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Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 15, No. 85, January, 1875

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Title: Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 15, No. 85, January, 1875

Author: Various


        
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE OF POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE, VOLUME 15, NO. 85, JANUARY, 1875 ***

LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE

OF

_POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE_.

VOLUME XV., No. 85.

PHILADELPHIA:

J. B. LIPPINCOTT AND CO.



January, 1875.



CONTENTS

THE NEW HYPERION.
  FROM PARIS TO MARLY BY WAY OF THE RHINE.
    XIX.--TYING UP THE CLEWS.

FOLLOWING THE TIBER
  TWO PAPERS.--1.

THE PARADOX by CHARLOTTE F. BATES.

THE LEADEN ARROW by EDWARD C. BRUCE.

TWO MIRRORS by F.A. HILLARD.

MALCOLM.
  CHAPTER LXIV. THE LAIRD AND HIS MOTHER.
  CHAPTER LXV. THE LAIRD'S VISION.
  CHAPTER LXVI. THE CRY FROM THE CHAMBER.
  CHAPTER LXVII. FEET OF WOOL.
  CHAPTER LXVIII. HANDS OF IRON.
  CHAPTER LXIX. THE MARQUIS AND THE SCHOOLMASTER.
  CHAPTER LXX. END OR BEGINNING?

THE STAGE IN ITALY by R. DAVEY.

THREE FEATHERS BY WILLIAM BLACK.
  CHAPTER XX. TINTAGEL'S WALLS.
  CHAPTER XXI. CONFESSION.
  CHAPTER XXII. ON WINGS OF HOPE.

ON THE VIA SAN BASILIO by EARL MARBLE.

A CHRISTMAS HYMN by T. BUCHANAN READ.

THE PARSEES by FANNIE ROPER FEUDGE.

OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP
  A SWEDISH PROVINCIAL THEATRE.
  VENETIAN CAFFÈS.
  A NEW MEXICAN CHRISTMAS EVE.
  ENGLISH BIBLE TRANSLATIONS.

LITERATURE OF THE DAY.
  _Books Received._




ILLUSTRATIONS

  CÆSAR'S PENNY.
  THE THRONED CORPSE.
  THE SKELETON IN ARMOR.
  BRUSSELS.
  FATHER JOLIET.
  THE CATECHISM.
  FRAU KRANICH.
  "TO MY ARMS."
  THE FUTURE OF FFARINA.
  HOHENFELS' FAILURE.
  READING THE CONTRACT.
  INTERRUPTED REPOSE.
  COALS vs. COATS
  THE JESTER AT THE FEAST.
  ST. GUDOLE, BRUSSELS.
  SQUARE OF THE HÔTEL DE VILLE, BRUSSELS.
  DIVERS DIVERSIONS.
  THE MIMIC HUNT.
  HOMEWARD BOUND.
  CHARLES AND JOSEPHINE.
  ARGUS AND ULYSSES.
  "HAND IT OVER TO ART."
  NEAR THE SOURCE OF THE TIBER.
  CAPRESE.
  LAKE THRASIMENE.
  THE TIBER NEAR PERUGIA.
  TODI.
  CHURCH AND CONVENT OF SAINT FRANCIS, AT ASSISI.




THE NEW HYPERION.

FROM PARIS TO MARLY BY WAY OF THE RHINE.


XIX.--TYING UP THE CLEWS.


[Illustration: CÆSAR'S PENNY.]

In leaving Cologne for Aix-la-Chapelle you turn your back to the
river--a particular which suited my mood well enough. The railway bore
us away from the Rhine-shore at an abrupt angle, and in my notion the
noble Germanic goddess or image seemed at this point to recede with
grand theatric strides, like a divinity of the stage backing away
from her admirers over the billowy whirlpool of her own skirts. As
I dreamed we penetrated the tunnel of Königsdorf, which is fifteen
hundred yards long, and which seemed to me sufficiently protracted to
contain the slumber of Barbarossa. The thought gave me a useful hint,
and I fell into a light sleep, while Charles and Hohenfels pervaded
the darkness merely by their perfumes--the former with whiffs at a
concealed bottle of Farina, the latter with a pastille counterfeiting
the incense of the cathedral. In a couple of hours from the Hôtel de
Hollande we reached Aachen, as the fond natives call the burgh so dear
to Charlemagne. Deprived of that magnificent mirror, the Rhine, the
pretty towns throughout this part of Germany seem but like country
belles. We should hardly have paused at Aix but for the sake of
affording a rest to Charles, who grew worse whenever lunch-time
competed with railway-time. As for the dull little city, for us it was
a wilderness, with the blank cleanliness of the desert, except in so
far as it was informed and populated by the memory of Charlemagne.

[Illustration: THE THRONED CORPSE.]

Here he died, and entered his tomb in the church himself had founded.
Into this sepulchre the emperor Otho III. dared to penetrate in the
year 997, impelled by a motive of vile and varlet-like curiosity. They
say the dead monarch confronted his living visitor in the great marble
chair in which he had been seated at his own command, haughty and
inflexible as in life, the ivory sceptre in his ivory fingers, his
white skull crowned with the diadem of gold. The peeping emperor
looked upon him with awe, half afraid of the mysterious and
penetrating shadows that reached forth out of his rayless eyes. Before
he left, however, he peered about, touched the sceptre and the throne,
fingered this and that, and having, as it were, trimmed the nails and
combed the beard of the great spectre, retired with a valet's bow.
Observing that Charlemagne had lost most of his nose, he caused it
to be replaced in gold very delicately chiseled and enchased. The
sacrilege was repeated by Frederick Barbarossa in 1165, who went
farther and forced Charlemagne to get up from his chair before him.
The corpse, in rising, fell in pieces, which have been dispersed
through Europe as relics. We saw such of them as remain here at the
Chapelle. I was allowed, for about the equivalent of an American
dollar, to measure the Occidental emperor's leg--they call it his arm.
And then, as a makeweight in the bargain, the venal sacristan placed
in my hands the head of Charlemagne.

I thought Hohenfels would have sunk to the ground with disgust. He
colored deeply and dragged me into the air. "I am ashamed of every
drop of German blood in my veins," he cried. "What are we to think of
the commerce of these wretches, for whom the very wounds of Cæsar are
the lips of a money-box?"

I had given back the skull, as Hamlet returns the skull of Yorick to
the grave-digger, and was dusting my fingers with a handkerchief,
as hundreds of Hamlets have dusted theirs. I said, "'Thrift, thrift,
Horatio.'"

"At Kreutzberg there are twenty monks on the counter! This morning, at
St. Ursula's, it was the eleven thousand virgins, their skulls ranged
like Dutch cheeses above our heads or in rows around the walls, with
a battery-full of them in the neighboring apartment, like a
cheesemonger's reserved magazine. Here, the very leader of modern
ideas, the creator of our form of civilization, is shown for so
many pennies to any grocer who wants to weigh the head of a king!
Profanation! Barbarians! Philistines!"

[Illustration: THE SKELETON IN ARMOR.]

I turned rather hastily, while my hands were yet clammy with the
skull, thinking that this accusation of Philistinism was aimed at me.
But Hohenfels thought of nothing less than of a personality, being
in his cloudiest mood of generalization. So I only concealed the
handkerchief, while I said, as easily as I might, "You need not accuse
your German blood, for I have lived long enough in my American's
Paradise to know that civilized Paris is considerably worse in this
particular respect, with the addition of a certain goblin levity
particularly French. How often have I seen babies frightened by the
skulls in the dentists' windows, with their cynical chewing action!
It is said that a child sat next a dentist's apprentice once in an
omnibus, and was observed to turn rigid, fixed and white, but unable
to speak: he had sat on one of these skulls, and it had bitten him.
Silver-mounted skulls set as goblets, in imitation of Byron, are to
be seen at any of the china-shops rubbing against the chaste cheeks
of the old maid's teacup. Skeletons are sold, bleached and with gilded
hinges, to the medical students, who buy the pale horrors as openly
as meerschaum pipes. Have I not often found young Grandstone
supping among his doctors' apprentices of the Ober restaurant after
theatre-hours, a skeleton in the corner filled with umbrellas like
a hall-rack, and crowned with the triple or quintuple tiara of the
girls' best bonnets? Ay, Mimi Pinson's cap has known what it is to
perch on the bony head of Death. The juxtaposition is but an emblem.
The sewing-girl, like Hood's shirtmaker, scarcely fears the
'phantom of grisly bone.' Poor Francine! where have you taken _your_
artisanne's cap to, I wonder? Are you left alone, all alone again, and
thinking of the pretty solitude you have left behind you at Carlsruhe?
Who uses those polished keys now?"

Hohenfels interrupted me, complaining that my monologue was
uninteresting and diffuse, and was interfering with the railway
time-table. But I finished it in the car: "And the railway! What has
a person of fixed and independent habits to do with railways but
to growl at them? Before I was tempted upon the railway by that
impertinent engineer at Noisy, I got up and sat down when I liked, ate
wholesome food at my own hours, and was contented at home. Confusion
to him who made me the victim of his engineering calculations!
Confusion to Grandstone and his nest of serpents at Épernay! Did they
not introduce me to Fortnoye, who has doubly destroyed my peace? Where
are the conspirators, that I may pulverize them with my maledictions?"

[Illustration: BRUSSELS.]

This question--which Hohenfels called peevish as he buried himself in
his book--was not answered until we had passed Verviers, Chaudfontaine
and Liège. I was aroused from a sulky slumber in the station at
Brussels by Hohenfels, who said, in his musical scolding way, like the
busy wheeze of a clicking music-box, "You may say what you like, with
your left-handed flatteries, in regard to Fortnoye, and you may praise
Ariadnes and widows to the end of the chapter. You are sorry at
this moment not to be at Épernay to see the destroyer of your peace
married: you had rather assist at the making of a wife than at the
making of a widow."

I was just sending Fortnoye to the gloomiest shades of Acheron when a
strong hand entered the carriage-door, helped me handsomely down the
steps, and then began warmly to shake my own. Fortnoye!--Fortnoye
in flesh and blood was before me. While my mouth was yet filled with
maledictions he began to pour out a storm of thanks with all his own
particular warmth, expressing the most effusive gratitude for the
trouble I had taken in forsaking my route to be his wife's bridesmaid.
That is what he called it. "She has but one other," said Fortnoye.
At the same time I began to recognize other faces not unknown to me,
crudely illuminated by the raw colors of the railway-lights. They
all had black wedding-suits and enormous buttonhole nosegays of
orange-flowers. I picked them out, with a particular recognition for
each: 'twas the civil engineer of Noisy; the short gentleman named
Somerard; James Athanasius Grandstone, with his saintly aureole upon
him in the shape of a Yankee wide-awake; the nameless mutes, or rather
chorus, of the champagne-crypt; in short, my nest of serpents in
all its integrity. Still entangled with my slumbers, I hesitated
to respond to the friendly hands that were everywhere thrust
centripetally toward me.

I looked blackly at Hohenfels. He was chuckling.

At Heidelberg, making the acquaintance of M. Fortnoye
contemporaneously with my departure, he had become more enthralled
than he ever confessed to this radiant traveler--whom he called a
packman, but regarded as a Mercury--and his pretty scheme of matrimony
in motion. Even now, if I can believe my eyes, he goes up to the
"vintner" and "peddler" of his objurgations, and meekly whispers into
his ear with the air of a conspirator reporting a plot to his chief.
Having engaged to produce me at the wedding of Fortnoye, and finding
me unexpectedly recusant, he had adopted a little stratagem for
bringing me to the scene while thinking to escape from it.

"Thou too, Brutus!" I said, and gave it up. It only remained for me
to return all round, after five minutes of petrified stupidity,
the hand-grasps that had been offered from every quarter of the
compass-box.

Next morning, at an early hour, I was interrupted by a knock, just
as Charles had buttoned my gaiters and the young man from the
perruquier's (who had stolen in with that air of delicacy and of
almost literary refinement which belongs to his gentle profession) had
lathered me. A nick he gave my chin at the shock made my countenance
all argent and gules, and the visitor entering saw me thus emblazoned,
while the barber and Charles, "like two wild men supporters of a
shield," could only stare at the untimely apparition.

"Do you know him, Charles?" I asked, not recognizing my guest, and
putting over my painted face a mask of wet toweling.

"I know him intimately," replied my jester-in-ordinary: "I would thank
Monsieur Paul just to tell me his name. Do you remember, monsieur, a
sort of beggar, with a wagon and a stylish horse and a pretty wife,
who limped a bit with his right hand, or perhaps his left hand? Does
monsieur know what I mean? He used to come and see us at Passy; and
monsieur even had some traffic with him in a little matter of two
chickens."

"Father Joliet!" I cried.

"Present!" shouted the personage thus designated at my appeal to his
name. I turned round, toweled, and he grasped my hands. The unusual
hour, appropriate as I supposed only to some porter or other
stipendiary visitor of my hotel, caused to shine out with startling
refulgence the morning splendors in which Papa Joliet had arrayed
himself. He wore a courtly dress, appropriate to the most formal
possible ceremony; his black suit was glossy; his hat was glossy;
his varnished pumps were more than glossy--they were phosphorescent.
Gloves only were wanting to his honest hands.

[Illustration: PERRUQUIER.]

Soaped, napkined and generally extinguished, I could only stammer,
"You here in Brussels? What a droll meeting!"

"Wherefore droll?" asked Joliet, with a huge surprise, which lasted
him all through his next sentence. "I come here to marry my daughter.
Everything is ready; we count on your presence at the wedding; the
lawyer has drawn up the contract; and the breakfast is now cooking at
the best restaurant in the place."

"Francine's wedding, my dear Joliet!" I exclaimed. And, going back to
my apprehensions at her furtive disappearance from Carlsruhe, and
to my conjectures of some amorous mystery between her and her Yankee
traducer, Kraaniff, I added gravely, "It is very creditable!"

"How, creditable--and droll?" repeated the honest man, evidently much
surprised at my own accumulating surprises. "Did not you hear?"

[Illustration: FATHER JOLIET.]

"Not the faintest word," I said, "but I am none the less gratified to
find this affair ending, as it should, in the presence of a lawyer. As
for your wedding-invitation, my good friend, you are a little tardy in
delivering it, for it is exactly to-day that I am obliged to attend at
the marriage of one of my friends, M. Fortnoye."

"Ah, that is a good joke!" cried Joliet, breaking into an explosion of
laughter and clapping me pleasantly on the shoulder--an action which
caused a slight frown on the part of Charles. "You always would have
your jest, Monsieur the American! Tease me and scare me as much as
you like: I like these hoaxes better before a wedding than after.
Hold that," he added, extending his hand as if it were a piece of
merchandise.

I "held" it, and he went on, dwelling slowly on his words: "If you are
at Henri Fortnoye's wedding you will be at Francine Joliet's also, for
both of these persons are to be married at one church."

"Impossible!" I exclaimed, dropping the hand and stepping back.

"What! again?" said Joliet, his manly face visibly darkening. "Droll!
and creditable! and impossible! Why impossible?" Then he dropped his
head and looked angrily at the floor. "Ah, yes, even you," he said,
his eyes still fixed on the boards, "believed that a French girl,
trained as French girls are trained, would flirt and expose herself to
remark; and all on account of such a man as your compatriot, the other
American! Well! well! you ought to know your countrymen best."

"I know of no harm," I interposed hastily. "I should always have
thought Kraaniff hard to swallow as a mere matter of taste. I can but
recollect, Father Joliet," I went on more seriously, "that the last
time I met you you begged me not to talk of Francine if I would not
break your heart. I have to add to this the news brought me from
Heidelberg, that this Kraaniff was a serpent who had fascinated some
young girl for an approaching meal.--How dare you, Charles," I cried
suddenly, recalled to the consciousness of his presence by this
souvenir of his oratory, "stand here staring? Show the young man out
directly, and pay him."

I will not answer for Charles's having got much farther away than the
door. Joliet continued: "But his aunt knows him now for what he is.
Kraaniff, say you? I call him Kranich, though he had better change his
baptismal record than disgrace one of the best names in Brussels."

[Illustration: THE CATECHISM.]

"Frau Kranich, then, my old friend, is really his aunt?"

"Madame Kranich, whom I have known in your parlor, is really
Francine's godmother. Did you never know of all her secret kindness?
That rigid lady would commit a perjury to deny one of her own good
actions. Young Kranich has written her a letter confessing his lies.
Don't you know? The very same day when you were determined to fight
him in a duel--"

"Certainly, certainly," I said, a little confused. "We will change the
subject and leave my ferocity alone. Let us understand one another.
In regard to Fortnoye's marriage, was there not some talk of a Madame
Ashburleigh?"

"I believe you. Madame Ashburleigh is the very key of the manoeuvre.
Madame Ashburleigh--don't you perceive?--lost a child."

"For that matter, she has lost four. I know the lady confidentially,
and she told me their histories and present address. Lucia lies in
Glasgow, Hannibal at Nice, and Waterloo sleeps somewhere hereabout, as
well as another nameless little dear."

"She is a good woman. She has collected all her proofs, and has come
hither with them voluntarily--has perhaps already arrived. Brussels,
where two of her marmots rest, is one of her most frequent stations.
That censorious Madame Kranich made a scene, but she had to yield to
conviction."

"A censorious Madame Kranich! Is the young duelist married?"

"What? No, no! It is Francine's guardian I speak of. Of late years she
has become a sort of Puritan abbess, seeking the Protestant society
which abounds in Belgium, and lamenting her husband, whom they say she
used to drug with opium."

"Then is she not Kranich's aunt?"

"Oh yes, an aunt by marriage; but he is not her nephew: I will die
before I call him so."

"Listen," said I, "Father Joliet. You are as full of information as an
oracle, but you are not coherent. This month past I have been hunting
down a chimaera, a hydra with a dozen heads: each head shows me by
turn the portrait of Fortnoye, or Francine, or yourself, or Kranich,
or Mrs. Ashburleigh. Ever since Noisy I have been meandering through
the folds of a mystery. My head is turning with it. If you want to
save me from distraction, sit down in this chair and answer me a long
catechism, without saying a word but in reply to my questions."

[Illustration: FRAU KRANICH.]

"I am sure I talk as plain as a professor. Look! You frightened me at
first with your doubts and your impossibilities. You have only to make
Kranich's aunt agree with Francine's guardian, and at the same time
forgive Francine's husband for having assumed the undertaker's bill
for Madame Ashburleigh's baby."

"Yes, yes, my dear Joliet, you are clearer than Euclid." And I
administered a category of questions. Joliet, with his fatherly joy
bursting out of him in the longest of parentheses, kept quiet in his
refulgent shoes and answered as well as he could.

[Illustration: "TO MY ARMS."]

Francine, he protested, had never been a flirt (I have met no
Frenchmen who were ignorant of that one English word, to which they
give a new value by pronouncing it in a very orotund manner, as
_flort_). When she came to be ten or twelve, Frau Kranich--until then
a well-preserved lioness with an appetite for society--ceased to give
her dolls and promised to give her an education. At the same time, the
banker's widow left Paris, and repaired with her charge to Brussels,
where the little girl received some good half-Jesuitical, half-English
schooling, of the kind suggested in the Brontë novels. Her diploma
attained, Francine begged to accompany her English teacher back to
London: she wished to become a _meess_, she said, and be competent to
teach like a new Hypatia. She had hardly bidden her kind protectress
adieu when Frau Kranich's nephew arrived at Brussels, exceedingly
dissatisfied with his American business in the bar-rooms of the grand
duke of Mississippi. A sordid jealousy of Mademoiselle Joliet's claims
upon his aunt took possession of this prudent spirit. He took up a
watch-post at a university town on the Rhine. He began to whisper
vague exaggerations of her coquetries and liveliness, which the
Protestant circle that revolved about Madame Kranich did not fail to
bear in to her. This lady admired her nephew, sure that his want of
manners was the sign of a noble frankness. She wrote to Francine,
bidding her come immediately from London. The girl not replying, the
hopeful nephew was put upon her track. He went away. His letters from
England reported that Francine was no longer in that country, but was
probably come back to Belgium, "I know not in what suburb of Brussels
our very independent miss may this instant be hiding," he wrote.

About the same time, in the circle of French exiles at Brussels,
a young _romantique_ named Fortnoye was reported as weeping and
lavishing statues over the grave of an unknown infant in the
churchyard at Laaken. It was a delicious mystery. Kind meddlers
approached the sexton, who said that all he knew of the babe's mother
was that she was a beautiful lady from London. Kranich carried the
story dutifully to his aunt, adding his own ingenious surmise: "Can
Francine have become sufficiently Anglicised to contract secret
marriages with roving revolutionists, and scamper about the country
with ardent young Frenchmen in the style of Gretna Green?" In fact, it
was really from London that Mrs. Ashburleigh was proceeding, for the
purpose of taking care, in the Rhenish city where he was dying, of
her handsome, dissipated, worthless husband. Taken suddenly ill at
Brussels, she left her infant to the unequaled chill of a strange,
unknown cemetery, hastening thence with tears and despair to the
bedside where duty called her.

Has my reader forgotten the dim, tear-swollen story which I heard--not
at all improved in the telling--from my generous young friend
Grandstone--how an impulsive Frenchman had laid to rest, in flowers
and evergreens, the unnamed baby of a woman he had never seen? Jealous
as I was of Fortnoye, I never could think without tenderness of this
singular action. To make the tomb of this helpless Innocence the young
man braved the curiosity of his comrades--despised the rumor, the
obloquy, and, hardest of all, the jests. Well has the wise dramatist
decided that Ophelia must needs be laid in Yorick's bed!

Poor Francine, gay, frivolous, innocently vain of her little travesty
of English behavior, found her accomplishments and graces received
by her guardian's circle with incomprehensible coldness. Hurt and
humiliated, she asked to pay a visit to her father. The honest rustic
received her with a miserable confusion of doubt and severity, for
her escapade to England had never pleased him, and her return from her
godmother's home wore to him the air of a repudiation. At her father's
house, however, she was discovered by Fortnoye, who had never heard
the ingenious Kranich's theory of his own private wedding with
Francine, and who thought to find in her the veiled unknown of the
cemetery. He saw for the first time, in the flowery home at Noisy,
that fresh ingenuous beauty, a little over-cast with disappointment.
His generous nature was touched; and, with his talent for
administration and planning, he conceived the idea of establishing
Francine in the pretty bird's nest at Carlsruhe, distant alike from
the strongholds of her calumniators, Belgium and France.

Fortnoye now had an object in life. "There is a very young person in
the cemetery of Laaken who is much in need of a chaperone," he said.
The frank proofs of his own relations with this churchyard would
not only do credit to his own reputation, but would gratify the best
friends of Mademoiselle Joliet and at least one other lady. To attain
these proofs he had to step over the coiling, writhing bodies of
a whole nest of rumors. When he seized by the throat the especial
slander that he himself was the husband of the babe's mother, he found
written on its crest the signature of John Kranich. He sought the
aunt. This lady gave him several interviews, the Lutheran prayer-book
for ever in her hand. "Why does the dear girl not come to me?"
she would say, weeping, but she refused to hear a word against her
precious nephew, the personification of bluff frankness. As if to make
crushing him impossible, young Kranich had now withdrawn to America,
leaving his reputation in that best possible protection, the chivalry
that is extended toward the absent. Fortnoye was baffled. "I will ask
the baby at its tomb for its mother's and father's name," he cried.
In the pretty God's Acre he found a fresh harvest of flowers and a
new statue over the well-known grave. It was a pretty miniature of
Thorwaldsen's Psyche, on which the proud copyist had inscribed his
name. A respectful correspondence with Mrs. Ashburleigh, to whom
he was guided by the sculptor, and who was now taking the waters at
Wildbad, soon put the whole tangled story to rights. Fortnoye had the
happiness of conducting Francine, by this time his affianced wife, to
the good Frau Kranich, who, convinced that she had wrongly judged
her, threw her arms ardently around her recovered jewel, letting the
eternal little book fly from her hand like a projectile.

[Illustration: THE FUTURE OF FFARINA.]

"But the most singular part of the story," concluded Father Joliet,
"is the letter which Fortnoye, after two or three quarrels, forced
out of young Kranich when the latter had returned to Europe, full of
triumph and debts, to take possession of his aunt for the rest of his
life. Here it is," added the good man, opening a pocket-book. "The
hand-writing is drunken, but the sense is clear as Seltzer-water.
The scholars tell me _in vino veritas est_, but it appears to me that
truth really comes out in the repentance and headache that follow."

[Illustration: HOHENFELS' FAILURE.]

"MY DEAR AUNT" (ran the letter which Charles had seen forced from the
alligator after his unlucky game of dominoes): "You have known me as
the soul of candor. It is this happy quality which compels me to state
(for I am something of a Rousseau) that if I ever playfully accused
your pretty pet Francine of being a flirt, I knew nothing about it.
The best proof is that she absolutely refused to join her expectations
with mine, though I am something of an Adonis. If you believed that
she and the wine-peddler had made a match, I pity your credulity and
ignorance of human nature. I am certain that neither the peddler nor
myself would touch the enterprise until you had shown exactly what you
would (pecuniarily) do. For my part, I have acted throughout on the
most exact and advanced scientific principles. Intending to modify
the spirit-trade in America, and especially to introduce the exclusive
agency of the Farina essences, I found that the sinew particularly
needed for this leap was capital. Desiring to absorb your bounties
toward Francine, I at first proposed matrimony. This offer was made
without any enmity toward the girl, as my next move was without
affection, though it seems to be resulting to her benefit. I became
her accuser as coolly as I had been her lover. Passion has nothing
to do with the combinations of strategic genius: I am something of a
Washington. My theory of her clandestine marriage was one of the most
masterly fictions of the age--a plot worthy of Thackeray. If I could
have succeeded in mutilating the statue in the graveyard, I might have
carried it, while you would have admired my act of iconoclasm with all
your Puritan nature. In the momentary abandonment of my plans, owing
to the machinations of my enemies, you will conceive that I am not
very rich. My college-debts and other expenses I am obliged to leave
for your kind attention. The main point of this letter, which M.
Fortnoye has persuaded me to set down as distinctly as in my present
feeble state I can, is that Francine is a pretty little maid who has
never passed by Gretna Green. There! that is my _credo_, and I will
subscribe to it,

"Your loving nephew, JOHN.

"P. S. Address, with such an enclosure as your generosity will prompt,
JEAN K. FFARINA, sole representative and cosmetical chemist in America
on behalf of the Farinas of Cologne, at New Orleans where I am going
to beat my adversaries like Old HIC--"

At this point the tipsy scrawl became illegible.

"This is not a very handsome apology. Did Fortnoye accept it?" I
asked, turning over the clammy and malodorous epistle. At this inquiry
the crack of the door widened and Charles appeared, on fire with
enthusiasm, and so possessed with self-importance that he forgot the
betrayal of his indiscretion.

"I can reply to that question," said Charles. "When M. Fortnoye
received the paper from the duelist he read it over and said, 'You
have meant to impose on me, monsieur, with an incomplete confession.
But, in return for your imperfect restoration of Mademoiselle Joliet's
portrait, you have unconsciously set down such a masterpiece of
yourself that I am certain your aunt will see you as she never did
before.'"

Charles, having thus added himself to our cabal without rebuke, took
a lively interest in what followed. The proud father continued: "My
son-in-law, after some business preliminaries, wrote me a handsome
letter demanding what he had already effectively possessed himself of.
I wrote to Francine, already returned to her duties, to be a good girl
and make her husband obey her in all things."

"That may have been," said I, "what made Francine take to laughing
all day and all night, as I heard she did some little time after my
departure from her house. The next news of her," I pursued, "was
that she had been spirited away by some sly old kidnapper. I almost
suspected Kranich."

"The old kidnapper," said Joliet, laughing heartily at the compliment,
"is the man now talking to you. I wanted to take Francine to her
godmother. I turned the key in the door at Carlsruhe, set the
geographers all upon their travels to explore new worlds, and we have
been living ever since quite close to Madame Kranich, who treats me
like an emperor."

It was easy now to understand why the young Kranich, as soon as he
could identify me as a protector of Francine, had been thrown off his
guard and tempted to attack me with his clumsy abuse. It was not very
mysterious, even, why he had wished all handsome girls to be drowned
in the Rhine. For him a pretty damsel was simply a rival in trade.

[Illustration: READING THE CONTRACT.]

Had I stopped at Wildbad with the party of orpheonists, I should have
encountered rather sooner the fatal beauties of Mary Ashburleigh. It
was to meet her that Fortnoye had paused at that resort, considering
her introduction to Frau Kranich almost indispensable to the success
of his scheme. She had no hesitation in following the protecting angel
of her lost child. "My object in this journey is a happy marriage,"
she had told me when to my unworthy care her guardianship had been
transferred. If I timorously suspected the marriage to be her own,
whose fault was it but mine? My heart leaped up at the successive
stages of this recital, its hopes confirmed by every additional fact:
the Dark Ladye's hand was certainly free. Fortnoye, I should surmise,
was not too desirous to abandon this magnificent companion at
Schwetzingen; but the serpent, he knew, was left behind, in company
with two or three of his and my friends: it was necessary to take
the youth by the ear, as it were, and dismiss him from the country,
without loss of time, to his future of counter-jumping. His dueling
experience may be of some use to him among the bowie-knives of
Louisiana. If his subsequent path is not strewn with roses, let him
rejoice that it is at least lubricated with cologne-water.

[Illustration: INTERRUPTED REPOSE.]

An hour had passed, and into my room from his own adjoining one now
ambled amicably my friend the baron. He greeted Joliet as an old
friend. Many a smoking-match had they had in my garden at Marly. But
Hohenfels this morning was in robes of state, with shoes that shone
even beside old Father Joliet's, and as a concession to elegance he
had abandoned his cavernous pipes in favor of cigarettes. A scroll of
this description, flavored with his Cologne pastille and very badly
rolled, was trying to exhale itself between his lips.

"What a genius for conversation you have to-day, my Flemming! This
hour I have rocked back and forth in bed, trying to understand your
observations or to cover my ears and go to rest. Your tongue has been
like the tongue of a monastery-bell summoning all hands to penance."
But I had hardly spoken ten consecutive words. The ears of the baron
were this morning quite muffled, I think, with the abundance of his
hair, which he had evidently been dressing with an avalanche of soap
and water, for the topknot was as harsh and tight as a felt. He had
lemon-blossoms on his lappel and lemon kids on his fists.

It was then I remembered that my bags were all in the steamer, where
I had left them when surprised by Charles's indisposition. My tin box
would possibly yield me a button-nosegay, but otherwise I might beat
my breast, like the wedding-guest in the _Ancient Mariner_, for I
heard the summons and was unable to attend in right attire. "We two
must take you out in the street and dress you," said Hohenfels.

Although I had never been dressed in the street, I yielded. It was a
grand public holiday, and the sounds of festivity, which had floated
into my chamber with the entrance of Hohenfels, were in full cadence
outside. Everybody was pouring out to the city-gate, or returning from
thence, where, in honor of some visit from the king of the Belgians
and count and countess of Flanders, a festival was going on in
imitation or rehearsal of the grand annual _kermesse_. These
festivals, retained in Belgium with a delightful fidelity to the
customs of antique Brabant, would fit the brush of Teniers better
than the pen of a mere bewildered tourist. Still, I will try, copying
principally from the reports of Charles (who contrives to peep at
everything, with an interest whose amount is in ratio with the square
of his distance from his master), to give a few features of the scene,
which he spread in detail before the attentive Josephine during many
an evening after.

[Illustration: COALS vs. COATS]

The principal fair-ground--though the occasion crammed the whole city
with revelers--was just outside the gate. It was a veritable town in
miniature, with a pattern of checker-board streets--Columbine street,
Polichinelle street, Avenue des Parades, Place des Parades, Street of
the Chanson, and the like. There were more than five hundred booths,
all numbered--shops and restaurants. There were the Salon Curtius,
the Ménagerie Bidel, the Bal Mabille, the Café Bataclan, the American
Tavern. From one of the little costumers' shops, Charles--with
a higher evincement of antiquarian taste than I should have
expected--managed to bear away a pattern of wall-paper, which I
afterward conferred on Mary Ashburleigh with great applause: it was
Parisian of 1824, the epoch of Charles Dix, and was entirely covered
with giraffes in honor of that puissant and elegant monarch. The above
establishments were near the entrance, to the right.

At the left were more attractions: another menagerie, a heap of
ostensible gold representing the five milliards paid by France, a
gallery of astonished wax soldiers representing the Franco-Prussian
war, a cook-shop with "mythologic" confectionery. Farther on, in the
Théâtre Casti, was exposed the "renowned buffoon Peppino," breveted by
His Majesty the "king of Egypt;" then came the Chiarini Theatre; then
the Théâtre Adrien Delille, an enchantingly pretty structure, where
receptions were given by a little creature who should have sat under
a microscope: she was "the Princess Felicia, aged thirteen, born at
Clotat, near Marseilles, weighing three kilogrammes and measuring
forty-six centimètres--a ravishing figure, admirably proportioned in
her littleness and _tout à fait sympathique!"_

The announcements were heard, it was thought by Charles, to the very
centre of the city. A low-browed animal with rasped hair was shouting,
"Messieurs and ladies, come and see--come and see the theatre of the
galleys! The only one in the world! This is the place to view the real
instruments of torture used on the prisoners---chains four yards long
and balls of thirty-five pounds. All authentic, gentlemen and ladies.
You will see the poisoners of Marseilles, Grosjon who killed his
father, Madame Cottin who ate her baby. Come in, come in, gentlemen
and ladies! Fifteen centimes! 'Tis given away! You enter and go out
when you like. Come in! It is educational: you see vice and crime
depicted on the faces of the criminals!"

[Illustration: THE JESTER AT THE FEAST.]

In another place a malicious Flemish Figaro explained the analogy
betwen _een spinnekop_ and _eene meisie_, the perspiration streaming
over his face; and my ancient minnesinger's blood stirred within me at
the report of the pleasantries which were improvised by this Rabelais
of the people, and I remembered that I too was a Flemming.

The bands belonging to the different booths tried to play each other
down, forming a stupefying charivari, with tributary processions that
quite overflowed the city. The house of "confections" yielded me no
broadcloth of a cut or dimension suitable to my figure. But my two
friends chose me a hat, a light pale-tot (my second purchase in that
sort on this eventful journey), a scented cambric handkerchief, a
rosebud, and a snowy waistcoat, in which, as in a whited sepulchre,
I concealed the decay of my toilet. These changes were judged to be
sufficient for my accoutrement. They might have done very well, but on
my way back I paused at a lace-shop window to inspect some present for
Francine. A band, with many banners and figures in masquerade, swept
past, followed by a shouting crowd. My friends lost me in a moment,
and I lost my way. I turned into a street which I was sure led to the
hotel, gave it up for another, lost that in a blind alley, and finally
brought up in a steep, narrow cañon, where I was forced to ask a
direction. The passer-by who obliged me was a man bearing a bag of
charcoal. He answered with a ready intelligence that did honor to his
heart and his sense of Progressive Geography. But he left on my white
waistcoat, alas! a charcoal sketch, full of chiaroscuro and _coloris_,
representing his index-finger surrounded with a sort of cloud-effect.
My waistcoat had to be given over in favor of the elder garment
buttoned up in the all-concealing overcoat.

[Illustration: ST. GUDOLE, BRUSSELS.]

The ceremonies of the day, I soon found, were to consist in an early
and informal breakfast at the house of Frau Kranich; then the civil
wedding at the mayor's office, followed by the usual church-service,
from which the Protestant godmother of Francine begged to be excused;
the day to wind up with a general dinner at a place of resort outside
the city at four o'clock, the usual dining-hour in old Brabant.

The early breakfast gave a renewal of my friendship with good Frau
Kranich and a glimpse of the bride, with her sweet, patient, dewy face
shadowed like a honey-drop in the gauzy calyx of her artisanne cap;
for she was in the simplest of morning dresses--something gray, with
a clean white apron. The quaint, old-fashioned house where we met was
decorated with exquisite trifles, the memorials of the mistress's old
fashionable taste, but scattered over the tables also were lecture
programmes, hospital reports and photographs of eminent philosophers.
As I took up for a plaything a gold pen-case, well used, which rested
on a magnificent old fan, the Kranich said, with just a reminiscence
of her former vivacity, "You find me much changed, Mr. Flemming. I
used to be the grasshopper in the fable--now I am the ant."

"I bless any change, ma'am," said I, "which increases your kindness
toward this charming girl."

"Dear Mr. Flemming," said pretty Francine, "how nice and shabby you
look! You will do admirably to stand by a poor girl--so poor that she
has hardly a bridesmaid. I hope you are as indigent as you were at
Carlsruhe." Upon this I felt very fatherly, and clasped her waist from
behind as I kissed her forehead.

The lawyer, a professionally bland old man, with a porous bald head
like an emu's egg, said as he was introduced, "Ah, I have heard of you
before, monsieur. You are the man of the two chickens."

Joliet was so enchanted with this rare joke, laughing and clapping
all his nearer neighbors on the back, that I could not but accept it
graciously. For this exceptional day, at least, I must bear my eternal
nickname. Was not the maid now present whose dower had been hatched
by those well-omened fowls? and was not the dower now coming to
use? Hohenfels paired off with the notary, and discussed with that
parchment person the music of Mozart, and, what would have been absurd
and incredible in any Anglo-Saxon country, the scribe understood it!

Our party had to wait but ten minutes for the groom and his men.
Fortnoye, in a grand blue suit, with a wondrous dazzle of frilling
on his broad chest, looked a noble husband, but was preoccupied and
silent. His chorus supported him--Grandstone, Somerard, my engineer
and the others--in dignified black clothes, official boutonnières
and ceremonial cravats: they greeted Frau Kranich with awe, and
bowed before the polished head of the lawyer with the parallelism of
ninepins. My little group of fellow-travelers was almost complete.
The young duelist, of course, was not expected or wanted. The Scotch
doctor, Somerard told me, had been obliged to fly to London, where a
mammoth meeting of the homoeopathic faith was in progress.

The great feature of the breakfast came on when every crumb of
breakfast had been eaten. Charles and the maid cleared away the table,
and the notary stood up to read the marriage contract. The reading,
ordinarily a dull affair, was in this instance vivified by curious
incidents. In the first place, Frau Kranich. amending the injustice
her over-credulity had caused, gave her _protègée_ a wedding-present
of twenty thousand francs, accompanying the gift with some singularly
tart remarks about her nephew: this sum was increased by the groom to
sixty thousand. The second incident was when Joliet, amid the almost
incredulous surprise of the whole table, raised the gift, by the
addition of ten thousand, to seventy thousand francs: the money was
the product of his former house and garden--that house of shreds and
patches which had cost him ten francs. When it came to affixing the
signatures, the notary appealed to Joliet for his name. He could
not sign it, being gouty and half forgetful of pen-practice, but he
responded to the question as bold as a lion: "John Thomas Joliet,
baron de Rouvière," throwing to the lawyer a fine bunch of papers
bearing witness to the validity of the title; after which he added, no
less proudly, "wine-merchant, wholesale and retail, at the sign of the
Golden Chickens, Noisy."

[Illustration: SQUARE OF THE HÔTEL DE VILLE, BRUSSELS.]

In truth, Joliet's father had rightfully borne the title of baron de
Rouvière, but, ruined by '48, had abandoned the practice of signing
it. Joliet resumed it for this special occasion, having every warrant
for the act, but whispered to me that he should never so call himself
in future, greatly preferring the enumeration of his qualities on his
business-card.

Poor Francine meanwhile had looked so timid and blushed so that Frau
Kranich nodded to her permission of absence. She gave one glance at
Fortnoye, buried her face in her hands, laughed a sweet little gurgle,
and fled. When her presence was again necessary, she reappeared,
drowned in white. We went to the mayor's office, where she lost a
pretty little surname that had always seemed to fit her like a
glove; then to the church, an obscure one in the neighborhood of Frau
Kranich's house. But at the door of the sacred edifice the elder lady
said, with much conciliatory grace in her manner, "I claim exemption
from witnessing this part of the ceremony; and you, Mr. Flemming, must
resume or discover your Protestantism and enter the carriage with
me. I must show you a little of the city while these young birds are
pairing."

No objection was made to this rather strange proposal. The bride,
between her father and husband, forgot that she had no friend of her
own sex to stand near her. We arranged for a general meeting at the
dinner.

In the carriage she said, "I brought you away because I am devoured
with uneasiness. Mrs. Ashburleigh wrote me that she would certainly
be here for at least the principal part of the ceremony. I do not know
what to make of it. It may be of no use, but we will scour the city.
These throngs, this noise, make me uneasy. I fear some accident,
having," she added with a smile, "one lone woman's sympathy for
another lone woman."

[Illustration: DIVERS DIVERSIONS.]

I peered through the crowds at this, right and left, with
inexpressible emotion. Perhaps this accidental sort of quest was that
which destiny had arranged for the solution of my life-problem. To
light upon Mary Ashburleigh in these festal throngs, perhaps wanting
assistance, perhaps calling upon my name even now through her velvet
lips, was a chance the mere notion of which made my blood leap.

When Brussels gives herself over to holiday-making, she does it in
a whole-souled and self-consistent way that has plenty of
attractiveness. The houses seemed to have turned themselves inside
out to replenish the streets. People in their best clothes, equipages,
processions, bands, troops of children, filled the avenues. Some
conjecture that there might have been a mistake about the church took
us to the cathedral of St. Gudule. Here, amid the superb spectrums of
the stained windows, we searched through the vari-colored throngs that
covered the floor, but no familiar face looked upon us. Strange to
us as the old, impassive monumental dukes of Brabant who occupy the
niches, the people made way to let us pass from the doorway between
the lofty brace of towers to the high altar, which is a juggler's
apparatus, and has concealed machinery causing the sacred wafer to
come down seemingly of its own accord at the moment when the priest is
about to lift the Host. All was unfamiliar and splendid, and we came
away, feeling as if our own little wedding-group would have been lost
in so magnificent a tabernacle. The Grande Place, on which lay the
wedge-like shadow of the high-towered Hôtel de Ville, was perhaps as
thronged a honeycomb of buzzing populace as when Alva looked out upon
it to see the execution of Egmont and Horn. Among all the good-natured
Netherlandish countenances that paved the square there was none that
responded to my own.

We drove vaguely through the principal streets, and then, baffled,
made our way to the faubourg in which is situated the zoological
garden, toward which a considerable portion of the inhabitants was
going even as ourselves. At the entrance our carriage encountered
that of the bride and groom, and soon the whole party of the
breakfast-table assembled by the gate, for the great coffee-rooms at
which our meal was laid were close by the garden, and a promenade
in this famous living museum was a premeditated part of the day's
enjoyment. We entered the grounds in character, frankly putting
forward our claims as a wedding-procession. That is the delightful
French custom among those who are brought up as Francine had been:
her father would have been heartbroken to have been denied the proud
exhibition of his joy, and Fortnoye was too great a traveler, too
cosmopolitan, to object to a little family pageant that he had seen
equaled or exceeded in publicity in most of the Catholic countries
on the globe. Francine, her artisanne cap for ever lost, her
gleaming dark hair set, like a Milky Way, with a half wreath of
orange-blossoms, the silvery gauzes of her protecting veil floating
back from her forehead, strayed on at the head of the little parade.
She was wrapped in the delicious reverie of the wedding-day. She was
not yellow nor meagre, nor uglier than herself, as so many brides
contrive to be. Her air of delicacy and tenderness was a blossom of
character, not a canker of ill-health. Her color was hardly raised,
though her head was perpetually bent. Fortnoye, holding her on his
firm arm, seemed like a man walking through enchantments. Just behind,
protecting Madame Kranich with an action of effusive gallantry that
must have been seen to be conceived, walked the baron de Rouvière,
his brave knotted hands, for which he had not found any gloves, busily
occupied in pointing out the animated rarities that to him seemed most
worthy of selection. The hilarious hyenas, the seals, the polar bears
plunging from their lofty rocks, all attracted his commendation; and
we, who walked behind in such order as our friendships or familiarity
taught us, were perpetually tripping upon his honest figure brought to
a halt before some object more than usually interesting. Exclamations
of delight at the bride's beauty, politely wrapped in whispers, arose
on all sides as we penetrated the throng: it was a proud thing to be
a part of a procession so distinguished. My good Joliet beamed with
complacency, and drove his little herd up and down and across and
about till the greater part of the garden was explored. The zoological
garden of Brussels has the beauty of not showing too obviously the
character of a prison. It is extensive, umbrageous, and the poor
captives within its borders have enough air and space around their
eyes to give them a semblance of liberty. For the special feast-day
on which we visited it the place had been arranged with particular
adaptation to the character of the time. There were elephant-races and
rides upon the camels free to all ladies who would make the venture.
In addition to the zebras, gnus and Shetlands, there was that species
of race-horse which never wins and never spoils a course, being
of wood and constructed to go round in a tent, and never to arrive
anywhere or lose any prizes. The pelicans were in high excitement, for
all along their beautiful little river, where it winds through bowery
trees, a profusion of living fish had been emptied and confined here
and there by grated dams, so that the awkward birds had opportunity
to angle in perfect freedom and to their hearts' content. In the
more wooded part of the garden a mimic hunt had been arranged, and
sportsmen in correct suits of green, with curly brass horns and baying
hounds, coursed through the grounds, following a stag which, though
mangy and asthmatic, may yet have been a descendant of the fawn that
fed Genevieve of Brabant. We had re-entered one of the grand alleys,
and were receiving again the little tribute of encomiums which the
greater privacy of the groves had pretermitted--we were parading
happily along, conscious of nothing to be ashamed of, our
orange-blossoms glistening, our veil flying, our broadcloth and
wedding-favors gleaming--when we met another group, which, though more
furtively, bore that matrimonial character which distinguished our
own.

[ILLUSTRATION: THE MIMIC HUNT.]

At the head walked Mr. Cookson & Jenkinson. He still wore that species
of shooting-costume which he had made his uniform, but it was decked
with roses, and his hands were encased in milk-white gloves: on his
hands, besides the gloves, he had the two grammatical ladies from
the Rhine steamboat in guise of bridesmaids. Behind him walked Mary
Ashburleigh. And emerging from the skirts of Mary Ashburleigh's dress,
with the embarrassed happiness of a middle-aged bridegroom, was--no?
yes! no, no! but yes--was Sylvester Berkley. I will not expose what I
suffered to the curiosity of imperfectly sympathetic strangers. I did
not faint, and I believe men in genuine despair never do so. But
I felt that weakness and unmanageableness of knee which comes with
strong mental anguish, and I sank back impotent upon the baron, whose
lingering legs repudiated the pressure, so that we both accumulated
miserably upon Grandstone. My eyes closed, and I did not hear the Dark
Ladye's salutations to Frau Kranich. But I awoke to see with anguish a
sight that drew involuntary applause from all that careless crowd.

It was the salute of the two brides. Imagine, if you can, two
great purple pansies, flushed with all the perfumed sap of an Eden
spring-time, threaded with diamonds of myriad-faceted dew,--imagine
them leaning forward on their elastic stems until both their soft
velvet countenances cling together and exchange mutually their
caparisons of honeyed gems; then let them sway gently back, and
balance once more in their morning splendor. Such was the effect when
these two imperial creatures approached each other and imprinted with
lips and palms a sister's salute. Mary Ashburleigh, whom the throng
recognized as a natural empress, was arrayed this morning as brides
are seldom arrayed, but with a sense of artistic obedience to her own
sumptuous nature and personality. The royal purple of her velvets
was cut, on skirt and bodice, into one continuous fretwork of heavy
scrolls and leafage, and through the crevices of this textile carving
shone the robe she carried beneath: it was tawny yellow, for she wore
under her outward dress a complete robe of ancient lace, whose cobweb
softness was more than half sacrificed--only perceived as the slashes
of her velvets made it evident. It was such dressing as queens alone
should indulge in perhaps, but Mary Ashburleigh chose for once to do
justice to her style and her magnificence.

I was leaning against a tree, stunned in the sick sunshine. I heard,
while my eyes were closed, a sort of voluminous cloudy roll, and the
Dark Ladye was beside me. She whispered quickly and volubly in my
ear, "I tried to confide in you, but I could not get it spoken. Yet
I managed to confess that my heart had been touched. It was only this
summer--at the Molkencur over Heidelberg--he lectured about the ruins.
'Twas information--'twas rapture! I found at once he was the Magician.
We were quietly united at the embassy this morning. And now he can
leave that dreadful consulate and has got his promotion, for he is
to be _chargé_ here in Brussels. It is sudden, but we were positively
afraid to do it in any other way, I am such a timid creature. When I
saw the travelers' agent on the steamboat, I was at first struck with
his manly British bearing and his resemblance to Sylvester. Then I
found he had the matrimonial prospectus, and perceived he might be a
link. He has managed everything beautifully. I had no idea--With his
assistance you need no more mind being married than going into a shop
for a plate of pudding. You must come up and be presented, to show you
bear no malice."

I cannot tell how I did it, but I allowed Sylvester and the agent to
grasp my hands, one on either side. Berkley, as to his collar, his
cravat, his face and his white gloves, presented one general surface
of mat silver. He clasped me with some affection, but his intellect
had quite gone, and he said it was a fine day.

I did not rally in the least until after my fourth glass of champagne
at the dinner. We made one party: indeed, Mrs. Ashburleigh had brought
her husband hither in that expectation. Fortnoye vanished a minute
to arrange the banquet-room; and as his wife rushed in to find him,
followed by the rest of us, he snatched a great damask cloth from
the table, and there was such a set-out of flowers and viands as has
seldom been seen in Belgium or elsewhere. The table, instead of a
cloth, was entirely laid with; young emerald vine-leaves: our places
were marked, and at each plate was a gift for the bride, ostensibly
coming from the person who sat there, but really provided by the
forethought of Fortnoye. In front of my own cover two pretty downy
chicks were pecking in a cottage made of crystal slats and heavily
thatched with spun glass--the prettiest birdcage in the world. On the
eaves was an inscription: "The Man of the Two Chickens." It happened
that the little keepsake I had found for Francine consisted of
wheat-ears in pearls and gold, adapted for brooch and eardrops; so
I only had to drop them in beside the chickens and the present was
appropriate and complete.

I cannot tell of the effect as Mary Ashburleigh swept into that
splendid banqueting-room, one long pyramid of velvet pierced with
webbed interstices of light. If the largest window of St. Ursula's
church had come down and entered the room, the spectacle could not
have been so superb. One item struck me: the younger bride, of course,
wore orange buds; but for the Englishwoman, a beauty ripe with many
summers, buds and blossoms were inappropriate; she wore fruits: in
the grand coronal of plaits that massed itself upon her head were
set, like gems, three or four small, delicious, amber-scented mandarin
oranges. With this piece of exquisite apropos did the infallible Mary
Ashburleigh crown the edifice of her good taste. The two brides sat
opposite each other. A small watch, which I had happened to buy at
Coblenz, I managed to detach and lay on the Dark Ladye's plate as my
offering. On a card beside it I merely wrote, "ANOTHER TIME!"

Who knows? Perhaps Sylvester may fill and founder as the other has
done. He looks miserably bilious and frightened.

I had rather partake of a rare dinner than describe one. The wines
alone represented all the cellars of the Rhine and the whole champagne
country. Fortnoye, who gave the feast, entertained both Sylvester's
party and his own with regal good cheer. Think not that Henri Fortnoye
was the ordinary obfuscated, superfluous, bewildered bridegroom. On
the contrary, assuming immediately the head of his own table, he took
the responsibility of the party's merriment, and made the good humor
flow like the wine. I know not how it was, but ere the meal was over
I found myself joining in one of his choruses; Frau Kranich forgot
her asceticism and exhumed all her youthful air of gayety; James
Athanasius Grandstone promised the host to set his wines running in
every State of America. But the prettiest moment was when the two
brides rose and touched glasses, mutually and to the health of the
company, apropos of a little wedding-song which Fortnoye had composed
and was trolling at the head our willing chorus.

[ILLUSTRATION: HOMEWARD BOUND.]




CONCLUSION.


I have arrived at Marly, and, with the ssistance of much sarcasm from
Hohenfels, am getting on with considerable spirit at my Progressive
Geography. When man's Hope ceases temporarily to take a merely Human
aspect, may it not suffer a fresh avatar and begin in a new and
Geographical form its beneficent career? The Dark Ladye has sunk
beneath my horizon, but speculations over the Atlantean and Lunar
Mountains are still succulent and vivifying.

[ILLUSTRATION: CHARLES AND JOSEPHINE.]

I fled, lashed by a hundred despairs and by many symptoms of headache
and dyspepsia, from the wedding-feast at Brussels. Charles and the
baron of Hohenfels accompanied me. It was a night-train. The spectacle
of so much wedded happiness was too much for me, too much for
Hohenfels. The effect was, contrarily, rather stimulating to Charles,
who has made a match with Josephine, and with her assistance is
now listening, the tear of sensibility in his eye, to Mendelssohn's
"Wedding March" as executed by the village organ!

We passed Valenciennes, Somain, Donai, Arras, Amiens, Clermont, Criel,
Pontoise--the last points of merely bodily travel that I shall ever
make: here-after my itineracy shall be entirely theoretical. We took
a carriage at Pontoise, and traversed the woods of Saint-Germain. As I
neared home I bowed right and left to amicable and smiling neighbors,
who waved me good-day from their doors. So did my Newfoundland,
who broke his chain and leaped upon my shoulders, flourishing his
tail--overjoyed to salute the returning Ulysses.

[ILLUSTRATION: ARGUS AND ULYSSES.]

In the British Museum, among the Elgin Marbles, Phidias has carved
a pile of heaped-up marble waves, and out of them rise the arms of
Hyperion--the most beautiful arms in the world. Homesick for heaven,
those weary arms try to free themselves of the clinging foam. Another
minute and surely the triumphant god will leap from his watery couch
and guide with unerring hands the coursers of the Dawn! But that
reluctant minute is eternal, and the divinity still remains incapable,
clogged and wrapped in the embrace of marble waves. Yet the real
sun every morning succeeds in equipping himself for his journey, and
arrives, glad, at his welcome bath in the western sea.

The inference I draw is: If you want a career to be eternal instead of
transitory, hand it over to Art.

[ILLUSTRATION: "HAND IT OVER TO ART."]

The true moral of it all is, that we are all savage myths of the
Course of the Sun. We disappear any number of times, but we rise and
trail new clouds of glory, and our readers or our audiences perceive
that it is the same old Hyperion back again. The youth who by the
faithful hound, half buried in the snow, is found far up on the most
inaccessible peaks of imagination, is perceived to grasp still in his
hand of ice that Germanesque and strange device--_Auf Wiedersehen_.

[ILLUSTRATION]




FOLLOWING THE TIBER.


TWO PAPERS.--1.


[Illustration: NEAR THE SOURCE OF THE TIBER.]

"Ecce Tiberum!" cried the Roman legions when they first beheld the
Scottish Tay. What power of association could have made them see in
the clear and shallow stream the likeless of their tawny Tiber,
with his full-flowing waters sweeping down to the sea? Perhaps those
soldiers under whose mailed and rugged breasts lay so tender a thought
of home came from the northerly region among the Apennines, where a
little bubbling mountain-brook is the first form in which the storied
Tiber greets the light of day. One who has made a pilgrimage from its
mouth to its source thus describes the spot: "An old man undertook to
be our guide. By the side of the little stream, which here constitutes
the first vein of the Tiber, we penetrated the wood. It was an immense
beech-forest.... The trees were almost all great gnarled veterans
who had borne the snows of many winters: now they stood basking above
their blackened shadows in the blazing sunshine. The little stream
tumbled from ledge to ledge of splintered rock, sometimes creeping
into a hazel thicket, green with long ferns and soft moss, and then
leaping once more merrily into the sunlight. Presently it split into
numerous little rills. We followed the longest of these. It led us
to a carpet of smooth green turf amidst an opening in the trees;
and there, bubbling out of the green sod, embroidered with white
strawberry-blossoms, the delicate blue of the crane's bill and dwarf
willow-herb, a copious little stream arose. Here the old man paused,
and resting upon his staff, raised his age-dimmed eyes, and pointing
to the gushing water, said, _'E questo si chiama il Tevere a Roma!'_
('And this is called the Tiber at Rome!') ... We followed the stream
from the spot where it issued out of the beech-forest, over barren
spurs of the mountains crested with fringes of dark pine, down to a
lonely and desolate valley, shut in by dim and misty blue peaks. Then
we entered the portals of a solemn wood, with gray trunks of trees
everywhere around us and impenetrable foliage above our heads, the
deep silence only broken by fitful songs of birds. To this succeeded
a blank district of barren shale cleft into great gullies by many a
wintry torrent. Presently we found ourselves at an enormous height
above the river, on the ledge of a precipice which shot down almost
perpendicularly on one side to the bed of the stream.... A little past
this place we came upon a very singular and picturesque spot. It was
an elevated rock shut within a deep dim gorge, about which the river
twisted, almost running round it. Upon this rock were built a few
gloomy-looking houses and a quaint, old-world mill. It was reached
from the hither side by a widely-spanning one-arched bridge. It was
called Val Savignone."[1] Beyond this, at a small village called
Balsciano, the hills begin to subside into gentler slopes, which
gradually merge in the plain at the little town of Pieve San Stefano.

[Illustration: CAPRESE.]

Thus far the infant stream has no history: its legends and chronicles
do not begin so early. But a few miles farther, on a tiny branch
called the Singerna, are the vestiges of what was once a place of
some importance--Caprese, where Michael Angelo was born exactly four
hundred years ago. His father was for a twelvemonth governor of this
place and Chiusi, five miles off (not Lars Porsenna's Clusium, which
is to the south, but Clusium Novum), and brought his wife with him to
inhabit the _palazzo communale_. During his regency the painter of the
"Last Judgment," the sculptor of "Night and Morning," the architect of
St. Peter's cupola, first saw the light. Here the history of the Tiber
begins--here men first mingled blood with its unsullied waves. On
another little tributary is Anghiara, where in 1440 a terrible battle
was fought between the Milanese troops, under command of the gallant
free-lance Piccinino, and the Floren-tines, led by Giovanni Paolo
(commonly called Giampaolo) Orsini; and a little farther, on the main
stream, Città di Castello recalls the story of a long siege which it
valiantly sustained against Braccio da Montone, surnamed Fortebraccio
(Strongarm), another renowned soldier of fortune of the fifteenth
century.

[Footnote 1: _The Pilgrimage of the Tiber_, by Wm. Davies.]

[Illustration: LAKE THRASIMENE.]

As the widening flood winds on through the beautiful plain, a broad
sheet of water on the right spreads for miles to the foot of the
mountains, whose jutting spurs form many a bay, cove and estuary. It
was in the small hours of a night of misty moonlight that our eyes,
stretched wide with the new wonder of beholding classic ground, first
caught sight of this smooth expanse gleaming pallidly amid the dark,
blurred outlines of the landscape and trees. The monotonous noise and
motion of the train had put our fellow-travelers to sleep, and when it
gradually ceased they did not stir. There was no bustle at the little
station where we stopped; a few drowsy figures stole silently by in
the dim light, like ghosts on the spectral shore of Acheron; the whole
scene was strangely unreal, phantasmal. "What can it be?" we asked
each other under our breaths. "There is but one thing that it can
be--Lake Thrasimene." And so it was. Often since, both by starlight
and daylight, we have seen that watery sheet of fatal memories, but
it never wore the same shadowy yet impressive aspect as on our first
night-journey from Florence to Rome.

Not far from here one leaves the train for Perugia, seated high on
a bluff amid walls and towers. We had been told a good deal of the
terrors of the way--how so steep was the approach that at a certain
point horses give out and carriages must be dragged up by oxen. It was
with some surprise, therefore, that we saw ordinary hotel omnibuses
and carriages waiting at the station. But we did not allow ourselves
to feel any false security: by and by we knew the tug must come. We
set off by a wide, winding road, uphill undoubtedly, but smooth and
easy: however, this was only the beginning; and as it grew steeper and
steeper, we waited in trepidation for the moment when the heavy beasts
should be hitched on to haul us up the acclivity. We crawled up safely
and slowly between orchards of olive trees, which will grow wherever
a goat can set its foot: beneath us the great fertile vale of Umbria
spread like a lake, the encircling mountains, which had looked like
a close chain from below, unlinking themselves to reveal gorges and
glimpses of other valleys. Thus by successive zigzags we mounted
the broad turnpike-road, now directly under the fortifications, now
farther off, until we saw them close above us, with the old citadel
and the new palace. And now surely the worst had come, but the carnage
turned a sharp corner, showing two more zigzags, forming a long acute
angle which carried us smoothly to the rocky plateau on which the city
stands, and we bowled in through the old gate-way at a round trot,
with the usual cracking of whips and rattling and jingling of harness
which announces the arrival of travelers at minor places on the
Continent.

We were not comfortable at Perugia--and let no one think to be so
until there is a new hotel on a new principle--but it is a place where
one can afford to forego creature comforts. Of all the towns on the
Tiber, so rich in heirlooms of antiquity and art, none can boast such
various wealth as this. The moment one leaves the centre of the town,
which is built on a table of rock, the narrow streets plunge down on
every side like dangerous broken flights of stairs: they disappear
under deep cavernous arches, so that if you are below they seem to
lead straight up through the darkness to the soft blue heaven, while
from above they seem to go straight down into deep cellars, but
cellars full of slanting sunshine. And whether you look up or down,
there is always a picture in the dark frame against the bright
background--a woman in a scarlet kerchief with a water-vessel of
antique form, or a ragged brown boy leading a ragged brown donkey, or
a soldier in gay uniform striking a light for his pipe. As soon as
you leave the live part of the town, with the few little _caffès_ and
shops, and the esplanades whence the thrice-lovely landscape unfolds
beneath your gaze, you wander among quiet little paved _piazzas_ with
a bit of daisied grass in their midst, surrounded by great silent
buildings, whence through some opening you descry a street which is a
ravine, and the opposite cliff rising high above you piled close with
gray houses overhung with shrubs and creepers, and little gardens in
their crevices like weeds between the stones of a wall; or you come
out upon a secluded gallery with tall, deserted-looking mansions on
one hand--except that at some sunny window there is always to be seen
a girl's head beside a pot of carnations or nasturtiums--and on the
other a parapet over which you lean to see the town scrambling up the
hillside, while a great breadth of valley and hill and snow-covered
mountain stretches away below.

Then what historical associations, straggling away across three
thousand years to when Perugia was one of the thirty cities of
Etruria, and kept her independence through every vicissitude until
Augustus starved her out in 40 B.C.! Portions of the wall, huge smooth
blocks of travertine stone, are the work of the vanished Etruscans,
and fragments of several gateways, with Roman alterations. One
is perfect, imbedded in the outer wall of the castle: it has a
round-headed arch, with six pilasters, in the intervals of which are
three half-length human figures and two horses' heads. On the southern
slope of the hill, three miles beyond the walls, a number of Etruscan
tombs were accidentally discovered by a peasant a few years ago. The
outer entrance alone had suffered, buried under the rubbish of two
millenniums: the burial-place of the Volumnii has been restored
externally after ancient Etruscan models, but within it has been left
untouched. Descending a long flight of stone steps, which led into the
heart of the hill, we passed through a low door formerly closed by a
single slab of travertine, too ponderous for modern hinges. At first
we could distinguish nothing in the darkness, but by the uncertain
flaring of two candles, which the guide waved about incessantly, we
saw a chamber hewn in the rock, with a roof in imitation of beams and
rafters, all of solid tufa stone. A low stone seat against the wall
on each hand and a small hanging lamp were all the furniture of this
apartment, awful in its emptiness and mystery. On every side there
were dark openings into cells whence came gleams of white, indefinite
forms: a great Gorgon's head gazed at us from the ceiling, and from
the walls in every direction started the crested heads and necks of
sculptured serpents. We entered one by one the nine small grotto-like
compartments which surround the central cavern: the white shapes
turned out to be cinerary urns, enclosing the ashes of the three
thousand years dead Volumnii. Urns, as we understand the word, they
are not, but large caskets, some of them alabaster, on whose lids
recline male figures draped and garlanded as for a feast: the faces
differ so much in feature and expression that one can hardly doubt
their being likenesses: the figures, if erect, would be nearly two
feet in height. The sides of these little sarcophagi are covered
with _bassi-rilievi_, many of them finely executed: the subjects are
combats and that favorite theme the boar-hunt of Kalydon; there was
one which represented the sacrifice of a child. The Medusa's head,
as it is thought to be, recurs constantly, treated with extraordinary
power: we were divided among ourselves whether it was Medusa or an
Erinnys with winged head. The sphinx appears several times: there
are four on the corners of an alabaster urn in the shape of a
temple, exquisite in form and features, and exceedingly delicate in
workmanship. Bulls' heads, with garlands drooping between them, a
well-known ornament of antique altars, are among the decorations. But
far the most beautiful objects were the little hanging figures, which
seemed to have been lamps of a green bronze color, though we were
assured that they are _terra-cotta_: they are male figures of
exquisite grace and beauty, with a lightness and airiness commonly
given to Mercury; but these had large angel pinions on the shoulders,
and none on the head or feet. There was not a scholar in the party,
so we all returned unenlightened, but profoundly interested and
impressed, and with that delightful sense of stimulated curiosity
which is worth more than all Eurekas. With the exception of a few
weapons and trinkets, which we saw at the museum, this is all that
remains of the mighty Etruscans, save the shapes of the common red
pottery which is spread out wholesale in the open space opposite the
cathedral on market-days--the most graceful and useful which could
be devised, and which have not changed their model since earlier days
than the occupants of those tombs could remember.

[Illustration: THE TIBER NEAR PERUGIA.]

The conquering Roman has left his sign-manual everywhere, but one
is so used to him in Italy that the scantier records of later ages
interest us more here. Like every other old Italian town, Perugia
had its great family, the Baglioni, who lorded it over the place,
sometimes harshly and cruelly enough, sometimes generously and
splendidly--protectors of popular rights and patrons of art and
letters. Their mediaeval history is full of picturesque incident and
dramatic catastrophe: it would make a most romantic volume, but
a thick one. At length the Perugians, master and men, grew too
turbulent, and Pope Paul III. put them down, and sat upon them, so to
speak, by building the citadel.

But time would fail us to tell of the Baglioni, or Pope Paul the
Borghese, or Fortebraccio, the chivalric _condottiere_ who led the
Perugians to war against their neighbors of Todi, or even the still
burning memories of the sack of Perugia by command of the present
pope. We can no longer turn our thoughts from the treasures of art
which make Perugia rich above all cities of the Tiber, save Rome
alone. We cannot tarry before the cathedral, noble despite its
incompleteness and the unsightly alterations of later times, and full
of fine paintings and matchless wood-carving and wrought metal and
precious sculptures; nor before the Palazzo Communale, another grand
Gothic wreck, equally dignified and degraded; nor even beside the
great fountain erected six hundred years ago by Nicolo and Giovanni da
Pisa, the chiefs and founders of the Tuscan school of sculpture; nor
beneath the statue of Pope Julius III., which Hawthorne has made known
to all; for there are a score of churches and palaces, each with its
priceless Perugino, and drawings and designs by his pupil Raphael
in his lovely "first manner," which has so much of the Eden-like
innocence of his master; and the Academy of Fine Arts, where one may
study the Umbrian school at leisure; and last, but not least, the Sala
del Cambio, or Hall of Exchange, where Perugino may be seen in his
glory. It is not a hall of imposing size, so that nothing interferes
with the impression of the frescoes which gaze upon you from every
side as you enter. Or no; they do not gaze upon you nor return your
glance, but look sweetly and serenely forth, as if with eyes never
bent on earthly things. The right-hand wall is dedicated to the sibyls
and prophets, the left to the greatest sages and heroes of antiquity.
There is something capricious or else enigmatical in the mode of
presenting many of them--the dress, attitude and general appearance
often suggest a very different person from the one intended--but the
grace and loveliness of some, the dignity and elevation of others, the
expression of wisdom in this face, of celestial courage in that, the
calm and purity and beauty of all, give them an indescribable charm
and potency. At the end of the room facing the door are the "Nativity"
and "Transfiguration," the latter, infinitely beautiful and religious,
full of quiet concentrated feeling. We were none of us critics: none
of us had got beyond the stage when the sentiment of a work of art is
what most affects our enjoyment of it; and we all confessed how much
more impressive to us was this Transfiguration, with its three quiet
spectators, than the world-famous one at the Vatican. Although
there are masterpieces of Perugino's in nearly every great European
collection, I cannot but think one must go to Perugia to appreciate
fully the limpid clearness, the pensive, tranquil suavity, which
reigns throughout his pictures in the countenances, the landscape, the
atmosphere.

[Illustration: TODI.]

We found it hard to rob Perugia even of a day for a pilgrimage to the
tomb of Saint Francis at Assisi, yet could not leave the neighborhood
without making it. We took the morning-train for the little excursion,
meaning to drive back, and crossed the Tiber for the first time on the
downward journey at Ponte San Giovanni. We got out at the station of
Santa Maria degli Angeli, so named from the immense church built over
the cell where Saint Francis lived and died and the little chapel
where he prayed. The Porzionuncula it was called, or "little share,"
being all that he deemed needful for man's abode on earth, and more
than needful. It was hither that he came in the heyday of youth,
forsaking the house of his wealthy father, the love of his mother,
a life of pleasure with his gay companions, and dedicated himself to
poverty and preaching the word of God. One of our party had said that
she considered Saint Francis the author of much evil, and as having
done irreparable harm to the Italian people in sanctifying dirt and
idleness. But apostles are not to be judged by the abuse of their
doctrine; and although it cannot be denied that Saint Francis
encouraged beggary by forbidding his followers to possess aught of
their own, he enjoined that they should labor with their hands for
several hours daily. And to me it seemed as if out of Palestine
there could be no spot of greater significance and sacredness to any
Christian than this, where in a sanguinary and licentious age a young
man suddenly broke all the bonds of self, and taught in his own person
humility, renunciation and brotherly love as they had hardly been
taught since his Master's death. The sternness of his personal
self-denial is only equaled by his sweetness toward all living things:
not men alone, but animals, birds, fishes, the frogs, the crickets,
shared his love, and were called brother and sister by him. The great
and instantaneous movement which he produced in his own time was no
short-lived blaze of fanaticism, for its results have lasted from the
twelfth century to our own; and although we may well believe that the
day is past for serving Christ by going barefoot and living on
alms, the spirit of Saint Francis's doctrine, charity, purity,
self-abnegation, might do as much for modern men as for those of six
hundred years ago. Believing all this, we were not sorry that our
uncompromising friend had stayed behind, and it was in a reverent
mood that we left the little stone chamber--which shrinks to lowlier
proportions by contrast with the enormous dome above it--and turned
to climb the long hill which leads to the magnificent monument which
enthusiasm raised over him who in life had coveted so humble a home.

[Illustration: CHURCH AND CONVENT OF SAINT FRANCIS, AT ASSISI.]

The cliff on which Assisi stands rises abruptly on the side toward
the Tiber: long lines of triple arches, which look as if hewn in
the living stone, stretch along its face, one above another, like
galleries, the great mass of the church and convent, with its towers
and gables and spire-like cypress trees, crowning all. It is this
marriage of the building to the rock, these lower arcades which rise
halfway between the valley and the plateau seeking the help of
the solid crag to sustain the upper ones and the vast superimposed
structure, that makes the distant sight of Assisi so striking, and
almost overwhelms you with a sense of its greatness as the winding
road brings you close below on your way up to the town. It is a triple
church. The uppermost one, begun two years after the saint's death,
has a magnificent Gothic west front and high steps leading from the
piazza, and a rich side-portal with a still higher flight leading from
a court on a lower level. As we entered, the early afternoon sun was
streaming in through the immense rose-window and flooding the vast
nave, illumining the blue star-studded vault of the lofty roof and the
grand, simple frescoes of Cimabue and Giotto on the walls. Thence we
descended to the second church, in whose darkness our vision groped,
half blind from the sudden change; but gradually through the dusk we
began to discern low vaults stretching heavily across pillars which
look like stunted giants, so short are they and so tremendously
thick-set, the high altar enclosed by an elaborate grating, the little
side-chapels like so many black cells, and through the gloom a twinkle
and glimmer of gold and color and motes floating in furtive sunbeams
that had strayed in through the superb stained glass of the infrequent
windows. The frescoes of Giotto and his school enrich every spandril
and interspace with their simple, serious forms--no other such place
to study the art of that early day--but a Virgin enthroned among
saints by Lo Spagna, a disciple of Perugino's, made a pure light in
the obscurity: it had all the master's golden transparency, like clear
shining after the rain. From this most solemn and venerable place we
went down to the lowest church, the real sepulchre: it was darker than
the one we had left, totally dark it seemed to me, and contracted,
although--it is in the form of a Greek cross--each arm is sixty feet:
in fact, it is only a crypt of unusual size; and although here
were the saint's bones in an urn of bronze, we were conscious of a
weakening of the impression made by the place we had just left. No
doubt it is because the crypt is of this century, while the other two
churches are of the thirteenth.

There are other things to be seen at Assisi; and after dining at the
little Albergo del Leone, which, like every part of the town except
the churches, is remarkably clean, my companion set out to climb up to
the castle, and I wandered back to the great church. As I sat idly
on the steps a monk accosted me, and finding that I had not seen the
convent, carried me through labyrinthine corridors and galleries, down
long flights of subterranean stone steps, one after another, until
I thought we could not be far from the centre of the earth, when he
suddenly turned aside into a vast cloister with high arched openings
and led me to one of them. Oh, the beauty, the glory, the wonder of
the sight! We were halfway down the mountain-side, hanging between the
blue heaven and the billowy Umbrian plain, with its verdure and its
azure fusing into tints of dreamy softness as they vanished in the
deep violet shadows of thick-crowding mountains, on whose surfaces
and gorges lay changing colors of the superbest intensity. Poplars and
willows showed silvery among the tender green of other deciduous trees
in their fresh spring foliage and the deep velvet of the immortal
cypresses and the blossoming shrubs, which looked like little puffs
of pink and white cloud resting on the bosom of the valley. A small,
clear mountain-stream wound round the headland to join the Tiber,
which divides the landscape with its bare, pebbly bed. It was almost
the same view that one has from twenty places in Perugia, but coming
out upon it as from the bowels of the earth, framed in its huge stone
arch, it was like opening a window from this world into Paradise.

Slowly and lingeringly I left the cloister, and panted up the many
steps back to the piazza to await my companion and the carriage which
was to take us back to Perugia. The former was already there, and in a
few minutes a small omnibus came clattering down the stony street, and
stopping beside us the driver informed us that he had come for us. Our
surprise and wrath broke forth. Hours before we had bespoken a little
open carriage, and it was this heavy, jarring, jolting vehicle which
they had sent to drive us ten miles across the hills. The driver
declared, with truly Italian volubility and command of language and
gesture, that there was no other means of conveyance to be had; that
it was excellent, swift, admirable; that it was what the signori
always went from Assisi to Perugia in; that, in fine, we had engaged
it, and _must_ take it. My companion hesitated, but I had the
advantage here, being the one who could speak Italian; so I promptly
replied that we would not go in the omnibus under any circumstances.
The whole story was then repeated with more adjectives and
superlatives, and gestures of a form and pathos to make the fortune
of a tragic actor. I repeated my refusal. He began a third time: I
sat down on the steps, rested my head on my hand and looked at the
carvings of the portal. This drove him to frenzy: so long as you
answer an Italian he gets the better of you; entrench yourself in
silence and he is impotent. The driver's impotence first exploded
in fury and threats: at least we should pay for the omnibus, for his
time, for his trouble; yes, pay the whole way to Perugia and back, and
his _buon' mano_ besides. All the beggars who haunt the sanctuary of
their patron had gathered about us, and from playing Greek chorus
now began to give us advice: "Yes, we would do well to go: the only
carriage in Assisi, and excellent, admirable!" The numbers of these
vagrants, their officiousness, their fluency, were bewildering. "But
what are we to do?" asked my anxious companion. "Why, if it comes to
the worst, walk down to the station and take the night-train back." He
walked away whistling, and I composed myself to a visage of stone
and turned my eyes to the sculptures once more. Suddenly the driver
stopped short: there was a minute's pause, and then I heard a voice
in the softest accents asking for something to buy a drink. I turned
round--beside me stood the driver hat in hand: "Yes, the signora is
right, quite right: I go, but she will give me something to get a
drink?" I nearly laughed, but, biting my lips, I said firmly, "A
drink? Yes, if it be poison." The effect was astounding: the man
uttered an ejaculation, crossed himself, mounted his box and drove
off; the beggars shrank away, stood aloof and exchanged awestruck
whispers; only a few liquid-eyed little ragamuffins continued to turn
somersets and stand on their heads undismayed.

Half an hour elapsed: the sun was beginning to descend, when the sound
of wheels was again heard, and a light wagon with four places and a
brisk little horse came rattling down the street. A pleasant-looking
fellow jumped down, took off his hat and said he had come to drive
us to Perugia. We jumped up joyfully, but I asked the price. "Fifty
francs"--a sum about equivalent to fifty dollars in those regions. I
smiled and shook my head: he eagerly assured me that this included
his _buon mano_ and the cost of the oxen which we should be obliged
to hire to drag us up some of the hills. I shook my head again: he
shrugged and turned as if to go. My unhappy fellow-traveler started
forward: "Give him whatever he asks and let us get away." I sat down
again on the steps, saying in Italian, as if in soliloquy, that
we should have to go by the train, after all. Then the new-comer
cheerfully came back: "Well, signora, whatever you please to give."
I named half his price--an exorbitant sum, as I well knew--and in
a moment more we were skimming along over the hard, smooth
mountain-roads: we heard no more of those mythical beasts the oxen,
and in two hours were safe in Perugia.




THE PARADOX.


  I wish that the day were over,
    The week, the month and the year;
  Yet life is not such a burden
    That I wish the end were near.

  And my birthdays come so swiftly
    That I meet them grudgingly:
  Would it be so were I longing
    For the life that is to be?

  Nay: the soul, though ever reaching
    For that which is out of sight,
  Yet soars with reluctant motion,
    Since there is no backward flight.

CHARLOTTE F. BATES.




A NIGHT AT COCKHOOLET CASTLE.

I.


Cockhoolet was the name of the place: it was a farm of which the
Ormistons were and had been tenants for several generations. A father,
mother and five olive-branches made up the family. A healthy, happy,
united, thriving family they were, and as such much respected. There
were two sons and three daughters, the eldest of whom was Bessie,
the "Rose of Cockhoolet," as she was called; for that she had all the
beauty and sweetness of the rose was generally allowed, although
there were people who could not be made to see this--people who were
probably idiopts; not idiots--although they might have a streak
of idiocy in them, too, perhaps--but idiopts, or persons who were
color-blind. None of the young men of the district were color-blind.

The clergyman of the parish in which Cockhoolet was situated, and at
whose church the Ormistons attended, was an old man comparatively,
whose sermons were old-fashioned, and not given forth with the fire
of youth: he was not one you would have expected to be very popular,
especially with the young; yet various young men from considerable
distances were attracted to his church, and, generally speaking, they
settled themselves in pews opposite the gallery in front of which
sat Mr. Ormiston and his family. Any person who chanced to be in the
vicinity, if of discerning powers, might have been conscious of the
electricity in the air. Dull people neither saw nor felt it.

Bessie Ormiston was not dull, but, being a modest girl, she would
rather not have been stared at; and, being a good girl, she thought
people might be better employed in church: still, she was only a girl,
and it would not be the truth to say she was mortally offended. Did
the person ever exist who was offended at an honest compliment? If
he ever did, he ought to have been fed on sarcasm for the rest of his
days.

Not only was Bessie pretty--she was also rich. A grand-uncle had left
her five thousand pounds, her brothers and sisters getting only one
thousand each. There is no use in asking reasons for this: simply, the
Rose was born with a silver spoon in her mouth. Perhaps, indeed, the
old man did not know he had so much money, for it was as residuary
legatee that Bessie got the five thousand pounds, and it was not
thought she would get anything like that: people remarked, in the
language of the district, which was apt occasionally to be strong and
graphic rather than elegant,--people remarked that "old Ormiston
had cut up well." Five thousand charms added to those Bessie already
possessed--not to mention that her father was a rich man--made her
most miraculously charming: like Tibby Fowler of the Glen, whose
perplexities of this kind have been embalmed in song, she had wealth
of wooers, and wealth, it is well known, makes wit waver.

It is a saying that an Englishman's house is his castle, but the
phrase is understood to be figurative: Mr. Ormiston's house was his
castle without a figure. Cockhoolet Castle is very old, at least one
part of it is, having been built probably about the year 1400. A more
modern part was built in 1527, while the most modern part of all was
added in 1726: this last division of it is used as the farm-house.
The rooms have been painted and papered in the present style of house
decoration, and in the sitting-rooms, in addition to the little old
windows, the thick walls have been pierced and a large bow-window put
in with fine effect. There are three narrow stone staircases leading
up the three divisions of the castle; there are long passages; there
are sudden short flights of steps taking you up or down into all
manner of cornered rooms; there is a hall which might hold the
population of the county. Keeping up one of the spiral staircases,
you come out on the roof, round which there is a walk guarded by a low
stone coping: should you want to fling yourself over, you have ample
opportunity. There are stone sentry-boxes where you can sit hidden
from the wind and everything else, and look far and wide over the
country, and down into the garden if you can do so without growing
giddy. There is also a dungeon tenanted by nothing more subject
to suffering than potatoes and other roots, for which it is a most
favorable receptable, the walls being so thick and the roof so low
that cold cannot get in in winter nor heat in summer: there is only a
single narrow slit in the wall for the admission of light, but it is
comforting to know that the doomed wretches who inhabited it in past
ages had at least a temperate climate.

There is the room Queen Mary Stuart slept in when she occasionally
visited in the vicinity. The reader is perhaps not familiar with Queen
Mary's name in connection with Cockhoolet Castle, but there may be
other facts about her of which he is also ignorant. Does he know, for
instance, that she had a daughter by her third marriage, whom, as an
infant, she despatched to France to be reared in a nunnery, "that she
may not," said the unhappy queen, "run the risk of having such a lot
as I have"? Does he know that John Knox was possessed by a mad passion
of love for Mary Stuart? It has always been thought otherwise--that
in point of fact he held her in contempt; but as it is proverbial that
"nippin' and scartin' (figurative of course) is Scotch folks' wooin',"
there may be truth in the new discovery. But true or not true, it
is enough to make the bold Reformer blush standing on the top of his
pillar in the necropolis of Glasgow: perhaps he _is_ blushing, if he
were near enough to see.

Be that as it may, there is no manner of doubt that Mary Stuart
honored Cockhoolet Castle by abiding under its roof when it suited her
to do so. Have not I, the present writer, stood in the room she slept
in--looked from the small windows set in the ten-foot thick wall from
which she looked? Have I not gazed over the same country, up to the
same skies, into the same moon at which she gazed? Could her face be
more fair than that of the present Rose of Cockhoolet, her thoughts
more innocent, her reveries more sweet, than those of Bessie Ormiston,
who in the course of time had succeeded to the room which had been
consecrated by royal slumbers?

It is a matter of certainty that Mary Stuart planted a tree fast by
Cockhoolet Castle--she would not have been herself if she had not done
that--and a magnificent tree it is, very old and quite big enough
for its age. The queen must have been fond of planting trees, and,
considering the number she planted, it is astonishing how she found
time for so many less innocent employments: she must have improved
each shining hour, and, poor woman! she had not too many of these.

There is a walk also, called the Lady's Walk, leading away from
the castle up a bosky dell, where a burn amuses itself playing at
hide-and-seek, but, like a little child, betrays its hiding-places by
its voice, and comes out into the light again and laughs at its own
joke. Did the queen ever wander here? did she ever "paidle in the burn
when summer days were fine"? did its murmur ever soothe her ear?
did she ever see her fair face in its pools, or drop bitter tears to
mingle and; flow on with its waters?

The burn has kept trotting through the dell for six thousand years,
singing its song all the time, and its speed is as good and its voice
as clear and musical as when the morning stars sang together and all
the sons of God shouted for joy. Many a wild story it could tell if
its murmur could be understood; but it is a murmur only--a murmur
which crept into the ears of Cæsar's legions, of Queen Mary, of Bessie
Ormiston, and will creep into yours, O reader! if you like to go
and explore the Lady's Walk, when you can interpret the murmur for
yourself, as all your predecessors no doubt did. In days of old it
fed the moat, traces of which are to be seen round the castle still,
although it has long since been filled up and covered, like the park
of which it forms part, with rich natural pasture, soft, thick and
velvety. In short, Cockhoolet had everything that a castle ought to
have, and wanted nothing that a castle ought not to want, not even a
ghost.

It was not the ghost of Mary Stuart: that would have been too
shocking--a ghost without a head, or having a head and a broad vivid
ray of red encircling its neck. Such a ghost would have made every one
who saw it lose his senses. Cockhoolet Castle had a ghost: so much was
certain, but hitherto no one had ever either seen or heard it. How,
then, was it certain? Why ask a question like that? Is it reasonable
to pin a human being down to prove a ghost? Will not presumptive
evidence do? Strange things had happened, must have happened, at
the castle: is it for a moment to be supposed that these things had
happened and all gone scot free?--in other words, that not one of them
had left a ghost? It is not to be supposed.




II.


It was Christmas Day. Christmas Day is not solemnized and festivalized
in Scotland as it is in England; still, the observance of it in some
shape is creeping in more and more. It was Christmas, and Mr. and Mrs.
Ormiston had gone to be present at a feast from which they were not
expected to return till the following day. There were left at home the
Rose, as head of the family for the time being; her sisters, Bell and
Jessie, supposed to be little girls still, although the supposition
made them very indignant; and her two brothers, John and William. A
guest aad two servants made up the known inhabitants of the house.

The guest was a young man who had arrived before the heads of the
house left, and had been laughingly charged by them to see that the
children did not work mischief. He was an old friend of the family; at
least as old a friend as he was a man, and she had been in the world
a quarter of a century. We shall call him Edwin: that name will do as
well as another; indeed, better, for he might not like his own made
public. It need hardly be said that among the rest young Edwin loved,
and, like his namesake in the ballad, he never talked of love. This
might be stupid, but the stupidity which springs from true modesty
is not to be classed with the stupidity which springs from want of
brains, even when, as is quite likely, the consequences are to the
full as disastrous. Now, how is a young lady to understand or bring
things to a bearing in a case like this? The Rose could not go up
to Edwin and tell him she was not a goddess; neither could she say,
"Although I have five thousand pounds--and you know it, and I know
that you know it, and you know that I know that you know it--I am
quite ready to believe that you love me, and would love me if I hadn't
a farthing:" she could not say this, but she thought it, she worried
herself thinking over it, and, being a sensible girl with a humble
opinion of herself, she came to the conclusion that she had been
altogether mistaken--that Edwin did not care for her, at least not
as she cared for him, otherwise why should he not say so? "If," she
thought--"if I were in his place and he in mine, neither money nor
pride, nor anything else, would keep me silent." And the roses in
her face deepened in color as she thought of her own silly folly in
allowing her feelings to be drawn in, and she determined her folly
should cease from that hour; which determination had the effect of
bringing sharp, short speeches about Edwin's ears tinged with sarcasm
that were meant to convey to him the conviction that she did not care
a pin about him; and they answered the purpose admirably.

  Love is a fickle game, which they
  Whose stakes are deepest worst can play,

Edwin was at Cockhoolet that Christmas Day by the same fatality that
causes a moth to hover round a brilliant light; and when her sister
told Bessie that Edwin had come and was putting his horse into the
stable, she said, "Is Mr. Forrester here again? He must surely be dull
at home." But of course she received him with friendly civility.

Edwin employed the forenoon out of doors with the boys and two other
visitors. A Mr. and Mrs. Parker arriving unexpectedly, who were
anxious to see the castle, the afternoon was spent in going through
every part of it from dungeon to roof.

Bessie carried the keys: she was châtelaine, seneschal and cicerone,
all rolled in one.

Going up the narrow stairs, the party had to climb Indian file: in the
passages they could spread out a little, and in some of the rooms in
the uninhabited portion they had to walk circumspectly, as if they
were crossing water on stepping-stones, for the flooring was wanting
in some places, leaving a stretch of bare rafters. Bessie tripped
lightly over them, and then turned to wait for the others. "Don't be
frightened," she said: "these rafters are as sound as the day they
were laid down. The flooring has not rotted: it must have been taken
up for some purpose. They did not know how to scamp work in those
days."

"If we fall through, where shall we go?" inquired Mrs. Parker, looking
down into what seemed deep mysterious darkness.

"Oh, not very far; but don't fall: it won't be pleasant," said Bessie:
"you would alight on very hard stones."

Mr. Forrester got on the roof first, and handed up the ladies; and
they all stood looking out over the country. It was not a cold, bleak,
snowy day, as Christmas in northern latitudes has a right to be. The
winter had been mild--one of a series of mild winters, overturning the
old traditions of frosts and snow-storms that lasted for months,
and to a great extent stopped traffic and labor, and made traveling
difficult and wearisome. This Christmas was different. The year was
dying with calmness and dignity, and with a smile on its face, as you
might take the pale gleam of sunshine to be; and if you were a little
sad in mood you could suppose there was a wistfulness in the smile
that was spread over the still, soft face of Nature. Cockhoolet stood
high, and the country immediately round it was flat, and much of it
moorland.

  If you climb to our castle's top,
  I don't see where your eye can stop;
  For when you've passed the corn-field country,
  Where vineyards leave off flocks are packed,
  And sheep-range leads to cattle-tract,
  And cattle-tract to open chase,
  And open chase to the very base
  O' the mountain.

Strike out the vineyards and that description will apply very well
to Cockhoolet; and in addition you ought to have seen from its roof
Edinburgh and the sea; but on this day the sea wore a garment of mist,
and had wrapped the metropolis in it also, as it not unfrequently
does. You ought to have seen more than one range of hills too, yet
except by eyes well acquainted with them their outlines could hardly
be distinguished from the leaden gray clouds lying in bands along the
horizon.

But as the party stood on the roof the clouds began to rise, tower
upon tower, against the sky, and the sun, who retires early at this
season, went behind them, when, instead of the pale, wistful gleam he
had been keeping up all day, he suddenly threw a deep bright golden
border on all the edges of the dark misty battlements which had piled
themselves like castles of the Titans: a big rift appearing at their
base, there poured through it, filling up the space, a great belt of
crimson rays streaked with gray, as if from burning ashes falling into
it, and like the dense glow from a furnace, giving the idea that the
cloud-building was on fire, and that the flames from below, shooting
up inside the dark walls, were the cause of the brilliant illumination
that shone round every pinnacle and coign of vantage. It was a grand
and a curious sight. You could fancy the sun looking across to the
old Castle of Edinburgh standing on its rock, and saying, "Can you
do anything like this with all the gas and paddelle you can lay your
hands on?" Precisely this idea struck Mrs. Parker, for she said, "I
think that is as good a sight as the castle the night the prince was
married."

"That was a very good sight in its way," said Mr. Parker, "but we can
hardly hope to compete with the sun, my dear: he has all his materials
within himself, and we have to pay for them."

"Do you know, Miss Ormiston," said Mrs. Parker, "one of the buildings
they said had such a fine effect put me in mind of a trunk studded
with brass nails--the initials of the happy pair in gas-jets looked
like the name of the owner of the trunk. All the time I was on the
street I could not get that notion out of my head; and I was sorry,
for I am sure it cost a great deal of money to light it up, and I
really wished to think it grand."

"We were all in town that night," said John Ormiston--"papa and mamma,
and the whole of us, and Mr. Forrester, who made eight."

"I thought it a beautiful sight," said Bessie.

"I never enjoyed anything more in my life," said Mr. Forrester, who on
that occasion had been Miss Ormiston's escort through the streets, in
which they lost their party, and had the supreme bliss of wandering
together in the crowd, when Mr. Forrester almost forgot that Miss
Ormiston was a goddess with five thousand earthly charms, and Miss
Ormiston had compared his merits as a guide and protector with those
of her brothers, and found he was much more considerate, and made her
wish law, which they were often far from doing. In point of fact, a
thaw had been very imminent, but, alas! since then a sharp frost had
set in between them, as unaccountably as frosts frequently do set in.

"I think, now," said Mrs. Parker, "a fine old castle like this ought
to have had a grander name: don't you think so, Miss Ormiston?"

"Yes, I do, and it had, originally. There was a monastery here at one
time, over in that field with the trees in the corner of it: it was
called the abbey of Cakeholy, and when the castle was built it got the
name of Cakeholy Castle, after the abbey. The name Cakeholy, tradition
says, arose from the fact that an extraordinary saint, whose wants had
been relieved at the monastery, blessed all the bread that should ever
be baked there, and the bread ever after had a great sustaining power
in it; so that pilgrims from Edinburgh and the North, going to the
southern shrines, all passed this way to get themselves supplied with
the holy cakes. At the Reformation the abbey was destroyed, and became
a ruin haunted by owls, so that, partly in derision and partly as
suiting the altered circumstances, the common people corrupted the
name into Cockhoolet; and in process of time it was given to the
castle also, and stuck to it. That is the history of a name which is
certainly neither romantic, nor high-sounding."

"How interesting!" said Mrs. Parker. "If I were you, I would go back
to the old name: there is a reverence about it there is not about the
other. Only think of bands of pilgrims coming across the moor there!"

"Yes, in their gowns and rope girdles, with wallets and
scallop-shells," said Bessie. "It must have been a curious old world
then: one could sit here and muse by the hour on all that has come and
gone. I often bring up my work or my book here in summer and think of
it."

"I do like old things," said Mrs. Parker, "and old families and old
names. Our name, for instance, has no smack of age about it, and it is
so short and perky: it must have been given to some one who had to do
with parks."

"But parks may be a very old institution," said Bessie, "if we looked
into the thing, though not so old as Forrester: that is an ancient
name," glancing at Edwin, who was leaning against a sentry-box
listening and watching the sun putting out the lights in his
bed-chamber; "yet not nearly so ancient as Ormiston. I always feel
it is fitting we should live in an old castle, we are so ancient
ourselves."

"Are we?" said John: "I never knew that before."

"Ormiston," she said, "is perhaps as pure a Saxon word as now exists.
It was during the Roman invasion our ancestor led an army through a
dense mist against the invaders: just as he came up with them the sun
shone out and the mist. The legions were taken by surprise, for the
advancing enemy had been hidden by the mist, and they were utterly
routed. The Saxon king--"

"What was his name?" asked John.

"John," she said, "don't seek to be wise above what is revealed. The
king called our ancestor to the front and made him earl of Ormiston on
the spot--'Gold-Mist-on;' that is, 'Be ever in the van;' and a proud
race were the earls of Ormiston, and well they answered to the name.
But their fortunes waned when the modern upstart, the Norman William,
laid his greedy hands on everything for himself and his mob of
pirates, and at present we are only middle-class people, but our blood
must be the bluest of the blue."

"Mine must be as blue," said Edwin, "for the Forresters came in with
the trees, and the trees were early settlers."

"But the mists were first by a very long time," answered Bessie.

"I don't believe that story," said John. "I have read about the
Cakeholy business somewhere, but you have made that Or-Mist-on affair
out of your own head: isn't that true, Bessie?"

"I am not bound to answer unbelievers, John."

"Besides," said John, "Ormiston is far; liker French than Saxon."

"Mr. Parker," said Bessie, "there was an abbot John of Cakeholy who
flourished in the thirteenth century: his ghost is said to revisit its
old habitation, or rather the place where it stood. I should like to
meet it and have a talk over things; it would be very interesting."

"Would you not be terrified?" asked Mrs. Parker.

"If I saw what I believed to be a ghost, I should die of terror," said
Bessie; "especially if I was alone and it was the dead of night; but I
have no faith whatever in ghosts."

"It is getting rather chilly," said Mrs. Parker.

"Perhaps we had better go down now, then," Miss Ormiston said. "Mr.
Forrester, would you come out of your brown study and let us pass?"

"Certainly. I'll see you all safe off the battlements. I wasn't in a
brown study: I was in a mist."

"Then take care: people in a mist always think they are going the
right way when they are going directly wrong."

"If I only knew the right way!" he said.

"That's true, Mr. Forrester," said Mrs. Parker. "If we only knew the
right way; and people tell you to be guided by Providence, but I say
I never know when it is Providence and when it is myself;" and she
threaded her way down the narrow stairs, followed by the rest of the
party.




III.


The dining-room, with its low roof, its crimson walls, dark furniture
and handsome fire (the fires at Cockhoolet were always handsome:
Bessie was the architect and superintended the building herself; they
never looked harum-scarum nor meaningless nor thoughtless, nor as if
they were not meant to burn; they combined taste, comfort, and, as a
consequence, economy; everything tasteful and comfortable is in the
long run economical), its table-cloth, glistening like the summit of
the Alps and laden with good things, looked a place where people even
not in love with each other might, unless naturally perverse, be very
happy.

Mrs. Parker, being from town, was in raptures with every country
eatable, especially the scones, which she found were manufactured by
Miss Ormiston herself.

"And have they," asked Mr. Parker, "the sustaining power that the
cakes made here of old had?"

"If you eat enough of them you may get to Edinburgh to-night before
you are very hungry," said John.

"The abbey cakes were unleavened," Bessie explained, "which these are
not, so that they are less substantial fare."

"What do you raise them with?" asked Mrs. Parker.

"Butter, milk and carbonate of soda," said Miss Ormiston.

"We call Bessie a doctor of the Carbon," said John: "she makes very
good scones, although you would hardly go from here to Canterbury on
the strength of one of them."

"Mr. Forrester, are you dull?" asked Jessie: "you are not saying
anything."

"I am too busy eating the holy cakes, Jessie," said Edwin: "your
sister is a master in her art."

"I say," Jessie went on, "are you ever dull at home? When I told
Bessie that you had come she was surprised, and said that you must
surely be dull at home. I am sorry for you if you are: you should come
here oftener--we are never dull here."

"Perhaps," said Edwin, "your sister thinks I come too often, as it
is."

Bessie was so deeply engaged pressing Mr. Parker to eat strawberry
jam, with cheeks the color of the fruit, that of course she could not
have heard what her sister had been saying.

"Oh no, I don't think she thinks that at all," Jessie said: "we never
think any one can come too often. Bessie, can Mr. Forrester come too
often?"

But still Miss Ormiston was so occupied with Mr. Parker that she did
not hear.

And Mrs. Parker said, "It is a most intensely interesting old place,
this: do not people come to look at it?"

"Oh yes," replied Bessie, "especially in summer: we generally have
several parties every week. One of the servants takes them over the
castle--grand people often, with carriages and livery servants."

"Do you not keep a book for them to write their names in?"

"No, we have never done that."

"I would do it if I were you: it would be interesting to know who
comes and how many. Why, very remarkable people may have been here
without your knowing."

"I doubt we are not sufficiently alive to our privileges," Bessie
said.

"It's fine moonlight," said the boys, who, seeing that they and every
one had ceased eating, were impatient to be out again. "Come, Mr.
Parker, we'll show you the echo: Mr. Forrester, come."

"I'll go too," said Mrs. Parker; and they all went but the Rose, who
stayed behind for a little to direct about household matters.

The echo was a favorite with the boys, it gave such unlimited scope
to their powers of shouting: it was the _sight_ they most enjoyed
exhibiting to strangers. And it was an echo that could repeat every
word of a sentence with such perfection that it was difficult to
believe that it was not a human being shouting back from the
other side of the park, where stood some houses inhabited by the
farm-servants and their families.

"Hallo, Abbot John! is that you?" shouted one of the boys, and
the other cried, "Yes, I'm taking a walk," so quickly that the one
sentence seemed the answer to the other, and both came back loud and
distinct on the still night-air.

"Are the Ormistons ancient? It's all fudge," shouted John.

"Well," said Mr. Parker, "that's the most perfect echo I ever heard.
I've no doubt the holy fathers of the Middle Ages knew of it, and used
it in some shape to keep the superstitious people in awe."

"It is awesome," said his wife, "here in the moonlight, with the old
castle so near: if I were alone, positively I should feel eerie."

"Are you dull at home, Mr. Forrester?" was sent out from the depths of
Will's chest, and sent back again just as Bessie came out and joined
the party.

"Boys! boys!" she said, "don't be foolish."

"Why, it was what you said yourself," her sister remarked.

"_Are_ you ever dull?" the lad shouted again.

"Often," answered Edwin, and "Often" came back instantly.

"In that case, Mr. Forrester," said Mrs. Parker, "why don't you get a
wife? There's no company for a young man like a good wife. Here's Miss
Ormiston; I don't think you could do better."

Think of the delicate wound of these young people being thus openly
probed in broad moonlight in the presence of so many people! What
could Mrs. Parker be thinking of? Not of her own love-passages surely,
or, if she was, they must have been of a blunter order than those of
the Rose and her lover.

"Oh no," said Bessie in cool, indifferent tones: "Mr. Forrester knows
better than that."

"There!" said Edwin, "you see, Mrs. Parker, I have been refused."

"'Faint heart never won fair lady,'" said Mrs. Parker.

The boys hallooed this sentiment to the echo, and the echo took it up
and sent it back so vigorously that even a timid man might have been
inspired. "Mary Stuart," "Henry Darnley," "James Bothwell," the lads
went on calling to the echo alternately--names which are not mere
echoes even after three hundred years, but live on by sheer force of
tragic romance. And it was possible that here, on this very spot, that
historical trio had stood and laughed and talked and amused themselves
as the young Ormistons and their visitors were doing. What words had
they used to rouse the echo? If only it could be made to give them
back now, what a wonderful echo it would be! The world would come
to listen to it. Would it tell of the passions of love and ambition,
grief and hatred, all hurrying their victims to their doom? or was the
place sacred only to gentler memories and softer moods--the scene
of enjoyment and freedom from care for however short a time? Who can
tell?

There was a woman in the village of Cockhoolet who was ninety-eight
years old, having all her faculties not perhaps quite so fresh as when
she was nineteen, but in wonderful preservation after having been in
daily use for little short of a century. She was one of a long-lived
race: her father had been eighty-nine when he died, and her
grandfather ninety-nine. Now, it is perfectly possible--and, as the
family had been on the spot for centuries, it is even probable--that
her great-grandfather might have dug the hole in which Mary planted
her tree, or he may have saddled the queen's horse when she went
hunting, or stood by the roadside and lifted his bonnet as she and her
gay train swept by. Or he may have been despatched upon royal errands
through the subterranean passage which is said to exist all the way
between Cockhoolet Castle and Edinburgh--the private telegraph of
those days, when wires in the air or under the sea by which to send
messages would have cost the inventors their lives as guilty of
witchcraft. While shaking hands with this old woman and speaking to
her, you lost sight of her and the present time and felt the air of
the sixteenth century blow in your face. Mary came up before you in
moving habit as she lived--the young Mary who caught all hearts, not
heartless herself, and laid hold of mere straws to save herself as
she drifted desperately with circumstances; not the woman who has been
painted as an actor from first to last, as coming forth draped for
effect at the very closing scene,--not that woman, but the girlish
queen who laughed and called to the echo, and forgot the cares of a
kingdom while she could.




IV.


"They are a nice family, those Ormistons," said Mr. Parker to his wife
as they drove to the railway-station in the moonlight.

"Very," said Mrs. Parker; "and Mr. Forrester is a nice lad. I hope he
and Miss Ormiston will make it out: I did my best for them."

"They'll be quite able to do the best for themselves: it is always
better to let things of that kind alone."

"I don't know that," said Mrs. Parker: "if a little shove is all that
is needed, it is a pity not to give it."

"But what if your shove sends people separate? That's not what you
intended, I fancy?"

"No fear: people are not so easily separated as all that."

"Well, we have had an uncommonly pleasant visit: I only wish the heads
of the house had been at home."

Either the attachment of this pair must have been pretty evident to
ordinary capacities, or Mrs. Parker must have been of a matchmaking
turn of mind; probably the latter, for Bessie at least was sure that
no mortal guessed her secret; which was a great comfort to her, seeing
that Edwin was so indifferent. Alas! there is no rose without a thorn,
or if there is it is a scentless, useless thing, most likely incapable
of giving either pleasure or pain.

The Parkers had left early. When the young people went in-doors again
it was only seven o'clock: the girls proposed a game at hide-and-seek,
and Bessie seconded the proposal; for you see it would have been
rather a formidable business to sit down and entertain Mr. Forrester
all the evening with conversation, rational or otherwise; and although
at the moment she was in the dignified position of lady of the castle,
she could not the less enjoy a game amazingly.

The theatre of operations was wisely restricted, because if they had
gone all over the castle they might have hidden themselves so that the
game would have been endless; therefore they kept to the under part
of the inhabited region. At length, tiring of this, they changed their
game to blindman's buff, and went to the kitchen to play it, there
being more room and fewer obstacles there; besides that, it was empty
of tenants at the time, the servants having gone to see some of the
neighbors.

It was a curious old kitchen, with a very low roof, and having a
fireplace in a big semicircular stone recess. Many a boar's head had
revolved there, and many a venison pasty had sent forth its fragrance
to greet the tired hunters returning from the chase. The fire glowed
in its deep recess like the eye of an old-world monster in a cavern,
till one of the boys seized the poker and made it flame up, throwing
its blaze out as far as it could for its walls, and making the kitchen
and the group standing in it like a picture by Rembrandt.

"Who's to be blind man first?" cried the girls.

"Edwin: that will be the best fun," the boys said.

"Very well, I sha'n't be long blind," said Edwin: "I shall soon catch
some of you. Who'll tie the handkerchief?"

"Bessie: she always ties it. Go and kneel to her, and she'll tie it so
that you won't see."

What must Mr. Forrester have felt while being blinded by the Rose?
Only, he had long been accustomed to be if not blinded, at least
dazed, by her. The boys led him into the middle of the floor and
dispersed themselves into corners. While he stood in the attitude of
listening intently, he was conscious of a very gentle movement near
him, and instantly closed his arms round it, as he thought, and
encountered empty air, while with a shout of laughter the children
cried, "Bessie was too quick for you. There, quick! quick! Edwin!" He
sprang to the corner the voices came from, and the boys rushed along
the wall to avoid his arms spread out to catch them, when suddenly the
doorbell rang.

At the sound Edwin put up his hand to take off the handkerchief, but
the boys cried, "Don't take it off: if it's any one, Bessie can speak
to them in the dining-room: we don't need to stop our game."

They were not aware that to Mr. Forrester the game without Bessie was
like _Hamlet_ with the part of Hamlet left out.

"Yes," said Bessie, "just go on, and I'll see who is at the door." As
she left the kitchen she honored Mr. Forrester with a good long look:
people can feel so much at ease looking at a blind person.

The door was chained for greater security, and Bessie did not take
off the chain: she merely opened the door as far as it would open, but
seeing no one, she opened it fully and went out on the steps; still
she saw no person, although she thought whoever rang the bell had not
had time to get out of sight. Waiting a little without result, she
went back to the kitchen.

"Who was it?" cried the children.

"No one," she said.

"But the bell rang," said John.

"Of course it did," Will corroborated.

"And somebody must have rung it," John said.

"Some one for a trick, I suppose," Bessie said, "although I don't know
how he disappeared so fast."

Without further remark the game was resumed. Edwin had caught John,
and John had caught Bessie, and when he was putting the handkerchief
round her eyes Mr. Forrester said, "You are making it far too tight,
John: you are hurting your sister."

"No fear," said John: "none of us have soft heads here. Is it too
tight, Bessie?"

"Rather, but I can bear it: go on."

"I'll slacken it first," Edwin said.

"Thank you, that will do. Now move off or I'll catch you." She went
very vigorously to work, and sent them all flying round the kitchen,
when the bell rang, and rang loudly, again.

John darted to the door and flung it wide, sure that he would see the
person who rang it, whether running away or not; but there was no
one, and the whole party followed him out, and they surveyed round and
round, but all was still and quiet and vacant, the moonlight making it
impossible that any figure should be there without being seen.

Now, if you lived in an ordinary house in an ordinary street in an
ordinary town, an incident like this would create no surprise. It
happens often: true, it is not a very new or bright joke, still it is
a joke that boys and girls enjoy, and will continue to enjoy. But away
in the country, at an old castle, with no house within a quarter of
a mile of it, the case is very different. How was it to be accounted
for?

The Ormistons came in, the girls looking scared, and the boys laughing
and saying that Mary Stuart or Darnley or Bothwell, whose names they
had made so free with shouting to the echo, must have heard themselves
called and were ringing the bell, although not allowed to show
themselves; but even as they said it the boys would fain have whistled
to keep their courage up.

"I wish papa and mamma had been at home," said Bell.

"Or if only the Parkers could have been persuaded to stay all night,"
suggested Jessie.

"Nonsense!" Bessie said. "Some one is playing us a trick, but we don't
need to let it spoil our game;" and she put the handkerchief over
her eyes. "Look here, Edwin: will you tie this? You do it better than
John."

"He doesn't," said John. "I believe he leaves it so that you can see.
I'll do it. No, I won't make it too tight."

"Don't you think, Jessie," Edwin asked, "that I could protect you, in
case of danger, as well as the Parkers?"

"I don't know. Perhaps if you were like yourself, but you're not like
yourself."

"He's as dull as ditch-water," said John.

"But," said Jessie, taking his hand with a feeling of security,
"you're better than nothing--a great deal better than nothing."

"Thank you, Jessie, thank you! A man is the better for a little
encouragement, you know;" and he looked at the Rose, but she was
blind; which made her easier looked at, to be sure, but there was less
chance of an answer, encouraging or otherwise.

They had got up the spirit of the game again, and were going on
briskly, when they were all brought to a stand by the bell ringing for
the third time.

"Don't stop," cried Bessie: "go on with the game and take no notice
unless it rings again;" and as a leader who must show no fear she
chased her sisters round the kitchen, making them flee to avoid being
caught, when, as if in answer to her remark, the bell did ring again.

This was too much. They all ran to the door, but neither human being
nor ghost was to be seen.

"I say," said John to his brother, "you and I will go out and watch.
Edwin, you'll stay with the girls--they are frightened--and if the
bell rings again we'll see who does it."

"You have more need of Edwin than we have, John," Bessie said: "it
will take you all to catch a ghost."

"Come away, then," cried John; and he posted his sentinels at
different angles, where each could have his eye on the door. The girls
shut themselves in the house, and outside and in they awaited the
result.

There was no result.

Ordinary sentinels can pace to and fro to make the moments go more
quickly, but Edwin and John and William were compelled to stand
without speech or motion, as to betray their presence would have been
to defeat their purpose. At the end of half an hour their patience was
worn out, and they came to the conclusion that whoever was playing the
trick knew that they were watching; so they went in, and hardly were
they in and the door shut when the bell rang again.

John rushed from the kitchen, whither he had gone for something, but
the others, being in the dining-room and nearer the door, reached it
before him; and again nothing was to be seen but the still calm night,
in which hung the moon with all her accustomed unimpassioned serenity.
What cared she for ghosts? Perhaps she is only a ghost herself, else
why, with all her pale quiet ways, does she never turn round and show
herself thoroughly? No doubt she has reasons of her own, whether
they are good or not: her sex is apt to be both capricious and
persistent--two qualities which she possesses in perfection.

The Ormistons and Edwin stood out on the broad walk before the door,
none of them feeling very comfortable, if the truth must be told, but
none of them showing their feelings except Bell and Jessie, who openly
declared that they were very much frightened.

"Nonsense!" said Bessie. "Who is going to be frightened at a silly
trick?"

"But it may be somebody wanting to get in to do us harm--kill us
perhaps," suggested Bell.

"People who want to get into a house for bad ends don't ring the front
doorbell, or any bell," said Bessie.

At this junction two figures appeared in the distance advancing along
the road to the castle--soon made out to be the servants, so that they
at least were guiltless in the affair.

"It has not been them, you see," cried John.

"No," Bessie said, "and you are not to say anything about it to them
when they come: if they know anything of it, it will soon leak out;
and if they don't tell, they will be quite frightened: they are as
easily frightened as Bell or Jessie here."




V.


All this time Mr. Forrester was feeling--not frightened certainly,
but--perplexed; and while he could not but admire Miss Ormiston's
coolness and courage, he could not help wishing that she had been just
a little bit chicken-hearted: it would have been so delightful to have
to act as protector and supporter. But there was no opening whatever
for such a position: she took the mysterious affair into her own hands
and pooh-poohed it entirely.

They were accustomed to early hours at Cockhoolet, but when the time
came for going to bed the girls declared they were too frightened to
go up stairs alone. "It would be far better," they both said, "for us
to stay here all together in this room till morning: we could sit up
quite well."

"Absurd!" said Bessie.

"Well, we could not sleep even if we were in bed," they protested.

"No fear," said the châtelaine. "If you were to sit up all night you
would be like ghosts yourselves to-morrow morning. Come, I'll go with
you and sit beside you till you sleep. But wait a minute till I come
back."

When they were bidding Mr. Forrester good-night he said to the girls,
"If anything happens let me know."

"Nothing will happen," said Bessie: "the bell is quiet now and the
servants are sound asleep. I have just been looking at them, and the
sooner we follow their example the better."

"What are we to do if we hear the bell ring again?" John asked.

"Nothing. Keep below the blankets, John," his sister said. "It will
ring a loud peal indeed if you hear it: I think a cannon might be
fired at your ear without disturbing you."

"That's a mistake," said John, "I am a remarkably light sleeper: a fly
on my nose will make me turn round any time."

"I believe that, but it won't waken you. Good-night;" and she took
a hand of each of her sisters and went off with all the dignity
beseeming her position as head of the family and governor of the
castle. Her presence being withdrawn, Edwin felt much as you do on a
March day when the sun goes under a cloud, although he had not
enjoyed the sun either, owing to the undercurrent of east wind that
continually chilled him. He almost determined to give it up. Of what
use was it? Evidently she did not care for him, and the words, "Mr.
Forrester here again! he must surely be dull at home," sounded in
his ears. Very east-windy they were; still, he loved her with a great
love, and he could not give her up: he was in a mist, and could see
neither to go back nor forward.

"I say, Edwin," said John confidentially, "what do you think about
this bell business? Of course one couldn't speak of it before the
girls, they are frightened enough already--Bessie too, although she
pretends not. What's your own private opinion about it?"

"Oh, it must be a ghost," said Edwin: "they do things of that kind,
you know--turn tables and rap and so on. I've been thinking I must be
an unconscious medium."

"Well," said John, "I, for one, don't believe in that kind of thing:
if the spirits ever told anything worth hearing, or did anything worth
doing, it might be different; but would Darnley or Bothwell or the
abbot, or even any of the smaller fry of monks, come back here to ring
a bell? I know in their place it's what I wouldn't do myself."

"It would depend on where they are and how employed," said Edwin:
"like some other people, they may be dull at home."

"Ah, that's what Bessie said that's sticking in your throat. Man, it's
no use minding what girls say: I never do.

"The spirits must be deplorably dull if ringing a bell is a diversion
to them."

"They may enjoy mystifying us," said Edwin. "Who knows but they are
listening just now, and laughing in whatever they may have instead of
sleeves?"

"I'm not frightened," said Will, "but I don't like subjects of this
kind at bedtime, so I wish you wouldn't say any more about it."

"It seems, however, that the bell was rung by invisible agency," said
John.

"Come, come, we'll stop talking and go to bed," Edwin said.

"But, Edwin," said Will with big eyes, out of which he could not keep
a frightened look, "do you think a spirit did it?"

"No: it is a trick, and you'll find out who did it before long."

"Well," said John, "it was a stupid trick, but cleverly done--very
cleverly done, or whoever did it would not have escaped me."

"I should not like to sleep alone to-night," Will said to his brother
in confidence when they were in their own room, "and I don't believe
you would either, although you don't say so. I wonder if Edwin likes
it, away from every one too, in that room with the hole in its roof? I
wonder papa does not get that hole mended?"

"He has often spoken about it," said John, "but if I slept in that
room I should rather like the hole. It's uncommon: every room hasn't a
hole in its roof. If you couldn't sleep, for instance, you'd have only
to stare at the hole, and you would doze off before you knew."

"Staring at it would only keep me from sleeping," Will said: "I should
always think something was looking at me through it."

"What could look at you but light--moonlight or daylight from the room
above? In the dark you would the hole."

"Let's sleep," said Will; and, forgetting ghosts and bells and all
influences, the two boys were soon asleep.

It is to be hoped the girls were asleep also; indeed, there is little
doubt the younger ones were. But Bessie, with the cares of a castle
on her head, the mysteries of the evening to perplex her, and an
unfortunate love-affair going more and more awry, how was it with her?

And Edwin, in his remote room with its hole in the roof, how did he
fare? He had gone up a stone staircase, through a long passage and
down a short flight of steps, into a room large, somewhat low in
ceiling, and, with the exception of the hole, most comfortably
appointed. It felt warm, rather too warm, and he did not replenish
the fire, preferring to let it go out. The room and the way to it
were both very familiar to him, and, like John, he enjoyed the hole:
staring at it made you sleep, and when not sleeping your fancy could
play round it to any extent. On this night the light of the moon,
shining in at the shutterless windows of the empty room above, fell
across its floor, and gleamed down through the opening.

A superstitious person with a talent for being eerie would have had
nice scope for being frightened out of his senses in a situation
like this--alone in a distant room of an old castle where bells rang
mysteriously, and with borrowed moonlight peering down from above
like a ghost looking for ghosts. But Mr. Forrester was not
superstitious--not in the least. He feared nothing material or
immaterial except--and it was a curious exception--except Bessie
Ormiston; yet it is true he loved her, perfectly as he thought, but
there was a flaw somewhere: it was not the perfect love that casteth
out fear. The turning of a straw, however, might make it that, but
who was to turn the straw? He feared to do it, and she would not.
Notwithstanding these perturbed and cantankerous circumstances, these
two people, being young and naturally sleepy, slept.

How long he had been sleeping Edwin did not know, when he awoke
suddenly, as if he had been startled by some noise. However, he might
have been dreaming: he did not know. The fire was thoroughly out
and black, there was no ray of light from the roof, and the
window-curtains being closely drawn, if there was any light outside it
was effectually shut out: the room was as dark as midnight.

He rose, and finding his way to the table groped for a box of matches
that he had noticed lying there, and lighted his lamp, when, looking
at his watch, he found the hour to be half-past three. Before going to
bed again he thought he would see what night it was. Accordingly,
he opened the curtains and shutters and gazed forth. The moon had
disappeared--which was not remarkable, as it was past her hour for
retiring--and the night was very dark and hazy. But a remarkable
object met his eye. But from an angle of the house, and toward the
corner of the field which had been the site of the ancient monastery,
there stood a column five or six feet in height of what through
the haze appeared luminous vapor. It seemed such an altogether
unaccountable thing, standing there, that Edwin pushed the window open
and rubbed his eyes to get a better sight of it. He expected it would
disappear in some way almost immediately, but it did not: there it
stood, perfectly still and perfectly distinct, at the corner of the
field, where there was absolutely nothing to cause it. He watched it
for a considerable time, and as his eye got accustomed to peering into
the darkness, he could see there was nothing near it, and not a sound
disturbed the stillness of the night.

"That's not a trick," he thought: "no one would think it worth while
to play a trick, certain of being without an audience either to see or
hear it. I question even if it is the abbot himself; or if he likes to
air himself there in the middle of a winter night, he must be too hot
at home, if not too dull."

A filmy mantle of pale white vapor is surely a more likely garment for
a spirit to snatch up and wrap round him when about to indulge in an
earthly tour than the conventional and traditionary white sheet:
in point of fact, for the sheet he must wait till he arrives in our
world, and when he does arrive he must of necessity help himself to
it; which I, for one, should be sorry to think any well-conditioned
ghost would do; but light, pale shadowy light, lying about everywhere
for the picking up, what so suitable as raiment for a being who has
nothing to wear?

It could not but occur to Edwin, Had the abbot come back to his old
haunt on some errand? Had he a benevolent ghostly interest in its
present inhabitants? Here was a work in which even a spirit of mark
might engage without loss of dignity and with perfect propriety. He
might turn tables on the perverse circumstances that kept two young
people separate; and if marriages are made in heaven, an angel need
not despise such a mission as making two lovers happy.

"Well" thought Edwin, "if you are Abbot John, how do you like to see
the dear old stones of your monastery built into dykes? or would you
have preferred seeing them applied to villa purposes?" If it were
the abbot, Edwin felt he would like to have that familiar kind of
intercourse with him which in our country is known as twa-handed
crack; and if it were not the abbot, he had a wonderful curiosity to
know what it was--to have it accounted for. There it stood, apparently
as firm and sure as the first moment he had seen it; and a cause it
must have.

Accordingly, he dressed himself with the intention of proceeding to
the spot to interview the abbot and see what kind of stuff he was made
of. Mr. Forrester took the lamp in his hand and opened the room-door
softly: not that he thought any one would hear him, but soft sounds
best become the stillness of the night. As he went down the stairs he
became conscious of a cold air playing about, as if from an open door
or window. He set his lamp on the stone sill of the passage-window,
and had his hand on the key of the outer door to unlock it, when he
heard a quick, sudden scream, apparently from the oldest part of
the building. He listened intently for a second, but there was no
repetition of it, and everything was perfectly quiet.

"That was human," he said to himself; and seizing his lamp he ran
along till he came to the door of the ancient keep, which was standing
open: he took the way he and the rest of the party had gone the
previous afternoon, and found the doors that were usually kept locked
all open. Going on very hurriedly, he came to the room where the bare
rafters were the only flooring, and at the other end of it he saw
something like a white heap gleaming. He strode across instantly, and
stooping with the light in hand discovered Bessie Ormiston lying in a
dead faint just at the edge of one of the rafters: the least movement
would have sent her down on the hard pavement below. He did not stop
to think how she came to be there: setting his lamp where it would
light him across the dangerous flooring, he lifted her up and threaded
the passages and stairs in the darkness till he laid her safe on the
dining-room sofa, still unconscious.

Kneeling beside her in the darkness, he felt that her face and hands
were very cold. He did not know what to do. If she had been any other
person, he would have had his senses about him, but, being who she
was, they had scattered themselves, and he felt dazed. The fire was
not quite out, and he thought of smashing up a chair to make it burn,
but searching in the coal-scuttle at the side, of the fireplace, he
found both sticks and coals, and heaped them on: then he lighted the
lamp that was still standing on the table. All this was the work of
a minute or two. A fainting-fit was quite beyond the range of his
experience, but he had some vague idea that in cases of the kind water
should be dashed in the face or a smelling-bottle held to the nostrils
or brandy poured down the throat; but none of these things were at
hand, and as he looked at Bessie, hesitating what to do, he saw the
color steal back to her face, and she opened her eyes and suddenly
shut them. When she opened them again she took his presence as a
matter of course, and said, "I sometimes walk in my sleep, I know, but
I am not in the habit of fainting;" and she smiled, looking much more
like the lily than the rose.

"I hope not," he said.

"It was the fright I got when I woke and saw where I was. I shouldn't
have been frightened, for I knew the place as well as I know this
room, and could have found my way back in the dark."

"What can I get for you?--you must have something." It is an awkward
thing when a nurse has to seek directions from a patient.

"Nothing," she said: "I can take nothing, and I am quite well. I can't
think how I was so foolish as to scream, and I am sorry for disturbing
you."

"You did not disturb me: if I had been asleep I should never have
heard you."

"I wish you had been asleep."

"You might have fallen through the rafters and been hurt or perished
of cold."

"I shouldn't have fallen through the rafters: I should have come to
myself and have walked back quite well alone; but I am not the less
obliged to you."

"I should say not," he said with a curl of sarcasm. "Then is there
nothing I can do for you?"

"Nothing, unless, indeed, you could get hot water for me to wash my
feet in. Sleeping as I was, I had the good sense to put on a thick
shawl, but I made my excursion barefoot: they say walking barefoot
improves one's carriage."

"Bessie, I never know what to make of you."

"If you know what to make of yourself it's a great matter: sometimes
people don't know that," she said, rather wearily.

"I had better make myself scarce at present, probably?" he said.

"I think so."

"Then good-night. You won't faint again?"

"No: good-night."

He left the room and shut the door gently, but when a few paces away
some impulse moved him to go back: she might faint again, and he would
ask if he should send one of the servants to her.

When he opened the door she was sitting with her face hidden in her
hands. At the sound of the door opening she glanced up, and Edwin saw
tears.

She turned away instantly. He went up to her and said, "I did not mean
to intrude. I forgot to ask if I should tell one of the servants to
come."

"No, you needn't."

"Bessie," he said, "you are not well, and something is vexing you.
Could you not tell me about it. I mean nothing but kindness."

"I know you don't," she said almost fiercely, "and I hate kindness:
it's an insult."

He stood in blank astonishment, "An insult?" he said.

"Yes, an insult; and if you were not obtuse you would see it. But you
don't see and you don't feel, or you would never have tried to make
any one care for you for whom you did not care a bit. But I won't care
for you, and I don't."

Off her guard, she had been stung into this. She was standing away
from him, her head erect and her eyes gleaming through tears: Mary
Stuart herself could not have been more effective.

"Care for you! not care for you!" he said in a voice he could hardly
control. "I have cared for you as I never cared for a thing on earth:
I have loved and shall love you as I have never loved a human being."

"How am I to believe it? Why did you not say it? Why did you not say
it without making me ashamed of myself?"

"Ashamed! Oh, Bessie, I only feared to annoy you."

"Annoy!"

He gathered her to him and kissed her.

A castle all to themselves at four o'clock in the morning is a piece
of fortune that rarely falls to lovers, and they need not expect it;
but those great thick walls were no way taken by surprise: they had
not been confidants of this kind of thing off and on for four or five
hundred years to be taken by surprise now. Whether after such long
familiarity with the old story they felt it any way stale, you will
readily believe they did not say.




VI.


"I've forgotten the abbot entirely," said Edwin when he had time to
come to himself after the first draught of miraculous champagne. "I
was on my way to investigate his ghost when I heard an unaccountable
scream."

"I never screamed before, and I don't think I shall ever scream again:
I don't know how I have been so weak to-night."

"Weakness always draws out kindness," said Edwin.

"I would rather be weak than obtuse," said Bessie.

"But it is better to be only obtuse than both. I know someone who was
both."

"Well, what was I to think, and what could I do?"

"Nothing better than you did--make a declar--"

"What were you saying about the abbot's ghost?"

"I was on my way to have an interview with it when--"

"What was it like, and where did you find it?"

"It was like a column of light standing not far from the house near the
corner of the abbey-field."

"And you did not think of any explanation of the phenomenon?"

"No, I did not: it seemed more mysterious even than the ringing of the
bell."

"To obtuse people it does."

"I thought the abbot might be feeling without a home, and sympathized
with him, I assure you, very heartily."

"I can tell you what it is: the servants had to rise at three this
morning to work. It is the light shining out from the laundry-window:
I've seen it often enough."

"Well, it was a providential ghost for you and Edwin."

"[illegible]" said John when they were assembled at breakfast next
morning, looking no worse for the excitement of the previous evening,
having all slept well: if the bell had rung it had disturbed no one
at all. Mr. Forrester and Bessie had not made any one the wiser of the
well-timed appearance of the abbot's ghost which had played such an
effective part in their previous night's drama,--"I say," he
said looking at Mr. Forrester and then at Bessie, "there is some
understanding between you two; you are always looking at each other,
and when you entered the room this morning you [illegible], and
started off [illegible] been caught. But I have [illegible] this
time."

Bessie realized that her secret had become common property, and
blushed becomingly.

Mr. Forrester said, "What have you suspected, John?"

"That Bessie and you laid your heads together to make the bell ring
last night to frighten us. Remember, I'm not stupid altogether."

"I assure you, John, I had nothing to do with the ringing of the
bell," Bessie said.

"Nor had I," said Edwin.

"That's queer, then," said John; "but I'm sure there's something of
some kind between you two: you're planning something, I know. What is
it?"

"Wise people don't reveal their plans to every one till near the time
for executing them, John," said Edwin.

"Oh, very well," John answered: "you can keep them to yourselves.
I dare say it's nothing of consequence;" and having finished his
breakfast, John was off to his out-door business. The shortest cut
to his destination--and he always took short cuts--was through the
kitchen, and as he hastily brushed along the wall toward the door he
was brought up suddenly by a loud peal of the bell, and he looked at
one of the servants, who was working at the table, as much as to say,
"Do you hear that?"

She answered his look: "Yes, I ha'en, but there's naebody at the door.
It was yu that rang the bell: ye cam against that bag of worsted
clues for durning that I hung on the bell-wine yesterday. When onybody
happens to touch it the weight o' 't gars the bell ring; I would hae
to ta'en off."

With this simple and inglorious explanation John rushed to the
dining-room where he found Mrs. Forrester and the châtelaine in deep
Conspiracy again; and to this hour the ghost of Cockhoolet is a matter
(if you can use that word in connection with a ghost at all) of faith
and not of sight.

When Mrs. and Mrs Ormiston returned they found that their eldest
daughter was engaged to be married, which surprised them as little as
it did the old woman but moved them a good deal more.




THE LEADEN ARROW.


A wondrous half-century was that which forms an isthmus rather than a
bridge between the Middle Ages and the times termed Modern. Exit
the Last of the Barons--enter the printing-press. Exit Boabdil
el Chico--enter Columbus and Da Gama. The plot thickened as the
_cinquecenti_ hove in view. The last years were the most pregnant.
While the last sigh of the Moor was dying into the murmurs of the
Xenil, that solitary shout that will ring while earth lasts went up
from the bows of the Pinta. Together came America and the sea-way to
India and--the rifle. For in 1498, when Buonarotti was at his prime,
Raphael, fifteen years old, had just taken his seat at the paternal
easel, and the scenes of the _Lusiad_ were in progress, "barrels were
first grooved at Venice."

Who grooved them we are not told. The name of that artist has not
survived, though we still remember his contemporary townsman, Titian.
Strictly, he is not entitled to the immortality of an originator. That
belongs to the unknown savage who, in the miocene era probably, first
gave a twist to the feather of his arrow, thereby communicating to it
a revolving motion at right angles to the line of flight, and making
it an "arm of precision." But pre-historic artillery we may dismiss
or leave to Milton. The blind bard omits to inform us whether the
guns used in the great pounding-match between Lucifer and Michael
were smooth-bores or rifles. The strong presumption is that they were
exclusively the former, and that a well-served battery of Parrotts
would have silenced them in fifteen minutes. By giving him a few
pieces of the kind the poet would have further brightened the feather
he sets in Satan's cap as the benefactor of mankind by inventing
gunpowder and shortening wars. The bow he presents to us as an old and
familiar weapon even at the date of that first and greatest of
pitched battles. Its claim, as the parent of projectile implements,
is recognized in the common etymology of _arcus, arcualia_--artillery.
Arblast, arquebuse, blunderbuss, mark a humbler collateral descent
in the same verbal family. The ballista, or fifty-man-power bow,
constituted the heavy, and the individual article the light, artillery
of twenty centuries ago. Slings and javelins, being for hand-to-hand
fighting (David was near enough to hold an easy conversation with
Goliath before bringing him down), can hardly be brought within
the designation. The twang of either heavy or light was but a thin
contribution to the orchestra of battle compared to "the diapason of
the cannonade." How much we have lost in the absence of this element
of tremendous noise from the conflicts of ancient days! What a tool
it would have been in Homer's hands! How trivial, to the author of
the book of Job, would have seemed the noise of the captains and
the shouting! We cannot, indeed, quite suppress the fancy that some
mightier counter-concussion must have filled the air at Thrasimene,
when "an earthquake reeled unheededly away:" _Nemo pugnantium
senserit_, avers Livy. But nothing is said of it. The old heroes died
in silence, like the wolf "biting hard among the dying dogs."

A well-known essay of a modern poet beautifully uses this piece of the
modern machinery of his craft. Dryden here makes distance mellow the
thunder of a naval fight into a musical undertone. The great sea-fight
between the duke of York and the Dutch, fought within hearing of
London, left "the town almost empty" of its anxious citizens, whose
"dreadful suspense would not allow them to rest at home," but drew
them into the eastern fields and suburbs, "all seeking the noise
in the depth of silence." Dryden and three friends took a barge and
descended the river. Once clear of the crowded port above Greenwich,
"they ordered the watermen to let fall their oars more gently; and
then, every one favoring his own curiosity with a strict silence, it
was not long ere they perceived the air to break about them like the
noise of distant thunder or of swallows in a chimney; those little
undulations of sound, though almost vanishing before they reached
them, yet still seeming to retain somewhat of their first horror which
they had between the fleets. After they had attentively listened till
such time as the sound by little and little went from them, Eugenius,
lifting up his head and taking notice of it, was the first who
congratulated to the rest that happy omen of our nation's victory."

This, the eloquent eolian music of distant and unseen battle, was
unheard by the ancient cities and their chroniclers and poets. It will
grow again less familiar as rifled ordnance is introduced, with its
thinner and sharper style of expression. Waterloo appears to have been
heard farther than Sedan or Metz, although its pieces were but popguns
compared with those that spoke the requiem of the Third Napoleon.
And perhaps, if we allow for smallness in number and calibre, those
employed by Robert the Bruce at the battle of Werewater in 1327--said
to be the first recorded occasion in Europe--were more vociferous than
their successors of to-day. Few and cumbrous they must indeed have
been, since Edward III. could only bring four into the field at Crécy;
and they did far less service than the twanging cloth-yard shaft in
deciding the event of that conflict.

It was not till centuries later that the rifle perceptibly exerted
its treble voice in the multitudinous debates of the _ultima ratio_.
Shrill as John Randolph's, its pipe, once set up, was very attentively
and respectfully listened to. Like his, it spoke from the woods
of America. "Stand your ground, my brave fellows," shouted Colonel
Washington under the sycamores of the Monongahela on the 9th of
July, 1755, "and draw your sights for the honor of old Virginia!"
The colonial rifle covered the retreat of the British queen's-arm, if
retreat such a rout as Braddock's could be called.

It is about the same time that we find a British writer, who had
witnessed the efficiency of the rifle as a companion implement to
the axe in pushing European settlement on this continent, saying,
"Whatever state shall thoroughly comprehend the nature and advantages
of rifle-pieces, and, having facilitated and completed their
construction, shall introduce into its armies their general use, with
a dexterity in the management of them, will by this means acquire a
superiority which will almost equal anything that has been done at
any time by the particular excellence of any one kind of firearms,
and will perhaps fall but little short of the wonderful effects which
histories relate to have been formerly produced by the first inventors
of firearms."

This was written in 1748, at which time the rifle was used only by
the hunters of the Alps and the hunters of the American backwoods;
the latter having doubtless derived it from the former through German
immigration. Bull's conservatism, however, was in the way. The lessons
of Fort Duquesne, of Saratoga and of New Orleans were successively
wasted on him. He did arm one regiment, the Ninety-fifth, with this
weapon toward the close of the last century, but for a long time it
stood alone in the royal service. Austria had previously maintained
some corps of Tyrolese Jägers. The French fought through all the wars
of their Revolution without having recourse to the rifle, save in the
campaign of 1793. It is singular that the keen eye of Napoleon failed
to detect its value, especially when we note the use he made of light
troops. The fate of Nelson justifies the idea that a large body of
good riflemen might have changed the issue of Trafalgar.

Curiously enough, the French, who were the last to realize the merits
of the rifle, were the first to institute those improvements which
caused, within the present generation, its universal substitution
for the musket. The Gallic pioneer was Delvigne, but his first
improvements proved, as Pat might say, no improvement at all. The
inconvenience of slow loading was the most obvious. Delvigne's remedy
was to give the ball increased windage; in other words, to diminish
its diameter comparatively with that of the bore. The ball thus went
easily down to the shoulders of the chamber containing the charge.
Arrived there, a smart rap with the ramrod moulded it to the grooves.
But it also flattened the top, and forced the bottom partly into the
chamber. Thus misshapen at birth, the bullet was cast upon the world
to an erratic and fruitless career.

In 1828 a second Frenchman took the tube in hand. Colonel Thouvenin
abandoned the chamber, and filled up much of the place it had occupied
with a cylindrical steel pillar, or _tige_, which projected from the
breech-plug longitudinally into the barrel. This formed a little anvil
whereon the bullet was to be beaten into the grooves. But the bottom
was flattened, and the powder acted only on the periphery of the ball
instead of the centre, tending thus to give it an oblique direction.

Here Delvigne picked up the weapon for another trial. He accomplished
far the most important advance yet seen--an advance relatively as
great as Watt's separate condenser in the steam-engine. He retained
the _tige_, but he _changed the spherical ball into a cylinder with a
conical point_, as we now have it. In this he, in effect, reached the
ultimatum of progress as regards the general form of the projectile.
He assimilated it to Newton's solid of least resistance. That primeval
missile, the arrow, had for unnumbered centuries presented to the
eyes of men an illustration of a simple truth which scientific formula
succeeded, scarce a couple of centuries since, in evolving. "The
bridge was built," as the old sapper told his commander, "before them
picters" (the engineer's designs) "came." The arrow-head describes, as
it whirls through the air, a solid varying from a cone only so far as
its edges vary from straight lines. This variation serves to blend the
cone with the cylinder formed by the revolution of the arrow-head and
the feather. The difference in length between the ball and the arrow
is due to the necessities of the case. The least practicable length
is best for both. The office of the spirally-wound feather in
communicating a rotary motion, and thereby balancing, by an opposite
force, the tendency of the missile to swerve in any given direction,
is fulfilled by the spiral groove of the rifle. Of course, the
ordinary smooth musket is unfitted to the conico-cylindrical ball.
Discharged from such a barrel, there being nothing to keep the point
in the direction of its flight, it soon tumbles over, like an arrow
without a feather, and strikes wide of the mark.

Delvigne's new gun came into use in 1840. The long matchlocks of the
Arabs had been very worrying to the French in Algiers. It was a common
pastime of the Ishmaelites to pick off the Gauls at a distance which
left Brown Bess helpless. Protruded over an almost inaccessible crag,
the former primitive instrument would plump its ball into the ranks
of the Giaour in the dell below with a precision and an effect hardly
requited by victories in the open field or by the cave-smokings of
His Grace of Malakoff. Delvigne's arm was accordingly supplied to the
Chasseurs d'Orléans, and in their hands served the desired purpose.
The matchlock met its match.

Under M. Delvigne's system, however, the ball was not always well
forced into the grooves. The _tige_, too, made cleaning difficult:
it often got crooked, and it sometimes broke off. A M. Tamisier
did something toward removing the former difficulty by cutting
very shallow grooves on the ball itself. The other called forth the
ingenuity of the now famous Minié, who made his first appearance
in 1847-1848, and whose name has attained the same kind of lethal
immortality with the names of Shrapnell, Congreve and Rodman. M. Minié
abandoned the _tige_ entirely. He scooped out the base of the ball and
inserted into it an iron cup. This cup was driven into the ball by
the explosion, and forced the soft lead into the grooves. The leading
objection to the Minié ball in this form was that the device did its
work too thoroughly. The iron was often driven so deep into the lead
as to tear off the solid point and scatter the whole projectile into
two or three pieces. This mitrailleuse-like distribution of disrupted
spheres or leaden asteroids was obviated by the abandonment of the
iron cup, the powder being left to act on the lead itself. Two or
three channels cut around the neck of the bullet helped to keep
the point in line, and aided at the same time the fastening of the
cartridge. Thus came its final metamorphosis to the buzzing little
torment that has been at intervals for the last twenty years flying
over all the continents and perplexing the nations.

It was not till 1852 that the Enfield rifle was settled on as the
standard weapon of the British army. Machinery and machinists were
imported for its fabrication from the United States, the appliances
of our government armories being copied, and Colonel Bruton, of the
Harper's Ferry Works, employed to set them going. Prior to that time
all firearms of public or private manufacture, in England, had been
made by hand, the interchangeability of all the parts of any given
number of guns being an end accomplished in this country alone. The
advantage of having every corresponding detail of each piece a fac
simile of the same part in all the firelocks of an army must have been
perceived from the time when such weapons were first invented;
and nothing but the most inveterate conservatism, or the steadiest
opposition of that stamp which mobbed threshing-machines and the
spinning-jenny, could have so long staved off its practical adoption.

Once awakened, however, England became, as she usually does, active,
innovating and experimental enough. Rifled cannon, breech-loaders and
armored ships--all the legitimate offspring of the Venetian barrel
and its American employment--have kept her ever since in a ferment of
boards, commissions and target-firing. But these would carry us
beyond our prescribed limit into a boundless field of inquiry and
description. It would be like passing from a notice of the tubular
boiler of Stephenson's Rocket to a discussion of the vast railway
system it begot.

The Crimean war afforded the first test, on a large scale, in
civilized warfare, of the issue between smooth and twist. How the
conoidal bullet and rifled barrel, opposed at Inkermann to the
antiquated Russian musket, tore through the dense columns which
had forced their way to the brow of the plateau, driving the stolid
Muscovites, "incapable of panic," back into the ravine pell-mell--how,
at many periods of the siege of Sebastopol, the rifle-pits did more to
cripple the defence than did the mortars and battering-guns--we need
not recount. These pits, and the rope mantlets wherewith they obliged
the Russians to cover their embrasures, were pronounced by Captain
(since General) George B. McClellan, in his report of the United
States Military Commission, about the only marked novelties of
the siege. Of both, _mutatis mutandis_, he and his opponents made
effective use in our civil war.

Nor shall we pick our perilous way among the Sniders, Chassepots,
Zündnadelgewehre, and Zündnadelbüchsen whose various charms absorb the
military mind at this day. The debate among them is but as to the best
utilization of the old arrow-theory. The oblong projectile, that goes
singing on its winding way, is common to them all. Slipped in at the
back door or rammed home at the front, delicately stirred up by the
insinuating needle and its titbit of fulminate or bluntly ordered off
by the snappish percussion-cap, it is the same obedient and faithful
messenger, and goes on its appointed errand in much the same style.

Under the ancient régime of the musket it required the soldier's
weight in lead to kill him. Its point-blank range was about sixty
yards, but precision even at that short distance it by no means
possessed. At the battle of Fontenoy the English and French Guards,
drawn up in opposite lines, conversed with each other prior to firing,
like two groups of friends across the street. "Gentlemen of the French
Guards, fire!" was the courteous invitation of the British commander.
"The French Guards never fire first," was the reply. And not till then
did punctilio come to an end. Such a colloquy in our day would need
to be carried on with forty-horse power speaking-trumpets, or with the
thunderous articulation of that between the bellowing Alps and echoing
Jura. Even smooth-bore field-pieces, with point-blank of three hundred
and twenty yards and service range of one thousand, have to keep their
distance. It is a rare thing now for cannon to be captured by a charge
of cavalry or the bayonet. The rifle destroys _quantum suff._ of their
horses, and, their support overpowered, they remain a helpless prey.

For this default of the blustering cannon in the trying of conclusions
with its quiet little cousin, the natural remedy is to improve its
interior in the same manner. This has been done, and with marvelous
effect in some respects. But the rifled cannon, though extensively
used both on sea and land, throwing shot and shell five miles, and at
close range through iron plates a foot thick, cannot be yet styled a
perfected weapon. It may be in a very few years, thanks to the ardent
anxiety, on the part of the several peoples composing "the parliament
of man, the federation of the world," to excel each other in the
"brain-spattering, windpipe-slitting art." At present it is maintained
by very good American authority that for use under some conditions,
at short or moderate range, the smooth gun of large calibre is more
effective than a rifled gun throwing a missile of the same weight.
Our monitors continue to be armed with the fifteen-inch Rodman, very
recent experiments being cited to prove its penetrating effect on iron
plates greater than that of the European rifled guns. This, of course,
at very close range.

The rifle is, in its simplest form, a more complex instrument than the
smooth-bored piece, and will always require superior intelligence to
manage it. The army which naturally possesses this requisite in the
highest degree will best handle this decisive weapon, and be, other
things equal, the strongest army. This consideration operates in favor
of our people, among whom the rifle has always been in so much more
constant and familiar use than with those of other countries. Our
broad forests will have to be cleared and our mountain-chains,
east and west, more densely settled than Switzerland, before the
distinction of a nation of marksmen can be lost to us. So far, there
is little evidence of this change. The deer and the wild-turkey are
nearly as abundant on the Atlantic slope of the Alleghanies as they
ever were. Probably there are more of both in Virginia than at the
time of the settlement of Jamestown. Like the quail and the bee, they
are favored by a certain advance of population and cultivation.

Another species of aborigine does not similarly thrive in the path of
the rifle. The Indian of the Plains is still troublesome occasionally,
but far less so than when blue-coats and blunderbusses joined forces
against him. The odds then were often on his side, for many of the red
men were armed with the rifle, while the troops had but the musket and
carbine. The appearance of the breech-loading rifle in the hands of
the United States dragoons on the frontier just fifteen years ago let
in new light upon the Camanche and Apache mind. Up to that period the
badgering of a detachment of "heavies" was a favorite pastime with
these gentry. They got up their "spring fights" with as much coolness
and regularity as the early patriarchs of Texas are related to have
done, and not merely, as in the case of the latter, in utter contempt,
but directly at the expense, of the constituted authorities. Tying
a bag of dried mule-meat and pounded corn to the peak of his saddle,
fashioning a small supply of arrows, or balls if he boasted the
spectre of a gun, coloring the inferior half of his frontispiece a
rich vermilion and the upper a delicate green, with ramifications of
lampblack coursing tastefully along the cheek-bones and the bridge of
the nose, twisting a crane's feather into the tail of his horse, and
giving his affectionate squaw a farewell kick, the cavalier of the
prairie was ready for a raid on the Long-knives. Making a rapid
night-march or two, he would carry the "latest intelligence from
the Indian country" to the border ranches of Texas or New Mexico.
Stampeding all the horses and mules that stood or ranged convenient,
and under favorable circumstances some cattle and sheep, and
"gobbling" on occasion some incautious Cyrion or Phyllis of the
Western Arcadia, the marauder made for the mountains. By the time he
had well passed the last outpost the hue-and-cry was at his heels,
followed, after an easy-going delay, by the lumbering dragoon. The
soldier, armed with ineffectual sabre and carbine, encumbered with
a variety of traps about as useful as they, usually managed, if not
forced to put back by stress of provisions, to come up with him in the
gates of the hills. There an idle interchange of arrow and round ball
between hollow and cliff wound up the eventful history of the chase.
As a rule, no marked chastisement was inflicted on the Indian: he
realized in peace the proceeds of his little speculation.

Now, Minié, like the Harpagon of his countryman, has "changed all
that." The retreating heathen flies to his hills in vain. They do not
cover him, but the rifle does. Cantering to the summit of a knoll,
he waves his compliments to the distant dragoon with a gesture of
derision, more expressive than elegant, he has acquired from the
white. Turning calmly to depart, as he sinks below the crest of the
hill a sagittiform bullet, fired at five hundred yards' distance with
all the science and talent purchasable with thirteen dollars a month
and rations, plumps into the rump of his unhappy pony, and the Stoic
of the woods is unhorsed. Reared on horseback, and weak in the legs
from long addiction to that mode of locomotion, this is a _casus
omissus_ in Lo's tactics. Scant time, however, has he for reflection.
He gathers up himself and his drapery as well as circumstances will
allow, and scuttles hurriedly off, a fluttering chaos of rags and
feathers. It is too late. Heaven is on the side of the best artillery.
A few minutes and the Philistines are upon him. Burnside's or
Remington's last patent again lifts up its voice, and the triumph of
civilization is complete.

The prairie Indian, unlike his congener of the woods, has as yet been
but partially able to substitute gunpowder for the bow. The advantage
he has in the protection afforded him by the desolation of his
waterless _mesas_ and sage-covered hills is thus in great measure
neutralized. What, when he does possess the modern firearm, he is
capable of doing with it, the achievements of the Modocs in their
volcanic stronghold will attest. But these were few, and soon went
down. The extinction of the tribes west and south of the Rio Grande
and the Humboldt cannot be many years postponed. The red rover of that
region will disappear as a combatant in the same way, and before the
same weapon, as his brother nomad of Algeria, the earliest victim of
the conoidal bullet. The spherical ball has done its appointed part
in disposing of the aborigines east of the Mississippi, where forests
covered the land and trees generally intercepted the sight at a
hundred or a hundred and fifty yards. With the extension of Caucasian
empire to the Plains came an extension of the range of vision, which
necessitated an advance in the range of the rifle. The weapon of
Sharpe figured for the first time in the van when the woods of
Missouri were passed and the open plains of Kansas reached. There
its office was, unfortunately, the strife of white against white. The
largest possible range, the greatest possible number of shots in a
given time, were demanded in a war wherein the opposing armies were
seldom within five miles of each other, or more than one man hurt to
five hundred charges of powder burned. How the Lenni Lenape must have
opened their eyes at this reproduction of the drama of a century ago
when the whites, English and French, were fighting each other for the
possession of the Delawares' lands in Pennsylvania! The feeble remnant
of the compatriots of Logan had "moved on," under pressure of a very
urgent police, a thousand miles westward to a reservation not a great
deal larger, when portioned out, than that last reservation allotted
to all men; and the pale-faces who had hung upon his track he now saw
fighting for that.

From its warlike aspect it is pleasant to turn to the contributions
of the rifle to peaceful amusement, if not peaceful industry.
Contemptuously giving the go-by to its minutest phase in this
field--the "parlor rifle," with a target against the chimney-piece
or meandering, in feline form, along our neighbor's roof-tree--we go
forth, with Snider and sunrise, to the forest fastness. Our companions
throng, tall, bronzed, close-knit and sinewy, true children of
the four-grooved, from frosty Caucasus, the Hartz, the Alps, the
Dovrafjeld, the Grampians, the Himmalaya, the Adirondack, the
Alleghany, the Nevada. The chamois, the ibex, the red deer, the
Virginia deer, the wapiti, the gour, or the royal tiger may be the
game in hand. The tiger we are accustomed to associate exclusively
with the dank jungles of Lower India, but he climbs, each summer, the
great passes of Central Asia, "the roof of the world," and makes his
way to the frontier of Siberia, beyond 50° north.

The equipment of the mountain-rifleman is characterized by simplicity
and a strict attention to business. The nature of the ground over
which he works inexorably prescribes this. The superfluities of the
fox-hunter or the partridge-shooter with his dog-cart cannot be his.
Hatchet, pouch, knife and knapsack, with alpenstock on occasion, about
comprise his kit. He may be attended by a hound or two, but not a
pack. He wants no yelling. He hears but

              the Spirit of the Mist,
  And it speaks to the Spirit of the Fell.

For little hollows and little hills Scott's dogs, that

        raved through the hollow pass amain,
  Chiding the rocks that yelled again,

may have been highly effective when his mediæval sportsmen, who
carried no guns, could keep within a furlong of them. But in the
depths of the great mountains, with point-blank range of six hundred
yards and long pops of nearly twice that, they would be preposterous.
Fancy the Quorndon or the Pytchley on the flanks of the Matterhorn!

Chamois-hunting, the sporting specialty of the Swiss and the Tyrolese,
appears to be dying out. The hunter of our day keeps it up rather as
a tradition than as a practical pursuit. He rarely bags a "goat,"
for goats are very few to bag, and those few even more supernaturally
fleet and sure of foot and keen of nose than their less-hunted
ancestors. Still, somewhere in that upper world of lilac-white that
melts into the clouds in vast but distance-softened chasms of viscid
ice and rifts of gray gneiss, there is an object for him. In some nook
or on some crag of the square leagues of desert that swell around him
a troop of the desiderated ruminants is grazing, if grazing it can
be called where grass is none. He is very sure of that. Even from the
door of his chalet he scans the slopes in the half hope of detecting a
flock or a single goat. His father and his grandfather before him had
looked forth from the same door on the same scene, snuffed the same
"caller air," mentally shaped the same pretext for yielding to the
same spirit of adventure begotten of the peaks and by going forth
to battle with the solitude, and hunted patiently, sometimes with
success, oftener without, the progenitors of the same quarry. So he
prepares himself anew for the wild and perilous tramp. A day--two or
three days--may pass without the compassing of a shot, or even hearing
the whistle of the sentinel goat as he shrills the alarm far out of
range and leads his fellows in twenty minutes to crags the hunter
cannot reach in as many hours. Death crouches in the treacherous
snow-crust beneath or the poised avalanche above. A false step or an
inch's miscalculation of leap may make him a waif for the lämmergeier
or land him among the buried villages of the last century. He toils
on until success or starvation sends him home. In the former case he
out-generals his shy game after a series of manoeuvres to which the
deepest stratagems of our Indians are straightforwardness personified.
He gets a long shot at a distance that would make the musket or
buckshot as useless as a sabre. The certainty may be apparent that the
animal, if hit mortally, must fall some hundreds of feet, perhaps into
an inaccessible chasm. There is no help for that. Now or never! The
short rifle, assisted by a portable rest, is called on for its best.
The concentrated energy of the whole chase is thrown into the long and
carefully calculated aim. A thin spurt of white smoke jets forth; a
sharp report echoes "from peak to peak the rattling crags among;" half
a dozen chamois whisk around the next rock-buttress, and "one more
unfortunate" tumbles from the verge into vacancy. The labor of days is
rewarded. Securing the scanty venison if he can, the hunter is off for
his hillside burrow, advertising his approach by an exultant jodel of
extra nerve-splitting power.

In Great Britain the rifle, ancient or modern, like, indeed, any other
firearm, has yet to establish itself as a democratic "institution."
Her forests are not forests in our sense, and her mountain-dwellers
know little of the rifle. In the duke of Athol's seventy-mile forest,
with scarce a tree save planted larches, the stag roams by thousands,
but of course the game-laws interpose, as they did eight hundred years
ago, between him and the (biped) hind. He is still the reserved
luxury of the Norman. So with the leagues of upland where His Grace of
Sutherland has made the Highlander give place to the hart, the "lassie
wi' the lint-white locks" to the Cheviot ewe--where, in short, the
white Celt has been improved out of existence as remorselessly as the
red man in America, and that in favor not of a superior race of men,
but of _feræ naturæ_. Into these and similar districts, at stated
seasons, sundry squads of gentlemen are turned loose. They either
"pay their shot," as _Punch_ has it, in the shape of rent, or are the
guests of the noble proprietors. Their devices for circumventing the
antlered monarch of the waste are amply detailed by Scrope, Hawker,
Herbert and also by the late Edwin Landseer doing the pictorial
department with a success attributable chiefly to his management of
landscape effect, for his dogs, deer and other animals from his Æsop's
fable-like groups to his four duplicated lions in Trafalgar Square,
belong--heretic that we are to say it!--properly to still life, their
want of action and _verve_ placing them beneath comparison with the
works of either one of a score of Flemish and French painters,
from Rubens and Snyders down to Bonheur and Vernet. That his unsold
pictures have brought, since his death, something like half a million
proves nothing. Time was when the worthless canvases of West and
Morland were equally transmutable into gold.

Like other forms of British field-sports, deer-stalking is
sufficiently intricate and artificial. It is obviously the occupation
of men whose primary object is more to kill time than to kill deer.
According to print, from type and plate, the stag, a reduced edition
of the American wapiti, is, in the heart of a little kingdom of some
hundreds of souls to the square mile, as little accustomed to the
sight of man and as hard to approach as he would be on the head-waters
of the Yellowstone. If five or six hours' worming, _ventre à terre_,
up the bed of a mountain-torrent, with not even a rowan-bush to aid
concealment, succeed in bringing the sports-man within two hundred
yards of his unconscious game, it is a good day's performance. How,
the dun deer's hide once perforated, the "tail" of game-keepers,
beaters and volunteer hangers-on is gathered up, the comforting
toothfu' of usquebaugh absorbed by the toilers of the brae, the victim
"gralloched" and suspended across the inevitable gray Highland pony
that makes such a capital "first light" for the foreground, and the
line of triumphant march taken up for hunting-box, clachan or castle,
have we not been told to repletion? The tool used on these occasions
is up to the latest requirements of modern science. Whitworth and
Lancaster, thanks to their projectile's being wedged in so tight as
to cause an occasional misunderstanding it and the breech-plug as to
which was expected to move, have grown unpopular. The style and the
patentee vary every year or two or oftener, breech-loading and the
elongated bullet being the only persistent features.

Among the commonalty of Britain, within a very few years past,
rifle-clubs and matches have been brought greatly into vogue under
government encouragement. Austria, _tu infelix_ this time, having
served unwillingly as an experimental target, with the most
distinguished and gratifying success to the experimenters, at
Solferino and Sadowa, gave a new impetus to the rifle movement in
England, as France, a trifle later, did to the Battle-of-Dorking
school of prophetic literature. Thus it happens that the rifle is
taking its place gradually by the side of fat Durhams, gooseberries,
lop eared rabbits and the Derby as a popular sensation. Johnny sends
over a "team," evidently in his judgment a whole one, to "shoot the
American continent." His next deputation ought to be sent, after
vanquishing the "blarsted" Gothamites, to the recesses of the
Alleghany, and pitted there against the woodsman with his ancient
weapon carrying a round ball of seventy-five to the pound, five
feet long and decorated with tin sights, double trigger and mayhap
flint-lock. The adventurers would beat in the long run, but they would
go home not wholly unlearned. Should they stay to a turkey-shoot,
they would see in it the Occidental analogue of their own public
matches--more picturesque, if not quite so prim and scientific.
Strictly, it presupposes conditions non-existent in England--a
community, for instance, first of hunters, and second of hunters with
the rifle.

This recreation, primarily belonging to localities where large game,
such as deer and wild-turkeys, is found, has spread down to the
cities, where it breaks out in a sporadic form about Christmas. But
the hills are its home--the foot-hills, notably, of the Appalachian
range, the domestic turkey not being very common higher up, nor its
wild original ("original," we insist, _pace_ the _Agricultural Report_
ornithologist, who finds an ineffaceable distinction in the fact that
the tail-ring of the one is sometimes, and that of the other never,
white!) lower down.

We mind us of an ancient town in the Valley of Virginia, settled
nearly a century and a half ago by riflemen, sheltered by them through
a stormy infancy, and still steeped in the traditions of the implement
in question. Spitted by the railway, the hub of many turnpikes, and
surrounded by a thickly-peopled country, it is yet near enough to the
mountains to receive from them each winter quite a delegation of their
inhabitants. Last year wild-turkeys were shot within the corporate
limits, a deer was chased within half a mile of them, and a fine
specimen of _Felis Canadensis_ was killed in an orchard still nearer.

Four miles west of the town the fertile limestone _carse_ swells into
the shady hills, clad largely with pine, that form the long glacis of
the Alleghanies. These hills are peopled principally by a hardy race
not unlike the German woodsmen, whose blood, indeed, a great many of
them share, as their surnames, though sadly thinned down into English
spelling and pronunciation, denote. They inherit, likewise, their
fancy for the rifle. Allied with the axe, which, like Talleyrand's
supposititious frontiersman, they have not forgotten, it supplies them
materially with sport and subsistence. Their land, where arable
at all, being unproductive as a rule, wood-chopping is their most
profitable branch of farming. A score or two of them drive into town
daily, each with his four-, three- or two-horse cargo of wood. The
pile is frequently topped off with a brace or two of ruffed grouse,
there called pheasant, or a wild-turkey, less often a deer, and
more often hares; which last multiply along the narrow intervales in
extraordinary numbers. We have seen three sledge-loads of hares--say
two thousand in all--on the street of a winter's day.

This sappy and sapid contribution to its comfort and luxury the town
often repays with a jug of whisky as an addendum to the cash receipts;
although it must not be inferred from this that the hillmen are noted
for a weakness in that direction. Generally, they are as sober as they
are hard-working, independent and honest. The few who do take kindly
to strong waters are so hardened by a life of toil and exposure
that the enemy is a lifetime in bringing them down.. One little old
hook-nosed fellow was an every-day feature of the road for fifteen or
twenty years. In that entire period he was rarely, if once, seen to go
out sober. He drove but two horses, which were apparently coeval with
himself. Long practice had taught them perfectly how to accommodate
themselves to their master's failing. The saddle-horse adapted his
movements with vigilant dexterity to the rolling and pitching aloft.
On more than one occasion the woodman was found lying in the road by
the side or under the feet of his faithful and motionless team. Poor
old Jack! thou hast "gone under," deeper than that, at last, leaving
behind thee the savor of an honest name, slightly modified by that of
corn whisky.

The Hayfield Inn, a little hostelrie on the Northern "pike," is the
scene of many a turkey-shoot. Between the hill and the road, at the
foot of a ravine that runs down at right angles, room enough has
been scooped out, partly by the rains and partly by the pick, for
the house, offices and microscopic yard decorated with hollyhocks and
larkspurs. Across the highway stands a capacious barn, with open space
for wagons, and between it and the brook beyond stretches a narrow
meadow, whence a vivid imagination has extracted the name of the
caravanserai. The open space flanking the house and road is the
rifle-course, so to speak. When occupied of a mellow October afternoon
by a party of the autochthones, in their pea-jackets of blue or
hickory homespun, it presents a gay and cheery spectacle. Festooning
fence and tree around them, the Virginia creeper, or _Ampelopsis_,
shames vermilion against the mass of pines that glooms skyward beyond.
Other tints of vegetable decay fringe the brook where it winds from
side to side of the long strip of grass, green from the autumnal rain.
Little reck the assembled marksmen of Nature's stage-decorations. One
group will be mentally weighing the turkeys, another discussing the
distance--too long or too short for the peculiar powers of this or the
other individual or his weapon. Around the rude target kneel two or
three, scoring on it each man his "centre," above or below, to the
right or left, of the true centre, to counteract the ascertained
obliquity of his eye or his gun. Here a six-foot Stoic, the Nestor
of the glen, is very formally going through the ceremony of loading.
Another is slowly, and with the precision of an astronomer, adjusting
the tin slides which protect his barrel from the glitter of the sun.
The chatter of a bevy of country maidens ripples from over the way.
The horses whinny under their square-skirted saddles, or stand "hard
by their chariots champing golden corn," like the horses of Nestor,
Agamemnon, Homer and Gladstone before Dr. Schliemann's Troy; the
yearlings in the meadow alternately gaze and graze; the guinea-fowl
now and then honors the shout over a good shot with its harsh but
well-meant rattle; the rifle speaks at measured intervals; the
prizes thin off to the remainder gobbler; and so, with the quiet
characteristic of rifle-matches, the evening draws toward the dew. The
smoke-whitened guns are carefully swabbed with tow and prepared for
their rest as tenderly as infants. Dobbin is rescued from the (fence)
stake to hie hill-ward with his master, cantering exultant or jogging
grumly according to the result of the "event;" and the metropolis of
Petticoat Gap--for such, in the vernacular and on the maps, is its
unfortunate designation--relapses into virtuous repose.

The implement employed at these rural reunions is rarely the
breech-loader, or even the short gun. It promises to hold its ground
for years yet, gradually yielding to the little modern tool. The
essential characteristics of this we have described as they exist
and will probably remain. Variations in the rifling and--where
muzzle-loading is abandoned--in the appliances of the chamber will
continue to be made, as they have heretofore been made without number
numberless. The patterns now fashionable will give place to others,
in their turn to be dropped like a last year's coat. Remington,
Winchester and the rest will retire in favor of new contrivers,
devoted, like them, to the simple task of facilitating the flight of
the leaden arrow with its grooved feather in steel or iron. With them
will rise and fall a parallel series of names on a broader and more
sonorous field--the field of heavy artillery, the ponderous Wiard
being full brother to the liliputian Sharpe. Rifled cannon certainly
present problems far more complicated than the small-arm. They can
by no means be considered, as yet, so near perfection. It is boldly
maintained by many experts, both here and in England, that the
"smashing" power at point-blank range of such smooth-bores as the
Rodman 12-inch and 15-inch is greater than that of the rifle of
the same weight. The question is so closely involved with that of
armor-plates for ships and ports, and that with buoyancy and other
naval requirements, and economy and stability on land, that a long
period must elapse ere the reaching of fixed conclusions. Within the
present generation wooden line-of-battle ships, with sails alone, have
ruled the wave. These have given place to the steam-liners that began
and closed their brief career at Sebastopol and Bomarsund; and the
prize-belt is now borne, among the bruisers of the main, by the mob of
iron-clads, infinitely diverse of aspect and some of them shapeless,
like the geologic monsters that weltered in the primal deep. Which of
these is to triumph ultimately and devour its misshapen kindred, or
whether they are not all to go down before the torpedo, that carries
no gun and fires no shot, is a "survival-of-the-fittest" question to
be solved by Darwins yet to come. But it is tolerably safe to say that
where the best shooting is to be done it will continue to be done with
the conico-cylindrical missile, spirally revolving around the line of
flight; that is, with the arrow-rifle.

EDWARD C. BRUCE.




TWO MIRRORS.

  My love but breathed upon the glass,
    And, lo! upon the crystal sheen
  A tender mist did straightway pass,
    And raised its jealous veil between.

  But quick, as when Aurora's face
    Is hid behind some transient shroud,
  The sun strikes through with golden grace,
    And she emerges from the cloud;

  So from her eyes celestial light
    Shines on the mirror's cloudy plain,
  And swift the envious mist takes flight,
    And shows her lovely face again.

  When o'er the mirror of my heart,
    Wherein her image true endures,
  Some misty doubt doth sudden start,
    And all the sweet reflex obscures,

  There beams such glow from her clear eyes
    That swift the rising mists are laid;
  And, fixed again, her image lies,
    All lovelier for the passing shade.

F.A. HILLARD.




MALCOLM.

BY GEORGE MACDONALD, AUTHOR OF "ANNALS OF A QUIET NEIGHBORHOOD,"
"ROBERT FALCONER," ETC.  CHAPTER LXIV.

THE LAIRD AND HIS MOTHER.


When Malcolm and Joseph set out from Duff Harbor to find the laird,
they could hardly be said to have gone in search of him: all in their
power was to seek the parts where he was occasionally seen, in the
hope of chancing upon him; and they wandered in vain about the woods
of Fife House all that week, returning disconsolate every evening to
the little inn on the banks of the Wan Water. Sunday came and
went without yielding a trace of him; and, almost in despair, they
resolved, if unsuccessful the next day, to get assistance and organize
a search for him. Monday passed like the days that had preceded it,
and they were returning dejectedly down the left bank of the Wan
Water in the gloaming, and nearing a part where it is hemmed in by
precipitous rocks and is very narrow and deep, crawling slow and black
under the lofty arch of an ancient bridge that spans it at one leap,
when suddenly they caught sight of a head peering at them over the
parapet. They dared not run for fear of terrifying him if it should be
the laird, and hurried quietly to the spot. But when they reached
the end of the bridge its round back was bare from end to end. On
the other side of the river the trees came close up, and pursuit was
hopeless in the gathering darkness.

"Laird, laird! they've ta'en awa' Phemy, an' we dinna ken whaur to
luik for her," cried the poor father aloud.

Almost the same instant, and as if he had issued from the ground, the
laird stood before them. The men started back with astonishment--soon
changed into pity, for there was light enough to see how miserable the
poor fellow looked. Neither exposure nor privation had thus weighed
upon him: he was simply dying of fear. Having greeted Joseph with
embarrassment, he kept glancing doubtfully at Malcolm, as if ready
to run on his least movement. In few words Joseph explained their
quest--with trembling voice and tears that would not be denied
enforcing the tale. Ere he had done the laird's jaw had fallen and
further speech was impossible to him. But by gestures sad and plain
enough he indicated that he knew nothing of her, and had supposed her
safe at home with her parents. In vain they tried to persuade him
to go back with them, promising every protection: for sole answer he
s

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