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Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 12, No. 29, August, 1873

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Title: Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 12, No. 29, August, 1873

Author: Various


        
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE OF POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE, VOLUME 12, NO. 29, AUGUST, 1873 ***

LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE

OF

_POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE_.

Vol XII, No. 29.

AUGUST, 1873.


TABLE OF CONTENTS
  THE NEW HYPERION [Illustrated] By EDWARD STRAHAN.
    II.--The Two Chickens.
  OUR HOME IN THE TYROL [Illustrated] By MARGARET HOWITT.
    CHAPTER VII.
    CHAPTER VIII.
  ON THE CHURCH STEPS By SARAH C. HALLOWELL.
    CHAPTER I.
    CHAPTER II.
    CHAPTER III.
    CHAPTER IV.
    CHAPTER V.
  INSIDE JAPAN By W.E. GRIFFIS.
  JASON'S QUEST By CHARLES WARREN STODDARD.
    I.
    II.
    III.
    IV.
  FOREBODINGS.
  DEER-PARKS By REGINALD WYNFORD.
  RAMBLES AMONG THE FRUITS AND FLOWERS OF THE TROPICS By FANNIE R. FEUDGE.
  TWO PAPERS.--I.
  A PRINCESS OF THULE By WILLIAM BLACK.
    CHAPTER XII.--Transformation.
    CHAPTER XIII.--By The Waters Of Babylon.
  GOLD By ITA ANIOL PROKOP.
  GLIMPSES OF GHOST-LAND By LUCY H. HOOPER.
  AFTERNOON</a> By EMMA LAZARUS.
  OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.
    Washington's Birthplace In 1873 By R.B.E.
    Vicissitudes In High Life.
    A Glass Of Old Madeira.
    At A Matinée: A Monologue. By C.A.D.
  NOTES.
  LITERATURE OF THE DAY.
    Books Received.


ILLUSTRATIONS
  THE FLOWERS OF WAR.
  THE INVADERS OF ROMIAINVILLE.
  STORY OF AN OLD MAN AND AN ELDER.
  MERCHANDISE IN THE TEMPLE.
  FATHER JOLIET.
  THE TWO CHICKENS.
  LOVE LEFT ALONE.
  "FOND OF CHICKEN."
  THE WIFE.
  THE LONE CRUSADE.
  TENDER CHARITY.
  NECESSITY KNOWING LAW.
  THE FERRY.
  JOVE'S THUNDER.
  SCHOOL.
  ON WITH THE DANCE!
  ENDYMION.
  HOW THE MODERN DOG TREATS LAZARUS.
  THE LAUGHING LACKEY.
  THE PRESENT.
  THE CONVALESCENT.
  THE DIVIDED BURDEN.
  SHARE MY CUP.
  BREAKING STONES.
  SICKNESS AND COURTSHIP.
  THE WAGON.
  DINNER-TIME!
  FIDELITY.
  A LITTLE VISITOR.
  FRANCINE.
  "DON'T WRING MY HEART!"
  VIEW OF TAUFERS VALLEY.
  SCHLOSS TAUFERS.
  HAPPY SOULS IN PARADISE.
  CROSSING THE TORRENT.




THE NEW HYPERION.

FROM PARIS TO MARLY BY WAY OF THE RHINE.

II.--THE TWO CHICKENS.


[Illustration: THE FLOWERS OF WAR.]

"Thou art no less a man because thou wearest no hauberk nor mail sark,
and goest not on horseback after foolish adventures."

So I said, reassuring myself, thirty years ago, when, as Paul Flemming
the Blond, I was meditating the courageous change of cutting off my
soap-locks, burning my edition of Bulwer and giving my satin stocks to
my shoemaker: I mean, when I was growing up--or, in the more beauteous
language of that day, when Flemming was passing into the age of
bronze, and the flowers of Paradise were turning to a sword in his
hands.

Well, I say it again, and I say it with boldness, you can wear a tin
botany-box as bravely as a hauberk, and foolish adventures can be
pursued equally well on foot.

Stout, grizzled and short winded, I am just as nimble as ever in the
pretty exercise of running down an illusion. Yet I must confess, as I
passed the abattoirs of La Villette, whence blue-smocked butcher-boys
were hauling loads of dirty sheepskins, I could not but compare myself
to the honest man mentioned in one of Sardou's comedies: "The good
soul escaped out of a novel of Paul de Kock's, lost in the throng
on the Boulevard Malesherbes, and asking the way to the woods of
Romainville."

[Illustration: THE INVADERS OF ROMIAINVILLE.]

Romainville! And hereabouts its tufts of chestnuts should be, or were
wont to be of old. I am in the grimy quarter of Belleville. Scene of
factories, of steam-works and tall bleak mansions as it is to-day,
Belleville was once a jolly country village, separated on its hilltop
from Paris, which basked at its feet like a city millionaire sprawling
before the check apron and leather shoes of a rustic beauty. Inhabited
by its little circle of a few thousand souls, it looked around itself
on its eminence, seeing the vast diorama of the city on one side,
and on the other the Près-Saint-Gervais, and the woods of Romainville
waving off to the horizon their diminishing crests of green. A jolly
old tavern, the Ile d'Amour, hung out its colored lamps among the
trees, and the orchestra sounded, and the feet of gay young lovers,
who now are skeletons, beat the floor. The street was a bower of
lilacs, and opposite the Ile d'Amour was the village church.

Then the workmen of the Paris suburbs were invaders: they besieged the
village on Sundays in daring swarms, to be beaten back successfully by
the duties of every successive Monday. Now they are fixed there. They
are the colorless inhabitants of these many-storied houses. The town's
long holiday is over. Where the odorous avenues of lilacs stretched
along, affording bouquets for maman and the children and toothpicks
for ferocious young warriors from the garrisons, are odious lengths
of wall. Everything is changed, and from the gardens the grisettes of
Alfred de Musset are with sighing sent. Their haunts are laboratories
now, and the Ile d'Amour is a mayor's office.

I, to whom the beer-scandals of the Rhine and the students' holidays
of the Seine were among the Childe-Harold enormities of a not
over-sinful youth, was sadly disappointed. Thinking of the groves of
an Eden, I ran against the furnaces of a Pandemonium. For a stroll
back toward my adolescence, Belleville was a bad beginning. I
determined to console myself with the green meadows of Saint-Gervais
and the pretty woods of Romainville. Attaining the latter was half
an hour's affair among long walls and melancholy houses: at
Saint-Gervais, a double file of walls and houses--at Romainville,
houses and walls again. In the latter, where formerly there were
scarcely three watches distributed amongst the whole village, I was
incensed to find the shop of a clockmaker: it was somewhat consoling,
though, to find it a clockmaker's of the most pronounced suburban
kind, with pairs of wooden shoes amongst the guard-chains in the
window, and pots of golden mustard ranged alternately with the
antiquated silver turnips.

Before the church I found yet standing a knotty little elder tree, a
bewitched-looking vegetable. A beadle in a blouse, engaged in washing
one of the large altar-candles with soap and water at the public pump,
gave me the following history of the elder tree. I am passionately
fond of legends, and this is one quite hot and fresh, only a hundred
years old. Hear the tale of the elder of Romainville.

The excellent curé of Romainville in the last century was a man of
such a charitable nature that his all was in the hands of the
poor. The grocer of the village, a potentate of terrific powers and
inexorable temper, finally refused to trust him with the supply of
oil necessary for the lamp in the sanctuary. Soon the sacred flame
sputtered, palpitated, flapped miserably over the crusted wick: the
curé, responsible before Heaven for the life of his lamp, tottered
away from the altar with groans of anguish. Arrived in the garden, he
threw himself on his knees, crying _Meâ culpâ_, and beating his bosom.
The garden contained only medicinal plants, shaded by a linden and an
elder: completely desperate, the unhappy priest fixed his moist eyes
on the latter, when lo! the bark opened, the trunk parted, and a jet
of clear aromatic liquid spouted forth, quite different from any sap
yielded by elder before. It was oil. A miracle!

The report spread. The grocer came and humbly visited the priest in
his garden, his haughty hat, crammed with bills enough to have spread
agony through all the cottages of Romainville, humbly carried between
his legs. He came proposing a little speculation. In exchange for a
single spigot to be inserted in the tree, and the hydraulic rights
going with the same, he offered all the bounties dearest to the
priestly heart--unlimited milk and honey, livers of fat geese and pies
lined with rabbit. The priest, though hungry--hungry with the demoniac
hunger of a fat and paunchy man--turned his back on the tempter.

[Illustration: STORY OF AN OLD MAN AND AN ELDER.]

One day a salad, the abstemious relish yielded by his garden herbs,
was set on the table by Jeanneton. At the first mouthful the good curé
made a terrible face--the salad tasted of lamp-oil. The unhappy girl
had filled a cruet with the sacred fluid. From that day the bark
closed and the flow ceased.

There is one of the best oil-stories you ever heard, and one of the
most recent of attested miracles. For my part, I am half sorry it is
so well attested, and that I have the authority of that beadle in the
blouse, who took my little two-franc piece with an expression of much
intelligence. I love the Legend.

[Illustration: MERCHANDISE IN THE TEMPLE.]

The environs of Paris are but chary of Legend. I treasure this
specimen, then, as if it had been a rare flower for my botany-box.

But the botany-box indeed, how heavy it was growing! The umbrella, how
awkward! The sun, how vigorous and ardent! Who ever supposed it could
become so hot by half-past eight in the morning?

[Illustration: FATHER JOLIET.]

Certainly the ruthless box, which seemed to have taken root on my
back, was heavier than it used to be. Had its rotundity developed,
like its master's? I stopped and gathered a flower, meaning to analyze
it at my next resting-place. I opened my box: then indeed I perceived
the secret of its weightiness. It revealed three small rolls of
oatmeal toasted, a little roast chicken, a bit of ham, some mustard
in a cleaned-out inkstand! This now was the treachery of Josephine.
Josephine, who never had the least sympathy for my botanical
researches, and who had small comprehension of the nobler hungers and
thirsts of the scientific soul, had taken it on her to convert my box
into a portable meat-safe!

Bless the old meddler, how I thanked her for her treason! The aspect
of the chicken, in its blistered and varnished brown skin, reminded
me that I was clamorously hungry. Shade of Apicius! is it lawful for
civilized mortals to be so hungry as I was at eight or nine in the
morning?

At last I saw the end of that dusty, featureless street which
stretches from the barrier to the extremity of Romainville. I saw
spreading before me a broad plain, a kind of desert, where, by
carefully keeping my eyes straight ahead, I could avoid the sight of
all houses, walls, human constructions whatever.

My favorite traveler, the celebrated Le Vaillant, to whom I am
indebted for so many facts and data toward my great theory of
Comparative Geography, says that in first reaching the solitudes of
Caffraria he felt himself elated with an unknown joy. No traced road
was before him to dictate his pathway--no city shaded him with its
towers: his fortune depended on his own unaided instincts.

I felt the same delight, the same liberty. Something like the heavy
strap of a slave seemed to break behind me as I found myself quite
clear of the metropolis. Mad schemes of unanticipated journeys danced
through my head; I might amble on to Villemonble, Montfermeil, Raincy,
or even to the Forest of Bondy, so dear to the experimental botanist.
Had I not two days before me ere my compact with Hohenfels at Marly?
And in two days you can go from Paris to Florence. Meantime, from the
effects of famine, my ribs were sinking down upon the pelvic basin of
my frame.

The walk, the open air, the sight of the fowl, whose beak now burned
into my bosom's core, had sharpened my appetite beyond bearing. Yet
how could I eat without some drop of cider or soft white wine to
drink? Besides, slave of convention that I have grown, I no longer
understand the business of eating without its concomitants--a shelter
and something to sit on.

The plain became wearisome. There are two things the American-born,
however long a resident abroad, never forgives the lack of in
Europe. The first I miss when I am in Paris: it is the perpetual
street-mending of an American town. Here the boulevards, smeared with
asphaltum or bedded with crunched macadam, attain smoothness without
life: you travel on scum. But in the dear old American streets the
epidermis is vital: what strength and mutual reliance in the cobbles
as they stand together in serried ranks, like so many eye-teeth! How
they are perpetually sinking into prodigious ruts, along which the
ponderous drays are forced to dance on one wheel in a paroxysm
of agony and critical equipoise! But the perpetual state of
street-mending, that is the crowning interest. What would I not
sometimes give to exchange the Swiss sweeping-girls, plying their long
brooms desolately in the mud, for the paviors' hammers of America,
which play upon the pebbles like a carillon of muffled bells? As
for the other lack, it is the want of wooden bridges. Far away in my
native meadows gleams the silver Charles: the tramp of horses' hoofs
comes to my ear from the timbers of the bridge. _Here_, with a pelt
and a scramble your bridge is crossed: nothing addresses the heart
from its stony causeway. But the low, arched tubes of wood that span
the streams of my native land are so many bass-viols, sending out
mellow thunders with every passing wagon to blend with the rustling
stream and the sighing woods. Shall I never hear them again?

A reminiscence more than ten years old came to give precision to my
ramblings in the past. Beyond the rustic pathway I was now following I
could perceive the hills of Trou-Vassou. Hereabouts, if memory served
me, I might find a welcome, almost a home, and the clasp of cordial if
humble hands. Here I might find folks who would laugh when I arrived,
and would be glad to share their luncheon with me But--ten years gone
by!

[Illustration: THE TWO CHICKENS.]

This computation chilled my hopes. What family remains ten years in a
spot--above all, a spot on that fluctuating periphery of Paris, where
the mighty capital, year after year, bursts belt after belt? Where
might they have gone? Francine!--Francine must be twenty-two. Married,
of course. Her husband, no doubt, has dragged her off to some
other department. Her parents have followed. March, volunteer, and
disentangle yourself from these profitless speculations!

Ten minutes farther on, in the shade of the fort at Noisy-le-Sec,
I saw a red gable and the sign of a tavern. As a tourist I have a
passion for a cabaret: in practice, I find Véfours to unite perhaps a
greater number of advantages.

[Illustration: LOVE LEFT ALONE.]

Some soldiers of the Fortieth were drinking and laughing in a corner.
I took a table not far off, and drew my cold victuals out of my box of
japanned tin, which they doubtless took for a new form of canteen. The
red-fisted garçon, without waiting for orders, set up before me, like
ten-pins, a castor in wood with two enormous bottles, and a litre of
that rinsing of the vats which, under the name "wine of the country,"
is so distressingly similar in every neighborhood. Resigned to
anything, I was about drawing out my slice of ham, the chicken seeming
to me just there somewhat too proud a bird and out of harmony with the
local color, when my glance met two gray eyes regarding my own in the
highest state of expansion. The lashes, the brows, the hair and the
necklace of short beard were all very thick and quite gray. The face
they garnished was that of the tavern-keeper.

[Illustration: "FOND OF CHICKEN."]

"Why, it is you, after all, Father Joliet!" I said, after a rapid
inspection of his figure.

[Illustration: THE WIFE.]

"Ah, it is Monsieur Flemming, the Américain-flamand!" cried the host,
striking one hand into the other at the imminent risk of breaking his
pipe. In a trice he trundled off my bottle of rinsings, and replaced
it by one of claret with an orange seal, set another glass, and posted
himself in front of me.

I asked the waiter for two plates, and with a slight blush evoked the
chicken from my box. The soldiers of the Fortieth opened a battery of
staring and hungry eyes.

"And how came you here?" asked I of Joliet.

"It is I who am at the head of the hotel," he replied, proudly
pointing out the dimensions of the place by spreading his hands.
"My old establishment has sunk into the fosses of the fort: it was a
transaction between the government and myself."

"And was the transaction a good one for you?"

"Not so bad, not so bad," said he, winking his honest gray eyes with
a world of simple cunning. "It cannot be so very bad, since I owe
nothing on the hotel, and the cellar is full, and I am selling
wholesale and retail."

The vanity which a minute since had expanded his hands now got into
his legs, and set them upright under his body. He stood upon them,
his eyes proudly lowered upon the seal of the claret. A pang of envy
actually crossed my mind. I, simple _rentier_, with my two little
establishments pressing more closely upon my resources with every
year's increase of house-rates, how could I look at this glorious
small freeholder without comparisons?

"So, then, Father Joliet," said I, "you are rich?"

"At least I depend no longer on my horse, and that thanks to you and
the government."

"To me! What do you mean?"

"Why, have you forgotten the two chickens?"

[Illustration: THE LONE CRUSADE.]

At the allusion to the chickens we caught each other's eye, and
laughed like a pair of augurs. But the mysterious fowls shall be
explained to the reader.

[Illustration: TENDER CHARITY.]

[Illustration: NECESSITY KNOWING LAW.]

I need not explain that I have cast my lot with the Colonial Americans
of Paris, and taken their color. It is a sweet and luxurious mode of
life. The cooks send round our dinners quite hot, or we have faultless
servants, recommended from one colonist to another: these capital
creatures sometimes become so thoroughly translated into American
that I have known them shift around from flat to flat in colonized
households of the second and third stories without ever touching
French soil for the best part of a lifetime. At our receptions,
dancing-teas and so on we pass our time in not giving offence.
Federals and Confederates, rich cotton-spinners from Rhode Island and
farmers from thousand-acre granges in the West, are obliged to mingle
and please each other. Naturally, we can have no more political
opinions than a looking-glass. We entertain just such views as
_Galignani_ gives us every morning, harmonized with paste from a dozen
newspapers. Our grand national effort, I may say, the common
principle that binds us together as a Colony, is to forget that we
are Americans. We accordingly give our whole intellects to the task of
appearing like Europeans: our women succeed in this particularly well.
Miss Yuba Sequoia Smith, whose father made a fortune in water-rights,
is now afraid to walk a single block without the attendance of a
chambermaid in a white cap, though she came up from California quite
alone by the old Panama route. Everybody agrees that our ladies dress
well. Shall I soon forget how proud Mrs. Aquila Jones was when
a gentleman of the emperor's body-guard took her for Marguerite
Bellanger in the Bois? Our men, not having the culture of costume to
attend to, are perhaps a little in want of a stand-point. Still,
we can play billiards in the Grand Hôtel and buy fans at the
Palais Royal. We go out to Saint-Cloud on horseback, we meet at the
minister's; and I contend that there was something conciliatory and
national in a Southern colonel offering to take Bigelow to see
Menken at the Gaîté, or when I saw some West Pointers and a nephew of
Beauregard's lighting the pipe of peace at a handsome tobacconist's
in the Rue Saint-Honoré. The consciousness that we have no longer a
nationality, and that nobody respects us, adds a singular calm, an
elevation, to our views. Composed as our cherished little society is
of crumbs from every table under heaven, we have succeeded in forming
a way of life where the crusty fortitude and integrity of patriotism
is unnecessary. Our circle is like the green palace of the magpies in
Musset's _Merle Blanc_, and like them we live "de plaisir, d'honneur,
de bavardage, de gloire et de chiffons."

[Illustration: THE FERRY.]

[Illustration: JOVE'S THUNDER.]

I confess that there was a period, between the fresh alacrity of a
stranger's reception in the Colony and the settled habits I have
now fallen into, when I was rather uneasy. A society of migrators, a
system woven upon shooting particles, like a rainbow on the rain,
was odd. Residents of some permanency, like myself, were constantly
forming eternal friendships with people who wrote to them in a month
or two from Egypt. In this way a quantity of my friendships were
miserably lacerated, until I learned by practice just how much
friendship to give. At this period I was much occupied with vain
conciliations, concessions and the reconciling of inconsistencies. A
brave American from the South, an ardent disciple of Calhoun, was a
powerful advocate of State Rights, and advocated them so well that
I was almost convinced; when it appeared one day that the right of
States to individual action was to cease in cases where a living
chattel was to escape from the South to the North.

[Illustration: SCHOOL.]

In this case the State, in violation of its own
laws unrecognizant of that kind of ownership, was to account for the
property and give it back, in obedience to general Congressional order
and to the most advanced principles of Centralization. Before I
had digested this pill another was administered to me in that
small English section of our circle which gave us much pride and an
occasional son-in-law. This was by no less a person than my dear old
friend Berkley, now grown a ruddy sexagenarian, but still given to
eating breakfast in his bath-tub. The wealthy Englishman, who had
got rich by exporting china ware, was sound on the subject of free
commerce between nations. That any industry, no matter how young might
be the nation practicing it, or how peculiar the difficulties of its
prosecution, should ever be the subject of home protection, he stamped
as a fallacy too absurd to be argued. The journals venturing such
an opinion were childish drivelers, putting forth views long since
exploded before the whole world. He was still loud in this opinion
when his little book of epigrams, _The Raven of Zurich and Other
Rhymes_, came out, and being bright and saucy was reprinted in
America. The knowledge that he could not tax on a foreign soil his own
ideas, the plastic pottery of his brain, was quite too much for
his mental balance, and he took to inveighing against free trade
in literary manufactures without the slightest perception of
inconsistency, and with all the warmth, if not the eloquence, of Mr.
Dickens on the same theme. The gradual accumulation of subjects like
these--subjects _taboo_ in gentle society--soon made it apparent that
in a Colony of such diverse colors, where every man had a sore spot
or a grievance, and even the Cinderellas had corns in their little
slippers, harmony could only be obtained by keeping to general
considerations of honor, nobility, glory, and the politics of
Beloochistan; on which points we all could agree, and where Mr.
Berkley's witty eloquence was a wonder.

[Illustration: ON WITH THE DANCE!]

It is to my uneasy period, when I was sick with private griefs and
giddy with striving to reconcile incompatibilities, that the episode
of the Chickens belongs. I was looking dissatisfied out of one of
my windows. Hohenfels, disappointed of a promenade by an afternoon
shower, was looking dissatisfied out of the other. Two or three
people, waiting for four o'clock lunch, were lounging about. I had
just remarked, I believe, that I was a melancholy man, for ever
drinking "the sweet wormwood of my sorrows." A dark phantom, like that
of Adamastor, stood up between me and the stars.

"Nonsense, you ingrate!" responded the baron from his niche, "you are
only too happy. You are now in the precise position to define my
old conception of the Lucky Dog. The Lucky Dog, you know, in my
vocabulary, is he who, free from all domestic cares, saunters up and
down his room in gown and slippers, drums on the window of a rainy
afternoon, and, as he stirs his evening fire, snaps his fingers at the
world, saying, 'I have no wife nor children, good or bad, to provide
for.'"

[Illustration: ENDYMION.]

I replied that I did not willingly give way to grief, but that the
main-spring of my life was broken.

"Did you ever try," spoke up a buxom lady from a sofa--it was the
Frau Kranich, widow of the Frankfort banker, the same who used to give
balls while her husband was drugged to sleep with opium, and now for
a long time in Paris for some interminable settlement with Nathan
Rothschild--"Did you ever try the tonic of a good action? _I_ never
did, but they actually say it rejuvenates one considerably."

I avowed that I had more faith in the study of Geography.
Nevertheless, to oblige her, I would follow any suggestion.

[Illustration: HOW THE MODERN DOG TREATS LAZARUS.]

"Benefit the next person who applies to you."

"Madame, I will obey."

At this moment a wagon of singular appearance drew up before my
windows. I knew it well enough: it was the vehicle of a handy,
convenient man who came along every other morning to pick up odd jobs
from me and my neighbors. He could tinker, carpenter, mend harness:
his wife, seated in the wagon by his side, was good at a button, or
could descend and help Josephine with her ironing. A visit at this
hour, however, was unprecedented.

As Charles was beginning a conversation under the hood of the wagon, I
opened the window. "Come into the room," I said.

Hohenfels maliciously opened his. "Come in," he added "Monsieur
Flemming is especially anxious to do you a benefit."

The man, uncovering, was now standing in the little garden before
the house--a man with a face at once intelligent and candid, which is
unfortunately rare among the poor rascals of his grade. Although still
young, he was growing gray: his blouse, patched and re-sewed at all
the seams, was clean and whole. Poverty had tested him, but had as yet
picked no flaws in him. By this time my windows were alive with faces.

The man, humble but not awkward, made two or three respectful bows.
"Monsieur," he said to me, "I hope you are fond of chickens. I am
desirous to sell you a fine pair."

[Illustration: THE LAUGHING LACKEY.]

Chickens for me! and what was it supposed I should do with them?
At this point the voice of the Frau Kranich was heard, clear and
malicious: "It is a bargain: bring them in."

At the same time the canvas cover of the wagon puffed outward, giving
issue to a heavy sigh.

The man went to a sort of great cage in lattice-work occupying the
back of the vehicle. Then he backed his wagon up to the sidewalk, and
we saw, sitting on the cage and framed by the oval of the wagon-cover,
a young woman of excellent features, but sadly pale. She now held the
two chickens in her lap, caressing them, laying their heads against
her cheek, and enwreathing them in the folds of her great shawl. I
could only close the bargain with the utmost speed, to be safe from
ridicule.

"Your price?" I asked.

"Fix it yourself, sir," said the man, determined to confuse me. "You
are doubtless thoroughly acquainted with poultry."

"The nankeen--colored one," spoke up again the bell-like and
inexorable voice from the other window, "is a yellow Crèvecoeur,
very well formed and lively-looking: the slate-colored one is a
Cochin-China, with only a few of the white feathers lacking from
the head. They are chef-d'oeuvres, and are worth fully forty francs
apiece."

"Only look, sir, at their claws and bills, see their tongues, and
observe under their wings: they are young, wholesome and of fine
strain--"

He was running on when I stopped him: "Here are a hundred francs for
you, brave man."

The patchwork blouse cut a caper, a look of lively joy shot from
the man's eyes, where a tear was gathering, and the wagon, from its
bursting cover, gave utterance to a sob.

"Why sell them," I asked, touched in spite of myself, "if you are so
attached to them? Is the money indispensable to you? I might possibly
make an advance."

"Ah, you are a real Christian--you are now," said the honest Joliet,
polishing his eyeball with his coat-cuff. "The good woman holds by
them, it is true. Holy Virgin! it's she that has raised them, and I
may say brooded over them in the coop. The eggs were for our salad
when we had nothing better than nettles and sorrel. But, day in and
night in, we have no other lodging than our wagon, and the wife is
promising to give me a dolly; and if we don't take out the cage, where
will the cradle go, sir?"

[Illustration: THE PRESENT.]

The calculation appeared reasonable. I received the birds, and they
were the heroes, in their boudoir under the piano, of that night's
conversazione.

[Illustration: THE CONVALESCENT.]

[Illustration: THE DIVIDED BURDEN.]

How hard it is for a life cast upon the crowded shores of the Old
World to regain the place once lost is shown by the history of my
honest friend Joliet. Born in 1812, of an excellent family living
twenty miles from Versailles, the little fellow lost his mother before
he could talk to her. When he was ten years old, his father, who had
failed after some land speculations, and had turned all he had into
money, tossed him up to the lintel of the doorway, kissed him, put a
twenty-franc gold-piece into his little pocket, and went away to
seek his fortune in Louisiana: the son never heard of him more. The
lady-president of a charitable society, Mademoiselle Marx, took pity
on the abandoned child: she fed him on bones and occasionally beat
him. She was an ingenious and inventive creature, and made her own
cat-o'-nine-tails: an inventor is for ever demonstrating the merits
of his implement. Soon, discovering that he was thankless and
unteachable, she made him enter, as youngest clerk, the law-office
of her admirer and attorney, Constabule. This gentleman, not finding
enough engrossing work to keep the lad out of mischief, allowed him to
sweep his rooms and blacken his boots. Little Joliet, after giving a
volatile air to a great many of his employer's briefs by making paper
chickens of them, showed his imperfect sense of the favors done him
by absconding. In fact, proud and independent, he was brooding over
boyish schemes of an honorable living and a hasty fortune. He soon
found that every profession required an apprenticeship, and that an
apprenticeship could only be bought for money. He was obliged, then,
to seek his grand fortune through somewhat obscure avenues. If I
were to follow my poor Joliet through all his transmigrations and
metempsychoses, as I have learned them by his hints, allusions and
confessions, I should show him by turns working a rope ferry, where
the stupid and indolent cattle, whose business it is to draw men, were
drawn by him; then letter-carrier; supernumerary and call-boy in a
village theatre; road-mender on a vicinal route; then a beadle,
a bell-ringer, and a sub-teacher in an infant school, where he
distributed his own ignorance impartially amongst his little patrons
at the end of a stick; after this, big drum in the New Year's
festivals, and ready at a moment's opportunity to throw down the
drumstick and plunge among the dancers, for Joliet was a well-hinged
lad, and the blood of nineteen years was tingling in his heels. After
fluttering thus from branch to branch, like the poor birdling that
cannot take its flight, discouraged by his wretched attempts at life,
he plunged straight before him, hoping for nothing but a turn of luck,
driving over the roads and fields, lending a hand to the farmers,
sleeping in stables and garrets, or oftener in the open air;
sometimes charitably sheltered in a kind man's barn, and perhaps--oh
bliss!--honestly employed with him for a week or two; at others rudely
repulsed as a good-for-nothing and vagabond. Vagabond! That truly was
his profession now. He forgot the charms of a fixed abode. He came
to like his gypsy freedom, the open air and complete independence. He
laughed at his misery, provided it shifted its place occasionally.

[Illustration: SHARE MY CUP.]

[Illustration: BREAKING STONES.]

One day, when Hazard, his ungenerous guardian, seemed to have
quite forgotten him, he walked--on an empty stomach, as the doctors
say--past the lofty walls of a château. A card was placed at the gate
calling for additional hands at a job of digging. Each workman, it
was promised, had a right to a plate of soup before beginning. This
article tempted him. At the gate a lackey, laughing in his face,
told him the notice had been posted there six months: workmen were no
longer wanted. "Wait, though," said the servant, and in another minute
gave the applicant a horse!--a real, live horse in blood and bones,
but in bones especially. "There," said the domestic, "set a beggar
on horseback and see him ride to the devil!" And, laughing with that
unalloyed enjoyment which one's own wit alone produces, he retired
behind his wicket.

[Illustration: SICKNESS AND COURTSHIP.]

The horse thus vicariously fulfilling the functions of a plate of soup
was a wretched glandered beast--not old, but shunned on account of the
contagious nature of his disease. Having received the order to take
him to be killed at the abattoir, monsieur the valet, having better
things to do, gave the commission to Joliet, with all its perquisites.

Joliet did not kill the steed: he cured it. He tended it, he drenched
it, he saved it. By what remedy? I cannot tell. I have never been a
farrier, though Joliet himself made me perforce a poulterer. Many a
bit of knowledge is picked up by those who travel the great roads. The
sharp Bohemian, by playing at all trades, brushing against gentry of
all sorts and scouring all neighborhoods, becomes at length a living
cyclopaedia.

[Illustration: THE WAGON.]

Joliet, like Democritus and Plato, saw everything with his own eyes,
learned everything at first hand. He was a keen observer, and in our
interviews subsequent to the affair of the chickens I was more than
once surprised by the extent of his information and the subtlety of
his insight. His wits were tacked on to a number of remote supports.
In our day, when each science has become so complicated, so obese,
that a man's lifetime may be spent in exercising round one of them,
there are hardly any generalizers or observers fit to estimate their
relativity, except among the two classes called by the world idlers
and ignorants--the poets and the Bohemians.

Joliet, now having joined the ranks of the cavalry, found his account
in his new dignity. He became an orderly, a messenger. He carried
parcels, he transported straw and hay. If the burden was too heavy for
the poor convalescent, the man took his own portion with a good grace,
and the two mutually aided each other on the errand. Thanks to his
horse, the void left by his failure to learn a trade was filled up by
a daily and regular task: what was better, an affection had crept into
his heart. He loved his charge, and his charge loved him.

This great hotel, the world, seemed to be promising entertainment then
for both man and beast, when an epoch of disaster came along--a season
of cholera. In the villages where Joliet's business lay the doors just
beginning to be hospitable were promptly shut against him. Where the
good townsmen had recognized Assistance in his person, they now saw
Contagion.

[Illustration: DINNER-TIME!]

If he had been a single man, he could have lain back and waited for
better times. But he now had two mouths to feed. He kissed his horse
and took a resolution.

He had never been a mendicant. "Beggars don't go as hungry as I have
gone," said he. "But what will you have? Nobility obliges. My father
was a gentleman. I have broken stones, but never the _devoirs_ of my
order."

He left the groups of villages among which his new industry had lain.
The cholera was behind him: trouble, beggary perhaps, was before him.
As night was coming on, Joliet, listlessly leading his horse, which he
was too considerate to ride, saw upon the road a woman whom he took
in the obscurity for a farmer's wife of the better class or a decent
villager. For an introduction the opportunity was favorable enough.
On her side, the _quasi_ farmer's wife, seeing in the dusk an honest
fellow dragging a horse, took him for a "gentleman's gentleman" at
the least, and the two accosted each other with that easy facility of
which the French people have the secret. Each presented the other with
a hand and a frank smile.

[Illustration: FIDELITY.]

Joliet, whom I have erred perhaps in comparing to Democritus, was
nevertheless a laugher and a philosopher. But his grand ha-ha! usually
infectious, was not shared on this occasion. The wanderer could not
show much merriment. A sewing-woman with a capacity for embroidery,
her needle had given her support, but now a sudden warning of
paralysis, and symptoms of cholera added to that, had driven her
almost to despair. She was without home, friend or profession.

[Illustration: A LITTLE VISITOR.]

Joliet set her incontinently on horseback, and walked by her side to
a good village curé's two miles off--the same who had assisted him to
his first communion, and for whom he subsequently became a beadle. The
kind priest opened his arms to the man, his heart to the woman, his
stable to the horse. For his second patient my Bohemian set in motion
all his stock of curative ideas. In a month she was well, and the curé
no longer had three pensioners, for of two of them he made one.

Two poverties added may make a competence. Monsieur and Madame Joliet
were good and willing. The man began to wear a strange not
unbecoming air of solidity and good morals. The girls now saluted him
respectfully when he passed through a village.

One thing, however, in the midst of his proud honeymoon perplexed him
much. Hardly married, and over head and ears in love, he knew not how
to invite his bride to some wretched garret, himself deserting her to
resume his former life in the open air. To give up the latter seemed
like losing existence itself.

One morning, as he asked himself the difficult question, a pair of
old wheels at the door of a cartwright seemed of their own accord
to resolve his perplexity. He bought them, the payment to be made in
labor: for a week he blew the wheelwright's bellows. The wheels were
his own: to make a wagon was now the affair of a few old boards and a
gypsy's inventiveness.

Thus was conceived that famous establishment where, for several years,
lived the independent monarch and his spouse, rolling over the roads,
circulating through the whole belt of villages around Paris, and
carrying in their ambulant home, like the Cossacks, their utensils,
their bed, their oven, their all.

From town to town they carried packages, boxes and articles of barter.
At dinner-time the van was rolled under a tree. The lady of the house
kindled a fire in the portable stove behind a hedge or in a ditch. The
hen-coop was opened, and the sage seraglio with their sultan prudently
pecked about for food. At the first appeal they re-entered their cage.

[Illustration: FRANCINE.]

At the same appeal came flying up the dog of the establishment, a most
piteous-looking griffin, disheveled, moulted, staring out of one eye,
lame and wild. For devotion and good sense his match could be found
nowhere. Like his horse, his wife, his house and the pins in his
sleeve, Joliet had picked the collie up on the road.

The arrival of a tiny visitor to the Bohemian's address made a
change necessary. Little Francine's dowry was provided by my humorous
acquisition of the yellow and slate-colored chickens.

With his savings and my banknote Joliet determined to have a fixed
residence. He succeeded of course. The walls, the windows, the doors,
everything but the garden-patch, he picked up along the roads.

[Illustration: "DON'T WRING MY HEART!"]

Buried in eglantine and honeysuckle, soon no one would suspect the
home-made character of Joliet's château. It became the centre of my
botanizing excursions. Francine grew into a fair, slim girl, like the
sweetest and most innocent of Gavarni's sketches, and sold flowers to
the passers-by.

       *       *       *       *       *

Such were the souvenirs I had of this brave tavern-keeper in his old
capacity of roadster and tramp. Now, after an hiatus of years, I
found him before me in a different character at the beginning of my
roundabout trips to Marly.

But what had become of my favorite little rose-merchant?

"Francine?" asked Joliet briskly, as if he was wondering whom I could
mean by such a name. "You mean my wife? Poor thing! She is dead."

"I am speaking of your daughter, Father Joliet."

"Oh, my daughter, my girl Francine? She went to live with her
godmother. It was ten years ago."

"And you have not seen her since?"

"Yes--yes--two years back. She has gone again."

"To her godmother?"

"No."

"Why so?"

"Her godmother would not receive her. Don't wring my heart so, sir!"

EDWARD STRAHAN.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]




OUR HOME IN THE TYROL.

[Illustration: VIEW OF TAUFERS VALLEY.]

CHAPTER VII.


We left the Hof one August Friday--we were not superstitious--a goodly
company, sufficient to freight the rumbling old stage-wagon which
jolted daily between Bruneck and Taufers, a distance of nine miles. At
this village the sedater portion of the party were to settle down with
books, pencils and drawing-paper until the Alpine visit should have
been paid.

The valley of Taufers, running northward with a grand vista to the
north-west of the vast Zillerthal snow-fields, suggests at a distance
the idea of a stern, joyless district. When in the broader Pusterthal
the sunshine floods upland plain and slope, this important but narrow
tributary valley lies steeped in its gloomy shade, the dark sides of
the Sambock frowning grimly on the opposite shadowy Tesselberg. Great,
therefore, was the surprise of some of the party to find, as we drove
along, instead of melancholy solitude, prosperous villages basking in
sunshine, whilst little children skipped merrily, and men and women
worked amongst the golden stooks as if enjoying the labor of their
hands. Yes, strange to say, effulgent sunshine everywhere on acre
and meadow, and slanting down upon a wayside cottage garden, where
a freshly-painted Christ lay drying between tall sunflowers. This
cottage seemed the only shadow in this unexpectedly bright picture,
for, occupied by a religious image-maker, crucifixes and wooden saints
peeped wholesale out of the windows. Is it a want of sensibility in
these poor Tyrolese peasants which causes them to cling tenaciously to
such frightful material forms of religion, making them give prominence
to every conceivable sign of sacred sorrow and suffering? But the
jolting stage-wagon allowed us no time to analyze this painful,
ever-recurring feature of the Tyrol. When we next looked up we
saw above us, on a wooded crag, a square gray tower, which, once a
stronghold, appears, as if exhausted with old age, to be tottering
into the midst of lesser ruins.

It was Neuhaus, once a fortress of the rigid old barons of Tuvers.
Hugo, the sixth lord, died there in 1309, and in the chapel, which
still stands, mass is said at stated periods for the salvation of his
soul and the souls of his relations. The whole place would undoubtedly
have been given over to the owls and the bats had not two adjacent
springs--one of iron, the other of chalk and alum--been considered, a
quarter of a century since, either as preventives or as cures for
the cholera, then raging. A chalet was therefore planted on the rocks
between the chapel and the castle, and a bath-house opened, which
would probably be still much frequented on account of the beauty of
the situation were the bath-owner only a little more attentive to the
comfort of his humble guests.

The valley, apparently so gloomy, proved not only cheerful, but full
of romance and old-world memories. Other castles there were,
perched gracefully on their crags; and thus, much sooner than we
had anticipated, we found ourselves stopping at the Post in Taufers.
Rather Sand in Taufers, the single appellation being used chiefly for
the parent church, which, with a mortuary chapel and a house for
the "young and sick," stands apart. Sand and Moritz, two prosperous
villages, cluster with this group of buildings at the head of the
valley, gathering like fiefs at the foot of the fine old castle, still
one of the grandest feudal remains in ruin-bestrewn Tyrol. A third
village, Müklen, though quite distinct, lies sufficiently near to
deserve being included in the circle.

The Post, in prospect of the increase of custom occasioned by the
Pusterthal railway, had enlarged its borders during the past winter.
Nor had it been deceived in the speculation, for, although only one
up-and-down train in the day crawls along the valley, the news of the
comfortable inn in the midst of beautiful scenery had already brought
custom enough. Thus all our powers of persuasion were lost upon
the handsome sister of the young wirth, a noted beauty of the
neighborhood. "Their house was full already. Nine guests, who had
never sent word beforehand, were quite out of the question, but the
Herrschaft could be accommodated at the Elephant opposite, which was
related to the Post."

So, crossing over to the Elephant, the house being entirely empty,
we found space and cleanliness, and might have found perfect comfort
withal, had not the landlord and landlady proved in a perpetual state
of somnolency, their few waking intervals being barely sufficient
for the supply of the simplest wants. In spite of these and
other unsatisfactory auspices, such as the tea being served in a
soup-tureen, the stayers voted to remain at the Elephant in our
absence, making up for all inward deficiencies by outdoor enjoyment.

A country clown with an honest face, Ignaz by name, agreed for a
trifle to carry our bundles and ample provision of food to the Olm. He
made a serious matter of it, however, when he pertinaciously insisted
on four in the morning being the hour for starting. The dispute
finally ended by the agreement to allow Ignaz to carry our belongings
at the hour he chose, seeing that all the village was ready to take an
affidavit as to his honesty, and we being allowed the same freedom of
choice for ourselves. All having thus been comfortably arranged, we
sallied forth for an evening stroll.

A turn in the quiet village street soon revealed the great massive
castle on its plateau of rock--shattered towers, broken battlements,
oriel and bay windows jutting out here and there, its bulwarks running
down the precipice, but not, as formerly, shutting in the narrow gorge
leading into the Ahrnthal, a busy, populous valley, closed in its turn
by the snow-clad bulk of the Tauern, down which, on the farther side,
the noted Kriml waterfall plunges. Remembering, from a visit paid to
the castle in the former year, that an easy winding road, shaded
by trees and commanding splendid mountain-views, led through the
fortifications by the back of the castle to the great gateway, we
chose it in preference to the steep, perpendicular path, which, always
taken by the natives, led equally to the drawbridge and main entrance.
To our extreme regret, however, we soon found our course impeded by
the huge trunks of mighty pine trees lying in a perfect pell-mell
above and on both sides of us. A glance up the hillside showed scores
more of these slain giants. To proceed was almost hopeless, and
we were forced to rest upon some timber and mark our future course
between piles oozing with turpentine.

Whilst we were engaged in our calculations, an old crone, who had
been groping about in the crevices for chips and sticks, stopped, and
seeing us thus penned in by tree boles, eyed us with a compassionate
look. "Ja, ja!" said she, "with fallen trees all jumbled together it
is hard for the Herrschaft to move on; but it's harder for us poor
folks, who have seen the trees growing here ever since we were born,
to hear day and night the axe going hack, hack, and the trees come
thudding down. Sixteen strong Welschers from a distance do the work:
they knew well enough a Taufern would have looked long at the sixers
(ten-kreuzer pieces) before he would have shorn the mighty forests.
Look you!" and she pointed to the sky. "As far as you can see they are
felling."

We looked, and sure enough the vast woods that clothed the lofty
mountainsides were being ruthlessly cleared away. We suggested that a
protest should be made.

"Oh, na, na! The woods are none of ours. The graf de Ferraris too has
sold the estate to a gesellschaft from Vienna. They care nothing for
the castle, but are hungry for timber. The count lives a long way
off, and does not feel it, but it must eat the heart of his aged
lady mother to the fibres--she lives in the village--to know that
foreigners are sweeping down masses of trees by wholesale--trees that
have always kept the poor man's noodles boiling. And where are the
planks to come from for our houses, our barns, our stables? And how
can the cattle be kept from straying without fences of wood? Then,
too, avalanches of snow and of stones will fall, and maybe overwhelm
the village. Thanks to the Mother of God! they will drop on my grave,
but, Lord Jesus, the children and the children's children!"

Having given us these sad scraps of information, and heaving a
big sigh, the poor old soul lifted up her bundle of chips and went
fumbling forward over her stumbling-blocks.

Sad and true was the picture which she had drawn. Nor does it,
alas! belong exclusively to Taufers, but to the whole Tyrol. In many
instances the people are themselves eager for this reckless clearing.
They hope thereby to secure more pasturage, the feeding and rearing
of cattle being the great idea of wealth to the Tyroler. So they make
ready money of their timber, which now in the form of masts floats on
the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal. The Venetians, requiring timber,
have turned the once beautiful, richly-wooded Dalmatia into a dreary,
barren land. In the Tyrol it is not generally foreigners, but the
natives, who unhesitatingly sweep away woods, which, causing grass and
plants to grow, have enabled human habitations to be erected on spots
that would otherwise be but dreary wildernesses, the battle-fields of
chilling winds and scorching sunshine. The precious timber, which like
refuse they cart into the clumsy yawning craters called stoves, or
else sell out of the country for economy so called, might not only
supply the land for centuries with a proper amount of fuel, either as
wood or charcoal, but bring prosperity to many a sequestered village
if turned into tools and kitchen utensils, whilst still leaving
thousands of trees for export. "The supply has never failed yet," say
the Tyrolese: "why should we replant forests to have to cut them down
again, when the ground, too, is good for grass or corn?" So the axe
lies ruthlessly at the root of every tree, for a heavy reckoning
hereafter to the Tyroler.

With a weighing and balancing over every step which we took worthy
of a diplomatist, we finally stood upon the drawbridge of the castle.
Here the savage customs of the rude days in which it was built
immediately impress the beholder. Traces remain of the ponderous iron
portcullis, heavy wooden bars, arrow-holes, and slits in the masonry
for the pouring of boiling water or oil upon adverse knight or lordly
freebooter. A steep path leads through two great entrance-gates into
the large inner court, which is erected upon the virgin rock. A roof
of old wooden shingles shelters the well, and ancient rotting timber
mingles everywhere with the impervious stone in the massive buildings
of the castle, conveying a sense of weakness and decay in the midst of
the strongest durability.

Not only was the old castle dismantled, but apparently entirely
abandoned this summer evening. We were preparing to return without
seeing the interior when a little maiden arrived from the village, who
with flushed face and timid mien drew the castle key from under a
big stone, stood on tiptoe and turned the heavy lock, and the door
creaking on its hinges we were left to wander at our will through
old wainscoted rooms in the dreamy twilight. No spirit of modern
restoration had ever reached them: they were allowed to remain just
as inconvenient, but also just as quaint, as on the day of their
erection. There were gloomy recesses enough, but there were likewise
graceful carvings, mottoes, rare tracery and wood-work; while, strange
to say, in several chambers grotesque wooden birds were suspended from
the ceiling like malformed ducks, conveying at first no idea of the
Holy Dove which the old lords had desired to symbolize, yet probably
in those unquiet days their best conception of this emblem of peace.

The barons not only fought, squabbled and feasted, but prayed too
in their fashion; so we came upon the chapel, disfigured by barbaric
effigies, tawdry ornamentation and flimsy modern artificial flowers.
It is still used for the weekly mass which, as at Neuhaus, is read
here for the peace of the turbulent lords of Tuvers. Still, within
the memory of man a hermit occupied some narrow chambers adjoining the
chapel. He had retired amongst these ruins of transitory greatness to
warn his fellow-creatures against carnal passions, prayed for the dead
and shrived the living. The old anchorite has passed, we hope, into
heavenly repose, but cinders, which may almost be called holy ashes,
still lie scattered on his deserted little hearth.

The banqueting-hall, a fine though low room, supported on solid
rounded arches, contains innumerable flour-and corn-bins, which,
though dating from the Middle Ages, are still in perfect condition.
Here knight and baron caroused, here mummers have played and bears
have danced, whilst sword and spur clanked upon the rude stone floor.
In the ladies' bower above many a minne-singer has struck his lyre.
Nay, Oswald von Wolkenstein, a prince amongst troubadours, wearing
his golden chain and brilliant orders, has brought tears from many a
gentle eye as he sang to his harp his pathetic elegies, the cruelty of
Sabina his lady, and his adventures in England, Spain and Persia.
He was a noble, courtly knight, conversing in French, Moorish,
Catalonian, Castilian, German, Latin, Wendisch, Lombardic and Russian;
and his bones lie in the great cloister of Neustift, not half a day's
journey from Taufers.

How often, too, has the shrill sound of the bugle called to feats
of arms in the court, to hawking and hunting in valley and
mountain-forest! How many a crusader against Turk, infidel, _Prussian_
and _Hussite_ has crossed the wooden drawbridge upon his war-horse!
Yes, and what an excitement in the noble Catholic household when in
the adjoining Ahrnthal the peasants, becoming enamored of Lutheranism,
rose in the peasant war of 1525! How darkly, too, must they have
painted the fanatical bauer Barthlmä Duregger of St. Peter's in the
Ahrnthal, who, after being taken prisoner, escaped near their
postern gate to circulate threats of fire and murder throughout the
neighborhood, vowing to reduce Bruneck to ashes! Reappearing with a
band of twelve poachers and twenty-six laborers, and accompanied
by Peter Baszler of Antholz, he robbed and plundered the clergy,
stripping the worthy priest Andreas Spaat of all his worldly goods,
so that he died in the utmost poverty. Although much blood was shed
in their pursuit, this lawless, misguided man and his band were never
taken. Great as their sin would naturally seem to the noble family at
the castle, no less lamentable and equally worthy of torture and
death would the heretics of Bruneck appear. About the same time the
sacrilegious books, as they were called, of Zwingli and Luther were
sold there openly, conventicle hymns were sung in the streets, and the
priest Stephan Gobi preached against the holy doctrine of confession
and the invocation of saints; whilst the schoolmaster Bartholomew
Huber, though he could not find time to teach the children the
catechism, puzzled their innocent minds with Virgil's _Georgics_ and
Cicero's _Letters_. Toward the end of the sixteenth century the heresy
was suppressed, when the lords and ladies of Taufers Castle sang no
doubt a triumphant Te Deum in their chapel. The inmates were not then
barons of Tuvers proper, for the title having early become extinct
the castle passed into many noble hands, sometimes reaching those of
royalty. Such a booty never remained unoccupied, until, coming
into the possession of Hieronymus, count of Ferraris, in 1685, his
descendants gradually permitted it to fall into ruin, its evil days
culminating under the present count, who sold the estate a few years
since to a speculating company, who merely value it for the timber.
The rooms which still remain habitable are tenanted by peasants and by
the sixteen pitiless wood-cutters.

Seven o'clock the next morning found Frau Anna, E----, the two
Margarets and our good Moidel bound full of life and spirits for the
Eder Olm. We had soon left the village of Moritz behind us, and were
climbing a shady wood-path, when we met a peasant-woman with her
daughter, and she exclaimed, "What! Herrschaft going to Rein! What big
eyes they will make over the stones!"

Sure enough, very big eyes were made by some of the Herrschaft. After
ascending to a meadow amphitheatre, then resting in a sunny wood,
redolent of pine odors, near the foundations of a ruined stronghold,
the Burgkofel, we came upon a realm of gigantic boulders. Some, in
the shape of huge granite slabs, formed a rude, continuous broadway;
others, scarred and furrowed, but softened and beautified by golden
and silver lichen, torn by storms and snow from the cyclopean
mountain-walls, were scattered topsy-turvy on either hand; many had
become lodged in the river, where they carried on a steady defence
against the tumultuous Giessbach, which, having its rise in mountains
ten thousand feet high, leapt, foaming milky white, over and between
them, forming a long series of bold cascades for a distance of half a
dozen miles. The road continued by the boisterous rapids, hemmed in on
the other hand by woods and threatening mountain-walls. The thunder of
the waters prevented continuous conversation: we therefore admired in
silence the grandeur of the scene and the magnificent glimpses which
slight curves in the road afforded ever and anon of neighboring
mountain-peaks and wooded valleys below.

No carriage of any kind can ascend this road. It would be difficult
indeed for horses; nevertheless, the herds of cattle traverse it
in the journey to and from the Olm, their hoofs being able to find
foothold on the rock. Moidel said that the cattle were so delighted
to go to the Alps for the summer after the winter's confinement in
the stall that they made the journey with a kind of joyful impatience,
going on still more eagerly as they approached the end. "Not so,
however," added Moidel, "with the pigs. I have often sat and cried on
these rocks at their perverse ways when I have had to bring them up.
They would only stand still and grunt while I begged and prayed and
pushed. When they reached the top a new spirit soon seized them: they
were here, there and everywhere--in a week's time leaping like goats,
as if they had taken to wine."

We made the climb slowly, and noon was long passed when we reached
the saw-mills, the first houses in the mountain parish of St. Wolfgang
or Rein. The busy, purring mills stood on the edge of the Sarine at
the extremity of a flat mountain-valley intersected by innumerable
brooks, which, continually overflowing, turn it constantly into a
lake. The grass had been under water a week previously, but was now
sufficiently dry for us to sit and rest. Whilst we were so doing,
Ignaz, our _träger_, stood before us, his empty basket on his back.

"The barn is swept and garnished in readiness for the Herrschaft, and
their bundles and parcels are arranged there in beautiful order--many
bundles, and far heavier than they looked last night." Ignaz, however,
was of opinion that though the pay was small the gentry meant well
by him, and therefore he had not scrupled to take the food the worthy
farmer's wife had offered him, leaving the Christian soul to be repaid
by the gentlefolks when they came. And, moreover, he had advised the
landlord at Rein that the gentry were passing through, so that they
should not fail to find eatables ready, seeing hunger and weariness
were best consoled by food.

After which communication we regarded Ignaz as much less a clown than
he looked. Pushing forward, we soon saw the little inn shining forth
a mile farther up the valley--a small white chalet, with the
pink-checked feather beds hanging to air in the upper gallery.

Moidel looked grave over the dinner which the interposition of Ignaz
had prepared for us. "The place is called Rein (clean)," she said,
"but it is none of the cleanest. A Graf once reached Rein, and he
thought it so pastoral that he asked at the inn for a drink of new
milk, but the landlord shook his head and asked for other orders,
seeing there was none in the house. Then the Graf said he would take
cream, but the landlord shook his head and asked for other orders.
Fresh eggs? Yes, the landlord said there were eggs, and begged him to
step into the zechstube until they were boiled. When they came they
made the very room smell, and the Graf in disgust ordered wine. This
was speedily forthcoming, but with so dirty a glass that the Graf,
making a long face, angrily called for the reckoning and departed."

After Moidel's tale, and certain recollections of our own concerning
the little hostel last year, we all approached the house with very
humble expectations. The wirth, already on the lookout, received
Moidel and two of the party as old friends, and hearing no nay he
marshaled us up stairs, and flinging open a bed-room door, looked
proudly triumphant as even Moidel uttered an exclamation of surprise.

Whether constant reminders from his neighbors of the Graf's
unfortunate visit, or a wave of civilization from the Pusterthal had
reached this secluded mountain-inn, certain it is that twelve months
had wrought a marvelous change here. Whilst the rest of the house
remained rough, dirty and primitive, the landlord had devoted all
his powers of taste and judgment upon this upper chamber. Leaning
complacently against the door, he received our congratulations on the
pretty ceiling and walls of carved deal wainscot, on the grand new
bed, and the bouquet of fresh Edelweiss in a wash-basin, but showed
surprise that the fiery tigers and gliding serpents which in a couple
of gilt frames adorned the walls received no flattering comments from
our lips. He next displayed a visitors' book, containing already some
half dozen names, watching closely the astonishment it should produce
in us as he prepared the table for our meal. But even the study of the
names had to be interrupted, for he had purchased some steel knives
and forks, which were, he considered, to bring him great credit and
reputation; nor could he complete his work without hinting at the
superiority of his table-cloth and napkins. Fortunately, a call from
below that the pancakes were ready enabled us to have a little laugh
to ourselves. Linen being used in all peasant houses, he had discarded
it as vulgar, wearing himself an unbleached cotton shirt with an
incipient frill, and supplying his guests with a table-cloth and
napkins of the same material from an empty wash-basin.

We had already discussed two dishes of hot pancakes--really worthy of
commendation--enjoyed an hour's rest, taken coffee, and were rising to
depart, when the landlady appeared with a hop, skip and jump. She was
a lively, voluble little woman, who, though she had attired herself
for us in two enormous cloth petticoats, a stuff bodice and yards of
Bohemian lace in frills and ruffles, by way of displaying the wealth
of her wardrobe, bobbed and curtseyed as if set on wires. Great was
the difficulty, between the amusing, friendly wife and the husband
proud of her and his inn, either to pay our bill or get away. They
declared there was no hurry about the reckoning, and pressed us still
to stay. Seeing our resolution, the wirth with a sigh produced a brown
painted board from under his arm, a piece of chalk from his pocket,
made the bill, gave us change out of a tea-cup, and amidst reiterated
invitations to return if not satisfied with the barn, we tore
ourselves away, their friendly good-byes and good wishes floating
after us.




CHAPTER VIII.


We now left the Reinthal and turned into the side-valley of
Bachernthal. It was the 17th of August, but the little plots of corn
still waved long and green, giving a feeling of early summer. We
were in a perfect paradise of an Alpine valley. Before us the great
near-lying mountains, the princely Hoch Gall and the Gross Lengstein
Glacier, shone like molten silver against the intense blue sky, whilst
the Schnebige Nock rose pure and isolated across the narrow valley,
suggesting to one of the party the simile of the swan-breasted maiden
of Northern mythology.

After passing several chalets we came to that of the Eder Olm. It
belonged to the Hofbauer, and was occupied by his _pächter_ or bailiff
the year round. Here, too, was the barn which we were to use as
our night-quarters during our stay. It was a great wooden building,
divided into three compartments, one being two-thirds filled with hay,
on which we were intended to sleep. It was true that Josef the pächter
had succeeded by means of sweeping and a little arrangement in making
the barn really attractive; but, alas! alas! we had hardly begun
preparing our beds when the horrible discovery was made that under the
surface the hay was soaking wet. Josef could hardly be blamed for not
telling us, as in the Tyrol the people regard lying on wet or dewy
grass as a natural system of hydropathy.

We had not shawls and cloaks enough to construct beds upon the barn
floor, and the pächter's house, though substantial, was but a dark
den, already stuffed full with wife and children. Must we, then,
really return to the inn at Rein with its ornamental snakes and lions?

It was dusk out of doors, but pitch dark within, save for the dim,
uncertain light of a horn lantern, and, all regularly worn out with
our ten miles' climb, we sighed for bed. It was futile, however,
simply to exchange expressions of dismay; so, groping about, to our
joy we alighted suddenly upon several bundles of clean, fresh straw
stowed away in the farthest recess of the opposite division. In a
trice a dangerous corn-chopping machine had been removed, the straw
loosened and spread out, and, covered with shawls and water-proof, it
formed as comfortable a great bed of Ware as ever weary bones could
desire. Forming a row, the tired wanderers were soon sleeping
the sleep of five just persons, the sound of several neighboring
waterfalls soothing rather than disturbing slumber.

In the early morning it was put to the vote and carried that eider
down and spring mattresses were useless innovations after luxurious
straw, and that whilst some benighted people might regard us as having
been in purgatory, we had been in paradise, and hoped to be there
again within twenty-four hours. And the barn, too! How poor in
comparison seemed a conventional house on this sweet Sunday morning!
We had prudently filled all the large apertures in the eaves and
wooden sides the night before with hay, but there were plenty of
crevices for the sun to peep in by, whilst with wafts of mountain-air
it entered freely by the folding barn door as Moidel gently passed in
and out, on breakfast matters intent. Corn- and grain-bins, sieves,
flails and ladders pleased us better for the nonce than formal
furniture, although none the less convenient did we find the great
square wooden table and the benches which the pächter had thoughtfully
placed on the threshing-floor which formed the central division.

[Illustration: SCHLOSS TAUFERS.]

On one side of the barn a small room had been boarded off. It
contained empty milk-pans, ox-bells, old ropes and cords, together
with two chests and two pairs of men's strong leather boots.
This, Moidel suggested, should be used as joint store-room and
dressing-room. Fortunately, however, we had applied it to neither
requirement, when a singular occurrence took place which might be
classed as a ghost-story at night or an optical delusion by day. The
great barn-door quietly opened, Moidel having gone out and shut it,
and two figures--one in soiled homespun shirt and _loden_ trousers,
wooden clogs, with a little black leather skull-cap on his head and a
pipe in his mouth; the other older, in leather breeches, brown knitted
worsted jacket, and an old black silk handkerchief tied round his
neck--glided in. We could have sworn that they were Jakob and the old
senner Franz, but no response came to our exclamation of recognition,
and in a second they had vanished into the said little room, where all
remained, however, as silent as before. Two of us now began even to
doubt, but the other two were positive, that figures had floated
in. Ten minutes later the mystery was solved by the identical Jakob,
attended by Franz, reappearing from the chamber, not, however, in
the hard-working dress in which they had entered, but in full
Sunday array, the leather boots upon their feet and broad-brimmed,
flower-bedecked beavers in their hands. Poor Jakob! sore must
have been his perplexity when, in the hope of slinking into his
wardrobe-room unobserved, we had come open-eyed upon him in his soiled
array. At the cost of apparent rudeness, arising chiefly from shyness,
he had silently disappeared, the old servant following his example.
Now, however, they could both freely welcome us to the Olm, expressing
the pleasure it would give them to accompany us to the senner huts on
their return with Moidel at ten o'clock from church.

This was Jakob's first introduction to Frau Anna and E----. He eyed
them closely and silently for some minutes; then said, "I like them:
they look good!" and so they went to mass.

The barn and chalet called Eder formed part of the Hofbauer's lower
Alp, where a little later in the season the cattle were brought down
for several weeks of pasturage before they descended to their winter
home. We were now bound in company with the returning church-goers for
the group of senner huts belonging to the larger still more elevated
tract, which the Hofbauer rented in company with five other bauers.
Leaving the meadows very shortly after quitting our night-quarters,
where we seemed already in the very bosom of the snow-mountains, we
began again to ascend through a wood of primeval pines and fir trees,
long gray moss hanging from their hoary branches like patriarchs'
beards, whilst round their stems, amidst a chaos of rocks, were spread
the softest carpets of moss and lichen. In the centre of the wood,
where an opening covered with the finest turf afforded an agreeable
resting-place, as usual a cross--that most familiar object in a
Tyrolese landscape--had been erected. In this instance, more striking
and melancholy than ever, for this general point of attraction to
peasants seemed here, in the very heart of the mountains, to be
forgotten and despised. Small in size, as if wood had been grudged
in this land of wood, the writing on the cross erased by storms,
the dissevered arms and limbs were painfully scattered on the sward
below--type indeed as of a powerless Saviour unable to save or to
bless. Indeed, so offensive and discordant did this pitiable emblem
appear, and in such mocking contrast to the sublimity of the scene,
that we spoke of it to Moidel, as, laden with our eatables, she came
slowly up behind. "Ah," she replied, "it is not that the cross is
left unregarded, nor is it age which has thus damaged it, but the wild
storms and lasting snows. A new cross is often erected, but it has not
long been exposed before it is again utterly defaced. The herdsmen
and senners, however, see the meaning under it, and it keeps them
straight, Fräulein."

Well-intentioned but slow of apprehension, these poor peasants cling
to a carved Christ, and feel a horrible alarm, as if you were offering
them a vacant creed, when you touch upon anything higher. Thus Moidel,
though very intelligent, looked somewhat grave and quiet until the
woods opened and she had to point out the senner huts. These were rude
but very picturesque log cabins, built in a clearing amongst a steep
chaos of rocks, with the glaciers and the majestic peak of the
Hoch Gall shining above all. Five were dwelling-houses, the rest
cattle-sheds and barns: our people's hut was the highest of the group,
and we had a long climb over the boulders before we reached it.

Seeing us approaching, good old Franz, who had gone forward in
advance, fastened on his apron and fried marvelous monograms and
circles of cream batter, of which we, the guests, were soon partaking
in the best room, otherwise the store-room and dairy. The hut was
divided into two compartments, both entered by adjoining doors from
the outside. Seated on milking-stools in somewhat dangerous proximity
to pans of rich cream, balls of butter and cheeses, the salt and
meal-bin served as our dining table. In the kitchen, Franz, resting
from his successful culinary labors, sat with Moidel and Jakob by the
hearth, where huge blocks of stone kept the fire in compass, the smoke
curling out of the door, and enjoyed in return some of our ham, wine
and almond cake.

[Illustration: HAPPY SOULS IN PARADISE.]

The hut was close quarters, even for the two ordinary inmates: there
were, however, innumerable contrivances for stowing away all kinds of
useful things, besides notches in the thick wooden partition for hands
and feet when at night they crept to their burrow of hay under the
low eaves. Everything with the exception of the old stone floor was
scrupulously clean: without, the pigs dabbled in the mire between
the rugged rocks, and nettles grew, but beyond, mountains, woods and
illimitable space were spread in uninterrupted fullness.

Resting after dinner at a little distance from the huts, we learned
from Jakob, who was full of excitement on the subject, that shortly
after we left the inn at Rein the preceding evening a gentleman
from Bohemia arrived. He immediately communicated to the wirth his
intention of ascending one of the three great mountains rising from
the Bachernthal, either the Hoch Gall (11,283 feet high), the Wild
Gall or the Schnebige Nock, both some thousand feet lower, but perhaps
even more attractive, as still possessing the charm of untrodden
summits. The wirth consequently sent for a fine, clever young fellow,
Johann Ausserkofer, a friend of Jakob's, and whose home we had passed
on the previous night before reaching the Eder Olm. He had ascended
the Hoch Gall with two gentlemen in the August of the former year,
and now recommended an attempt at the still virgin Wild Gall. The
arrangement being speedily made, for extra help and security Johann
fetched his younger brother, Josef, as a companion, and the little
party started by torchlight at two o'clock in the morning.

Jakob now produced a telescope, through which he hoped we might detect
moving figures amongst the snow of the Wild Gall. In vain we strained
our eyes through the greasy old telescope, for neither moving figures
nor stationary black dots were visible. Even Jakob with his eagle
eye confessed to seeing no trace of man either amongst the irregular
ash-colored rocks or upon the snowy curves of the Wild Gall, which,
like a huge white-crested breaker at sea, upheaved itself in the air
as in the very act of turning. Quite as solitary and untrodden did
it look as its still more stately sister, the Hoch Gall, a mountain
deservedly the especial pride of the district, its lofty pinnacle
piercing the sky, whilst a vast sheet of thick, pure snow hung
straight and smooth down its concave sides, a huge mountain-buttress
linking the lower portion of this snow pyramid to the white,
glittering expanse of the Gross Lengstein Glacier--a buttress of
many thousand feet, standing prominently forth like an antediluvian
monster, on whose gigantic pachydermatous flanks the shattered,
blasted stems of dead uniform fir trees shone out a silvery gray,
mingling in color with the loose, glittering débris which had slidden
into the upland valley just below. Two silver threads descending from
the glaciers of the Hoch Gall wound through these fallen stones into
the green turf of the Bachernthal, but whether formed of snow or water
it would have been difficult to decide, had not ever and anon a sound
as of a distant train been borne upon the breeze, proving them to be
brooks, which helped to swell the roaring, tumbling Giessbach, whose
boisterous acquaintance we had already made.

The Hoch Gall, which has been twice ascended, was first attempted in
1869 by a very adventurous, clever young Alpine climber, Karl Hofmann,
the only son of a well-known physician of Munich--a youth of whom it
is said that no study was too difficult, no danger too great, no
peak too high for him. Innumerable were the mountains which he scaled
between 1866 and 1870, and of which he wrote excellent, accurate
descriptions: then laying down his young life--he was but
twenty-three--on September 2, 1870, in the fierce battle of Sedan, his
spirit passed away to mightier slopes, to more delectable mountains.

Again, in the August of 1871, after our first visit to the Olm, the
ascent was repeated by two other members of the Tyrolese Alpine Club,
Herr Richter and Herr Strüdl. They brought with them two experienced
men--one the chief guide of the Gross Glockner, the other of the
Venediger Spitze--and, except for Hofmann's written description, had
to plan and calculate for themselves, there being no local knowledge
of the mountain attainable, as the two guides who accompanied the
young explorer were also dead.

Although well provided with their own guides, they thought it right
to take some active young man of the neighborhood with them, in order
that he in his turn might help future climbers. At the recommendation
of the landlord of Rein--who on this important occasion commenced
his visitors' book--they chose for the purpose Jakob's friend, Johann
Ausserkofer. They started by torchlight one Monday morning, and after
a steep climb through a wild mountain-forest on the opposite side of
the Bachernthal, crossing a vast glacier and the crevasse between the
Hoch Gall and the Wild Gall, began the real ascent, which proved so
perpendicular as to be achieved principally with the aid of ropes.
After a toilsome nine hours and a quarter they had the good fortune to
reach the summit in safety. The weather was favorable, and the view,
in Richter's opinion, far surpassed the much-vaunted panorama from the
Kriml Tauern. A long rest, and raising a cromlech in memory of their
bold achievement, and then the steep descent over snow and glaciers
was effected, and St. Wolfgang reached after fourteen hours of toil
and great danger.

[Illustration: CROSSING THE TORRENT.]

At half-past four, Jakob, having crossed the valley in search of his
oxen, came upon the Bohemian gentleman--whose name afterward proved to
be Dr. Hecht--with the two Ausserkofers, and learned their adventures
in the ascent of the Wild Gall. After clambering over steep, slippery
glaciers they had begun the climb proper at five o'clock in the
morning, Dr. Hecht pushing forward in order to be the first human
being who had ever placed his foot upon the summit of the mountain.
He had indeed almost reached the highest point when a dark, terrific
chasm suddenly yawned beneath him, entirely cutting off all farther
progress. The three explorers, although considerably dejected by
the disagreeable check and the waste of labor and time which it
had involved, determining not to be baffled, resolved to make a
considerable détour. After having, with much trouble, reached a lower
plateau, they attacked the precipitous, almost invincible mountain
from another side, the still early hour of the day alone permitting
the renewal of the attempt. Leaving their telescope and provisions to
await their return, they boldly scrambled, crept and worked their way
up the scaly side, and finally reached the summit in safety. The view
thence they declared to be magnificent. They too raised a cromlech,
and then a giddy descent followed. However, all three were full of
spirits when Jakob met them, and the Ausserkofers declared that they
were ready henceforth to pilot any other tourist to the summit for a
moderate four or five gulden apiece.

Jakob, as herdsman, had left us at three o'clock to look after the
cattle, we strolling with him as far as a wild old wood which formed a
strange contrast to this Sunday afternoon, as lovely an August day as
ever rejoiced the earth. The near yet unattainable Hoch Gall glittered
coldly white between the stems and branches of gigantic pines, which,
scathed and bleached by lightning and storm, rose in the form of
ruined towers or lay tumbled about in the wildest, dreariest confusion
amongst the rugged enormous rocks, fit emblems of the forest in
the Inferno inhabited by the souls of the lost. Nor was this stern,
forbidding scene enlivened when a melancholy man, carrying the dead
body of a goat across his shoulders, crossed the torrent on a fallen
tree and advanced slowly up the craggy path, followed by a little boy
timidly picking his way behind.

"Ach, Mathies, in God's name, another goat!" said Moidel, lifting
her eyes from a little book, the life of the odd, humane Joseph II.,
which, bought for a few kreuzers at a fair, was worth as many guldens
in the pleasure which it gave her.

The man glanced from under his eyebrows, and answered with a sigh,
"_Gott hat's so wölln, Diendl_" ("God would have it so, maiden"); and
then he added in dialect, "It was a beautiful creature. I missed it in
the reckoning last night. After mass I strode far and wide searching
it, until an hour since I found the body hanging by a hind hoof from a
cleft in the Auvogl Nock. See, it has broken its leg in its struggles.
Ah, poor beast! A solitary, cruel death, _und hast ma g'nomma mei
Ruah_" ("and it has taken my rest from me").

"Poor Mathies! his half dozen goats are all that he has in the world.
He rents one of father's huts, but since he has brought them to the
Olm two or three are already dead." This Moidel explained to us as he
moved dejectedly forward. "Father, however, told him that our Olm was
bad for goats. They not only slip from the rocks, but grow thin and
weakly. Just the reverse of the cattle. Onkel Johann--there is no one
so deep as he in cattle--says that every blade of grass on our Olm is
worth half a pint of milk. And it's not the air, nor the water,
nor the winds that make it wholesome, but some law that he cannot
understand. Who can? There is Jagdhaus, a wonderfully fertile
_sennerei_ an hour beyond Rein. It is far finer than our Olm, which
is so mountainous that timid new-comers amongst the cattle must first
teach themselves to walk about; but at Jagdhaus, which is as large
as a village, all the land is smooth, fat pasturage for miles. Yet
a curse rests on the place for which neither priests nor farmers can
account. Some seasons, it is true, all goes well, but in others the
cattle are suddenly bitten, fall dead, and their flesh then turns
black and rustles like paper. Some say that it is an insect or animal
that attacks them; others, that it is caused by the grass which they
eat; and there are again others who are sure that it is a phantom
which, touching them, blasts them. And there seems reason in the idea,
because when the priest of Taufers, who has an Olm there, goes and
says mass and prays for the cattle, or when the _Sterniwitz_ (landlord
of the Stern), who has acres of pasturage and many heads of cattle at
Jagdhaus, pays a Capuchin to go thither and pray, the murrain ceases."

In Moidel's tale we had almost forgotten our long walk back to the
barn and the arrangement for supper previously at the huts. Now, it
curiously happened that whilst waiting for the tea-pan--rather than
tea-kettle--to boil, I accidentally alighted upon a people's calendar,
published at Brixen for the current year, protruding its somewhat
greasy pages from behind a churn; and after turning over long
black-and red-lettered lists of fasts and feasts, came upon some
pertinent advice to the Tyrolese farmers by Adolph Trientl, concerning
_Milzbrand_. He described it as a dreadful pestilence, the scourge
of many a mountain-pasture. Hundreds of cattle, he tells them, are
sacrificed to it yearly. Even the deer and lesser game die from the
contagion, as well as human beings; death in the latter case being
occasioned either by eating the meat of diseased animals or by having
cuts or wounds which have come in contact with the victims. Even the
bite of a fly which has fed on the contaminated meat will propagate
the malady. Hides or reins made of the skins are known years after
to reproduce Milzbrand. Where the body of an affected animal has been
buried the ground becomes contagious for a long run of years, the
cattle pasturing there being attacked. The only remedy consists in
burning the contaminated body, and then keeping the live-stock from
the place where the victim fell. When Milzbrand appears the farmer
feels he has no option between sacrificing his cattle and abandoning
for a season his rich pastures. And yet a little attention might soon
cause a remedy, the evil often arising from the water of a particular
pool or brook, which if carefully guarded against makes the rest of
the Alp perfectly secure.

When I ventured to quote from the calendar to Moidel, suggesting that
at Jagdhaus it might certainly be the water, she remained impervious
to any new views on the subject. "There was Milzbrand, and that might
arise from the water, for all she knew, but at Jagdhaus it was a rod
of God, which only prayer averted."

Adolf Trientl appears to be a Tyrolese priest, who travels annually
through his native land watching closely the agriculture and domestic
economy, and trying, countenanced by government, to help his country
people to an easier working life, healthier houses and more profitable
land. To the credit of the clergy of Brixen, his practical often pithy
remarks are published in their church calendar. He and his colleagues
must, however, use almost supernatural patience and energy before they
can move a Tyroler one jot from the beaten path which his ancestors
have taken for a thousand years before him. The people are perfectly
content, it is pleaded, with the existing state of things: why should
they change their sowing or ploughing any more than the sun his course
or the mountains their position? Changes, like bad weather, breed
discontent.

We had brought no books with us for our five days at the Olm, and in
the pauses of our out-door enjoyment the calendar, greasy rather from
contact with butter and milk than with fingers, afforded amusing,
profitable reading: a lecture may often be pleasant to hear when not
addressed to one's self.

Moidel, Jakob and Franz, though they had looked with blind eyes on
the print, did not turn deaf ears when we spoke; only we had to manage
that all we said and thought did not come as a quoted sermon, but as
suggestions and inquiries from us, who did not know half as much about
a dairy and farm-life as they did. First of all, we tried to make them
believe that the staff of life need not of necessity be rye bread
of so hard and flinty a nature as to require in every house a square
wooden board and iron chopper to cut it.

"Yes," said Moidel, "it is very hard for old people, who must needs
sop it, but while one's teeth are good the crunching is a pleasure.
And then it must needs be dry, because the oven can only be heated
once in three months. I wish it could come round oftener, for there
is no going to bed on baking nights, with some three hundred loaves to
pop into the oven."

"How could the poor bake often," suggested Jakob, "when there is only
one oven amongst them in the village?"

"Why," said we, looking very learned, "you have a common schoolmaster,
and a common swineherd, and a common goose-boy: why not have a common
baker, who knew how to make good, light dough, and could bake a good
batch of bread for each family weekly?"

To Franz, eating good bread only a few days old appeared woeful
extravagance. "Bread," he said, "should be like rocks to last, not
like snow to melt away. The rye meal would fly before the wind at that
rate, and where would the poor man then be?"

Butter and cheese-making, however, involved hours of deep discussion.
You would indeed have thought that man merely came into the world to
make butter and cheese. Personal experience after two summers in
the Tyrol had made us reflect very much upon the butter and cheese
question. Whether regarded as a luxury or a necessity, the Swiss
Gruyère and Emmenthal cheese and the fresh dainty pats of butter made
the contrast striking in the Tyrol. The milk and cream were rich and
delicious, but became simply loathsome when transformed into butter
or cheese. We wondered how and why it was that we could never obtain
perfectly palatable butter, until we discovered the universal practice
of churning it, without salt, into huge oblong balls, large as the
nave of a wheel, which naturally soon turn rancid. It does not on this
account lose its value to the natives, who use very little butter,
melting it down into a clarified dripping called Schmalz for their
endless fryings and frizzlings. This badly made butter is, however,
often adorned with the emblems of the Passion, such as the cross,
ladder, crown of thorns and nails. It was so at the Hofbauer's Olm.
It is considered to enhance the value of the butter _Kugel_ or ball,
especially when given to the priest in payment for masses said for
dead relations. The Ursuline Sisters were paid for Moidel's education
in butter.

And the native cheese!--meagre cheese, as it is justly called--a
poor, insipid, not overclean curd cheese. The curds are often merely
squeezed in a cloth, then turned out and placed upon an upper shelf to
dry, where they look like the back portions of gigantic skulls until
damp and mould somewhat destroy the resemblance. The kind called fat
cheese is not much better. It is, however, made with greater care, and
dried in bands of pine bark in the Alpine kitchen. This distasteful
butter and cheese, the sole result of gallons of rich milk and cream
and many a long summer week upon the lofty Alp, becomes still
more distasteful when the milk and cream are kept in the one hot,
over-crowded sleeping-room, or in a dairy where the goatherd sleeps
amongst the milk-dishes. The mountain dwellings are dark and badly
constructed, and if furnished with a proper dairy, the prejudiced
housewife often refuses to use it, believing that cream will not set
unless the milk is warm; thus, much becomes sour, and is either thrown
away or turned into a still more inferior cheese. Or she purposely
lets the cream become rancid before she churns, that the children
may not take too great a fancy to the Schmalz, and thus it may last
longer!

We had tasted already too much of this milky tree of knowledge not to
learn with pleasure from the Brixen calendar that in different parts
of the Tyrol co-operative _sennereien_ had been started with the
greatest success. A manager was employed in each who understood
perfectly the Swiss mode of cheese-making and the best manner of
churning. Thus, the most excellent produce was gained from the same,
or rather from a smaller, quantity of milk, when the reckless waste
was deducted. Each shareholder had the right of skimming the milk
from his own cows, taking what he required for his personal use, or
he might send his entire share of butter, cheese, whey and goats' milk
with the common stock to market, where such co-operative wares already
brought the highest price. Thus, the farmer gained both ways, not only
receiving more money, but saving in dairy utensils, house room and
fuel, and his wife in labor.

Great was our glee over these enlightened and successful efforts; but
a friendly dispute immediately arose when one amongst us expressed a
surprise that the half dozen bauers who shared the Olm in common
did not manage matters on this improved principle. They would find
themselves richer, more care-free men. Moidel declared her inability
to form an opinion. Old Franz, however, had much to say. He thought
it would be foolish. Why need the Hofbauer mix himself up with others,
when he only wanted to make meagre cheese for family use, while if
there were any over it always brought its worth in kreuzers at the
market? And then the pounds and pounds of butter were all wanted for
Schmalz. It might be sweeter, it is true, if they could melt it down
at the hut, but then there was the fear of setting the place on fire,
and the home-melted Schmalz went fast enough, as Moidel knew. And as
for the artificial Schmalz which was being sold in the towns now,
it was made of palm-oil, fresh suet and butter, and colored with
the yellow dye called Orleans; and people praised this machine-made
Schmalz and talked of progress! But he hoped, so long as he handled a
frying-pan, to stick to good old Schmalz and good old ways.

MARGARET HOWITT.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]




ON THE CHURCH STEPS.

CHAPTER I.


What a picture she was as she sat there, my own Bessie! and what a
strange place it was to rest on, those church steps! Behind us lay the
Woolsey woods, with their wooing fragrance of pine and soft rushes of
scented air; and the lakes were in the distance, lying very calm
in the cloud-shadows and seeming to wait for us to come. But to-day
Bessie would nothing of lakes or ledges: she would sit on the church
steps.

In front of us, straight to the gate, ran a stiff little walk of white
pebbles, hard and harsh as some bygone creed.

"Think of little bare feet coming up here, Bessie!" I said with a
shiver. "It is too hard. And every carriage that comes up the hill
sees us."

"And why shouldn't they see us?" said my lady, turning full upon me.
"I am not ashamed to be here."

"Churches should always have soft walks of turf; and lovers," I would
fain have added, "should have naught but whispering leaves about
them."

But Bessie cut me short in her imperious way: "But we are not lovers
this morning: at least," with a half-relenting look at my rueful face,
"we are very good friends, and I choose to sit here to show people
that we are."

"What do you care for _people_--the Bartons or the Meyricks?" as I
noticed a familiar family carriage toiling up the hill, followed by
a lighter phaeton. I recognized already in the latter vehicle the
crimson feather of Fanny Meyrick, and "the whip that was a parasol."

"Shall I step out into the road this minute, and stop those ladies
like a peaceable highwayman, and tell them you have promised to marry
me, and that their anxiety as to our intimacy may be at rest? Give me
but leave and I will do it. It will make Mrs. Barton comfortable. Then
you and I can walk away into those beckoning woods, and I can have you
all to myself."

Indeed she was worth having. With the witchery that some girls know,
she had made a very picture of herself that morning, as I have
said. Some soft blue muslin stuff was caught up around her in airy
draperies--nothing stiff or frilled about her: all was soft and
flowing, from the falling sleeve that showed the fair curve of her arm
to the fold of her dress, the ruffle under which her little foot
was tapping, impatiently now. A little white hat with a curling blue
feather shaded her face--a face I won't trust myself to describe, save
by saying that it was the brightest and truest, as I then thought, in
all the world.

She said something rapidly in Italian--she is always artificial when
she uses a foreign tongue--and this I caught but imperfectly, but it
had a proverbial air about it of the error of too hasty assumptions.

"Well, now I'll tell you something," she said as the carriages
disappeared over the top of the hill. "Fanny Meyrick is going abroad
in October, and we shall not see her for ever so long."

Going abroad? Good gracious! That was the very thing I had to tell
her that morning--that I too was ordered abroad. An estate to be
settled--some bothering old claim that had been handed down from
generation to generation, and now springing into life again by the
lapsing of two lives on the other side. But how to tell her as she
looked up into my face with the half-pleading, half-imperious smile
that I knew so well? How to tell her _now_?

So I said nothing, but foolishly pushed the little pebbles aside with
my stick, fatuously waiting for the subject to pass. Of course my
silence brought an instant criticism: "Why, Charlie, what ails you?"

"Nothing. And really, Bessie, what is it to us whether Fanny Meyrick
go or stay?"

"I shouldn't have thought it _was_ anything. But your silence, your
confusion--Charlie, you do care a little for her, after all."

Two years ago, before Bessie and I had ever met, I had fluttered
around Fanny Meyrick for a season, attracted by her bright brown
eyes and the gypsy flush on her cheek. But there were other moths
fluttering around that adamantine candle too; and I was not long in
discovering that the brown eyes were bright for each and all, and that
the gypsy flush was never stirred by feeling or by thought. It was
merely a fixed ensign of health and good spirits. Consequently the
charm had waned, for me at least; and in my confessions to Bessie
since our near intimacy it was she, not I, who had magnified it into
the shadow even of a serious thought.

"Care for her? Nonsense, Bessie! Do you want me to call her a mere
doll, a hard, waxen--no, for wax will melt--a Parian creature, such
as you may see by the dozens in Schwartz's window any day? It doesn't
gratify you, surely, to hear me say that of any woman."

And then--what possessed me?--I was so angry at myself that I took
a mental _résumé_ of all the good that could be said of Fanny
Meyrick--her generosity, her constant cheerfulness; and in somewhat
headlong fashion I expressed myself: "I won't call her a dolt and an
idiot, even to please you. I have seen her do generous things, and she
is never out of temper."

"Thanks!" said Bessie, nodding her head till the blue feather
trembled. "It is as well, as Aunt Sloman says, to keep my shortcomings
before you."

"When did Aunt Sloman say that?" I interrupted, hoping for a diversion
of the subject.

"This morning only. I was late at breakfast. You know, Charlie, I was
_so_ tired with that long horseback ride, and of course everything
waited. Dear aunty never _will_ begin until I come down, but sits
beside the urn like the forlornest of martyrs, and reads last night's
papers over and over again."

"Well? And was she sorry that she had not invited me to wait with
her?"

"Yes," said Bessie. "She said all sorts of things, and," flushing
slightly, "that it was a pity you shouldn't know beforehand what you
were to expect."

"I wish devoutly that I had been there," seizing the little hand
that was mournfully tapping the weatherbeaten stone, and forcing the
downcast eyes to look at me. "I think, both together, we could have
pacified Aunt Sloman."

It _was_ a diversion, and after a little while Bessie professed she
had had enough of the church steps.

"How those people do stare! Is it the W----s, do you think, Charlie? I
heard yesterday they were coming."

From our lofty position on the hillside we commanded the road leading
out of the village--the road that was all alive with carriages on this
beautiful September morning. The W---- carriage had half halted to
reconnoitre, and had only not hailed us because we had sedulously
looked another way.

"Let's get away," I said, "for the next carnage will not only stop,
but come over;" and Bessie suffered herself to be led through the
little tangle of brier and fern, past the gray old gravestones with
"Miss Faith" and "Miss Mehitable" carved upon them, and into the leafy
shadow of the waiting woods.

Other lovers have been there before us, but the trees whisper no
secrets save their own. The subject of our previous discussion was not
resumed, nor was Fanny Meyrick mentioned, until on our homeward road
we paused a moment on the hilltop, as we always did.

It is indeed a hill of vision, that church hill at Lenox. Sparkling
far to the south, the blue Dome lay, softened and shining in the
September sun. There was ineffable peace in the faint blue sky, and,
stealing up from the valley, a shimmering haze that seemed to veil the
bustling village and soften all the rural sounds.

Bessie drew nearer to me, shading her eyes as she looked down into the
valley: "Charlie dear, let us stay here always. We shall be happier,
better here than to go back to New York."

"And the law-business?" I asked like a brutal bear, bringing the
realities of life into my darling's girlish dream.

"Can't you practice law in Foxcroft, and drive over there every
morning? People do."

"And because they do, and there are enough of them, I must plod along
in the ways that are made for me already. We can make pilgrimages
here, you know."

"I suppose so," said Bessie with a sigh.

Just then Fanny Kemble's clock in the tower above us struck the
hour--one, two, three.

"Bless me! so late? And there's that phaeton coming back over the hill
again. Hurry, Charlie! don't let them see us. They'll think that we've
been here all the time." And Bessie plunged madly down the hill, and
struck off into the side-path that leads into the Lebanon road. The
last vibrations of the bell were still trembling on the air as I
caught up with her again.

But again the teasing mood of the morning had come over her. Quite out
of breath with the run, as we sat down to rest on the little porch of
Mrs. Sloman's cottage she said, very earnestly, "But you haven't once
said it."

"Said what, my darling?"

"That you are glad that Fanny is going abroad."

"Nonsense! Why should I be glad?"

"Are you sorry, then?"

If I had but followed my impulse then, and said frankly that I was,
and why I was! But Mrs. Sloman was coming through the little hall: I
heard her step. Small time for explanation, no time for reproaches.
And I could not leave Bessie, on that morning of all others, hurt or
angry, or only half convinced.

"No, I am not sorry," I said, pulling down a branch of honeysuckle,
and making a loop of it to draw around her neck. "It is nothing,
either way."

"Then say after me if it is nothing--feel as I feel for one minute,
won't you?"

"Yes, indeed."

"Say, after me, then, word for word, 'I am glad, _very_ glad, that
Fanny Meyrick is to sail in October. I would not have her stay on this
side for _worlds_!"

And like a fool, a baby, I said it, word for word, from those sweet
smiling lips: "I am glad, _very_ glad, that Fanny Meyrick is to sail
in October. I would not have her stay on this side for _worlds_!"




CHAPTER II.


The next day was Sunday, and I was on duty at an early hour, prepared
to walk with Bessie to church. My darling was peculiar among women in
this: her church-going dress was sober-suited; like a little gray nun,
almost, she came down to me that morning. Her dress, of some soft gray
stuff, fell around her in the simplest folds, a knot of brown ribbon
at her throat, and in her hat a gray gull's wing.

I had praised the Italian women for the simplicity of their
church-attire: their black dresses and lace veils make a picturesque
contrast with the gorgeous ceremonials of the high altar. But there
was something in this quiet toilet, so fresh and simple and girl-like,
that struck me as the one touch of grace that the American woman can
give to the best even of foreign taste. Not the dramatic abnegation
indicated by the black dress, but the quiet harmony of a life atune.

Mrs. Sloman was ready even before Bessie came down. She was a
great invalid, although her prim and rigid countenance forbore any
expression save of severity. She had no pathos about her, not a touch.
Whatever her bodily sufferings may have been--and Bessie dimly hinted
that they were severe to agony at times--they were resolutely shut
within her chamber door; and when she came out in the early morning,
her cold brown hair drawn smoothly over those impassive cheeks, she
looked like a lady abbess--as cold, as unyielding and as hard.

There was small sympathy between the aunt and niece, but a great deal
of painstaking duty on the one side, and on the other the habit of
affection which young girls have for the faces they have always known.

Mrs. Sloman had been at pains to tell me, when my frequent visits to
her cottage made it necessary that I should in some fashion explain to
her as to what I wanted there, that her niece, Bessie Stewart, was in
nowise dependent on her, not even for a home. "This cottage we rent
in common. It was her father's desire that her property should
not accumulate, and that she should have nothing at my hands but
companionship, and"--with a set and sickly smile--"advice when it was
called for. We are partners in our expenses, and the arrangement can
be broken up at any moment."

Was this all? No word of love or praise for the fair young thing that
had brightened all her household in these two years that Bessie had
been fatherless?

I believe there was love and appreciation, but it was not Mrs.
Sloman's method to be demonstrative or expansive. She approved of the
engagement, and in her grim way had opened an immediate battery of
household ledgers and ways and means. Some idea, too, of making me
feel easy about taking Bessie away from her, I think, inclined her to
this business-like manner. I tried to show her, by my own manner, that
I understood her without words, and I think she was very grateful to
be spared the expression of feeling. Poor soul! repression had become
such a necessity to her!

So we talked on gravely of the weather, and of the celebrated Doctor
McQ----, who was expected to give us an argumentative sermon that
morning, until _my_ argument came floating in at the door like a calm
little bit of thistledown, to which our previous conversation had been
as the thistle's self.

The plain little church was gay that morning. Carriage after carriage
drove up with much prancing and champing, and group after group of
city folk came rustling along the aisles. It was a bit of Fifth Avenue
let into Lenox calm. The World and the Flesh were there, at least.

In the hush of expectancy that preceded the minister's arrival there
was much waving of scented fans, while the well-bred city glances took
in everything without seeming to see. I felt that Bessie and I
were being mentally discussed and ticketed. And as it was our first
appearance at church since--well, _since_--perhaps there was just a
little consciousness of our relations that made Bessie seem to retire
absolutely within herself, and be no more a part of the silken crowd
than was the grave, plain man who rose up in the pulpit.

I hope the sermon was satisfactory. I am sure it was convincing to a
brown-handed farmer who sat beside us, and who could with difficulty
restrain his applauding comment. But I was lost in a dream of a near
heaven, and could not follow the spoken word. It was just a quiet
little opportunity to contemplate my darling, to tell over her
sweetness and her charm, and to say over and again, like a blundering
school-boy, "It's all mine! mine!"

The congregation might have been dismissed for aught I knew, and
left me sitting there with her beside me. But I was startled into the
proprieties as we stood up to sing the concluding hymn. I was standing
stock-still beside her, not listening to the words at all, but with
a pleasant sense of everything being very comfortable, and an
old-fashioned swell of harmony on the air, when suddenly the book
dropped from Bessie's hand and fell heavily to the floor. I should
have said she flung it down had it been on any other occasion, so
rapid and vehement was the action.

I stooped to pick it up, when with a decided gesture she stopped me.
I looked at her surprised. Her face was flushed, indignant, I thought,
and instantly my conscience was on the rack. What had I done, for my
lady was evidently angry?

Glancing down once more toward the book, I saw that she had set her
foot upon it, and indeed her whole attitude was one of excitement,
defiance. Why did she look so hot and scornful? I was disturbed and
anxious: what was there in the book or in me to anger her?

As quickly as possible I drew her away from the bustling crowd when
the service was concluded. Fortunately, there was a side-door through
which we could pass out into the quiet churchyard, and we vanished
through it, leaving Mrs. Sloman far behind. Over into the Lebanon
road was but a step, and the little porch was waiting with its cool
honeysuckle shade. But Bessie did not stop at the gate: she was in no
mood for home. And yet she would not answer my outpouring questions as
to whether she was ill, or what _was_ the matter.

"I'll tell you in a minute. Come, hurry!" she said, hastening along up
the hill through all the dust and heat.

At last we reached that rustic bit of ruin known popularly as the
"Shed." It was a hard bit of climbing, but I rejoiced that Bessie, so
flushed and excited at the start, grew calmer as we went; and when,
the summit reached, she sat down to rest on a broken board, her color
was natural and she seemed to breathe freely again.

"Are they all hypocrites, do you think, Charlie?" she said suddenly,
looking up into my face.

"They? who? Bessie, what have I done to make you angry?"

"You? Nothing, dear goose! I am angry at myself and at everybody else.
Did it flash upon you, Charlie, what we were singing?"

Then she quoted the lines, which I will not repeat here, but they
expressed, as the sole aspiration of the singer, a desire to pass
eternity in singing hymns of joy and praise--an impatience for the
time to come, a disregard of earth, a turning away from temporal
things, and again the desire for an eternity of sacred song.

"Suppose I confess to you," said I, astonished at her earnestness,
"that I did not at all know what I was singing?"

"That's just it! just what makes it so dreadful! _Nobody_ was thinking
about it--nobody! Nobody there wanted to give up earth and go straight
to heaven and sing. I looked round at all the people, with their new
bonnets, and the diamonds, and the footmen in the pews up stairs, and
I thought, What lies they are all saying! Nobody wants to go to heaven
at all until they are a hundred years old, and too deaf and blind and
tired out to do anything on earth. My heaven is here and now in my own
happiness, and so is yours, Charlie; and I felt so convicted of being
a story-teller that I couldn't hold the book in my hand."

"Well, then," said I, "shall we have one set of hymns for happy
people, and another for poor, tired-out folks like that little
dressmaker that leaned against the wall?" For Bessie herself had
called my attention to the pale little body who had come to the church
door at the same moment with us.

"No, not two sets. Do you suppose that she, either, wants to _sing_ on
for ever? And all those girls! Sorry enough they would be to have to
die, and leave their dancing and flirtations and the establishments
they hope to have! It wouldn't be much comfort to them to promise them
they should _sing_. Charlie, I want a hymn that shall give thanks that
I am alive, that I have _you_."

"Could the dressmaker sing that?"

"No;" and Bessie's eyes sought the shining blue sky with a wistful,
beseeching tenderness. "Oh, it's all wrong, Charlie dear. She ought to
tell us in a chant how tired and hopeless she is for this world; and
we ought to sing to her something that would cheer her, help her, even
in this world. Why must she wait for all her brightness till she dies?
So perfectly heartless to stand up along side of her and sing _that_!"

"Well," I said, "you needn't wait till next Sunday to bring her your
words of cheer."

In a minute my darling was crying on my shoulder. I could understand
the outburst, and was glad of it.

All athrill with new emotions, new purposes, an eternity of love,
she had come to church to be reminded that earth was naught, that the
trials and tempests here would come to an end some day, and after, to
the patiently victorious, would come the hymns of praise. _Earth_
was very full that morning to her and me; _earth_ was a place for
worshipful harmonies; and yet the strong contrast with the poor
patient sufferer who had passed into church with us was too much for
Bessie: she craved an expression that should comprehend alike her
sorrow and our abundant joy.

The tempest of tears passed by, and we had bright skies again. Poor
Mrs. Sloman's dinner waited long that day; and it was with a guilty
sense that she was waiting too that we went down the hill at a
quickened pace when the church clock, sounding up the hillside, came
like a chiding voice.

And a double sense of guiltiness was creeping over me. I must return
to New York to-morrow, and I had not told Bessie yet of the longer
journey I must make so soon. I put it by again and again in the short
flying hours of that afternoon; and it was not until dusk had fallen
in the little porch, as we sat there after tea, and I had watched the
light from Mrs. Sloman's chamber shine down upon the honeysuckles and
then go out, that I took my resolution.

"Bessie," I said, leaning over her and taking her face in both my
hands, "I have something to tell you."




CHAPTER III.


"I have something to tell you;" and without an instant's pause I went
on: "Mr. D---- has business in England which cannot be attended to
by letter. One of us must go, and they send me. I must sail in two
weeks."

It was a thunderbolt out of a clear sky, and Bessie gave a little gasp
of surprise: "So soon! Oh, Charlie, take me with you!" Realizing in
the next instant the purport of the suggestion, she flung away from my
hands and rushed into the parlor, where a dim, soft lamp was burning
on the table. She sat down on a low chair beside it and hid her face
on the table in her hands.

Like a flash of lightning all the possibilities of our marriage before
many days--arranging it with Mrs. Sloman, and satisfying my partners,
who would expect me to travel fast and work hard in the short time
they had allotted for the journey,--all came surging and throbbing
through my brain, while my first answer was not given in words.

When I had persuaded Bessie to look at me and to answer me in turn,
I hoped we should be able to talk about it with the calm judgment it
needed.

"To leave my wife--my wife!"--how I lingered on the word!--"in some
poky lodgings in London, while I am spending my day among dusty boxes
and files of deeds in a dark old office, isn't just my ideal of our
wedding-journey; but, Bessie, if _you_ wish it so--"

What was there in my tone that jarred her? I had meant to be
magnanimous, to think of her comfort alone, of the hurry and business
of such a journey--tried to shut myself out and think only of her in
the picture. But I failed, of course, and went on stupidly, answering
the quick look of question in her eyes: "If you prefer it--that is,
you know, I must think of you and not of myself."

Still the keen questioning glance. What new look was this in her eyes,
what dawning thought?

"No," she answered after a pause, slowly withdrawing her hand from
mine, "think of yourself."

I had expected that she would overwhelm me in her girlish way with
saucy protestations that she would be happy even in the dull London
lodgings, and that she would defy the law-files to keep me long from
her. This sudden change of manner chilled me with a nameless fear.

"If _I_ prefer it! If _I_ wish it! I see that I should be quite in
your way, an encumbrance. Don't talk about it any more."

She was very near crying, and I wish to heaven she had cried. But she
conquered herself resolutely, and held herself cold and musing before
me. I might take her hand, might kiss her unresisting cheek, but she
seemed frozen into sudden thoughtfulness that it was impossible to
meet or to dispel.

"Bessie, you know you are a little goose! What could I wish for in
life but to carry you off this minute to New York? Come, get your hat
and let's walk over to the parsonage now. We'll get Doctor Wilder to
marry us, and astonish your aunt in the morning."

"Nonsense!" said Bessie with a slight quiver of her pretty, pouting
mouth. "Do be rational, Charlie!"

I believe I was rational in my own fashion for a little while, but
when I ventured to say in a very unnecessary whisper, "Then you will
go abroad with me?" Bessie flushed to her temples and rose from the
sofa. She had a way, when she was very much in earnest, or very much
stirred with some passionate thought, of pacing the parlor with her
hands clasped tightly before her, and her arms tense and straining at
the clasping hands. With her head bent slightly forward, and her brown
hair hanging in one long tress over her shoulder, she went swiftly
up and down, while I lay back on the sofa and watched her. She would
speak it out presently, the thought that was hurting her. So I felt
secure and waited, following every movement with a lover's eye. But
I ought not to have waited. I should have drawn her to me and shared
that rapid, nervous walk--should have compelled her with sweet force
to render an account of that emotion. But I was so secure, so entirely
one with her in thought, that I could conceive of nothing but a
passing tempest at my blundering, stupid thoughtfulness for her.

Suddenly at the door she stopped, and with her hand upon it said,
"Good-night, Charlie;" and was out of the room in a twinkling.

I sprang from the sofa and to the foot of the stairs, but I saw only a
glimpse of her vanishing dress; and though I called after her in
low, beseeching tones, "Bessie! Bessie!" a door shut in the distant
corridor for only answer.

What to do? In that decorous mansion I could not follow her; and my
impulse to dash after her and knock at her door till she answered me,
I was forced to put aside after a moment's consideration.

I stood there in the quiet hall, the old clock ticking away a solemn
"I-told-you-so!" in the corner. I made one step toward the kitchen
to send a message by one of the maids, but recoiled at the suggestion
that this would publish a lovers' quarrel. So I retreated along the
hall, my footsteps making no noise on the India matting, and entered
the parlor again like a thief. I sat down by the table: "Bessie will
certainly come back: she will get over her little petulance, and know
I am here waiting."

All about the parlor were the traces of my darling. A soft little coil
of rose-colored Berlin wool, with its ivory needle sheathed among the
stitches, lay in a tiny basket. I lifted it up: the basket was made
of scented grass, and there was a delicious sweet and pure fragrance
about the knitting-work. I took possession of it and thrust it into my
breast-pocket. A magazine she had been reading, with the palest slip
of a paper-knife--a bit of delicate Swiss wood--in it, next came in my
way. I tried to settle down and read where she had left off, but the
words danced before my eyes, and a strange tune was repeating in my
ears, "Good-night, Charlie--good-night and good-bye!"

One mad impulse seized me to go out under her window and call to her,
asking her to come down. But Lenox nights were very still, and the
near neighbors on either side doubtless wide awake to all that was
going on around the Sloman cottage.

So I sat still like an idiot, and counted the clock-strokes, and
nervously calculated the possibility of her reappearance, until I
heard, at last, footsteps coming along the hall in rapid tread. I
darted up: "Oh, Bessie, I knew you would come back!" as through the
open door walked in--Mary, Mrs. Sloman's maid!

She started at seeing me: "Excuse me, sir. The parlor was so--I
thought there was no one here."

"What is it, Mary?" I asked with assumed indifference. "Do you want
Miss Bessie? She went up stairs a few moments ago."

"No, sir. I thought--that is--" glancing down in awkward confusion at
the key she held in her hand. She was retiring again softly when I saw
in the key the reason of her discomposure.

"Did you come in to lock up, Mary?" I asked with a laugh.

"Yes, sir. But it is of no consequence. I thought you had gone, sir."

"Time I was, I suppose. Well, Mary, you shall lock me out, and then
carry this note to Miss Bessie. It is so late that I will not wait for
her. Perhaps she is busy with Mrs. Sloman."

Something in Mary's face made me suspect that she knew Mrs. Sloman
to be sound asleep at this moment; but she said nothing, and waited
respectfully until I had scribbled a hasty note, rifling Bessie's
writing-desk for the envelope in which to put my card. Dear child!
there lay my photograph, the first thing I saw as I raised the dainty
lid.

"Bessie," I wrote, "I have waited until Mary has come in with her
keys, and I suppose I must go. My train starts at nine to-morrow
morning, but you will be ready--will you not?--at six to take a
morning walk with me. I will be here at that hour. You don't know how
disturbed and anxious I shall be till then."




CHAPTER IV.


Morning came--or rather the long night came to an end at last--and at
twenty minutes before six I opened the gate at the Sloman cottage.
It was so late in September that the morning was a little hazy and
uncertain. And yet the air was warm and soft--a perfect reflex, I
thought, of Bessie last night--an electric softness under a brooding
cloud.

The little house lay wrapped in slumber. I hesitated to pull the bell:
no, it would startle Mrs. Sloman. Bessie was coming: she would surely
not make me wait. Was not that her muslin curtain stirring? I would
wait in the porch--she would certainly come down soon.

So I waited, whistling softly to myself as I pushed the withered
leaves about with my stick and drew strange patterns among them. Half
an hour passed.

"I will give her a gentle reminder;" so I gathered a spray from the
honeysuckle, a late bloom among the fast-falling leaves, and aimed
it right at the muslin curtain. The folds parted and it fell into the
room, but instead of the answering face that I looked to see, all was
still again.

"It's very strange," thought I. "Bessie's pique is not apt to last so
long. She must indeed be angry."

And I went over each detail of our last night's talk, from her first
burst of "Take me with you!" to my boggling answers, my fears, so
stupidly expressed, that it would be anything but a picturesque
bridal-trip, and the necessity that there was for rapid traveling and
much musty, old research.

"What a fool I was not to take her then and there! She _is_ myself:
why shouldn't I, then, be selfish? When I do what of all things I want
to, why can't I take it for granted that she will be happy too?" And
a hot flush of shame went over me to think that I had been about to
propose to her, to my own darling girl, that we should be married as
soon as possible _after_ I returned from Europe.

Her love, clearer-sighted, had striven to forestall our separation:
why should we be parted all those weary weeks? why put the sea between
us?

I had accepted all these obstacles as a dreary necessity, never
thinking for the moment that conventional objections might be
overcome, aunts and guardians talked over, and the whole matter
arranged by two people determined on their own sweet will.

What a lumbering, masculine plan was mine! _After I returned from
Europe!_ I grew red and bit my lips with vexation. And now my dear
girl was shy and hurt. How should I win back again that sweet impulse
of confidence?

Presently the household began to stir. I heard unbarring and
unbolting, and craftily retreated to the gate, that I might seem to be
just coming in, to the servant who should open the door.

It was opened by a housemaid--not the Mary of the night before--who
stared a moment at seeing me, but on my asking if Miss Bessie was
ready yet to walk, promised smilingly to go and see. She returned in
a moment, saying that Miss Bessie begged that I would wait: she was
hurrying to come down.

The child! She has slept too soundly. I shall tell her how insensate
she must have been, how serenely unconscious when the flower came in
at the window.

The clock on the mantel struck seven and the half hour before Bessie
appeared. She was very pale, and her eyes looked away at my greeting.
Passively she suffered herself to be placed in a chair, and then, with
something of her own manner, she said hurriedly, "Don't think I got
your note, Charlie, last night, or I wouldn't, indeed I wouldn't, have
kept you waiting so long this morning."

"Didn't Mary bring it to you?" I asked, surprised.

"Yes: that is, she brought it up to my room, but, Charlie dear, I
wasn't there: I wasn't there all night. I did shut my door, though I
heard you calling, and after a little while I crept out into the entry
and looked over the stairs, hoping you were there still, and that I
could come back to you. But you were not there, and everything was so
still that I was sure you had gone--gone without a word. I listened
and listened, but I was too proud to go down into the parlor and see.
And yet I could not go back to my room, next Aunt Sloman's. I went
right up stairs to the blue room, and stayed there. Mary must have put
your note on my table when she came up stairs. I found it there this
morning when I went down."

"Poor darling! And what did you do all night in the blue room? I am
afraid," looking at her downcast eyes, "that you did not sleep--that
you were angry at me."

"At you? No, at myself," she said very low.

"Bessie, you know that my first and only thought was of the hurry and
worry this journey would cost you. You know that to have you with me
was something that I had scarce dared to dream."

"And therefore," with a flash of blue eyes, "for me to dare to dream
it was--" and again she hid her face.

"But, my precious, don't you know that it was for _you_ to suggest
what I wanted all the time, but thought it would be too much to ask?"
For I had discovered, of course, in my morning's work among the dead
leaves on the porch, that I had desired it from the moment I had
known of my journey--desired it without acknowledging it to myself or
presuming to plan upon it.

At this juncture breakfast was announced, and the folding doors thrown
open that led into the breakfast-parlor, disclosing Mrs. Sloman seated
by the silver urn, and a neat little table spread for three, so quick
had been the housemaid's intuitions.

"Good-morning, Charles: come get some breakfast. You will hardly be in
time for your train," suggested Aunt Sloman in a voice that had in it
all the gloom of the morning. Indeed, the clouds had gathered heavily
during the parlor scene, and some large drops were rattling against
the window.

I looked at my watch. After eight! Pshaw! I will let this train go,
and will telegraph to the office. I can take the night train, and thus
lose only a few hours. So I stayed.

What rare power had Bessie in the very depths of her trouble, and with
her face pale and eyes so heavy with her last night's vigil--what gift
that helped her to be gay? Apparently not with an effort, not forced,
she was as joyous and frank as her sunniest self. No exaggeration of
laughter or fun, but the brightness of her every-day manner, teasing
and sparkling round Aunt Sloman, coquetting very naturally with me.
It was a swift change from the gloomy atmosphere we had left behind in
the parlor, and I basked in it delighted, and feeling, poor fool! that
the storm was cleared away, and that the time for the singing of birds
was come.

I was the more deceived. I did not know all of Bessie yet. Her horror
of a scene, of any suspicion that there was discord between us, and
her rare self-control, that for the moment put aside all trouble,
folded it out of sight and took up the serene old life again for a
little space.

"Aunt Maria," said Bessie, pushing aside her chair, "won't you take
care of Mr. Munro for a little while? I have a letter to write that I
want him to take to New York."

Aunt Maria would be happy to entertain me, or rather to have me
entertain her. If I would read to her, now, would I be so kind, while
she washed up her breakfast cups?

How people can do two things at once I am sure I cannot understand;
and while the maid brought in the large wooden bowl, the steam of
whose household incense rose high in the air, I watched impatient for
the signal to begin. When the tea-cups were all collected, and Aunt
Sloman held one by the handle daintily over the "boiling flood,"
"Now," she said with a serene inclination of her head, "if you
please."

And off I started at a foot-pace through the magazine that had been
put into my hands. Whether it was anything about the "Skelligs," or
"Miss Sedgwick's Letters," or "Stanley-Livingstone," I have not the
remotest idea. I was fascinated by the gentle dip of each tea-cup,
and watched from the corner of my eye the process of polishing each
glittering spoon on a comfortable crash towel.

Then my thoughts darted off to Bessie. Was she indeed writing to her
old trustee? Judge Hubbard was a friend of my father's, and would
approve of me, I thought, if he did not agree at once to the hurried
marriage and ocean journey.

"What an unconscionable time it takes her! Don't you think so, Mrs.
Sloman?" I said at last, after I had gone through three several papers
on subjects unknown.

I suppose it was scarcely a courteous speech. But Mrs. Sloman smiled a
white-lipped smile of sympathy, and said, "Yes; I will go and send her
to you."

"Oh, don't hurry her," I said falsely, hoping, however, that she
would.

Did I say before that Bessie was tall? Though so slight that you
always wanted to speak of her with some endearing diminutive, she
looked taller than ever that morning; and as she stood before me,
coming up to the fireplace where I was standing, her eyes looked
nearly level into mine. I did not understand their veiled expression,
and before I had time to study it she dropped them and said hastily,
"Young man, I am pining for a walk."

"In the rain?"

"Pshaw! This is nothing, after all, but a Scotch mist. See, I am
dressed for it;" and she threw a tartan cloak over her shoulder--a
blue-and-green tartan that I had never seen before.

"The very thing for shipboard," I whispered as I looked at her
admiringly.

Her face was flushed enough now, but she made no answer save to stoop
down and pat the silly little terrier that had come trotting into the
room with her.

"Fidget shall go--yes, he shall go walking;" and Fidget made a gray
ball of himself in his joy at the permission.

Up the hill again we walked, with the little Skye terrier cantering in
advance or madly chasing the chickens across the road.

"Did you finish your letter satisfactorily?" I asked, for I was
fretting with impatience to know its contents.

"Yes. I will give it to you when you leave to-night."

"Shall we say next Saturday, Bessie?" said I, resolving to plunge at
once into the sea of our late argument.

"For what? For you to come again? Don't you always come on Saturday?"

"Yes, but this time I mean to carry you away."

A dead pause, which I improved by drawing her hand under my arm and
imprisoning her little gray glove with my other hand. As she did not
speak, I went on fatuously: "You don't need any preparation of gowns
and shawls; you can buy your _trousseau_ in London, if need be; and
we'll settle on the ship, coming over, how and where we are to live in
New York."

"You think, then, that I am all ready to be married?"

"I think that my darling is superior to the nonsense of other
girls--that she will be herself always, and doesn't need any
masquerade of wedding finery."

"You think, then," coldly and drawing her hand away, "that I am
different from other girls?" and the scarlet deepened on her cheek.
"You think I say and do things other girls would not?"

"My darling, what nonsense! You say and do things that other girls
_cannot_, nor could if they tried a thousand years."

"Thanks for the compliment! It has at least the merit of dubiousness.
Now, Charlie, if you mention Europe once in this walk I shall be
seriously offended. Do let us have a little peace and a quiet talk."

"Why, what on earth can we talk about until this is settled? I can't
go back to New York, and engage our passage, and go to see Judge
Hubbard--I suppose you were writing to him this morning?"

She did not answer, but seemed bent on making the dainty print of her
foot in the moist earth of the road, taking each step carefully, as
though it were the one important and engrossing thing in life.

"--Unless," I went on, "you tell me you will be ready to go back with
me this day week. You see, Bessie dear, I _must_ sail on the fixed
day. And if we talk it over now and settle it all, it will save no end
of writing to and fro."

"Good-morning!" said a gay voice behind us--Fanny Meyrick's voice. She
was just coming out of one of the small houses on the roadside. "Don't
you want some company? I've been to call on my washerwoman, and I'm so
glad I've met you. Such an English morning! Shall I walk with you?"




CHAPTER V


If I could have changed places with Fidget, I could scarce have
expressed my disapproval of the new-comer more vehemently than he.
Miss Meyrick seemed quite annoyed at the little dog's uncalled-for
snapping and barking, and shook her umbrella at him in vain. I was
obliged to take him in hand myself at last, and to stand in the road
and order him to "Go home!" while the two young ladies walked on,
apparently the best of friends.

When I rejoined them Fanny Meyrick was talking fast and unconnectedly,
as was her habit: "Yes, lodgings in London--the dearest old house in
Clarges street. Such a butler! He looks like a member of Parliament.
We stayed there once before for three days. I am just going to settle
into an English girl. Had enough of the Continent. Never do see
England now-a-days, nobody. All rush off. So papa is going to have a
comfortable time. Embassy? Oh, I know the general well."

I looked beseechingly at Bessie. Why wouldn't she say that we too
would be there in London lodgings? Perhaps, then, Fanny Meyrick might
take the hint and leave us soon.

But Bessie gave no sign, and I relapsed into a somewhat impatient
_résumé_ of my own affairs. Yes: married quietly on Saturday; leave
here on Monday morning train; take, yes, Wednesday's steamer. I could
arrange it with my law-partners to be absent a little longer
perhaps, that there might be some little rest and romance about the
wedding-journey.

Two or three times in the course of that morning--for she stayed with
us all the morning--Fanny Meyrick rallied me on my preoccupation and
silence: "He didn't use to be so, Bessie, years ago, I assure you.
It's very disagreeable, sir--not an improvement by any means."

Then--I think without any malice prepense, simply the unreasoning
rattle of a belle of two seasons--she plunged into a description of
a certain fête at Blankkill on the Hudson, the occasion of our first
acquaintance: "He was so young, Bessie, you can't imagine, and blushed
so beautifully that all the girls were jealous as could be. We were
very good friends--weren't we?--all that summer?"

"And are still, I hope," said I with my most sweeping bow. "What have
I done to forfeit Miss Meyrick's esteem?"

"Nothing, except that you used to find your way oftener to Meyrick
Place than you do now. Well, I won't scold you for that: I shall make
up for that on the other side."

What did she mean? She had no other meaning than that she would have
such compensation in English society that her American admirers would
not be missed. She did not know of my going abroad.

But Bessie darted a quick glance from her to me, and back again to
her, as though some dawning suspicion had come to her. "I hope,"
she said quietly, "that you may have a pleasant winter. It will be
delightful, won't it, Charlie?"

"Oh, very!" I answered, but half noting the under-meaning of her
words, my mind running on deck state-rooms and the like.

"Charlie," said Miss Meyrick suddenly, "do you remember what happened
two years ago to-day?"

"No, I think not."

Taking out a little book bound in Russia leather and tipped with gold,
she handed it to Bessie, who ran her eye down the page: it was open at
September 28th.

"Read it," said Fanny, settling herself composedly in her shawl, and
leaning back against a tree with half-shut eyes.

"'_September 28th_'" Bessie read, in clear tones which had a strange
constraint in them, "'Charlie Munro saved my life. I shall love
him for ever and ever. We were out in a boat, we two, on the
Hudson--moonlight--I was rowing. Dropt my oar into the water. Leaned
out after it and upset the boat. Charlie caught me and swam with me to
shore.'"

A dead silence as Bessie closed the book and held it in her hand.

"Oh," said I lightly, "that isn't worth chronicling--that! It was
no question of saving lives. The New York boat was coming up, if I
remember."

"Yes, it was in trying to steer away from it that I dropped my oar."

"So you see it would have picked us up, any how. There was nothing but
the ducking to remember."

"Such a figure, Bessie! Imagine us running along the road to the gate!
I could scarcely move for my dripping skirts; and we frightened papa
so when we stepped up on the piazza out of the moonlight!"

To stop this torrent of reminiscences, which, though of nothings, I
could see was bringing the red spot to Bessie's cheek, I put out my
hand for the book: "Let me write something down to-day;" and I hastily
scribbled: "_September_ 28. Charles Munro and Bessie Stewart, to sail
for Europe in ten days, ask of their friend Fanny Meyrick her warm
congratulations."

"Will that do?" I whispered as I handed the book to Bessie.

"Not at all," said Bessie scornfully and coldly, tearing out the leaf
as she spoke and crumpling it in her hand.--"Sorry to spoil your book,
Fanny dear, but the sentiment would have spoiled it more. Let us go
home."

As we passed the hotel on that dreary walk home, Fanny would have
left us, but Bessie clung to her and whispered something in a pleading
voice, begging her, evidently, to come home with us.

"If Mr. Munro will take word to papa," she said, indicating that
worthy, who sat on the upper piazza smoking his pipe.

"We will walk on," said Bessie coldly. "Come, Fanny dear."

Strange, thought I as I turned on my heel, this sudden fond intimacy!
Bessie is angry. Why did I never tell her of the ducking? And yet when
I remembered how Fanny had clung to me, how after we had reached
the shore I had been forced to remind her that it was no time for
sentimental gratitude when we both were shivering, I could see why
I had refrained from mentioning it to Bessie until our closer
confidences would allow of it.

No man, unless he be a downright coxcomb, will ever admit to one woman
that another woman has loved him. To his wife--perhaps. But how much
Fanny Meyrick cared for me I had never sought to know. After
the dismal ending of that moonlight boat-row--I had been already
disenchanted for some time before--I had scarce called at Meyrick
Place more than civility required. The young lady was so inclined to
exaggerate the circumstance, to hail me as her deliverer, that I felt
like the hero of a melodrama whenever we met. And after I had met
Bessie there were pleasanter things to think about--much pleasanter.

How exasperating girls can be when they try! I had had my _congé_ for
the walk home, I knew, and I was vexed enough to accept it and stay at
the hotel to dinner.

"I will not be played upon in this way. Bessie knows that I stayed
over the morning train just to be with her, and piled up for to-morrow
no end of work, as well as sarcastic remarks from D. & Co. If she
chooses to show off her affection for Fanny Meyrick in these few hours
that we have together--Fanny Meyrick whom she _hated_ yesterday--she
may enjoy her friendship undisturbed by me."

So I loitered with my cigar after dinner, and took a nap on the sofa
in my room. I was piqued, and did not care to conceal it. As the clock
struck five I bethought me it was time to betake me to the Sloman
cottage. A sound of wheels and a carriage turning brought me to the
window. The two young ladies were driving off in Fanny Meyrick's
phaeton, having evidently come to the hotel and waited while it was
being made ready.

"Pique for pique! Serves me right, I suppose."

Evening found me at the Sloman cottage, waiting with Mrs. Sloman by
the tea-table. Why do I always remember her, sitting monumental by the
silver urn?

"The girls are very late to-night."

"Yes." I was beginning to be uneasy. It was nearing train-time again.

"Such lovely moonlight, I suppose, has tempted them, or they may be
staying at Foxcroft to tea."

Indeed? I looked at my watch: I had ten minutes.

A sound of wheels: the phaeton drove up.

"Oh, Charlie," said Bessie as she sprang out, "you bad boy! you'll
miss your train again. Fanny here will drive you to the hotel. Jump
in, quick!"

And as the moonlight shone full on her face I looked inquiringly into
her eyes.

"The letter," I said, "for Judge Hubbard?" hoping that she would go to
the house for it, and then I could follow her for a word.

"Oh! I had almost forgotten. Here it is;" and she drew it from her
pocket and held it out to me in her gloved hand. I pressed the hand
to my lips, riding-glove and all, and sprang in beside Fanny, who was
with some difficulty making her horse stand still.

"Good-bye!" from the little figure at the gate. "Don't forget, Fanny,
to-morrow at ten;" and we were off.

By the wretched kerosene lamp of the car, going down, I read my
letter, for it was for me: "I will not go to Europe, and I forbid you
to mention it again. I shall never, never forget that _I_ proposed
it, and that you--_accepted_ it. Come up to Lenox once more before you
go."

This was written in ink, and was sealed. It was the morning's note.
But across the envelope these words were written in pencil: "Go to
Europe with Fanny Meyrick, and come up to Lenox, both of you, when you
return."

SARAH C. HALLOWELL.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]




INSIDE JAPAN.


A double pleasure rewards the pioneer who is the first to penetrate
into the midst of a new people. Besides the rare exhilaration felt in
treading soil virgin to alien feet, it acts like mental oxygen to look
upon and breathe in a unique civilization like that of Japan. To feel
that for ages millions of one's own race have lived and loved, enjoyed
and suffered and died, living the fullness of life, yet without the
religion, laws, customs, food, dress and culture which seem to us
to be the vitals of our social existence, is like walking through a
living Pompeii.

I confess to a chronic desire to explore the Island Empire in which I
dwell. Having already, in the central provinces of Japan, trodden many
a path never before touched by foreign foot, I yearned to explore
the twin provinces of Kadzusa and Awa, which form the peninsula lying
between the Gulf of Yeddo and the Pacific Ocean. A timely holiday and
a passport from the Japanese foreign office enabled me to start toward
the end of March, the time when all Japan is glorious with blossoming
plum trees, and the camellia trees in forests of bloom are marshaled
by thousands on the mountain-slopes.

I was glad to get away from Yeddo: I had a fit of anti-Caucasianism,
and wished to dwell a while amidst things purely Japanese. There
were too many foreigners in Yeddo. In that city of only eight hundred
thousand Japanese there are now full two hundred foreigners of all
nationalities; and of these, fifty or more are Americans. It was too
much like home and too little like Japan. Should I go to Yokohama,
the case was worse. Nearly twelve hundred of the sons of Japheth dwelt
there, and to reach that upstart European city one must travel on a
railway and see telegraph-poles all along the line. What _was_ the
use of living in Japan? Every young Japanese, too, in the capital is
brainful of "civilization," "progress," "reform," etc. I half suspect
a few cracks in the craniums belonging to some of the youths who wish
to introduce law, religion, steam, language, frock-coats and tight
boots by edict and ordinance. There was too much civilization. I
yearned for something more primitive, something more purely Japanese;
and tramping into the country I should find it. I should eat Japanese
food--profanely dubbed "chow-chow;" sleep in Japanese beds--on the
floor; talk Japanese--as musical as Italian; and live so much like an
old-time native that I should feel as one born on the soil. By that
time, returning to Yeddo as a Japanese of the period, I should of
course burn to adopt railways, telegraphs and balloons, codify the
laws, improve upon United States postage, coinage and dress-coats, and
finish off by annexing the English language after I had cut out all
irregularities and made all the crooked spelling straight.

So, resolving to be a heathen for a week at least, I left Yeddo one
afternoon, though it took several hours to do so: the big city is one
of distances more magnificent than those of Washington. I started in
a _jin-riki-sha_, which baby-carriage on adult wheels has already been
described, so as to be tolerably familiar to all American readers.
The "team" of this "man-power carriage" consists of two men, pulling
tandem--one in the shafts, the other running ahead with a rope over
his shoulder, and, until the recent passage of a law commanding
decency, attired only in his cuticle and a loin-cloth two inches wide.
You take three coolies when you wish to be stylish, while four are
not an unknown sensation in Yeddo. With these and fresh relays you can
travel sixty, or even eighty, miles a day; and I have known one man to
run thirty miles on the stretch.

Of all the modes of traveling in Japan, the jin-riki-sha is the most
pleasant. The _kago_ is excruciating. It is a flat basket, swung on
a pole and carried on the shoulders of two men. If your neck does
not break, your feet go hopelessly to sleep. Headaches seem to lodge
somewhere in the bamboos, to afflict every victim entrapped in it. To
ride in a kago is as pleasant as riding in a washtub or a coffin slung
on a pole. In some mountain-passes stout native porters carry you
pickapack. Crossing the shallow rivers, you may sit upon a platform
borne on men's shoulders as they wade. Saddle-horses are not to be
publicly hired, but pack-horses are pleasant means of locomotion.
These animals and their leaders deserve a whole chapter of description
for themselves. Fancy a brass-bound peaked pack-saddle rising a foot
above the animal's back, with a crupper-strap slanting down to clasp
the tail. The oft-bandied slur, that in Japan everything goes by
contraries, has a varnish of truth on it when we notice that the most
gorgeous piece of Japanese saddlery is the crupper, which, even on
a pack-horse, is painted crimson and gilded gloriously. The man who
leads the horse is an animal that by long contact and companionship
with the quadruped has grown to resemble him in disposition and
ejaculation: at least, the equine and the human seem to harmonize well
together. This man is called in Japanese "horse side." He is dressed
in straw sandals and the universally worn _kimono_, or blue cotton
wrapper-like dress, which is totally unfitted for work of any kind,
and which makes the slovens of Japan--a rather numerous class--always
look as if they had just got out of bed. At his waist is the usual
girdle, from which hangs the inevitable bamboo-and-brass pipe, the
bowl of which holds but a pellet of the mild fine-cut tobacco of the
country. The pipe-case is connected with a tobacco-pouch, in which
are also flint, steel and tinder. All these are suspended by a cord,
fastened to a wooden or ivory button, which is tucked up through the
belt. On his head, covering his shaven mid-scalp and right-angled
top-knot, is a blue cotton rag--not handkerchief, since such an
article in Japan is always made of paper. This head-gear is usually
fastened over the head by twisting the ends under the nose. With a
rope six feet long he leads his horse, which trusts so implicitly
to its master's guidance that we suspect the prevalence of blindness
among the Japanese pack-horses arises from sheer lack of the exercise
of their eyesight. These unkempt brutes are strangers to curry-combs
and brushes, though a semi-monthly scrubbing in hot water keeps them
tolerably clean. Their shoes are a curiosity: the hoofs are not shod
with iron, but with straw sandals, tied on thrice or oftener daily.
Grass is scarce in Japan, and oats are unknown. The nags live on
beans, barley, and the stalks, leaves and tops of succulent plants,
with only an occasional wisp of hay or grass.

In certain districts horses of one or the other sex, as the law
determines, are kept exclusively. Horses of the gentler sex in Japan
are usually led by women. During part of my journey to the place which
I am about to describe the leader of the mare I bestrode was a maiden
of some forty summers--a neat, spare, vinegar-faced sylph, who had
evidently long since left the matrimonial market, and had devoted
herself to making one horse happy for the rest of her pilgrimage. That
she was neither wife nor widow I discovered, not by asking questions,
but by the manner in which her hair was dressed. Japanese virgins and
wives have each distinct coiffures, by which, apart from the shaven
eyebrows and the teeth dyed black of the married women, the _musume_
or young maiden may be known. The widow who has resolved never to
marry again (always too old or ugly) is distinguished by her smooth
skull, every hair of which is shaved off. A lady of rank may also be
known by her coiffure; and many other distinctions are thus noted.

I waited three-quarters of an hour for my horse and its leader to
appear at the post-relay at which I sat down, and was stared at during
that time by about three hundred pairs of eyes. The populace of
each village turned out _en masse_ to see the foreigner, and they
diligently improved their time in examining him from crown to
boot-sole. Like everything else in the rural districts of Japan, my
guide was not in a hurry, and could not understand why a foreigner
should be. But finally arriving, she bowed very low and invited me
to climb up on the saddle, and off we started for a mountain ride of
eight miles.

A Japanese pack-horse, at his best, seems always swaying between two
opinions: his affection for the bestower of his beans and that for the
repose of the stable mutually attract him. On this occasion the little
woman gently led the horse over the rough places and down the steep
paths with the ejaculation, _Mite yo! Mite yo!_ but when the beast
stopped too long to meditate or to chew the bit, as if vainly trying
to pick its teeth, a lively jerk of the rope and a "You old beast!
come on," started the animal on its travels. Finally, when the
creature stopped to deliberate upon the propriety of going forward at
all, the vials of the wrath of the Japanese spinster exploded, and I
was tempted to believe her affections had been blighted. But when we
met any of her friends on the road, or passed the wayside shops or
farm-houses, the scolder of horses was the lady who wished all _Ohaio_
("Good-morning"), or remarked that the weather was very fine; and when
joked for carrying a foreigner, replied, "Yes, it is the first time I
have had the honor."

I need not trouble the reader with many details of geography. My
trip lasted eight days, during which I passed over two hundred miles,
two-thirds of the way on foot. I made the entire circuit of the lower
half of the peninsula, but shall dwell only on my visit to Kanozan
(Deer Mountain), famous for its lovely scenery, temple and Booddhist
monastery. From the top of the mountain there are visible innumerable
valleys, nearly the whole of the Gulf of Yeddo, and the white-throned
Foosiyama, called the highest mountain in Japan and the most beautiful
in the world. We spent the night previous in Kisaradzu, the capital
of the now united provinces, and a neat little city, just beginning to
introduce foreign civilization. Its streets were lighted with Yankee
lamps and Pennsylvania petroleum. Postal boxes after the Yankee custom
were erected and in use. Gingham umbrellas were replacing those made
of oiled paper. Barbers' poles, painted white with the spiral red
band, were set up, and within the shops Young Japan had his queue
cut off and his hair dressed in foreign style. Ignorant of the
significance of the symbolic relic of the old days, when the barber
was doctor and dentist also, and made his pole represent a bandage
wound around a broken limb, the Japanese barber has, in many cases,
added a green or blue band. Not being an adept in the use of that
refractory language which Young Japan would so like to flatten out and
plane down for vernacular use, the Japanese barber is not always happy
in executing the English legend for his sign-board. The following are
specimens:

                  "A HAIR-DRESSING SALOON FOR
                    JAPANES AND FOREIGNER."

                        "SHOP OF HAIR."

                   "HAIRS CUT IN THE ENGLISH
                      AND FRENCH FASHION."

Passing out of Kisaradzu, and winding up to Kanozan over the narrow
bridle-path, we pass the usual terraced rice-fields watered by
descending rivulets, and the usual thatched and mud-walled cottages,
which characterize every landscape in Japan, besides long rows of
tall _tsubaki_ (camellia) trees, forty feet high and laden with their
crimson and white splendors. Along the road are the little wayside
shrines and sacred portals of red wood which tell where the worshipers
of the Shintoo faith adore their gods and offer their prayers without
image, idol or picture. The far more numerous images and shrines
of Booddha the sage, Amida the queen of heaven, and hundred-armed
Kuannon, tell of the popular faith of the masses of Japan in the
gentle doctrines of the Indian sage. The student of comparative
religions is interested in noticing how a code of morals founded
upon atheistic humanitarianism, in its origin utterly destitute
of theology, has developed into a colossal system of demonology,
dogmatics, eschatology, myths and legends, with a pantheon more
populous than that of old Rome. Many of the images by the wayside are
headless, cloven by frost, overturned by earthquakes, and so pitted
by time as to resemble petrified smallpox patients rather than
divinities. Nature neither respects dogma nor worships the gods made
by men, and the moss and the lichens have muffled up the idols and
eaten the substance of the sacred stone. Here Booddha wears a robe
of choicest green, and there the little saxafrage waves its white
blossoms from the shoulder of Amida, rending asunder her stone body.
Even the little stone columns which contain a guiding hand pointing
out the road to Kanozan are dedicated to Great Shaka (Booddha).
Passing one of the larger temples, we meet a company of pilgrims.
Actual sight and reasoning from experience in other lands agree in
telling me that they are women, and most of them old women. They
return my salute, politely striving to conceal their wonder at the
first _to-jin_ they have ever looked upon.

I would wager that these people, like most of the rustics in Japan,
have always believed the foreigners from Europe and America to be
certainly ruffians, and most probably beasts. Many of them,
without having heard; of Darwin or Monboddo, believe all the "hairy
foreigners" to be descendants of dogs. Their first meeting with a
foreigner sweeps away the cobwebs of prejudice, and they are ashamed
of their former ignorance. In extorting from Japanese friends their
first ideas about foreigners, I have been forcibly reminded of some
popular ideas concerning the people of China and Japan which are still
entertained at home, especially by the queens of the kitchen and the
lords of the hod.

After the fashion in Japan, I inquire of the pilgrims whence they came
and whither they are going. Leaning upon their staves and unslinging
their huge round, conical hats, they give me to know that they have
come on foot from Muja, nearly one hundred and fifty miles distant,
and that they will finish their pilgrimage at Kominato--where the
great founder of the Nichiren sect (one of the last developments of
Booddhism in Japan) was born--twenty-seven miles beyond the point
at which we met. I inform them that I have come over seven thousand
miles, and will also visit Nichiren's birthplace. "_Sayo de gozarimos!
Naru hodo?_" ("Indeed, is it possible?")

I have reached their hearts through the gates of surprise. A foreigner
visiting Nichiren's birthplace! And coming seven thousand miles too!
The old ladies become loquacious. They pour out their questions
by dozens. Do you have Booddhist temples in America? Of course the
Nichiren sect flourishes there? When I politely answer No to both
questions, a look of disappointed surprise and pity steals over both
the ruddy and the wrinkled faces. "Then he is a heathen!" says the
expression on their faces. How strange that no Booddhist temples exist
in the foreigner's country! Ah, perhaps, then, the Shintoo religion is
the religion of the foreigner's country? "No? _Naru hodo!_ Then what
_do_ you believe in?"

It did not take long to answer that question. There is no country in
the world in which Christianity has been more publicly and universally
advertised. For three centuries, in every city, village and hamlet and
on every highway, the names of Christianity and its Founder have been
proclaimed on the edict-boards and in the public law-books of the
empire as belonging to a corrupt and hateful doctrine; which should
a man believe, he would be punished on earth by fines, imprisonment,
perhaps death, and in _jigoku_ (hell) by torments eternal. "Whosoever
believeth in Christ shall be damned--whosoever believeth not shall be
saved," was the formula taught by the priests for centuries. I pointed
to the board on which hung the edicts prohibiting Christianity, and
told them I believed in that doctrine, and that Christ was the One
adored and loved by us. A volley of _naru hodos_, spoken with bated
breath, greeted this announcement, and I could only understand the
whispered "Why, that is the sect whose followers will go to hell!"
The old ladies could not walk fast, and we soon parted, after many
a strange question concerning morals, customs and the details of
civilization in the land of the foreigner. Be it said, in passing,
that the present liberal and enlightened government of Japan, in spite
of priestly intolerance and the bigotry of ignorance, resisting even
to blood, has decided upon the recission of the slanderous falsehoods
against the faith of Christendom; and Japan, though an Asiatic nation,
will soon grant toleration to all creeds.

The path wound up through higher valleys, revealing bolder scenery.
Afar off, in the sheen of glorified distance, the water slanted to the
sky. The white bosoms of the square-sailed junks heaved with breezy
pulses, the mountains were thrones of stainless blue, the floods
of sunny splendor and the intense fullness of light, for which the
cloudless sky of Japan is remarkable, told the reason for the naming
of Niphon, of which "Japan" is but the foreigner's corruption,
"Great Land of the Fountain of Light." Anon we entered the groves
of mountain-pines anchored in the rocks, and with girths upon which
succeeding centuries had clasped their zones. They seemed like
Nature's senators in council as they whispered together and murmured
in the breeze that reached us laden with music and freighted with
resinous aroma. Reaching a hamlet called Mute ("six hands"), I sit
outside an inn on one of the benches which are ever ready for the
traveler, and shaded overhead by a screen of boughs. A young girl
brings me water, the ever-ready cup of tea, and fire for the pipe
which I am supposed to smoke. A short rest, another hour's climb and
walk, and we are in the village of Kanozan, which is scarcely more
than a street of hotels. Situated on the ridge of the mountain, it
rises like an island in a sea of pines.

In imagining a Japanese hotel, good reader, please dismiss all
architectural ideas derived from the Continental or the Fifth Avenue.
Our hotels in Japan, outwardly at least, are wooden structures, two
stories high, often but one. Their roofs are usually thatched, though
the city caravansaries are tiled. They are entirely open on the front
_ground_ floor, and about six feet from the sill or threshold rises a
platform about a foot and a half high, upon which the proprietor may
be seen seated on his heels behind a tiny railing ten inches high,
busy with his account-books. If it is winter he is engaged in the
absorbing occupation of all Japanese tradesmen at that time of
year--warming his hands over a charcoal fire in a low brazier. The
kitchen is usually just next to this front room, often separated
from the street only by a latticed partition. In evolving a Japanese
kitchen out of his or her imagination, the reader must cast away the
rising conception of Bridget's realm. Blissful, indeed, is the thought
as I enter the Japanese hotel that neither the typical servant-girl
nor the American hotel-clerk is to be found here. The landlord comes
to meet me, and, falling on his hands and knees, bows his head to the
floor. One or two of the pretty girls out of the bevy usually seen
in Japanese hotels comes to assist me and take my traps. Welcomes,
invitations and plenty of fun greet me as I sit down to take off my
shoes, as all good Japanese do, and as those filthy foreigners don't
who tramp on the clean mats with muddy boots. I stand up unshod, and
am led by the laughing girls along the smooth corridors, across an
arched bridge which spans an open space in which is a rookery, garden,
and pond stocked with goldfish, turtles and marine plants. The room
which my fair guides choose for me is at the rear end of the house,
overlooking the grand scenery for which Kanozan is justly famous all
over the empire. Ninety-nine valleys are said to be visible from
the mountain-top on which the hotel is situated, and I suspect that
multiplication by ten would scarcely be an exaggeration. A world of
blue water and pines, and the detailed loveliness of the rolling
land, form a picture which I lack power to paint with words. The water
seemed the type of repose, the earth of motion.

Enjoying to the full that rapture of first vision which one never
feels twice, I turned and entered the room, which made up in neatness
what it lacked in luxury. Furniture in a Japanese house there is
none. Like all the others, the floor of my room was covered with soft
matting two inches thick, made into sections six feet long and three
feet wide, and bound with a black border. The dimensions of a room may
always be expressed by the number of mats. The inside of the mats is
of rice straw, the outside is of the finest and smoothest matting.
There are no chairs, stools, sofas or anything to sit down upon,
though, having long since forgotten the fact, we find a ready seat on
the floor. On one side of the room, occupying one-half of its space,
is the _tokonoma_, a little platform anciently used for the bed, two
feet wide and five or six inches high. In one corner is a large vase
containing four or five boughs broken from a plum tree crowded with
blossoms, and a large bunch of white, crimson and dappled camellias,
both single and double. In the centre is the sword-rack, found in
every samurai's house, yet now obsolete, since Japan's chivalry have
laid aside their two swords. On the other half of the room, occupying
the same side as the tokonoma, is a series of peculiar shelves like
those of an open Japanese cabinet, though larger; and at the top of
these is a little closet closed by sliding doors. The other three
sides of the room are of sliding partitions six feet high, made of
fine white wood, latticed in small squares and covered with paper,
through which mellow, softened light fills the room. On the plastered
wall above the latticed sliding doors hangs a framed tablet on which
are written Chinese characters, which, having the Japanese letters
at the side, tell in terse and poetical phrase that "This room is the
chamber of peaceful meditation, into which the moonlight streams."
Some of the lattice and other work is handsomely carved and wrought,
and a paper screen along the wall which separates this room from the
next is covered with verses of Japanese poetry. Were it cold weather,
a brazier, with some live coals in it, would be brought for us to
toast our hands and feet and to shiver over, as stoves and hard coal
are not Japanese institutions. First of all, however, at present, one
of the _musumes_ brings me a _tobacco-bon_ or tray, in which is fire
to light my pipe, the Japanese scarcely having a conception of a man
who does not smoke.

My description of a Japanese room will answer, in the main, for any
in Japan _as it was_--from the artisan's to the emperor's. Even
the palaces of the mikado in Kioto never contained tables, chairs,
bedsteads or any such inconvenient and space-robbing thing. The tables
upon which they ate, played chess or wrote were six inches or a foot
high. A Japanese of the old style thinks the cumbrous furniture in our
Western dwellings impertinent and unnecessary. In the eye of aesthetic
Japanese a room crowded with luxurious upholstery is a specimen of
barbaric pomp, delighting the savage and unrefined eye of the hairy
foreigners, but shocking to the purged vision and the refined taste
of one born in great Niphon. No such tradesman as an upholsterer or
furniture-dealer exists in Japan. The country is a paradise for young
betrothed couples who would wed with light purses. One sees love in a
cottage on a national scale here. That terrible lion of expense, the
furnishing of a house, that stands ever in the way of so many loving
pairs desirous of marriage and a home of their own, is a bugbear not
known in Japan. A chest of drawers for clothing, a few mats, two or
three quilts for a bed on the floor, some simple kitchen utensils,
and the house is furnished. Why should we litter these neatly matted
rooms, why cover with paint and gilding virgin wood of faultless
grain, or mar the sweet simplicity and airy roominess of our
(Japanese) chambers by loading them with all kinds of unnecessary
luxuries?

These reflections are broken in upon by Miss Cherry-blossom, one of
the maids, who glides in, kneels upon the floor, and sets down a tiny
round tray with a baby tea-pot and a cup the size of an egg. Pouring
out some tea, enough to half fill one of these porcelain thimbles, she
sets it in the socket of another yet tinier tray, and bowing her head
coquettishly, begs me to drink. Having long since learned to quaff
Japan's fragrant beverage guiltless of milk or sugar, I drain the cup.
Miss Cherry-blossom, sitting upright upon her heels, folds her dress
neatly under her knees, gives her loose robe a twitch, revealing to
advantage her white-powdered neck, the prized point of beauty in a
Japanese maiden, and then asks the usual questions as to whence
I came, whither I am going, and to what country I belong. These,
according to the Japanese code of etiquette, are all polite questions;
and in return, violating no dictum which the purists of Kioto or Yeddo
have laid down, I inquire her age ("Your honorable years, how many?").
The answer, "_Ju-hachi_," makes known that she is eighteen years of
age. Chatting further, I learn what things there are to be seen in the
neighborhood, whether foreigners have been there before, the distance
to the next village, the history of the old temple near by, etc. All
this is told with many a laugh and a little pantomime--she naturally
committing the mistake of speaking louder and faster to the foreigner
who cannot fully understand her dialect or allusions--when a new
character appears upon the scene.

A very jolly, matronly-looking woman, evidently the landlady, pulls
aside one of the sliding paper doors, and bowing low on her hands and
knees, smiles cavernously with her jet-black teeth, which, like all
correct and cleanly women in Japan, she dyes on alternate days. She
asks concerning dinner, and whether it is the honorable wish of the
visitor to eat Japanese food. The answer being affirmative, both
matron and maiden disappear to prepare the meal, evidently thinking it
a fine joke. No such thing as a common dining-room exists in Japanese
hotels. Caste has hitherto been too strictly observed to allow of such
an idea. Every guest eats in his own room, sitting on his calves and
heels. The preparations are simple, though of course I speak now of
every-day life.

Miss Peach-blossom appears, bearing in her hand a table four inches
high, one foot square, and handsomely lacquered red and black. Behind
her comes a young girl carrying a rice-box and plate of fish. Most
gracefully she sets it down with the apology, "I have kept you long
waiting," and the invitation, "Please take up."

On the table are four covered bowls, two very small dishes containing
pickles and soy, and a little paper bag in which is a pair of
chopsticks. The place of each article is foreordained by gastronomic
etiquette, and rigidly observed. In the first bowl is soup, in the
second a boiled mixture consisting of leeks, mushrooms, lotus-root
and a kind of sea-weed. In a third are boiled buckwheat cakes or
dumplings, and _tofu_ or bean-curd. In the porcelain cup is rice. In
an oblong dish, brought in during the meal, is a broiled fish in soy.
Lifting off the covers and adjusting my chopsticks deftly, I begin.
The bowl of rice is first attacked, and quickly finished. The
attendant damsel proffers her lacquered waiter, and uncovering the
steaming tub of rice paddles out another cupful. It is etiquette to
dispose of unlimited cups of rice and soup, but a deadly breach of
good manners to ask to have the other two bowls replenished. Of course
at the hotels whatever the larder affords can be ordered. Boiled eggs,
cracked and peeled before you by the tapering fingers of the damsels,
are considered choice articles of food. Raw fish, thinly sliced and
eaten with radish, sauce, ginger sprouts, etc., is highly enjoyed by
the Japanese, who are surprised to find the dish disliked by their
foreign guests. A member of one of the embassies sent to Europe
confessed that amid the luxuries of continental tables, he longed for
the raw fish and grated radish of his native land. Some articles of
our own diet, especially cheese and butter, are as heartily detested
by the Japanese as their raw fish is by us. The popular idea at home,
that the Japanese live chiefly on mice and crawfish, and that the
foreigners are in chronic danger of starvation, is matched by that of
some Japanese, who, finding that the "hairy foreigners" do not eat
the food of human beings--_i.e._ Japanese--wonder what they do eat. A
member of the present embassy in Europe, when first leaving his native
land, was thus addressed by his anxious mother: "Now, Yazirobe, you
are going to those strange countries, where I am afraid you will get
very little to eat: do take some rice with you." I confess that on
first landing in Japan I could not relish Japanese diet and cookery.
Barring eggs and rice, everything tasted like starch or sawdust. The
flavors seemed raw and earthy, or suggested dishcloths not too well
scalded. I suspect that a good deal of Philadelphia and Caucasian
pride lined the alimentary canal of the writer. Now, after a ten-mile
tramp, a Japanese meal tastes very much as it does to one native and
to the diet born.

Besides the young damsel who presides, there is another, less neatly
dressed. Her apron is suggestive of the kitchen, and altogether she
seems a Cinderella by the fireplace. This damsel is evidently a supe
or scullion. She is not so self-possessed as her superior companion,
and while observing the foreigner with a mild stare, unskillfully
concealing her mirth, she finally explodes when he makes a _faux pas_
with the chopsticks and drops a bit of fish on the clean matting.
Thereupon she is dispatched to the kitchen for a floor-cloth, and
severely lectured for laughing aloud, and is told to stay among the
pots and pans till she learns better manners.

Dinner over, a siesta on the soft mats is next in order. These mats
seem made for sleep and indolence. No booted foot ever defiles them.
Every one leaves his clogs on the ground outside, and glides about in
his mitten-like socks, which have each a special compartment for the
great toe. My waiting damsel having gone out, and there being no such
things as bells, I do as the natives and clap my hands. A far-off
answer of _Hei--i--i_ is returned, and soon the shuffling of feet
is heard again. The housewife appears with the usual low bow, and,
smiling so as to again display what resembles a mouthful of coal, she
listens to the request for a pillow. Opening the little closet before
spoken of, she produces the desired article. It is not a ticking bag
of baked feathers enclosed in a dainty, spotless case of white linen,
but a little upright piece of wood, six inches high and long, and one
wide, rounded at the bottom like the rockers of a cradle. On the
top, lying in a groove, is a tiny rounded bag of calico filled with
rice-chaff, about the size of a sausage. The pillow-case is a piece of
white paper wrapped around the top, and renewed in good hotels daily
for each guest. One can rest about four or six inches of the side of
his _os occipitis_ on a Japanese pillow, and if he wishes may rock
himself to sleep, though the words suggest more than the facts
warrant. By sleeping on civilized feathers one gets out of training,
and the Japanese pillows feel very hard and very much in one place.
The dreams which one has on these pillows are characteristic. In my
first some imps were boring gimlet-holes in the side of my skull,
until they had honeycombed it and removed so much brain that I felt
too light-headed to preserve my equilibrium. On the present occasion,
after falling asleep, I thought that the pillow on which I lay pressed
its shape into my head, and the skull, to be repaired, was being
trepanned. My head actually tumbling off the pillow was the cause of
the fancied operation being suddenly arrested. A short experience in
traveling among the Japanese has satisfied me that they are one of
the most polite, good-natured and happy nations in the world. By
introducing foreign civilization into their beautiful land they may
become richer: they need not expect to be happier.

W.E. GRIFFIS.




JASON'S QUEST.


I.

This is a story of love for love, and how it came to naught. In it
there shall be no marrying from mercenary motives; the manoeuvering
mother-in-law is suppressed; Nature takes her course; and in the
climax I strive to prove how sad a thing it is that men are modest and
women weak.

Still, I do not lose faith in humanity, but hope for better things in
the broad, bright future. I would respectfully call attention to
the moral of this tale, and, as for the heroes and heroines of the
hereafter, I cheerfully leave them to regulate their affairs upon a
different basis; which basis, I devoutly believe, will be one of the
inevitable results of time.

But, lo! the heroine approaches and the story begins!

       *       *       *       *       *

Life with some of us is but the grouping of a few brilliant or sombre
tableaux, which are like the famous lines in an epic that immortalize
the whole. Maud's life was such a one, and her years had been rather
unpicturesque until now, when the shadows began to deepen and the
lights to grow more intense. In fact, she seemed to be approaching
some sort of a climax, and she began to grow nervous about it, being
just woman enough to dwell somewhat anxiously upon her anticipated
_début_, and to hope for at least a decent appearance in her
extremity.

The good-hearted, commonplace people of a pleasant country down the
coast--which I will call Dreamland for convenience' sake--thought
of Maud only as a gentle and humane little lady, with a comfortable
income and a character above reproach. So Maud abode in peace with her
maids at the seaside cottage, spending the still hours of Dreamland
between her rose-garden on the sunny slope to the southward and the
conservatory of lily-like nuns on the hill toward the sea.

Maud was unhappy in a world which had treated her very kindly indeed,
and it was simply because she had a dove's heart, that was always
fluttering in a strange place, and the face of a nun, that was for
ever getting looked at by all sorts of people, much as it disliked
that kind of treatment from the best of them.

The only reason why Maud preferred such a dull place as Dreamland to
the splendid metropolis up the coast was that she might have a quiet
time of it, and not be annoyed by the impudent metropolitans. In fact,
she was tired of her lovers--all save one, a fine young fellow named
Jason, but better known in Dreamland as John. I have mentioned, I
believe, that Maud was in very good circumstances: I am sorry to
add that Jason wasn't. He was rich only in his untried youth and the
promises of a glorious manhood.

Jason loved Maud, and she knew it as well as she ever knew anything in
her life--she knew it without his having told her. Had she not divined
it by the infallible intuition of the heart, she might have lived
believing herself unloved, for Jason hadn't the remotest idea of
mentioning the fact. He could barely live comfortably by himself,
frugal as he was; and he would not go to her empty-handed, though
Heaven knows she had enough for two, and was dying to share it with
him. He went his way, and the way was tedious enough in those days.
Like a mirage, happiness glimmered before him, but his upright and
patient steps brought him no nearer to its alluring vista.

Youth is impatient and sanguine, and Jason, in his impetuous and
hopeful youth, besought the oracle, whose prophetic utterances seemed
to imply that his future and his fortune lay in some distant land,
and that it would be wise for him to seek it at once. Jason, like his
illustrious predecessor, resolved to go over the sea in search of the
golden fleece. It was the most adventurous thing he ever did, and Maud
thought it a hopeless and a willful act; yet she could do nothing
but hold her peace, while her poor heart was as near to breaking
as possible--much nearer to breaking than it is usually safe for a
maiden's heart to be.

So Jason gathered his mates--a reckless lot they were, too--and,
having laden his barque and swung into the stream, his men said their
final adieux, receiving quantities of pincushions and bookmarks, so
indispensable to Argonauts, as testimonials of eternal fidelity from
the maids of Dreamland.

Jason strode to the cottage and kissed the hand of Maud as if it
were the hand of a princess; after which, with much embarrassment, he
plucked a rose from her garden, while a pang pierced his heart till it
ached again, and a thorn probed his finger till a drop of blood
fell upon a myrtle leaf; which leaf Maud coveted, and keeps to this
day--hugged to her in her grave-clothes.

It is of course best that this life should not be perfect, for the
life to come might suffer by comparison; yet it is one of the cruelest
decrees of Nature--if Nature has really decreed what seems so wholly
against her--that a woman's heart must bide its time and be silent in
the presence of its natural mate while every attribute of her being
implores his recognition; and that the truest men are too honorable
or too proud to yield themselves, having no offering but their honest
love to lay at the feet of their mistresses. If it were not so, the
princess would not have mourned in her garden for her flown mate, and
there would have been much happiness on short notice.

Driven forth by the propitious winds, the barque fled from the shore,
while Maud, seated among her roses, with weeping and wringing of
hands, poured out upon the winds the burden of her love.

Why didn't Jason catch a syllable of that fervent prayer, reef, and
come home to her? Then I need not have written this history, and all
would have been well in Dreamland. But he didn't. He heard nothing
but the sibilant waters as they rushed under his keel: he thought of
nothing but the rose that was withering in the secret locker of his
cabin, and of the wound in his heart that was gaping and as fresh as
ever. So the night-winds hurried him onward, and the darkness absorbed
the outlines of the dear Dreamland coast.

Maud watched the barque while it lessened and lessened in the
distance, and the clouds blew over her, and it grew chilly and damp in
the rose-garden--as chilly and damp as though it were not the abode of
a princess who was beloved of the noblest of men. She watched the sail
till it faded suddenly beyond the headland, and between it and her
loomed the dark towers of the convent. Out on that troubled sea,
seeking the golden fleece in some remote kingdom, tossed on the
treacherous waves for her sake, in her white and radiant dreams she
beheld Jason. Yet ever between him and her, hiding the lessening
barque from the slope of the rose-garden, loomed the dark towers of
the convent.




II.


Jason and his fellows coursed the seas, scanning with eager eyes
the cloudy belt of the horizon, hopefully seeking some signs of the
Fortunate Islands, of whose indescribable beauty and untold wealth
they had heard many surmises. Day after day they pressed on between
the same blank sky and the same blank sea, but there was no token to
gladden the eyes of the watchers. Jason grew impatient at last: he had
called upon nearly all the saints in the calendar, and was growing to
be a very poor sort of a Catholic, inasmuch as he doubted the efficacy
of his prayers and the ability of saints to answer them. He didn't
realize that there might be good reasons for their not being answered
under the existing circumstances; which is a matter worthy of the
consideration of all of us.

The fact was, the Fortunate Islands were not one-half so wonderful as
had been represented; and the saints knew it well enough. Had Jason
invested there, as he purposed doing at the time of his embarkment,
he might have sunk all that he possessed--which was little enough
to float, as one would think--and then Maud might have tended her
rose-garden and carried fruit-offerings to the sweet-faced nuns
till she was gray and limping, for all Jason's fine notions of
independence--namely, a good income from the rise of stocks in the
Fortunate Islands, and two souls and two hearts doing the same sort of
thing at the same time, with complete and unqualified success, in that
sweet rose-garden on the sunny slope to the southward.

That was the way life went with Captain Jason of the Argonauts, called
John, for short, in Dreamland, while the crew growled a good deal at
their ill-luck, and began to fear that if things went on in that way
much longer they would have more fasts than Fridays in the week. Those
were trying times for all of them, and when land was made at last, and
it proved to be a temptation and a snare, Jason ordered a special fast
and a mass for the salvation of the souls in imminent peril. Out in
the world at last, thousands of miles from the unsophisticated
people of Dreamland, Jason beheld the dread Symplegades rocking their
enormous bulks upon the waves, and liable at any moment to swing
together with a terrific and deadly crash. Probably they were whales
at play: it may have been two currents of the sea rushing into
each other's arms: at all events, it was something deluding, though
temporary, and perhaps the selfsame difficulty experienced by the
original J. when he went after the original fleece.

My hero was young and unschooled in the world's wickedness, but he
knew that where two opposing elements come together with much force,
whatever happens to lie between them must suffer. What should be done
was a question of no little importance to the Argonauts. Most of
them were in favor of running the risk of a collision and letting the
vessel drive straight through. Jason thought this a judgment worthy
of young men whose lady-loves give expression to their most sacred
sentiments by gifts of pincushions and bookmarks. But he had something
to consider more than they--yea, more than any other living man--in
exemplification of the pleasing fallacy that besets all lovers in all
ages. Blessed be God that it is so!

The original Jason in the fable let loose a dove upon the waters, and
the dove lost only a tail-feather or two when the clashing islands
clashed their worst, and in the moment of the rebound the Argo swept
through in safety. The modern J. thought of this in his predicament,
and having turned it in his mind, he concluded that whereas the
pioneer Argonaut did not meet his princess till after his encounter
with the elements, he was not worthy of consideration; for had he
known her and loved her as some one knew and loved some one else
at that moment, most likely he would not have valued his life so
slightly. He clewed up his canvas like a wise mariner, and lay to
while the Symplegades butted one another with their foreheads of
adamant, and the sea was white with terror all about them. Jason
was no coward: he would have braved the passage had he alone been
concerned in the result; but for Maud in her rose-garden and for the
future, dear to him as his hope of heaven, he paused and trembled.

It is a pity there should be so little pausing and trembling among
the clashing islands when life hangs in the balance and the odds are
against it. But there always has been and always will be this little,
because we believe that nothing but experience is capable of teaching
us, and experience invariably teaches it all wrong end to, so that we
begin our lesson with a disaster and conclude it with a slow recovery.

During Jason's hour of deliberation his guardian angel, who was the
only one having his interests really at heart, and who loved him
unselfishly,--this angel advised him in the similitude of a dream to
"luff a little and go round the obstacles." Jason luffed, and passed
on with colors flying; which was doubtless much better than trying to
squeeze through the floating islands in the midst of an exceedingly
disagreeable sea.

Then came the land beyond, the long-sought kingdom, full of arts and
wiles. Jason was beset with ten thousand temptations, and was more
than once upon the point of falling into a snare, when, however, he
seemed to behold the apparition of his withered rose, which bloomed
and blushed again at such times, and gave out a faint fragrance, so
like a breath from that Eden on the sunny slope that he paused and
grew strong, and was saved.

His troubles were not yet over. There was the bargaining for the
golden fleece, and the tempting offer of the dragons' teeth which
he was to sow. They were the lusts of the body, that, once planted,
spring up an armed force of bloody and persistent accusers. But
that precious rose! How it blossomed over and over for his especial
benefit, a perpetual warning and an unfailing talisman--a very
profitable sort of blossom to wear in one's button-hole in these
times! But such blossoms are scarce indeed.

In due course of time that potent charm got him the golden fleece in a
very natural and business-like way, and, rejoicing in his possessions,
Jason returned to his vessel and trimmed his sails for home.

Merry the hearts that sailed with him, and fresh the winds that wafted
them onward, while, as is usual at sea, nothing occurred during the
voyage worth mentioning an hour after its occurrence. Jason in his new
joy had almost forgotten that withered token. In deep remorse at his
thoughtlessness, he sought his treasure, and, horror of horrors! every
leaf had fallen from the stem, the blossom was annihilated for ever.
He dwelt upon this episode morbidly, as upon a presentiment: he
pictured in his mind the hill-slope cottage deserted, the rose-garden
wasted and full of tares, and the bleak wind blowing whither it listed
through those avenues of beauty, for desolation possessed them all. He
groaned in spirit and wrestled with his new and invisible adversary,
beseeching the Most Merciful, from the bitterness of his suspense, a
speedy deliverance or a happy death.




III.


There were thistles and tares in the unkept rose-garden, and
the cottage was abandoned to a sisterhood of doves, who mourned
perpetually for their lost princess. The place was desolate, yet there
had been no sudden desertion of it. For many months no news had been
heard of the Argonauts. They were considerably overdue: the sages of
Dreamland shook their grizzly heads. They were just as sage and shaky
in those days as in these degenerate times. The maids of the hamlet
wept for a season, then turned from sorrowing, dried their tears, took
unto themselves new lovers, and the world wagged well in Dreamland.

But Maud was a truer soul than any amongst them: she prayed hourly
for Jason's prosperity, and was trusting and hopeful until it seemed
almost that something had whispered to her the fate of the voyagers.
Then she mourned night and day: she went into retirement with the
sweet-faced nuns at the headland, whose secluded life had ever been
very grateful to her. She gave out of her bounty to all who asked, and
rested not then, but sought the sick and the suffering, and they were
comforted, and blessed her who had blessed them. They began to think
her half an angel in Dreamland, and it seemed as though she were not
made for this world at all. The same thing happens now occasionally,
and in this way we acknowledge our shortcomings before our fellow-men
and women when we find some one considerably above the average who
shames us into confessing it. I hope the Recording Angel is within
hearing at these precious moments.

The world certainly possessed no charms for one of Maud's temperament:
it never did possess any for her. She was as out of place in it as a
mourning dove in a city mob. Her spirit sought tranquillity, and she
found it in the serene and changless convent life. You and I might
seek in vain for anything like peace of spirit in such a place: we
might find it a stale and profitless imprisonment; and perhaps it
speaks badly for both of us that it is so. The violet finds its silent
cell in the earth-crevice by the hidden spring a sufficient refuge,
and rejoices in it, but the sea-grass that has all its life tossed in
the surges would think that a very dull sort of existence. There are
human violets in the world, and human sunflowers and poppies, and
doves also, and apes and alligators; and some of them come within one
of being inhuman; and sometimes that _one_ drops out, and the inhuman
swallows up the human.

Maud was the mourning dove seeking its bower of shade: she used to
fancy herself a nun, and followed the prescribed duties of the house
as faithfully as Sister Grace herself. She knelt in the little chapel
of the convent till her back ached and her knees were lame, but it was
a never-failing joy in time of trouble, and her time of tremble had
come. Maud said many prayers before an altar of exceeding loveliness,
where fresh flowers seemed to breathe forth an unusual fragrance.
There was a statue of the Virgin, said to possess some miraculous
qualities: tradition whispered that on two or three occasions the
expression on the face of the statue had been seen to change visibly.
Maud heard of this, and was very eager to witness the miracle, for it
was thought to be nothing less than miraculous by the good Sisters.
She bowed before the altar for hours, and dreamed of the marble face
till she seemed to see its features smiling upon her and its small,
slim hand beckoning her back to prayer. She grew nervous and pale and
almost ill with watching and waiting, and at last was found prostrate
and insensible at the foot of the statue, overcome with excitement
and exhaustion. When she grew better she vowed she had seen the head
bowing to her, and the hands spread over her in benediction: no one
could deny it, for she was alone in the chapel. After that there was
a feast of lilies at the convent, and Maud became Sister Somebody or
other, and never again set foot beyond the great gates of the convent
wall.

The consecration was doubtless a blessing to her, for she was happy in
her new home, and found a sphere of usefulness that employed her hours
to the best advantage. Moreover, she grew to be a sensible nun, and
ceased to look for supernatural demonstrations in the neighborhood of
the chapel. She grew hearty, and was cheerful, and sang at her work,
and prayed with more honesty and less sentiment. Her life was as
placid as a river whose waters are untroubled by tempestuous winds,
and upon her bosom light cares, like passing barges, left but a
momentary wake.

As Maud mused in her cell one day, through the narrow barred window
she caught a glimpse of the burnished sea bearing upon its waves a
weather-beaten barque inward bound. There was danger that her mind
might wander off, piloted by her dreamy and worshipful eyes. She
arose, drew across the opening a leathern curtain, and returned with
undisturbed complacence to her prayers.




IV.


Jason, having among his freights the veritable golden fleece, still
coursed the seas, but beheld with rapture the fair outlines of the
Dreamland coast traced in the far blue and mysterious horizon. The
wind freshened: hour after hour they were nearing port, and as the
whole familiar picture grew more and more distinct, Jason saw the
convent towers looming like a great shadow, and afterward the sunny
slope whereon the rose-garden grew.

The manner of his quitting the barque before she was fairly within
communication with the shore was hardly worthy of his calling. I
forbear to dwell upon this exhibition of human weakness, for almost
any one in Jason's shoes would have been equally regardless of the
regulations, and in consequence proportionally unseamanlike.

With soiled garments and unshorn beard Jason ran to the hill. No one
of the idlers in port recognized the returned wanderer, and he assured
himself of the fact before venturing upon his visit to the dove-cot
where Maud dwelt, for he wished to gaze upon her from afar, and in
silence to worship her, unknown and unregarded. When he reached the
wicket, breathless with haste and excitement, he at once beheld the
ruin of his hopes--the thistles in the paths, the roses overgrown and
choked with weeds, the sad and general decay. Jason smote his breast
in a paroxysm of despair, while the doves fluttered out from the porch
of the cottage in amazement at the approach of a human foot to their
domains.

What could it mean? he asked himself again and again, while suspicions
taunted him almost to madness. Up and down that disordered garden he
paced like a ghostly sentinel; the doves fluttered to and fro, and
were dismayed; the night-winds came in from the chilly sea, and the
dews gathered in his beard. Through the deepening dusk he beheld the
lights of the little town below him: across the solemn silence floated
the clear notes of the vesper-bell. Jason turned toward the tower on
the headland. A single ray of light stealing from one of the high,
narrow windows shot through the mist toward heaven. "The ladder
of Jacob's dream," said Jason: "on it the angels are ascending and
descending in their visitations. Oh that I, like Jacob, might receive
intelligence from these!"

With the heaviest heart that ever burdened man he returned to the town
and entered the open doors of the church, seeking a few moments of
repose. An alien in his own land and unwelcomed of any, Jason sought
the good priest and learned the fate of Maud. She was dead to the
world and to him. It was but the realization of his fears, and he
was in some measure prepared for it; yet the best part of the man was
killed with the force of that blow. His only hope was gone. He set
his house in order, like one about to leave it, never to return:
his golden fleece was made over to enrich the convent, and, as the
magnanimous offering of a homelesss and nameless voyager, it delights
the happy creatures within those walls, and the shrine of the Virgin
was made more wonderfully beautiful than it is possible to conceive.

That night Jason walked in the shadow of the lofty walls and poured
out his sorrowful prayers upon the winds that swept about them. Once
in his agony he beat at the massive gates, demanding in the name of
God and of mercy admittance for a lost soul that had no shelter save
under that roof, and no salvation away from it; but his bleeding hands
made no impression upon the ponderous doors, and the silent inmates
at prayer heard nothing save their own whispers, or dreamed in their
cells of heaven and of peace.

So the cry of that hopeless soul rang up to the stars unanswered, and
the night frowned down upon him with impenetrable darkness.

End of the tragedy of Jason's Quest, which might easily have been a
pleasant comedy if Maud had only spoken her mind in the right place.
Will women never learn--since God has given them the same instincts
with man, to love, to trust, to doubt, to hate and to make themselves
at times disagreeable, even with a more complete success than men in
each of these lines of dramatic business--that God must have intended
also that they should have the equal right to choose the particular
object upon which they may exercise those various offices of love,
trust, etc., etc.? I shall never cease to wonder why they are
persistently and stupidly silent through six thousand years, content
to let their hearts wither and die within them, or surrender at
last to the wretched apology for a lover who offers himself as a
substitute, and is surprised at rinding himself accepted.

To be sure, it is less dramatic. Jason might have come back and
married Maud: there would have been a pretty wedding and some
delightful hours before things grew dull and commonplace, as they must
have done ultimately. That rose-garden would have come to grief
when once the children got to playing

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