unity’s?

She advanced an eager step or two along the garden walk, clenching her delicate fists, and the fiery dragons retreated backward. She could give, too, as well as Unity, her life if need be. If that was not required, at least whatever could be demanded of her for those she loved. Again she read the letter. Underlying it was tenderest anxiety lest she should be stricken down by the ghastly knowledge. With the personal motive, the intense and omnipotent motive of her sex, unconsciously dominating her, she murmured half articulately:

“He thinks I’m a weak child. I’ll show him that I am a woman. He shall see that I’m not afraid of life.”

SO when Walter Herold went home late that night,—the theater being out of the question, he had stayed at Kilburn until John had been persuaded to go to bed,—he found a telegram from Stellamaris.

“Coming to London to see if I can be of any help. My dear love to John in his terrible trouble. Tell me when I had better come.”

The next day, when they met before the inquest, he showed the telegram to John, who, after glancing at it, thrust it back into his hand with a deprecating gesture.

“No; let her stay there. What is she to do in this wilderness of horror?”

“I have already written,” said Herold.

“To keep away?”

“To come.”

“You know best,” said John, hopelessly. “At any rate the news hasn’t killed her. I feared it would. I had long letters from Oliver and Julia this morning.”

“What do they say?”

John put his hand to his head. “I forget,” said he.

(To be concluded)

Drawn by Frank Wiles

“SHE LOOKED DOWN WITH A NEW AND LIFE-GIVING FEELING OF PITY UPON THE BOWED GRAY HEADS”

THE CENTURY’S AFTER-THE-WAR SERIES

GREAT EVENTS IN AMERICAN PROGRESS

DURING THE HALF-CENTURY FOLLOWING THE CIVIL WAR

DESCRIBED BY AMERICAN JOURNALISTS AND BY WRITERS HAVING PERSONAL AND SPECIAL KNOWLEDGE OF IMPORTANT INCIDENTS

PREFATORY EDITORIAL NOTE

Two generations of readers have entered on the field of action since the Civil War marked the end of what may be called the formative era of American life. Twenty-eight years ago THE CENTURY began its memorable Civil War Series, which gave the surviving leaders, Joseph E. Johnston, Beauregard, Longstreet, and their valiant colleagues on the Confederate side, a chance to be read with calm appreciation by the people of the North, and brought to the reviving people of the South dispassionate accounts by Grant, Sherman, McClellan, Porter, and their fighting coadjutors on land and sea, of the motives and deeds which shaped the heroic contest and resulted in a reunited country. Through the medium of personal recollection, with fairness and without feeling, the brave men of both sides fought their battles over again before an open-minded audience of all the people, and for the first time since slavery became the cause of strife, both parts of the country shook hands over “the bloody chasm” in mutual admiration and respect.

The forty-seven years which have elapsed since Appomattox have also had their conflicts, though most of them have been waged in the ways of peace. They have resulted, however, in forcing the republic, shaped by the aims of the fathers, into the wider domain of empire required by the expanding purposes of the sons. In order to bring the great happenings of this period vividly before the new generations of readers, THE CENTURY has organized an After-the-War Series. It will treat of such compelling and lasting influences as the attempt to “recall” Andrew Johnson, seventeenth President, by impeachment; the acquisition of Alaska, with its great promise for the future; the settlement of the Alabama Claims, which brought about a new status for the United States with Europe; the memorable attempt to make Horace Greeley President, which in a way may be compared to the present campaign of the “Progressives”; the near ship-wreck of the Hayes-Tilden contest; the chain of measures and financial disasters from “Black Friday” and the Crédit Mobilier to the time when the nation kept its faith by the resumption of specie payments; the large features of Reconstruction, still being worked out in the South; the victory of civil-service reform, beginning with Cleveland’s election over Blaine; the solidifying of the Monroe Doctrine in the Venezuelan dispute, which prepared the way for the Panama Canal; the diplomacy of the war with Spain, by which the republic became an empire; and also articles describing the remarkable Bryan conventions, the progress of conservation, the battle with the trusts, and the gigantic problem of organized labor. In its total effect the series will reveal the drift of life in the United States.

Each of these commanding subjects will be treated by a prominent American journalist having particular acquaintance with the theme, and also, where supplemental articles are necessary, by writers having special knowledge of these historic dramas of American progress and personal contact with the actors. In this year of political conflict Colonel Watterson’s article, which begins the series, has a timely as well as a distinct personal interest.

THE HUMOR AND TRAGEDY OF THE GREELEY CAMPAIGN

BY HENRY WATTERSON

I

AMONG the many misconceptions and mischances which befell the slavery agitation in the United States and finally led a kindred people into actual war, the idea that got afloat after this war, that every Confederate was a Secessionist, best served the ends of the radicalism which sought to reduce the South to a conquered province, and as such to reconstruct it by hostile legislation supported, wherever needed, by force.

Andrew Johnson perfectly understood that a great majority of the men who were arrayed on the Southern side had taken the field against their better judgment through pressure of circumstance. They were Union men who had opposed Secession and clung to the old order. Not merely in the Border States did this class rule, but in the Gulf States it held a respectable minority until the shot fired upon Sumter drew the call for troops from Lincoln. The Secession leaders who had staked their all upon the hazard knew that to save their movement from collapse it was necessary that blood be sprinkled in the faces of the people. Hence the message from Charleston,

With cannon, mortar, and petard,

We tender you our Beauregard,

with the response from Washington, precipitated the conflict of theories into a combat of arms for which neither party was prepared.

The debate ended, battle at hand, Southern men had to choose between the North and the South, between their convictions and predilections on one side and expatriation on the other side, resistance to invasion, not secession, the issue. But, four years later, when in 1865 all that they had believed and feared in 1861 had come to pass, these men required no drastic measures to bring them to terms. Events more potent than acts of Congress had already reconstructed them. Lincoln, with a forecast of this, had shaped his ends accordingly. Johnson, himself a Southern man, understood it even better than Lincoln, and backed by the legacy of Lincoln, he proceeded not very skilfully to build upon it.

The assassination of Lincoln, however, had played directly into the hands of the radicals, led by Ben Wade, in the Senate, and Thaddeus Stevens in the House. Prior to that baleful night they had fallen behind the marching van. The mad act of Booth put them upon their feet and brought them to the front. They were implacable men, politicians equally of resolution and ability. Events quickly succeeding favored them and their plans. It was not alone Johnson’s lack of temper and tact that gave them the whip-hand. His removal from office would have opened the door of the White House to Wade, so that strategically Johnson’s position was from the beginning beleaguered and, before the close, came perilously near to being untenable.

From a photograph taken about 1872, owned by Mr. F. H. Meserve

LYMAN TRUMBULL

Grant, who, up to the time of his nomination for the Presidency, had had no partizan conviction, not Wade, the uncompromising extremist, came after, and inevitably four years of Grant had again divided the triumphant Republicans. This was the situation during the winter of 1871–72, when the approaching Presidential election brought the country face to face with an extraordinary state of affairs. The South was in irons. The North was growing restive. Thinking people everywhere felt that conditions so anomalous to our institutions could not last.

II

JOHNSON had made a bungling attempt to carry out the policies of Lincoln and had gone down in the strife. The Democratic party had reached the ebb-tide of its disastrous fortunes. It seemed the merest reactionary. A group of influential Republicans, for one cause or another dissatisfied with Grant, held a caucus and issued a call for what they described as a Liberal Republican Convention to assemble in Cincinnati, May 1, 1872.[1]

A Southern man and a Confederate soldier, a Democrat by inheritance and conviction, I had been making in Kentucky an unequal fight for the acceptance of the inevitable. The line of cleavage between the old and the new South I had placed upon the last three amendments to the Constitution, naming them the Treaty of Peace between the sections. The negro must be invested with the rights conferred upon him by these amendments, however mistaken and injudicious the South might think them. The obsolete black laws instituted during the slave régime must be removed from the statute-books. The negro, like Mohammed’s coffin, swung in mid-air. He was neither fish, flesh, nor fowl, nor good red herring. For our own sake we must habilitate him, educate and elevate him, make him, if possible, a contented and useful citizen. Failing of this, free government itself might be imperiled.

I had behind me the intelligence of the Confederate soldiers almost to a man. They, at least, were tired of futile fighting, and to them the war was over. But there was an element, especially in Kentucky, which wanted to fight when it was much too late—old Union Democrats and Union Whigs—who clung to the hull of slavery when the kernel was gone, and proposed to win in politics what had been lost in battle.

The leaders of this belated element were in complete control of the political machinery of the State. They regarded me as an impudent upstart, since I had come to Kentucky from Tennessee as little better than a carpet-bagger, and had done their uttermost to put me down and drive me out.

I was a young fellow of two and thirty, of boundless optimism and with my full share of self-confidence, no end of physical endurance and mental vitality, and having some political as well as newspaper experience. It never crossed my fancy that I could fail. I met resistance with aggression, answered attempts at bullying with scorn, generally irradiated by laughter. Yet I was not wholly blind to consequences and the admonitions of prudence, and when the call for a Liberal Republican Convention appeared, I realized that, interested as I was in what might come of it, if I expected to remain a Democrat in a Democratic community, and to influence and lead a Democratic following, I must proceed with caution. Though many of those proposing the new movement were familiar acquaintances, some of them personal friends, the scheme was, as it were, in the air. Its three newspaper bell-wethers, Samuel Bowles of the Springfield “Republican,” Horace White of the Chicago “Tribune,” and Murat Halstead of the Cincinnati “Commercial,” were specially well known to me; so were Horace Greeley, Carl Schurz, and Charles Sumner. Stanley Matthews was my kinsman; George Hoadley and Cassius M. Clay were next-door neighbors. But they were not the men I had trained with—not my “crowd,”—and it was a question how far I might be able to reconcile myself, not to mention my political associates, to such company, even conceding that they proceeded under good fortune with a good plan, offering the South extrication from its woes and the Democratic party an entering wedge into a solid and hitherto irresistible Republicanism.

From a photograph taken about 1872, owned by Mr. F. H. Meserve

CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS

Nevertheless, I resolved to go a little in advance to Cincinnati, to have a look at the stalking-horse there to be offered, free to take it or leave it, as I liked, my bridges and lines of communication still open and intact.

III

A LIVELIER and more variegated omnium-gatherum was never assembled. They had already begun to pour in when I arrived. There were long-haired and spectacled doctrinaires from New England, and short-haired and blatant emissaries from New York, mostly, as it turned out, friends of Horace Greeley. There were brisk Westerners from Chicago and St. Louis. If Whitelaw Reid, who had come as Greeley’s personal representative, had his retinue, so had Horace White and Carl Schurz. There were a few rather overdressed persons from New Orleans brought up by Governor Warmouth, and a motley array of Southerners of every sort, who were ready to clutch at any straw that promised relief to intolerable conditions. The full contingent of Washington correspondents was there, of course, with sharpened eyes and pencils, to make the most of what they had already begun to christen a conclave of cranks.

From a photograph taken in 1872

HENRY WATTERSON

Bowles and Halstead met me at the station, and we drove to the St. Nicholas Hotel, where White and Schurz were awaiting us. Then and there was organized a fellowship of the first three and myself which in the succeeding campaign went by the name of the Quadrilateral. We resolved to limit the Presidential nomination of the convention to Charles Francis Adams, Bowles’s candidate, and Lyman Trumbull, White’s candidate, omitting altogether, because of specific reasons urged by White, the candidacy of B. Gratz Brown, who, because of his Kentucky connections, had better served my purpose. The very next day the secret was abroad, and Whitelaw Reid came to me to ask why, in a newspaper combine of this sort, the “New York Tribune” had been left out.

From a photograph taken in 1872

HORACE WHITE

To my mind it seemed preposterous that it had been, or should be, and I stated as much to my new colleagues. They offered objection which to me appeared perverse, if not childish. To begin with, they did not like Reid. He was not a principal, like the rest of us, but a subordinate. Greeley was this, that, and the other; he could never be relied upon in any coherent, practical plan of campaign; to talk about him as a candidate was ridiculous. I listened rather impatiently, and finally I said: “Now, gentlemen, in this movement we shall need the ‘New York Tribune.’ If we admit Reid, we clinch it. You will all agree that Greeley has no chance of a nomination, and so, by taking him in, we both eat our cake and have it.” On this view of the case Reid was invited to join us, and that very night he sat with us at the St. Nicholas, where from night to night until the end we convened and went over the performances and developments of the day and concerted plans for the morrow.

As I recall these symposiums, amusing and plaintive memories rise before me.

The first serious business that engaged us was the killing of the boom for Judge David Davis of the Supreme Court, which was assuming definite and formidable proportions. The preceding winter it had been organizing at Washington under the ministration of some of the most astute politicians of the time, mainly, however, Democratic members of Congress. A party of these had brought the boom to Cincinnati, opening headquarters well provided with the requisite commissaries. Every delegate who came in that could be reached was laid hold of and conducted here.

From a photograph by Sarony, taken in 1872

SAMUEL BOWLES

We considered this flat burglary. It was a gross infringement upon our preserve. What business had the professional politicians with a great reform movement? The influence and dignity of journalism were involved and imperiled. We, its custodians, could brook no such defiance from intermeddling office-seekers, especially from brokendown Democratic office-seekers.

The inner sanctuary of our proceedings was a common drawing-room between two bedchambers shared by Schurz and me. Here we repaired after supper to smoke the pipe of fraternity and reform and to save the country. What could be done to kill off “D. Davis,” as we irreverently called the eminent and learned jurist, the friend of Lincoln, and the only aspirant having a “bar’l”? That was the question. We addressed ourselves to the task with earnest purpose, but characteristically. The power of the press must be invoked. It was our chief, if not our only, weapon. Each of us indited a leading editorial for his paper, to be wired to its destination and printed next morning, striking “D. Davis” at a prearranged and varying angle. Copies of these were made for Halstead, who, having with the rest of us read and compared the different screeds, indited one of his own in general comment and review for Cincinnati consumption. In next day’s “Commercial,” blazing under vivid head-lines, these leading editorials, dated “Chicago,” “New York,” “Springfield, Mass.,” and “Louisville, Ky.,” appeared with the explaining line, “‘The Tribune’ of to-morrow morning [or the ‘Courier-Journal’ or ‘Republican’] will say,” etc.

Wondrous consensus of public opinion! The Davis boom went down before it. The Davis boomers were paralyzed. The earth seemed to have arisen and hit them amidships. The incoming delegates were stopped and forewarned. Six months of adroit scheming was set at naught, and little more was heard of “D. Davis.”

From a photograph by Gutekunst

ALEXANDER K. McCLURE

Like the Mousquetaires, we were equally in for fighting and foot-racing; the point with us being to “get there,” no matter how; the end—the defeat of the rascally machine politicians and the reform of the public service—being relied upon to justify the means. I am writing this forty years after the event, and must be forgiven the fling of my wisdom at my own expense and that of my associates in harmless crime. Reid and White and I are the sole survivors. We were wholly serious, maybe a trifle visionary, but as upright and patriotic in our intentions and as loyal to our engagements as it was possible for older, and maybe worse, men to be. For my part, I must say that if I have never anything on my conscience heavier than the massacre of that not very edifying, yet promising Davis “combine,” I shall be troubled by no remorse, but to the end shall sleep soundly and well.

In that immediate connection an amusing incident throwing some light upon the period thrusts itself upon my memory. The Quadrilateral, with Reid added, had finished its consolidation of public opinion just related, when the cards of Judge Craddock, Chairman of the Kentucky Democratic Committee, and of Colonel J. Stoddart Johnston, editor of the “Frankfort Yeoman,” the organ of the Kentucky Democracy, were brought from below. They had come to look after me, that was evident. By no chance could they have found me in more equivocal company. In addition to ourselves, bad enough from the Kentucky point of view, they found in the room Theodore Tilton and David A. Wells. When they crossed the threshold and were presented seriatim, the face of each was a study. Even an immediate application of whisky and water did not suffice to restore their lost equilibrium and bring them to their usual state of convivial self-possession. Colonel Johnston told me years after that when they went away they walked in silence a block or two, when the old judge, a model of the learned and sedate school of Kentucky politicians and jurists, turned to him and said: “It is no use, Stoddart. We cannot keep up with that young man or with these times. Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace!”

From a photograph taken in 1861, owned by Mr. Frederick H. Meserve

CARL SCHURZ

The Jupiter Tonans of reform in attendance upon the convention was Colonel Alexander K. McClure of the Philadelphia “Times.” He was one of the handsomest and most imposing of men; Halstead himself was scarcely more so. McClure was personally unknown to the Quadrilateral, but this did not stand in the way of our asking him to dine with us as soon as his claims to fellowship in the good cause of reform began to make themselves apparent through the need of bringing the Pennsylvania delegation to “a realizing sense.”

As he entered the room, he looked like a god, nay, he acted like one. Schurz first took him in hand. With a lofty courtesy that I have never seen equaled, he tossed his inquisitor into the air. Halstead came next, trying him upon another tack, but fared no better than Schurz. Then I hurried to the rescue of my friends. McClure, now looking a bit bored and resentful, landed me somewhere near the ceiling.

It would have been laughable if it had not been ignominious. I took my discomfiture with the bad grace of silence throughout the brief, stiff, and formal meal which followed. But when it was over, and the party had risen from the table and was about to disperse, I collected my energies and resources for a final forlorn hope. I was not willing to remain so crushed or to confess myself so beaten, though I could not disguise from myself a feeling that all of us had been overmatched.

“McClure,” said I, with the cool and quiet resolution of despair, drawing him aside, “what in the —— do you want, anyhow?”

He looked at me with swift intelligence and a sudden show of sympathy, and then over at the others with a withering glance.

“What? With those cranks? Nothing.”

Jupiter descended to earth. I am afraid we actually took a glass of wine together. Anyhow, from that moment to the hour of his death we were the best of friends.

Without the inner circle of the Quadrilateral, which had taken matters into its own hands, were a number of persons, some of them disinterested and others simple curiosity- and excitement-seekers, who might be described as merely “lookers-on in Vienna.” The Sunday afternoon before the convention was to meet, we, the self-elect, fell in with a party of these in a garden “over the Rhine,” as the German quarter of Cincinnati is called. There was first general and rather aimless talk, then came a great deal of speech-making. Schurz started it with a few pungent observations intended to suggest and inspire some common ground of public opinion and sentiment. Nobody was inclined to dispute his leadership, but everybody was prone to assert his own. It turned out that each regarded himself, and wished to be regarded, as a man with a mission, having a clear idea how things were not to be done. There were civil-service reform protectionists and civil-service reform free traders. There were a few politicians, who were discovered to be spoilsmen, the unforgivable sin, and as such were quickly dismissed. The missing ingredient was coherence of belief and united action. Not a man of them was willing to commit or bind himself to anything. Edward Atkinson pulled one way, and William Dorsheimer exactly the opposite way. David A. Wells sought to get the two together; it was not possible. Sam Bowles shook his head in diplomatic warning. Horace White threw in a chink or so of a rather agitating newspaper independence, while Halstead, to the more serious-minded, was in an inflamed state of jocosity.

From a photograph by Sarony

MURAT HALSTEAD

All this was grist to the mill of the Washington correspondents, chiefly “story” writers and satirists, who were there to make the most out of an occasion in which the bizarre was much in excess of the conventional, with George Alfred Townsend and Donn Piatt to set the pace. Hyde of the “Republican” had come from St. Louis to keep special tab on Grosvenor of the “Democrat.” Though rival editors facing our way, they had not been admitted to the Quadrilateral. McCullagh and Nixon were among the earliest arrivals from Chicago. The lesser lights of the gild were innumerable. One might have mistaken it for an annual meeting of the Associated Press.

IV

THE convention assembled. It was in Cincinnati’s great music-hall. Schurz presided. Who that was there will never forget his opening words, “This is moving day.” He was just turned forty-two; in his physiognomy a scholarly Herr Doktor; in his trim, lithe figure a graceful athlete; in the tones of his voice an orator.

Even the bespectacled doctrinaires of the East, whence, since the days the Star of Bethlehem shone over the desert, wisdom and wise men have had their emanation, were moved to something like enthusiasm. The rest of us were fervid. Two days and a night and a half the Quadrilateral had the world in a sling and things its own way. It had been agreed, as I have said, to limit the field to Adams, Trumbull, and Greeley, and Greeley being out of it as having no chance whatever, the list was still further abridged to Adams and Trumbull. Trumbull not developing very strong, Bowles, Halstead, and I, even White, began to be sure that it would require only one ballot to nominate Adams—Adams the indifferent, who had sailed away for Europe, observing that he was not a candidate for the nomination, and otherwise intimating his disdain of it and us.

Matters being thus apparently cocked and primed, the convention adjourned over the first night of its session with everybody happy except the “D. Davis” contingent, which lingered, but knew its “cake was dough.” If we had forced a vote that night, as we might have done, we should have nominated Adams. But, inspired by the bravery of youth and inexperience, we let the golden opportunity slip. The throng of delegates and the vast audience dispersed.

In those days it being the business of my life to turn day into night and night into day, it was not my habit to go to bed much before the presses began to thunder below. This night proved no exception: being tempted by a party of Kentuckians, some of whom had come to back me and some to watch me, I did not quit their agreeable society until the “wee sma’ hours ayant the twal.”

Photograph by Pearsall, taken in 1872

HORACE GREELEY

This portrait, unusual for the absence of spectacles, is owned by his daughter, Mrs. F. M. Clendenin.

Before turning in, I glanced at the early edition of the “Commercial” to see that something—I was too tired to decipher precisely what—had happened. It was, in point of fact, the arrival about midnight of General Frank P. Blair and Governor B. Gratz Brown of Missouri. I had in my possession documents which would have induced at least one of them to pause before making himself too conspicuous. The Quadrilateral, excepting Reid, knew this. We had separated upon the adjournment of the convention. I, being across the river in Covington, their search for me was unavailing. They were in despair. When, having had a few hours of rest, I reached the convention hall toward noon, it was too late.

HORACE GREELEY AND WHITELAW REID

From a photograph taken in the editorial rooms of “The Tribune” shortly before the opening of the Greeley Campaign.

From a cartoon by Thomas Nast in “Harper’s Weekly”

NAST’S CARTOON, “‘THE PIRATES’ UNDER FALSE COLORS—CAN THEY CAPTURE THE ‘SHIP OF STATE’?”

At the left Sumner is reading a book; Andrew Johnson is behind the capstan; August Belmont in the gangway with a knife in his mouth; Fenton in the background; Whitelaw Reid on a keg of powder playing a violin tagged, “This is not an organ”; David Davis is behind Archbishop Hughes with the cross; Manton Marble is hiding behind his newspaper “The World”; Senator Tipton is bawling near Greeley; Carl Schurz is waving his hat to friends on the Ship of State and Theodore Tilton is embracing him; Governor Hoffman holds a parasol; Horatio Seymour kneels to Jeff Davis lying on the Confederate flag, behind him a group of Confederates with Wade Hampton standing near Greeley; John Kelly holds the Tammany knife, and above his head are faces of Tweed, and Mayor Oakey Hall with eye-glasses.

I got into the thick of the session in time to see the close, not without an angry collision with that one of the newly arrived actors whose coming had changed the course of events, and with whom I had lifelong relations of affectionate intimacy. Recently, when I was sailing in Mediterranean waters with Joseph Pulitzer, who, then a mere youth, was yet the secretary of the convention, he recalled the scene: the unexpected and not over-attractive appearance of B. Gratz Brown, the Governor of Missouri; his not very pleasing yet ingenious speech in favor of the nomination of Greeley; the stoical, almost lethargic indifference of Schurz. “Carl Schurz,” said Pulitzer, “was the most industrious and the least energetic man I have ever known and worked with. A word from him at that crisis would have completely routed Blair and squelched Brown. It was simply not in him to speak it.”

From a photograph by Sarony, taken in 1872

THOMAS NAST

The result was that Greeley was nominated amid a whirl of enthusiasm, his workers, with Whitelaw Reid at their head, having maintained an admirable and effective organization, and being thoroughly prepared to take advantage of the opportune moment. It was the logic of the event that B. Gratz Brown should be placed on the ticket with him.

The Quadrilateral was “nowhere.” It was done for. The impossible had come to pass. There arose thereafter a friendly issue of veracity between Schurz and me, which illustrates our state of mind. My version is that we left the convention hall together, with an immaterial train of after incidents; his that we did not meet after the adjournment. He was quite sure of this because he had ineffectually sought me. “Schurz was right,” said Joseph Pulitzer, upon the occasion of our yachting cruise just mentioned, “because he and I went directly from the hall with Judge Stallo to his home on Walnut Hills, where we dined and passed the afternoon.”

The Quadrilateral had been knocked into a cocked hat. Whitelaw Reid was the sole survivor. He was the only one of us who clearly understood the situation and thoroughly knew what he was about. He came to me and said: “I have won, and you people have lost. I shall expect that you stand by the agreement and meet me as my guests at dinner to-night. But, if you do not personally look after this, the others will not be there.” I was as badly hurt as any; but a bond is a bond, and I did as he desired, succeeding partly by coaxing and partly by insisting, though it was uphill work.

Frostier conviviality I have never sat down to than Reid’s dinner. Horace White looked more than ever like an iceberg; Sam Bowles was diplomatic, but ineffusive; Schurz was as a death’s head at the board; Halstead and I, through sheer bravado, tried to enliven the feast. But they would none of us, nor it, and we separated early and sadly, reformers hoist by their own petard.

THE SAME TUNES BY ANOTHER FIDDLE WILL SOUND AS SWEET.
IT IS TOO BAD TO HAVE THE NEW YORK WORLD PLAY SECOND FIDDLE TO ITS OWN FAVORITE TUNES.

From a cartoon by Thomas Nast in “Harper’s Weekly”

NAST’S CARTOON OF WHITELAW REID OF “THE TRIBUNE” AND MANTON MARBLE OF “THE WORLD” PLAYING IN CONCERT

V

THE reception by the country of the nomination of Horace Greeley was as inexplicable to the politicians as the nomination itself had been unexpected by the Quadrilateral. The people rose to it. The sentimental, the fantastic, and the paradoxical in human nature had to do with this. At the South an ebullition of pleased surprise grew into positive enthusiasm. Peace was the need, if not the longing, of the Southern heart, and Greeley’s had been the first hand stretched out to the South from the enemy’s camp,—very bravely, too, for he had signed the bail-bond of Jefferson Davis,—and quick upon the news flashed the response from generous men eager for the chance to pay something on a recognized debt of gratitude.

Except for this spontaneous uprising, which continued unabated in July, the Democratic party could not have been induced at its convention at Baltimore to ratify the proceedings at Cincinnati and formally to make Greeley its candidate. The leaders dared not resist it. Some of them halted, a few held out, but by midsummer the great body of them came to the front to head the procession.

Horace Greeley was a queer old man, a very medley of contradictions, shrewd and simple, credulous and penetrating, a master penman of the school of Swift and Cobbett, even in his odd, picturesque personality whimsically attractive and, as Seward learned to his cost, a man to be reckoned with where he chose to put his powers forth.

What he would have done with the Presidency had he reached it is not easy to say or to surmise. He was altogether unsuited for official life, for which, nevertheless, he had a longing. But he was not so readily deceived in men or misled in measures as he seemed, and as most people thought him.

His convictions were emotional, his philosophy experimental; but there was a certain method in their application to public affairs. He gave bountifully of his affection and his confidence to the few who enjoyed his familiar friendship; he was accessible and sympathetic, though not indiscriminating, to those who appealed to his impressionable sensibilities and sought his help. He had been a good party man and was temperamentally a partizan.

To him place was not a badge of bondage; it was a decoration, preferment, promotion, popular recognition. He had always yearned for office as the legitimate destination of public life and the honorable reward of party service. During the greater part of his career, the conditions of journalism had been rather squalid and servile. He was really great as a journalist. He was truly and highly fit for nothing else, but, seeing less deserving and less capable men about him advanced from one post of distinction to another, he wondered why his turn proved so tardy in coming, and when it would come. It did come with a rush. What more natural than that he should believe it real instead of the empty pageant of a vision?

After the first shock and surprise of the Cincinnati nomination, it had taken me only a day and a night to pull myself together and to plunge into the swim to help fetch the water-logged factions ashore. This was clearly indispensable to forcing the Democratic organization to come to the rescue of what would prove otherwise but a derelict upon a stormy sea. Schurz was deeply disgruntled. Before he could be appeased, a bridge found in what was called the Fifth Avenue Hotel Conference had to be constructed in order to carry him across the stream which flowed between his disappointed hopes and aims and what appeared to him an illogical and repulsive alternative. Like another Achilles, he had taken to his tent and sulked. He was harder to deal with than any of the Democratic file-leaders; but he finally yielded, and did splendid work in the campaign.

Carl Schurz was a stubborn spirit, not readily adjustable. He was a nobly gifted man, but from first to last an alien in an alien land. He once said to me, “If I should live a thousand years, they would still call me a Dutchman.” No man of his time spoke so well or wrote to better purpose. He was equally skilful in debate, an overmatch for Conkling and Morton, whom, especially in the French Arms matter, he completely dominated and outshone. As sincere and unselfish, as patriotic and as courageous, as any of his contemporaries, he could never attain the full measure of the popular heart and confidence, albeit reaching its understanding directly and surely. Within himself a man of sentiment, he was not the cause of sentiment in others. He knew this and felt it.

During the campaign the Nast cartoons in “Harper’s Weekly,” which while unsparing to the last degree to Greeley and Sumner, and treating Schurz with a kind of considerate, qualifying humor, nevertheless greatly offended him. I do not think Greeley minded them much, if at all. They were very effective, notably the “Pirate Ship,” which represented Greeley rising above the taffrail of a vessel carrying the Stars-and-Stripes and waving his handkerchief at the man-of-war Ship of State in the distance, while the political leaders of the Confederacy, dressed in true corsair costume, crouched below, ready to spring. Nothing did more to sectionalize Northern opinion and fire the Northern heart, or to lash the fury of the rank and file of those who were urged to vote as they had shot, and who had hoisted above them “the bloody shirt” for a banner.

In the first half of the canvass the impetus was with Greeley; the second half, beginning in eclipse, seemed about to end in something very like collapse. The old man seized his flag and set out upon his own account for a tour of the country. And right well he bore himself. If speech-making ever does any good toward the shaping of results, Greeley’s speeches surely should have elected him. They were marvels of impromptu oratory, mostly homely and touching appeals to the better sense and the magnanimity of a people not ripe or ready for generous impressions, convincing in their simplicity and integrity, unanswerable from any point of view of sagacious statesmanship or true patriotism, if the North had been in any mood to listen, to reason, and to respond.

I met him at Cincinnati and acted as his escort to Louisville and thence to Indianapolis, where others were waiting to take him in charge. He was in a state of querulous excitement. Before the vast and noisy audiences which we faced he stood apparently pleased and composed, delivering his words as he might have dictated them to a stenographer. As soon as we were alone he would break out into a kind of lamentation, punctuated by occasional bursts of objurgation. He especially distrusted the Quadrilateral, making an exception in my case as well he might, because, however his nomination had jarred my judgment, I had a real affection for him, dating back to the years immediately preceding the war, when I was wont to encounter him in the reporters’ galleries at Washington, which he preferred to using his floor privilege as an ex-member of Congress.

It was mid-October. We had heard from Maine. Indiana and Ohio had voted, and Greeley was for the first time realizing the hopeless nature of the contest. The South, in irons and under military rule and martial law sure for Grant, there had never been any real chance. Now it was obvious that there was to be no compensating ground-swell at the North. That he should pour forth his chagrin to one whom he knew so well and even regarded as one of his “boys” was inevitable. Much of what he said was founded on a basis of fact, some of it was mere suspicion and surmise, all of it came back to the main point that defeat stared us in the face.

I was glad and yet loath to part with him. If ever a man needed a strong friendly hand and heart to lean upon he did during those dark days—the end in darkest night nearer than any one could divine. He showed stronger mettle than had been allowed him; bore a manlier part than was commonly ascribed to his slovenly, slipshod habiliments and his aspect in which benignancy and vacillation seemed to struggle for the ascendancy. Abroad, the elements conspired against him. At home his wife lay ill, as it proved, unto death. The good gray head he still carried like a hero, but the worn and tender heart was beginning to break.

Happily the end came quickly. Overwhelming defeat was followed by overwhelming affliction. He never quitted his dear one’s bedside until the last pulse-beat, and then he sank beneath the load of grief. “‘The Tribune’ is gone and I am gone,” he said, and spoke no more.

The death of Greeley fell upon the country with a sudden shock. It aroused a wide-spread sense of pity and sorrow and awe. All hearts were hushed. In an instant the bitterness of the campaign was forgotten, though the huzzas of the victors still rent the air. President Grant, his late antagonist, with his cabinet, and the leading members of the two Houses of Congress, attended his funeral. As he lay in his coffin, he was no longer the arch-rebel leading a combine of buccaneers and insurgents, which the Republican orators and newspapers had depicted him, but the brave old apostle of freedom, who had done more than all others to make the issues upon which a militant and triumphant party had risen to power. The multitude remembered only the old white hat and the sweet, old baby face beneath it, heart of gold, and hand wielding the wizard pen; the incarnation of probity and kindness, of steadfast devotion to his duty, as he saw it, and to the needs of the whole human family. It was, indeed, a tragedy; and yet, as his body was lowered into its grave, there rose above it, invisible, unnoted, a flower of matchless beauty—the flower of peace and love between the parts of the Union to which his life had been a sacrifice.

The crank convention had builded wiser than it knew. That the Democratic party could ever have been brought to the support of Horace Greeley for President of the United States reads even now like a page out of a nonsense-book. That his warmest support should have come from the South seems an incredible, and was a priceless, fact. His martyrdom shortened the distance across the bloody chasm; his coffin very nearly filled it. The candidacy of Charles Francis Adams or of Lyman Trumbull would have meant a mathematical formula, with no solution of the problem, and as certain defeat at the end of it. Greeley’s candidacy threw a flood of light and warmth into the arena of deadly strife; it made a more equal and reasonable division of parties possible; it put the Southern half of the country in a position to plead its own case by showing the Northern half that it was not wholly recalcitrant, and it made way for real issues of pith and moment relating to the time instead of pigments of bellicose passion and scraps of ante bellum controversy.

In a word, Greeley did more by his death to complete the work of Lincoln than he could have done by a triumph at the polls and the term in the White House he so much desired. Though only sixty years of age, his race was run. Of him it may be truly written that he lived a life full of inspiration to his countrymen, and died not in vain, “our later Franklin” fittingly inscribed upon his tomb.

[1] Dissatisfaction with the administration of General Grant led a number of distinguished Republicans to unite in a call for what they named a Liberal Republican Convention to assemble in Cincinnati the first of May, 1872. Charles Sumner, Lyman Trumbull, and Carl Schurz were foremost among these Republicans. Mr. Schurz was chosen permanent chairman of the convention and delivered a striking key-note speech. Stanley Matthews, afterward a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, served as temporary chairman.

The free-trade and civil-service reform elements were largely represented under the leadership of David A. Wells, George Hoadley, and Horace White. Charles Francis Adams was the choice of these for the Presidential nomination. The opposition to Mr. Adams was divided at the outset between Justice David Davis of the Supreme Court, ex-Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, and Governor B. Gratz Brown of Missouri, with a strong undercurrent for Horace Greeley. The arrival upon the scene at the opportune moment of Governor Brown, accompanied by General Francis P. Blair, turned the tide from both Adams and Davis, and, Brown withdrawing and throwing his strength to Greeley, secured on the sixth ballot the nomination of the famous editor of the New York “Tribune,” Brown himself taking second place on the ticket.

In the platform that was adopted the free-trade issue, in deference to Mr. Greeley’s Protectionist antecedents and sentiments, was “relegated to the congressional districts.”

The result at Cincinnati was received with mingled ridicule and applause. Many Liberal Republicans refused to accept Mr. Greeley and fell back within the lines of the regular Republican party. A sub-convention, called the Fifth Avenue Conference, was required to hold others of them, including Carl Schurz. Finally, the Democratic National Convention, which met at Baltimore in July, ratified the Greeley and Brown ticket.

During the midsummer there were high hopes of its election; but as the canvass advanced, its prospects steadily declined. Early in October Mr. Greeley made a tour from New England westward as far as Indiana and Ohio, delivering a series of speeches in persuasive eloquence regarded as unexampled in the political annals of the country. But nothing sufficed to stay overwhelming defeat, the portion fate seemed to have allotted Mr. Greeley on several occasions, in 1861 as a candidate for the Senate, in 1869 as a candidate for Controller of New York, and in 1870 as a representative in Congress, to which he had been sent in 1848–9.

During his absence from home his wife had fallen ill. He returned to find her condition desperate. She died and was buried amid the closing scenes of the disastrous campaign. Mr. Greeley had for years suffered from insomnia. His vigil by the bedside of his dying wife had quite exhausted him. Inflammation of the brain ensued; he remained sleepless, delirium set in, and he died November 29, 1872. General Grant and his Cabinet, with most of the officials of Congress and the Government, attended his funeral, the tragic circumstances of his death wholly obliterating partizan feeling and arousing general sympathy among all classes of the people.

COMMENTS ON COLONEL WATTERSON’S PAPER

THE foregoing was written in the south of France to help while away a winter vacation. I was not willing to give it to the public without the “visé” of my surviving colleagues, Whitelaw Reid and Horace White, to each of whom I sent a copy. At first I thought of recasting my matter to meet their objections. But, on second thought, it seems best to “let the hide go with the tallow,” as it were, their comments not only illuminating my narrative, but throwing on it the side lights of their differing points of view. No one holds in higher respect than I the noble aims and great sacrifices made by the Liberal Republicans.

HENRY WATTERSON.

I—BY WHITELAW REID

Dorchester House,
Park Lane, W., London, England,
May 3, 1911.

My dear Watterson:

I have read the manuscript with the greatest interest. On a few little matters I shouldn’t have put things quite the same way; but that of course is to be expected from the different points of view from which we necessarily regard the subject. On the whole, it seems to me extremely fair and accurate.

I shall append a few notes, which I have made on different points suggested by the manuscript, not with the idea that you will find any occasion to incorporate any of my suggestions in your account, but only by way of refreshing your memory, as your manuscript has refreshed mine, about interesting incidents of a period which now seems so remote as to belong exclusively to our romantic youth.

On page 27 it would seem to be implied that Ben Wade was somewhat influenced in his support of the impeachment policy by the fact that if impeachment succeeded, he was the inevitable successor. I saw a great deal of Wade in those days. He certainly knew what the consequence to himself of a successful impeachment would be, but I never saw any reason to suppose that if somebody else had been acting Vice-President, Wade’s attitude would not have been the same. Probably he would have been even more outspoken.

Page 31. What you say of the attitude of three of the Quadrilateral toward myself is not news to me. I knew, however, the reasons for it (which would probably have influenced me if I had been in their places), and I bore no grudges. In fact, at the time I had a pretty strong conviction that they were the people who were going to be badly disappointed in the end; so that, while you all thought you were taking me into camp, I was comforting myself with the belief that I was taking the Quadrilateral into camp, and should find them very useful articles to begin housekeeping with.

Page 35. Did McCullagh come from Chicago? I thought we always counted him as belonging to Cincinnati until he went to St. Louis. When I first went to Cincinnati, he was a reporter on the “Gazette,” from which he went to the “Commercial.”

Page 40. The “bravery” of Greeley’s outstretched hand may have been fully recognized, but I doubt if its self-sacrifice ever was. First and last it must have cost him (poor man that he was) nearly a million dollars. Shortly after the first volume of his history, “The American Conflict,” was published, I remember congratulating him on the pecuniary success. His reply was: “Oh, I haven’t made as much as the newspapers say. Still, I’ve made a hundred thousand dollars that I know of, for I have spent every cent of it. The past at least is secure.” With that figure as a basis, you can calculate how much he would probably have made from the enormously augmented sale of the first volume when the second came out, as well as from the copyrights on the second. The circulation of “The Tribune” was also affected for a time in the same disastrous way.

Page 41. With my intimate knowledge of Greeley at that period I should hardly have said he had a passion for office. What I did think was that he had a passion for recognition, and was very sore at being treated not as an equal and comrade, but as a convenience to the machine, by Seward and Thurlow Weed. It was less office he sought than an opportunity to teach those gentlemen their places and his. Certainly he never had a lifelong passion for office like Lincoln.

Page 41. We had no better politics during the campaign than in the management of the Fifth Avenue Conference. I remember that William Henry Hurlbert and some others who were doing their best then to defeat us did not wake up to the real significance of our attitude toward this conference until the morning it met. Then Hurlbert described the course of “The Tribune” as that of a court gallant, tiptoeing forward to bow the favorites to their places.

I always thought we had the country with us until after the North Carolina election, and believed we carried that. I am afraid it was our old friend Ned Webster who deliberately rushed down to steal it away from us, and that his very strong measures had pretty high sanction. Or was it in the Hayes-Tilden election that he came to the front? The truth is the North Carolina election was the turning-point. If the result had been left as we believed it to be for the first two or three days, I don’t think we should have had the October reaction, or that Nast’s cartoons could have had anything like the effect they did exert.

By the way, some of those cartoons could hardly have been tolerated at any other time in America, and would hardly have been tolerated in any other country at any time, such as the one depicting Greeley—Greeley of all living men!—as clasping hands with the ghost of Wilkes Booth across the grave of murdered Abraham Lincoln. I once told “Brooklyn” Joe Harper he ought to be ashamed of that, and begin every day of his life with a prayer for forgiveness for it. His reply was that we all of us had done something at some time in our lives that we ought to be ashamed of. He understood perfectly that I never resented in the least Nast’s caricatures of myself. In fact, I thought some of them extraordinarily clever, such as the one depicting me playing a hand-organ in front of the old Manhattan Club, with Greeley as the monkey holding out a hat for pennies, while on the end of the organ was the familiar quotation from “The Tribune” of those days, “This is not an organ.”

Page 42. You are perfectly right in praising Greeley’s hopeless campaign in the West. In fact, if I were writing, I should pitch the note a little higher. I remember Joseph H. Choate saying to a group, of which I was a member, one Saturday night at the Century Club during that campaign, “What extraordinarily good speeches Greeley is making out West!” To give that its full value, please remember that Choate was a partner of Evarts, who had nominated Seward, and that to that whole combination Greeley was anathema.

Page 42. My recollection is that Mrs. Greeley died in the interval after his return from the West, but before the election. I always attributed his sudden collapse after the election as much to his loss of sleep, while watching for a week at her bedside, as to disappointment over the result, and this opinion was somewhat confirmed by Dr. Choate (a brother of Joseph), to whose private sanatorium he was taken. I asked Choate what the real disease was, and he said, “If you want it in popular phrase, it is really an inflammation of the outer membrane of the brain, due to loss of sleep or extraordinary excitement.” Then I asked what his prognosis was, and he replied, “He will either be well in a week or dead.” This is of course not a description of insanity at all; and I always felt a cruel injustice was done his memory in describing him as going crazy over defeat—as cruel as it would be to say such a thing of a fever patient because he was in a temporary delirium.

I was never convinced that the “last words” you quote were ever uttered by him, “‘The Tribune’ is gone, and I am gone.” Dana was surrounded in those days by people who for one reason or another had grudges equal to his own against “The Tribune”—Amos Cummings, who had left us in a pet because of some rebuke from John Russell Young; Dr. Wood, whom Amos got away from us; and, above all, a man in the proof-room, who resented my criticisms of his proofreading and deserted us, taking with him the manuscript of one or two of Greeley’s unbalanced articles, which his brother-in-law, John Cleveland, had discovered and brought to me, and which I suppressed because they were obviously unbalanced. They reveled in these things; and it happened at that time to be all grist to Dana’s mill.

II—BY HORACE WHITE

I HAVE read “The Humor and Tragedy of the Greeley Campaign.” What I think of it depends upon the point of view from which I look at it. The only tragic thing in it is the death of Greeley. All the rest is comedy.

Regarded as such it has high merits. I can think of nothing political that is more mirth-provoking, unless it is Dickens’s description of Mr. Veneering’s campaign for a seat in Parliament with the help of Boots and Brewer riding about London in cabs and “bringing him in.”

The first three pages are serious. On the fourth page the fun begins, and continues till the death of Greeley. At the bottom of page 33 there are two sentences beginning with the words, “We were wholly serious,” which excuse the participants, including yourself, for being at Cincinnati at all. Then the humor starts afresh and becomes side-splitting at the place where McClure enters and tosses Schurz and Halstead and yourself to the ceiling successively.

Now the question arises, What will the readers of your paper, who get from it their first and only knowledge of the campaign of 1872—and these will probably be ninety per cent. of its readers—think of that campaign? They will think it was a very droll affair and quite unaccountable. They will know nothing about disfranchisement or Santo Domingo or nepotism or whisky frauds, or civil-service rapine or the real causes of the uprising of 1871–72.

The McClure episode, by the way, is even more unaccountable. I don’t understand it myself. It reads as though Colonel McClure was surveying the scene from Olympus as a disinterested spectator, with great scorn for the participants in the convention. In fact he was chairman of the Pennsylvania delegation, supporting Greeley or Davis or somebody. He was as deep in the mud as anybody else was in the mire.

Chapter V on Greeley is prime, but it is hardly true to say or imply that his martyrdom shortened the distance across the bloody chasm or that his coffin nearly filled it. Reconstruction, Ku Klux, and carpet-baggery lasted through Grant’s second term, except in so far as it was put down (in Texas and Arkansas) despite the Republican party. The South did not get any real relief until Hayes came in, and then only as the result of a bargain made before the vote of the Electoral Commission was taken.

To sum up: I think that you have dwelt too much on the humorous side of the Cincinnati Convention, and that you have omitted the only features that gave it a raison d’être, or have given such slight attention to them that the reader will not catch their significance.

IS THE NEGRO HAVING A FAIR CHANCE?

BY BOOKER T. WASHINGTON

IF I were asked the simple, direct question, “Does the negro in America have a fair chance?” it would be easy to answer simply, “No,” and then refer to instances with which every one is familiar to justify this reply. Such a statement would, however, be misleading to any one who was not intimately acquainted with the actual situation. For that reason I have chosen to make my answer not less candid and direct, I hope, but a little more circumstantial.

THE NEGRO TREATED BETTER IN AMERICA THAN ELSEWHERE

ALTHOUGH I have never visited either Africa or the West Indies to see for myself the condition of the people in these countries, I have had opportunities from time to time, outside of the knowledge I have gained from books, to get some insight into actual conditions there. But I do not intend to assert or even suggest that the condition of the American negro is satisfactory, nor that he has in all things a fair chance. Nevertheless, from all that I can learn I believe I am safe in saying that nowhere are there ten millions of black people who have greater opportunities or are making greater progress than the negroes in America.

I know that few native Africans will agree with me in this statement. For example, we had at Tuskegee a student from the Gold Coast who came to America to study in our Bible Training School and incidentally to learn something of our methods of study and work. He did not approve at all of our course of study. There was not enough theology, and too much work to suit him. As far as he was concerned, he could not see any value in learning to work, and he thought it was a pretty poor sort of country in which the people had to devote so much time to labor. “In my country,” he said, “everything grows of itself. We do not have to work. We can devote all our time to the larger life.”

LITTLE IMMIGRATION OF NEGROES

IN the last ten years the official records show that 37,000 negroes have left other countries to take residence in the United States. I can find no evidence to show that any considerable number of black people have given up residence in America.

The striking fact is, that negroes from other countries are constantly coming into the United States, and few are going out. This seems in part to answer the question as to whether the negro is having a fair chance in America as compared with any other country in which negroes live in any large numbers.

By far the largest number of negro immigrants come from the West Indies. Even Haiti, a free negro republic, furnishes a considerable number of immigrants every year. In all my experience and observation, however, I cannot recall a single instance in which a negro has left the United States to become a citizen of the Haitian Republic. On the other hand, not a few leaders of thought and action among the negroes in the United States are those who have given up citizenship in the little Black Republic in order to live under the Stars and Stripes. The majority of the colored people who come from the West Indies do so because of the economic opportunities which the United States offers them. Another large group, however, comes to get education. Here at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama we usually have not far from one hundred students from South America and the various West Indian Islands. In the matter of opportunity to secure the old-fashioned, abstract book education several of the West Indian Islands give negroes a better chance than is afforded them in most of our Southern States, but for industrial and technical education they are compelled to come to the United States.

In the matter of political and civil rights, including protection of life and property and even-handed justice in the courts, negroes in the West Indies have the advantage of negroes in the United States. In the island of Jamaica, for example, there are about 15,000 white people and 600,000 black people, but of the “race problem,” in regard to which there is much agitation in this country, one hears almost nothing there. Jamaica has neither mobs, race riots, lynchings, nor burnings, such as disgrace our civilization. In that country there is likewise no bitterness between white man and black man. One reason for this is that the laws are conceived and executed with exact and absolute justice, without regard to race or color.

UNEQUAL LAWS THE CAUSE OF RACIAL TROUBLE IN AMERICA

REDUCED to its lowest terms, the fact is that a large part of our racial troubles in the United States grow out of some attempt to pass and execute a law that will make and keep one man superior to another, whether he is intrinsically superior or not. No greater harm can be done to any group of people than to let them feel that a statutory enactment can keep them superior to anybody else. No greater injury can be done to any youth than to let him feel that because he belongs to this or that race, or because of his color, he will be advanced in life regardless of his own merits or efforts.

In what I have said I do not mean to suggest that in the West Indian Islands there is any more social intermingling between whites and blacks than there is in the United States. The trouble in most parts of the United States is that mere civil and legal privileges are confused with social intermingling. The fact that two men ride in the same railway coach does not mean in any country in the world that they are socially equal.

The facts seem to show, however, that after the West Indian negro has carefully weighed his civil and political privileges against the economic and other advantages to be found in the United States, he decides that, all things considered, he has a better chance in the United States than at home. The negro in Haiti votes, but votes have not made that country happy; or have not even made it free, in any true sense of the word. There is one other fact I might add to this comparison: nearly all the negro church organizations in the United States have mission churches in the islands, as they have also in Africa.

Does the negro in our country have a fair chance as compared with the native black man in Africa, the home of the negro? In the midst of the preparation of this article, I met Bishop Isaiah B. Scott of the Methodist Episcopal Church, one of the strongest and most intelligent colored men that I know. Bishop Scott has spent the greater part of his life in the Southern States, but during the last seven years he has lived in Liberia and traveled extensively on the west coast of Africa, where he has come into contact with all classes of European white people. In answer to my question, Bishop Scott dictated the following sentence, which he authorized me to use:

“The fairest white man that I have met in dealing with the colored man is the American white man. He understands the colored man better because of his contact with him, and he has more respect for the colored man who has accomplished something.”

Basing my conclusions largely on conversations which I have had with native Africans, with negro missionaries, and with negro diplomatic officials who have lived in Africa, especially on the west coast and in South Africa, I am led to the conclusion that, all things considered, the negro in the United States has a better chance than he has in Africa.

THE NEGRO AS A DEPENDENT RACE

IN certain directions the negro has had greater opportunities in the States in which he served as a slave than he has had in the States in which he has been for a century or more a free man. This statement is borne out by the fact that in the South the negro rarely has to seek labor, but, on the other hand, labor seeks him. In all my experience in the Southern States, I have rarely seen a negro man or woman seeking labor who did not find it. In the South the negro has business opportunities that he does not have elsewhere. While in social matters the lines are strictly drawn, the negro is less handicapped in business in the South than any other part of the country. He is sought after as a depositor in banks. If he wishes to borrow money, he gets it from the local bank just as quickly as the white man with the same business standing. If the negro is in the grocery business or in the dry-goods trade, or if he operates a drug store, he gets his goods from the wholesale dealer just as readily and on as good terms as his white competitor. If the Southern white man has a dwelling-house, a store-house, factory, school, or court-house to erect, it is natural for him to employ a colored man as builder or contractor to perform that work. What is said to be the finest school building in the city of New Orleans was erected by a colored contractor. In the North a colored man who ran a large grocery store would be looked upon as a curiosity. The Southern white man frequently buys his groceries from a negro merchant.

Fortunately, the greater part of the colored people in the South have remained as farmers on the soil. The late census shows that eighty per cent. of Southern negroes live on the land.

There are few cases where a black man cannot buy and own a farm in the South. It is as a farmer in the Southern States that the masses of my race have economically and industrially the largest opportunity. No one stops to ask before purchasing a bale of cotton or a bushel of corn if it has been produced by a white hand or a black hand.

The negro now owns, as near as I can estimate, 15,000 grocery and dry-goods stores, 300 drug stores, and 63 banks. Negroes pay taxes on between $600,000,000 and $700,000,000 of property of various kinds in the United States. Unless he had had a reasonably fair chance in the South, the negro could not have gained and held this large amount of property, and would not have been able to enter in the commerce of this country to the extent that he has.

SKILLED NEGRO LABOR BETTER TREATED IN THE SOUTH THAN IN THE NORTH

AS a skilled laborer, the negro has a better opportunity in the South than in the North. I think it will be found generally true in the South as elsewhere that wherever the negro is strong in numbers and in skill he gets on well with the trades-unions. In these cases the unions seek to get him in, or they leave him alone, and in the latter case do not seek to control him. In the Southern States, where the race enters in large numbers in the trades, the trades-unions have not had any appreciable effect in hindering the progress of the negro as a skilled laborer or as a worker in special industries, such as coal-mining, iron-mining, etc. In border cities, like St. Louis, Washington, and Baltimore, however, the negro rarely finds work in such industries as brick-laying and carpentry. One of the saddest examples of this fact that I ever witnessed was in the City of Washington, where on the campus of Howard University, a negro institution, a large brick building was in process of erection. Every man laying brick on this building was white, every man carrying a hod was a negro. The white man, in this instance, was willing to erect a building in which negroes could study Latin, but was not willing to give negroes a chance to lay the bricks in its walls.

Let us consider for a moment the negro in the professions in the Southern States. Aside from school teaching and preaching, into which the racial question enters in only a slight degree, there remain law and medicine. All told, there are not more than 700 colored lawyers in the Southern States, while there are perhaps more than 3000 doctors, dentists, and pharmacists. With few exceptions, colored lawyers feel, as they tell me, that they do not have a fair chance before a white jury when a white lawyer is on the other side of the case. Even in communities where negro lawyers are not discriminated against by juries, their clients feel that there is danger in intrusting cases to a colored lawyer. Mainly for these two reasons, colored lawyers are not numerous in the South; yet, in cases where colored lawyers combine legal practice with trading and real estate, they have in several instances been highly successful.

THE DIFFICULTY OF OBTAINING UNIFORM TREATMENT

HERE again, however, it is difficult to generalize. People speak of the “race question” in the South, overlooking the fact that each one of the 1300 counties in the Southern States is a law unto itself. The result is that there are almost as many race problems as there are counties. The negro may have a fair chance in one county, and have no chance at all in the adjoining county. The Hon. Josiah T. Settles, for example, has practised both criminal and civil law for thirty years in Memphis. He tells me that he meets with no discrimination on account of his color either from judges, lawyers, or juries. There are other communities, like New Orleans and Little Rock, where negro lawyers are accorded the same fair treatment, and, I ought to add, that, almost without exception, negro lawyers tell me they are treated fairly by white judges and white lawyers.

The professional man who is making the greatest success in the South is the negro doctor, and I should include the pharmacists and dentists with the physicians and surgeons. Except in a few cities, white doctors are always willing to consult with negro doctors.

The young negro physician in the South soon finds himself with a large and paying practice, and, as a rule, he makes use of this opportunity to improve the health conditions of his race in the community. Some of the most prosperous men of my race in the South are negro doctors. Again, the very fact that a negro cannot buy soda-water in a white drug store makes an opportunity for the colored drug store, which often becomes a sort of social center for the colored population.

From an economic point of view, the negro in the North, when compared with the white man, does not have a fair chance. This is the feeling not only of the colored people themselves, but of almost every one who has examined into the conditions under which colored men work. But here also one is likely to form a wrong opinion. There is, to begin with, this general difference between the North and the South, that whereas in the South there is, as I have already suggested, a job looking for every idle man, in the North, on the contrary, there are frequently two or three idle men looking for every job. In some of the large cities of the North there are organizations to secure employment for colored people. For a number of years I have kept in pretty close touch with those at the head of these organizations, and they tell me that in many cases they have been led to believe that the negro has a harder time in finding employment than is actually true. The reason is that those who are out of employment seek these organizations. Those who have steady work, in positions which they have held for years, do not seek them.

As a matter of fact, I have been surprised to find how large a number of colored people there are in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago who hold responsible positions in factories, stores, banks, and other places. In regard to these people one hears very little. There is a colored man, for example, in Cleveland who has been for years private secretary to a railway president. In St. Paul there is a colored man who holds a similar position; in Baltimore there is still another colored private secretary to a railway president.

THE SHIFTING OF OCCUPATIONS

IN recent years there has been a great shifting of employment between the races. A few years ago all the rough work in the mines, on the railway, and elsewhere was performed by Irish immigrants. Now this work is done by Poles, Hungarians, and Italians. In cities like New York, Chicago, and Pittsburg one finds to-day fewer colored people employed as hotel waiters, barbers, and porters than twenty years ago. In New York, however, many colored men are employed in the streets and in the subways. In Pittsburg thousands of colored men are employed in the iron mills. In Chicago negroes are employed very largely in the packing-houses. Twenty years ago in these cities there were almost no colored people in these industries. In addition to the changes I have mentioned, many colored people have gone into businesses of various kinds on their own account. It should be remembered, also, that, while in some trades and in some places discrimination is made against the negro, in other trades and in other places this discrimination works in his favor. The case in point is the Pullman-car service. I question whether any white man, however efficient, could secure a job as a Pullman-car porter.

BETTER OPPORTUNITY FOR EDUCATION IN THE NORTH

IN the North, as a rule, the negro has the same opportunities for education as his white neighbor. When it comes to making use of this education, however, he is frequently driven to a choice between becoming an agitator, who makes his living out of the troubles of his race, or emigrating to the Southern States, where the opportunities for educated colored men are large. One of the greatest sources of bitterness and despondency among colored people in the North grows out of their inability to find a use for their education after they have obtained it. Again, they are seldom sure of just what they may or may not do. If one is a stranger in a city, he does not know in what hotel he will be permitted to stay; he is not certain what seat he may occupy in the theater, or whether he will be able to obtain a meal in a restaurant.

THE UNCERTAINTY OF TREATMENT OF THE RACE IN THE NORTH

THE uncertainty, the constant fear and expectation of rebuff which the colored man experiences in the North, is often more humiliating and more wearing than the frank and impersonal discrimination which he meets in the South. This is all the more true because the colored youth in most of the Northern States, educated as they are in the same schools with white youths, taught by the same teachers, and inspired by the same ideals of American citizenship, are not prepared for the discrimination that meets them when they leave school.

Despite all this, it cannot be denied that the negro has advantages in the North which are denied him in the South. They are the opportunity to vote and to take part, to some extent, in making and administering the laws by which he is governed, the opportunity to obtain an education, and, what is of still greater importance, fair and unbiased treatment in the courts, the protection of the law.

I have touched upon conditions North and South, which, whether they affect the negro favorably or adversely, are for the most part so firmly entrenched in custom, prejudice, and human nature that they must perhaps be left to the slow changes of time. There are certain conditions in the South, however, in regard to which colored people feel perhaps more keenly because they believe if they were generally understood they would be remedied. Very frequently the negro people suffer injury and wrong in the South because they have or believe they have no way of making their grievances known. Not only are they not represented in the legislatures, but it is sometimes hard to get a hearing even in the press. On one of my educational campaigns in the South I was accompanied by a colored newspaper man. He was an enterprising sort of chap and at every public meeting we held he would manage in some way to address the audience on the subject of his paper. On one occasion, after appealing to the colored people for some time, he turned to the white portion of the audience.

“You white folks,” he said, “ought to read our colored papers to find out what colored people are doing. You ought to find out what they are doing and what they are thinking. You don’t know anything about us,” he added. “Don’t you know a colored man can’t get his name in a white paper unless he commits a crime?”

I do not know whether the colored newspaper man succeeded in getting any subscriptions by this speech or not, but there was much truth in his statement.

THE GREATEST SOURCE OF DISSATISFACTION TO THE NEGRO IN THE SOUTH

ONE thing that many negroes feel keenly, although they do not say much about it to either black or white people, is the conditions of railway travel in the South.

Now and then the negro is compelled to travel. With few exceptions, the railroads are almost the only great business concerns in the South that pursue the policy of taking just as much money from the black traveler as from the white traveler without feeling that they ought, as a matter of justice and fair play, not as a matter of social equality, to give one man for his money just as much as another man. The failure of most of the roads to do justice to the negro when he travels is the source of more bitterness than any one other matter of which I have any knowledge.

It is strange that the wide-awake men who control the railroads in the Southern States do not see that, as a matter of dollars and cents, to say nothing of any higher consideration, they ought to encourage, not discourage, the patronage of nine millions of the black race in the South. This is a traveling population that is larger than the whole population of Canada, and yet, with here and there an exception, railway managers do not seem to see that there is any business advantage to them in giving this large portion of the population fair treatment.

What embitters the colored people in regard to railroad travel, I repeat, is not the separation, but the inadequacy of the accommodations. The colored people are given half of a baggage-car or half of a smoking-car. In most cases, the negro portion of the car is poorly ventilated, poorly lighted, and, above all, rarely kept clean; and then, to add to the colored man’s discomfort, no matter how many colored women may be in the colored end of the car, nor how clean or how well educated these colored women may be, this car is made the headquarters for the news-boy. He spreads out his papers, his magazines, his candy, and his cigars over two or three seats. White men are constantly coming into the car and almost invariably light cigars while in the colored coach, so that these women are required to ride in what is virtually a smoking-car.

On some of the roads colored men and colored women are forced to use the same toilet-room. This is not true of every Southern railway. There are some railways in the South, notably the Western Railway of Alabama, which make a special effort to see that the colored people are given every facility in the day coaches that the white people have, and the colored people show in many ways that they appreciate this consideration.

Here is an experience of R. S. Lovinggood, a colored man of Austin, Texas. I know Mr. Lovinggood well. He is neither a bitter nor a foolish man. I will venture to say that there is not a single white man in Austin, Texas, where he lives, who will say that Professor Lovinggood is anything but a conservative, sensible man.

“At one time,” he said to me, in speaking of some of his traveling experiences, “I got off at a station almost starved. I begged the keeper of the restaurant to sell me a lunch in a paper and hand it out of the window. He refused, and I had to ride a hundred miles farther before I could get a sandwich.

“At another time I went to a station to purchase my ticket. I was there thirty minutes before the ticket-office was opened. When it did finally open I at once appeared at the window. While the ticket-agent served the white people at one window, I remained there beating the other until the train pulled out. I was compelled to jump aboard the train without my ticket and wire back to get my trunk expressed. Considering the temper of the people, the separate coach law may be the wisest plan for the South, but the statement that the two races have equal accommodations is all bosh. I pay the same money, but I cannot have a chair or a lavatory and rarely a through car. I must crawl out at all times of night, and in all kinds of weather, in order to catch another dirty ‘Jim Crow’ coach to make my connections. I do not ask to ride with white people. I do ask for equal accommodations for the same money.”

LACK OF A “SQUARE DEAL” IN EDUCATION IN THE SOUTH

IN the matter of education, the negro in the South has not had what Colonel Roosevelt calls a “square deal.” In the North, not only the Jew, the Slav, the Italian, many of whom are such recent arrivals that they have not yet become citizens and voters, even under the easy terms granted them by the naturalization laws of the Northern States, have all the advantages of education that are granted to every other portion of the population, but in several States an effort is now being made to give immigrant peoples special opportunities for education over and above those given to the average citizen. In some instances, night schools are started for their special benefit. Frequently schools which run nine months in the winter are continued throughout the summer, whenever a sufficient number of people can be induced to attend them. Sometimes, as for example, in New York State, where large numbers of men are employed in digging the Erie Canal and in excavating the Croton Aqueduct, camp schools are started where the men employed on these public works in the day may have an opportunity to learn the English language at night. In some cases a special kind of text-book, written in two or three different languages, has been prepared for use in these immigrant schools, and frequently teachers are specially employed who can teach in the native languages if necessary.

While in the North all this effort is being made to provide education for these foreign peoples, many of whom are merely sojourners in this country, and will return in a few months to their homes in Europe, it is only natural that the negro in the South should feel that he is unfairly treated when he has, as is often true in the country districts, either no school at all, or one with a term of no more than four or five months, taught in the wreck of a log-cabin and by a teacher who is paid about half the price of a first-class convict.

This is no mere rhetorical statement. If a negro steals or commits a murderous assault of some kind, he will be tried and imprisoned, and then, if he is classed as a first-class convict, he will be rented out at the rate of $46 per month for twelve months in the year. The negro who does not commit a crime, but prepares himself to serve the State as a first-grade teacher, will receive from the State for that service perhaps $30 per month for a period of not more than six months.

Taking the Southern States as a whole, about $10.23 per capita is spent in educating the average white boy or girl, and the sum of $2.82 per capita in educating the average black child.

Let me take as an illustration one of our Southern farming communities, where the colored population largely outnumbers the white. In Wilcox County, Alabama, there are nearly 11,000 black children and 2000 white children of school age. Last year $3569 of the public school fund went for the education of the black children in that county, and $30,294 for the education of the white children, this notwithstanding that there are five times as many negro children as white. In other words, there was expended for the education of each negro child in Wilcox County thirty-three cents, and for each white child $15. In the six counties surrounding and touching Wilcox County there are 55,000 negro children of school age. There was appropriated for their education last year from the public school fund $40,000, while for the 19,622 white children in the same counties there was appropriated from the public fund $199,000.

There are few, if any, intelligent white people in the South or anywhere else who will claim that the negro is receiving justice in these counties in the matter of the public school fund. Especially will this seem true when it is borne in mind that the negro is the main dependence for producing the farm products which constitute the chief wealth of that part of Alabama. I say this because I know there are thousands of fair-minded and liberal white men in the South who do not know what is actually going on in their own States.

In the State of Georgia, negroes represent forty-two per cent. of the farmers of the State, and are largely employed as farm laborers on the plantations. Notwithstanding this fact, Georgia has two agricultural colleges and eleven district agricultural high schools for whites, supported at an annual cost to the State of $140,000, while there is only one school where negroes have a chance to study agriculture, and to the support of this the State contributes only $8000 a year. When one hears it said that the negro farmer of Georgia is incompetent and inefficient as compared with the white farmer of Minnesota or Wisconsin, can any one say that this is fair to the negro?

Not a few Southern white men see what is needed and are not afraid to say so. A. A. Gunby of Louisiana recently said: “Every one competent to speak and honest enough to be candid knows that education benefits and improves the negro. It makes him a better neighbor and workman, no matter what you put him at.”

Every one agrees that a public library in a city tends to make better citizens, keeping people usefully employed instead of spending their time in idleness or in committing crime. Is it fair, as is true of most of the large cities of the South, to take the negro’s money in the form of taxes to support a public library, and then to make no provision for the negro using any library? I am glad to say that some of the cities, for instance, Louisville, Kentucky, and Jacksonville, Florida, have already provided library facilities for their black citizens or are preparing to do so.

One excuse that is frequently made in the South for not giving the negro a fair share of the moneys expended for education is that the negro is poor and does not contribute by his taxes sufficient to support the schools that now exist. True, the negro is poor; but in the North that would be a reason for giving him more opportunities for education, not fewer, because it is recognized that one of the greatest hindrances to progress is ignorance. As far as I know, only two men have ever given thorough consideration to the question as to the amount the negro contributes directly or indirectly toward his own education. Both of these are Southern white men. One of them is W. N. Sheats, former Superintendent of Education for the State of Florida. The other is Charles L. Coon, Superintendent of Schools at Wilson, North Carolina, and formerly connected with the Department of Education for that State.

THE NEGRO PAYS MORE THAN HIS SHARE TO EDUCATION IN THE SOUTH

IN his annual report for 1900, Mr. Sheats made a thorough analysis of the sources of the school fund in Florida, and of the way in which it is distributed between the white and negro schools. In referring to the figures which he obtained, he said:

A glance at the foregoing statistics indicates that the section of the State designated as “Middle Florida” is considerably behind all the rest in all stages of educational progress. The usual plea is that this is due to the intolerable burden of negro education, and a general discouragement and inactivity is ascribed to this cause. The following figures are given to show that the education of the negroes of Middle Florida does not cost the white people of that section one cent. Without discussing the American principle that it is the duty of all property to educate every citizen as a means of protection to the State, and with no reference to what taxes that citizen may pay, it is the purpose of this paragraph to show that the backwardness of education of the white people is in no degree due to the presence of the negro, but that the presence of the negro has been actually contributing to the sustenance of the white schools.

Mr. Sheats shows that the amount paid for negro schools from negro taxes or from a division of other funds to which negroes contribute indirectly with the whites, amounted to $23,984. The actual cost of negro schools, including their pro rata for administration expenses, was $19,467.

“If this is a fair calculation,” Mr. Sheats concludes, “the schools for negroes are not only no burden on the white citizens, but $4525 for negro schools contributed from other sources was in some way diverted to the white schools. A further loss to the negro schools is due to the fact that so few polls are collected from negroes by county officials.”

Mr. Coon, in an address on “Public Taxation and Negro Schools” before the 1909 Conference for Education in the South, at Atlanta, Georgia, said:

The South is spending $32,068,851 on her public schools, both white and black, but what part of this sum is devoted to negro public schools, which must serve at least forty per cent. of her school population? It is not possible to answer this question with absolute accuracy, but it is possible from the several State reports to find out the whole amount spent for teachers, and in all the States, except Arkansas, what was spent for white and negro teachers separately. The aggregate amount now being spent for public teachers of both races in these eleven States is $23,856,914, or 74.4 per cent. of the whole amount expended. Of this sum not more than $3,818,705 was paid to negro teachers, or twelve per cent. of the total expenditures.

He also brought out the fact that in Virginia, if, in addition to the direct taxes paid by negroes, they had received their proportion of the taxes on corporate property and other special taxes, such as fertilizers, liquor, etc., there would have been expended on the negro schools $18,077 more than was expended; that is, they would have received $507,305 instead of $489,228. In North Carolina there would have been expended $26,539 more than was expended, the negroes receiving $429,197 instead of $402,658. In Georgia there would have been expended on the negro schools $141,682 more than was expended.

In other words, Superintendent Coon seems to prove that negro schools in the States referred to are not only no burden to the white tax-payers, but that the colored people do not get back all the money for their schools that they themselves pay in taxes. In each case there is a considerable amount taken from the negroes’ taxes and spent somewhere else or for other purposes.

CONVICT LABOR A GREAT EVIL IN THE SOUTH

IT would help mightily toward the higher civilization for both races if more white people would apply their religion to the negro in their community, and ask themselves how they would like to be treated if they were in the negro’s place. For example, no white man in America would feel that he was being treated with justice if every time he had a case in court, whether civil or criminal, every member of the jury was of some other race. Yet this is true of the negro in nearly all of the Southern States. There are few white lawyers or judges who will not admit privately that it is almost impossible for a negro to get justice when he has a case against a white man and all the members of the jury are white. In these circumstances, when a negro fails to receive justice, the injury to him is temporary, but the injury to the character of the white man on the jury is permanent.

In Alabama eighty-five per cent. of the convicts are negroes. The official records show that last year Alabama had turned into its treasury $1,085,854 from the labor of its convicts. At least $900,000 of this came from negro convicts, who were for the most part rented to the coal-mining companies in the northern part of the State. The result of this policy has been to get as many able-bodied convicts as possible into the mines, so that contractors might increase their profits. Alabama, of course, is not the only State that has yielded to the temptation to make money out of human misery. The point is, however, that while $900,000 is turned into the State treasury from negro-convict labor, to say nothing of negro taxes, there came out of the State treasury, to pay negro teachers, only $357,585.

I speak of this matter as much in the interest of the white man as of the black. Whenever and wherever the white man, acting as a court officer, feels that he cannot render absolute justice because of public sentiment, that white man is not free. Injustice in the courts makes slaves of two races in the South, the white and the black.

THE BALLOT TO THE INTELLIGENT NEGRO

NO influence could ever make me desire to go back to the conditions of Reconstruction days to secure the ballot for the negro. That was an order of things that was bad for the negro and bad for the white man. In most Southern States it is absolutely necessary that some restriction be placed upon the use of the ballot. The actual methods by which this restriction was brought about have been widely advertised, and there is no necessity for me discussing them here. At the time these measures were passed I urged that, whatever law went upon the statute-book in regard to the use of the ballot, it should apply with absolute impartiality to both races. This policy I advocate again in justice to both white man and negro.

Let me illustrate what I mean. In a certain county of Virginia, where the county board had charge of registering those who were to be voters, a colored man, a graduate of Harvard University, who had long been a resident of the county, a quiet, unassuming man, went before the board to register. He was refused on the ground that he was not intelligent enough to vote. Before this colored man left the room a white man came in who was so intoxicated that he could scarcely tell where he lived. This white man was registered, and by a board of intelligent white men who had taken an oath to deal justly in administering the law.

Will any one say that there is wisdom or statesmanship in such a policy as that? In my opinion it is a fatal mistake to teach the young black man and the young white man that the dominance of the white race in the South rests upon any other basis than absolute justice to the weaker man. It is a mistake to cultivate in the mind of any individual or group of individuals the feeling and belief that their happiness rests upon the misery of some one else, or that their intelligence is measured by the ignorance of some one else; or their wealth by the poverty of some one else. I do not advocate that the negro make politics or the holding of office an important thing in his life. I do urge, in the interest of fair play for everybody, that a negro who prepares himself in property, in intelligence, and in character to cast a ballot, and desires to do so, should have the opportunity.

In these pages I have spoken plainly regarding the South because I love the South as I love no other part of our country, and I want to see her white people equal to any white people on the globe in material wealth, in education, and in intelligence. I am certain, however, that none of these things can be secured and permanently maintained except they are founded on justice.

THE CRIME OF LYNCHING

IN most parts of the United States the colored people feel that they suffer more than others as the result of the lynching habit. When he was Governor of Alabama, I heard Governor Jelks say in a public speech that he knew of five cases during his administration of innocent colored people having been lynched. If that many innocent people were known to the governor to have been lynched, it is safe to say that there were other innocent persons lynched whom the governor did not know about. What is true of Alabama in this respect is true of other States. In short, it is safe to say that a large proportion of the colored people lynched are innocent.

A lynching-bee usually has its origin in a report that some crime has been committed. The story flies from mouth to mouth. Excitement spreads. Few take the time to get the facts. A mob forms and fills itself with bad whisky. Some one is captured. In case rape is charged, the culprit is frequently taken before the person said to have been assaulted. In the excitement of the moment, it is natural that the victim should say that the first person brought before her is guilty. Then comes more excitement and more whisky. Then comes the hanging, the shooting, or burning of the body.

Not a few cases have occurred where white people have blackened their faces and committed a crime, knowing that some negro would be suspected and mobbed for it. In other cases it is known that where negroes have committed crimes, innocent men have been lynched and the guilty ones have escaped and gone on committing more crimes.

Within the last twelve months there have been seventy-one cases of lynching, nearly all of colored people. Only seventeen were charged with the crime of rape. Perhaps they are wrong to do so, but colored people in the South do not feel that innocence offers them security against lynching. They do feel, however, that the lynching habit tends to give greater security to the criminal, white or black. When ten millions of people feel that they are not sure of being fairly tried in a court of justice, when charged with crime, is it not natural that they should feel that they have not had a fair chance?

I am aware of the fact that in what I have said in regard to the hardships of the negro in this country I throw myself open to the criticism of doing what I have all my life condemned and everywhere sought to avoid; namely, laying over-emphasis on matters in which the negro race in America has been badly treated, and thereby overlooking those matters in which the negro has been better treated in America than anywhere else in the world.

Despite all any one has said or can say in regard to the injustice and unfair treatment of the people of my race at the hands of the white men in this country, I venture to say that there is no example in history of the people of one race who have had the assistance, the direction, and the sympathy of another race in all its efforts to rise to such an extent as the negro in the United States.

Notwithstanding all the defects in our system of dealing with him, the negro in this country owns more property, lives in better houses, is in a larger measure encouraged in business, wears better clothes, eats better food, has more school-houses and churches, more teachers and ministers, than any similar group of negroes anywhere else in the world.

What has been accomplished in the past years, however, is merely an indication of what can be done in the future.

As white and black learn day by day to adjust, in a spirit of justice and fair play, those interests which are individual and racial, and to see and feel the importance of those fundamental interests which are common, so will both races grow and prosper. In the long run no individual and no race can succeed which sets itself at war against the common good.

PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR

BY JAMES D. CORROTHERS

HE came, a dark youth, singing in the dawn

Of a new freedom, glowing o’er his lyre,

Refining, as with great Apollo’s fire,

His people’s gift of song. And, thereupon,

This negro singer, come to Helicon,

Constrained the masters, listening, to admire,

And roused a race to wonder and aspire,

Gazing which way their honest voice was gone,

With ebon face uplit of glory’s crest.

Men marveled at the singer, strong and sweet,

Who brought the cabin’s mirth, the tuneful night,

But faced the morning, beautiful with light,

To die while shadows yet fell toward the west,

And leave his laurels at his people’s feet.

Dunbar, no poet wears your laurels now;

None rises, singing, from your race like you,

Dark melodist, immortal, though the dew

Fell early on the bays upon your brow,

And tinged with pathos every halcyon vow

And brave endeavor. Silence o’er you threw

Flowerets of love. Or, if an envious few

Of your own people brought no garlands, how

Could Malice smite him whom the gods had crowned?

If, like the meadow-lark, your flight was low,

Your flooded lyrics half the hilltops drowned;

A wide world heard you, and it loved you so

It stilled its heart to list the strains you sang,

And o’er your happy songs its plaudits rang.

THE NEGRO SINGER

BY JAMES D. CORROTHERS

O’ER all my song the image of a face

Lieth, like shadow on the wild, sweet flowers.

The dream, the ecstasy that prompts my powers;

The golden lyre’s delights bring little grace

To bless the singer of a lowly race.

Long hath this mocked me: aye, in marvelous hours,

When Hera’s gardens gleamed, or Cynthia’s bowers,

Or Hope’s red pylons, in their far, hushed place!

But I shall dig me deeper to the gold;

Fetch water, dripping, over desert miles,

From clear Nyanzas and mysterious Niles

Of love; and sing, nor one kind act withhold.

So shall men know me, and remember long,

Nor my dark face dishonor any song.

In the Wilstach Gallery, Philadelphia Engraved on wood by Henry Wolf

THE ANNUNCIATION

PAINTED BY H. O. TANNER

EXHORTATION (A NEGRO SERMON)

WORDS BY ALEX. ROGERS

MUSIC BY WILL MARION COOK

Copyright, 1912, by G. Schirmer

Re-mem-ber, if a brudder smotes dee on de lef’ cheek,

Turn roun’ and’ han’ him de od-der!

Kase, — ef you kaint ’turn good fu’ e-vil,——

What’s de good o’ bein’ a brudder?

Sez’ — when de an-gry pas-sions ris-es wid-in dee,——

Say, “Sat-an,— go!—git dee be-hin’ me!”

Den stop! an’ count a hun-dert,—— den go on ’bout yo’ bus’ness!—

Be keer-ful,—— be cau-tious,—— al-ways look be-fo’— you leap,——

Be sho’ you do— some pray-in’— be-fo’ you goes-a to sleep.——

To fight is wrong,—— it’s wrong to fight,——

An’ no two wrongs-a kaint make-a one right,

So try an’ be right unto de en;—

Dat’s right, all right! A-men! A-men!

Dat’s right, all right! A-men! A - A - A - A - A - A - men!——

Scamps of Romance

Scamps of Romance

by

William Rose Benét

I

With pipe and timbrel ribboned gay, with fiddle-scrape and clog.

Then, Nolly Goldsmith, here’s to thee!

Send Villon’s soul no ill!

But all hail that Prince of Vagabonds, Sir John Maundeville!

Oh, Sir John Maundeville, Sir John Maundeville,

Saw more Golcondas in the west than e’er another will!

Brave Marco Polo pales to naught,

Aladdin’s boast is still,

Before the gallant glory of Sir John Maundeville!

So we march—tramp! tramp!—and the ringing of our tread

Hales forth the highway swaggerers of lusty times long dead.

When so the glad world’s purple clad, it’s hail the romance scamp,

With the zesting of our jesting, and our march—tramp! tramp!

II

THERE’S Spindleshanks and Bonfire-head and trolling Heneree,

And each as mad a braggart bred as any age may see.

There’s castles in each wind-piled cloud and Spain just o’er the hill;

And, for best of all romancers, there’s Sir John Maundeville!

Oh, Sir John Maundeville, Sir John Maundeville!

Æneas Sylvius, go up, and, Hakluyt, rest you still;

Cathay, Damascus, Lamary, and Persia shall fulfil

The magic of the legends of Sir John Maundeville!

III

COME, hydra of the Lernean slough! Promethean vulture, come!

The charms that we have learned for you shall strike your terrors dumb.

The ghost of Raleigh gapes askance; he takes our mirth so ill.

And Pliny louts his bonnet to Sir John Maundeville!

Oh, Sir John Maundeville, Sir John Maundeville!

Of Noah’s Ark and Hills o’ Gold he’ll spin you yarns until

The Chan of rich Cathay’s your slave, and Caffolos is shrill

Singing the lofty praises of Sir John Maundeville!

IV

WE know the wild chimæric herds—Aspis, Leviathan,

And all the fabled beasts and birds were since the world began.

The Solan Geese flop from their trees; yon crawls the Cuckodrill—

And all because we read about Sir John Maundeville!

Oh, Sir John Maundeville, Sir John Maundeville,

From Malabar to Tartary they marvel at you still.

Old Aldrovandus drops a tear in envy fit to kill

Because we sing the praises of Sir John Maundeville.

V

WE’RE off across the hills to-day with merriment agog,

With pipe and timbrel ribboned gay, with fiddle-scrape and clog.

And in our pack we’ll bring you back

(I’ faith, we swear we will!)

Mad tales and lays your ghost shall praise

Sir John Maundeville.

Oh, Sir John Maundeville, Sir John Maundeville,

The world that gaped at romance then shall gape at romance still.

There’s portents in each autumn leaf,—Vale Parlous o’er the hill,—

And our jolly dreamland captain is Sir John Maundeville!

So we march—tramp! tramp! Do you wonder that our tread

Stamps up the ghosts of gallant knights from dust of days long dead?

When so the glad world’s romance-clad, it’s hail the romance scamp,

With old glories on our stories, and our march—tramp! tramp!

Drawn by Oliver Herford

A CLEAN SHAVE

BY GRACE MAC GOWAN COOKE

Author of “Mistress Joy,” “The Machinations of Ocoee Gallantine,” etc., etc.

WITH AN ILLUSTRATION BY F. E. SCHOONOVER

THERE was a storm brewing. The sun had gone down in splendor over Big Bald; heat lightnings laced the primrose of its afterglow. Now the air trembled to a presage of thunder; the world panted for its outburst of elemental rage.

The camp-meeting was in a brush arbor; the dry leaves on the boughs with which it was roofed rustled faintly when breathings of the coming tempest whispered across the highlands. The congregation, seated on backless puncheon benches, seemed to crouch beneath the uncertain illumination of a few torches and lanterns. Protracted meetings in the mountains are always held in midsummer, when the crops are laid by, so that perhaps the rising generation comes to associate their souls’ salvation and hot, breathless nights like this. Fleeing from the wrath to come no doubt gets hopelessly mixed in some minds with running for adequate shelter from the sudden passionate thunder-storms of the season.

There were six exhorters at work, swaying on their feet, shouting, two of them singing, the mourners’ bench partly filled, a promising tremor of excitement abroad in that portion of the congregation which had not yet come forward or risen for prayer—and the shower was almost upon them.

Vesta Turrentine, who always came up from the riverside store kept by her widower father at Turrentine’s Landing to stay with her Aunt Miranda during protracted meetings, had withdrawn to the end of a bench, where she sat with bowed head, watchful, agonizedly alert, letting her attitude pass for that of a penitent, hoping to be undisturbed. She was a slim, finely built young creature, already past the mere adolescence at which the mountain girl is apt to seek a mate. As she sat, chin on hand, dark eyes staring straight forward, her salient profile, a delicate feminine replica of old Jabe Turrentine’s own eagle outlines, relieved against the lights of the meeting, a man who crawled through the bushes found her very good to look upon. So absorbed was he in staring at her that he did not notice another man, deeper in shadow, who stared at him. Careless of observation, certain that the meeting was fully occupied with itself, Ross Adene, the first man, crept forward to the girl’s knee, touched it, laid his yellow head against it with a murmured greeting.

Drawn by F. E. Schoonover Half-tone plate engraved by H. C. Merrill

“HE WORKED WITH THE AIR OF A MAN WHO HAS COME AT LAST TO SOME DECISION, TURNED TO REACH FOR THE TOWEL—AND LOOKED INTO THE MUZZLE OF HIS OWN GUN, WITH HIS DAUGHTER’S RESOLUTE EYES BEHIND IT” (SEE [PAGE 69])

“Ross?” The whisper was strangled by terror; her hand went down against his hair, spread protectingly to conceal its shine.

“Who did you reckon it was?” whispered the young fellow. “Anybody else hangin’ round hidin’ to get sight of ye and a chance to speak with ye?”

“Didn’t you get my word?” Vesta breathed. “Pappy’s on the mounting—unless’n the storm’s turned him back.”

“I reckon it has,” Ross answered, settling himself comfortably in the deep shadow beside her. “It’s shore goin’ to be a big one.”

As he spoke there was an instant’s breathless hush of the voices in the meeting, a dying down of the lights. It was followed by a white flash so blinding, so all-enveloping, that in it one could see nothing. Close after came a crash which seemed to rend earth and menace heaven. The young fellow leaped to his feet, regardless of all concealment, pulling the girl up beside him, flinging an arm about her. After that lightning-flash the torches and lanterns seemed darkness. Women were screaming, mothers calling to their children, men shouting hoarsely, and running toward plunging teams hitched in the grove.

It would have seemed that in such confusion even the rashest intruder might go unchallenged, unrecognized, yet Vesta pushed her companion from her and into the shadow again before she looked around for her people. Her Aunt Miranda was puffing ponderously down the aisle toward a shrieking infant which had awakened from its nap on a back bench.

“Aunt ’Randy,” Vesta called, “I’m goin’ home with—somebody. I’m all right. I’ll be thar afore ye.”

She could see Mrs. Minter’s lips shape themselves to some words which her vigorously nodded head suggested were those of assent. She dipped into the dark; Ross swept his sweetheart up on a capable arm, and they set off running down the wood path which led across the fields to the Minter place.

The noises of the meeting behind them diminished as they ran. Other people were hurrying through the forest, calling, assuring themselves of the whereabouts and safety of members of their parties. Here and there lanterns or torches flickered.

“Hadn’t we better go through the bushes?” panted the girl. “Somebody’s apt to see ye—an’ then—”

“No,” returned Adene, half lifting her along; “nobody’ll take notice in a storm like this; an’ if they should, I’m about tired of dodgin’. We got to marry sometime, girl. How about then? Yer pappy’ll know then, won’t he?”

Thereafter they ran in silence. Twice the lightning illuminated their way, diminishing peals of thunder following. It was after the second of these that a shot rang out, startling Vesta so that she clung to Ross’s arm and screamed. The young fellow made the usual dry comment of the mountain-born, “They’s a man standin’ somewhars right now with an empty gun in his hand.” Then they fled breathlessly under the cover of a projecting ledge in the small bluff among the bushes which had been Adene’s objective point. The heavens opened, and the floods descended.

There is something cozy and delightful about standing sheltered and dry, while the whole world falls down in rain, the elements themselves seeking all in vain to reach and destroy you. Vesta put out a hand to let the great drops strike on it, pushing back her hair and lifting her face to the keen, sweet coolness of the downpour.

“Don’t you love it?” she asked again and again. “Hit ’minds me of playin’ when I was a child, and just goin’ crazy hollerin’ ‘Rain flag’ when hit come down this a-way.”

“You an’ me used to play that together,” Ross reminded her. “That was in the days before your dad took up the feud again.”

At this the girl turned and clutched him.

“Oh, Ross, I sent ye word not to come to-night,” she said, “but I wanted to see ye an’ warn ye, too. Pappy’s actin’ quare. He’s bound I shall marry.”

“Well, so ’m I,” assented Ross, half humorously. “Him an’ me won’t fall out over that.”

“Don’t make a joke of it,” said Vesta. “Hit’s as much as your life’s worth, an’ you know it. Hit’s as much as your life’s worth to be here to-night. We ort never to meet again.”

She added the concluding words in a lower tone not intended, perhaps, for her lover’s ears.

“Has he picked out a man for ye?” The young fellow returned to what she had first said.

“U-m—h-m,” assented Vesta, reluctantly.

“Who?”

“Sam Beath.” She spoke very low.

“Sam Beath.” The young fellow repeated her words louder. “That feller that come up from the Far Cove neighborhood to stay in the store?”

“Pappy don’t like him—for me—so very well,” Vesta faltered, “but he’s kin to kin of ourn, an’—you know, he’ll keep up the feud. Pappy says I’m gittin’ awful old; an’—”

“If what he wants is to see his gal married, you an’ me’ll wed to-morrow night after meetin’,” Ross declared.

Vesta laid hold of the lapels of his coat. She even slipped an arm about his neck in entreaty, a tremendous demonstration for a mountain girl, who feels that she must always be in the shy, reluctant attitude of one who is besought, whose scruples are overcome.

“Ross, I know ye don’t mean it, honey, but, oh, for any sakes! walk careful! Three years you an’ me has been promised to each other, a-meetin’ wherever we could, me scared to death for ye all the time; but pappy ain’t never found it out. Ross, give me yo’ word that you’ll be careful.”

A fleeting glow showed Adene his sweetheart’s pale, entreating face, and then came darkness and the steady drumming of the rain on the leaves.

“You an’ me are a-goin’ to be married to-morrow night after meetin’ at Brush Arbor,” he repeated doggedly. And Vesta, used to the men of her world, with whom action follows the word swiftly, if it does not precede, began to cry, leaning weakly against his shoulder.

“Ross, I’ll run away with ye, I’ll go anywhars you say. I’ll work my fingers to the bone for you. I’ll never look on the face of my kin again—for your sake.”

In her pleading she raised her voice until it was almost a cry. The storm had died down; the lisp of falling water scarcely blurred the sound of their words.

“Not for my sake you won’t,” returned her lover, sturdily, putting a strong arm about her, bending to cup her cheek in his hand. “Why, I like your daddy fine. I picked him out for a father-in-law same’s I picked you out for a wife. I ain’t never had any dad of my own to look to. Yourn suits me. I’ll make friends with him.”

“And why ain’t you got no father?” inquired Vesta, tragically. “’Ca’se my uncle shot him down when you was a baby in your mother’s lap—and there all the trouble began.”

“Hit’s a long time ago,” said Ross, philosophically. “I ain’t bearin’ any grudge till yet. I reckon if your uncle hadn’t ’a’ got my father, my father’d ’a’ got him. I aim to marry ye, here in Brush Arbor meetin’, an’ make friends with your daddy an’ put an end to the feud.”

As a spectacular conclusion to the storm, and apparently to Ross’s speech as well, there blazed through the woods a sudden greenish-white radiance of lightning. It flickered on the wet leaves, giving them a phosphorescent glow; it lit with an infernal illumination a face peering between those leaves, looking squarely into Adene’s own—a dark face, full of the strong beauty of age and courage, vivid yet with the zest of life. The young fellow’s hand went up to cover Vesta’s eyes, to press her head in against his breast.

“What is it?” she breathed.

“You said you was scared of lightning,” Ross answered close to her ear, as the thunder reverberated through a darkened, wet world.

Evidently she had not seen. Certainly he would not tell her. As the detonations died down, he stood rigid, waiting for the bolt of death, weighing with instant clearness the chance of whether old Jabe would kill only him, or slay as well the daughter who had proved treacherous.

Nothing came. A light wind sprang up and set drops pattering down from the boughs. The storm-clouds were rent, torn, scattered, rolling sullenly away to the north. A few drowned stars began to make the sky lighter.

All at once, as he waited for the death that came not, Ross remembered the shot they had heard as they ran through the woods. That was Jabe Turrentine’s gun. Turrentine had been the man standing with an empty weapon, without another cartridge to reload. When he was certain of this, Adene felt momentarily safe. The old panther had missed his spring; he would not try again to-night. Ross laughed a little softly to himself as he imagined Jabe skulking quietly between the dripping trees to the horse that must be tied somewhere near the timber’s edge, getting on the animal and riding down the river road to his store. Yes, that’s what the old man would do. And, after that, Ross Adene knew that the next move in the game was his.

“I reckon I’d better take you on home,” he said at length. “If we’re a-goin’ to be married to-morrow night, I’ve got some sev-rul things to do.”

Hand in hand they went through the drenched leafage, speaking low, Vesta trying feebly to remonstrate. When they came to where the lighted windows of the Minter cabin made squares of ruddy light in the blue-black darkness, Ross said his farewells.

“You put on whatever frock it is you want to be married in to-morrow night and go to meetin’,” he concluded. “For wedded we’ll shorely be at Brush Arbor church. I’ll speak to the preacher, an’ mebby your daddy’ll come to the weddin’ hisself.”

Vesta wept. She kissed her lover farewell as we bid good-by to the dead. In the dim radiance streaming out from the dwelling she watched his rain-gemmed, yellow head as he walked away, hat in hand, shoulders squared, moving proudly.

“O Lord,” she sighed to herself, “why can’t men persons take things like women does—a few ill words and no harm done?”

The night sky refusing answer, she went silently in and to bed.

NEXT morning Ross Adene put his house in order, as might a man on the eve of a duel. His day was busily spent. He notified the revivalist who was conducting meetings at Brush Arbor church of an intention to wed Vesta Turrentine directly after sermon that night, and, late in the afternoon, took his dugout canoe and dropped thoughtfully down the river toward Turrentine’s Landing. There was money in his pocket, but no weapon on him. He had not traveled the road, for he knew that even in daylight some wayside clump of trees might hide an ambush. He put his canoe into the current, crossed the stream, going down the farther bank, out of rifle-shot of the leaning willows that dipped long, green tresses to the water, offering a veil for a possible foe. When he was opposite the landing he came squarely across, his eyes searching the prospect ahead.

There was nobody about as he beached his boat, pulling it well up out of reach of the current, and walked deliberately toward the store. The landing had no village, the only buildings being the store, Turrentine’s dwelling, and barns. He approached the former by the front way, and stopped in the door, offering a glorious target to any hostile person who might be within; for he stood six feet tall and broad-shouldered against the westering light. The interior of the room was at first obscure to him, but almost immediately he made out old Jabe behind the counter and Sam Beath sitting humped in a chair at the back of the store.

For a moment no word was spoken. There was no exclamation, though there was a mental shock of encounter, evinced by not so much as the tremor of an eye upon the part of either of the principals. Beath it was who glanced stealthily toward the corner where Turrentine’s loaded rifle stood.

“Howdy,” said Ross in the even, musical monotone of his people.

“Howdy,” responded old Jabe’s deep bass.

Beath did not speak. Ross remained in the doorway until he considered that he had given quite sufficient opportunity for any gentleman who desired to pick a vital spot in his frame. When he felt he had been amply generous in this way, he came stepping slowly into the building, walked to the counter, and laid his empty hands upon it.

“And what can I do for you to-day?” inquired old Jabe with a sardonic exaggeration of the shopkeeper’s manner.

“I want to buy me a right good suit of clothes,” returned Ross, mildly.

The man in the back of the store, staring at the two, began to wonder when old Jabe would take advantage of the opening offered him.

“Err-um,” grunted Turrentine. “Somethin’ to be buried in—eh?”

“Well—no,” demurred the customer, amiably. “Somethin’ to be married in. A weddin’ suit is what I’m a-seekin’.”

Beath’s eyes went without any volition of his own to a bolt of fine white muslin on the shelf. From that Vesta had chosen a dress pattern the day her father bade him ask her in marriage. His proposal had been bafflingly received, but she had chosen the dress and taken it with her to her Aunt Miranda’s to finish.

Meantime, as though his customer had been any mountain man of the district, the storekeeper calmly estimated Ross’s height and breadth, turned to his shelves, and pulled down a suit. The two immersed themselves in a discussion of fabric and cut. The assistant, used to old Jabe’s browbeating, could scarcely believe his eyes as he noted the glances of approval his employer gave to the goodly proportions he was fitting. Beath’s ears seemed to him equally unreliable when Turrentine, a big man himself, remarked with apparent geniality on the chance of a wrestling-bout between them.

“I ain’t backin’ off,” responded Adene, “but I’d ruther stand up to you when I didn’t have somethin’ else on hand.”

“Aw, I’m gittin’ old,” said Turrentine, deprecatingly. “Time was when you might have said such of me; but I’m gittin’ old.”

The blue eyes of the younger man looked ingenuously into the face so like Vesta’s.

“Well, we’re all gettin’ older day by day,” Ross allowed, “but yet you don’t look as though you was losin’ your stren’th, an’ that’s a fact.”

Turrentine folded the suit and laid it on the counter.

“I think them clothes’ll fit ye,” he said. “An’ I’ll th’ow in this hyer necktie you looked at. I always th’ow in a necktie with a suit. That all?”

“Well—no,” Ross repeated his phrase. “I want to buy the best razor you’ve got in the shop.”

With a sudden movement that might have been excitement or even rage, Sam Beath took off his hat and cast it on the floor beside his chair. Turrentine bent down to get from under the counter a tray of razors, setting it on the boards and inviting his customer’s attention. Beath could scarcely bear to look at the two men facing each other across these bits of duplicated and reduplicated death, so tremendously did the juxtaposition excite him. He felt as he had sometimes on the hunting trail when the kill was imminent—as though he must cry out. Jabe and Ross were oblivious, trying, choosing, drawing their thumbs lightly over edges.

“I believe I like that un,” Ross said finally. “What say?”

“You’ve got a good eye for a blade,” old Jabe agreed, taking the razor in his fingers. “That thar’s by far the best un in the lot.” He opened and held it up, so that a stray gleam of sun winked wickedly upon the steel. “You could cut a man’s head off with that, slick an’ clean, ef ye had luck strikin’ a j’int—an’ I allers do have luck.”

“I wasn’t aimin’ to put it to no such use,” Ross commented gently. “An’ yit, when you’re a-buyin’ a tool, hit’s but reasonable to know what its cay-pacities may be. I’ll take that un.”

“Now—is that all?” Jabe put his query with the half-smile of a man who might easily suggest something else. He laid the razor with the other purchases.

“Is it honed, ready to use?” inquired Ross.

“Why, yes,” agreed old Jabe in a slightly puzzled tone. “A few licks on a strop or your boot-laig’ll make it all right.”

Ross was rubbing a rough cheek with thoughtful fingers, looking sidewise at the storekeeper.

“I’m a-goin’ to git married to-night,” he murmured. “Looks like I need a clean shave. They tell me you’re a master hand at shavin’ folks. Will ye shave me?”

Beath’s chair dropped forward with a slam, but neither of the men started or turned. The black eyes burned deep into the blue; the blue were unfathomable. Behind a mask of primitive civility the two men interrogated savagely each other’s motives. Jabe was the first to speak.

“Why, shorely, shorely,” he said with what seemed to Beath ominous relish. “Set down on that thar cheer that’s got a high back to it, so’s you can lean yo’ head right. Sam,”—Beath leaped as though he had been struck,—“bring me the wash-pan an’ soap an’ a towel. I’ll git the lather-brush.”

Beath finally arrived with the required articles. His shaking hand had spilled half the water from the basin; his eyes gloated. He put the things down on a box and retired once more to his chair, seating himself with the air of a man at a play.

Ross leaned back, found a comfortable rest for his head, and closed his eyes. The strong, brown young throat exposed by the turned-down collar of his shirt fascinated Beath so that he could not look away from it.

Jabe took the towel and put it about his customer’s neck with expert fingers. As he did so, Beath’s hand began to play about his own throat, and there was a click as it nervously contracted. Turrentine dipped his brush in the water and whirled it on the soap-cake, lathering Ross’s face silently and with a preoccupied manner. Beath’s glance flickered from the man in the chair to the man who worked over him. When Jabe took up the razor, passed it once or twice across the strop and approached it to Ross’s cheek, Beath swallowed so noisily that the sound of it was loud in the silent room.

Suavely—the old man was grace itself—the operation of shaving the bridegroom was begun. Placidly it progressed, with a murmured word between the two men, the deft turning of the inert head by the amateur barber, an occasional deep-toned request.

Yet always the onlooker shook with anticipation of the sweep of old Jabe’s arm which must come. Continually Beath figured to himself the sudden jetting out of crimson from that artery in the neck that was beating evenly and calmly under old Jabe’s touch. Perhaps the end might have arrived then and there, and swiftly, had those fingers felt the swell of excitement in the blood of a possible victim. But Ross had closed his eyes and seemed to be dozing. Jabe made an excellent job of it.

“Thar—I believe that’s about all you need,” he remarked at length.

The low sun came through the door between piles of calico, heaps of ax-handles, and glinted on Adene’s yellow head. Suddenly Beath felt the light for a moment obscured. He glanced up to see a woman’s figure, black against the glow, yet unmistakable in its slim alertness, and clothed, as his eye accustomed to fabrics told him, in the white muslin he had believed to be selected for a wedding-dress. Neither old Jabe nor his customer appeared to mark as Vesta Turrentine slipped like a shadow through the doorway and stole to the corner where her father’s rifle stood. Sam watched as she lifted the weapon in practised fingers. His mouth was open, but he did not cry out.

Ross unclosed his eyes lazily, raised his thumb to his cheek, close by the ear, very near indeed to the great veins and arteries Beath had looked to see the razor sever.

“Ain’t they a rough place right thar?” he inquired with a half-smile.

The ultimate spark of daring was in the eyes that gazed up into those of the man Ross had chosen for a father-in-law. Old Jabe, with a portentously solemn face, muttered an assent, dabbed the lather on, and made a pass with his razor.

“U-m-m—looks like they was a little more to do in that direction. Maybe I ain’t quite finished ye up yit,” the old man’s voice had a lilt of laughter in it, and it seemed that the end had surely arrived. Turrentine’s devil was always a laughing fiend. He worked with the air of a man who has come at last to some decision, turned to reach for the towel—and looked into the muzzle of his own gun, with his daughter’s resolute eyes behind it.

There was no start, no outcry; the old fellow only stood, scowling, formidable, checked midway in some spectacular vengeance, Beath was sure. The clerk crept, stooping behind the piles of merchandise, toward Vesta.

“Put down that thar razor.”

The girl’s tone had a ring of old Jabe’s own power.

“Ye say,” drawled Jabe, making a jest of a necessity, as he laid the blade on the counter. “What else?”

“You let him walk out o’ that door with me, same as he walked in,” Vesta’s air was resolute, her aim steady.

At the first word Adene had turned his head merely, showing no disposition to get beyond Jabe’s reach. But in the instant of her demand Beath rose up from behind some boxes, grasped the gun, twisting its barrel upward, and disarming Vesta. Ross sprang toward his sweetheart, hit out at the clerk’s unguarded side, and sent him staggering across the room, to fall sprawling at his employer’s feet. For a long moment while Beath was scrambling to hands and knees, life and death seemed to hang in the balance as old Jabe studied the two opposite; mechanically he had taken the gun Beath thrust into his hand. When Vesta saw it in his grasp, she flung herself upon her lover’s breast, clasping her arms about him, protecting his life with hers.

“Me first,” she screamed. “You’ll have to kill me first.” She waited for the bullet.

Jabe interrogated the pair with remorseless eye; he moved forward a pace, though Sam Beath on all fours thought it was plenty close to shoot. His gun was not raised. Instead, the old man and the young were studying each other once more, speeding messages from eye to eye above Vesta’s bent head. At last Jabe seemed to find that for which he sought. He looked long at the daughter who defied him in words, and her lover who braved him in action. Adene read the look aright.

“You’re bid to the weddin’ at Brush Arbor church, father-in-law,” he said in the tone of one who finds a satisfactory answer to a riddle.

The gun-butt rattled on the puncheon floor.

“Will your dugout hold three?” asked Jabe.

Vesta stirred, but still feared to look up.

“Shore; five, by crowdin’,” came the answer.

The girl raised her head, glanced incredulously from father to lover, and a light of comprehension dawned in her eyes.

“An’ me,” yammered Sam Beath. “What about me?”

“You can keep sto’ or come along to the weddin’, accordin’ to yo’ ruthers,” allowed old Jabe, generously; “ye hearn my son-in-law say his boat would hold five.”

Drawn by Oliver Herford

TO ANY ONE

BY WITTER BYNNER

WHETHER the time be slow or fast,

Enemies hand in hand

Must come together at the last

And understand.

No matter how the die is cast

Or who may seem to win,

You know that you must love at last!—

Why not begin?

THOROUGHBREDS AND TROTTERS AS SADDLE-HORSES

Drawn by Joseph Clement Coll

EVER since the employment of an English judge of saddle-horses at the New York Horse Show, a few years ago, a lively discussion has been going on between the advocates of thoroughbreds and of our American saddle-horse, which is for the most part trotting-bred, upon the subject of their respective merits as saddle-horses. The English judge had of course an Englishman’s preference for a thoroughbred. He has shown this in his awards, and he has established a class of thoroughbreds under saddle. His view has naturally not found favor with the friends of the American saddle-horse, an animal usually a cross between the trotter and the Kentucky saddle-horse, which is a registered family, and is itself largely of trotting ancestry. The discussion, however, has not been confined to the merits of these two animals as saddle-horses, but has covered the whole subject of their respective characteristics.

Against the thoroughbred it is charged that he is unsound, wanting in stamina, flighty and excitable, and has not the trotting action to make a comfortable hack under the saddle or to become a good harness-horse, and even that he is inferior to some other horses in style and beauty. There is a certain truth in these accusations; but they contain also a great deal of untruth.

It is not possible to say that there is a want of stamina in a family of horses to which belong all runners, virtually all steeplechasers, and from which are directly descended all hunters and nearly all cavalry horses. Nearly all steeplechasers are thoroughbreds, and these horses do their four miles like old-fashioned runners, besides going over the exhausting jumps. And how can blood be said to want stamina which is the basis of the blood of all the cavalry horses in Europe? In 1870 the German cavalry horses of this breeding could do their thirty-five miles a day for three months during the roughest winter weather. And taking it nearer home, do any horses surpass in toughness the half-bred horses of Canada and tide-water Virginia? The old Virginians say that Kentucky can show a better head and tail than can be found in Virginia, but that for everything between Virginia is better, and the assertion is not without a color of truth. My observation is that, as a rule, trotting and saddle-bred horses have not the stamina of the best horses descended from the thoroughbred.

When we come to speak of gaits under the saddle, it will of course be admitted that thoroughbreds can walk, canter, and gallop. Their deficiency is in the trot. Most thoroughbreds do not show good hock action. They do not give one that definite rise and fall which one should have when riding at a trot. But there are thoroughbreds that have good hock action. Where, for instance, can one find better hock action than in the thoroughbred mare Jasmine, which has lately been seen about New York? There are many thoroughbreds with such a trot.

When we come to speak of disposition, the case against the thoroughbred is rather stronger. It cannot be denied that he is hot-tempered. That an animal should be used for generations for an exciting employment, and that employment an artificial one, must result, one would expect, in some eccentricity of temper. And the bad effects are rendered worse by certain necessary concomitants of the employment. It cannot be good for the temper of an animal two years old to be an hour getting away at the start, and to be whipped and spurred for the last hundred yards of every race. As a matter of fact, they are frequently as excitable and often as vicious as one might expect animals to be which had been subjected to such an experience. There is a thoroughbred stallion in Kentucky that has killed two grooms. It is said that an attempt, which for some reason was not successful, was made to put out his eyes in order that he could be handled with safety. A few years ago at Lexington I was told that a thoroughbred stallion at a stable near by had just taken two fingers off a groom’s hand. I went to the stable, had the animal brought out, and studied his countenance from a respectful distance, and he looked to me as though he could do it. The eye was somewhat ruthless, perhaps, but I should not say that the countenance was vicious or ill tempered. It had rather the opaque look of faces one will see behind the bars of a menagerie—faces unrelated to kindness or unkindness, and expressive only of the wish to survive and the readiness to perish in the struggle for existence. A few years ago we had in my native county, Greenbrier County, West Virginia, a celebrated performer on the turf, King Cadmus, which had killed at least one person. Once, when racing, he seized with his teeth a jockey on a horse that was passing him, threw him under his feet, and killed him. He was a lop-eared, rough-made brute, and if a man did not know him and took him for some harmless old screw, which might easily be possible, without any sign of ill temper he would allow the man to approach till he was in reach of his teeth, when he would try to seize him and throw him under his feet. Some of his colts are still about Greenbrier, and, strangely enough, do not seem to have inherited his vicious disposition,—an instance, I suppose, of failure to transmit acquired characteristics. I remember when a boy seeing Rarey leading about his celebrated Cruiser, which must have been very much such a horse as Cadmus. Possibly the animals I have mentioned might have been reformed if they had had such a handler as Rarey.

But these horses are exceptions, as it is hardly necessary to point out. A few years ago in Kentucky I rode for some weeks a four-year-old thoroughbred stallion that a child could have ridden, a very handsome bay, sixteen hands high, very fashionably bred (half-brother to Foxhall). He had been raced, but had not been found fast enough for the track. He was perfectly gentle. His only fault was not one of temper at all. He was a little sluggish, sluggishness being sometimes a fault of thoroughbreds. This fault affected his trot. A certain ambition and steady force in a horse are necessary to a comfortable trot.

But apart from the subject of gaits and disposition, it is claimed that the thoroughbred is inferior in style and beauty to certain other horses, such, for instance, as the Kentucky saddle-horse. That, of course, is a matter of taste, and tastes differ and change from time to time. I prefer the Kentucky horse myself, and believe him to be the handsomest horse in the world, and yet I find that when I go to England and live among people to whom the thoroughbred type seems perfection, I begin insensibly to see it as they do, and so I think will almost any one. There is no doubt that the type at its best is very beautiful. I have now in mind a chestnut mare, Miss Trix, which I saw at a pretty little show in the west of England summer before last and which afterward took the first prize at the international in London. A more beautiful creature it would be hard to find, or one better gaited or better mannered. And even when one sees this type in this country, where the taste and feeling are mostly on the side of the Kentucky horse, it is impossible to deny that it is beautiful. Three years ago at the State fair at Lexington I saw a class of thoroughbred stallions judged very early before the crowd was on the grounds. It was an extraordinary display of equine beauty that was gaily paraded before the stand on that bright and fragrant September morning, and, difficult as the choice seemed, the blue ribbon went deservedly to the most beautiful, a brown horse named Jack-pot. Later in the day I saw Jack-pot judged for the championship against the superbly handsome and universally accomplished chestnut stallion Bourbon King, the champion saddle-horse of Kentucky. The prize went to Bourbon King, and I myself should have so voted; but surely no one would propose that such a type of beauty as Jack-pot should be allowed to disappear from the earth.

ATHLETE. A COMBINATION TROTTING AND SADDLE BRED HORSE FROM GREENBRIER COUNTY, WEST VIRGINIA

There is one point in which the thoroughbred is doubtless superior to the Kentucky saddle-horse. I mean the shoulder. The fault of the Kentucky saddle-horse often is that he is thick in the shoulder. The Kentucky horse would be about perfect if one could give him the shoulder of the thoroughbred; yes, and if one could give him a little heavier bone. No doubt the Kentucky men would say that the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and since the Kentucky horse, as he now is, is about perfect in gaits, there is no occasion to change him. There is reason in this, and yet there are practical advantages in the thoroughbred shoulder. The rider grasps it with his knees more easily than a thicker shoulder. And for women who ride with a side-saddle a deep and slender shoulder and high withers are a necessity; they are needed to hold a side-saddle in place. If the horse is thick-shouldered, the groom must be continually getting off to tighten the girths, which thus have to be made so tight that the animal can scarcely breathe. And then, quite apart from its utility, there is no doubt of the beauty of the thoroughbred shoulder. It is beautiful whether you see it in Jack-pot or Miss Trix, or in some old screw of thoroughbred ancestry that pulls a grocer’s wagon. You will sometimes see about a stable a half-starved, uncared-for animal with a shoulder the memory of which will remain with you for years. That shoulder is entirely the property of the thoroughbred. You never see it except in a thoroughbred or a descendant of thoroughbreds. I do not know whence it comes. It does not appear to come from the Arab, from which are derived most of the characteristics of the thoroughbred. It can come only from the thoroughbred. For this reason I cannot agree with those critics who have opposed the recent action of the Kentucky saddle-horsemen in admitting to registration the product of Kentucky saddle-horses crossed with thoroughbreds. Of course it is to be hoped that breeders will choose those thoroughbreds that are without certain thoroughbred faults.

Drawn by Joseph Clement Coll

AWARDING THE BLUE RIBBON

There is one purpose for which thoroughbreds are certainly necessary. Hunters must be of thoroughbred blood. There are horses not of thoroughbred blood that can be taught to jump, but a hunter must also be able to run. It is often said that hunting in this country is not serious, and that is probably true. Hunting over timber is too dangerous to be widely and generally practised. It is different from hunting over hedges, which can be broken through. A horse must clear a wood fence if he is to get over it safely. If he strikes the fence with his knees, he may turn a somersault and fall on his rider, and horses cannot be relied upon to clear fences. The most celebrated of English hunters, Assheton Smith, who had made a study of falling and had learned how to fall, had sixty falls the year he was eighty. (By the way, one wonders what kind of horses he rode; they could have done better for him than that in Virginia.) We may be sure he did not have those falls over timber.

But it is not certain that hunting has no considerable future in this country. Knowing what the spirit of sport has accomplished here within the memory of most of us, there is no saying what it may yet do. I have sometimes wondered why some such large preserves of land, stretches of forest and meadow as are taken by clubs for shooting and fishing, are not set apart for hunting, in which it would be possible to hunt the stag and the fox or even to revive sports more old fashioned.

I lately found a hunting-man in Virginia, a nice fellow and a gentleman, who has a whole valley to himself in which to pursue the fox. He has his own pack of hounds, and as his business is training hunters, he has always in his stable half a dozen animals he can use. To be sure he does not own the valley, a beautiful one; but he is quite as well off as though he did, for there are no wire fences, the timber fences are not too plentiful, and he tells me he can always start a fox. He hunts entirely alone, and does not mind the lack of company. He happens to be afflicted with an infirmity of speech, which makes the society of all but a few of his fellow-creatures irksome to him. This kind of sport was a new idea to me, who had always thought of hunting as done in company and with the accompaniment of red coats and blowing horns and the like. It struck me as a pretty idea, quite like Fitz-James’s pursuit of the stag in the first canto of “The Lady of the Lake.” This gentleman rides mostly thoroughbreds. He told me that he found it more and more necessary to ride thoroughbreds, or, at any rate, horses as clean bred as he could get them, for the reason that they are now breeding faster hounds than formerly. I wondered why they should breed faster dogs unless at the same time they bred faster foxes.

From a painting by Richard Newton, Jr.

THE MASTER OF FOX HOUNDS, ORANGE COUNTY HUNT (NEW YORK), ON HIS THOROUGHBRED HUNTER, GREEK DOLLAR

I may add that the evidence in favor of fox-hunting is pretty strong, to judge from the testimony of those who know most about it. A celebrated hunter has expressed the opinion that all the time that is not spent in hunting is wasted, and that is what men like Assheton Smith and Anstruther Thompson really thought and have thought for two hundred years. If that view is the correct one, the sport will probably continue to exist and grow in this country. In the end Americans are likely to have whatever is good.

With regard to the questions of type and taste, I may say here that a certain deference is due to the opinion which the world’s best horsemen have long entertained. We should not dismiss too lightly the views of such men as Admiral Rous, Assheton Smith, and Mackenzie Grieve. The last-named famous horseman, who lived in Paris and was a member of the well-known Jockey Club there, I once saw in his old age in Rotten Row. One afternoon in Hyde Park I noticed an acquaintance on foot in conversation over the railing with some one on a black horse. The horse, which had not a white hair, was a beautiful creature, of the kind not usual in Rotten Row, having the graceful curves of the haute école, preferred on the Continent, and attractive to the finer Latin perceptions rather than the straight lines of the half-bred English hack. The horse of the haute école is very thoroughbred in type, however, as this animal was. But perfect as the horse was, I was even more interested in the man in the saddle. All he was doing was sitting on a horse that was standing still, but there was a singular grace in his manner of doing this. The pose and attitude were beautiful. An old dandy, much made up, and dyed to the eyebrows, there was in every detail of his dress, from his silk hat to his patent-leather boots, a correctness and thoroughness that argued great courage and spirit in a man of his age. The tight trousers of some dark color were worn over Wellington boots, which a good London tailor will tell you is the only way to have them set well. The frock-coat showed the slender waist essential to good looks in the saddle. I wondered if this waist might not be the result of pretty severe banting, being sure that the plucky old fellow would have preferred death to abating one jot his pretensions to the character of a perfect horseman. Greatly interested in this survivor of the dandies, it pleased me to think that he might in his youth have been the model from which Bulwer made his sketch of Pelham riding in the park in Paris. Some days later, happening to meet my acquaintance, I asked him who his friend was, and he told me that he was Mr. Mackenzie Grieve. Before forming a final opinion of the thoroughbred from the point of view of taste and beauty, I should like to consult the shade of Mackenzie Grieve. His opinions, whatever they were, he no doubt held strongly.

When we come to speak of horses partly thoroughbred (and that is of course the subject most interesting to breeders), I can say that I myself have known numbers of them that were neither flighty nor weedy nor wanting in physical stamina nor deficient in gaits or in looks. I may take occasion to mention one or two of these. There was a big roan mare, nearly thoroughbred, in my native county, which was sent to New York and was for some years ridden by an eminent lawyer. She was a most distinguished horse. No matter how many good horses this gentleman has ridden or may ride, he can never forget Betsey, nor be in danger of confusing her with any other horse. She was sixteen hands high, and in condition would weigh nearly twelve hundred pounds. She had been a favorite runner at county fairs and of course could gallop. She could walk like a storm, she had a single foot that was a lullaby, she had a perfectly square trot, she was excellent in harness, and she could be ridden or driven by anybody. A little plain in the quarters, she had as fine a neck, head, and shoulders as I ever saw. “She has a grand front on her,” said the owner’s young Irish coachman, who knew the type. I had at first some misgivings as to the appearance she would make by the side of New York prize-winners; but when I went to the Riding Club and she was brought out with the saddle on, her fine head carried high, her large, prominent eyes awake, with her deep shoulder and sweep of neck looking as though she had just descended from one of the classic engravings of the eighteenth century, I wondered that I should have had any doubts as to the appearance she would make when put in competition with the equine upstarts of the present day.

Another of our mountain horses, also nearly thoroughbred, went to the Riding Club. He was perhaps a little eccentric in temper, if one was rough with him, and I think once he did run up the steps into the Plaza Bank; but for gaits, sureness of foot, and physical endurance he was remarkable. All his gaits were perfection, and, as for strength, I can only say that I first rode him in 1890, then a full-grown horse, and I believe he is still living, a pretty good horse yet. His purchaser, a well-known New York specialist in nervous diseases, said to me, “I am nervous, and he’s neurotic,” but he admitted that his trot was, as he said, “the poetry of motion.” The animal came fairly by his eccentricities of temper and his tenacity of life and strength. His mother died not long ago at the age of twenty-five, and up to the day of her death she would run away if you struck her.

Drawn by Reginald Birch. Half-tone plate engraved by R. Varley

A MORNING CANTER IN CENTRAL PARK

It should not be forgotten that, whatever faults modern thoroughbreds may have, there is a lot of good old-fashioned thoroughbred blood behind such horses as I have mentioned—such blood as that of Diomed, the winner of the first English Derby in 1780. Diomed, one of many good horses imported here from England, was the ancestor of perhaps three fourths of the horses now running in this country. Mr. Moses Green, of Warrenton, Virginia, a man widely learned in pedigrees, whose grandfather imported Diomed, writes me, “I have often heard my grandfather say that he did not consider a race-horse one that could not run four miles in good company in fast time and repeat.” One little story of Mr. Green’s I may mention in passing. He once told me that he had passed a considerable part of his childhood on the back of Diomed, and the story is in a sense true, notwithstanding the fact that Mr. Green, although by no means a young man, was of course born long after the death of Diomed. It was the custom to spread the skin of an animal under a mattress to keep the mattress from sinking in between the cords of the bedstead, and the skin of Diomed served this purpose on the bed on which Mr. Green slept when a child.

Drawn by Joseph Clement Coll

AT A COUNTRY HORSE SHOW

The objection urged by thoroughbred men against American saddle-horses is that they are of harness rather than saddle type. The objection most commonly made to trotting-horses in general is, however, from the breeder’s point of view. It is claimed that they do not breed true. Of course, trotters can scarcely be said to be a family as thoroughbreds and hackneys are. A thoroughbred[2] must be the progeny of animals themselves thoroughbred. Trotters may become “standard” by performance. Any animal that has trotted a mile in 2:30 at some recognized fair is entitled to registration as standard. The offspring of parents that are themselves standard by performance and not by birth are entitled to registration as standard by birth. There are thus many standard animals whose pedigree cannot be traced. Nevertheless, although we may not know the pedigree of an animal that is standard by performance, we know that he must be trotting bred, since no horse can trot a mile in 2:30 that is not trotting bred. It must be admitted, however, that trotters cannot be bred with the certainty with which you can breed thoroughbreds and hackneys.

DELHI. An ideal type of thoroughbred saddle-horse. Owned and bred by Mr. James R. Keene.

SIR EDWARD. A fine type of thoroughbred hunter. Owned and bred by the Hon. Adam Beck.

TENERIFFE. An ideal standard bred roadster. Owned and bred by Mr. W. M. V. Hoffman.

MAHLI. A fine type of Kentucky saddle-horse. Owned by Mrs. Thomas J. Regan.

Thoroughbreds and hackneys, being, as families, older than trotters, hold their qualities more intensely and are more capable of reproducing them. In the matter of speed, however, you cannot breed a Derby winner any more certainly than you can breed a two-minute trotter. But the trotter’s inability to reproduce himself with certainty is not altogether without its advantages. One would be sorry to lose the variety in types thrown off by the trotter, which is a result of this inability. There is no family which produces animals that have such various uses as trotters, and in which a single animal will be found to have so many good qualities. He will be a good saddle- and a good harness-horse, and he will combine spirit with the best manners and the kindest disposition. For instance, that wonderful animal sought for with such avidity by ladies, a combination of opposite, if not irreconcilable, qualities, “a bed by night, a chest of drawers by day,” if he exists anywhere, can surely be found only among trotters. In horses for use in harness one will get in the same animal, besides speed, action nearly as good as that of the best hackneys, with a vigor and endurance greater than theirs, and a head and neck that for quality and fineness one will rarely see in hackneys, and will not often find surpassed among thoroughbreds. We in this country are so used to that head and neck that the English, who send us their best hackneys, are careful not to send us animals that are deficient in quality. Two years ago I saw at Bath, which has the best show in the west of England, a pair of hackneys that won there and had been winning all over England, very fine movers, but with plain heads and necks. They would have been sent to this country had it not been for their want of quality. Furthermore, a trotter will have, with the quality of a thoroughbred, a sense and kindness, to find which among thoroughbreds you must pick and choose.

1 ROSALIND

A famous saddle-horse and winner of many blue ribbons. Owned and ridden by Mrs. W. A. McGibbon.

2 HERO

A fine type of heavy-weight Virginia trotting bred hunter and jumper. Owned by Mr. Paul D. Cravath.

3 KENTUCKY’S CHOICE

One of the most famous registered saddle horses in the world. He was sold for $7500, the record price for a Kentucky saddler. Owned by Mrs. Richard Tasker Lowndes.

A critic who objected to the trotter on account of his inability to breed true has lately proposed to get a coach-horse from the Kentucky saddle-horse, a suggestion which, if somewhat novel, seems to me a good one. I fancy that this writer must have had in mind the pair of Forest Denmarks I saw at the Lexington Fair three years ago. These horses were by Forest Denmark, a registered Kentucky saddle-horse. One of them, Tattersall, was not only a saddle-horse, but had been the champion gaited saddle-horse of Kentucky. They were undoubtedly the best pair in the State. They were afterward bought by an ardent adherent of Christian Science from Texas for presentation to Mrs. Eddy, and were sent to her. Mrs. Eddy, after trying them and finding them not entirely amenable to influence, requested her Texan admirer to take them back, which he did. I know the Forest Denmarks well. They are largely trotting bred. One of them, the champion heavy-weight saddle-horse in a recent New York Horse Show, the Cardinal, was originally a harness-horse. The official spelling of the name of these horses, by the way, is probably incorrect. The founder of this branch of the Denmarks was a horse called Ned Forrest and must have been named after Edwin Forrest, the actor.

The saddle-horses brought to New York are largely of mixed saddle and trotting stock, and are often pure trotters. Trotters have the hock action necessary to a comfortable trot under the saddle much more generally than thoroughbreds. They have this action till they get down to their very fast gait, when they are likely to begin to roll, which is unpleasant. This does not always happen, however. There is now in New York a gentleman who rides only trotters that have a record of 2:10 or thereabouts, and who finds such a trot the best of gaits. I can believe that, from some such experiences of my own. About forty years ago I used to ride, on the road from Madison, New Jersey, to Morristown, a big trotter of Kimball Jackson stock that was fast for those days, and was, besides, a powerful and particularly honest and friendly horse. Going at a slow trot, he was perhaps the roughest horse I ever was on. But when he got down to his fast trot, one did not leave the saddle at all. I have never obtained such pleasure from any action in the saddle as from that horse going at that gait. A thoroughbred galloping on turf, measuring the earth like an animated pair of compasses, with a succession of leaps and bounds, and going at the rate of an express-train with scarcely more shaking to the rider than a walk would give him,—so smoothly, indeed, that he might almost carry a glass of water,—will of course give one delightful sensations. But that trotting-horse was even better. You will notice in a trotting race in harness that a horse, when put to top-speed, will now and then give a leap forward of perhaps fifteen or eighteen feet, still holding his trot. It was at the moment when the Kimball Jackson trotter, with one of his powerful hind-quarters, assisted perhaps with an extra shove off from the other, would propel himself forward through the air in this occasional leap that I experienced the keenest delight that I ever got from any kind of locomotion. I cannot forget those morning rides in that pretty country on sunny October days, the air a golden fluid, and the distant hills lying in cameo clearness, over which were chasing the thick, sharply defined shadows cast by the clouds.

A very great merit of the trotter is his sense and kindness. His education is happier than that of the thoroughbred. As a harness-horse, he is nearer to everyday use than the thoroughbred. He is raced at a more mature age, and he does not receive the cruel treatment of the thoroughbred. Whip and spur seem to be inseparable from running races. But a trotter may break if he is whipped severely, although one sometimes sees the whip laid on pretty well in a trotting-race. People in Europe, who have used our trotters, and even those who do not like them, have told me that they found them remarkably sensible and kind as compared with their own horses. Sense and kindness, I am sure, are not only among the most useful, but among the most attractive, qualities a horse can have. A certain trotting-bred horse of my acquaintance has a soul such as I never knew in any other horse. I have tried hard to trace his pedigree, because I wanted to know where that soul came from, and to see it bred into other horses. But I have never been able to find it. Perhaps some one who reads this may help me to some information about it. He was a black gelding, 16:2 hands high, very handsome, and was bought by Hudson from Bayless and Turney of Paris, Kentucky, and sent to New York in 1896, at that time five years old. I suppose he was bred in Bourbon County. I say I never saw such a mind in any other horse. Horsemen have many best horses they ever knew. It is not their way to be off with the old love before they are on with the new. But I am sure he was, on the whole, the nicest horse I ever knew. High-lifed as he was, he was full of sweet intelligence. In his dark, melancholy eyes one read that “sad lucidity of soul” mentioned by the poet. And he was so kind and considerate. A horse of great ambition, his one fault was that he pulled; but he consented without the least show of ill temper to the use of a pretty severe curb.

Drawn by Joseph Clement Coll

READY FOR THE PARK

I could cite many examples of his sweet intelligence. Once when a young woman upon a bicycle in Central Park was trying to ride us down, and going, as an unskilful bicyclist will do, in just the direction she wished to avoid, his efforts to keep out of her way, while at the same time putting me to as little inconvenience as possible, were charming—the horse evidently wondering whether a woman was a reasoning animal. One could teach him something one day in fifteen minutes, and the next day one could teach him as quickly just the contrary. When he first came on from Kentucky, where he had been single-footed, I found it hard to suggest a trot to him. I took him to a big mud-hole in the bridle-path in the park, and for some time worked him back and forth through it, evidently much perplexed as to what I wanted of him. In mud six inches deep he could not throw his foot out laterally, and had to bring it up vertically, and soon struck a trot. I patted him on the neck, and he stepped out cheerfully with an expression of, “Oh, is that what you want? I’d rather do that than the other.” He could trot in much less than three minutes, and so must have been trotting bred, but no thoroughbred had a better canter or gallop. And with all the qualities above enumerated, he was magnificently handsome. I gave the lady to whom I sold him the choice of two names, Casabianca, in allusion to his docility and devotion and because he would stand without hitching; and Solomon, because, as regarded his sense and intelligence, she would discover that the half had not been told her.

I think I have given pretty fairly the points of contrast between these two families of horses. In harness there can be no question that the trotter is the better. For use under saddle there is no doubt also that the American preference is for the trotter. But we have seen that the thoroughbred has his points of superiority as a saddle-horse. We should preserve the thoroughbred, improve him, if one likes, eliminate his undesirable qualities, but still preserve him. The saddle-horse of the future will combine the good qualities of the thoroughbred with those of the trotter.

[2] An animal, especially a horse, of pure blood, stock, or race; strictly, and as noting horses, a race-horse all of whose ancestors for a given number of generations (seven in England, five in America) are recorded in the stud-book. In America the name is now loosely given to any animal that is of pure blood and recorded pedigree, ... whose ancestry is known and recorded for five generations of dams and six of sires.—C. D.

SECRET WRITING

THE CIPHERS OF THE ANCIENTS, AND SOME OF THOSE IN MODERN USE

BY JOHN H. HASWELL