Lippincott's Magazine

OF

POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE.

SEPTEMBER, 1877.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1877, by J. B. Lippincott & Co., in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

Transcriber's notes: Minor typos have been corrected. Table of contents has been generated for HTML version.

Contents

[AMONG THE KABYLES.]
[A PADUAN HOLIDAY.]
[A LAW UNTO HERSELF.]
[A WISH.]
[MADAME PATTERSON-BONAPARTE.]
[A SUMMER EVENING'S DREAM.]
[BRANDYWINE, 1777.]
[A GREAT DAY.]
[A VENETIAN OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.]
[HEINE.]
[THE MARQUIS OF LOSSIE.]
[OUR BLACKBIRDS.]
[OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.]
[LITERATURE OF THE DAY.]
[BOOKS RECEIVED.]

AMONG THE KABYLES.

TWO PAPERS.—I.

MOSQUE AND DWELLING OF MARABOUTS, KOUKOU.

Remains of old nationalities are scattered in odd corners all over the earth. Every land, almost, possesses a relic of the kind markedly different from the specimens preserved elsewhere, and peculiar enough to give color to the old theory of its having sprung from the soil. These torn and battered shreds of humanity are usually found lodged among the rocks, the blast of foreign invasion having driven them thither from the plains. The mountains not only give them shelter, but seem to reinfuse new vigor, and thus in many cases enable them to exert more or less of a reflex influence on their conquerors. This influence varies with the character of the country and of the respective races. The invaders, if actuated by civilizing impulses and not mere military ambition, will make themselves useful and necessary to the natives, develop what capacity they have, and absorb them politically. In the opposite case fusion is not effected, and a degree of antagonism is maintained which breaks out on occasion into actual hostilities. Between these two extreme cases we may trace an infinity of examples, modified by endless combinations of circumstances and conditions.

In Great Britain we see the Gael whirled up by successive gusts from Italy, the Elbe and Normandy into the clefts of the Welsh and Scottish mountains. France has driven her aborigines into the peninsula of Brittany and the gorges of the Eastern Pyrenees. The Finns find refuge among the frozen swamps north-east of St. Petersburg. The ethnic museum of mountainous Spain is more rich and varied than that of her Northern neighbors, and Italy has remnants dating back into the night of historic time in Sardinia and the Abruzzi. Japan, ancient as she is, has her Ainos of unrecorded antiquity, and the ranges of Central India are haunted by races still more primitive and unprepossessing in manners and physiognomy. Over the plains of both continents so many successive waves of population have swept that no race can claim more than a comparative antiquity. The traceable pedigree of any given community becomes very short indeed, and the inquirer contents himself with conceding that the Thibetan sept which arrogates descent from Alexander's Greeks may do so with truth—say as much truth as there was in the descent of certain straw-colored Creeks and Choctaws from the followers of De Soto.

Unlike the Thibetans, the Kabyles repudiate classic origin. They are the only people who have made "barbarian" a title of honor, and call themselves Berbers, the modern name having been given them by the Arabs. The dwellers on the Danube, the Seine and the Thames, who once shared with them the designation of "barbarian," were quick to shake it off. European Barbary exists no longer. Its modern inhabitants amuse themselves with exploring the southern shore of the Mediterranean, and in ascertaining whether their whilom fellow-provincials of that coast are still determined to be barbarous in fact as in name. The Germans took their turn at an attempt of this character in the days of Genseric, the Vandal name and nation having wound up its career in Africa, sinking into the sands of that inhospitable continent irrecoverably, unless we accept the Kabyles as the representatives of their blood. Forty years ago another Northern race entered upon the task, the misrule of the Arab and the Turk having apparently prepared the way for a new invasion. The French pined for an opportunity of testing once more their genius for colonization, and they selected this time, in place of a wild tract in America or Oceanica, a region opposite their own shores cultivated and densely peopled when Gaul was savage, and still occupied by inhabitants as proud and turbulent as those who proposed to reclaim and reconstruct them. Kabylia proper is a part of the Algerine territory but a few hours distant from the walls of Algiers, of the size of an average French department, and having a population of one hundred and seventy-five to the square mile—a ratio identical with that of France. But the new province, like its new mother—or step-mother—country, had also its outliers of territory and people. The Kabyles overflow east, west and south. They nearly equal the Arabs of Algeria in numbers, the Mountain Kabyles being estimated at five hundred and eighty thousand, and those of the plain at three hundred and seventy-nine thousand, while the Arabs count in all one million three hundred and eighty-five thousand. These figures measure the extent to which the Oriental immigration has supplanted the natives of Romano-Gothic Numidian origin. Its effect in other respects has hardly been in a like proportion. It has imposed the Mohammedan religion in a modified form, strangely mixed with relics of older superstitions. In language it has wrought much less of a change, though more than can be traced to either the Vandals or the Romans. In physique and manners the difference between Arab and Kabyle remains sharply drawn. The Arabs are gaunt and indolent dwellers in tents, as they were in the days of Job, the spear their only implement; while the Kabyles herd in towns, weave, forge and plough. Red beards, light eyes, broad and round skulls and massive features are not unfrequent among the Kabyle men, and in many of the villages the children are all blondes, as are to a less degree the women.

OIL-WORKS.

In nothing, perhaps, is the line more strongly drawn between the two races than in the treatment of their females. The Asiatic seclusion of women is unknown among the Kabyles. There are no harems and no veils. If, in return, the Kabyle women are subjected to more of such unfeminine employments as harvesting and turning the wheels of olive-mills, that does not lessen the assimilation to Western usage, but rather increases the resemblance between the life of the fair Africans and that of their sisters among the peasantry of Europe. Carrying water, so characteristic a female office in the East, as the artists are constantly reminding us, is none the less so among the Kabyles. But it becomes a more serious matter when the wells or streams are three or four hundred feet lower than the site of the dwelling to be supplied. In such cases donkeys come to the aid of their mistresses, at some sacrifice of the picturesque, but with great advantage to comfort.

A water-supply thus obtained must be, it is obvious, inadequate to the demands of scrupulous cleanliness. Accordingly, the desert wanderer has the advantage in this respect of the Kabyles, crowded into a village perched on the summit of a rock and traversed only by pathways cut, as it were, through solid blocks of houses. These abodes are of but one story, and generally of one room. Bipeds and quadrupeds live together, eating and sleeping on the same earthen floor. There are no chimneys and no windows. Cutaneous and ophthalmic affections are of course common, and typhus fever now and then redresses the balance in Malthusian fashion by reducing the crowd. Death is the great sanitary regulator or superintendent of hygiene. His functions in this regard are but slightly, if at all, interfered with by the authorities of the village.

The head of the municipality is an officer called an amin: we might style him the mayor. He is chosen by popular suffrage from each of the family or patriarchal groups or clans composing the community in turn. He is guided in his administration by a code of written laws bearing the name of khanoun or canon, established from time immemorial. He is checked also by a city council chosen from among the notables, and is required to consult it before taking any executive or judicial step. The secretary of the council, elected by it, bears the title of chodja. He is generally an old codger, for the double reason that clerks usually do grow old in harness, and that writing is not a universal accomplishment among the Kabyles and competition for the office is not great. He keeps the journal of the municipality, and conducts all its correspondence with other towns and with the French authorities. He enjoys a salary, paid in kind with figs, olives, etc. In this pleasant feature of his post he seems to be distinguished from his associate functionaries. We do not find that they receive any pay, unless in the indirect shape of bribes and perquisites—a mode of compensation as well understood in the East as in the West.

Moslem influence shows itself in the close association of Church and State. The mosque of each town has its treasury, fed by the fines imposed on transgressors by the municipal council and by dues from the registration of marriages, births and deaths. The sacred building itself serves another purpose still more alien to its religious character. The hustings, even among this simple and primitive people, are not scenes of unbroken tranquillity. There are always two parties in the village, as with us; but, as fortunately is not the in the United States, these parties have casehardened into hereditary factions, always ready to air their ancestral feuds at the polls. Bullets come to the aid of ballots. To use the local expression, "The speaking is done with powder." The rude fire-lock of the country, with its absurdly long barrel and wheel-lock, answers well enough at short range, and proves highly influential in bringing about a speedy decision without the assistance of returning boards and electoral commissions. The villages have rarely more than two or three thousand souls, and cover but a few acres. The dispute cannot last long, and contested elections are soon settled. The mosque is one story higher than the other buildings, having a second floor. It is also on more elevated ground. These attractions cause the sanctuary to fill up rapidly in time of trouble. The faithful who get first to church have a marked advantage over their fellow-parishioners.

A KABYLE WAKE.

The administration of the tribe comes directly under French control. It is committed to a chief who is not allowed to interfere with the local affairs of the villages composing the tribe. But pressure in the direction of centralization is gradually being employed by the French, in accordance with the political notions and genius of that nation. It needs, however, to be used with extreme caution, as warning catastrophes still occur to prove. The solemn engagement made when the Kabyles capitulated in 1857, to rigidly respect their public customs and their communal elections, will enforce itself upon the more or less sincere attention of the invaders as long as they possess the country. The stormy clanhood that insists on the luxury of at least an annual fight among neighbors is often the last hold of national independence.

THE POLLS: MODEL VOTERS.

France is not the first suzerain who has found it hard to rule, and indispensable to sedulously humor, these restless indigenes. They were quite as troublesome to the Turks. The dey of Algiers was but a nominal branch of the home house at Constantinople. Thanks to his Kabyle constituents, he did business pretty much on his own account and in his own way. Could the sultan have been held responsible for the piracies of his nominal vassal, they would have been put an end to a century sooner. He could not control the dey because the dey could not control the Kabyles. At the village of Tiza-Terga is shown—or was a year or two ago—a curious field-piece of hexagonal form abandoned by the Turks in the seventeenth century after an unsuccessful attack on the Kabyle stronghold of Koukou. When the dey yielded to the French he conveyed what he was unable to deliver, and the conquest of the country has been going on ever since. This process of subjugation is anything but steady. The years of tranquillity outnumber those of disturbance, and that disproportion, already very great, may be said to be increasing. In the long intervals of peace everything goes on smoothly. The natives busy themselves in their fields and their simple workshops, content with the occasional effervescence of a town-quarrel. The exports of the province mount up rapidly. France felicitates herself on the brilliant success of her experiment, sends over small groups of immigrants and occupies herself with projects of vast prospective value. Paper railways permeate the gorges of the Djurjura Mountains, and paper canals lead the waters of the Mediterranean into the desert basin beyond. She repairs some of the Roman aqueducts, builds wooden bridges, keeps at bay the purely predatory tribes of the interior, and protects industry as certainly it never was protected under the Turks. She manifests a sincere wish to make the tri-color a blessing to Africa, and with time and no disaster at home bids fair to succeed.

KABYLE ARMORERS AT WORK.

Were she to be driven out to-day, the traces of her beneficent sway would be more marked than those left by her predecessors, or by their predecessors the Vandals. They could not possibly be less so. The mission of both these was fruitful chiefly of disorder and devastation. Compared with them, the natives whom they ruled against incessant protest were the representatives of civilization. The Arabs built a few forts on the beach to shelter piracy. What the Vandals left were burnt and overthrown walls, the memory of some religious riots, and a small library of pious polemics. Between them, they held the country for fifteen centuries: the Romans had it for four. All the moles and artificial forts, numerous and often massive; all the aqueducts, some of them spanning ravines three hundred feet deep, and others stretching for many leagues; all the cities, tombs and temples, of which the remains are scattered from the sea to the peaks,—everything, in fact, which shows that this was once a domain of art and intellect and culture, is Roman. Roman sepulchres look down upon the central French cantonment; Roman coins and gems are thrown out by the zouave, who works with the pick in one hand and the rifle in the other; and the squared stones and round columns of Roman temples are built into the huts of the people and the forts of their present rulers.

This superiority of the ancient methods of colonization, as attested by results, cannot be explained by any advantage in the arts of war comparable to that now enjoyed by the invading nation. Gunpowder did not exist to cast the balance. The success attained must be ascribed to a deeper knowledge of the arts of peace, and especially those of government. Surely the nineteenth century ought to be able to discover the secret.

Their suspicions once allayed, and apprehensions of purposes of mere military encroachment and new oppression removed, the Kabyles are very ready to forward the construction of works of public utility, and respond with alacrity to calls for labor. The mountain-streams, nearly dry for great part of the year, are at times swelled by destructive floods which carry down great boulders and trunks of trees. For want of bridges, access to the open-air markets which are held at places and periods fixed by long usage is thus liable to be prevented.

One of the most largely attended of these markets is held on the right bank of the small river Djemaa at a point about midway between Fort National on the north and the summit of the Djurjura on the south, three or four leagues from either. The crowd of buyers and sellers, most of them belonging to both classes, reaches as many as four thousand. The freshets of the Djemaa becoming yearly more of an impediment to travel, the tribe of the Beni-Menguellet, upon whose territory the fair is held, became fearful of the loss of its commercial advantages, which were largely dependent on the visits of the tribes on the left bank. They consequently proposed the building of a bridge, and offered to furnish men and materials to be used under French direction. A section of sappers commanded by a lieutenant soon finished the work with the aid promised. The Kabyles showed great skill in the handling of their rude tools. With their small axes they felled large trees so rapidly as to astonish the French. The felling, however, was a minor part of the task. The heavy beams had to be carried from the bottom of the steep ravine up goat-paths to the level of the bridge. This was done in the old Egyptian way, by sheer multiplication of hands, with no aid from the mechanical forces. A number of men took hold of each beam and of hand-spikes passed under it where the track was wide enough, and others drew by ropes. The slow and solemn procession, enlivening its way with equally solemn chants in the deepest of gutturals, climbed the precipice on the slow but sure principle. The bridge was a success, the threatened diversion of trade escaped, and Beni-Menguellet stock stood at a higher quotation than ever. A squad of sappers, not a mouthful in a military sense for the hundreds of Kabyles they supervised, had done more to win the loyalty of the natives than a brigade of beaux sabreurs or cave-smokers could have accomplished. The hammer rather than the musket is the weapon of subjugation.

FORT NATIONAL.

ROMAN TOMB, NEAR FORT NATIONAL.

At these markets Kabylia sits to the foreigner for her picture. How she lives, what she produces and what she wants is plainly and picturesquely stated. The inevitable Jew, in beard and gaberdine, brings from the city his pack of trinkets and gay stuff, with bales of heavier tissues for the excessively simple work-day robes of the Kabyle. The rich plain of Oued Sahel sends its wheat and barley to exchange for the products of the hill-loving olive-orchard and fig-plantation. The Beni-Janni, chiefs of the metal-workers, sit surrounded by enticing rows of swords, daggers, guns, armlets, leglets, silver and copper-gilt head-dresses and brooches. Vases in clay, ornamental and plain in every gradation, are the specialty of the Beni-Aissi. The Beni-bou-Yousef are the weavers, famous for many-colored haïks and burnouses, leaving to the Beni-Abbes a repute for similar garments of a particular striped fabric. Horses of the Barb type, small but elegant in figure, come from all quarters; but mules, which are offered in considerable number, are something of a monopoly with the Beni-Ouassif, the Kentuckians of Kabylia. Women, indifferent as to tribe, and indifferent also, it is sad to state, in appearance, being mostly over age, spread stores of butter, honey, eggs, fruit, lean poultry and herbs. The young ladies, there as in other parts of the world, come not to sell, but to shop. Things of Paris are not wanting to encourage this propensity, which grows by what it feeds on, and promotes the civilization of the country by the creation of artificial wants.

AN IMPROVISED GOBLET.

Brushing through dewy thickets of lentisk and rose-bay, or drawn sharp against the vivid African sky on the summit of a bare spur, groups of mountaineers with their wares and their flocks wend their way at dawn to the market. It has the air of a unanimous turn-out of the family, all who can walk or be carried, with dogs, goats, sheep, asses and cattle, yielding to the common attraction. The Kabyles, unlike the Arabs, do not smoke, making up for that privation by a much greater consumption of meat. The marketers of the Beni-Menguellet will swallow for breakfast and dinner two score oxen and twice as many sheep and goats. The butchering is done on the spot, or rather hard by, usually by negroes who make it their profession, and journey from fair to fair with the outfit of knives and steel and a reed flute to beguile the way with genuine African melodies. The Kabyles have no higher use for the negro, the post of seraglio-guard assigned him among wealthier and more orthodox Moslems being a sinecure with them.

When we remember that these large commercial reunions are held as often as each week, we are prepared to recognize a degree of movement and energy sufficient of itself to separate sharply the Kabyles from their Asiatic coreligionists. Repose is not their chief luxury. The charms of kief are less irresistible than to the Arab or the Turk. The mere labor, indeed, of reaching their rock-built homes exacts considerable bodily exertion. Compared with a daily climb of some hundreds of feet when the ploughman homeward takes his weary way, the toil of the harvest-field below looks like recreation. A life which keeps the blood circulating so rapidly cannot fail to develop a hardy race full of the pride born of conscious strength, and not disposed to yield readily to lords who exhaust their physical powers in scaling their eyries. Long training has given the natives something of the agility of the monkeys with which they share the crags. Kabyle sharpshooters obstructed the completion of French hill-forts by ascending the parapet at night and waking the garrison and the workmen with a storm of balls. The pursuit of them, when driven back, was unavailing. The soldiers, encumbered with clothing and accoutrements and shod with stiff leather, could hold no headway with the Kabyle clad only in a tunic and grasping the cliffs with four hands like the monkeys. Finally, dogs were imported, regularly brigaded and regularly credited at the commissariat. Dogs are keen distinguishers of persons and acute ethnologists. These traits, however, were possessed alike by the African curs, which outnumbered the quadruped Gauls and fully sympathized with the prejudices of their dusky proprietors. This difficulty was fatal to the canine crusade. The infidel dogs were too many for the Christians, and were soon able to redevote themselves to older enemies, the jackals and hyænas.

A preference for peaceful industry may be said to have always prevailed among the Kabyles when left to themselves. The chronic passion for fighting was rather localized: particular villages were affected by it. That of Taka, for instance, commandingly posted on a height thirty-five hundred feet above the level of the sea, has always been the terror of its neighbors. Whatever the flag or faith nominally in the ascendant, Taka took her place in the opposition and invited all Adullamites to make their home within her gates. Misdirected energy like this will, under a strong, patient and progressive government, be directed into more useful channels. The most turbulent will become sensible of the necessity of eating. The larder of crags and caves is necessarily meagre and precarious. The braves must go to market. For success at that place of popular resort they must carry something to sell in order to be able to buy, and they must behave themselves in 'change hours. On the latter point the French and the peaceably disposed natives insist with increasing unanimity. They will have to take a lesson from the vultures which stoop with them from the hills. These know market-day as well as the almanac or the negro butcher. Punctual to a minute, they perch at a respectful distance from the centre of traffic, frame the dusky crowd with a circle of feathered sentinels in uniform of light gray, and calmly await the distribution of such shreds of eatables as even the Kabyle cannot use. It is impossible to fancy a gentleman who restricts himself to the occupation of fighting, buying from those at whose expense he pursues it his weekly supply of provisions, and marching home with his diss, or strings of chops and cutlets, festooned from his spear or garlanded around his gallant brow.

Such is the drift of the times. Mankind is banded against brigandage. Never was an ancient and honorable profession so sadly under the weather everywhere. When it flares up into momentary life in Sicily or Attica the newspapers seize hold of the event, a reporter is promptly on the spot, and the bandit-chief is interviewed as coolly as though he had merely shot his wife, bought a legislature or effected a triumphant corner in mess pork. Such depressing influences cannot but wear down the noblest calling. Sicily is tamed, and Circassia, the Asiatic Kabylia, nearly so. A recent French tourist in Algeria was much struck with certain resemblances between the two mountain-races separated by the length of the Mediterranean and the Euxine. At the Kabyle rock-village of Tighil-boukbair the town band turned out to receive him. It consisted of a flute and two tambourines. Both the instruments and the airs appeared to him identical with those to which he had listened in the gorges of frosty Caucasus. At Tiflis he had "assisted" at a concert almost the duplicate of the African entertainment. To make the resemblance perfect, it would have sufficed, he says, to strip the Caucasians to a single undergarment.

The same seeker of the picturesque describes a wayside scene characteristic alike of landscape, dress and manners. What can be more sensational than a draught of spring-water, under the shadow of a great rock in a weary land, from the hollowed palm of a Kabyle girl surrounded by her juniors arrayed in a costume that can neither be described nor expressed, for the simple reason that it does not exist? A group like this carries us back to within easy hail of the primal simplicity of Eden. And a period little later than that of Adam and Eve is suggested by the experience of the same traveller at his halt a few hours later. As Abraham, according to the custom of his day, was ready for the three angels with a substantial lunch, so the official Frenchman is the beneficiary of a regulation which entitles him to an abundant diffa, or provender for man, horse and attendants, supplied by the nearest village. The Gaul is not always an angel, but his appetite is none the worse for that. Butter does not usually appear in the bill of fare, but its absence is amply atoned for by couscoussou, or African vermicelli, mutton, boiled fowls, honey and sour milk. This repast is served upon flat shallow dishes of wood or earthenware a foot and a half in diameter, the universal platter of Kabylia, and must be a highly acceptable surprise in the desert. Wine is not a part of the required ration, the native grapes, though delicious when eaten, not performing well in the press and vat. Efforts are in progress to remedy this defect and make Algeria a wine-exporting country, but the summer heat is probably too great, and the northern edge of the vine-zone will doubtless maintain its supremacy over the southern, and make the Loire, the Rhine and the Middle Danube lords of the vintage for all time. Yet there is no more pacifying industry than wine-making, whatever may be said of wine-drinking; and the French anxiety to turn the Kabylian caves into wine-vaults is sensible and laudable.

Edward C. Bruce.

A PADUAN HOLIDAY.

On the morning of Sant' Antonio's Day we strolled through the streets of Padua, side by side with the country-folk who had come from miles around to offer up their prayers at the shrine of the saint. Some rode jaded mules or were packed close in great market-wagons. Others trudged on foot, with their dinners tied up in blue cotton handkerchiefs. There were bronzed men in homespun, who pushed steadily on, aiding themselves with mighty umbrellas; dark-eyed girls, with bright kerchiefs knotted about their heads or carnations in their glossy braids; smart young contadini, with their hats tied afresh with ribbons and their long blue hose darned anew. The murmurs of the crowd, loud and merry and full of bursts of laughter, softened into a solemn whisper as the multitude pressed onward to the broad piazza where the sanctuary of Sant' Antonio stands.

One by one the people lifted the leathern curtain of the church-door. The men doffed their hats, the women told their beads. An awed hush fell upon those simple peasants as they gazed up at the vastness of the arches. The world of the winepress and the silk-weaving and the soup-pot vanished from their hearts, and in its place came the illimitable calm which holds them bowed for hours against the altar-steps. But now they press on toward the shrine of the saint. The choir bursts into a triumphant shout that seems to come from the throats of the bronze angels about the altar. The chancel is a blaze of light, against which stand two great dark bronze candelabra like sentinels of the tabernacle. The steps before Sant' Antonio's shrine are half buried under the great white lilies that bear his name, and the tall dark angels that keep guard about his tomb bear sceptres of fresh lilies. There is no need of the swinging silver censers. Myrrh and frankincense rise, sweet and strong, from the depths of the snowy chalices. The children kneeling about the altar bear stalks of the lilies like tall waxen tapers, that wave to and fro over the surging heads of the multitude. There are carved pillars around the shrine brought from Byzantium, and great white marble heads of saints and holy men stand out in relief from the walls. Silver lamps, beautiful with shining chains and the winged heads of cherubim, hang from the low vault, warming all the pale figures into life with the crimson glow of the flame within.

A little bell tinkles. There is a murmur of voices and a rustle of garments throughout the church. The golden lights of the altar die away, one by one. The people rise from their prayers with the wide-eyed, unseeing gaze of those who have been wandering in a far land. They have crossed the sea with the blessed Antonio; they have followed him into the presence of the terrible Ezzelin, the feudal enemy of Padua; they have heard him command the tyrant to set his captives free; they have accompanied the saint to his hermitage among the purple olive-hills about the city; they have struggled and suffered and died with him, and have rejoiced at last in his apotheosis and canonization. And then, the war being over, the race of Ezzelin expelled, and the lords of the soil, the Carraras, strong in power, they see how the holy body is brought into the town to protect it for ever, and a fair temple is built above its resting-place to prove the people's gratitude to the power that set them free. They press about the marble sarcophagus that holds his poor skeleton, and stoop and kiss the clammy surface with reverent looks, or take the benediction from the hand of some neighbor who stands nearer the shrine, and utter a petition for the coming year.

See that high-bred young girl in her simple black dress, with her nurse by her side, and her dark eyes bright and soft under their long lashes. It is some sweet Bianca, who has left her home to escape sister Katharine's taunts and make Heaven knows what blushing vow at the shrine of the kind saint. See how her soft lips caress the feet of the bronze angel with the lilies in his hand. Do you mark those bold, black, handsome eyes devouring her face from across the crowd of low-statured peasants? It is some wild youth from the university, you say? Ay, one Lucentio of Pisa, a noble gentleman, whose father has sent him to Padua to study those parts of philosophy that treat of happiness. Bianca knows not how near her fate lies—knows not that to-morrow the new master of music and languages will present himself at her father's door and try his skill in translation, and carry off the sweet prize under the very beards of the reverend wooers of Padua.

CHURCH OF SANT' ANTONIO.

Oh horror! there comes sister Katharine! Blessed Virgin, help us to escape before she sees us, or there will be no peace in the house for a week. Come, nurse! quick! And Bianca flutters off in affright, and is lost in the crowd.

There she comes, bonny Kate—a small, slight consequential person, dressed in a robe of that brilliant green of the northern Italian painters. She wants no nurse—not she! She would go from Padua to the farthest country on Fra Paolo's map on the strength of her biting tongue and her snapping green eyes. "Make way," she orders, "you low, vile brutes!" and the peasants draw back and look askance at her, and the women mutter under their breath, and the girls laugh a low laugh. See her kiss her hand and lay it on the marble. She will not touch her lips to it for fear of contamination. She hurls an angry oath at the market-woman standing near with her hens tied up in her kerchief, because she crowds so close that the hungry birds peck at the silver galloon of her sleeve. Ay, pretty Kate, you are arrogant now. But wait a little. Here comes Petruchio, a most unwholesome sight for a summer's day. Get thee gone in haste, fair Kate!

See how he stalks on through the crowd, with his riding-whip in his hand, now cutting good-humoredly at a small boy's legs, now playfully throttling a ruddy peasant-girl with the long lash. His clothes are torn and muddy. He wears a new hat and an old jerkin, and a pair of old breeches, thrice turned. He has ridden into town on the sorriest nag ever bred on the plains of Lombardy. See him stride up to the shrine of Sant' Antonio. Do you think he will kiss that filthy stone, with the impress of so many foul mouths upon it? He cuts at it with his whip until the people start back in affright and the wind blows half the lamps out, and the priest would gladly launch a malediction at his head, but that he knows his man, for Petruchio's pranks with the clergy are the talk of all Padua.

He is the delight of the university lads, this mad fellow from Verona. See how they crowd about him as he stalks down the nave, and crave a look or a salute from their bully hero! They lay bets in lecture-hours as to whether he will succeed in taming that young shrew, Baptista's daughter.

Be sure the Moorish prince and he of Arragon stopped with their trains to ask the saint's protection when they went to woo fair Portia. And the lady herself, after that good deed done in Venice, when she went praying about at holy crosses, craved the saint's blessing on her lord, Bassanio. He too, I wager, meditated here on his lady and his friend. They crowd, a shadowy multitude, about the gleaming sepulchre under the crimson glow of the silver lamps.

We wandered on, past the carved chapel-gates, the wrought bronze lamps, the incense-clouds and the silver-white lilies, out into the tomb-filled cloisters. There they lie, cheek by jowl—old professors from the university in cap and gown, high up under the arches; old warriors in armor, with their griffins and lions at their feet, and slaves bearing scrolls with their names and exploits registered thereon. Old councillors and syndics in robe and ruff, noble women in veil and coif, lie side by side with some brave young heart that shed its life's blood for united Italy.

PADUAN CAFFÉ.

Old dragons and monsters and wide-mouthed cherubim leer down from the gray sepulchres. From under the pointed arches, blossoming with palm-leaves and sweet stone child-faces, young painted angels, soft-eyed, long-haired, in pink and blue robes, smile down from the gold background, with emblems of resurrection in their hands, like flowers springing from the dust beneath. Here and there, high up under the cornice of some old Gothic tomb, is a round-eyed frescoed Madonna watching the slumbers of an old knight whose bed-curtain is upheld by long-armed saints. Pompous and grim and fantastic and sullen by turns, these tombs would make the heart of the stranger ache with their mockery, but that the living sunlight streams athwart the hard stone faces and the monster heads, and in the quadrangle of the cloister the lilies are standing like white-robed heavenly hosts, and a well upheld by angels rises up from the rank meadow-space. The purple clover runs riot among the grass. There is humming of bees about the golden lily-hearts, and a red butterfly loses its way now and then among the graves.

There is the rustle of ghostly garments in the silent air—the fall of shadowy feet upon the grave-lined pavements. A white-robed, shining multitude of philosophers and sages is for ever pacing up and down the sunny gallery discoursing of great and high things, like the blessed in the Paradise of Dante. A goodly company were they who walked there of old. Here came Giotto, pale-browed and thoughtful, discoursing with his friend, old Pietro di Abano, wizard, astrologer and learned physician, of the designs he was to give him for the frescoing of the new Palace of Reason that the city was erecting. With them, perchance, walked the great Tuscan, for he knew and loved them both, and all three, the seer, the poet and the painter, brooded over the inner forces of Nature and bared their souls to revelation. Hither came Petrarch, worn with the pomp of courts, yet flushed with modest pride at the new clerical dignity conferred upon him by his friend the Carrara, looking back upon his past life with philosophic calm, bidding no man judge the day till the evening be past, yet now and again feeling the old waves of passion surge through his heart, breathing a prayer for the repose of his dead love and a sigh for those sweet, far-off days of his youth. Here Tasso, the beautiful young dreamer, escaping from the dull round of the university, threw himself down in the clover beside the angels of the well, and saw fair white women with golden hair wreathing their arms about him, while the bees and the butterflies laughed aloud and cried, "Poor fool! he does not know they are only lilies." And Galileo, teaching the while the dull youth of the school, came to gather strength in the thought of the great finality that was to lay him low beyond the reach of the Inquisition, and yet lift him far above all human grandeur to mate with the stars that had been his comfort through long years of pain. Great Paolo Sarpi, when he came down from Venice in his monk's dress to discourse with the learned men of Padua, wandered here with his mind intent on the mighty problems of the universe, all unthinking of the assassin's knife that was to ease the jealousy of the Roman cardinals. Here wandered the apprentice-boy Mantegna, poor and humble, stealing timidly in behind the furred gowns and the gilded chains to feast his poor little artist-soul upon the frightened young Madonnas and wide-eyed angels that look out timidly from the arches of the sepulchres. What grand old phantoms glide on by the side of the laughing student-lads, and the old market-women in red kerchiefs who tell their beads in corners, and the young girls who gather the long stalks of seed-grass from the quadrangle and whisper to them timid questions concerning their absent lovers!

On the great square in front of the church were booths filled with bright flowers and early fruit and cheap sweetmeats, at which the peasants were haggling and chaffering and filling their blue handkerchiefs. The saints and prophets raised their hands in blessing from the blossoming spires. Over the way, in the inn of the "Two White Crosses," the farmers were dining. The laughter floated out through the open windows, and a man appeared at the door and scattered cherries to the crowd. By the side of the church was a great sepulchre, horrible with demon-heads and pictures of the sinners in Purgatory. Above the heads of the crowd, high on a pedestal, sat a bronze warrior on a fiery charger. It is old Gattamelata, the condottiere of the Venetian forces in the long wars with Padua. His body lies within the church, and his effigy is the work of one Donatello, famous in Tuscan art.

We followed the crowd along the white-walled street to the great market-square the people call the Prato della Valle. In the middle was a circular space of meadow, with trees above it, surrounded by a moat, above which stand life-size statues of warriors and poets and nobles and philosophers, blackened with the damp and mould of centuries, the folds of their gowns battered and grass-grown, their noses missing, their eyes put out by stones in the well-nerved hands of riotous youth, their swords and sceptres broken short, their pointed beards snapped off into bluntness. All around the great piazza are arches with caffès and shops under them. Off at one end rises the massive front of Santa Giustina.

The broad paved space between the arcades and the moat of the statues was the scene of a horse-fair. The most miserable animals that the imagination can conjure up, all the gaunt, ghostly steeds that graze in the pastures of legend and fable, were gathered there, neighing and pawing as impatiently as their half-starved spirits would allow. Be sure Petruchio bought his famous steed at the horse-fair of Padua, and that he tried the beast's speed, as these peasants do, by driving him round and round the statues, raising a cloud of white dust and scattering crowds of girls and children, who screamed with terror and prayed that the curse of Sant' Antonio might ever follow him.

Suddenly, a sound as of kettledrums and cymbals and squeaking violins rose above the neighing and braying of the fair. In front of Santa Giustina were a circus and a wild-beast show and a crowd of lesser jugglers and charlatans. Outside the circus-booth, high up on a platform, stood the clowns in their dingy fleshings and faded scarlet trunks. They blew furiously on great brass trumpets until their cheeks were purple and nigh to bursting under all the ghastly chalk. There were ballerine in draggled pink tarletan petticoats and low white bodices that made their bony necks and brawny arms still browner by contrast. They had honest, unpainted faces, and wore their hair screwed up tightly on the tops of their heads. They bore traces of exposure to wind and rain. Their eyes had a kind of wistful look, as though they were tired of all this noise and foolery, and wished themselves back again on the old olive-farms with their toiling mothers. There was something in their dogged mouths and the resolute manner in which they thumped the big drums and clashed the great brass cymbals that told of the threshing of grain and the treading of the winepress. There were gorgeous matrons in threadbare velvet and tattered lace head-dresses who cast glances of sweetness upon the unresponsive crowd, and cheered on the panting clowns to cry out at the top of their poor strained lungs, "Avanti, signori! avanti!" Small lithe children clothed in pink tights, with jewelled crowns on their heads, darted in and out among the curtains of the tent, and gazed with a royal air upon the open-eyed, wondering little peasants, rough-shod and clothed in homespun, who stood and worshipped them.

Not far from the circus, under a wooden tent, a half score of monsters were whirling round and round in mad rivalry—fishes with enormous mouths and mighty fins, like the terrible "Orco" of Ariosto; wild steeds whose legs blossomed out into acanthus-leaves, like the old grotesques that lurk under the ferns about the basins of the village fountains; great mysterious birds, with big eyes, and golden chains about their necks; beasts with the heads of cats and the bodies of dogs, as monstrous and fantastic a crew, full of high-colored, confused images, as ever rioted in the high-strung brain of some old cinque-cento poet. Each of these terrible monsters had its rider—some little golden-curled child, who clung about the neck of a cat-headed dolphin and shrieked with delight at the danger. Some pale sewing-girl, with a turret of powdered hair above her soft face and her black shawl thrown like a habit around her, sat erect on her white palfrey, and for a moment held herself the equal of the great ladies of other times whose faces looked down upon her from the corridors of the palaces to which she went to carry home her work, and haunted her as she sat alone in her little chamber high up among the red roofs. Some straight-limbed peasant-boy, with a clear-cut face and a red flower in his hat, bestriding the black charger with fiery nostrils, felt his heart swell with noble longing at some dim memory of the glorious deeds of the old warriors of Padua that his grandmother had related to him many a winter's night when the chestnuts were roasting on the hearth and the rain was rustling through the dead vine-stalks. To him every note of the cracked trumpet was full of intoxication: it meant war and love and glory and heroic deeds.

There are brown-faced women in tarnished spangles tumbling on squares of carpet, with their children crouching patiently on the blue handkerchiefs that contain the family wardrobe, waiting for their dinner to be earned. They are assisted by white curly poodles, with pink shaven legs, solemn faces and long ears, which make them look like old Paduan marchesi in powdered wigs. They make the circuit of the carpet on their hind legs, and jump through hoops, and pass the hat among the bystanders, and watch the sleeping babies, and carry the weight of the whole family upon their meditative shoulders.

There are tame magpies that tell the peasant-girls' fortunes by choosing printed slips of paper from a box, and others that predict the winning numbers of next week's lottery. Now and then an old magician passes who has horse-hair curls reaching to his waist, a green shade over his eyes, and carries slung about his neck a board on which sits a drugged cock or a great black cat. He consults his familiar for answers to the questions that are put to him. The peasants form groups about the charlatans and tumblers and ring-throwers, and the sunlight streams over the happy, careless crowd with a blessing. How many of them know that where they stand the early Christians met their death with psalms upon their lips and the palm of martyrdom in their hands?

There was one among those early martyrs, a beautiful young maiden, named Giustina, whose life and death were full of such heroic loveliness that in later times a mighty church was raised in her honor near the spot of the sacrifice. The bones of all her fellow-martyrs were collected and buried in a vault within the edifice. It is a great gray pile, cold and solemn and austere, that rises dark behind the brilliant groups of the fair. On either side of the great staircase crouches a stone monster, some mysterious symbol of the early faith. Tradition gives them the names of the paladins Roland and Oliver. The one clasps the figure of a crusader between its mighty paws—the other, some mystical four-footed creature. They look down upon the merry crowds with solemn unwinking gaze, large-eyed and mysterious. They seem to put the old riddle of the Sphinx to the traveller who pauses by their side to watch the surging waves of human life that beat against the broad stairway of the church. The seal of the centuries is on their broad brows. They have looked down upon battle and tournament, upon success and defeat, upon life and death.

The history of the Prato is a stirring Italian epic, some heroic Orlando or Gerusalemme, with undertones of mirth and satire. There the Paduans held their masques and holiday-shows; there rose the mighty castle that was stormed on a feast-day by armed men with missiles of oranges and pomegranates; there stalked Donatello's mighty wooden horse, towering high above the crowd in the Carnival cavalcades; there, after Ezzelin the Terrible had for years enriched the ground with Paduan blood and hung the Paduan bodies high on gibbets, the freed and happy people celebrated the expulsion of the tyrant by instituting the famous horse-races, in which the prizes were scarlet cloth and gloves and a sparrow-hawk. Hither came Charlemagne and Barbarossa to witness the games held in their honor. Fairs and shows and Carnival riot have been the lot of the Prato from the days when the nuns of Santa Giustina sold it to the town, until now when the Paduan ladies drive around the weatherbeaten statues of a Sunday with mighty towers of hair on their heads and enormous fans screening their faces. But there were times when the Prato echoed with the noise of battle. Blood flowed through the moat about the statues swifter than the sluggish waters of to-day. What stern, mighty figures have that Prato for their background! Alaric the Goth, Attila, Ezzelin, all fought with the rebellious Paduans on those gray stones. All the Venetian generals and the princes of old Verona and the terrible Visconti of Milan—all have left the traces of their iron tread upon the patch of meadow where the pink daisies open their eyes, and the red clover calls to the bees from the base of the dingy statues, and the boys lie on the grass and play at morra or sit for hours with their bare brown legs hanging over the moat fishing for the infant minnows. What wonder that the great square echoes with battle-cries and the clash of steel! There is another echo, lower and more feeble, but yet more ominous, for it is the echo of the plague-bell. I can hear it above all the noises of battle and tournament and Carnival mirth that haunt the Prato. For the old chronicles tell us how in the war with Venice the starving, the plague-stricken, the dying lay in heaps upon the flower-starred turf of the Prato. At midnight the death-cart made its round about the square, the muffled tread of the horses' hoofs mingling with the moaning of the sick and the wailing of the wind through the ghostly trees above the statues. The darkness was broken but by the light of a lantern fastened to the shafts of the cart, which threw the white-faces into ghastly relief. Black-robed figures, silent and prayerful, passed in and out among the stricken groups.

SANTA GIUSTINA.

Of all the tragic episodes connected with the Prato, there is none that contains such elements of warm vital interest or extorts from us such sorrowful sympathy as the history of Francesco, the last of the Carraras. The old Italian chronicles are written with such sublime and pathetic simplicity that human life after centuries rises up before us with all its warm joys and sorrows, delights and agonies. We see him first, this gallant Francesco, as a youth returning home in triumph from a victory over the Scaligeri of Verona, welcomed by his old father, the lord of Padua, there on the Prato, amidst the rejoicings of the people. Then we see how, when Padua had fallen into the hands of the Visconti, the old Francesco was kept a prisoner at Monza. His son, Francesco II., was also held in bondage by the Milanese, but his proud heart revolted at the thought of his slavery, and he compassionated the sufferings of his country, for the Visconti were hard, stern rulers. He asked permission of the Visconti to reside in Asti, which lay near the frontier of the Milanese territory. A little later he quitted the town, disguised as a pilgrim and accompanied by his wife and two servants, under pretext of visiting the shrine of Sant' Antonio at Vienne in France. The emissaries of the Visconti follow him to Avignon, where he treats with the pope in person and by letter with other influential personages. Having obtained promises of assistance, he returns to Italy by way of the coast. Moneyless, friendless, dreading arrest at every step, burdened with a sick wife, Francesco knocks at the gate of Genoa. The haughty city favors the Visconti, will have nothing to do with the wanderer, and threatens him with the dungeons of the ducal palace. So they follow the coast down to Pisa, the wife almost dead with fatigue and privation, for they are often obliged to walk all day, and no peasant is bold enough to offer them assistance. At last, one of their servants, by much diplomacy, procures a miserable nag and a shaky market-wagon filled with straw, and in this state the outcast rulers of Padua drive up to the gates of Pisa. They are refused admittance, and wander sorrowfully on. Outside the town they chance upon a deserted hovel. How these princes praise God for his goodness, for now Madonna Taddea can have a night's rest on the straw in the corner! One of the servants steals back to the town and bribes a shopkeeper to sell him bread and meat and wine. They build a fire and warm their poor weatherbeaten limbs, and are right merry in a desperate, reckless way. With the morrow they take up their march, and at last reach a friendly city, where the wife rejoins her children. Francesco is provided with men and arms to enable him to attack his native town, which is ready to welcome him back. He assaults the city one midnight, surprises the Milanese, is welcomed by the Paduans with the old shout, "Viva il Carro!" and at dawn is encamped in triumph upon the Prato. He ruled for a long time wisely and well, for he had known the discipline of life, and had hungered and thirsted like the lowest of his subjects. How he must have laughed, this stately soldier banqueting in his palace-halls, at the thought of the night when he had been so thankful for that bit of bread and drop of wine snatched from the grudging Pisan! And Madonna Taddea, a blooming matron, surrounded by her children, laughed with the tears in her eyes, and told them how one of their number had come near being born not in a manger like our Lord, but in the open fields.

But a terrible fate hangs over this princely house. Francesco is accused by the Venetians of violating a treaty, and war is declared against him. The flower of the Venetian army, led by the bravest of the Venetian generals, is sent against Padua. There is a long, fierce struggle. In spite of famine and plague, Francesco holds out to the very last, but one night the Venetians scale the walls and build their camp-fires on the Prato. Francesco, with his two sons, Jacopo and Francesco, is loaded with chains and carried to Venice, and lodged in the dungeons of the ducal palace. There is the mockery of a trial in one of those great painted rooms, but there is only one opinion with regard to the sentence that will be pronounced against them. It is a terrible sight, the proclamation of that judgment to the prisoners, nearly blind, wan and half dead in their cells under the canal. When the executioner prepares to read the fatal document one of them rushes at him and throws his stool at his head. When the day of execution comes they embrace one another, and Jacopo writes a letter to his wife, which the tenderness and sorrow of the chronicler have handed down to us, bidding her pray for his soul and love their children. Then they are placed upon wooden chairs in their several dungeons, with their backs toward the door. The executioner jerks a silken cord about their necks, and the race of the Carraras has vanished from among the rulers of the earth. Their bodies, wrapped in velvet cloaks and adorned with golden spurs, are laid in different churches, but their graves are nameless and the memory of the old heroic lords of Padua is branded with shame.

PRATO DELLA VALLE.

We wandered on with the holiday crowd through the narrow arcades. Against the pillars leaned little stalls and booths where were sold fruit and fried cakes and hard gingerbread and crucifixes and rosaries and lives of the saints and veils and ribbons and fans and silver hair-pins. The young peasant-girls, strolling up and down under the arcades, some in groups, some clinging timidly to their lovers' arms, stop at the booths and glance wistfully at the pretty trinkets, and end by buying a life of Sant' Antonio for the old mother who has stayed at home among the olives, and a clay pipe for the old father taking his holiday rest on the doorstep by her side. They form bright pictures against the open archways of the palaces beyond, through which the young green of the gardens gleams in the sunlight. There is an air of mystery and reserve about these broad gateways which contrasts well with the honest, gaudy street-life under the arcades. One of these palaces may be Baptista's, and within the unwelcome wooers of his daughters may be feasting with him or sauntering arm-in-arm through the young leafage of the garden, flouted by saucy Kate and shunned by sweet Bianca.

Conspicuous among the brown-faced peasants were the students, who strolled by in groups with a lordly air of possession or gathered in knots at the street-corners and waxed loud in discussion. They were lithe, slender, handsome fellows, with dark eyes and fair skins and oval faces. They had that nameless poetic grace which is the birthright of all young Italians. The soft feminine beauty of these young Paduans, with their dainty dress and pretty girlish ways, was something akin to the sleepy grace of young lions. Watch that group at the corner waxing hot over some wrong done to the leaders of their party—some one of their political heroes arrested and cast into prison for uttering the thoughts of all just men. See their eyes flash, their hands move in anger and grope instinctively toward the place where they wore their swords in their year of service. Do you say that the old Paduan flame has died out of these young hearts? They are of the same temper as the hearts that held out against the Venetian, the Visconti, the pope himself—that made a hedge for the Austrian bayonets to pierce, and yielded life and fame and fortune for their country's sake, and languished in the hundred prisons of the northern tyrants, and were lifted up at last in one great glad shout of victory. Let those battle-fields among the olive-farms on the hills outside the gates tell the story of the Paduan students. Their bright youthfulness was like sunshine warming the gray old walls of the town. The romance of the old Italian life seemed incarnate in their graceful shapes. Such heads as theirs gleam out from the dark canvases that hang high in the corridors of the old palaces—sometimes as the portrait of a long-forgotten young knight; sometimes in the guise of a warrior-saint, some George or Michael, painted by a master hand; sometimes as a beautiful young ascetic in his monk's dress.

Is it strange that the pretty peasant-girls cast shy veiled glances at the young lads that stroll by with a careless stare? For centuries they have given pledges and broken them there under the dark arcade, and so they will do for centuries to come. There will be other holidays and other prayers at Antonio's shrine, and other girls will have ribbons bought for them at the booths, and then there will be a couple of kisses and a parting and a few tears, and now and then a broken heart. The young men will take their diplomas and go out into the world, and rush into the turmoil of the state and the senate and the court, and lose the proud heroic bearing of their youth in cringing and fawning; or they will settle down on their estates and marry the Marchesa Tal Quale, who will have many quarterings and many bank-notes, and their beautiful Greek outlines will disappear under the weight of fat proper to a landed proprietor. The grand ideals of their youth will drop away from them one by one, and they will laugh with contempt at their old student notions of liberty and freedom for high and low.

Only some morning, when the children tell them it is Sant' Antonio's Day, an old pain will rise in their hearts, and they will see the dear old arcades of Padua and the little gay booths, and trustful eyes and fresh girl-faces will start up in their memories; and when the church-bells ring out they will hide their heads from the marchesa and the marchesini and cry out aloud for the old happy student-time, when love and hope of glory and high belief in God and man were theirs. God pity them, those poor young things, in spite of all their glorious youth! The beautiful promise of their spring will ripen into dull mediocrity. They will learn to be false to themselves and the truth. Happier are they who die there in old Padua in the fulness of their youth and hope, and are borne to the great hall of the university and are laid on the black-draped bier, with candles burning about them and their fellow-students rising from their seats and bowing three times before the corpse, and reading the funeral eulogy of him who is going to his grave with the spirits of the great and good that have left their footprints in the solemn halls for his mourning train.

PIAZZA DELLA ERBE.

In the vestibule of the university, high up on the walls, hang the escutcheons of the more famous of the students of past centuries, gray with age and mould and cobweb. What colossal figures stalk about the quadrangle and along the overhanging galleries! The mightiest minds of Europe are among them. Every footfall makes an echo across the centuries. Yet of all the old shadows, the one that has the greatest charm for me is that of the gray-haired serving-man who steals along the gallery with the bundle under his arm. Do you say it is only the sunlight lying athwart the arches? I tell you it is Portia's faithful servant, and he has been to the university to seek Doctor Balthazar, her cousin, and has obtained from him a lawyer's cap and gown, and he is hastening home to Belmont, that his mistress may don them and reach Venice in time to save Antonio from the Jew's hands.

Sedate groups of students were seated on the terrace of the caffè opposite sipping beer in gentlemanly Italian fashion. Here and there some honest burgher family, out for a holiday, was cooling itself with pink ices after the pilgrimage to the shrine. The female members were clothed with garments of such exaggerated form and color that one sees at once why Petruchio, in spite of his madness, had wit enough left to send to Venice for the wedding-clothes, and why Katharine, after the atrocious fashions of Padua, was disposed to be content with anything the Veronese tailor chose to offer her.

We sauntered on to where the afternoon sun flashed red against the great arched windows of the Palace of Reason. It is a mighty stone edifice, with a curved glass roof over the great justice-hall, which was the pride of mediæval Padua. Under the pointed arches of the wide galleries outside are gathered gray old milestones and funeral tablets and antique busts that carry the stranger back to the days of Latin legend, when old Antenor came up from the south and founded the city.

On the piazza, under the shadow of the beautiful loggie, the market-women are gathering up the bright fruits from the stalls and folding their red umbrellas, and thanking the saint for a profitable feast-day. A flood of yellow sunlight streams over the piazza, wrapping it about with a delicious drowsiness. No sound is in the air save the echo of a footfall in some one of the dark streets behind or the yawn of a weary fruit-seller. In the little caffè under the arcades the idlers seem to have fallen into an enchanted sleep. Now and then a student saunters by, gazing dreamily up at the graceful galleries. Tired mothers hasten across the piazza, dragging their tired but happy children after them. The mothers are red in the face with the heat, their bonnets are nigh to falling off, and their mighty castles of hair are shaken to their foundations. The children's hands are filled with dead lilies and hard cakes, and their faces are aglow with melted sugar and happiness. They have a weary air, as through surfeit of sweets. They will welcome the work-day minestra to-night when they reach their homes high up among the terraces and the chimneys and the clothes-lines. Ah, well! Sant' Antonio's Day is drawing to a close.

Those children with the lilies in their hands carried me back to the old religious masque of centuries ago. The chroniclers tell us that every year, in the month of the Blessed Virgin, a procession formed here on the piazza in front of the palace composed of all the civil dignitaries, the priests, the nobles and the different guilds. At their head went two children beautiful as seraphim, the one dressed in snowy white, with golden hair falling on his shoulders and a sceptre of white lilies in his hand—the angel of the Annunciation; the other, clothed in a flowing blue garment, with long brown hair escaping from under her golden crown—the Blessed Virgin herself. So they passed on, accompanied by music and the shouts of the people, through the streets of Padua, that were hung with crimson arazzi and tapestry from the looms of Flanders and curtains of cloth of gold. Onward they went to the vineyard outside the town, in which stands Giotto's chapel. At the gate the procession paused, and there was a colloquy in rhyme between the Virgin and the angel, and all the dignitaries listened with profound seriousness, and a mass was chanted within the chapel, and bombs were exploded, and bells rung, and there were singing and shouting and feasting throughout Padua.

After all the gaudy brilliancy of the feast-day, after all the hot unrest of the streets and the stifling atmosphere of the churches, it was pleasant to stroll toward the gray walls of the town in the late afternoon. The bells were calling from tower to tower. Along the grass-grown streets no footfall save our own broke the stillness. Here and there a goddess or a couple of cherubs bearing an escutcheon smirked at us from the high garden-walls. Sometimes from within the wrought-iron gates came the rustling of trees or the plash of a fountain. We paused at a wide weatherbeaten door, rang the bell and were admitted by a brown smiling contadina, who preceded us up the narrow path that had vines stretching out on either side, with flowering peas and beans climbing, all crimson and scarlet blossom, over the jagged stakes. The air was rilled with perfume and the eager buzzing of bees. At the end of the path stood a large square house, on the portico of which sat two blue-frocked peasants smoking and drinking red wine. There was a broad patch of green sward in front, on which three yellow-haired children and a small tawny dog were rolling in play. Under the great fig tree at the side of the house sat three brown-faced women, two knitting, the third dressing her hair. There were cool shadows under the broad leaves of the fig tree, and bars of slanting sunlight falling through the foliage on to the grass. At the right of the house stood a little Gothic chapel with the sunlight streaming across the threshold. On the arch of the door the birds were singing, and there was a growth of purple cabbages and kingly artichokes by the side of the chapel, and low in the hollows near by lay patches of brake and fern.

At the sunlit threshold a woman sat sewing. Before her was a table with photographs, and a stalk of lilies in a blue earthern pitcher upon it. The sun streamed over the sunken pavement to the neglected little altar with its coarse mosaics and paper flowers, over the rickety little pulpit and the traces of Byzantine gilding, and over the quaint old effigy of the founder. It fell, soft and brilliant and caressing, on the frescoes of Giotto. They were as pure and fresh and holy as the very lilies; and as the lilies revealed the innermost meanings of Sant' Antonio's Day to the hearts of the worshippers, so the frescoes symbolized the deepest reverence, the hidden longing of the whole brilliant, noisy Middle Age life of Padua. Their very crudeness, their nakedness, their barrenness of accessory, their sharp, brilliant coloring, cause them to stand out in strong relief. Never did the mystery of Holy Writ receive better interpretation than at the hands of Giotto. The characters in the sacred writings stand out sharp, bold, naked, crude, and Giotto caught the bare emotional and intellectual nature of every personage. He painted their souls and not their bodies, and therefore he painted well. Each character might stand for the personification of some one emotion. What can be more full of sweetness and humble adoration than the Annunciation! what more awe-inspiring, more faithful in its horror, than the miracle of Lazarus, where the corpse, swathed in its bandages, stands upright among the multitude with its hollow eyes gazing in mingled gratitude and terror at the Saviour! what more full of grotesque sternness than the Last Judgment! what more nobly imagined, more faithfully executed, than the Last Supper! The simplicity and sublimity of revelation shine down from them, and make the beholder speechless with the thought of divine love.

Let us go no farther. Let us end our holiday here. Under the altar sleeps the old knight who built the chapel, and outside the door the peasants sit upon the threshold of his palace. The butterflies saunter in on the sun-filled breeze and flutter about the lilies on the table and the painted lilies on the wall. The dark sweet faces shine down from the frescoes, as they have shone down upon the worshippers through the ages, with a blessing on their holy, sentient mouths. A deep reverent hush is in the air—a nameless expectancy fills our hearts. We stand on the threshold of all that is best and worthiest in the human life of centuries, with the shades of the great and noble pressing about us. The announcing angel has brought unto us the lilies of revelation, and we feel with glad humility that we are for ever one with all the high souls that have joined earth with heaven.

Charlotte Adams.

A LAW UNTO HERSELF.

CHAPTER VI.

A year after Laidley's death, Judge Rhodes, being in New York, breakfasted with Mr. Neckart. He noticed that the editor had grown lean and sallow. "And God knows he had no good looks to spare," smoothing down his own white beard over his comfortable paunch. Something, too, of that easy frankness which had made Neckart so popular was gone; no topic interested him; his eye was secretive and irritable; he spoke and moved under the constant pressure of self-control. The judge, as he watered his claret, eyed the dark face opposite to him critically. "Now, I never," he thought, "saw a sign of ill-temper or cruelty in that man. Yet I have a queer fancy that if the reins were once taken off he could not master himself again. It must be devilishly uncomfortable, holding one's self in in that way," the last morsel of quail sliding down his throat unctuously. "I can let myself out without danger."

"Why, you eat nothing! The campaign's been too much for you, Mr. Neckart," he said aloud. "You've run down terribly in the last year. Always the way. You young men make too many spurts in the first heat, and break down before the middle of the race. Well, that's our American policy. But the American physique won't stand it."

"Do you only mean that I have broken down physically, or do you see any change in my work? The leading articles are mine, you know. Don't be afraid to be frank."

"Well, now that you ask me—Your articles are more forcible lately, more popular: they bring down the galleries, eh? But it's a sledge-hammer force, it's vehemence, d'ye see? There's a lack of that moderation, that repressed power, in which was your real strength. You asked me to be frank?"

"Yes. And I knew just what you would say. Well, what must be, is!" with a gesture which dismissed the subject.

"Nonsense! It's your nervous system that needs toning, that's all. If our side goes in, get a foreign mission—some warm, lazy place on the Mediterranean, say. Rest a few years, and when you come home take an easier pace for the rest of your life. Lord bless you, boy! I've been through it all. When I was a young fellow—mere bundle of nerves, high-strung, sir—high-strung! Ambition, love! Constitution wouldn't stand it!—Bit of the steak, John, rare.—Joe Rhodes, I said, either come down to the jog-trot level or die. So here I am! Good for forty years yet, please God! When you are my age you may be just what I am, if you choose."

Neckart's eye twinkled: "Try the birds, judge."

He made an effort after that to resume his old careless manner, and the judge had tact enough to drop the subject. But he was not deceived. "There's more here than meets the eye," he said shrewdly to himself. "Neckart has had a blow that has made him stagger. He has worked like a horse in a treadmill. But he has the constitution to stand it. Functions in healthy condition—tremendous vital power. Either hereditary disease is at work, or some morbid passion, or he would not have given way."

He urged him to eat with tender solicitude, even gave him his famous recipe for a salad. No matter what our sympathy, our help for each other can seldom come any closer than skin or stomach, after all.

"By the way," he said presently, "I hear that Swendon has bought a place up the Hudson. Can you tell me anything about him?"

"I meet him everywhere," said Neckart. "The old man is failing fast. But he takes life just as he always did—like a boy let loose for the holidays."

"And his daughter?"

"She never comes into town: she is not a woman of society."

"I remember the little Swede was no favorite of yours," noticing a certain reserve in Neckart's tone. "But I had an object in asking for her. Of course you would not be likely to know much about them: they are out of your line."

"I have met the captain and his daughter several times during the year," said Neckart. "They were camping on the Maine coast last summer, and I stumbled into their tent one day. Miss Swendon fancied her father would grow strong on a diet of fish of his own catching. When the cold weather set in she took him to St. Augustine. I ran against him by the old fort the very morning I arrived, and in the spring we met at Omaha, and made the overland trip to California together. There is no kind of air and no kind of amusement which she has not tried, since she had the means, to give the old man his health back again. To no purpose, however."

"Very odd!" the judge nodded mysteriously. "Very odd indeed about that property! Laidley told me the very night before he died that he had made a will leaving it in charity. Now, Jane inherited by virtue of a will made two years before. No other forthcoming. I suppose remorse seized him in articulo mortis. There was a curious thing occurred in that last interview of mine with Laidley.—How can I see Swendon?" interrupting himself. "Where is their house?"

Mr. Neckart hesitated a moment: "I am going there this evening to dine and spend the night, and I will take you with me. It will be a surprise which the captain will like."

"The very thing! Precisely! The truth is, Neckart—light a cigar—the truth is," lowering his voice and leaning over the table, "Laidley exacted a half promise from me that night which troubles me. The fellow died forthwith, you see, and so clenched it on me. He had a plan for Miss Swendon's future, and asked me to forward it. I thought he was going to cheat the girl, and paid little attention to it. But he did the clean thing after all, and then died promptly. I must say Laidley acted in a much more decent and gentlemanlike way than I expected. So, now I feel as if I owed it to the fellow to keep my word."

Mr. Neckart nodded. He asked no questions, but scanned the judge's flabby face narrowly. Rhodes lifted one leg on to the other knee and nursed it. It was his confidential attitude.

"It's a delicate matter, you see. Van Ness is concerned."

"Van Ness, the antiquarian?"

"Oh, he's more than that! You don't suppose a man of his breadth of intellect confines himself to old bricks and dry bones? Why, God bless you! Pliny Van Ness is the final authority in Philadelphia on new singers or pictures or cracked teapots or great religious or philanthropic reforms. If he were taken from it, the underpinnings of that town would be knocked away, and it would fall flat."

"Last fall, I think, I heard he had a plan for enforcing compulsory education in Pennsylvania?"

"Well, yes. I don't know why that didn't pass. It died out. Van Ness was trying, too, to establish a grand scheme for the benefit of the mining population. But somehow I haven't heard of that lately. Oh he's a great man, sir! When I hear him talk half an hour it quite lifts me up to purer air. I always say when I come away, 'Joe Rhodes, you're a selfish scoundrel! A selfish scoundrel!'"

The judge smoked in silence a few minutes. "Yes," he resumed thoughtfully, "it was about Van Ness. Poor Laidley had that reverence for him which men of his calibre are apt to have for a character of perfect excellence, and in his anxiety for Jane he planned that a marriage should be brought about between them. I was to inaugurate the matter—bring them together. Easily, naturally, you understand? The sort of thing that is done every day. I've seen excellent matches made in Virginia by a little quiet management of friends."

"Yes. It is done every day." Mr. Neckart yesterday would have talked of the marriages of half the women he knew as "good matches" or "well managed" without knowing that he was vulgar in so doing. But now the whole idea struck him as loathsome and disgusting. Were women to be paraded before their buyers as in a slave-market? He looked at the poor judge babbling innocently as he might at some venal go-between in the markets of Cairo.

"Thinking the matter over," pursued the judge anxiously, "it has occurred to me that Laidley would not have been so confident of Van Ness's ultimate concurrence in the scheme unless Pliny had shown some prepossession in favor of the little girl."

"You think, then, the sultan is ready to throw the handkerchief?" dryly.

"Oh, that's a coarse way of putting it, Neckart. But, considered as a match, now, really, you know, Van Ness is—The idea that he was favorable to it was suggested to me again yesterday when he proposed that we should look up the captain and call upon him. He is not a man who usually makes advances."

"Is Mr. Van Ness in New York with you?"

"Yes, certainly. I thought you knew that."

"And you propose to take him out to-night?"

"Why, that seemed a good plan. Unless you have some objection?"

"What objection can I have? What does it matter to me?" He stooped to pat his dog, that sat upright watching his face.

"Surely, that is that savage wolf-hound of Miss Swendon's?"

"Yes. He divides his time between us." After a few minutes he said, "You seem to anticipate no difficulty in the way of your conquering hero? Yet Miss Swendon by no means belongs to the warm-blooded, susceptible order of women. This Van Ness, as I remember him, is a starved, insignificant-looking fellow."

"Oh, on the contrary! He has a very noble presence. Pliny is tall, with much dignity of carriage."

"Pompous, eh? 'I am Sir Oracle'?"

"Nothing of the kind. Rather deprecating manner, with a calm face, beaming blue eyes, and abundant fair hair and beard. The very finest of Saxon types, in fact."

"Ah? But these reformers are apt to be underbred, irritable, with nasty peculiarities of habits and manner which they never have thought it worth while to cure. I suppose your friend is like his brethren?"

"Now, Neckart, just wait until you see Van Ness. You'll be charmed, or I've no judgment. Most men are, and all women," laughing significantly.

They rose at the moment. As they left the room Neckart caught sight in a mirror of his own dwarfed bulk and the massive head set in its black mane. He stopped and looked for an instant at himself fixedly, a thing which he had not done perhaps for years, and then walked on in silence beside the judge. When they parted in the street he wrote a line on a card and gave it to him.

"In case I am not able to go out on the same train with you, this is the route to the farm," he said.

He could scarcely be courteous. He was in a rage of indignation. Not, of course, that it mattered to him whether Jane married this or any other man whom she loved. She was only an acquaintance—more perhaps—his little friend. She must marry: he had thought of that often; and she would love—with a strength and fidelity beyond that of any woman he had ever known. He had often thought of that too. When the time came—years hence, perhaps—he would consult with her father as to the man. They must be satisfied that he would make her happy—they two. It must be a careful, cautious, slow matter. He might surely claim so much of a guardianship over her! He had studied her character very carefully, and appreciated it as a rare and delicate one; and he was very fond of the captain—very fond of the captain. But as for the plan of marriage—Mr. Neckart understood his own disgust at the judge, and accounted for it naturally. He had but little of the ordinary chivalric belief in woman's modesty and purity. Much knowledge of female lobbyists and literary tramps and champagne-tippling belles had shaken his faith, probably.

"But this girl is the most innocent, sincerest thing God ever made," he said. "She is clean in thought and body and word."

In those long days on the Maine coast, or by the sea-wall at St. Augustine, or crossing the interminable mountain-ranges or alkali deserts, he had had time to read this candid soul page by page: her clear skin and liquid eyes were not more transparent than her thoughts. All through that day's work a young noble figure moved like a shadow—a woman with the brave blue eyes, the ruddy lips, the grand unconsciousness of the great women of her race. The blood of Aslauga and Ingeborg was in her veins. So strong was this feeling upon him, that always, when he was making ready to meet her, he bathed and arrayed himself as if he was going to take part in the rites of a church or some sacred place. "'So white, so fair, so sweet was she!'" he sang softly to himself. And guzzling Rhodes, with his oily laugh and fat hands, meant to show her off, exhibit her fine points to this Admirable Crichton of morality, and persuade him to marry her! Was there any danger that she would love or marry him? She was undoubtedly dull in perception of character: had she not always made a demigod of the silly old captain? The finest vessels were always first to break themselves to pieces against some earthen pitcher.

He made haste to take an early afternoon train. He would see his friends again before Rhodes arrived.

CHAPTER VII.

The Hemlock Farm, the captain's new possession, was a great untrimmed tract of farm and woodland on the Hudson, with a rough-hewn stone house, open-windowed and wide-doored, uncivilized and picturesque, set down hospitably in the midst of it. Mr. Neckart, striking across the fields from the little station, caught glimpses through the forest for a mile or two of its walls and heavy chimneys stained with smoke and lichen. They seemed to grow out of the ground as naturally as the oaks and gray beeches.

It was a damp, cool day in June. Ragged patches of clouds were driven down across the tree-tops; the dark blue of the sky had yet a tinge of moist yellow in it after the night's rains; the wind was wet as it blew now and then gustily in Neckart's face. He jumped across a brush hedge overgrown with smilax and blackberry vines, and passed in under the hemlocks. They were dark and still. Outside, the sunshine flashed sometimes, pale and watery, and the blackberries in the hedge were getting rid of their white blossoms and reddening their green knobs, and a wild tiger-lily here and there blazed its answer to the summer; but the old hemlocks, just as Neckart knew them when a boy, kept silence and nodded thoughtfully together, meditating over their ancient secret. He walked more slowly. How long was it since he had left the office or sat in the club-room at breakfast with Rhodes's puffy face and unsavory talk?

Why, even the hedge with its sleepy hum of bees and yellow butterflies seemed to be of the world, worldly here. He left it far behind. The aisles of the wood grew higher and more solemn, and slowly filled with pale-green light. The wind and rain last night had not reached these solitudes, yet he climbed over fallen trunks rank with soaked emerald moss and branching fungus yellow or red as coral. A lizard with bulging eyes of jet darted across his foot: now came the whir of a partridge from under the dead leaves, now the veery cut the air with its fine silver pipe.

Neckart stood still and drew long slow breaths. The life of the woods was like sleep to him; the air was marrowy, stimulating; he could feel himself growing quiet and stronger in it. A moment later he drew his breath deeper.

"She is coming!" A tall, erect girl, bareheaded, came noiselessly down between the gray trunks of the trees, her feet sinking at each step into the dead, ash-colored moss. Her color rose as she saw him, and her eyes lighted, but she put her finger on her lips. "You have frightened them," she whispered. "They have all gone into their houses."

"They—?"

"Hush-h!" She sat down on a fallen log and motioned him to a place beside her: then she waited, listening. There was a space of silence: presently a red squirrel came out overhead and darted along the limbs; the ragged bark of the tree in front of them was suddenly full of creeping things, busily hurrying up and down; the coffee-colored water of the brook at their feet began to glance with silvery flashes of minnows and wagtails; out of a miniature hill came a long procession of ants; they marched, deployed, disappeared, and came again; monster spiders, like lumps of glittering enamel, swung in the air by invisible threads; two black beetles rose to view by Neckart's foot, rolling a white ball twice as big as themselves toward a flicker of clear sunshine on the grass.

"They are taking the babies for a sun-bath," whispered Jane.

The muffled hammering of a woodpecker, building its nest, came from a hollow tree at a little distance. A flock of kingbirds dashed boisterously through the underbrush. The pewees began their pitiful cry of "Lost! lost!" a scarlet tanager sat like a sentinel on a dead branch and challenged them with a sharp single note. The whole air grew full of that strenuous, mysterious wood-sound which is next to silence—the voice and movement of millions of living things too small for sight. It rose to a full orchestra as the two human listeners sat motionless, though only a few notes were familiar to Neckart—the tic-tic of the grasshoppers, the low monotone of countless unseen springs escaping under the grass, the lone call of the thrush, a single minor note from a golden bugle. But it was not the grasshoppers or thrush to which he listened breathlessly: it was the soft breathing of the young girl beside him, as she sat attentive, a quiet delight in her face, her blue eyes gathering soft lustre. Nature, when she and the world were young, might have looked with such motherly tenderness on all her living things. Her large nervous hands were clasped about her knees: the yellow hair glistened close beside him, and as her full bosom rose and fell he could hear her heart beat in the silence.

He stood up quickly with a shiver: "Shall we go to the house?"

She rose: "Yes, if you will. They are learning to know me now. I come here every day. There is a partridge lives under that bush, and he came out and actually let me see him drum once, and yesterday I found a blacksnake attacking a bluebird's nest in time to help fight the battle."

They had reached the hedge: Neckart held apart the thorny bushes, but did not give her his hand to help her through, as he would have done to any other woman. He was always scant in personal courtesies to her.

She looked back at the woods: "Yes, there they all live and keep house, and marry and quarrel and die. It does not concern them at all what man you make President, Mr. Neckart. It is very hard to make their acquaintance. I think they ought to know their friends at sight."

"I don't know. I know two human beings," said Neckart gravely, "who, when they first met, felt a strong mutual antipathy, and now they—"

She turned, looking keenly at him.

"They are good friends, Miss Swendon," looking into her eyes.

"Yes. There could not be any better," putting out her hand frankly. He held it but an instant, as he might have done a boy's when offered to him; but as she turned away a soft lovely color dyed her throat and face.

"There is so much wild mint growing here," she said incoherently, stooping to gather it, "and pennyroyal, and a plenty of sweet basil. I am going to have an herb- and seed-room, and give out the seeds to Twiss myself next spring. I have not told you any of the news. Father has slept every night without a tonic. Don't you think his color is better? Did you see him yesterday?" anxiously.

"Oh, it is better without doubt."

"I am quite sure, now, we did the very wisest thing in coming here. The house is on an elevation, you see—above any chance of malaria—and then the warm moisture from the river—just what he needs. And the going to town—Do you often meet him in town? Is he enjoying himself? Did it strike you that he was improving until I suggested it?"

"Why, it was only to-day," said Neckart, "that I told Judge Rhodes how I met Captain Swendon everywhere—at the club—"

"Yes. I urged him to join the club," her face beaming.

"Couldn't have been a wiser move.—At the club, at dinners, at the theatre, meeting old friends, taking in new life everywhere, and making new life for everybody. Why, to see him on Broadway waving his hat and calling 'Hillo!' to somebody across the street puts even the cab-horses in good humor."

She laughed: "I knew it, I knew it! And here on rainy days he has so much to do. He is trying every one of his patents in the house or grounds. I am fitting up a billiard-room to surprise him on his birthday. But come and I'll show you some of the patents at work. And I have never showed you the barn or the orchard. Father will not be at home until evening. He expected to meet you on the train. We can go exploring all the afternoon."

They crossed the meadow to the barn, Jane explaining that the former owner of the Hemlocks had lived for years in Europe, and left house and land to run into their present overgrown decay. "Farmer and gardeners worry about new fences and repairs, but I will not have even the dead leaves cleared from the paths. I remember you said once you liked to hear them crisp under your feet," sliding her own feet among them.

There was nothing in the idle, purposeless afternoon which any practical man or woman would have thought worthy of an hour's remembrance; yet it stood out for ever after, above all of Bruce Neckart's life, as some fair table-land lifted from the fogs near to the sun.

They went into the house, examined patent hinges and locks, and explored the vacant rooms and mysterious garrets filled with lumber. She sat down by an old spinning-wheel, turning it and singing a scrap of Gretchen's song, while the light from the dormer window touched her white arched throat and yellow hair. They went to the stables, and the old Scotch hostler brought out the horses and talked with Neckart of the mysteries of flanks and strains of blood, while Jane looked on shyly, standing with the dog in the wide door.

"Maybe I shall know them as well as I do you some day, Bruno," she said gravely to him. "But I shall never like them as well. That wouldn't be possible: they're strangers." The dog nuzzled his head into her hand and marched steadily beside her. Then she took Neckart and Bruno over a little hill to a spring-house, into which you went through a mossy door across a sparkling little brook. She went inside and brought out a bowl of yellow cream, all of them watching the kitchen windows guiltily as she did it; and then they went on aimlessly across the stepping-stones in the brook up through the field of young corn until they skirted the brush hedge again, when Bruno left them in pursuit of ground-squirrels. There was a bank running along the river-shore, topped with nodding ferns and purple iron-weed, and brown with the soft, feathery tops of the mouse-ear. The bank was on one side, the water on the other, swift, dark, mobile, throwing back now a still belt of sunshine, now gloomy woods, now the yellow shadows of low-driven clouds. They walked with the river, not against it. The wind blew damp in their faces. Since Neckart had talked so confidently of her father's improvement, Jane had been gay and light-hearted as a child, with a nervous quaver now and then in her voice as if a word would bring the tears. She looked at him thoughtfully as they walked on.

"You ought to go to California again," she said abruptly.

"I can take tonics at home, if you mean that I need them."

"Yes. You are more worn and haggard than when we left Omaha. Every day of the journey I used to see how the wrinkles left your forehead, and your eye cleared and your voice changed. It was the mountain-air. There is no tonic for you like the mountain-air."

Neckart shifted his hat uneasily, and turned to look at the river as though the frank blue eyes anxiously inspecting his face hurt him.

"I was harassed and perplexed then as to the policy which I should adopt for the paper in a certain political question. My grim looks were no doubt owing to that. You decided the question for me."

"I? Why, I know nothing of politics."

"No. But the choice offered me was between right and financial ruin on one side, and a fortune and neutrality on the other. It would be impossible," in a tone which suddenly became careless and matter of fact, "for any man to come in contact with a nature as absolutely honest as yours, Miss Swendon, and not be influenced by it. I do not think I spoke to you at all of this question, yet it seemed to me that you dictated every step of my course. I never have told you of my affairs since, yet every day I take your advice on them. It is always different from that of my political friends, because it is simply the broad truth and common sense. I follow it." He turned to her with one of his rare smiles and an odd break in his controlled voice. "I hold your hand in mine every step of my way."

She did not smile in return. She was standing still in the path, as though she had been stopped by a blow. "Honest? I honest?" she said.

The dog jumped up on her breast to go on with his romp. She pushed him down, looking straight into Neckart's amazed face.

"You may have made mistakes: everybody is liable to do that," he stammered. "But as for sincerity—"

She drew a long breath as if throwing off a burden: "No. I have been honest. You are not wrong about me there. I have made no mistakes." She turned and walked on quickly.

As he followed her he observed for the first time how steady was her step and how close set the finely-cut jaws. His own mouth, by the way, was coarser, but more facile: it spoke when silent: the chin was cleft and sensitive.

"When she once makes up her mind, the verdict of the whole world will not make her flinch," he thought with keen approval. The quality which he had that very day damned as mulish obstinacy in one of his clerks was infinitely alluring to him in this young girl. He came closer to her, watching her averted face, a passion of delight and longing gradually dulling all past resolves or reason.

If she would but turn her eyes on his face again searching for signs of trouble or illness! It was actually the first time in Neckart's life that a woman had taken any care of him. His mother had been a burden and charge on him since his boyhood. That single kindly glance had opened to him unknown possibilities of tenderness, of the touch of a woman's fingers, and all that came to other men through them.

But she walked on without speaking, her head sunk on her breast. She seemed to have forgotten that he was in the world.

At a bend in the road they met the captain. He was heated and agitated, and tried to hide it by tremendous hilarity. He welcomed Neckart boisterously, shaking hands with him again and again before he turned to Jane, who stood watching him with delighted eyes.

"How well you are looking this afternoon, father! Your cheeks are as red as a girl's!"

"Oh, I'm all right! Don't bother about me. Think of other people sometimes, child. Now, there's a matter I want to speak to you about, if I could only put it to you properly."

"I am ready. Put it directly, point-blank: that is the best way in delicate questions."

"Don't laugh. It's no laughing matter. It's the most serious business of my life, and I've only a few minutes to make you understand," mopping his hot forehead with his handkerchief. "The train will be due in half an hour."

"The train? Serious business? The commissioner of patents is coming?—"

"Damn the patents! I beg your pardon, Jane. But really—This is a request I have to make of you. A request of you from poor Will Laidley."

She drew back. The weight which she had a moment ago thrown off fell on her again. "A request of me?" she said slowly. "Whatever he asked me to do I shall do. I owe him at least so much."

"Of course! You owe him everything. You know he might have left us without a penny, as he thought of doing. Instead of which, there was not even a legacy to any charity."

"No. Every dollar of it came to me. I know."

"Oh, Will behaved most generously, nobly, to you, there's no doubt of it! And this plan of his shows such tender care of you. I never heard of it until to-day from Judge Rhodes. God forbid that I should influence you! But you would be sorry to thwart him in his grave."

"I will not thwart him again."

"If I could put it to you properly now!" The captain grew red and coughed. Mr. Neckart looked at him with fierce disgust. Was he so brutal as to talk to any woman of her marriage with a man whom she had never seen?

"You forget," he said coldly. "Miss Swendon owes no gratitude for money which was justly her own. William Laidley, too, was a weak, impure man—the very last who should be allowed to stretch his hand out of his grave to control any woman's life. You should not hamper her with any such gratitude."

"You cannot judge of this for me, Mr. Neckart," said Jane. "He has the right, especially when it concerns his money.—What is it he wished me to do?"

The captain stammered with embarrassment.

"Tut! tut! Money has nothing to do with it.—As for poor Will, Bruce, he had his good points. De mortuis—you know. I knew him in his prime. It's a trifle, after all," evading Neckart's eye, of which he had read the meaning. "But you are so apt, Jane, to take unreasonable prejudices against people. This is a friend of Will's, whom Judge Rhodes will bring out this evening. And it was your cousin's wish that he should be your friend also—adviser, eh? I've no head for business, you know, and you might refer knotty questions to him. Consult him about stocks, and the drainage of the stables, and this and that," glancing at Neckart for approval of his delicacy and cunning. "I only wanted to warn you not to take an antipathy to him, but I am clumsy—"

"Is that all?" putting her hand to her eyes for a minute as though they ached.—"Come, Bruno. It is time to dress for dinner."

"Yes, do, my dear. Haven't you any dress with frills and fal-lals, such as the ladies are wearing now? These clinging gowns do well enough for home-folks like me and Bruce, but—Something airy, gay, now. It's only as an adviser that Will recommended Mr. Van Ness to you, you understand? Your cousin consulted him of late years in all financial matters. I do suppose Van Ness—and Laidley too," turning to Neckart—"would think the child was flinging the money to the dogs, buying such a place as this to humor her old father's whims."

Jane halted, her hands on the dog's collar: "I will have no advice from Mr. Van Ness, father, as to my disposal of the money. It is mine. No man, dead or living, shall interfere with my use of it," she said in a low voice.

"Now I've prejudiced her against him," groaned the captain as soon as she was out of sight. "I saw you thought me coarse in urging this matter on her so abruptly, Bruce. But you do not understand. My time here is short—God knows how soon it may end—and I can't bear the thought of leaving the child alone. Van Ness is so pure a man—a Christian whom all the world reverences—What better can I hope than to see her his wife before I go?"

"His wife?"

"Yes. Is there any objection to him? Be frank, Bruce. It is nothing to you, but it's life and death to me. Van Ness told Judge Rhodes candidly this morning that he had watched Jane since she was a child, himself unknown, and that it was his hope their acquaintance would deepen into something warmer than friendship."

"Good God! what a model lover! Stands off watching for years—weighs her carefully in his scales. Item, so much amiability; item, so many pounds of healthy flesh; item, annual income so much. Then he steps in to inspect her a little closer, and if she prove satisfactory he will marry her."

"Bruce, you're unjust. Every man has not your sensitiveness. The way that Rhodes stated it there really was no indelicacy in it. Do you know any objection to Van Ness? Be candid. Have you any reason to urge against the marriage in case—?"

Mr. Neckart did not answer for a few moments. He had been smoking, but the cigar went out in his mouth. "No," he said at last. "I have no objection to urge to it. I have nothing to say. Go in, captain. The train is due now. I will follow you when I have finished my cigar."

CHAPTER VIII.

Miss Swendon, going up the wooded hill toward the house, raising her head, saw a man coming toward her down the narrow path. The low sunlight struck through the trees on his broad forehead and magnificent golden beard flowing full on his breast. He was in evening-dress; a topaz blazed on his snowy shirt-front; he walked meditatively, his hands clasped behind him; his eyes rested on her with beaming pleasure. She turned her head away, but saw him, without her eyes, advancing upon her—coming, it seemed to her, into her life.

Mr. Van Ness's personality indeed was too potent to admit of his slying unnoticed, like an ordinary human being, in and out of anybody's vision. You might look at him but for a moment, but his majestic port, the fineness of his linen, the very set of his high hat, his Christian benignity and grace, remained with you ever after, a possession of comfort and joy.

Jane knew him at a glance, though they had never met before. All of her life she had heard Aristides called the Just, and been a trifle bored by it. Undoubtedly this was he. She was not petulant or bored now.

If we want a key to her feeling, we can find it in the fact that there was not a moment since she burned the will that she had not known that she was right in doing it, and that there was not a moment in which she had not remembered that in the judgment of the world she was a thief.

Here was the man sent by Laidley out of his grave to judge her, a man who was embodied Virtue and Honor—in the world's eye.

There was evidently no doubt in Mr. Van Ness's mind, either, as to who the slight erect woman might be who came slowly up the rocky path, one hand on the dog's collar, the folds of her blue dress falling about her like the drapery of an antique statue, the coils of yellow hair only held in place by a black velvet band. If he had been watching her growth for years, as he said, waiting for this supreme moment, he gave no sign of emotion now that it had arrived, except that the radiance in his protruding light eyes became more intense. I may as well say, once for all, that Mr. Van Ness never was known to yield to weak emotion, irritability or any of those vicious humors which beset other men. If he had done so it would have grievously wounded the faith of his disciples. He possibly had met these temptations in his cradle, as the infant Hercules the serpents, strangled them and left them dead there, so passing into a serene boyhood and victorious middle age.

Bruno at this moment caught sight of the stranger, and began to growl ominously. Now, the dog was an amiable, courteous dog ordinarily, but subject, like his mistress, to irrational antipathies, and, like her, with a large reserve of untamed blood to support his prejudices. He stopped, dropped his head between his fore legs, his eyeballs reddened, he barked a short, sharp warning. Miss Swendon knew the signs: she had seen them once before. She caught him by the collar, looking straight at the exceptionally handsome man with the underbred blaze of yellow on his shirt-front: "Down! down, sir!—You had better go back," to Mr. Van Ness. "I beg of you to go back."

"No, no," gently, and still advancing. "Poor fellow!—Let me catch his eye, Miss Swendon."

It was something in the eye, however, which maddened the dog: he shook in every limb; his lips were drawn back; the sharp teeth glistened.

Jane threw herself on her knees, her arms about his throat: she motioned Van Ness back with her head, but the enraged animal threw her off as he would a wisp of straw, and sprang straight at his throat. Van Ness, though a heavily-built man, staggered back; but he caught the dog about the throat with both hands, and held him as in a vise. The red eyeballs and panting tongue were close to his face. Next, Bruno struck with his paw at one of the white soft hands, and tore a great gash in it, from which the blood gushed; but the pleasant smile did not leave the lips of his antagonist.

"Now, Miss Swendon," he said gently, "I think you can soothe him. I will hold him quiet to listen to reason."

Jane came to him, and in a few moments had the beast subdued and lying panting at her feet, his bloodshot eye still fixed on Van Ness. She was pale and trembling, offered her handkerchief to tie up the wounded hand, and was humble in her apologies; but Van Ness knew all the while that her sympathies were with the dog. Judge Rhodes had heard the scuffle, and arrived now, out of breath, and violent in his abuse of poor Bruno.

"Why you keep such an ill-conditioned beast, Jane, I cannot understand," he cried as he swabbed and tied the wound.

Mr. Van Ness beamed down unruffled on the stout little man: "You are always unjust to dogs, Rhodes. Now, I should say that our friend Bruno was one of the Brahmin caste—fine-natured and well-bred as a rule. Liable to mistakes, perhaps.—I am right, Miss Swendon?" and he beamed down in his turn on Jane, who sat on the bank, stroking the dog's muzzle as it lay on her knee. She forced a smile which proved a failure, said that he was right, and that she must hurry before them to the house. She stopped as soon as she was out of sight to hug the dog with a sob: "But we are not wild beasts, are we, Bruno?"

She felt the dog's insane desire to tear off this amiability, this cloying gentleness of the newcomer, and find what was beneath. It was just as it used to be long ago when prim, polite little misses came to play with her—white, pink-eyed poodles consorting with a big Newfoundland. She used to feel clumsy and worsted beside them, possessed by the devil too to scare and disgust them. Yet she knew herself more right than they all the time.

When she sat at the head of the dinner-table an hour or two later, soft silken drapery having taken the place of the soft woollen, and her usual calm good temper on the surface instead of pallor and tears, her secret mood was very much the same. Mr. Neckart sat apart from her: he spoke little, and that only to the captain, who was eager about the political question of the day. Judge Rhodes, dropping his voice, poured into her ear eulogiums on Van Ness.

"Did you see him smiling down on that brute? Now, how did he know but he had given him the hydrophobia?"

"I appreciated the self-control," smiling. "So did Bruno. It drove him mad."

"Self-control? I tell you, it's super-human! I've thought sometimes it was a divine power sustaining him. Why, I saw that man at his mother's deathbed. She lay in his arms, and he sang to her—hymns, you know—sang to her in a clear, unbroken voice until her spirit had passed out of hearing. I couldn't have done it, even for a stranger."

"I am sure you could not," said Miss Swendon.

"He sinks self out of sight wholly, you see. Now, he had a dog once—a hound like yours—brought him up. It was touching to see them together—the devotion of the poor brute. Well, he sold him, and gave the hundred dollars to his State Home for Children. He could not afford such a luxury as the dog's love, he said, while these poor wretches needed so much."

"But my dog," said Miss Swendon quite distinctly, "is more to me than all the wretches in Pennsylvania."

There was an awkward silence.

Mr. Van Ness turned his handsome face on her with a benign nod: "How natural and beautiful that is! Her dog and her babe and her lover are more to a woman than all the outside world. So they ought to be! Love is like air: when it is confined it only fills a given space, but give it escape and it spreads over all God's creation. The day is not far distant when young, fair women will freely give themselves to the work of raising the dangerous classes."

"Well, I don't know about that," said Rhodes. "I'm growing hopeless. What with ignorance and whiskey and conceit, the dangerous classes even here are too heavily handicapped to make any running. They will need two or three lives after this, it seems to me, to bring them up to a fair starting-point."

"That's a fact!" cried the captain. "Now, there are beggars. My plan is to give to 'em all, and so be on the safe side; but the organized charities tell us they are all impostors; and then every day some organized charity turns out a swindle! What is a man to do?"

"To do? Give himself up, I suppose, to the cause of the poor and the Lord, as this man has done!" cried the judge earnestly, touching Van Ness on the shoulder, who shook his head and smiled—a sad, deprecating smile.

"Don't look for wages of any sort, then. If a man wants to be suspected by the rich and abused by the poor, let him take up my work," he said a moment after, meeting Neckart's eye with a frank laugh.

"No doubt you are right," said Mr. Neckart gravely. "I never tried it."

They were rising from the table at the moment. As they passed through the hall, Mr. Neckart halted beside a window in which grew some house-plants. Jane came directly to him. She had fallen of late into the habit of consulting him in all her plans, as they both knew very well that she was not at all a capable woman—according to the New England idea: she lacked acuteness and knowledge of facts and all the fashionable aptitudes. She had not even cognizance enough of Wagner or cloisonné or old andirons to put her en rapport with her times.

It was a daily matter for her to appeal to Neckart to help her ignorance here or there, yet when he heard the soft rustle of her skirts beside him he grew perceptibly colder and stiffer, waiting without a smile for her to speak.

"I have brought my mind, as usual, to have it made up," she began gayly, growing instantly sober when she caught his glance. "What do I want with this ready-made Mentor? Do you think I need a financial adviser?"

"I have no doubt you will find Mr. Van Ness both shrewd and honest in that capacity, if you choose to consult him."

"Why should I? I suppose the money is invested properly. I draw the dividends regularly, and I have no use for money but one. I mean to make my father's life happy with it, and I know how to do that. Nobody can teach me. What have I to do with this reformer and his State Home?"

Mr. Neckart had been in the habit of looking down on her in her occasional outbursts with an amused indulgence as from an immeasurable difference of years. He was looking down at her now with unsmiling and, as she thought, unfriendly eyes; but she was suddenly, for the first time, conscious of how young he actually was, and how near to her in many unworded, fathomless ways. She drew back within the narrow limits of the window, and was silent.

He withdrew his eyes from her with an effort, and did not immediately answer. When he did, it was in a cool business tone. "I do not know what relation Mr. Van Ness may hold to you hereafter, if any," he said. "But he seems to me thoroughly honest and manly. He is the first professed reformer I ever saw who was not either subservient or aggressive to me, as a newspaper-man who did not ride his hobby."

"I do not see him with your eyes," she said with a shrug. "Bruno's, rather."

Neckart laughed. After the manner of men, he had judged the man who was crossing his life with calm common sense and justice, but he was quite satisfied that the woman with neither should condemn him.

The late clear twilight lingered with a haze of red in the sky, although the sun had been down for an hour or more. Jane stood irresolutely in the window. Through the bushes she could see the stoop where her father and the judge sat smoking, Mr. Van Ness beside them, his benign, sheep-like gaze wandering slowly around in search of her.

"Of course he does not smoke!" she said. "He has not a single weakness on which one can hang a liking; and he has actually taken father's own chair!" which by the way she had cushioned herself years ago, when it and two small stools furnished their shabby room. No wonder that she and the captain looked upon it as a sacred relic.

The window where they stood was shaded on the outside by privet and althea bushes: it opened to the ground, and a sandy little footpath ran directly to the river, where her boat was moored. Usually, while the captain took his after-dinner nap, she rowed along the shore, and Neckart, when he was there, would sit in the stern reading or scribbling his next leader, but oftener leaning back, his hands clasped behind his head, listening with half-closed eyes to her chatter. It is significant to note the occasion on which a silent woman has a flux de bouche. The necessity for talking was upon Jane at this moment. There were twenty things which she must tell Mr. Neckart to-night—how the shoemaker Twiss, who used to live—or starve—in the alley back of their garden, was here as head-gardener; and how capitally that consumptive sempstress, Nichols, managed the dairy and was growing quite fat at the work; and how that boy in the stable, whom Neckart had brought from the printing-office, where he was going headlong to the devil, had really turned out the best of fellows. The truth was, that there were very few people who had been kind to Jane or the captain in the days when they were all hungry together whom Neckart had not met at the farm, either as visitors or settled in fat sinecures of office. He had arranged the business part of their removal, indeed, in many cases. But he was in no mood for consultation to-night—answered briefly when she spoke to him: his face, hard and inflexible, was turned toward the river. "His mind is filled with some matter of state—that Navy appropriation bill, I suppose," she thought, looking at him deferentially. Her little affairs and thoughts fell back on her as if they had struck against iron.

She never wanted sympathy or advice from others: sometimes there were whole days in which, her father being gone, she scarcely spoke a word. But now, at the necessity for silence, her heart sunk with a miserable emptiness, her throat choked, hot wretched tears came up into her eyes. She had thought all the week of this day, and she had kept the best of all she had to tell until this evening. She thought, of course, they would go out in the boat, and now his mind was full of the Navy appropriation bill!

She pulled the white threads from the ragged cactus leaves beside her, looking at him sometimes from under her lashes. "I think I will go out on the river," she said timidly.

"Shall I push out the boat? The water will drift you without rowing," going promptly before her down the path. He took up the little anchor, wiped the seat of the bateau with the sponge, and held out his hand to help her in. She seated herself and took the oars. Surely he was coming? He never had allowed her to go alone. No: he waited with one hand on the stern, and then pushed her off, taking off his hat as the boat darted out into the current and her oars struck the water.

It was the bill: no doubt it was the bill! She knew he had been sent for to Washington on business concerning it. Of course he was a statesman, and it was quite right that the government and the country should have the benefit of his best thoughts. But what if this bill and other bills should always fill his mind, and leave no room there for—for the poor little affairs of his friends? "What would father do then?"

The oars rested motionless in the row-locks. Her eyes were dry, but there was a breathless stricture on her breast, as though an iron hand had clenched her and for the moment crushed the life back.

CHAPTER IX.

Mr. Neckart, standing back in the shadow of the scrubby althea-bushes, his hands clasped behind him and his eyes following the skiff as it drifted down the river in the twilight, compelled himself to argue the matter out according to the rulings of common sense, just as he would the appropriation bill.

He had been coming too close of late to this little girl in a brotherly way—of course in a brotherly way. He must stand farther off. She must marry. He had always looked forward to her marrying, and the time, in all probability, had come now. Van Ness was a manly, strong fellow: her father would urge it, and Jane would soon be won. For Neckart, with the majority of men, regarded amiability and high-colored, beefy good looks in his own sex as the irresistible attractions in a woman's eyes.

"They both have youth and personal attractions and culture—everything to make a marriage suitable. I can find no objection to it," proceeded his most reasonable meditation.

"But I can never see it!"

He had not spoken, but it seemed to him as if he had cried out. Then he laughed to think what an egregious ass he was. What was this yellow-haired girl in the boat to him more than any other of the millions of women with whom the world was filled? Nothing. They all were nothing to him.

He turned his back on the river and struck into one of the dusky alleys of the garden, pacing up and down below the old plum trees. He whistled to himself, and ran his hand through his shaggy hair as if to be rid of some cobwebs in his brain. As he brushed against the branches a bird fluttered out of its nest and chirped angrily. Why, women and their love and their homes could no more come into his life than that silly robin or her brood! Two years ago this inexorable necessity did not even give him a moment's chagrin. The newspaper, his army of followers, the policy of the country,—these made life big and full enough. If he wanted little selfish pleasures, there was his arm-chair and open fire, his shelf of old books, or a dinner at Delmonico's with some clever fellow, or a dash to Europe, or across the continent, to pry into the background against which other clever fellows, whether white or yellow or black, lived and worked. He would go back to the office to-night; he could hear the engine puffing at the station now, making ready for the next train; he could finish the evening with his old friends, the books; he could order a dinner to-morrow that would satisfy even his palate,—and he used to be an epicure. He ought to go. He would go.

He walked up the open path leading to the house. Then he stopped, turned and struck directly through the trees and bushes to the river-side. The boat was at some distance: he called once or twice for her to come and take him on board before she heard him. His voice sounded hoarse and strange to himself: he did not know himself in what he did. As for the world, there was nothing in it but that boat yonder which shot through the water, and the woman with eager face rowing swiftly toward him.

There was not a Wall-street banker or a politician among Neckart's confrères who would not have looked upon him as insane for the moment. This dull wisp of a woman to blot out all business, power, place, from his life? But, after all, there is no insanity so practical or long-lived. Why does A bull and bear the market, or B sell himself and his party, but for the sake of some ugly, faded woman and the commonplace children she has borne him? They are not thought worth notice by anybody but himself, but he ignores honesty, death, God himself, for them his life long. A plodding, shrewd fellow too, probably not a whit heroic.

Neckart was tramping along the common road which all of us know, but it seemed to him that he was breaking ground in a new world full of misty splendors and untried action. When he called to her his breath failed him, as it used to do when he was a boy wild with excitement. The sand under his feet, the brambles on the bank, the overarching sky, were not the same they were an hour ago. When the boat darted up to the shore, rocking as she held it fast with the oar, it seemed strange to him that she should speak in her ordinary tone. Did she not know?

She stood up in the bow steadying the skiff as he sprang into it. His hand touched her fingers for an instant, and she noticed that it shrank from hers.

"Did my father call me?"

"No: I wanted to talk to you alone."

She pushed from shore and dipped her oars: in a moment they were out in the current. It was a rippling belt of steely blue, the banks making indistinguishable ramparts of shadow on either side. Overhead was the soft starless twilight of June, through which a nighthawk flapped heavily and vanished. When it was gone they were alone. Could she not understand that they were alone? In this wide dark world that there were only they two, a man and a woman?

He could not distinguish her face, and her figure was but a light dark outline like a silhouette against the air. But the power of her womanhood was upon him, a something which Neckart had never felt before—a terrible, pure passion.

"Give me the oars," he said. "Let me help you," reaching forward to take them. His hand rested on hers accidentally: he did not remove it. Now did she understand? His mouth was closed. It seemed to him as if words were poor to say what was in his blood, in his soul, in the water, the air, the very ground.

She was startled, and turned to him wondering. The moon, rising higher, showed him the childish, sensitive mouth, the dark eyes heavy with tears, for she had been crying. What was that which gleamed through them, half answering him, frightened at itself? It seemed to him in this brief pause that they had been waiting all their lives for this word—he to speak and she to hear.

"Jane!" He took her hand in both of his and held it close, and then he threw it from him, drawing back: "My God! I had forgotten."

"Forgotten?" She closed her eyes once or twice, bewildered, as if suddenly wakened from sleep. "You are in trouble," she said anxiously. "Can I help you?"

The question brought him to sober reason sharply enough. It was precisely the frank, tender tone which she would use to her father; and the truth was, that the girl to herself did not yet distinguish between her father and this friend. A moment before a strange emotion had touched her. But it had passed like a warm gust of summer. There was not a seven-year old child in the city yonder who did not know more about love than Jane. She had never heard servants or schoolmates chatter about it; novels had bored her; the captain, whatever he had left undone, had kept the air pure and cold about her as for a very nun.

"What is this trouble, Mr. Neckart? You have been ill for months, I know. Can I—? Or perhaps father—"

She leaned forward, the oars suspended in her hands, her lips apart, attentive and eager.

He leaned over the edge of the skiff and wet his forehead and eyes, forcing a careless laugh: "One moment, Miss Swendon, and I will explain to you," adding presently, precisely in the manner with which he would have discussed the weather, "We men each have our skeleton to hide, according to popular belief, and mine is no worse than the rest. It is the most practical of facts. Only I am apt to forget it, and then, when it meets me unawares, it is as grim as death."

She nodded, watching him intently as if he were physically ill: she would not let the oars strike on the water, lest the noise might jar on him. All kinds of wild plans for helping him filled her brain. If the trouble were anything which money could help, there was plenty of that, thank God! If it was political difficulty—bills maybe—she could not even understand it. If God had only not made her so stupid! the humble tears rising slowly to her eyes.

Mr. Neckart did not see them. He was careful not to look at her as he spoke, and hurried on with his explanation, as if it were business of small importance. But she was not deceived by that. "I never have talked of this matter, and least of all should I have told it to you. I can bear the trouble when it comes without difficulty. The most ordinary men meet disaster coolly which they know is inevitable. Commonplace fellows who are born with scrofula or consumption march along with them to early death cheerfully. They make no tragedy out of it. There is no reason why I should complain of my lifelong companion." His tone was harder than he had ever used in speaking to Jane before.

"I have never told you of my mother?"

"No," eagerly, hastening to spare him pain. "But I have heard of her from Cornelia Fleming, who was your neighbor in Delaware. I know all that she suffered. You need not tell me."

"She was the last of the Davidge family. There was not one of them for generations who had not inherited disease of the brain. They were either epileptics from youth, or became, as she did, incurably insane. The disease invariably manifested itself in that way after middle age, and from that time they were helpless burdens to their children. Yet there was not a Davidge who refrained from marriage, so entailing the curse on another generation. It would have been more righteous to have put a pistol to their heads and have blown out their brains."