A SCENE ON THE FAST DRIVE OF CENTRAL PARK ON A SEPTEMBER AFTERNOON.

DRAWN BY ALEXANDER COLES.

MUNSEY’S MAGAZINE.

SNAP SHOTS IN CENTRAL PARK.

By J. Crawford Hamilton.

THE TERRACE—STEPS LEADING DOWN TO THE BETHESDA FOUNTAIN AND THE LAKE.

The provincial, who knows all about Central Park and regards it as the eighth wonder of the modern world, is more nearly right than the New Yorker, who is inclined to take it as a matter of course. There are comparatively few who remember the unpromising aspect of the rocky, swampy waste which, thirty five years ago, occupied the midmost portion of Manhattan Island. The designers of the park have been so signally successful in overcoming the difficulties that confronted them when they took their task in hand, that the visitor of today hardly gives them due credit for the remarkable result, or realizes the vast expenditure of money, labor, and skill that has here created the most beautiful park possessed by any of the world’s great capitals.

THE CENTRAL PARK MENAGERIE ON A SUMMER AFTERNOON.

For where can Central Park’s charms be matched? Not beneath the smoky sky of London, where vegetation cannot attain anything like the variety and luxuriance possible in our clear, pure atmosphere. Besides, little attempt at landscape gardening has been made in any of the parks of the British metropolis. They may be termed useful rather than ornamental, and are valued more for their practical hygienic effect as breathing spots in a vast and crowded city than as fields for the artistic reproduction of natural beauties. And in Paris, the allées of the Bois de Boulogne, prim and formal in their straightness, lack the charm of Central Park’s winding drives with their changing vistas of bordering woodland and meadow. Philadelphia and Chicago—if we admit those cities to a comparison—have parks of larger acreage, but inferior attractions. Quantity can never atone for defects of quality.

Central Park is not so very small, either. It is over half a mile in width, and more than two and a half miles in length. It covers 840 acres, which will hardly compare with Fairmount’s 2740 or the Bois de Boulogne’s 2150, but is enough to rank it with other large metropolitan parks, and to afford ample scope to the various arts that have contributed to make it what it is. Londoners call Hyde and Regent’s Parks large, but their united extent is but five acres more than that of Central Park.

Indeed, one of the most wonderful and attractive features of Central Park is the skill with which its apparent size has been magnified. A stranger driving or walking through it would never suppose that in his entire journey he had never been more than four hundred and fifty yards away from the streets of New York. The almost total exclusion of the outer world, and the production of effects of distance, are really remarkable triumphs of landscape gardening.

ON THE DRIVE.

Another great charm of Central Park is the marvelous variety of its scenery and embellishments. In the Mall, and especially in the terrace that leads from it to the lake, we find the highest development of artificial decoration. The broad promenade and the straight avenue of trees, the work of masons and sculptors, the plashing fountain and the lake below—all these combine to produce the appearance of the garden of some old French chateau. On the other hand, on the banks of the Harlem Mere, in the North Park, sylvan nature reigns in almost primeval wildness. Here and there in the park are broad, level meadows, divided by stretches of thick wood. The Ramble, with its labyrinth of winding paths, its rustic bridge, its cave, and its miniature water falls, is an ideal Arcadian spot, while the lawn tennis ground presents a fin de siècle contrast. Then there are over thirty buildings, put to almost as many different uses, from the monkey house in the menagerie to the lofty tower of the Belvedere, which seems like a picturesque corner of a Rhine castle. As further evidence of the amount of work that has been done to perfect the park, and of the variety of its contents, it may be stated that it can boast of nine sheets of water, forty eight bridges and archways, nine miles of drives, five miles of bridle path, and nearly thirty miles of walks; that it has nineteen gates, and that over half a million trees have been set out within its limits.

THE OBELISK IN CENTRAL PARK.

The list of statues to be found in Central Park is a long and rather curiously mixed one. Daniel Webster, Alexander Hamilton, FitzGreene Halleck, S. F. B. Morse—these names are well worthy to be thus commemorated. It is not inappropriate that the marble image of Columbus, the discoverer of the New World, should stand in the chief pleasure ground of its metropolis. Nor can there be any objection to the ideal figures—that of Commerce, the cleverly modeled Indian Hunter, and the memorial to the soldiers of the Seventh Regiment who fell in the civil war. But strangely enough, all the other statues in the park are those of foreigners. The German residents of New York presented the busts of Humboldt and Schiller. Citizens of Italian birth erected the bust of Mazzini, while sons of stern Caledonia contributed the statues of Burns and Scott. From South America came the equestrian bronze of Bolivar, and the list of monuments is completed by those of Shakespeare and Beethoven. Great men as all these worthies were, and laudable as is the desire of their fellow countrymen to do them honor, it is somewhat unfortunate that the erection of a statue in Central Park should have come to be the recognized method of giving expression to this feeling. If the process is continued indefinitely, the park will become so thickly dotted with the monuments of foreigners that the statues of Webster and Hamilton may have to be removed to make room for the images of the deceased poets and scientists of England and France, Finland and Kamskatka.

Of this tendency to cosmopolitanism the Mall seems to be headquarters. Halleck (the poet, not the general), is the solitary American represented in its statuary. The visitor may listen there to imported music discoursed by a band principally composed of imported musicians, or stroll to the terrace to admire the most ambitious ornament of the park—the Bethesda fountain, which, although designed by a New York artist—Miss Emma Stebbins—was modeled in Rome and cast in Munich.

IN THE NORTH PARK—A SOLITARY STROLL.

In its vegetation, too, Central Park has a cosmopolitan tone. Much has been done to make it a sort of Jardin d’Acclimatation for the trees and shrubs indigenous to other climes. The commissioners’ efforts in this direction have had good results in varying its flora with exotics whose foliage or flowers make them pleasing to the eye as well as interesting to the botanist. They have not always been equally fortunate, however, and have been criticised for an apparent partiality to foreign trees in preference to natives of sturdier growth and better suited to the climate. It is not every European plant that will flourish here. For instance, six years ago a splendid row of English hawthorn bushes lined a long stretch of the park’s western edge between Sixtieth and Seventieth Streets, and in May bore a wealth of the white blossoms that take their name from the month. They are there no more, killed by the severity of our winters.

AN AFTERNOON GATHERING ON THE MALL.

Asia, and especially Japan, have contributed some valuable additions to Central Park’s woods and shrubbery. The most conspicuous of these is the Rose of Sharon, whose pink and white blossoms are the park’s chief floral ornament in the latter days of summer—for it is in spring that most of the other shrubs and creepers flower.

In the spring, indeed, Central Park reaches its acme of natural beauty and artificial attraction. In the spring its drives are thronged by the equipages of the Four Hundred who later in the year are scattered over two or three continents. In the spring the trees and meadows are clothed with a fresh garb of green, and the Park policeman in a new suit of gray, the cynosure of admiring nursemaids. In the spring the wistaria, the honeysuckle, the jasmine, and the guelder rose make the landscape gay with color. In the spring the dogwood, the most beautiful and characteristic of our lesser trees, sends down its falling petals in a snow white shower. In the spring the New Yorker may be pardoned if for once he feels positively poetical as he witnesses in Central Park the annual miracle of nature’s rejuvenation.

THE BRIDGE ACROSS THE STRAIT BETWEEN THE UPPER AND LOWER LAKES.

But more observers’ eyes, probably, are turned upon the driveways and their wonderful parade of vehicles than upon the panorama of wood and meadow. Such a sight as the wheeled procession that pours through the entrance at Fifty Ninth Street and Fifth Avenue cannot be found elsewhere in America, and is indeed only matched by the displays of Rotten Row and the Champs Elysées. Other American cities admittedly look to New York as their leader and mentor in the matter of fine horseflesh and smart equipages. The very latest and handsomest products of the carriage builders’ skill are here to be seen whirling along behind teams whose value represents a small fortune. There comes the banker’s victoria, drawn by a pair of horses whose clock-like gait and well fed aspect of sleekness show that they appreciate their position in the establishment to which they belong. Behind this comes a trim, light phaeton; then a family party in a barouche; these predominating types of vehicle being interspersed with the tall and ostentatious four in hand, the more unconventional buckboard, the natty dogcart, and the democratic park coach, whose passengers take in all the beauties of the scene at twenty five cents a trip.

The bridle path, too, on a sunny afternoon in May, is a spectacle to be remembered. Its pictures come and pass more swiftly than those of the drive, where moderation of speed is a necessity, and is promptly enforced, in the rare cases of its infraction, by the mounted policemen. And, by the way, these sublimated graycoats are themselves worthy of a second glance. Their animals are a really beautiful and well groomed set—most of them bays—and the riders’ horsemanship is of such uniform excellence that a stranger in the park can hardly distinguish one member of the mounted force from another. And in their patrol over fourteen miles of driveway and bridle path their duty is by no means a sinecure. Their courage and promptitude have often been tried by the accidents caused from time to time by untrained horses or reckless or inexperienced drivers and riders. At the season and the hour when it is most frequented, the bridle path is no place for the careless or unskilled horseman. As much space has been given to it as can well be spared, but its width is so comparatively small that at some of the bends serious accidents might easily occur. The rule against riding more than two abreast is a highly necessary one.

The separation of the drives and the bridle paths is a point in which convenience has been subordinated to other considerations. If they lay close together throughout their length, instead of winding through the park on wholly divergent lines, the enjoyment of both riders and drivers would be increased. A radical alteration in the plan of the park, however, would be necessary to effect such a change.

Nearly a quarter of Central Park is occupied by its various bodies of water. These have their ornamental and their practical side. The latter is of course represented by the reservoirs that receive the principal portion of the water supply brought down by the Croton aqueduct. There is a smaller double basin (now being deepened) in the center of the park opposite Eightieth Street, overlooked by the Belvedere, and the main reservoir that fills nearly the whole of the space between Eighty Sixth and Ninety Sixth Streets, and forms the division between the North Park and the South Park. That this big pond, pretty nearly half a mile in length and in width, adds nothing to the attractions of the park, few who have walked or ridden along its border will maintain.

CHILDREN AND NURSES IN THE PARK.

Of the ornamental waters the Lake—so called par excellence—is the chief. The effect with which irregularity of outline may be used to add to apparent size is well exemplified by comparing this with the reservoir. Take a boat on the upper part of the Lake, near the foot of the Terrace, row under the bridge across the strait into its lower expanse, and continue to the furthest extremity of the creeks that open into it, and you will hardly guess that the whole sheet of water measures but twenty acres, while the Croton reservoir covers more than a hundred. You will also be likely to think that you have found a remarkably pleasant place for a row, especially if your expedition is made in the dusk of a summer evening, when the red lanterns that glow dimly in the bows of the boats make a picturesque scene which is often pronounced to be “just like Venice” by those who have never been in that city of watery streets.

A “TALLY HO” IN CENTRAL PARK—THE FAVORITE VEHICLE OF THE JEUNESSE DORÉE.

The other lakes are the Pond, near the Fifty Ninth Street entrance, on which ply the swan boats; the Conservatory water near Fifth Avenue and opposite Seventy Fourth Street; and three in the North Park—Harlem Mere, in the northwestern corner, and the two miniature lakelets called the Pool and the Lock.

The swan boats are by no means the park’s only attraction especially designed for children. There are the swings and merry-go-round of the carrousel, and the little carriages that are drawn up and down the Mall by well trained goats. The menagerie, too, is a source of never failing wonder and amusement. There is always a crowd, in which young people predominate, watching the monkeys, gazing with something like awe at Tip, the huge elephant who has murdered more than one of his keepers, or throwing peanuts and similar esculents to the more docile pachyderm whose quarters are in the neighboring cage.

The enjoyment of the children would be greater yet if the grass covered lawns were not forbidden territory to them. In a few places, indeed, they are allowed to play upon nature’s green carpet, and the privilege might well be extended without injury to the park.

PLAYS AND PLAYERS OF THE DAY.

By Morris Bacheller.

FRANCIS WILSON.

Of the two great divisions of the drama, tragedy is today surprisingly similar to what it was in the days of the ancient Greeks, while comedy has in the mean time been the subject of a remarkable evolution. That evolution has proceeded with especial rapidity within recent years. To find the best and noblest exemplifications of tragedy we have to go back two centuries to the master works of Shakespeare. A few exceptional comedies there are of Sheridan’s or Goldsmith’s, whose popularity has not diminished with the lapse of time, though many generations have come and gone since they were penned. But they may be counted upon the fingers of a single hand, and only serve to emphasize the rarity of comedies that can hold the boards for more than a few seasons.

The development of comedy, and especially of its more farcical branches, is, indeed, the chief feature of recent dramatic history. Attribute it to a reaction from the increased tension of modern business life, or assign what sociological cause you will, the fact remains that the general demand is for plays whose aim and object is to amuse. It cannot be maintained that this tendency is restricted to the less educated class of theater goers. On the contrary, it is at houses that are especially frequented by people of wealth and fashion that the supremacy of comedy is most assured. Melodrama is still the most drawing card in the theaters patronized by the lower million.

The advance of comedy has been multiform. Farces of greater ingenuity and more sustained brilliance of workmanship are written by the playwrights of today than by their forerunners. They are interpreted upon the boards by more finished artists, and with a stage setting that constantly becomes more complete and costly. The comedian has a higher professional and even social standing now than a generation ago, and he may secure a much greater degree of renown, with its financial accompaniment of ample earnings. And all this arises from the workings of the old law of supply and demand. Every art that can contribute to the embellishment of its presentation becomes the handmaid of comedy. Music is pressed into its service, and the result is that characteristic phase of latter day theatricals, the burletta.

There was a time, and not so very long ago, when the predecessors of Francis Wilson and De Wolf Hopper were set down as “low comedians,” and relegated to an artistic rank slightly superior to that of the circus clown. Every one knows the contrast in the position of the modern apostles of Momus. Attend the theaters, read the newspapers, listen to the comment of the club rooms, and you will speedily be convinced that they are the theatrical lions of the hour, that among all the constellations of the dramatic firmament their planet is in the ascendant. Nor is there anything in this state of affairs to justify the pessimistic philosopher in an outcry against the alleged decadence of the stage. The popular taste for comedy is neither a degraded nor a perverted one, and the success of its leading exponents has been won upon their merits.

The comic star rises to the zenith by an ascent as difficult and laborious as that which leads to high rank in any other profession. Ars est celare artem, and the apparently easy spontaneity with which he develops the humor of a stage situation is the fruit of conscientious study and persistent practice. There are no more painstaking actors than the two typical burlesquers who as the Regent of Siam and the Merry Monarch have during the recent months reigned successively at the Broadway Theater, New York.

Francis Wilson, who recently succeeded his brother potentate, has worked his way up from the lowest rounds of the theatrical ladder. His first appearance was with Sandford’s minstrel company in a sketch called “The Brians,” which was played in Philadelphia. Young as he was—only a boy in his teens—Wilson made something of a hit. This was enough to secure him plenty of remunerative engagements with minstrel troupes, as a member of which he traveled all over the country. He was ambitious, however, for work of a higher order, and to secure a foothold upon the legitimate stage he undertook a minor part in a company that appeared at the Chestnut Street Theater, in Philadelphia. Here again his talents declined to conceal themselves under a bushel. In the role of Lamp, a broken down actor in “Wild Oats,” he carried with him upon the stage an old foil, the last relic of better days, and from this seemingly unpromising article he managed to extract so much quiet humor that the audience was convulsed and the star of the piece entered a formal complaint at this interference with his supremacy.

DE WOLF HOPPER.

The following years saw the young actor steadily advancing in his art, but experiencing various ups and downs of fortune, which wound up with the “stranding” of his company, Mitchell’s Pleasure Party, in San Francisco. Next he reappeared in Philadelphia—let us hope that he was not obliged to reach it on foot—as a member of the McCaull troupe, with which he played in his first comic opera, “The Queen’s Lace Handkerchief.”

From this point his career has been one of uncheckered prosperity. He was speedily recognized as a comic opera star of no ordinary luster. In such standard parts as that of Cadeaux in Erminie he achieved a reputation and a popularity that finally led him to organize a company of his own, with which he has even eclipsed his previous successes in “The Oolah” and “The Merry Monarch.”

De Wolf Hopper’s popularity has been won still more rapidly than that of his brother comedian. He is the youngest of our successful actors, as well as one of the most original in his methods, but he has been upon the boards long enough to gain a thorough dramatic training and a varied experience. It was his enthusiasm for private theatricals, and his success in them, that led him upon the professional stage—in spite of the fact that he had been educated for the law. He was only twenty when, in 1880, he appeared as the leading spirit of the Criterion Comedy Company, which had a fair measure of prosperity, presenting such standard plays as “Caste” and “Our Boys.” When it disbanded he was successively with Edward Harrigan in “The Blackbird,” and at the Madison Square Theater under the management of Daniel Frohman. At this latter house, in the parts of Pittacus Green in “Hazel Kirke,” and Oliver Hathaway in “May Blossom,” he gained the approbation of metropolitan theater goers to a degree that was greatly enhanced during the next five years, which he passed as a member of the McCaull opera company. His last season with that organization was marked by a success as Casimir in “Clover” that showed an advance upon anything he had previously done. “Wang,” which was so notably well received at the Broadway Theater during the past summer, was his first independent venture.

MODJESKA AS ROSALIND.

There are those who cherish the idea that the continued success of actors like Messrs. Wilson and Hopper is largely due to the prestige of their reputation and the indulgence shown by the public toward established favorites. They tell us that it matters little what may be the merits of the piece or its staging, the star is sure to have a following sufficient to fill the box office with a golden stream. He might almost as well dispense with the libretto altogether, they say, for as soon as he opens his lips to speak the audience roars with laughter.

MODJESKA AS PORTIA.

So far as it denies the necessity for care and labor, thought and skill, in the preparation and presentation of a farce, this theory is fundamentally mistaken. It has again and again been proved that no names upon the playbill, however eminent, can make a poor play successful. The theater going public may not be infallible, but it is too discriminating to accept an unpalatable article because it bears a title of repute. The later popularity of “The Oolah” has obliterated recollection of the fact that on its first night its reception was not enthusiastic. The critics thought and said that Wilson had made a mistake. But the comedian set himself at work to improve the piece, cutting here, adding there, and interlining and changing until in a hundred small but yet not unimportant points it was a different and a better play. This is merely a single example of those expenditures of thought and care that escape the hasty critic, and many similar incidents might be cited. For instance, the remarkably flexible voice of which De Wolf Hopper makes such effective use has received almost as careful training as a prima donna’s.

MADAME HELENA MODJESKA.

It would hardly be fair to the theatrical situation of the day to picture it only as a regime of farce comedy. The burlesque is indeed the most characteristic phase of the fin de siècle dramatic development, but it is not by any means sole monarch of the stage. The avenue that leads to the applause of the world of culture is still open to interpreters of the art that can call forth tears as well as laughter.

MODJESKA AS JULIE DE MORTIMER.

No better proof of this can be given than the marked favor with which Madame Modjeska has been everywhere received during her comparatively brief career upon the American stage. It is true that she had already gained a wide reputation in Europe when she abandoned her profession and came to the New World with her husband, Count Bozenta. They had in view the establishment of a colony of their Polish fellow countrymen in Southern California. The scheme was probably somewhat Utopian. At any rate it was abandoned, and the countess, under her earlier name of Modjeska, fitted herself for the English speaking stage.

San Francisco was the scene of her debut, and “Adrienne Lecouvreur” the play. She has since acted in all the leading cities of America, besides making two visits to London. Her repertory includes a wide range of pieces of the highest intellectual order. As a delineator of Shaksperian heroines she is unsurpassed, and her appearances with Edwin Booth in the great dramatic classics have been among the most notable events of recent seasons. The intensity of her Juliet, the grace and dignity of her Portia, the pathos of her Ophelia, and the Arcadian naïveté of her Rosalind have borne witness to her rare endowment of histrionic talent. Among other plays in which she has taken the leading part are “Camille,” “Mary Stuart,” “Juanna,” “Frou-Frou,” “Odette,” and “Richelieu.” In the last named, which she played in conjunction with Booth, she scored one of her most notable successes as Julie de Mortimer.

Long as she has been upon the stage of two continents, Madame Modjeska’s impersonations of Juliet or Beatrice have all the fresh charm of youth. With exceptional skill in the portrayal of strong emotion she combines a lightness of touch and a graceful refinement that are peculiarly characteristic. The fact that she has never succeeded in removing from her English speech the last faint trace of a foreign accent, is to many of her parts rather an added interest than a blemish.

MODJESKA AS OPHELIA.

A DAUGHTER OF THE DESERT.

By Thomas Winthrop Hall.

A tired horse ambled slowly up to the solitary adobe house, or rather hut, that meets the sight of the dusty traveler who journeys between a certain station on the Southern Pacific railroad and the famous Indian station at San Carlos. One hundred miles of dusty road that wound over a naked, sandy plain sparsely dotted with hideous cactus, a stretch of the desert on either side, and on the horizon walls of gray mountains treeless as the desert itself—these were the uncheerful surroundings of McCoy’s ranch. Worse than a prison, more remote than a Siberian mine, lonelier than the grave, here two human souls, father and daughter, had lived for more than twelve years, and during that twelve years they had been away from that adobe oasis, the girl at least, not one single day, and the father never longer than it would take him to ride over to the mountains for a short hunt. It was a watering station on the stage road. An artesian well had been sunk there in the early days. Like every other work of man it had to have its human slaves, and from the day the last adobe had been laid these slaves had been McCoy and his daughter Sis. The latter was a child of six when she was lifted out of the ox wagon at the door of the house. She was now a girl of eighteen.

What a life hers had been! One unvarying monotony of cooking and of washing, of chopping wood and feeding the horses and of looking anxiously one day up the road for the stage to come down and the next day down the road for the stage to come up so that she might have dinner (a pretentious name for a meal that consisted always of bacon, eggs, coffee and hot bread) prepared for the stage driver and what unfortunate companions in misery he might be transporting to or from the agency. These, alas, gulped down their food as hastily as possible and hastened away at once, only too anxious to get the thing over with. That was all she saw of them. Once in a while she caught sight of a muffled figure in an ambulance that stopped for water for its thirsty mules and knew that it was a woman because it did not get out and swear at the heat and dust, an officer’s wife probably—ah! how she longed to speak to her. The rough freighters often camped there. This was the sum total of the girl’s experience with beings of her kind save one.

That was the man who sat carelessly erect on the tired horse that ambled up to the adobe house. Lieutenant Jack Harding was he, of Uncle Sam’s —th regiment of cavalry. And what a man he was, to be sure! Handsome as a Greek god, stalwart as a Norse warrior, reckless, brave, accomplished, as gentle as a girl until aroused, then as wild and defiant as an Apache, he was a Bayard in the eyes of most women and a demi-god in the estimation of poor Sis. He had stopped over night at the watering station six times in four years. Sis dreamed of his coming months before he appeared, and dreamed, too, of his going months after he went. She worshiped him from the moment she first saw him. That was all. She had read many books, for her father had taught her to read, and Jack Harding served in turn as the hero of each novel she became possessed of, and, of course, (O dear little trait of woman’s nature) she as the heroine.

Lieutenant Jack jumped from his horse as lightly as though a ride of fifty miles were a mere bagatelle, and walked smilingly up to the door. Just as he reached it Sis came bashfully to the doorway.

“Hello, Sis,” said the lieutenant cheerfully.

“O——,” replied Sis. She never could talk to him.

“Dad home?”

“Nope.”

“Hunting?”

“Yep.”

“Well, I’ve come to make my party call for the last time I was here. Got anything to eat?”

“Only bacon and eggs.”

“Good enough for a prince—if the prince is as hungry as I am. All right, get them ready. I’ll go and take care of Noche. Come, Noche—want some water, old girl?” He led off the horse, and Sis turned from the doorway to the kitchen. As she did so she stepped just for one moment into a little room that, were she a lady, she would call her boudoir, though it was but little larger than a good sized piano box, and looked searchingly at her own face in a bit of broken looking glass. What did she see? No thing of beauty, I assure you. This girl had not been dowered by God with that divine gift that makes every woman who possesses it a queen. Far from it. But so ignorant of the world was she, so much an utter stranger to the appearance of others of her sex, that she did not know that she was remarkably homely. Freckle faced, pug nosed, red haired, rough and worn with work, she was in appearance positively ugly. She had often asked her father whether or not she was good looking, and he had invariably replied “Yes.” But he always said it in such a way that poor Sis began at last to suspect that she was not really as beautiful as the heroines of Scott’s novels (she knew the descriptions of them by heart.) Still it might be, and she hoped—a thing that a woman does almost as easily as she forgives.

The supper was eaten in the usual wondering silence on her part and the running fire of nonsense on the part of the lieutenant. He accused her of being in love with “Peg-leg,” the mule driver, and was cheerfully unconscious of the fact that his words tortured her heart until she almost broke down and cried before him. He told her all the news of the post and the latest jokes on the officers in an endeavor—a vain one—to make her laugh. People who have lived ten years in a desert do not laugh. At last it was over, and she cleared away and washed the dishes. He smoked his pipe the while, wondering how in the world she came to be so homely, wondering how she managed to exist in such a place, and coming to a mental conclusion as to how long he himself could stand such a life before committing suicide. Then he went out and took a stroll on the sandy desert. Old McCoy was not in sight, and though it was moonlight it was hardly probable that he would return that night. He congratulated himself, too, that Sis had not been brought up to the ideas of good society, else he would have to make his bed in the hay that night and leave the house, double barred and locked, to Sis. He even thoughtlessly muttered to himself, “What a wonderful protection a homely face is!” Then he went back to the kitchen to talk to Sis a while before going to bed. As he entered a sight met his astonished eyes that almost made him burst with laughter. It was nothing more nor less than Sis arrayed in a gown that would have been an absurdity in caricature. Green satin trimmed with red ribbons and a red sash, formless, shapeless, it was her pitiful attempt to appear beautiful. Her great hands hung from the sleeves like baskets from the branches of an apple tree. Her red face and hair looked redder still by the contrast with the gaudy colors of the dress, and she stood in the habitual slouching attitude so characteristic of her. Yet there was something in her gray eyes that told him it was a supreme moment in her life—the wearing of this dress—and he did not laugh. Indeed, for a moment he almost felt sad. He tried to sit down as unconcernedly as possible, and busied himself filling his pipe. He did not dare to look at her. He hoped she would do something or say something, but she did not. She stood there silent, intense, looking at him so earnestly that it was but too manifest that she was trying to read his thoughts. He must do something.

“Where did you get that dress, Sis?” he said as quietly as he could.

“Dad gave it to me,” she answered. “He always promised me a satin dress, and so last Christmas he sent and got the satin. I made it. This is the first time I have worn it before any one.”

She spoke as though the words were choking her. She seemed to be nerving herself for something unusual. She was.

“Tell me,” she cried, almost fiercely, “tell me honestly, am I beautiful?”

He tried not to do it. He felt like a cur, a second afterwards, for having done it. But he could not help it, do what he could to control himself. He laughed aloud.

“O don’t—don’t—don’t——” she almost screamed. Then she fell on the floor in a green and red heap and wept. Jack had seen women weep before (a number of them had wept at different times when he had come to say “good by”), but never before had he seen such a torrent of tears as this. There was no stemming it, though he tried very hard. It seemed an age before it ceased, and then it seemed another age that she sat there motionless with her face in her hands as though she was trying to hide it. He felt horribly nervous. It took him sixteen matches, as he afterwards said, to smoke one pipe. Finally she broke the silence. Her voice was calm enough as she asked:

“What is a beautiful woman like?”

He did not answer in words. It was just a little hard to speak at all. He unbuttoned his blouse and took from the inside pocket a photograph and handed it to her. She held it fiercely in her two great rough hands and gazed at it steadily for a long time. Poor woman, she learned what beauty was, and she learned of the love of this man whom she worshiped. Then she got up, handed back the photograph to its owner and walked silently and slowly from the room.

It was hard for Jack Harding to sleep that night. He got into a fitful slumber along towards morning, and he had not been sleeping for an hour when he found himself standing awake in the middle of the room feeling for his revolver in the gray light of the early dawn.

“Nothing but a shot could wake me like that,” he said to himself, and hastily pulling on his clothes and taking his revolver in his hand he went through the house. The fire had been built and breakfast, already cooked, was waiting for him. “I guess Sis didn’t sleep much either,” he thought. He knocked at her door but received no answer. “Milking the cow, I guess,” he thought, but there was beginning to be a horrible dread in his heart. He ran hastily out of the house, and there—there under his own window lay Sis, again a green and red heap, but there was red on the dress now that was not ribbon. She had shot herself in the breast. He ran to her and picked her up. He carried her into the house and swore at himself for never having had the energy to study a little surgery in all the long years of his army idleness. Presently she revived a little and he heard her murmur faintly: “Tell dad good by—tell him I can’t help him any longer.”

“Oh, Sis!” he pleaded, “why did you do this?”

“Because you laughed at me,” she answered.

“But I did not mean it. You are beautiful, Sis, indeed you are very beautiful.”

“Oh no, I’m not,” she said. “I know what beauty is now.”

He could say nothing for a time. He hardly knew why he said what he did when he spoke.

“Sis,” he asked her gently, “tell me, why did you want to be beautiful?”

“Because—because I loved you,” she answered slowly and with a sob.

And when her father got home that afternoon and walked gayly into the little adobe house, he found them still together, one dead—one weeping.

A BRIEF BURLESQUE.

As Performed Upon the Modern Stage.

She—You love me?

He—Aye, I do indeed,

How can I prove it?

She—Is there need?

He—Nay, not for some, but you are cold—

Ah, would our life were that of old

That I might prove by feat of arms

My wish to shield you from all harms—

As knight of thine I could not fail!

She—There’s safety in a coat of mail.

He—True, so there is; but take the case

Of Orpheus—give to me his place.

For Orpheus left this world above,

At Pluto’s throne he showed his love—

She—But that’s mythology, you know—

He—To Pluto I would go to show—

She—Ah, thanks; but is it just to trace

Comparisons between his Grace

Of the Inferno and mon père?

You’d hardly find the latter there,

But in that room with door ajar

You’ll see him deep in his cigar;

Which after dinner smoke, I find,

Brings him a happy frame of mind.

Go to him, therefore, and confess—

Then I am yours if he says yes.

(She watches him as he hurries away)

Poor boy, without a single cent

Upon an empty errand bent!

THE MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY.

By Warren Taylor.

The completion of the new building of the American Museum of Natural History marks the second step toward the realization of one of the most colossal schemes ever formed for the promotion of science. The plan will not be fully carried out until the whole of Manhattan Square, on a part of which the present edifice stands, is covered with a structure of imposing extent and immense capacity, which is to become the great headquarters of natural science on this continent, and to rank on at least an equality with any similar institution in the world.

Natural history is a department of knowledge that should be of especial interest to the inhabitants of a country where nature displays her wonders on so tremendous a scale and her riches in such exhaustless variety. And indeed America’s contributions to that branch of science have already been great. Of this the names of Alexander Wilson, Charles Lucien Bonaparte, James E. DeKay, James Dwight Dana, and others no less noteworthy, will serve as sufficient evidence.

Scientific societies were among the earliest developments of American intellectual life, and in our leading cities they have received a constant and growing support. Oldest of all is the Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, which issued scientific works as long ago as 1769. In 1780 the American Academy of Arts and Sciences was organized in Boston, and in 1812 the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Science began its useful existence. New York was later in entering the field. The Lyceum of Natural History, the germ of the present establishment, was originated in 1817. In 1869 its collections were destroyed by fire, but the disaster proved to be the beginning of its expansion. Some prominent and public spirited members of the society, realizing the importance of securing for it safer and more extended quarters, took steps to establish it upon a broader basis as one of the recognized institutions of the metropolis. The American Museum of Natural History was incorporated by the Legislature, and an ample and well situated plot of ground, covering four entire city blocks, was assigned to its use by the municipal park department, which has also paid for the erection and maintenance of the museum building.

Of the immense structure designed by the incorporators of the museum, an interior wing, about one twentieth part of the whole mass, was the first erected. The corner stone was laid by President Grant in June, 1874, and the building was opened in December, 1877. Its external appearance is by no means unattractive, although in its design architectural beauty was subordinated to practical considerations of light and arrangement. Its collections are displayed in three great halls, one of which has its floor space almost doubled by a capacious balcony. Above these is an attic story, containing the library of the institution and a number of chambers set apart as lecture rooms, laboratories, and the like.

THE NEW BUILDING OF THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY.

The board walk that runs diagonally from Seventy Seventh Street and Central Park to Eighty First Street and Columbus Avenue—the two points at which visitors usually approach the museum—passes, midway, the present entrance, whose unpretentious aspect is a most decided contrast to the solid magnificence of the newly finished front. It leads directly to the first great hall, on the ground floor, which is mainly occupied by the Jesup collection of American woods. This is an assemblage of specimens of trees indigenous to North America, wonderfully complete and well arranged. Each is cut so as to display the bark and the polished and unpolished timber, with a colored map that shows at a glance the geographical distribution of the species. In most instances an entire section of the trunk is exhibited, and on the west side of the hall there are two colossal specimens, worthy to serve as round tables for King Arthur, which may prompt the unobservant visitor to exclaim, “Those must be the Big Trees of California!” Such is not the case, though both of them hail from the Pacific coast, being respectively the Yellow and the Sugar Pine. A specimen of the Sequoia gigantea is in an adjoining case, where it attracts less attention because it is but a comparatively small fragment of the trunk of one of those famous monarchs of the vegetable kingdom.

In the same hall, in cases that stand along the center of the room and in the window alcoves, are some bird groups that receive a plentiful share of admiration. They deserve it, for as specimens of accurate and artistic taxidermy they have rarely been equaled and never excelled. They reproduce feathered life and its surroundings with a fidelity that bespeaks thorough knowledge, remarkable skill, and almost infinite patience. There are birds in every attitude—perching, swimming, walking, and even flying—each in a setting that very picturesquely shows its habitation and habits. The uninitiated visitor can hardly persuade himself that the foliage, the herbage, and the flowers that he sees through the glass can be the imperishable product of an artificer’s ingenuity, and not the work of nature herself. Some of the best of the groups are the robins, with their nest among the pink blossomed apple boughs; the grebes, swimming in a happy family upon a glassy imitation of water; the laughing gulls with their nest in the bent grass; the Louisiana water thrush, domiciled under an overhanging bank; the cat birds, the clapper rails, and the ruffed grouse, these last so life-like that the visitor can almost fancy he hears the brown leaves rustle beneath the feet of the chickens. Great credit is due to Jenness Richardson, the museum’s chief taxidermist, and Mrs. E. S. Mogridge, who jointly prepared this beautiful series of exhibits.

THE BELLA BELLA INDIAN WAR CANOE.

A specimen that calls for a word of notice, as one of the most valuable in the museum, stands on the right hand side of the entrance to this lower hall. It is an awkward looking bird of medium size, dark plumage, and disproportionately large bill, and its label designates it as the Great Auk. It is, in fact, one of the very few extant relics of a species that has within the memory of living man disappeared from the earth. There are but three others in this country—one in the National Museum at Washington, one in the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Science, and one in the collection belonging to Vassar College. The money value of a specimen of such rarity is hard to fix precisely, but it undoubtedly runs into the thousands of dollars.

A DETHRONED IDOL.

The second floor—the main story of the building—is principally devoted to cases of stuffed birds. These multitudinous rows of single specimens, each perched upon its neat stand of cherry wood, are, of course, less picturesque than the grouped figures, but are nevertheless of great interest and value. The martial aspect of the eagles, the curious structure of the pelicans and secretary birds, and the bright plumage of the flamingoes, the peacocks, and the argus pheasant attract attention and admiration.

Here, too, are the osseous remains of the late lamented Jumbo, to whom has fallen the rare privilege of achieving a double immortality; for while his pachydermatous hide, stuffed with straw, is still a feature of the “Greatest Show on Earth,” his skeleton stands majestically on the visitor’s right hand as he enters the second hall of the museum. Sea lions, walruses and other marine monsters are also to be found on this floor, besides a few stuffed groups. One of these last shows a family of screech owls, with their nest deep in a hollow tree. Another—one of the best in the museum—represents a scene in the tree tops of Borneo, and includes five fine specimens of the orang-utan, or Wild Man of the Woods, the great simian that disputes with the African chimpanzee and gorilla, the honor of being the brute’s nearest approach to man. Playing among the branches and eating the fruit of the durian, we see here a group that shows the orang-utan (we follow the spelling adopted by the museum) at various periods of its life and growth. There are a baby, a young female, a full grown male, and two veterans—one of either sex—with long, black hair and hideously wrinkled faces.

Ascending to the gallery above, we find a large and varied collection of implements of savage tribes and relics of prehistoric man. A huge case of skulls, whose owners lived and breathed thousands of years ago, is a ghastly reminder of the continuity of human history. Implements of stone and flint from France, from Denmark, and from the Mississippi valley are silent witnesses of the days before the discovery of the art of working iron. There are also a couple of notable groups—one of opossums and one of muskrats. The latter is a singularly faithful reproduction of nature. It shows a muskrat swimming by the bank of a pond, whose glassy surface is blurred by the ripples that mark his course. White and yellow lilies float on the water, from which rises a muskrat house, opened at the side to show one of its inmates lunching upon a reed stem. The sandy bank of the pond is pierced by galleries from which there peeps a young rat.

From the ceiling, in the center of the hall, there hangs a huge Indian war canoe, which once bore the warriors of the Bella Bella tribe, in British Columbia, over the waters of Queen Charlotte’s Sound. Though capacious enough to carry a small regiment, it was made from the wood of a single tree.

THE MASTODON—AN EXTINCT INHABITANT OF NORTH AMERICA.

The third floor of the museum is devoted to collections of shells and minerals, which include a wealth of interesting specimens. There is a sheet of itacolumite, or flexible sandstone, from North Carolina, so arranged that its power of bending can be tested by turning a screw; there are stibnite (antimony ore) from Japan, galenite (lead ore) from Missouri, gold quartz from California, calamine from New Jersey, as well as chalcopyrite, marcasite, and a host of other minerals of strange name and form. On one small tray are grouped reproductions of the world’s most famous diamonds, showing the exact size and appearance of these little pebbles for which dynasties have been overthrown. One of them is labeled “the Koh-i-noor, value $1,000,000.” It is safe to say that Queen Victoria is not offering the original for sale at that price. And if the Koh-i-noor, which weighs 125 karats, is worth a million, what must be the value of the Great Mogul diamond, of 297 karats?

Further down the same row of cases are amethysts, beryls, agates, and other semi-precious stones. Among these is a curious section of an agatized tree from Chalcedony Park, Arizona. It was mineralized by the waters of a hot silicated spring, the silica replacing the wood as it decayed, particle by particle.

In the center of the hall stands a remarkably perfect skeleton of a mastodon, the huge prehistoric elephant that once roamed over Europe and North America. This specimen was found in a peaty swamp near Newburgh, New York, in 1879. Compared with the bony framework of Jumbo on the floor below—the two monsters were separated, perhaps, in order to prevent jealousy between them—the mastodon is shorter in stature, but considerably longer. He stands 8 feet 5 inches from the ground, while his length “over all” is 18 feet, and his immense curved tusks measure 7 feet 5 inches. Near the entrance there is the skeleton of a moa, the great extinct ostrich of New Zealand, and at the further end of the hall that of another animal that existed in the dawn of man’s history—the great Irish elk, found in a peat bog near Limerick.

The raised map of New Hampshire, which stands in an alcove on the left hand side of the entrance, is the product of an immensity of care and labor. It is constructed to a scale of a mile to the inch, the elevation being exaggerated about five times, or to a scale of a thousand feet to the inch. It is a good illustration of the value of this sort of map in giving a graphic and comprehensive idea of the topographical and geological formation of a country.

A SCREECH OWL FAMILY.

On the wall on the other end of the hall are two large tablets of triassic rock from Massachusetts, showing the foot prints—or “au-toe-graphs,” as James Russell Lowell once ventured to call them—of some huge reptile, and of tiny insects and shellfish.

Throughout his inspection of the museum’s contents, the visitor will have noticed that every inch of available space has been occupied, and that the exhibits are in some cases cramped for lack of room. The opening of the new building will effectually remedy this, and provide ample accommodations for the collections and their probable augmentation for some time to come. Its halls are now being fitted up with cases. Its appearance is imposing, and not devoid of a solid and substantial style of architectural beauty. Its general character is Romanesque. The front, which faces Seventy Seventh Street, is of a rough, light reddish stone, with a lofty and rather heavy looking roof of red tiles. It is approached by two wide flights of stone steps, connected with a spacious arched portico by a bridge that passes over a basement entrance below—a very convenient and symmetrical arrangement. Like the older building, the newly finished structure has unusually ample window light, and is altogether well adapted to the purpose for which it is designed.

NO BARGAIN.

We were riding home together,

When I told her of my love;

It was gentle summer weather,

And the moon looked down above

With a very bashful brightness,

Just as though it wished to say

“If I could, for sheer politeness,

I would look the other way;”

And the little pony trotted

On with such a leisure gait,

I believe that he had plotted

To be lazy, kind and late;

So I told her how my breast hid—

Like a bee within the hive—

Love, and hopefully suggested

She might drive.

In her hands the ribbons fluttered,

And the pony seemed to know

There was something tender uttered,

And he took it very slow;

Then I leaned a trifle nearer

To the maiden at my side,

And I told my pretty hearer

How delightful ’twere to ride

On and on with her forever

If she would but be my wife—

How ’twould be my one endeavor

To make happy all her life;

And the brief reply that met me

In my memory remains

Like a thorn—“If you will let me

Hold the reins.”

I said,

Discreetly, “No.”

And so

We didn’t wed.

BROOKLYN’S STATUE OF BEECHER.

By R. H. Titherington.

“Let the sound of those he wrought for,

And the feet of those he fought for,

Echo round his bourne forevermore.”

Tennyson’s lines on the Duke of Wellington may well be applied to the monument that Brooklyn has set up to commemorate her greatest citizen and the foremost of all American preachers. The recently unveiled statue of Beecher could hardly be better placed than at the junction of two main arteries of traffic, and facing the City Hall. It stands at the heart of Brooklyn, as in another sense Beecher stood, during his life, at the heart of Brooklyn and of the nation. Its location is in keeping with the character of the statue, and with those sides of the great man’s nature which it especially typifies. It should, perhaps, have been set so as to face away from the City Hall, rather than toward it. It is certainly somewhat unfortunate that that which meets the eye of most of those who see it should be the back of the statue, draped in the folds of a heavy cloak.

THE STATUE IN FRONT OF THE BROOKLYN CITY HALL.

The monument itself, as may be inferred from the mention of John Quincy Adams Ward as its designer, is one that shows intelligent and conscientious work besides much technical skill. It is animated by a definite conception of its subject, and partakes of the character of an ideal group as well as that of an actual likeness. The subsidiary portion is of course wholly ideal; while the central figure itself is something more than a reproduction of the form and features of its original. Those who remember Mr. Beecher only in the last few years of his life may be inclined to think that the lines of the statue’s face are too deep and emphatic, that its expression has too much positiveness and strength, and too little gentleness and benignity. There is truth in this criticism, if criticism it can be called. The sculptor prepared for his task by taking a death mask of Mr. Beecher’s face; but from the more rounded outlines of the preacher’s later years he deliberately went back to show him as he was in the prime of life, in those stirring times when he led the vanguard of freedom’s forces. The statue is Beecher as he will live in the grateful memory of posterity, rather than as he lives in the affectionate recollection of surviving friends. It is the Beecher of history.

HENRY WARD BEECHER.

Indeed, the designer has struck the very keynote of Beecher’s immortality. He has given us the man who voiced the cause of emancipation in the days when it was the protest of the minority against a great wrong firmly intrenched in the possession of power; the man who faced anti-abolition mobs in New York and the prejudice of a nation in England; the man who all through his life seemed to delight in facing unjust opposition and in fighting the battle of the weak against the strong.

He was born during the war of 1812, a perilous crisis in our national history. To quote from the memoir compiled by members of his family, “he carried war in him as a birthmark, but with him it was war against wickedness and wrong.” He was an abolitionist in his undergraduate days at Amherst, where his first attacks upon human slavery were made in the college debating society. Then, as a young minister in an Ohio River town, he was brought into close contact with the institution, and saw its actual horrors. He returned east to Brooklyn to lift up in that city a voice that presently made itself heard from the Atlantic to the Pacific. He would accept no compromise, and fought with all his powers against that offered in 1850 by Henry Clay. “For every free State,” he cried, “it demands one State for slavery. One dark orb must be swung into its orbit, to groan and travail in pain, for every new orb of liberty over which the morning stars shall sing for joy.”

He knew full well the strength of the forces arrayed against him. “An Abolitionist,” he said later in life, “was enough to put the mark of Cain upon any young man that arose in my early day, and until I was forty years of age it was punishable to preach on the subject of liberty. It was enough to expel a man from church communion if he insisted on praying in prayer meeting for the liberation of the slaves. If a man came to be known as an anti-slavery man it almost preluded bankruptcy in business.”

Several times angry crowds gathered near Plymouth Church and threatened to attack it, but Beecher cared nothing for personal danger. When the irrepressible conflict between liberty and slavery was reddening the plains of bleeding Kansas, he took up a collection in the church to buy rifles for the free soilers. Some of them were sent through the enemy’s lines in Missouri in boxes marked “bibles,” and though this was done without his knowledge, “Beecher’s bibles” became a proverbial synonym for improved firearms.

When the flame first kindled in Kansas spread to blaze forth into the war of the Rebellion, none realized more fully than he the stern duties of the hour. Beecher was away from Brooklyn when the news came that Fort Sumter had been attacked. On reaching home he was greeted by his eldest son with the question, “Father, may I enlist?” “If you don’t I’ll disown you,” he replied.

He threw himself heart and soul into the work of arming for the defense of the Union. Plymouth Church became a rendezvous for regiments passing to the front, and its pastor’s house at 124 Columbia Heights a veritable storehouse for military goods. He was largely instrumental in raising and equipping three regiments for the Union army. The third of these, which he organized almost unaided, was the Long Island Volunteer regiment, afterward enrolled as the Sixty Seventh New York. In this his son, Henry Barton Beecher, held a lieutenant’s commission.

Indeed, Beecher’s enthusiasm outran the government’s unreadiness. Lack of necessary funds compelled the army authorities to delay the acceptance of his volunteers; and in the summer of 1862, after McClellan had made his fruitless attempt to reach Richmond, Beecher gave voice to his impatience at what seemed to him the inactivity of the authorities at Washington. He hated half measures, and believed that the nearest way to peace lay through a vigorous prosecution of the war.

In June, 1863, he sought to find, in a brief visit to England, rest and recuperation for bodily and mental powers exhausted by the strain they had endured. Those were the darkest days of the war. Two years of campaigning, and vast expenditures of blood and treasure, had done little or nothing to break down the rebellion. Vicksburg was defying the desperate efforts of Grant, while in the East Lee, at the head of his veteran army, was pressing forward to invade Pennsylvania and outflank Washington. All the world looked upon the United States as on the eve of splitting asunder. In England the sympathy of the laboring men was with the North, but the upper social and official classes were solidly on the other side. Even such a man as Gladstone declared that “Jefferson Davis had created a nation,” and only a few tribunes of the people like John Bright and Richard Cobden publicly pleaded the cause of freedom.

With his love of battling against unjust opposition, it is not strange that Beecher was drawn into a crusade against the prejudices that he found prevalent in England—a crusade undertaken without premeditation, but one whose results proved it to be one of his most notable services to his country. It was begun in the Free Trade Hall at Manchester, where he faced a great and hostile assemblage, secured a hearing by sheer pluck and persistence, and then, by his magnificent oratorical power and the conscious justice of his cause, won a victory that was afterward repeated in the other chief cities of England and Scotland. His speeches turned the balance of British sentiment, and warned the government from the path that might have led to intervention in the struggle.

“I believe I did some good,” Beecher himself said, in speaking of his missionary work in England. A New York journal of that time put it more strongly. “The administration at Washington,” it remarked, “has sent abroad more than one man to represent the cause of the North and press it upon the minds of foreign courts and citizens; but here is a person who goes abroad without official prestige, on a mere private mission to recruit his health, and yet we doubt whether his speeches in England have not done more for us by their frank and manly exposition of our principles, our purposes, and our hopes, than all the other agencies employed.”

The value of Beecher’s work in England was fully recognized by President Lincoln and Secretary Stanton. With these leaders, whom he had never hesitated to criticise when he believed it his duty to do so, he now entered into warm relations. It was he who was invited to deliver the address at the raising of the old flag over the regained Fort Sumter.

His active participation in public affairs continued up to his death. His part in the election of 1884 is of course fresh in the memory of readers—so fresh, indeed, that it can hardly be reviewed without intrenching upon the prejudices of present day partisanship.

Henry Ward Beecher was a great man—one of the greatest and most remarkable men of his day. His personality was so large, his gifts so varied, his mental and moral composition so multiform, that a volume would be needed to give a complete character sketch of the man. We can only attempt within the limits of this article to bring out the two main elements of his character that seem to have inspired Mr. Ward’s conception of his subject. On the one hand is the positive, almost militant expression that typifies Beecher’s fearless championship of the oppressed; on the other his universal sympathy, his unselfish kindliness, and his especial love for children, betokened by the figures beside the pedestal. His heart was as great as his brain. He was intensely human. Artificiality he hated, and dissembling and deception he could not understand. He was sometimes called a great actor, but sincerity was his very breath of life. “Some men,” he once said, “are like live springs that bubble and flow perpetually, while others are like pumps—one must work the handle for all the water he gets.” And rare indeed are such live springs of imagination and eloquence, of intellect and of affection, as that which welled in Beecher’s own heart. “He was quite as likely,” says one of his biographers, “to burst out into splendid eloquence amid a small group of chatting friends, or even to a single listener, as before a vast audience. One would as soon suspect the Atlantic of holding back a particularly grand roll of surf at Long Branch until people should come down to see it, as to imagine Mr. Beecher keeping a fine thought or a striking figure till he had an audience.”

Or again, as Oliver Wendell Holmes says in his essay on Beecher’s English speeches: “He has the simple frankness of a man who feels himself to be perfectly sound in bodily, mental, and moral structure; and his self revelation is a thousand times nobler than the assumed impersonality which is a common trick with cunning speakers who never forget their own interests. Thus it is that wherever Mr. Beecher goes, everybody feels, after he has addressed them once or twice, that they know him well, almost as if they had always known him; and there is not a man in the land who has such a multitude who look upon him as their brother.”

When Beecher was a man, he was a man; when he was a boy, he was a boy. Brought up in the rigid atmosphere of an old time New England parsonage, there was nothing sanctimonious or unhealthy about his boyhood religion. Plain living and high thinking was the regime of his youth, but withal he was a warm blooded, high spirited lad. At school Hank Beecher, as his playmates called him, was a leader in outdoor sports, and at college he was an enthusiastic athlete. Dr. Holmes called him, later in life, “the same lusty, warm hearted, strong fibered, bright souled, clear eyed creature, as he was when the college boys at Amherst acknowledged him as the chiefest among their football kickers.” Strangely characteristic was a document that he drew up on leaving the school at Amherst that bore the high sounding title of Mount Pleasant Collegiate Institute. It was a covenant between him and his chief schoolboy “chum,” wherein Henry W. Beecher and Constantine F. Newell formally undertook, “in the presence of God and his holy angels,” to be “real, lawful, and everlasting brothers”—an agreement that was faithfully kept, in spite of long separations, until the death of Beecher’s boyhood friend in 1842. Another touch of nature that may be cited from the annals of his early career was his trial sermon at Lawrenceburg. No less than a hundred souls—an unprecedented assemblage—had gathered to hear the young college graduate, who is said to have been so nervous that his address was a total failure—rather a contrast to the flow of noble thoughts clad in impressive language that afterward held many a vast audience spell bound.

His forty years’ ministry at Plymouth Church will always remain a unique landmark in the annals of the American pulpit. It was in June, 1847, that Beecher, then in the prime of early manhood, received an invitation to become the first pastor of the newly formed Congregational church, which had indeed been organized only the day before, with a membership of twenty one. Coming to his charge four months later, the first thing he did was characteristic. He had the pulpit cut away, and a simple desk set in its place, upon a broad platform. He wanted to draw nearer to his audience—literally as well as figuratively. He wished to “get at” his hearers—to grasp them closely. He was a fisher of men’s hearts and souls. Of the wonderful powers that made his preaching so remarkable in its effectiveness and so world wide in its fame it is hard to give a precise analysis. Among the component elements were a vividly creative imagination, a mind richly stocked by reading and observation, a ripe judgment, a deep sympathy, a remarkable adaptability to occasions and situations, and an unfailing earnestness and enthusiasm. He was an accomplished elocutionist, with the natural advantages of a commanding presence and a voice of great power and flexibility.

From its small original nucleus, Plymouth Church expanded to be larger than any other similar body in the country, with a membership of fifteen hundred. Scores came to it from widely variant sects, and found in its broad and liberal Christianity a common ground whereon they could stand together and work shoulder to shoulder. It has often been said that nowadays churches are filled with women, almost to the exclusion of their husbands, brothers and fathers. Such was not the case with Beecher’s congregation. Men always flocked to hear him, and felt themselves irresistibly drawn toward the sunlight of his strong nature.

Intense as was his interest in the growth and success of Plymouth Church, it was to him a means, and not an end in itself. He sought to make not a prominent church, but one active and powerful in all good works. The success of its schools and missions, its meetings and societies, was the outward evidence of the inspiration it received from the master mind around which it was focused.

Lesser men have ventured to criticise Beecher as deficient in theology. Such criticism implies inability to understand the great preacher’s breadth. He was thoroughly grounded in theological lore by his father, who was one of the leading controversialists of the day. In Lyman Beecher’s home dogma and doctrine reigned supreme. “Of him I learned,” his son says, “all the theology that was current at that time. In the quarrels between Andover and East Windsor and New Haven and Princeton—I was at home in all these distinctions. I got the doctrines just like a row of pins on a paper of pins. I knew them as a soldier knows his weapons. I could get them in battle array.” After graduating at Amherst, he studied at the Lane Theological Seminary, of which his father had become president. He entered into Dr. Beecher’s controversy against Unitarianism in Boston, and the subsequent conflict between the so called old and new schools of Presbyterianism, of which latter his father was the protagonist.

But the more he saw of these doctrinal battles, the less he believed in their real utility and importance. “I will never be a sectary,” was a resolve that he formed very early in his independent ministry. “Others,” he once said, “may blow the bellows, and turn the doctrines in the fire, and lay them on the anvil of controversy, and beat them with all sorts of hammers into all sorts of shapes; but I shall busy myself with using the sword of the Lord, not in forging it.” His religious sympathy was as wide as humanity, and his ardor for the good of mankind partook of the divine, for to quote his own words again—and the thought they express is a fine one—the love of God for man comes “not from a ‘law’ or ‘plan of salvation,’ but from the fullness of His great heart.”

TO PRISCILLA.

I know, since you my dreams are haunting—

So purely fair, so winsome faced—

Though Love the gift of sight is wanting,

He hasn’t lost the sense of taste.

Stephen Decatur Smith, Jr.

MY PRETTY LIBRARY VIS A VIS.

I.

Across the table meekly sat—

I could not, would not choose but see—

With charms a monk might wonder at,

My pretty library vis a vis!

II.

I tried in vain to turn the page—

Romance and rhyme had lost their spell;

When mind and heart a warfare wage

The victory is not hard to tell.

III.

O sixteen summered rosy lass,

I came to read the hour away;

But not a sentence could I pass,

Save in a make believing way.

IV.

For glancing up from time to time

Filled me with tremors and surprise;

The heroines of tales and rhyme

Vanished before those dazzling eyes!

V.

I wonder if she archly knew

How fast I grew illiterate;

And when she looked off, listless, too,

Was it for pity of my fate?

VI.

The hour went by. She would not leave

I tried to seem absorbed and wise.

To glance at her was to receive

Quick notice from her answering eyes.

VII.

O bookish nymph, say, was it fair

To capture so my holiday?

Before your beauty who would dare

To turn a leaf, or go away?

VIII.

But on the morrow when I went

To make amends, whom should I see

Face me again? (O time misspent!)

My pretty library vis a vis!

Joel Benton.