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Lippincott's Magazine

OF
POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE.

NOVEMBER, 1880.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1880, by J. B. Lippincott & Co.,
in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

CONTENTS

THE RUINS OF THE COLORADO VALLEY.

HOUSE OF A MOQUI CHIEF.

It was about seventy years before our English race gained a foothold on the eastern coast of America that, far away in the West, the seeds of another form of Eastern civilization began to fall upon ground which now belongs to our national territory. In the wilderness near the western border of New Mexico there stands a great crag, torn into curious shapes by the wear of ages, bearing on its summit a ruined fortress of a forgotten people and on its side hieroglyphic writing which no one can decipher. The same smooth sandstone surface which invited the picture-writing of the ancients has also tempted later passers-by to perpetuate their names. A long series of inscriptions in Spanish, begun before the first English had landed at Jamestown, tells how explorers, conquerors, government emissaries and missionaries of the Cross, passing that way, paused to leave their names on the enduring rock. That imperishable monument bears record to all time that this remotest region of our country, the last which the new life of the nineteenth century penetrates, was the first point to be touched by European civilization, if we except one old Florida fort. It is three hundred and forty years since the Spaniards entered New Mexico. There, almost at the centre of the continent, in the valleys of the Rio Grande and Colorado, the old Spanish life has remained, as unprogressive as a Chinese province, continuing to the middle of this century a kind of modified feudal system. But this old declining civilization of the South-west is new in comparison with that which the Spanish conquerors found existing in the country when they entered it. A remnant of that old half-civilized life lingers still, almost unchanged by contact with white men, in the seven citadels of the Moquis perched on the high mesas of Arizona, while in the Pueblo villages of New Mexico we find it more affected by the Spanish influence.

The attraction which drew the conquerors of Mexico forty-five days' journey away into the North was the fame which had reached them of the Seven Cities of Cibola (the buffalo), great in wealth and population, lying in the valley of the Rio de Zuñi. To the grief of the invaders, they found not cities, but rather villages of peaceful agricultural people dwelling in great pueblos three and four stories high, and they searched in vain for the rumored stores of gold. At that time the pueblos held a large population skilled in many arts of civilization. They cultivated large tracts of ground, wove fabrics of cotton and produced ornate pottery. Their stone-masonry was admirable. But even three hundred years ago it seems that the people were but a remnant of what they had once been. Even then the conquerors wondered at the many ruins which indicated a decline from former greatness. The people have not now the same degree of skill in their native arts which the race once had, and it is probable that when the Spaniards came and found them declining in numbers the old handicrafts were already on the wane.

In a remote age the ancestors of these Pueblo tribes, or a race of kindred habits, filled most of that vast region which is drained by the Colorado River and its affluents, and spread beyond into the valley of the Rio Grande. The explorers of a great extent of country in Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado have found everywhere evidences of the wide distribution and wonderful industry of that ancient people. On the low land which they used to till lie the remains of their villages—rectangular buildings of enormous dimensions and large circular estufas, or halls for council and worship. On the sides of the savage cliffs that wall in or overarch the cañons are scattered in every crevice and wrinkle those strange and picturesque ruins which give us the name "Cliff-dwellers" to distinguish this long-forgotten people. And on commanding points, seen far away down the cañons or across the mesas, stand the solitary watch-towers where sentinels might signal to the villagers below on the approach of Northern barbarians.

It is only a few years since Mr. John Ruskin rejected a suggestion that he should visit the United States, urging among other reasons that it would be impossible for him to exist even for a short time in a country where there are no old castles. We Americans were disposed to resent this slap at our country, and not a few newspaper editors relieved their minds by intimating that we could get along quite comfortably without old castles and without Mr. Ruskin. But, after all, it is a consolation for our national pride to know that the fault is not in our country, but in Mr. Ruskin's ignorance of American archæology. We have old castles without number in the Western Territories—ruined fortifications and dwellings of an unknown antiquity, perhaps as old as Warwick or Bangor, as impregnable as the highest cliff-built castle of the Rhine, as grand in situation as the Drachenfels or Dover Castle.

Only the more eastern part of the great domain held by that ancient people has yet been examined thoroughly with reference to its antiquities. Within the last decade Mr. W H. Jackson of the United States Geological Survey has brought to notice, by his admirable photographs and descriptions, the remains in the cliffs and cañons of South-western Colorado and the adjacent region. Thirty years ago Lieutenant Simpson described the ruined pueblos of New Mexico. But in regard to the ruins farther west, seen by Major Powell in his headlong course down the Colorado River, and the innumerable remains of cities, fortresses and canals mentioned by visitors to Arizona, but little careful investigation has been made. I believe that few richer fields for an antiquary can be found in the world than this south-western region of our own country. I cannot doubt that a thorough comparative examination of these remains would throw a new light upon the relationship between the ancient and modern civilized tribes, and upon their connection with their far more civilized Aztec neighbors of the South. As yet, hardly an attempt at excavation has been made in the Colorado Valley.

GUALPI.

There is no other district which embraces in so small a compass so great a number and variety of the Cliff-dwellers' ruined works as the cañon of the Little Rio Mancos[1] in South-western Colorado. The stream rises in a spur of the San Juan Mountains, near the remote mining-camp called Parrott City. Flowing southward for a few miles through an open valley, it is soon enclosed between the walls of a profound cañon which cuts for nearly thirty miles through a tableland called the Mesa Verde. The cañon is wide enough to permit the old inhabitants to plant their crops along the stream, and the cliffs rising on either side to a height of two thousand feet are so curiously broken and grooved and shelving, from the decay of the soft horizontal strata and the projection of the harder, as to offer remarkable facilities for building fortified houses hard of approach and easy of defence. Therefore the whole length of the cañon is filled with ruins, and for fifteen miles beyond it to the borders of New Mexico, where the river meets the Rio San Juan, the valley bears many traces of the ancient occupation. The scenery of the cañon is wild and imposing in the highest degree. In the dry Colorado air there are few lichens or weather-stains to dull the brightness of the strata to the universal hoariness of moister climates: the vertical cliffs, standing above long slopes of débris, are colored with the brilliant tints of freshly-quarried stone. A gay ribbon of green follows the course of the rivulet winding down through the cañon till it is lost to sight in the vista of crags. The utter silence and solitude of the wilderness reigns through the valley. It is not occupied by any savage tribe, and only a few white men within the last few years have passed through it and told of its wonders; and yet its whole length is but one series of houses and temples that were forsaken centuries ago. I can hardly imagine a more exciting tour of exploration than that which Mr. Jackson's party made on first entering this cañon in 1874.

Above the entrance of the cañon the evidences of pre-historic life begin. On the bottom-land, concealed by shrubbery, are the half-obliterated outlines of square and circular buildings. The houses were of large size, and were plainly no temporary dwelling-places, for an accumulation of decorated pottery fills the ground about them, indicating long occupation. No doubt they were built of adobe—masses of hard clay dried in the sun—which the wear of ages has reduced to smoothly-rounded mounds. For some miles down the cañon remains of this sort occur at short intervals, and at one point there stands a wall built of squared sandstone blocks. Along the ledges of the cliffs on the right bits of ruinous masonry are detected here and there, but for a time there is nothing to excite close attention. At last a watchful eye is arrested by a more interesting object perched at a tremendous height on the western wall of the cañon. It is a house built upon a shelf of rock between the precipices, but, standing seven hundred feet above the stream and differing not at all in color from the crags about it, only the sharpest eyesight can detect the unusual form of the building and the windows marking the two stories. The climb up to the house-platform is slow and fatiguing, but the trouble is repaid by a sight of one of the most curious ruins on this continent. Before the door of the house, part of the ledge has been reserved for a little esplanade, and to make it broader three small abutments of stone, which once supported a floor, are built on the sloping edge of the rock. Beyond this the house is entered by a small aperture which served as a door. It is the best specimen of a Cliff-dweller's house that remains to our time. The walls are admirably built of squared stones laid in a hard white mortar. The house is divided into two stories of three rooms each. Behind it a semicircular cistern nearly as high as the house is built against the side of it, and a ladder is arranged for descending from an upper window to the water-level. The floor of the second story was supported by substantial cedar timbers, but only fragments of them remain. The roof, too, has entirely disappeared, but the canopy of natural rock overhanging serves to keep out the weather. The front rooms in both stories are the largest and are most carefully finished. Perhaps they were the parlor and "best bedroom" of some pre-historic housewife. They are plastered throughout with fine smooth mortar, and even in that remote age the mania for household decoration had a beginning: floor, walls and ceiling were colored a deep red, surrounded by a broad border of white.

The same cliff on which this house stands has on its side many other ruins—some half destroyed by gradual decay, some crushed by falling rocks, none so perfect as the one described; but all are crowded into the strangest unapproachable crevices of the cañon-wall, like the crannies which swallows choose to hold their nests, far removed from the possibility of depredation. Some are so utterly inaccessible that the explorers, with all their enthusiasm and activity, have never been able to reach them. How any beings not endowed with wings could live at such points it is hard to conceive: it makes one suspicious that the Cliff-dwellers had not quite outgrown the habits of monkey ancestors.

As the cañon widens with the descent of the stream, the ruins in the western wall increase in number. One fearful cliff a thousand feet in height is chinked all over its face with tiny houses of one room each, but only a few of them can be detected with the naked eye. One, which was reached by an explorer at the peril of his life, stands intact: ceiling and floor are of the natural rock, and the wall is built in a neat curve conforming to the shape of the ledge.

RUINS IN THE CAÑON OF THE MANCOS.

A mile farther down the stream there is a most interesting group of houses. Eight hundred feet above the valley there is a shelf in the cliff sixty feet in length that is quite covered by a house. The building contains four large rooms, a circular sacred apartment and smaller rooms of irregular shape. It was called by its discoverers "The House of the Sixteen Windows." Behind this house the cliff-side rises smooth and perpendicular thirty feet, but it can be scaled by an ancient stairway cut into it which ascends to a still higher ledge. The stairs lead to the very door of another house filling a niche a hundred and twenty feet long. A great canopy of solid rock overarches the little fortress, reaching far forward beyond the front wall, while from below it is absolutely unapproachable except by the one difficult stairway of niches cut in the rock. In time of war it must have been impregnable. These dwellings have given more ideas about their interior furnishing than any of the others. Among the accumulated rubbish were found corn and beans stored away. In the lower house were two large water-jars of corrugated pottery standing on a floor covered with neatly-woven rush matting. In a house not far above were found a bin of charred corn, and a polished hatchet of stone made with remarkable skill.

From this point onward both the valley and the cliffs are filled with the traces of a numerous population, every mile of travel bringing many fresh ones into sight. Among the cliff-houses there is of necessity a variety in form and size as great as the differences of the caves and crevices that hold them; but among the buildings of the low ground there is more uniformity, not only in this cañon, but in all the valleys of the region. Most of them may be classed as aggregated dwellings or pueblos with rectangular rooms, round watch-towers and large circular buildings. To these must be added a few which seem to have been built only for defence. The straight walls have generally fallen, except the parts supported by an angle of a building; but, as usual in old masonry, the circular walls have much better resisted decay.

About midway down the cañon the curved wall of a large ruin rises above the thicket. It is a building of very curious design. The outer wall was an exact circle of heavy masonry a hundred and thirty feet in circumference. Within, there is another circular wall, concentric with the outer, enclosing one round room with a diameter of twenty feet. The annular space between the two walls was divided by partitions into ten small apartments. Other buildings of the same type occur in this region, some of much larger size and with triple walls. Even in this one, which is comparatively well preserved, the original height is uncertain, though the ruin still stands about fifteen feet high. The vast quantity of débris about some of them indicates that they were of no insignificant height, and their perfect symmetry of form, the careful finish of the masonry, the large dimensions and great solidity, made them the most imposing architectural works of that ancient people. I find no reason to doubt that they were their temples, and the presumption is very strong that they were temples for sun-worship. The occurrence of a circular room in connection with nearly every group of buildings is of special interest, as seeming to link the Cliff-dwellers to the modern Pueblo tribes in their religious customs.

Most striking and picturesque of all the ruins are the round watch-towers. On commanding points in the valley, and on the highest pinnacles of the cliffs overlooking the surface of the mesa, they occur with a frequency which is almost pathetic as an indication of the life of eternal vigilance which was led by that old race through the years, perhaps centuries, of exterminating warfare which the savage red men from the North waged upon them. To us the suffering of frontier families at the hands of the same bloodthirsty savages is heartrending. What was it to those who saw year by year their whole race's life withering away, crushed by those wild tribes?

Near the lower end of the cañon stands one of the most perfect of these towers, rising sixteen feet above the mound on which it is built. It was once attached to an oblong stone building which seems to have been a strongly-fortified house. The rectangular walls, as usual, are prostrate, and have left the tower standing as solitary and picturesque and as full of mystery as the round-towers of Ireland.

After the stream breaks from its long confinement out into the open plain of the San Juan Valley the traces of old life are still abundant, but they present no features very different from those above. At the cañon's mouth an Indian trail strikes away toward the north-west. It passes a remarkable group of ruins at a spot called Aztec Springs, and continues to the McElmo, the next arroya, or dry stream-bed, west of the Rio Mancos. Aztec Springs no longer deserve the name, for within a short time the last trace of water has disappeared from the spot, showing that the slow drying up of the great South-west country, which has been going forward for ages, and which starved out the old inhabitants, is still progressing. In the dry season there is no water within many miles of this spot, though it is strewn with the remains of stone buildings covering several acres and indicating a large population of industrious people who must have lived by agriculture. Until a long comparative study has been made of all the remains of this race it is mere guesswork to estimate the age of the ruins; but when the prostrate condition of these walls is compared with the state in which the Chaco ruins of New Mexico are found, and when we consider that the latter have no doubt been deserted for at least three hundred and fifty years, it is reasonable to suppose an age of a thousand years for these massive walls at Aztec Springs. Many other great structures of this region, which seem to be coeval with these, are situated many miles away from any perennial water, and the time which has elapsed since those sites were suitable for large farming-towns must be counted by centuries. In this group are two large quadrangular buildings with walls still fifteen feet high, two of the circular estufas, besides a multitude of half-distinguishable walls of dwellings. It is the largest group of ruins in Colorado.

CIRCULAR RUIN IN THE CAÑON OF THE MANCOS.

Not many miles beyond these so-called springs the trail leads into the dry bed of the McElmo near its head, and another long succession of antiquities is entered upon, but to enumerate them further would be tedious, for the ruins of the Mancos are good representatives of all those which are found along the courses of the Animas, La Plata, McElmo, Montezuma, Chelley and other tributary valleys of the San Juan. Nevertheless, there are a few buildings here and there of some unusual interest which cannot be passed by without mention. On the verge of a little side-cañon of the McElmo there is a curious instance of the keen ingenuity of this people in taking every advantage of the fantastic, castle-like shapes which Nature has formed out of the cañon-walls. High on the edge of the mesa appears the ragged outline of a ruinous watch-tower sharply drawn against the clear, unvarying blue of the sky. It seems to be a tower of unusual height, but a closer view shows it to be half of Nature's building. A tall fragment of rock, torn from its bed, has rolled down the slope to the edge of the steep descent. This rock the old builders have chosen to crown with a little round tower where a sentinel, guarding the village behind him from stealthy attacks, could command a wide sweep of country. The same thing on a larger scale is found at another point where the dry McElmo meets with the drier Hovenweep—a tributary without tribute. In this position stands an enormous rock nearly cubical in shape. Its high sides make it a natural fortress strong against an enemy without artillery, and to its natural strength the Cliff-dwellers have added a battlement of masonry. But among all the ruined strongholds of the region that which is called the Legendary Rock has a pre-eminent interest on account of the Moqui romance or tradition which clings to it. The rock is a grand and solitary crag standing on a plateau of sandstone from which the soil is washed away. It is far from water: a garrison must have been dependent wholly on the very precarious rain-supply. About it runs an outer rampart of stone, and on the rock itself is built a fortress. It is several years since an aged member of the Moqui tribe first confided to a white man versed in his language the legend of this rock. It has been widely published, and considered of much significance. The Moqui patriarch related how his people in the old time were many. Their tribe dwelt in the North-east. One year they were visited by strangers from the North, who came peaceably at first, but came again another year, and year by year encroached and grew more warlike. At last the Northern strangers gained the mastery and drove them from their homes. In a long, slow struggle the Moqui forefathers gradually lost their ground, till at last they made one final, desperate fight for their old homes at the fortress of the Legendary Rock. They conquered their besiegers, but with such fearful carnage that the rocks bear still the stains of the blood-streams that flowed in that battle, and the remnant of the besieged were glad to make an unmolested retreat to the mesas of Arizona, where they dwell to this day.

The story is an interesting one, and has been honored by the explorers with a place in their government report, for it shows a belief among the Moquis that those old builders were their kinsmen. But, considering the fact that the first Spanish discoverers found the Moqui tribe in nearly the same condition as we see it now, and that this story therefore must have been handed down for at least three hundred years among an unlettered people, I am as much disposed to distrust the other details of it as I am to doubt that the red iron-stains in the rock were caused by the blood of their ancestors.

In the neighboring Montezuma Cañon, just beyond the State border, there are some remains built after an unusual manner with stones of great size. One building of many rooms, nearly covering a little solitary mesa, is constructed of huge stone blocks not unlike the pre-historic masonry of Southern Europe. In the same district there is a ruined line of fortification from which the smaller stones have fallen away and are crumbling to dust, leaving only certain enormous upright stones standing. They rise to a height of seven feet above the soil, and the lower part is buried to a considerable depth. Their resemblance to the hoary Druidical stones of Carnac and Stonehenge is striking, and there is nothing in their appearance to indicate that they belong to a much later age than those primeval monuments of Europe.

All the certain knowledge that we have of the history and manners of the Cliff-dwellers may be very briefly told, for there is no written record of their existence except their own rude picture-writing cut or painted on the cañon-walls, and it is not likely that those hieroglyphics will ever be deciphered. But much may be inferred from their evident kinship to the Moquis of our time; and the resemblance of the ancient architecture and ceramics to the arts as they are still practised in the degenerate pueblos of Arizona gives us many intimations in regard to the habits of the Cliff-dwellers.

It was centuries ago—how long a time no one will ever know—when that old race was strong and numerous, filling the great region from the Rio Grande to the Colorado of the West, and from the San Juan Mountains far down into Northern Mexico. They must have numbered many hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions. It is not probable that they were combined under one government or that they were even closely leagued together, but that they were essentially one in blood and language is strongly indicated by the similarity of their remains. That they were sympathetic in a common hostility to the dangerous savage tribes about them can hardly be doubted. They were of peaceful habits and lived by agriculture, having under cultivation many thousands of acres in the rich river-bottoms, which they knew well how to irrigate from streams swollen in summer by the melting snows of the high mountain-ranges. We read of their dry canals in Arizona, so deep that a mounted horseman can hide in them. We know that they raised crops of corn and beans, and in the south cotton, which they skilfully wove. That they had commercial dealings across their whole country is shown by the quantity of shell-ornaments brought from the Pacific coast which are found in their Colorado dwellings. They did not understand the working of metals, but their implements of stone are of most excellent workmanship. Their weapons indicate the practice of hunting, and while the race was still numerous their forts and their sharp obsidian arrows made easy their resistance to the wandering savage hordes.

RUINS AT AZTEC SPRINGS.

I believe that no instance can be cited of a people still in their Stone Age who have surpassed that old race in the mason's art: indeed, I doubt if any such people has even approached their skill in that respect. The difficulty of constructing a great work of well-squared, hammer-dressed stones is enormously increased if the masons must work only with stone implements. Imagine the infinite, toilsome patience of a people who in such a way could rear the ancient Pueblo Bonito of New Mexico, five hundred and forty feet long, three hundred and fourteen wide and four stories high! In one wall of a neighboring building of stone less carefully dressed it is estimated that there were originally no less than thirty million pieces, which were transported, fashioned and laid by men without a beast of burden or a trowel, chisel or hammer of metal.

Nothing marks more strikingly the vast advance which these people had made from the condition of their savage neighbors than their evident efforts not only for household comfort, but even for the beautifying of their homes. I have referred to the rush-carpeted floor of the "House of the Sixteen Windows" and the decorated walls of the two-story house on the Mancos; but they, like other semicivilized peoples, found the first expression for their love of the beautiful in the ceramic art. The variety of graceful forms and decorations found in their pottery is endless. In some regions the country for miles is strewn with the fragments of their earthenware. The ware is usually pale gray shading to white: the decoration is in black or red, often in the angular designs commonly called "Greek patterns." The Moquis of our time produce a handsome ware closely resembling that of the ancient people. But the old cliff-painters and the modern potters often sacrificed beauty to a passion for producing the most wildly-grotesque forms. There is a certain general resemblance, which often strikes me forcibly, but which is almost indefinable, between the ceramic and sculptured forms of the Mississippi Mound-builders, the Pueblo tribes and the ancient Mexicans. The resemblance seems to lie partly in a certain capacity which those peoples possessed in common of producing the most frightfully-grotesque forms ever evolved by the human imagination—forms plainly intended to suggest living beings, yet not at all transgressing the injunction against "anything that is in the heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the waters under the earth." The resemblance seems to me very significant.

At the time of the Spanish conquest the Pueblo tribes were worshippers of the sun and fire, like all the races of this continent which were above barbarism. To-day, even in those pueblos where a corrupted form of the Roman faith is accepted, there are traces of the old sun-worship mingled with it, and in all pueblos there are large circular rooms called estufas reserved for councils and for worship. The invariable appearance of estufas among the ruined towns, and even on the ledges of the cliffs, shows what sacredness was attached to the circular room, which perhaps was symbolic of the sun's orb: it indicates a unity of religious faith between the ancients and moderns.

The priest who chronicled the events of the first expedition to New Mexico was impressed with the great ruined towns which they saw even before crossing the desert of Arizona. There is good reason to believe that the cliff-dwellings, the last retreats of a persecuted people, were abandoned before that time. But how could a people so numerous, intelligent and civilized fall a prey to stupid, roving savages? The wild tribes never could have won the fight against their more quick-witted neighbors if the ancients had not begun their own destruction.

The story which they have left recorded on the face of the country is of this sort. At some very remote time they began agriculture in the valleys of the South-west. They found the rainfall of the region too limited for farming without irrigation, but the whole country was intersected by streams fed through summer by the snows of the mountain-tops and the abundant springs of the wooded slopes and uplands. Thus their crops were watered and yielded increase with a regularity unknown to farmers who must look to the summer rainfall for success. The people prospered, multiplied and spread over a wide country. In every green valley rose their great common dwellings and circular temples. By superior numbers and intelligence they were strong against their enemies. But the spreading population required a great wood-supply. The finest of the trees were felled for timbering their houses, and whole forests were swept away to give them fuel and perhaps to feed perpetual sacred fires. The country was all too little watered at the best, and the mountain-sides, once stripped of their covering, oftentimes dried up and no new growth of trees appeared. Old men began to observe that the streams did not maintain their even flow through the whole year as when they were young, and lamented the good old times when there was no lack of water for irrigation. The streams began to be swollen with disastrous floods in spring and winter, and to dwindle away alarmingly in summer. So through centuries the gradual destruction of the wood brought ever-increasing drought, and drought led in its train famine, disease and wholesale death. The people were decimated and discouraged, and on the northern frontier began to be at the mercy of savage raiders. They fled from their pleasant valley-homes to hide in caves and dens of the earth, and built the cliff-dwellings. There a remnant lingered in unceasing fear of the foes who coveted the fruits of their toil; but even from these refuges they were driven ages ago. Where they used to build villages and cultivate fields are now barren gulches where two or three times a year a resistless flood rushes down from the mountains that can no longer retain their moisture. Thus ended their national suicide.

RUINS IN MONTEZUMA CAÑON.

It was a strange ignorance that led them to their own destruction, was it not? Yet we as a nation from Maine to California are recklessly working the same ruin. We are stripping our mountains a hundred times more rapidly than they, but who cares whether the forests are restored?

As a child I played and bathed in a pretty tumbling brook among the Litchfield hills, and wondered that so small a stream but fifty years before had given power to all the mills now ruined on its banks. Twenty years more have passed, and now in the heat of summer there is hardly water for a child to bathe. The hills are stripped, the stream has dwindled, but the spring floods tear through the valley like a deluge. Even the larger streams that still turn the mill-wheels and make the wealth of Connecticut are not the trusty servants that they once were. In summer they grow weak and must be supplemented with steam, and at times they rise in fury and carry destruction before them. It is the beginning of woes, but our Atlantic slope with its heavy rainfall cannot easily be changed to a desert. In the far West it is different. Colorado, Nevada and California, with a less regular rainfall and with greater floods and smaller streams, would soon find the desert encroaching on the habitable land. But in these very States the waste of timber is most extravagant. Mining-camps and cities devour the woods about them, and in every dry summer many hundred square miles are burned by the recklessness of Indians and white men. Where the Californian mountains have been cleared, the browsing millions of sheep keep down all new growth, and, bringing great wealth in our age, they threaten to impoverish posterity.

The dreary experiment has been tried by the ancient races of both continents. Why should we repeat it? The question should command the earnest attention of State and national governments. In our own land already one old race has wrought its own destruction in this same way.

Alfred Terry Bacon.

Footnote

[1] ]In studying the ruins of the Mancos and neighboring cañons I have made constant use of the reports of explorations by Mr. W. H. Jackson and Mr. W. H. Holmes in Bulletins of U. S. Geolog. and Geograph. Survey, Second Series, No. 1, and Annual Report of the same survey for 1876.

THE ARTS OF INDIA.

BUDDHIST RELIC-CASKET.

The study of the industrial arts of India, if the warnings of learned Orientalists are to be of any avail, is not a matter to be rashly undertaken. All Indian art must be viewed in reference to Indian religion. Forms, materials and colors have meanings that can only be caught by familiar acquaintance with a symbolism both intricate and obscure. Little decorative touches that to the untaught Western eye are introduced merely to give an artistic finish to an involved design, or to give room for bringing in the bit of color demanded by the sense of harmony, have all a meaning not necessarily connected with art. While in the West the problems of art are dealt with by men whose eyes are bent on art alone, the Oriental artist solves these problems while keeping his eyes fixed upon religion. The maturity of Indian religious life was reached several centuries before our era began: it then took a form which it still retains. There is no secular life from which it can be distinguished. When a domestic utensil is examined, the first question to be answered is, What religious meaning attaches to it? This is an appalling fact, for it means that the arts of India cannot be appreciated as the Hindus appreciate them until we have mastered an accumulation of mythological and legendary lore such as possibly no other country has amassed.

HINDU WOMAN REELING SILK.

To appreciate the full extent of a task that already seems to hang like a shadow over the whole of what yet remains of one's life, it may be pointed out that the Vedas form only one of four groups of sacred writings, that there are four Vedas, and that each one of the four consists of four parts. Then there are Upa-Vedas, Ved-Angas and Upangas; and under the last-named fall the epics of the Ramayana, of ninety-six thousand lines, and the Mahabharata, of two hundred and twenty thousand long lines, not to mention others. These are mere glimpses into a vista long and dark, and it seems a little odd that one should be called upon to go through so much in order to appreciate a specimen of carving from Vizagapatam, an inlaid table-top from Agra, a box of Cashmere lacquer or a panel of carved sandal-wood from Canara. The fact is, that the matter may be looked at from another point of view—that taken up by those who decline to see anything in a painting but canvas and paint—who care for nothing in the shape of sentiment or story, but have a single eye to art. In this way the beauty and harmony of Oriental coloring, the delicacy and wonderful finish in all manner of carvings, the skill displayed in inlaying and chasing—in a word, all the points of industrial art in India—may be both enjoyed and understood without a reference to the Puranas or the Code of Manu, or without the observer's being able to enumerate the avatars of Vishnu. The inquirer is thus borne up against the deterrent influence of specialists, with the plaintive notes of whose voice he has become in all probability elsewhere familiar. It is the same voice, to all intents and purposes, that haunts the graves of Egypt, the ruins of Rhagœ, the tombs of Etruria and Magna Græcia, the workshops of King-teh-chin and the mounds of Pachacamac. It is heard, in short, all round the world, and its burden is ever the same: "Understand the religion of a people before peering into their arts." The obvious answer comes: Life is short and art is long: if to art religion be prefixed, all knowledge of art is at an end. It would be pleasant, no doubt, to tell at a glance what legend or myth is represented on a Greek vase, but meantime we can admire the form. It would be equally pleasant to be able to interpret the painting on a Chinese historical vase, but meantime we can admire the colors. So with Egypt, Persia and Peru: it will be well for the many to get at the industrial secrets of these countries if they never obtain even a glimpse of the underlying religious idea of the craftsman.

It is merely thrown out as a suggestion by the way, and without any intention of belittling the importance of studying the superstitions and philosophies of the world or of aiming at something more than a strictly industrial view of industrial art, that so much attention may be bestowed upon religions as the sources of ideas as to obscure the form and manner of their expression in art. Possibly the formation of an Indian museum at South Kensington may be productive of a longing desire to become acquainted with Rama and the lovely Sita, the strong Arjuna and the beauteous Draupadi; but it is hardly likely that this was the object of its formation or that it will lead to the acquisition of any more abstruse knowledge than such as comprises the weaving of rich textures, the blending of gay colors, or the industrial arts of damascening, carving and working in gold and silver and precious stones. In what has here to be said, at all events, only such references will be made to religion and legend as are absolutely necessary to a general understanding of the conditions under which Indian art has developed, and of the forms under which it is most frequently seen.

The Indian Museum—or rather the collection forming the Indian section of the South Kensington Museum—is of very recent formation. It may be said to have grown without developing. Its nucleus was formed in the days of the East India Company, and was stored in a little museum in Leadenhall street. There it long remained, and one of its chief attractions was Tippoo's tiger, now occupying a place of honor near the musical instruments, to which it bears some kind of a relation. The "tiger" is a wooden animal of ferocious aspect represented in the act of tearing a prostrate European soldier dressed in the military red coat and wearing a broad-brimmed felt hat of decidedly civil make. It was taken at the fall of Seringapatam, and was probably made by some European artificer for the delectation of the Tippoo Sultan. If not symbolical it was undoubtedly suggestive of pleasant thoughts to Tippoo, although as a musical instrument it could never have been much of a success. To tickle the sultan's ear the tiger when wound up emitted startling roars and groans, while its victim feebly moaned. But on a certain festive occasion after the "tiger" was brought to England the winding-up was unfortunately overdone, and long afterward the soldier stoically declined to moan. The odd musical toy has been brightened up to suit its new home, and its internal construction has also received proper attention to such purpose that the roaring can be reduced to something like method by merely passing the hand over a keyboard, and the resuscitated struggling red-coat moans as lustily as he did in the palmy days at Seringapatam.

Such is the instrument which played an important part in the Leadenhall Street Museum. When the East India Company passed away and the British government assumed the direct control of India, the tiger and all the other curiosities were sent first to Fife House, and thence to the India Office. The latter step was possibly taken on the advice of some utilitarian who wished to bring within reach of the officials an opportunity of acquiring some knowledge of India. Any such object was frustrated.

GOLD EMBROIDERY ON VELVET: MURSHEDABAD.

The director and curator were the only individuals known to visit the collection. It was then sent to South Kensington and placed in a temporary building, but still nobody looked in upon the tiger and the jade, the carvings and Bidri-work. They were still under the control of the India Office, and at length became a burden to it. Their failure to interest the public naturally led to a desire to transfer the responsibility of guardianship. This is not to be wondered at. The collection had, as has already been pointed out, merely grown in bulk. It was promiscuous in the worst sense. It consisted of a fortuitous concourse of articles taken in war or bought upon no ostensible system in peace. To these old Indian officers occasionally made testamentary additions of things picked up in their travels or acquired by inheritance or otherwise. International exhibitions have always been good for museums. The unsalable is often valuable, and exhibitions have been a source from which the Indian collection has reaped many solid benefits. Thus the accumulation increased in bulk and intrinsic value, but practically it still continued valueless. It was neither arranged nor inventoried. It continued to illustrate little more than the manner of its accumulation. Very naturally, the India Office in looking for relief from a useless burden turned first to the Science and Art Department under which South Kensington was flourishing. Its offer of a transfer was at first declined, but the authorities at the India Office would take no refusal. Their object was at once to get rid of the collection and of the cost of maintaining it, and at the same time to preserve its representative character and such individual identity as it possessed. They ultimately succeeded in both respects, though their success was not perfect. A part, including the collections of economic botany of wild Indian silk and lac, went to Kew. The zoological collection is in the hands of the trustees of the British Museum, and will eventually take its place in the new Natural History Museum at South Kensington. To the British Museum have gone the Indian Buddhist sculptures, but casts of these may hereafter be placed in the Indian Museum: certainly, in view of the influence of architectural decoration upon industrial art, they seem necessary to its completeness. All else was on the first of January last handed over to the Science and Art Department, and came under the management and control of Sir Philip Cunliffe-Owen, K. E. M. G., C. B. and director at South Kensington. It was characteristic of Sir Philip that he should undertake to have within six months a collection arranged and ready for public inspection which had not for twenty years been seen in anything like order. It had never before been catalogued, and had never before been so placed that it could be seen intelligently or at one view. The first thing to be done was the drawing up of an inventory. This work occupied six weeks, and on its completion the discovery was made that the collection was altogether inadequate to its purpose. It represented neither the arts nor the industries of India, and gave a very disjointed view of the resources of that country. The work, however, went on. Sir Philip used all his influence, both personal and official, to supplement defective departments. He made purchases and applied for loans. Her Majesty, the prince of Wales and the duke of Edinburgh made selections from their magnificent collections, and others were not slow to follow their example. The result was that in his race against time Sir Philip won by more than a month, making allowance for what has yet to be done with the contributions still being made. Few other men could have won a victory so complete with such apparent ease, because there are not many who could have imbued contributors with similar confidence or so thoroughly inspired an entire department with his own spirit of energy and well-regulated activity. A word or two may be said of his career.

His father was Charles Cunliffe-Owen, a captain in the royal navy, and at the age of twelve Philip entered the same service. He served for five years in the Mediterranean and the West Indies, and at seventeen was obliged by ill health to retire, but taking with him the habits a naval career was well calculated to engender or develop of promptitude and decision. After a rest of a few years he was appointed to the Science and Art Department, and gradually won the notice and confidence of his superiors. He was quick of apprehension, prompt in action and accurate in execution. Sir Henry Cole recognized these qualities in him, and entrusted him with the post of one of the superintendents of the Paris Exhibition of 1855. A few years took him upward through the rank of deputy-general superintendent of South Kensington Museum to that of assistant director in 1860. At subsequent international exhibitions he filled various offices as follows: at London, in 1862, director of the foreign sections; at Paris, in 1867, assistant executive commissioner; at Vienna, in 1873, secretary to the royal British commission; at Philadelphia, in 1876, executive commissioner; and at Paris, in 1878, secretary of the royal British commission. Meanwhile, in 1873, he was created a Companion of the Bath, and was advanced to the directorship of the South Kensington and Bethnal Green Museums on its becoming vacant by the retirement of Sir Henry Cole. In 1878 he received the honor of knighthood.

A good linguist and possessing rare tact and wonderful executive ability, Sir Philip has succeeded where many of his countrymen fail—namely, in making a favorable impression upon foreigners. Prepossessing in appearance and manner, he can dash through business at a speed calculated to astonish men of less energy and of a lower vitality, and he does it, moreover, without the faintest taint of the brusquerie which almost as a rule bristles all over the less capable official. Red tape he abhors, and is as easy of access as a republican. He transacts his business as it arises, knows nothing of arrears, keeps nobody waiting, rises early, works incessantly, drinks nothing stronger than tea, has no office-hours and no rules—making both subservient to the business in hand, instead of following the example of the greater part of the world in fitting business to rule and time—and is only a little forgetful of social engagements. Such is the man to whom more than any other the credit is due of India's being first fairly if not fully represented in Europe by a museum containing specimens of all its native arts and industries.

R. REID. DEL.

SANDAL-WOOD CARVING AT TRAVANCORE.

Certain general impressions will be received from a walk through the galleries and from a hurried view of the sculptures, textile fabrics, arms, pottery, jewelry, furniture, lacquer and metal-work. Forms, combinations and decorative styles will catch the eye which seem not new, but merely changed from something seen elsewhere, as the ear will catch a well-known melody running through a profusion of intricate variations. The alternative questions occur: Is India the home of all the arts? or, Has it no original art? In one place stands a small table of Cashmere lacquer in which a great part of the decoration is surely Chinese: a small gold cup has a sculpturesque decoration as surely Greek. Here is a coffee-pot of Mongolian type, and a parcel-gilt vase of Greek: there are gold dishes after the Saracenic, inlaid-work decidedly Persian, and mosaic-work most certainly Florentine.

It is long since the connoisseur of Indian art awakened from the dream that India has been an isolated country. The fact is, that it lies in the way of all commerce between the far East and the West, and that it can be, and has been, approached as easily from land as from the sea. It has a long legendary history, but a comparatively short real history. The immigration of the Aryan race is said to have taken place about B.C. 3101, but from that period until the rise of Buddhism, in the sixth century B.C., there is nothing to guide us but legend. Putting aside what may have been learned of India by the Greeks from the troops from the Panjab and Afghanistan which swelled the gigantic army of Xerxes, Alexander's invasion of India (B.C. 327) may be said to have really opened the way to the acquisition by the Greeks of something like an exact though partial knowledge of the country pronounced by Herodotus the wealthiest and most populous in the world. In truth, the writings of Greeks who accompanied Alexander, and of Chinese pilgrims, and some temple-inscriptions, constitute the basis of Indian history. The commerce of India at a very early period extended far and wide. Arrian, an Alexandrian merchant of the second century, mentions the muslins of the Ganges, cloths of all sorts, colored shawls and sashes, purple goods, gold embroidery, lac, steel, jewels, perfumes and spices. How long this trade had been going on we cannot say. It was, however, encouraged by the Ptolemies, who established a port on the Red Sea and organized a system of conveyance by means of caravans to the Nile, and so to Alexandria. In this way Indian manufactures reached Europe, while the Persians were at the same time carrying on an extensive trade in the same materials. The Indians further contributed to the advance of commerce by becoming road-builders, and thus bringing the manufacturing places along the valley of the Ganges into connection with the Panjab in the north-west and with ports and trading-stations in the west and south. Thus, Egypt and Assyria were brought into commercial intercourse with the eastern tract of the valley of the Ganges—that lying between the modern Allahabad and Calcutta. That commerce spread in other directions there can be no doubt. Within three centuries of the foundation of Buddhism it had penetrated to Ceylon, and reached Tibet and China in the first century of our era. Let us look at one stupendous fact as indicative of international intercourse with India—namely, that Buddhism, which has all but disappeared from the land of its birth, is at the present moment the religion of about five hundred millions of human beings occupying the continent of Asia from the Caspian to the Pacific, from Tartary to China and Japan.

Leaving both religion and commerce aside—the latter of which might have been brought down to the opening of maritime intercourse between Europe and the far East by way of the Cape—there have yet to be taken into consideration the several invasions of India, which afford yet another possible explanation of the manner in which its arts may have been affected by contact with foreigners.

SHIELD DAMASCENED IN GOLD: PANJAB.

There were many schisms among the Buddhists between the sixth and third centuries before our era, but in power their community grew year by year. Asoka brought all Northern India under his power, and, becoming a good Buddhist, sent missionaries all over India from Cashmere to Ceylon. After his death India was for some centuries under the Indo-Scythians, until the fourth century of our era. From that time Buddhism declined rapidly. The Brahmans were ever its enemies, and toward the eighth century began to push northward from the retreats they had sought when Brahmanism, a thousand years before, had given way to Buddhism. About the same time began the Arab invasions which ultimately led to the establishment of Mohammedan rule. This was the beginning of about twelve hundred years of war. The Arabs came first in A.D. 664, and again in 711. The Turkomans entered the Panjab in 976, and the Afghan dynasties of Mahmud of Gazni and Mohammed of Ghor followed in the tenth and twelfth centuries. The third Afghan dynasty established its rule at Delhi in the thirteenth century. With this century we approach the conquests of Chingis Khan in Central Asia and of Hulaku Khan, and then in rapid succession came the Mohammedan incursions into the Dekkan and the Mongolian subjugation of India, which was begun in 1298, carried on by Tamerlane in 1398, and completed in 1526 by Sultan Baber. The Mogul period ended with the British conquests of 1803 and 1817.

If the rise and fall of these various tides of commerce and war are followed, it will be seen that not only has India not been an isolated country, but, on the contrary, through a hundred channels it has held communication with the world beyond the Himalayas. Its art has no doubt been affected by such intercourse. The effect of architectural forms upon the decorations made use of in industrial art has already been referred to; and when we find that the Buddhists acquired a knowledge of the use of stone in building from the Greeks and Persians, we at once see why Doctor Leitner's collection of fragments of sculpture from Peshawur in the north of the Panjab, and now in the museum, should be called Græco-Buddhistic. Indian architecture is based upon Greek, and the influence of the latter lasted so long that Mr. Fergusson, who has made a special study of Hindu temples, says that he could not find anywhere in Cashmere the slightest trace of the bracketed capital of the Hindus, but that the Doric or quasi-Doric column is found all along the valley in temples dating from the eighth to the twelfth century. Doctor Birdwood, again, has succeeded in tracing the inlaid woodwork or marquetry of India from Shiraz in Persia to Sindh, Bombay and Surat. Further, the mosaic-work of Agra is of Florentine extraction, having been introduced by Austin de Bordeaux in the seventeenth century, and recently revived.

NATIVE GOLD JEWELRY OF POONA, BOMBAY.

Let these examples suffice to show that India did not originate all the arts it now practises. Unfortunately, all that has been borrowed by it has not been to its advantage—such as the Dutch black-wood carving at Bombay—and it is scarcely possible that Anglo-Indian art will add anything to the laurels won by the workmen of the same presidency. It is moreover to be feared that the machine-made dry goods of England, the French patterns of Cashmere, the introduction of machinery, the absorption of hand-weavers by factories, and, above all other things, the establishment of art-schools, may ultimately break down the barriers which for two thousand years and more have, in spite of war, commerce and the introduction of new arts, preserved in the work of the art-craftsmen of India an element essentially indigenous.

Many conservative agencies were no doubt at work in preserving to Indian art a distinctively national character. Amongst these the religious epics and the Code of Manu come first. Of the former, those already referred to, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, show what the art and life of the Hindus were between the fifth and the third centuries before Christ. The Code gave them a form which they preserve to-day in at least all essential respects. The arts have been handed down from father to son for countless generations, and traditional skill has reached its high perfection chiefly by the village-system of the Code. The centre of the political interest of the Hindu is his own village. In our sense of the word he has no country, but he has a village home, and his loyalty is absorbed by the administrators of that home's affairs. He is unmoved either by conquest or commerce. His life has crystallized into a certain form. It is the life his forefathers led, and it is the life his children will lead. His village is to all intents and purposes an independent community. This is the account of a traveller: "Outside the entrance, on an exposed rise of ground, the hereditary potter sits by his wheel moulding the swift-revolving clay by the natural curves of his hands. At the back of the houses which form the low irregular street there are two or three looms at work in blue and scarlet and gold, the frames hanging between the acacia trees, the yellow flowers of which drop fast on the webs as they are being woven. In the streets the brass- and copper-smiths are hammering away at their pots and pans; and farther down, in the veranda of the rich man's house, is the jeweller working rupees and gold mohrs into fair jewelry—gold and silver ear-rings and round tires like the moon, bracelets and nose-rings and tablets, and tinkling ornaments for the feet—taking his designs from the fruits and flowers around him or from the traditional forms represented in the paintings and carvings of the great temple which rises above the groves of mangoes and palms at the end of the street above the lotus-covered village-tank." By and by the work-day closes with feasting and music and the songs chosen from the religious epics. In the morning the same routine begins again: the same sounds are heard, the same sights seen, the same pleasures indulged in. It is the life of the Code and of the great epics—a happy, contented, frugal and, in a sense, cultured life, based upon a religion which gave it expression and form long before our era began, and fenced it in from the influences of external change. All its conquerors have succumbed to the social and religious life of India. They came and found themselves within a magic circle. All that they brought of art was Indianized. A new art meant nothing more than a new illustration of Hindu religion. We have seen the craftsmen at work, and the fountain of their inspiration is not far to seek when we are told that the stories of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are told nightly all over India to listening millions. Let us suppose the village-festival is approaching its close. Then "a reverend Brahman steps upon the scene with the familiar bundle of inscribed palm-leaves in his hands, and, sitting down and opening them one by one upon his lap, slow and lowly begins his antique chant, and late into the starry night holds his hearers, young and old, spellbound by the story of the pure loves of Rama and Sita, or of Draupadi who too dearly loved the bright Arjuna, and the doom of the froward sons of Dhritarashtra."

COPPER-GILT SACRIFICIAL VASE: MADURA.

Can we wonder, then, that from these legends of the heroic age are taken figures for the sculptor, scenes for the carver and the graver, and subjects for the jeweller and the worker in ivory? Religion is thus the greater conservator of Indian art as it appeared in its earlier forms, and reduces into conformity with it all that comes from abroad.

Further agencies toward the same end are the caste-system, in the large cities trade-guilds—or, as we would call them, trades unions—and, finally, hereditary offices in both village and city. Under the village-system artisans may be said to have undergone successive generations of training, and the result is that in a country where manufacture means, literally, "making by hand," any object of industrial art represents the development of hereditary skill. His craftsmanship is the father's richest legacy to his son.

One point more deserves consideration. In America and Europe nearly everything is done by machinery: in India nearly everything is made by hand. Whatever is done, therefore, is the expression of a thought; and that art in the East is not trammelled by tradition may be inferred not less from the variety of its productions than from the Indianizing process to which foreign arts are subjected. The hand leaves almost unconsciously the impress of the workman's individuality. There is room there for patronage to lead to superexcellence. The saving of time and rapidity of output are not important objects when a prince lends his encouragement to art and his influence to its elevation. In the East—in China, in Persia and in India—artisans have worked directly under the imperial power. All that was asked of them was good work. In India offices of this kind were, in the imperial workshop as in the villages, hereditary; and without trouble about subsistence, without a thought of time, without limit in expense—without, in short, one disturbing element—the art-workers labored only for their art and for the approval of their king or chief. In the museum is a rug of silk woven by deft fingers which have for possibly three centuries been still. Four hundred knots occupy every square inch, and the size of the rug leads to the total of three and a half millions of knots, between every two of which the pattern demanded a change in the treadles of the loom. We turn from this to a bowl of jade beautifully engraved upon which were expended the labors of three generations of workers in the employ of the emperors of Delhi. It is in this way the best work of all kinds is produced to-day. Spinning, weaving and embroidering are, moreover, practised all over the country in the homes of the rich and in the dwellings of the poor. "Every house in India," says Doctor Birdwood, "is a nursery of the beautiful." The words are suggestive. They imply that correct taste is best formed by practice. We who have lectures on decorative art and technological schools live in too fast an age ever to rival the industrial art of India, and shall in our hurry do well if we arrive at something like an understanding appreciation of the works of the villagers of Hindostan.

PIERCED AND REPOUSSÉE SILVER SHRINE-SCREEN: MADURA, MADRAS.

The general attributes of Indian art as displayed in the museum are richness of decoration, great manipulative skill, good taste, brilliancy, harmony of color, intricacy of decorative forms, and the due subserviency of both color and design to decorative effect. Nearly all these qualities are illustrated by the textile fabrics, the dresses and turbans, the horse and elephant caparisons, the carpets and the rich canopies of the howdahs. These are the tissues that spread the fame of India on every side. It is not known how long it has possessed the art of weaving. Possibly it originated in the Valley of Roses or by the banks of the sacred Ganges. The weaving of silk India appears to have borrowed from China, but when or how it first wove silk we cannot tell, any more than we can tell when first it wove its marvellous gold brocades or gauzy muslins. It was weaving cotton in times beyond the realm of history, and continues weaving it to-day all over the Panjab, Sindh, Rajputana, Oudh, Bengal, the Central Provinces, in Assam, Bombay and Madras. The prince of Wales obtained a few pieces of the famous muslin of Dacca, requiring about six yards to weigh an ounce. Of this kind one was called shabnam, or "dew of the evening," because if laid upon the grass it became undistinguishable from the dew; another was called bafthowa, or "woven air;" a third was called abrawan, or "running water," because when placed in water it became invisible. Even the prince's pieces weigh nearly twice as much as the older tissues. Indian lace in gold or silver, cotton or silk, is in texture and design the highest representative of that most beautiful fabric. The brocades are glories of color and rich with glittering flowers of gold, and the embroidery on velvet, silk, wool or cotton is both pleasing and rich. The museum contains several examples of the gorgeous embroideries of the Dekkan, and we find in one or two of the costumes and some of the fans a beautiful embroidery of shining green beetle-wings and gold. As to the carpets, they are as a rule satisfying to the eye and possess a general simplicity of design blended with richness of color. In all the more brilliant textile fabrics of India warmth is secured without violence of contrast; and one fact it will be well for Western manufacturers to study—namely, that floral or animal decoration is invariably flat.

SARAI DAMASCENED IN SILVER: HYDERABAD, IN THE DEKKAN.

In furniture the Hindus do not follow the prevailing American rule: with them, the less furniture the better. There are, however, specimens from Bombay of their works upon forms supplied by Europe—as, for example, two sofas and a high-backed chair, the backs of which are so perforated that they seem as cool and light as cane. A sideboard from Bombay has its top and panels so perforated that one wonders how long a time it took to weave the endless flower-stems of the design and to carve the fruits and flowers and the griffin-like monsters that support the upper shelf. Some of the heavy, deep-cut flower-stands are less pleasing. On the other hand, a dark wood stand from Ahmedabad is carved in a fine, close and perforated pattern which is altogether appropriate and admirable. It seems to have been made in parts. The bottom or stand is solid and deeply cut in twining snakes and leaves: to this is fastened the lowest section, hollow and perforated in a floral design; above this is another of a different design; a third section supports the vase and cover, which are also perforated. The work throughout is elaborate and exquisite. A good deal of the furniture and many of the tables, trays and boxes or coffers are variously lacquered and colored, but when color is used lavishly it is never inharmonious. Ivory is frequently employed in conjunction with ebony, and the effect is often striking. The carving of ivory is practised in many parts of India, and the Berhampore stately state-barges with their rowers all in position, and the elephants with howdahs on their finely-modelled backs, are all that need be mentioned, though there are numberless objects that come from Bombay carved in low relief or perforated. Even after the small ivories and the larger chess-tables, cots and palanquins in which ivory is employed, the sandal-wood carving is amongst the most attractive in the museum. There is a model of a doorway from Ahmedabad cut after a microscopic pattern, and all around are designs, some mythological and others purely naturalistic. The low-relief foliated ornamentation of Bombay seems more attractive than the mythological designs of Canara and Mysore, or than the mixed foliated and mythological designs of Ahmedabad, possibly because the Western mind finds less to sympathize with in the figures of the Hindu Pantheon than in the exuberant wealth of India's gorgeous flowers and shady groves.

There are many carvings in horn and tortoise-shell from Vizagapatam and Belgaum; pots, vases, bowls and bottles in marble of various colors, solid, mottled and variegated; in soapstone, flowers, and notably a model of a tomb, in which the most minute details are reproduced; and specimens of the original Florentine inlaid marble-work of Agra. In the latter we find white marble inlaid after various designs with agate, chalcedony, topaz, jasper, garnet, lapis-lazuli, coral, crystal, carnelian, and even with pearls, turquoises, amethysts and sapphires. It demands judgment in the selection of the stones, skill in their handling and taste in their arrangement in order to be what may worthily be called artistic. It is ever too easy to perpetrate the grossest crimes against good taste in the richest materials, and it is the crowning glory of the industrial art of India that mere richness of effect is never sought at the expense of taste.

ENAMELLED HUKU-STAND OF MOGUL PERIOD.

Lac is used in an endless variety of ways—from making lacquered walking-sticks, boxes, toys and bangles to bracelets and beads. The best work is found in house-decoration and furniture. In the case of some of the Sindh boxes the decorative design is worked out by covering the box with successive layers of variously-colored lacquer and then cutting away the pattern to the depth required by the color-treatment. Sometimes metal rings appear to be let into incisions, and again the decoration consists exclusively of surface-painting in bright colors. The latter is found upon the papier-mâché of Cashmere, which ranks with the best lac-work of India.

We pass the pottery, merely noting the beauty of the colors, and especially of the turquoise-blue, and the graceful simplicity of some of the early forms, the trappings and caparisons, and glance round the magnificent collection of arms, from the rough robbers' clubs bound with serrated iron to the finest chain-mail and rifles inlaid with gold. From Sindh comes a flintlock gun having the barrel inlaid and plated with gold at the muzzle and breech, and bearing an inscription inlaid in gold. Round the muzzle are set nine uncut rubies, and an emerald forms the "sight." The stock is rosewood, curved and expanding at the butt, enriched with mounts of chased gold, and attached to the barrel by three perforated and chased gold bands. In some cases the woodwork is almost obscured by the gold ornaments. On all sides are weapons richly chased and damascened in gold. Weapons are there of the steel that Persia, and even Damascus, never equalled, and they come, as to a masquerade of the dread weapons of war, with handles of crystal, of jade set with rubies and emeralds, of gold and green enamel set all over with table diamonds, and sheathed in green velvet scabbards gleaming with diamonds and fitted with cap, band and chape of green-enamelled gold.

If this people carried such arms, what must their jewelry be? An answer is found in the museum. We again find jade set with emeralds and rubies. From Trichinopoly are gold chains of the snake pattern so finely wrought that the scales are almost invisible, and the chain doubles like thread, or chains and bracelets of rose open-work, most minute and beautiful. From Madras and Delhi comes granulated gold made into ear-drops or set as bosses in open-work. About everything there is a lightness as far removed as possible from Western ideas of handsome solidity and valuable weight. In the museum a model stands for the purpose of showing how the woman of India wears jewelry. She has not only "rings on her fingers and bells on her toes," but in nose and ears, on her hand, dropping over her bosom, round her arms and waist, and loading her ankles, are stringed gems and hoops of gold.

Akin to the jewelry is the gold and silver plate. The cup, or Buddhist relic-casket, already mentioned, is interesting as being one of the oldest examples found in India, and its age, about two thousand years, only tells how much India art-work in the precious metals has been destroyed or lost. There are many excellent examples of the parcel-gilt work of Cashmere, and one shrine-screen of silver, pierced and repoussée, is exceptionally fine in design and treatment. There are tinned brass vessels with incised decorations, sculptured vessels of brass, brass incrusted with copper and copper incrusted with silver, but which can be called the baser and which the richer metals when all assume shapes of such wondrous beauty as the lotas and sarais, and are decorated with designs so pleasing and with a skill so perfect with damascened work, incrustations or enamel? The metal excipient is forgotten in the art. The enamelled huku-stand in the illustration belongs to the best Mogul period of transparent enamelling, and is painted in green and blue enamels. At Jaipur red, blue and green enamels are laid upon pure gold, and the richness and brilliancy of the result have raised the enamels of that place to the first rank among those of all the East.

Here our round of inspection may close, and as the doors shut behind us a remarkable fact presents itself: that in no branch of industrial art, either in metal-work, weaving or carving, can the science of Europe cope with the plodding industry of the East.

Jennie J. Young.

ADAM AND EVE.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

While the small party of soldiers were employed in attracting the attention of the inhabitants to the meaningless parade of taking down the offer of reward and replacing it by the announcement of discovery, the larger portion of their company had already entered Uncle Zebedee's house and seized upon Jerrem, their object being to avoid any defence on the part of the neighbors, which Adam, with a view of preventing further search being made in the house, had assured them was certain to take place unless they could find a means of very speedily effecting their purpose. Although little disposed to be influenced by any of his suggestions, the force of this one was greatly strengthened by the necessity of dividing themselves into two parties, one of which must take Adam on, while the other returned to Polperro to seize the prisoner. And this they managed with such promptitude that in less than ten minutes they had entered the house and had dragged out Jerrem, who, half stupefied, was pinioned and marched off before he was sufficiently aroused to thoroughly comprehend or realize his situation.

The tattoo of the drums announced to the men on the quay that the capture was effected, and the party, hurrying off by the Warren, had joined their comrades, already half up Talland lane, before those who had been spectators of one calamity could exchange their evil tidings with those who had witnessed the other.

Yes, Jerrem was gone—led off to disgrace, maybe to death, through the treachery of his shipmate, his comrade, his—all but in blood—brother. What would come next? Ghastly fears crowded in upon all present. Vengeance grew rank, hatred spread out on all sides: the earth thirsted for his blood, and the air was thick with curses showered on his name. Even Joan turned relentless and flung pity from her heart; while old Zebedee, stung to the quick by the odium brought upon his name, disowned Adam for his son and took God to witness that so long as life remained every farthing he possessed should be spent in saving Jerrem.

At early dawn of the next day, Joan, at the instance of her uncle and in company with several trusty friends, set off first for Liskeard, and then, if need be, to get on to Plymouth or to Bodmin, at one of which places Jerrem, they said, was certain to be tried. Bodmin jail and Plymouth clink had both been familiar in days gone by to many who still lived to tell their tales and give their experience, and schemes were already abroad to put the larger boats on wheels, so that, if Bodmin were selected, conveyances might be supplied by which the mass of the people could be transported there and see fair play dealt out to their comrade.

But days went by without Joan coming back, and Eve, who was left behind to look after Uncle Zebedee, had to sit and listen to the terrible outpourings of wrath against his son to which the old man gave vent in the presence of his neighbors, and see the more heartrending desolation of spirit which bowed him to the ground when no strange eye was near to witness his weight of woe.

So entirely had the chain of circumstances overpowered Eve that this climax of disaster seemed to have sealed up the flow of her emotions, and listening to and looking at the tears, exclamations, sighs and groans with which the excitable, sympathetic Cornish folk expressed their anguish and their indignation, she asked herself, "Had all feeling left her? Did she no longer care what happened to herself or anybody around her? Was it nothing to her that her life was, as it were, at an end, her future blighted, her hopes dead, her lover disgraced, reviled, disowned and denounced by his own father and his own family?" Any way, she could find no tears to bewail her sad fate in, no sighs to relieve her burdened heart, no groans to ease her desolate spirit: all was chaos, over which two dark shadows moved—the spectral forms of herself and Adam.

"Uncle, what do you think's become of him? where can he have gone to?" Eve asked one night as, no longer afraid of his neighbors seeing him, the old man tore off the armor under which in their presence he concealed every softer feeling.

"To bottom o' sae, clane gone out o' the warld, I hope, where I wishes I was too," groaned Zebedee. "Awh! to think e'er a boy o' mine should ha' sarved us so!—that he us counted 'bove all other flesh and blood should ha' bin the whiles carryin' 'bout the heart of a fausse Judas in his body!"

"Perhaps he was mad," said Eve, dropping her voice in terror of the suggestion.

"Lord send I could see un ravin'!" cried Zebedee. "Why," he added, his voice breaking under the pictured joy, "I'd thraw mysel' 'pon un and hug un to me close, though he tored out my heart 'pon the spot for 't. Naw, lass, naw," he sighed, "he ain't mad: 'tis the devil has seazed hold on un somehow: that's what's brought un to this."

"Didn't he say nothing that seems now as if he'd told you that night what he meant to do?" urged Eve.

"Naw, nothin'."

"And you didn't say anything to him, did you?"

"Iss, there 'tis: that's what sticks by me and shaws me plain the vengeance that was in un, 'cos I tawld un that us was tryin' to dale double, so as to manage for Jerrem to stale away."

"You didn't tell him about the soldier?" faltered Eve. "No, you couldn't, because you didn't know anything about it yourself, did you?"

"Iss, I did. Jerrem tawld—he allays tawld me everything Jerrem did—and I ups and tells Adam."

An icy grip seized Eve by the heart. "Oh, uncle!" she groaned, "could it be because of that—that he thought about me?"

"What damon's in the maid now?" cried the old man, starting to his feet and standing before her with clenched hands and quivering limbs. "Do 'ee give heed to what 'tis you'm sayin' of? Doan't 'ee knaw that if I thought that 'twas you was the cause of it I'd scat out yer brains on the planchin' where you'm standing to?"

Eve shrank back in terror, while Zebedee, after a minute's pause, his outburst ended, sank down into his former despondent attitude, muttering, "There! there! let be! let be! Awh, I wander what 'tis a keepin' o' Joan so? Things is all bottom side upmost when her's out o' hailin'-distance."

But two days more passed before Joan returned, bringing with her the startling intelligence that, instead of Bodmin or Plymouth, Jerrem was to be tried in London, to which place report said Adam had already been removed. But, though every one thirsted for news, beyond the bare facts Joan had little with which to satisfy them: she had failed in her endeavor to see Jerrem, of whose present whereabouts even no one could speak with certainty; she could learn no positive tidings of Adam, neither had she been able to ascertain any trustworthy account of the betrayal, only that it was in every one's mouth that Adam had done it, and had meant to do it from the first moment he found that the shot fired against his will would bring them all to trouble. Mr. Macey, the lawyer at Fowey, who had always managed Uncle Zebedee's money-business, had said 'twas a terrible job of it, and though he couldn't take it himself he'd see 'twas carried through by somebody sharper at such work than he was; and he'd sent Uncle Zebedee word that not a stone should be left unturned or a guinea unspent while hope was left that Jerrem's life might be saved; but he also sent a solemn warning to him and to all the Lottery's crew to keep quiet and out of sight until 'twas seen whether they meant to carry their vengeance further, or whether Jerrem's life alone would serve to content them.

"Wa-al," sighed Zebedee, who had listened eagerly to the whole of Joan's details and patiently to old Mr. Macey's friendly warning, "they'm fair words and kindly spoken, and, so far as they goes, I'll bide by 'em. But hark 'ee here, Joan: if the warst comes to warst, mind this—though they strings me up with un and we swings together, I'll stand yet wance more face to face with Jerrem afore he dies."

"And that you shall," said Joan; "and so will I too, for while in life us cherished un, so while life lasts us 'll never desert un."

"And as for t' other wan," said the stricken old man, his wrinkled face growing pinched and sharp, "may the wound that he's planted in my heart rankle and fester in his own! May he live to know the want o' they he's cast hisself off from, and die a stranger in a furrin land, and be buried where none who knawed un here can point to the grave that holds un!"

"Uncle!" cried Eve, thrusting her fingers into her ears to keep out these terrible words from falling on them—"uncle!" But Joan's upraised hand warned her to keep silent, and turning she saw that a sudden change had fallen upon Zebedee: his features had relaxed, his stretched eyelids were half closed over his glazed eyes, his head drooped low and was sunk down upon his breast.

For some minutes the two girls stood anxiously gazing at him, until Joan, terrified by the ashen pallor which had blanched his usually ruddy cheeks, ventured to speak, and at length succeeded in so far rousing him that he allowed himself to be persuaded to go to bed, and the two girls were left alone.

"You're wanting to run up to your mother's, Joan, ain't you?" said Eve. "I'll sit and watch Uncle Zebedee while you're gone."

"No, never mind for to-night," said Joan wearily.

"Then let me go," said Eve: "'twon't take me any time, and I want a breath of fresh air;" and she rose from her seat as she spoke.

But Joan intercepted. "No, now sit down," she said hurriedly: "there ain't no call for neither to go; 'sides which, 'tis too late. I don't wan't 'ee to go wanderin' 'bout in the dark: you'm too much given to goin' out by yourself. It won't do now: 'tain't safe, you knaw."

Eve stared: "Not safe, Joan? Why not?"

"Well, now, I'd rather you didn't. Sit down now, like a dear."

Eve sat down, but, her curiosity awakened by Joan's agitated, nervous manner, she said, "Joan, what is it? I'm sure you've heard something. Tell me, what makes you say we oughtn't to go out by ourselves, eh?"

Joan hesitated. "I wonder," she said, "whether I'd best tell 'ee or not? It may be nothin' but a passel o' mazed talk, only I wouldn't have a finger o' harm laid 'pon 'ee for warlds."

"Why, what is it, Joan?"

"Well, my dear, you see, I've see'd Jonathan. Through Adam's tellin' he was tooked off too and lodged in Plymouth clink; but findin' they couldn't make un spake a word o' sense, when they carr'd Adam away they left Jonathan bide; and there he is, and there I hopes he'll stay."

"You do? What for?" asked Eve, amazed.

"Why, 'cos o' you, Eve. Iss," she said, answering her look of surprise, "he's for all the world like anybody ravin' mad agen you."

"Against me? But why against me?"

"He will have that you'm the cause of it all," said Joan; "and 't seems now he let out to Adam 'bout the letter that Jerrem writ and he broffed, and then he drove un further mad by a passel o' lies he's somehow got tagged on t' it—that you'd ha' told the sergeant, and through that he dropped a bit o' paper, tellin' of it all, into the rendevoos winder; for, seemin', that was how they got scent o' the Lottery's landin'."

"And Adam believed him?" gasped Eve.

"He must have," sobbed Joan; "and then I reckon somethin' he see'd or heerd that night finished un."

"Oh, Joan!" cried Eve, flinging herself down and burying her head on Joan's lap.

"Iss: don't it seem as if us all must have some hand in tightenin' the rope that's round that poor sawl's neck?"

"And Adam could believe that I would betray them—would betray him?" and, clasping her hands, Eve looked up as if making an appeal to some unseen presence—"him," she said, "for whom I would have given my life—for whom," she cried, breaking down, "oh, Joan, I would give my life now!"

"Iss, I know you would," said Joan, hugging her close to her. "Why, haven't I called un everything bad before 'ee, o' purpose 'cos I should see 'ee flare up agen me for doin' it? and haven't I blessed 'ee in my heart for stickin' to un through thick and thin? Awh, Eve, my dear, don't 'ee judge me hard for keeping all to Jerrem's side. 'Tain't only love for Jerrem makes me do it, but that Adam sha'n't never be fouled by havin' the stain o' blood restin' 'pon un. If 'twas only for that I'd spend my last breath to save Jerrem from hangin'."

"They think they'll try to hang him?" said Eve in a faltering voice.

"Iss, for certain they'll try; and, though I didn't say so to uncle, all Mr. Macey fears is that wan life won't content 'em, neither."

"Could Adam have known that?" whispered Eve.

"He knawed 'twas death to whoever was took, and a free pardon to whoever told on 'em, or else why didn't he take and knock him on the head hisself? Jonathan says," she added after a minute's pause, "that when he'd told un 'bout you he sprung on un like a tiger and shook un like a rat; and after, when it comed to 'bout the letter, he roared out like a bull belvin', and then fell flat down 'pon his face like one struck for death."

"Oh, why, why did Jerrem send that letter?" moaned Eve, wringing her hands in desperation.

"Iss, why indeed?" said Joan. "Though that could have had nothin' to do with the findin's out, that I can see; for, if 'twas the last word I spoked, I could take an oath to never havin' quitted a word 'bout it to a single livin' sawl; and as to you meetin' the sergeant, why, you never stirred from this, did 'ee?—Let's see: what did us do that day?" she added, trying to recall the past events; while Eve, sensible of having concealed her meeting with Reuben May, averted her face so that Joan might not perceive its terrible pallor.

Over and over again had Eve endeavored to screw up her courage to tell Joan of this meeting, since which one misfortune after another had crowded so thickly upon them as to make each endeavor seem inopportune. For days after the interview she had every now and again been seized with terror lest Reuben should make his appearance, and great was her relief when, as time went on, she began to be released from this anxiety. But no suspicion that he could in any way have been connected with the betrayal had ever entered her mind until now, when, as Joan spoke of her being the supposed betrayer, a sudden dart of terror seemed to strike her. Was it possible? Could she have said anything that Reuben had laid hold of against them? For an instant Eve wrestled with the doubt and tried to crush it, but so vividly did it rise up before her that at any cost she felt it must be set at rest, and seizing Joan's hand she blurted out, "Joan, there's one thing I've never told you of—that the day we expected them all back, after Jerrem's letter had come, I went out for a bit by Talland way, and there, just down before you come to the Warren stile, I met—"

"Not he! No, doan't 'ee tell me you see'd the sergeant!" cried Joan, forcing her hands up to Eve's mouth as if to keep back the words.

"The sergeant? no!" said Eve indignantly; "but the young man I told you of from London—Reuben May."

"Reuben May, Eve? Why, however did he come down 'long this ways? What broffed un here, eh?"

"He was coming to see me," said Eve. "He had come in Capen Triggs's vessel because of something he'd heard about us, and the minute he saw me he began about uncle and Adam, calling them both thieves and robbers, and I can't tell what."

"But that wouldn't make 'ee tell un nothin' 'bout their landin'?" said Joan.

"No: I feel sure I never mentioned that. I told him they were expected home, because I feared he'd want to come that night and see you all; but then we fell to quarrelling again, and parted in such anger that I said I hoped never to see his face again."

"But whatever made 'ee keep it to yourself and never spake of it till now?" said Joan, turning her eyes upon Eve with a look of anxious scrutiny.

"I never meant to keep it from you, Joan," said Eve earnestly; "and only that your mother and Mrs. Climo and the rest were here, I should have told you the minute I got back: then, when they were gone, I said, 'I'll tell her as soon as we come down from the cliff;' but what happened there put everything else out of my head for that night, and since then, though I've had it on my lips to say twenty times, something has always come up to hinder me from speaking."

"I'd a made sure you'd never cast eyes on any man outside the place," said Joan, perplexed by this new opening-out of difficulties.

"I wish now, more than ever, that it had never happened," sighed Eve. "Still, Joan, the more I think of it the more certain I feel that Reuben May had no hand in it, unless it could be that anybody might have watched us together. That's not impossible, although I never met a single soul, coming or going."

Joan made no comment: for a minute she seemed to struggle and debate with her thoughts; then, suddenly looking up, she said, "Eve, you'll have to go back home to wance: it 'ull never do to have 'ee stayin' here now."

"But why, Joan? Has what I have told you made you think ill of me? Don't you believe that I am speaking the truth when I say that what kept me silent were the bitter words that Reuben May spoke? I meant to tell you of it, because I had spoken of him to you before, but I could never have told Adam that one I had counted as my greatest friend had called him a thief over whose head the gallows was dangling;" and at the remembrance of how near those words seemed now to the truth Eve burst into a passion of tears.

"Now, don't 'ee go for to cry like that," exclaimed Joan, dashing away the drops which were blinding her own eyes. "Whatever 'tis, I loves 'ee too well to think harm of 'ee for it; and whether 'twas he or some other man, t' mischief's done now and can't be set straight agen. But, Eve, us mustn't let more harm come to us if we can hinder it; and I tawld 'ee that I didn't like the angry words and the manin' looks o' Jonathan, and he gived two or three twists o' hisself while he was spakin' that made me turn as cold as death, and 't seemed as if I couldn't draw my eyes away from the glarin' roll he was lookin' about un with."

"Oh, I'm not afraid of Jonathan," said Eve, trying to brave down the tremor of nervous fear which was creeping through her—"a poor half-witted creature, who says one thing this minute and forgets all about it the next."

"Awh, my dear, don't 'ee sneer at Jonathan," said Joan reprovingly: "he's a bitter foe, I'll warn 'ee. And when," she added, dropping her voice to a whisper, "he talks of maidens who loves to stand gazin' 'pon the sea growin' dizzy and fallin' in, and o' folks bein' 'ticed fro' their homes and never comin' back 'longs agen, 'tis time to steer clear of un, Eve, for there's devilry in his words and mischief broodin' in his mind."

"Why, Joan," gasped Eve, "surely he wouldn't—you don't think he'd murder me?" and as the words came trembling out her very lips turned white with horror.

"I wouldn't like to lave 'ee in his way," faltered Joan.

"But he'd be afraid, wouldn't he?"

"Wa-al, if so be he could get free to tell his story there's no knawin' what might come of it. I had to dale double with un as it was, and manage so that neither wan but me got in to see un; and 'fore he gets set free altogether, Eve, you must put miles atween you and they who, when they'd listened to his story, would awnly be too quick to shut their eyes to what they wasn't axed to take part in."

"Of course, in that case," said Eve, "'tis best I should go back by myself again to London."

And as the words came slowly dragging forth, the narrow street, the obscured sky, the stifling air weighed down upon her, and crushed her with a sense of gloom unknown before when her thirst for freedom was but a want unsatisfied. Her whole being revolted against the cruel exchange: her nature cried out in protest, but in vain.

The more they discussed the point the more convinced they both became that there was no other possible alternative; and the money for her journey being supplied by Uncle Zebedee, under pretence of accompanying Jochabed Giles in one of her stolen visits to Plymouth Eve set off late one afternoon, intending to rest by the way, and get on the next day to Plymouth, whence she would take coach to London.

There was to be no leavetaking, for no one must know that she was going away. So, with only a nod of good-bye to Uncle Zebedee and a moment's desperate clinging to Joan, Eve left the house, and in silent sadness followed Jochabed down the street, past the Warren, and away along by the cliff-path until they came to the jutting point which, once past, shuts out all view of Polperro from beyond. Here Eve paused, and motioning Jochabed to go on she turned and bade her eyes gaze round upon the scene and look their last farewell.

The sun, which all day long had shone hot and fierce, had run its course and sunk to rest, leaving its trail of glory to tip the hills above and be reflected down in crimson glow upon the sea below. The mist of heat which all day long had hung over the land, though rolled away from there, still floated in filmy clouds before the harbor's mouth, veiling the little haven and casting broad shadows on the rugged cliffs, up whose steep sides the white-faced houses clung, higher and higher still, till they were lost amid the tangle of the ridge which crowns the valley's sides.

Like an echo awakened by some tuneful strain which jars on the ear and smites the heart because the voice which gave it melody is still and hushed for ever, the sunset calm of that peaceful scene jarred on the misery of her who stood stricken and desolate. Involuntarily she shut her eyes, that through them at least her heart should be no longer pierced; and when she opened them again a mist of gathering tears obscured her view and blotted out the prospect from her sight. Then, slowly turning, Eve went her way, knowing that while this life should last the face of that fair portion of earth would never meet her eyes again.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

Reuben May had been but a short time back in London when one evening, as he was closing the shutters of his small shop, a boy presented himself, saying he was the landlady's nephew at Knight's Passage, and had been sent by her to ask Mr. May for some of the things he was taking care of for Eve Pascal.

"Why, what does she want them for?" asked Reuben curtly.

"She wants them for Eve Pascal herself," said the boy. "Eve Pascal has come back again: she came back this morning, only she hadn't got any one to send till now."

"All right," said Reuben, returning to his shutter-closing and then proceeding to fasten the door: "I'll go round and speak to her myself."

"Then you won't want me?" said the boy, not sorry to be released by his stern-looking companion.

"No: you can go your own way," replied Reuben, already several paces in advance, and walking with such rapid strides that a few minutes brought him to the house which had been the scene of all the romance his life had ever known.

"Oh, Mr. May!" but, paying no heed to the landlady's voice and without a pause, Reuben ran up the different flights of stairs, knocked at the door, opened it, and found himself at once in the presence of Eve: "Eve!"

"Reuben!"

And then silence, each looking at the other, wondering what could have wrought such a change; for the bodily fatigue and mental anxiety undergone by Reuben had told as heavily on his appearance as the sorrow Eve had endured had told on hers, although the absence of original comeliness made the alteration in him less generally noticeable.

"Have you been ill, Eve?" and as he put the question a wild thought sprang up that perhaps her suffering had been on his account, and, stirred by this prompting, Reuben took her hand in his and looked with tender anxiety into her face.

"No," she said, quietly withdrawing her hand, "I have not been ill. Have you? You look very ill."

"Oh, that's on account of my having walked most of the way back here from Plymouth: it's a stiffish tramp, you know, and took the little flesh I had off my bones."

Eve paused for an instant, as if trying to repress the over-haste of her question: then she said, while her face was half turned away, "Did you go straight on to Plymouth after I saw you?"

"I got to Plymouth before daylight the next morning. I was forced to rest a bit here and there on the way, as I'd come the same ground once before that day; but the night was fine; so, as I didn't care about stopping anywheres, I stumped on without waiting to see Triggs even—made a message do for him—and started off on my journey."

"Then you never went near Looe at all?" Eve exclaimed with eagerness.

"Ah!" replied Reuben, evading a direct reply by a little laugh, under which he heralded his answer, "you may be sure I didn't stop to inquire the names of all the places I passed through: I was in too hot haste to turn my back on them for anything of that sort."

"Oh, thank God!" said Eve; and at the words her whole mind and body seemed to relax from the strain imposed on them by the suspicion that in some indistinct way on her had rested the blame of the betrayal.

"'Thank God'?" repeated Reuben sharply. "Thank God for what?"

"For not making me the betrayer of those who put their trust in me."

Reuben's face turned crimson, but so engrossed was Eve by her own satisfaction that his sudden confusion was lost upon her, and she continued: "I may as well tell you, Reuben, that a terrible trouble has fallen upon me and mine since I parted with you. That very night some one played us false and betrayed the Lottery into the hands of the revenue."

"I can't see what else was to be expected," said Reuben stolidly: "when men run their necks into a noose they may be pretty sure of some day finding the knot drawn tight."

"I was so afraid that you might have laid hold on anything I said to you, and had been led in any way to tell it against them," sighed Eve, paying no heed to the taunt with which Reuben had hoped to sting her.

"And supposing I had," he said, "oughtn't you to thank me for doing it? Don't tell me, Eve"—and he threw into his tone a mixture of contempt and bitterness—"that you've come to take it as a trial that those you talk of belonging to are forced into taking to honest ways."

"Those I belong to have been hunted down like dogs," she cried. "A price has been set upon their lives, and one of them has been dragged away up here that they may try and hang him if they can."

"What?" exclaimed Reuben, starting to his feet—"hang him? Who are they going to hang? What can they hang him for? Is it your cousin, Adam Pascal, you're talking of?"

"No: I wish it was," said Eve, her face quivering with the emotion the relation of these details stirred within her; "but, though 'twas in fair fight, 'twas Jerrem shot the man."

"Shot what man?" gasped Reuben.

"The revenue-man. The Lottery was lying still, waiting for the tide to come up, when the boats crept up behind them in the dark; and if it hadn't been for Adam not one among their crew would have lived to tell the tale, but by his word he kept his own men quiet—all but Jerrem, who fired his gun, and down the revenue-man fell, dead."

Reuben stifled the exclamation which rose to his lips, and Eve, to whose days of pent-up misery the repetition of these woes seemed to bring relief, continued: "At first all blamed Adam and praised Jerrem, but almost at once the soldiers came, and they'd only barely time to hide away from them. Adam went to the mill, and was there a week and more; and then some one told him that 'twas I was the cause of their being betrayed; and it drove him so mad with jealousy and rage that he told of the place where Jerrem was hid; and the next day the soldiers came again, dragged Jerrem out and carried him away. And now, though uncle spends every guinea he has got, 'tis almost sure that through Adam's word Jerrem will be hanged; for they say they've brought them both to London, and that they're lodged in Newgate jail."

Up to this time Reuben's eyes seemed riveted upon Eve's face, but as she paused he bent his head and sunk it down upon the table near—a movement that at any former time would naturally have awakened some surprise, but now Eve had grown so familiar with the aspect of sorrow that she regarded all visible emotion as an outburst of the certain sympathy to be expected from her hearers. "Now you know why it is, Reuben," she continued, "that I feel so glad that you had no hand in anything of this; for you must overlook the anger that I showed at that time. I've been sorry for it often since, and feared you'd count me over-bold for talking as I did. Not that I'm changed, Reuben, nor think one bit the less of Adam for what's happened. No; and though all the world should turn their backs on him, I'd stand by his side; and to prove it I must find him out and tell him that, in spite of all they've told him, in heart and tongue I've never been untrue to him." And, filled with the desire of seeing the man she loved, Eve clasped her hands and sat trying to revolve her plans, while Reuben commenced pacing the little room with a troubled air.

Suddenly bringing himself to a stand before Eve, he said, "Eve, be sure your sin will find you out."

"No, Reuben—no;" and she put up her hand as if to avert the continuance of any homily: "'tis of no good talking like that. Sorrow has sealed up my heart against taking condemnation or comfort from anything of that sort."

"It isn't of you I'm thinking," he exclaimed. "Oh," he cried, giving vent to his pent-up feelings, "down into what a pitfall a minute's evil passion may fling a man! To think that I, while I was crying vengeance against others, was drawing down the wrath of God upon my own head, stamping myself with the brand of Cain, and doing the devil's work by sending men to death with all their sins still heavy on their souls!"

"Reuben, what is it you mean?" and seizing hold of him with both her hands, Eve gazed into his face.

"That the thought you had was true," he said, "and that 'twas me who dropped the paper in that told them where the Lottery would be found;" and a tremor ran through Reuben's frame: his pulses for a moment quickened, and then grew faint and seemed to die away; while Eve uttered neither word nor sound: her eyes drooped, her hold relaxed, and tottering she sank back into the seat behind her, and there sat motionless and still as one carved out of stone.

The abandonment of hope, the unutterable despair of face and form, so unlike anything which Reuben had ever seen in Eve, touched him as no reproaches could have done. That depth of misery which words can neither describe nor express pierced his inmost soul and added to the stings with which conscience was already smiting him. Not for the act of betrayal, for had there been no Eve to prompt him Reuben would have looked upon it as an act of justice that he should aid the law against men who set order and government at defiance, and though each man on board had met his death Reuben would have held his conscience free of any tittle of reproach; but, equitable and unyielding to himself as well as to others, he full well knew that when he wrote the words which sealed the Lottery's fate justice was clean gone out of his mind. He neither knew nor cared what might become of the men whose safety he betrayed: the whole rancor of his hate was turned against his rival; and the paper he flung into the rendezvous window was as much a blow aimed at Adam as if he had dealt him a thrust and had stabbed him in the dark.

"Eve," he said, "words are but poor things at a time like this, and if I spoke from now till never I couldn't make you see by them the misery I feel; but if you'll trust me this far, I swear by Him who sees us both and knows our hearts that no stone shall be unturned, no thing undone. I'll walk London over, and neither rest day nor night till I find out Adam Pascal and his comrade and tell them the whole truth. And when I say this," he added, his face working with emotion, "don't fancy 'tis because of love of you, Eve: I know that, come what may, we never can be nothing more than friends now; but oh—" and he held out his hands toward her—"let's at least be that, Eve: let me help you to set yourself clear with the man who, be he what he may, it seems you've given all your heart to; and you—you help me to rid myself of the thought that I've led into sin and hurried on to death fellow-creatures whose godless lives I'd now give my own to save. Together, if we set our minds to work, there's no knowing what we mayn't do yet. Warrants have been quashed and pardons given when men have reached the very gallows' foot; and as for getting in, why Mr. Osborne knows Newgate prison, every inch, from going there with old Silas Told when he was living, and he'll do anything for me; so there'll be no fear about that. And you know me, Eve: you know how when I'm set upon a thing I strain my utmost nerve to get it done;" and, pausing, he stood watching with mingled hope and fear the effect of his words—first, the flush of spreading color, then the quivering mouth and eyes, and finally the rush of tears which lifted up and cleared away that stone-like gloom.

A ray of hope seemed once more near, and catching at the feeblest chance of being brought again face to face with Adam, Eve, unable to speak, stretched out her hand, which Reuben took, grasped it almost to pain, then let it go, and with it every hope of love that lingered still for Eve.

The rest of the time was spent in explanations of the various incidents relating to the all-engrossing event, the details which bore upon it, the circumstances which surrounded it, until, from following out all these into their different channels, Reuben began to have a clearer conception of the men, their characters, their individual virtues and collective failings, growing interested in them almost against his will. The hour was late before he recollected that until he reached his home he could hardly settle his plans so as to secure an entrance into the prison on the following day. Bidding Eve good-night, he left the house and walked away, only stopping at the turn of the street to step into the road and cast his wistful gaze up to the window of the room which to him now was as the tomb of his dead love.

An ordinary workingman standing in an obscure street is not a figure to arouse much interest, and Reuben's stolid face gave little index to the varied emotions which surged within his troubled heart. He was able to return the gruff "Good-night!" the watchman gave, and the old man, passing on, went wondering as to the cause of such anxious survey on Reuben's part. For as he stood his thoughts ran here and there, and by the magic of their power showed to his view the long-gone joys of other days. He watched the struggling birth of love, scorched himself in its flame, and felt by turns the tortures and delights its presence gives to those who live on hope alone: then sadly saw it fade from out his sight, sicken and faint almost to death, and yet it did not die until by that one action he had robbed it of life and killed it evermore. Yes, love was dead, and love was Eve; and for Reuben May the Eve he had loved so fondly lived no longer.

CHAPTER XXXV.

During the time which had elapsed since the night on which Eve Pascal and Reuben May renewed their bond of friendship many an anxious incident had occurred to test its value and cement its strength.

Jerrem and Adam were familiar names to Reuben now, and the men who bore them were often before his eyes and constantly in his thoughts. Prepared as Reuben had been for undergoing much awkwardness in delivering himself of the tale he had to tell, he found he had greatly underrated the pain and humiliation he actually felt when, through the interest of his friend, he found himself within the walls of Newgate and in the presence of Adam. Reuben was no coward, yet it needed all the strength of his strictly-disciplined mind to open up and lay bare before a rival's eyes those wounds which love had made and time had had no space to heal. He shrank from placing in front of Adam the picture of himself and Eve as they had stood in the days when, Adam all unknown, the balance of a happy future seemed trembling still within the hand of Fate; and he paused from time to time as he spoke, hoping some word or sign would make his task more easy; but Adam never spoke or turned aside his eyes, and under that fixed gaze Reuben was forced to tell his tale out to the end, constraining his pride to give out word for word what Eve had said in Adam's praise, and searing the green memory of his love by making his lips repeat those vows which she had told him bound her to another.

At length the task was ended, the jealous rage, the mad revenge, was all confessed; and satisfied that, whatever guilt it might please Adam to lay to his charge, he had at least shown that Eve was free from any shadow of stain, Reuben paused, and the two so strangely linked stood looking at each other with envy, jealousy, distrust clouding their minds, while a chord of sympathy drew them together as they recognized a similitude in their actions which made each self-abasement uttered find an echo in its listener's breast. Proud, stern, unyielding to emotion as both these men had lived, it was not in them to take comfort in the shifts and excuses weaker natures find: the hearts that had refused pity for their neighbors would not entreat it because they themselves now stood in need. As they had judged their fellows so they arraigned themselves, and thus unwittingly rendered the first atonement man is called upon to make.

The sight of Adam's strong, powerful form shaken and bowed down by the remorse he strove in vain to control moved Reuben strangely. The haggard pallor of his striking face, the sunken eyes, the untasted food, the unslept-in bed,—each told its tale of misery and woe, and opened out to Reuben a depth of despair his own experience hitherto had furnished him with no gauge to measure. What if with no further warning he fetched up Eve to Adam's aid? The thought would bear no hesitation: a thousand jealous "Noes" battled with the suggestion, but Reuben's better self resolved to have its way, and, seizing the opportunity of Adam's head being bent down in his arms, Reuben went swiftly out and along down to the keeper's room, where Eve had been left impatiently awaiting his return.

Although the grating of the hinge roused Adam, he neither stirred nor moved until, satisfied by the unbroken silence that Reuben had left him to himself, he ventured to raise his head. Where could he go? where hide himself from human gaze? And as the thought of all his shame came crowding to his mind he started up and wildly stared around, and then around again, seeing each time the walls, which looked so near, draw nearer still. No hope! no hope! Here he must live until the hour when those who brought him here would drag him forth to swear away his comrade's life. O God! how helpless he felt! and as he let himself drop down each limb gave way and nerveless fell, as if Dejection claimed him for her own. The time had been when Adam's mind was racked by thoughts of what lay in the hearts of those he had left behind: their pictured hatred and contempt stung him to madness; the words they would say, the curses they were uttering, seemed ever ringing in his ears. But Reuben's tale had for the time swept this away and filled its place with dark remorse for what he had done to Jerrem. True, Reuben had shown that Jerrem's hand had wrought his own and their destruction, but what of that? Adam through him had wreaked his vengeance on them all—had, Judas-like, delivered them to death: henceforth, branded and disgraced, he must be an outcast or a wanderer. As this fallen spectre of himself rose up and flitted in his sight a cry of wild despair burst forth, wrenched from the depths of his proud heart—a cry which some one near sent echoing back; and as it came his hands were caught, and Pity seemed to stretch her arms and fold him to her breast.

Was it a nightmare he was waking from—some hideous dream in which our bodies slumber while our fancies live a lifetime? Would this vision of Eve (for Eve it was who knelt close by his side, her arms around his neck) melt away and fade as many a one of her had done before? She calls him love—her love, the husband of her heart. What! he, this guilty outcast—can he be this to any one, and most of all to Eve?

A finger's touch seemed laid upon the veil which hitherto had shut out hope from Adam's view, and as it shrivelled up and rolled away the light revealed that Mercy still sat throned on high, and bowing down his head on Eve's neck he let his stricken soul take comfort in the thought.

But while Adam was thus cast down under suffering, sorrow had taken but a slight hold on Jerrem, who, after the first shock produced by the horrors of a place then branded as "the darkest seat of woe this side of hell," gradually regained his old elasticity, and was soon ready to treat, laugh and drink with all who came near him. His merry jokes, his quaint sea-songs, the free handling he gave to his plentiful supply of money,—all served to ensure his popularity, so that, instead of the man sunk under misery and despair whom Reuben, after leaving Adam, had girded himself up to encounter, he came upon Jerrem rollicking and gay, a prime favorite with all the authorities, and a choice spirit amid the crew of tried and untried prisoners who in those days crowded together in the foul wards of Newgate.

Fresh from the sight of Adam's dark remorse, filled with compunction at the thought of all the ills their joint passions had hurled on Jerrem's head, Reuben had invested Jerrem with a sense of wrong, to make reparation for which he had come prepared to offer whatever sacrifice he should demand. To find the man for whom all this feeling had been conjured up reckless and unconcerned, casting oaths against his ill-luck one moment and cutting jokes at his possible fate the next, jarred upon Reuben terribly, and made him at once decide that it would be worse than useless to urge upon him any necessity for taking thought for his soul when he was so utterly reckless as to what would become of his body. The story Reuben had to tell of himself and Eve, the betrayal, and the suspicions it had aroused against Eve in Adam, merely affected Jerrem as a matter for surprise and curiosity. He seemed pleased to hear that Eve was close at hand, but still expressed no wish to see her. He talked about Adam, and with a painful absence of all malice told Reuben to say to him that he'd best lay it thick on his back, so that the judge and jury would let the other chaps go free. The circumstance of being brought to London to be tried seemed to afford him immense satisfaction—a thing, he said, that hadn't happened for sixty years and more, since old —— swung for it; and then he fell to wondering how soon that might be his fate, and if so how many from Polperro would make the stretch to come so far. He'd promise them it shouldn't be for nothing: he'd show the Cornishmen that he could cut his capers game. Only one subject seemed able to sober or subdue his reckless spirit, and this was any mention of Joan or Uncle Zebedee: to them the poor soul seemed to cling with all the love his nature could command. And when Reuben, instructed by Eve, told him how stricken down the old man lay, and farther on promised to write for him all the messages he wished to send to Joan, a heart of wax seemed given to his keeping, in which it now must be his care to mould the little good there yet was time to teach. And so it happened that in all his future visits—and every hour that Reuben had to spare was given up to Jerrem—Joan was the theme that threaded all their discourse, and by her power Jerrem's soft heart and softer nature became to Reuben as an open page, wherein he read of actions in which good and bad were so mixed up and jumbled that in the very midst of his reproof and condemnation Reuben was often forced to stand abashed before some act of generous pity which found no echo in his former life. And out of this humility, which grew in strength, there sprang forth greater merits than from all the weary efforts he made at working out his own atonement; for Reuben, like Adam, had been over-satisfied about his own rectitude, and took pride in the knowledge that if ever he had committed a wrong he had acknowledged it freely and expiated it to the uttermost farthing; while Jerrem, for the first time in his life brought to see guilt in what he had counted pleasure, scarce dared to listen to a hope of mercy for himself, but rather craved Reuben to beg it for the many who had been thoughtless sharers in his folly. His ruling desire was to see Joan once more, and no sooner was he told that the admiralty session had begun and that his day of trial, although not fixed, was near at hand, than he begged Reuben to write and ask Joan to delay her promised visit no longer; and this Reuben did, adding on his own account that, from what the lawyer said, it would be best she came at once by the coach which would reach London on the following Thursday week, on which day Reuben would be waiting to receive her.

Now, at the onset of this disaster had such a letter reached Polperro not a man in the place but, short of knowing it would cost his life, would have risked all else to go to London, and if Jerrem was to die give him courage by mustering round their comrade at the last. But the downpour of disaster had cowed these daring spirits, and the men who had not known what fear meant so long as success was secure now trembled and gave way under the superstitious certainty that Ill-luck was following them and Misfortune had marked them for her own. Their energies paralyzed, they succumbed to what they looked upon as Fate, and in most cases were seized without a struggle and led off to the nearest prisons without an effort on their own part toward resistance.

The money over which, from the small scope for spending it, they had seemed so lavish and reckless, when needed for lawyers and counsel and bribes went but a small way; and though they made a common purse of all their hoards, not a day passed without some house being stripped of the substance which adorned it, so that money might be got for the husband, the son, the brothers who had brought these treasures home. The women, on their knees, pressed on the farmers' wives their chintzes, their lace, their gaudy stock of jewelry, and when this market failed toiled along to Liskeard, Plymouth and Launceston, carrying their china, silver plate and bowls in the hope of finding somebody to buy them.

With a revenue cutter—often two—always in sight, landing parties of king's men, who, recalling ugly thoughts of the hated press-gang, roamed hither and thither, ready to seize any one who happened to show his face; with half the husbands, sons and brothers in Plymouth clink or Bodmin jail, and the rest skulking in farm-houses or lying hidden in the secret places; with plenty vanishing and poverty drawing nigh,—the past circumstances which had led to this desolation were swallowed up in the present misery it had entailed upon them; and though every one now knew the whole story as it stood—how that through Jerrem writing to Eve she had had it in her power to tell Reuben May, her former lover, who, led on by jealousy, had betrayed them to the revenue-men—so familiar had Reuben's good services to Jerrem become known that it was taken as only one more of his many friendly actions that he should write to Joan, urging her to come to London without delay, and promising to meet her and see that she was taken care of. If any among them thought that Joan would go probably to Eve's home, they made no mention of it, for Eve's name was by a tacit understanding banished from their mouths, and the memory of her lay as a seal to that dark sepulchre wherein, with bitter scorn and hate, Adam lay buried.

There was no question now of Uncle Zebedee going, for the confinement, the excitement and the degradation had been too much for the old man, whose free and happy life had never known trouble or restraint, and his mind had gradually weakened under the burden imposed upon it; so that now, except when some unexpected incident roused the flickering flame of memory, the past few months were blotted from his mind, and in company with Jonathan—who, broken down by ill-usage and turned out of prison to die, had managed to crawl back to the friends he knew he should find shelter with—he roamed about harmless and contented, always watching for the Lottery's return, and promising, when she did come back, that he would give them all a fling such as Polperro had not seen for many a day.

It was an easy matter to cheat him now, and when, her journey all arranged, Joan stepped into the boat which was to take her round to Plymouth and left old Zebedee standing on the shore, raising his thin cracked voice to fetch her ear with cheery messages for Jerrem and for Adam, whom she was going to meet, her cup of bitterness seemed to overflow.

The Author of "Dorothy Fox."

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

A PIVOTAL POINT

We are but beginning to understand what this America of ours is to do for the Old World. If we consider it under the figure of a vast steamship journeying to the relief of the mother nations, surely the beef and the flour, the cotton and the corn, even the inventions, with which it is freighted, form the least portion of its immeasurable cargo of supplies. Now, imagining our republic to be such a vessel, if Alaska be the stern and Florida the prow turned toward the other hemisphere for the peaceful conquest thereof, then must New York on the left hand and Texas upon the right be, in the days to come, the great paddle-wheels which shall drive it onward—New York not more so in a commercial than Texas in an agricultural sense. But it is with Texas only that we have here to do, and this in order to detail certain things hitherto unpublished which may not be without their use to the Humes and Motleys, the Froudes and Macaulays, of our nation in the wonderful future.

It is well to bear in mind from the outset that Texas is by far the largest of the States. To get even an idea of this, place within its boundaries New England, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Ohio and Pennsylvania: even then you must pack into the crevices between these two or three granite boulders each of the size of Massachusetts to make a solid territory as large as Texas. As to that, however, Alaska is vast, and so is Sahara. If you set out upon a journey south and south-westward, beginning at the Potomac, and visit every Southern State in its order upon the map, you will find—and that almost immediately upon your arrival in Texas—that you have reached that State of them all which surpasses the others as much in prosperity as it does in dimensions. Near as Texas is to the equator, the oxygen of its abnormal growth is perceived by the newcomer in almost his first breath. There is a combination of causes for this. The Puritan who landed on Plymouth Rock gave character to, and transmitted himself down, the after ages of New England history; and the same is true of the influence of the Connecticut Austin who in 1820 began the settlement of Texas. The lapse of two centuries may have given a more earthward direction to the old energy, but the energy itself is there; and, somehow, the character and history of this larger New England of the West have been along the same line. Everything has helped forward the prosperity of the State. General health, moderate taxation, fertility of soil, astonishing diversity of product, cheap and rapid construction of railroads along lines both of latitude and longitude, immeasurable reserves of alternate sections of land held sacred for education,—these are some of the causes which are attracting an immigration of about a hundred thousand a year to a realm so vast that the two millions already there seem but pioneers of the coming hosts.

But that which strikes the stranger most is the seemingly small proportion of negroes to whites in comparison with other Southern States; and this is becoming more marked every year. In one thing the population seems to be unanimous, and that is that Texas shall remain, vast as it is, one undivided State, a recent legislature having set apart three millions of acres toward the construction of a new capitol at Austin which shall be worthy of that one of the United States which is also, and in itself, an empire so much larger than Germany that to bring the balance to a level you must cast into the scale with it Jamaica, Holland, Denmark, Belgium and Greece. There is the momentum as of its enormous bulk in the prosperity of Texas; and not a man of us, however wide awake he is, but is a Rip Van Winkle as to what it is coming to be.

But all this is said in order to something else. Heaven knows that the history of Texas was romantic enough during the era of the mysterious Aztec, then of the Frenchman, the Spaniard, the Mexican, and after that of the original and unadulterated Texan of the battles of '36, and yet there is a page, unprinted hitherto, of its annals, in connection with the Confederacy, which is, in some senses, the most interesting of all. To appreciate it one must remember that, unlike any other State, Texas was once a republic which had won its independence with its own sword. Of its own free will it deliberately abdicated its nationality as such to become one of the United States. When the fever of Secession set in, of all the Southern States it was, on account both of its size and strategic location, the most important. An anecdote in regard to Mr. Lincoln may illustrate this. One of the early settlers of Texas was a gentleman whom I will designate as Mr. S——. There is hardly a citizen of the State but will know who is meant, so long and thoroughly has he been recognized over its broad domain for his indomitable energy, sagacity and magnificent success, as well as for an integrity and high sense of honor unimpeached by any. Except as he was compelled by the very qualities of his clear-headed character to be a Union man during the rebellion, Mr. S—— has never meddled in politics, and no man stands higher to-day in the estimation of the best men in Texas than he. As a Union man he was obliged to absent himself from the State during the war, and was in Washington in 1864. As soon as Mr. Lincoln knew of his arrival he sent for him, and held three different interviews with him in regard to Texas. During these conversations the President dwelt at length and with the utmost energy upon the necessity, in a military sense, of Texas to the Federal cause. "If we held Texas," he said, "we should not only outflank the Confederacy by land, but by water also;" and he developed the statement in all its details. "Go back," he entreated Mr. S——, "and say to your State that if it will return to the Union the slaves will not be interfered with."

"But the Emancipation Proclamation has been issued," Mr. S—— exclaimed.

"No matter for that. We will consent to any plan for gradual emancipation the Texans will make," replied the President: "they may arrange for it not to go into effect for forty years to come if they will but return. We will fix it to suit them. One thing is certain," he went on: "even if the Confederacy should succeed with the other Southern States, we will never give up Texas. With it we can fence in the Confederacy, and whatever befalls we can never let Texas go—never!"

After much further conversation the President led Mr. S—— to the window and pointed to the trees. "Do you see," he said, "how the buds upon those boughs are swelling as they yield to the coming spring and summer? So is it in regard to the matters of which we are speaking: there is a Power mightier than we which, inevitable, irresistible, is dealing with them. Upon that Power we also can afford to wait. But we will never give up Texas, Mr. S——: never!"

Let it be added here, as casting light upon the characteristics of Texas, that it was never conquered by the Federal forces. Although attacked often and from almost every quarter, it invariably repelled the assault. When it succumbed at last it was from within, and not as the result of any victory achieved by Federal troops upon its own soil. But all this is merely to show that, superior in many respects to every other Southern State, the case of Texas was unique in almost every point of view; and this is stated with reference to what is now to follow.

When the rebellion began, General Sam Houston, who had been president of Texas when it was a republic, was governor of the State. In common with the overwhelming majority of the people, Houston was utterly hostile to Secession. With them he knew too well what Texas had been and how it had come into the Union. There was a certain grand inertia of the great State which resisted the noisy efforts of South Carolina to drag it out, as a stately ship resists, of itself and although its crew be passive, the attempts of a little tug to tow it along. Not one-fourth of the people of the State voted, when the test came, for Secession, and no man opposed it more determinedly than did its governor. If, like Texas among the States, he towered among men, almost a giant in stature and breadth of person, like Texas also he was peculiar every way. It required men of marked individuality to settle the country, to wrest it from Mexico, to erect it into a republic; and no Texan was more emphatically "himself and nobody else" than was the ponderous chief magistrate. Manifold stories illustrative of this are still afloat there: let one suffice, even if it shows also the weakness of the man. One morning when he was president of the republic the envoy from France called to confer with him upon an affair of critical importance. The executive mansion was but a log-cabin boarding-house at the time, and the only thing to be done was for the portly president to promenade up and down the long porch in front of the building, the envoy, who was the most polished and nervous of Frenchmen, walking by his side. But a small nurse-girl was engaged in drawing a screaming baby upon the porch in a roughly-constructed child's wagon. When he passed it the president said, with the politeness which always characterized him when anything female was in question, "Will you be so kind as to roll your charge somewhere else?" The nurse merely stared at him, and continued to drag the squalling infant up and down upon the squeaking wheels, the president and the envoy conferring together as well as they could as they walked. "My young friend," the former remonstrated at last as he halted before the girl, "I will esteem it a singular favor if you will go elsewhere." But it was little the nurse cared for the affairs of empires, and she paid no attention to the request. It so chanced that when the rival occupants of the porch passed each other the next time it was opposite the steep steps leading down into the yard, the Frenchman being upon that side. As the president came upon the rolling nuisance, now noisier than before, he whirled about. "I had rather," he shouted to the astonished girl, his face ablaze, his arms extended, "meet all hell in harness, and be dragged down the streets of the New Jerusalem by wild horses, than meet your horrible cart!" and, glancing around for his companion, he saw that in the violence of his explosion he had hurled the represented majesty of France down the steps and into the dirt.

He was an older man when Jeff Davis came along trundling his species of nuisance upon their common path, but he was no milder in his denunciation. Morning, noon and night, in public addresses and in private conversation, he left no shadow of doubt in the mind of any as to his opinion of Secession and its certain result. "Texas and the Federal government are like two noble mastiffs," he told the people from the steps of the Capitol at Austin in the earliest days of the rebellion, "and these miserable politicians are like little curs snapping and snarling about them to provoke them to fight. When the mastiffs are launched at last into bloody battle these wretched curs, holding themselves carefully out of danger, will circle about the big dogs which are tearing each other to pieces, with their shrill bow-wow-wows." And the writer remembers how well the old hero imitated as he said it, and with more accuracy than dignity, the vicious feebleness of the querulous spaniels.

Nor was the governor backward in doing also what he could to save his State from the coming chaos. A well-known and efficient lawyer of Texas hastened to Washington and had an audience with President Buchanan at the very outset of things, commissioned, doubtless, to do so by General Houston. "Relieve the officer now in command of that department," he urged upon Buchanan, "and appoint Houston in his place. Do that, do it at once, and we can assure you that you need have no fear of seeing Texas secede." The poor President shrank aghast from the proposition. We know how clerical in appearance Mr. Buchanan was, especially in the spotless whiteness of his ample necktie. "When I mentioned Houston to him," the lawyer said afterward, "he turned as pale as his cravat."

What was to be done? Governor Houston demanded it of himself as he sat and whittled shingles in his easy-chair at the executive office in the basement of the Capitol. General Twiggs was in command of the United States troops in that department, and they comprised one-fourth of the entire army then at the disposal of the Federal government. There were one hundred and twenty-one commissioned officers then in Texas—three thousand troops in thirteen forts and ten camps, including seven companies of the Third Infantry. At the general's head-quarters in San Antonio were fifty-five thousand dollars in cash, and thirty-five thousand stand of arms and seventy cannon within reach, with horses, mules, ammunition, wagons, tents, in abundance. In other words, General Twiggs, with a disciplined army and military stores of the value of over three millions of dollars, was available for resistance to Secession. But what about the officer in command? When General Twiggs shortly before had gone on leave of absence to Georgia, he had left Robert E. Lee in charge, remarking even at that early date, "If Old Hickory were President he could hold things." But Twiggs had returned, and Lee had left Texas, saying, "I am going to Virginia to turn planter. There will be at least one soldier the less to do the fighting." Could the governor rely upon General Twiggs? Captain R.M. Potter of the army, then in Texas, assures the writer that Twiggs did it merely as a ruse and to save time, but the governor had received tidings from him two months before that he could rely upon him. As it was, the United States troops were scattered six hundred miles along the frontier, and something must be done, secretly and instantly. Governor Houston knew that he could count upon many thousand volunteers. And not upon men merely as Union men: throughout the State were multitudes of those whose devotion to Houston was more almost of a religious nature than a matter of politics. These "Houston men" would have rallied to him rifle in hand, more or less indifferent to the cause he espoused, so that if there was to be a fight, and Houston was to command, he could have had plenty of soldiers, whoever and whatever was to be fought for or against.

And so the old governor sat awaiting events, a King Canute upon the seashore, and the ocean already lapping his feet. Almost every one of the many papers of Texas was ablaze with the prairie-fires of Secession. Everywhere the men were being rapidly organized into companies, ladies were making and presenting banners, editors, recruits, haranguing politicians rushing into the affair as purely from sentimental considerations, and with as little sound consideration, as the youngest and most frivolous of the excited beauties who were decking out lovers and brothers to their death. But the Secession convention assembled at Austin: how could the governor prevent it? Resisting the importunities of inflamed, remonstrating, exasperated, vituperative, threatening men, the old man sat in the executive department silently whittling away, a cypress shingle in one hand, a jack-knife in the other. The swarming politicians could not but revere and be afraid of him. Was he not "Old Sam," "the hero of San Jacinto"? He had been president of the republic, United States Senator, possible President of the United States. He was, as has been said, a very large man, of commanding aspect, and he threw his whole weight, so to speak, into his detestation and denunciation of Jeff Davis and all his crew.

As he sat and whittled he could not but hear the uproar in the legislative hall overhead in which the convention was assembled: the vehement applause of clapping hands and stamping feet reached his ears, even if he could not hear the eloquence which had aroused it. So far, he had fired blank shot only from behind his entrenchments, but he outnumbered—and all knew it—in his one person, and ten times over, the throngs of brave but mistaken men discussing and rushing through grandiloquent resolutions above, not a man of whom but was thinking all along of the governor down stairs as of a sort of legitimate Guy Fawkes who might at any moment blow their noisy parliament to the moon. "What do you think Old Sam will do?" That was the question of the day with them beyond every other. Alas! that was the conundrum which the governor, ponder as he might, was so far unable to answer. He had conquered and driven out the Mexicans; had sent the Texan soldiers home with the one charge, "Go and plant corn;" had seen Texas grow into a republic under his care; had rejoiced when he had helped place it in the Union. Now the imperial State was in the act of being hurled into what he confidently regarded as the most causeless of catastrophes; but what could he do? That was the supreme question. "What can I do to prevent it? What ought I to do, to-day and before it is too late?"

Early one morning a man entered the executive office, locked the door behind him and walked up to the pondering governor, his felt hat in his hand. It was not his name, but I will content myself with calling him Jack Jones. You would not have looked at him a second time had you passed him in the street, for he was merely a tall, pallid-faced, pigeon-chested, stoop-shouldered victim, apparently, of consumption, and as mild as could be desired in tone and manner. Governor Houston knew him well, however—knew him so well that he gave him a cordial reception and listened to him to the end as his visitor proceeded to unfold his plans. They were exceedingly simple, and in substance this: "I hate these scoundrels of the convention as much as you do, governor, and you know it, and you know me! I have got eight hundred men of the same stripe up in Burnet county. We have plenty of guns and ammunition, and are more than ready. We can save Texas. Only say the word, governor, and we will clean out the convention in twenty-four hours. What do you say?"

The governor debated with himself as he sat. Suppose he consented. There would be a fight, possibly a bloody massacre. Might not the Secessionists call another convention to meet at Galveston, Houston, somewhere else? In any case, war, civil war in its worst form, would follow. Hat in hand, the messenger waited for his answer. "Thank you, but not quite yet," the governor said. "Go back to Burnet county and hold your men in readiness. When I send for you come, and come quick."

There was no time to be lost. "But these men: how am I to feed them when they come?" the chief magistrate asked of himself.

"About two months before the passage of the Secession ordinance," said the Mr. S—— to whom allusion has already been made, and in reluctant answer to the questioning of the writer, "General Houston, Mrs. Houston and some of their children drove out to my house in the country near Austin, ostensibly upon a friendly visit. General Houston and myself took seats on the porch, while the ladies retired to the parlor. After some of the usual small-talk, the general remarked of the roses then in bloom, 'I see you have a beautiful garden: let us take a walk among them.' We did so, but soon took our seats in the arbor. There, after pledging me to secrecy, he said, 'Although Mr. Lincoln is not yet inaugurated, he has sent a Mr. Lander to me as an agent to assure me of all the aid I need the day he takes office if I can but hold the State until then. General Twiggs,'the governor added,'has agreed to do what he can to help me. I have eight hundred men waiting to come at a word. Volunteers will pour in. I am sure that I can, with the aid of General Twiggs, hold Texas against any force the Confederacy can send. But my men must be supplied with powder and lead, and must be fed. Above all,' added the governor, 'they must have plenty of coffee. Can you undertake the task? I am not going to rob the State treasury, but I pledge you my honor as governor that you shall be paid in the end. Abundant assurances have been made me from Washington that the money will be on hand as soon as Lincoln is inaugurated, and no appropriation will be necessary from the State.'

"The next day," continued Mr. S—— in narrating the facts to me, "I saw the governor in his office. Locking himself with me into an inner apartment, we discussed the whole matter, and I agreed to supply five hundred thousand rations, and as many more as possible, the governor insisting again and again upon there being, whatever else might be lacking, an abundance of coffee. For these rations I was to be paid at the rate of thirty cents each, and transportation. The governor then wrote out the contract, spelling out every word aloud, according to his habit, as he did so. I hastened away with the contract duly signed, and, going down to Houston and Galveston, I purchased two hundred and fifty-seven sacks of Rio coffee to begin with—all I could find—and enough percussion-caps, bacon, rice and flour to meet the emergency impending. Meanwhile, I could not but laugh at what seemed to me the puerile efforts at fortification going on in Galveston;" and my friend paused, as he told me the story yesterday, to unroll and put into my hand the commission given him by the governor as quartermaster-general upon his staff with the rank of colonel.

"In two weeks," continued Mr. S——, "I was back again, but the instant the governor had locked me with him into his inner office he turned to me with rage in his face. 'Sir,' he said to me in a manner and tone of voice which I can never forget, 'Twiggs is a traitor!' Then he sank into a chair, the tears trickling down his heroic countenance, and sobbed like a child. He then clenched his fist and smote the table with what seemed to be a suppressed curse, long and deep. After he had somewhat recovered he repeated to me the message Captain Smith had brought him from Twiggs. It was in such cautious language as to the general's isolation and want of instructions from Washington that I suggested to Governor Houston that possibly he misunderstood General Twiggs. 'No, sir,' the governor exclaimed, again smiting the table with his huge fist, 'there can be no mistake. Twiggs is a traitor! We are to have a fearful civil war;' and he appealed to God for wisdom and protection in a manner which touched me to the heart. In a few weeks thereafter," added Mr. S——, "the ordinance of Secession was passed, and Twiggs surrendered everything to a stageload of politicians and a preconcerted show of a few men improvised as soldiers whom a corporal's guard of loyal men could have easily dispersed if there had been any one to give orders. About a year after this an ex-governor of Texas and an ardent Secessionist whispered to me in the street, 'Take my advice and destroy that contract with General Houston.' How it had become known that there was such a contract is and for ever will be a mystery to me. But the pity of the whole thing was that Governor Houston was not the man he had once been—was too old."

Mr. S—— was perhaps the largest merchant at the capital, but the choicest of his merchandise just then was seven tons of rifle-powder. This was seized ere long by the Confederate authorities. When Mr. S—— protested against it and refused Confederate money in payment, the State treasurer hastened to give him his price for the powder in silver thalers which happened to be rusting in the vaults. Would the Federal authorities have been as complaisant toward a man in their midst known to be a rebel and who refused greenbacks? Surely, as in the hesitation already alluded to of Twiggs and Lee, while the feelings of the leaders were fired their judgment must to the last have remained but half convinced as to the justice, and therefore ultimate success, of the Confederate cause. Gallant as, in most instances, they were, they would have struck more unhesitatingly, more vigorously, more victoriously, had every man been able to put his entire self, brain and conscience as well as heart, into the blow.

It was extremely little of themselves that the Union men of Texas invested in their show of obedience to Secession when that was required of them at last. How well the writer recalls the rueful aspect of a body of these who, to save themselves from worse things, had been organized into a military company! They comprised some of the best citizens of Austin, but Falstaff himself did not have, morally speaking, as forlorn a set of recruits when they formed into dismal lines under the trees of Court-house Square. Every man had his weapons, but they dispensed with music: gladly would they have marched and countermarched without a flag also. But there were ladies ardent in the cause of Secession who, unasked and with malicious haste, constructed a particularly large and gorgeous Confederate flag for them. If it was presented with enthusiasm, it was received by the dolorous warriors in sepulchral silence, and the wheelings hither and thither of the ununiformed heroes thereafter were more funereal, if possible, than before. The one spark of hope in every bosom was that in some way Governor Houston or somebody else might suddenly employ them against the flag, more hateful to them than Fluellen's leek, which they were constrained for the time to flaunt. "Never mind, men," a certain Mr. O—— in their ranks whispered to them as they sadly trudged along—"never you mind. Some day we may prove to be the mucilage around which a Federal army will rally."

It so happened that the writer was about this time at the house of Captain Whitely, a noble-hearted officer of the army who remained true to the Union. It was in San Antonio, and one morning General Twiggs drove up in his carriage and entered the parlor. He was a large and unwieldy man, with an exceedingly red face, and he sat for a time in sombre silence. "Whitely," he said at last, "what can I do? The Southern people hate the North as Comanches do the whites, and the North returns the compliment. Five times have I written to General Scott, and not a word of instructions has he sent me. What can I do?"

Ignorant as the writer was of such matters, he easily conjectured, what Twiggs must have well known, that all despatches to and fro were intercepted. "Ah! what an opportunity!" he thought as he looked at the hesitating man—"what an opportunity for you to act on your own responsibility! You may become, if you do, as one of the immortals."

"You are my superior officer," was the only reply of Captain Whitely, who knew what Twiggs had already determined to do, himself in consequence thereof soon after a prisoner of war.

And so in a few days Governor Houston's fears were realized. Everything was surrendered to the Confederacy. As Twiggs rode through the streets of San Antonio with his disgraced army, many of them weeping as they went, in such triumphal procession as Rome never knew in its worst degradation, it was not for nothing that San Antonio had given a large majority against Secession. An old watchmaker known by everybody shouted as Twiggs went by, "Hurrah for General Hull!" But the people did not recognize the name of the man who in other days had dishonored America by his surrender. They should know what was meant. Mounting upon a goods box, his white hair upon the breeze, and in a voice heard by all, the aged patriot shouted, "Three cheers for Benedict Arnold!" In due time, as we know, the name of Twiggs was struck from the Army List as a coward and traitor, nor did he make a new name for himself in the Confederate ranks. The paymaster did not hand over the military chest to the new authorities. Was there not the half conviction as to Secession in this also? He placed it upon the porch of his house, and let them take it instead. I know not how true it is, but it is said that Davis could not be induced afterward to give employment to this man, whose name has slipped into oblivion from my memory also.

Somehow, there is always a flash of farce even in the agony of the darkest tragedy. When Twiggs surrendered his stores he demanded that somebody should receipt to him for the three millions of United States property which he gave up. Three small politicians stepped eagerly forward and signed the document. But Twiggs was not content. "I must have a more responsible name," he said. And so a Mr. M——, the wealthiest man in San Antonio, was brought in, and, "as a mere matter of form" he was told, he attached his name beneath that of the others. Afterward the possible import of what he had done began to dawn upon Mr. M——. One day, as he walked the troubled streets of San Antonio, he was observed to stop and soliloquize aloud. "A—— has signed that paper," he said to himself. "A——? Yes, he is worth about one thousand dollars. B——, he signed it, and he couldn't raise over three thousand to save his life. C——? Heavens! he is not worth one cent! Three millions of dollars! Good Lord! and I am responsible for it all!" and, slapping his hand upon his forehead, he rushed away to digest the thing in private.

The hurly-burly is hushed into silence now. Good men and bad, gallant but mistaken heroes, and those who faltered not in the fiercest blowing of the terrible storm—the whole period has come and gone. Like the sudden "northers" peculiar to Texas, the tempest broke upon it and passed away, leaving its imperial expanse all the greener and more fruitful, as if enriched by the blood of so many of its noblest sons. But for my part, as I look back into the darkness of those days, the central figure of them all is that of the old governor sitting in his chair in the basement of the Capitol, the tumultuous convention in session overhead, sorrowfully meditating what it were best to do. As he sat a day came when the officer of the gathering up stairs summoned the old man three times to come forward and take the oath of allegiance, as governor, to the Confederacy. I remember as yesterday the call thrice repeated—"Sam Houston! Sam Houston! Sam Houston!" but the man sat silent, immovable, in his chair below, whittling steadily on. The pert lieutenant-governor stepped at last with brisk willingness upon the platform, and was sworn in to an official nothingness in Houston's place. Very early next morning, when the old man went as usual to his office, he found his seat occupied by his smirk successor, and there was nothing for him to do but to abandon his last hope of help from any quarter and retire. Withdrawing to his plantation, he died before the war ended, a Union man still.

William M. Baker.

THE MISTAKES OF TWO PEOPLE.

It seemed an extraordinary chance which brought those two people together upon that dirty little Neapolitan steamer. But then any incident of our human lives, divorced from the chain of cause and effect that has been forging since the world began, would seem an extraordinary chance, just as this did, which really was not extraordinary at all.