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Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885

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Title: Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885

Author: Various


        
Release date: May 16, 2005 [eBook #15840]
                Most recently updated: December 14, 2020

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE, DECEMBER, 1885 ***




Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Kathryn Lybarger and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team.






[Note: The Table of Contents was added by the transcriber. Footnotes
and Transcriber's notes will be found at the end of the text.]




LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE.

_DECEMBER, 1885._




TABLE OF CONTENTS
                                                                    Page
  A TOBACCO PLANTATION by PHILIP A. BRUCE.                           533

  SCENES OF CHARLOTTE BRONTÉ'S LIFE IN BRUSSELS by THEO. WOLFE.      542

  COOKHAM DEAN by MARGARET BERTHA WRIGHT.                            549

  BIRDS OF A TEXAN WINTER by EDWARD C. BRUCE.                        558

  THE FERRYMAN'S FEE by MARGARET VANDEGRIFT.                         566

  "WHAT DO I WISH FOR YOU?" by CARLOTTA PERRY.                       580

  LETTERS AND REMINISCENCES OF CHARLES READE by KINAHAN CORNWALLIS.  581

  IN A SUPPRESSED TUSCAN MONASTERY by KATE JOHNSON MATSON.           591

  THE SUBSTITUTE by JAMES PAYN.                                      601

  NEW YORK LIBRARIES by CHARLES BURR TODD.                           611

  THE DRAMA IN THE NURSERY by NORMAN PEARSON.                        623

  OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.
    "The Man Who Laughs." by C.P.W.                                  627
    Why We Forget Names by XENOS CLARK.                              629
    A Reminiscence of Harriet Martineau by F.C.M.                    631

  LITERATURE OF THE DAY.                                             633
    Illustrated Books.                                               634




A TOBACCO PLANTATION.


In the following article I propose to give some account of a typical
tobacco-plantation in Virginia and the life of its negro laborers as I
have observed it from day to day and season to season. Although it is
restricted to narrow local bounds and runs in the line of exacting
routine, that life is yet varied and eventful in its way. The negro
stands so much apart to himself, in spite of all transforming
influences, that everything relating to him seems unique and almost
foreign. Even now, when emancipation has done so much to improve his
condition, his social and economic status still presents peculiar and
anomalous aspects; and in no part of the South is this more notably the
case than in the southern counties of Virginia, which, before the late
war, were the principal seat of slavery in the State, and where to-day
the blacks far outnumber the whites. This section has always been an
important tobacco-region; and this is the explanation of its teeming
negro population, for tobacco requires as much and as continuous work as
cotton. There were many hundreds of slaves on the large plantations, and
their descendants have bred with great rapidity and show little
inclination to emigrate from the neighborhoods where they were born.
Some few, by hoarding their wages, have been able to buy land; but for
the most part the soil is still held by its former owners, who
superintend the cultivation of it themselves or rent it out at low rates
to tenants. The negroes are still the chief laborers in the fields and
artisans in the workshops; and, excepting that they are no longer
chattels that can be sold at will, their lives move in the same grooves
as under the old order of things. Their occupations and amusements are
the same. As yet there has been no increase in the physical comforts of
their situation, and but little change in their general character; but
this is the first period of transformation, when it is difficult to
detect and to follow the modifications that are really taking place.

Every large tobacco-plantation is an important community in itself, and
the social and economic condition of the negro can be observed there as
freely and studied with as much thoroughness as if a wide area of
country were considered for a similar purpose. In the diversity of its
soils and crops and in the variety of its population and modes of life
it bears almost the same relation to the county in which it lies that
the county bears to its section. Indeed, no community could be more
complete in itself, or less dependent upon the outside world. In an
emergency, the inhabitants of one of these large plantations could
supply themselves by their own skill and ingenuity with everything that
they now obtain from abroad; and if cut off from all other associations,
the society which they themselves form would satisfy their desire for
companionship; for not only would its members be numerous and
representative of every shade of character and disposition, but they
would also be bound together by ties of blood and marriage as well as of
interest and mutual affection. Similar tasks and relaxations create in
them a similarity of tastes. The social position of all is identical,
for there are no classes among them, the only line of social division
being drawn upon differences of age; and they are paid the same wages
and possess the same small amount of property. They are attached to the
soil by like local associations, which vary as much as the plantation
varies in surface here and there. Each plantation of any great extent is
like that part of the country, both in its general aspect and its
leading features, just as the employments and amusements of its
population, if numerous, are found reflected in the social life of the
whole of the same section.

The particular plantation to which I shall so often allude in this
article as the scene of the observations here recorded, like most of the
tobacco-plantations in Virginia, covers a broad expanse of land,
including in one body many thousand acres, remarkable for many
differences of soil and for a varied configuration. It is partly made up
of steep hills that roll upon each other in close succession, partly it
is high and level upland that sweeps back to the wooded horizon from the
open low-grounds contiguous to the river that winds along its southern
border. At least one-half of it is in forest, in which oak, cedar,
poplar, and hickory grow in abundance and reach a great height and size.
The soil of the lowlands is very fertile, for it is enriched every few
years by an inundation that leaves behind a heavy deposit; that of the
uplands, on the other hand, is comparatively poor, but it is fertilized
annually with the droppings of the stables and pens. Patches of new
grounds are opened every year in the woods, the timber being cleared
away for the purpose of planting tobacco in the mould of the decayed
leaves, while many old fields are abandoned to pine and broom-straw or
turned into pastures for cattle.

The principal crops are tobacco, wheat, corn, and hay, but the first is
by far the most important, both from its quantity and its value.
Everything else is really subordinate to it. The soils of the uplands
and lowlands are adapted to very different varieties of this staple.
That which grows in the rich loam of the bottoms is known as "shipping
tobacco," because it is chiefly consumed abroad, as it bears
transportation in the rough state without injury to its quality.
"Working tobacco" is the name which is given to the variety that
flourishes on the hills; and this is used in the manufacture of brands
of chewing- and smoking-tobacco to meet the domestic as well as the
foreign demand. There is a third variety which grows in small quantities
on the plantation,--namely, "yellow tobacco," so called from the golden
color of the plant as it approaches ripeness; and this tint is not only
retained, but also heightened, when it has been cured, at which time it
is as light in weight as so much snuff. This variety is principally used
as a wrapper for bundles of the inferior kinds, and is prepared for the
market by a very tedious and expensive process; but the trouble thus
entailed and the money spent have their compensation in the very high
prices which it always brings in the market.

The fields where tobacco has been cultivated during the previous summer
are sown in wheat in the autumn, unless they are new grounds, when the
rotation of crops is tobacco for two years in succession, followed in
the third year by wheat, and in the fourth by tobacco again. The soil is
then laid under the same rule of tillage as land that has been worked
for many seasons. As a result of this necessity for rotation, much wheat
is raised on the plantation, although the threshing of it interferes
very seriously with the attention which the tobacco requires at a very
critical period of its growth. The greater part of the low-grounds is
planted in Indian corn, the return in a good year being very large; and
even when there has been a drought, the general average in quantity and
quality falls short very little. The soil here is so fertile that
tobacco planted in it grows too coarse in its fibre, while the cost of
cultivating it is so high that the planter is reluctant to run the risk
of an overflow of the river, which destroys a crop at any stage in a few
hours. Although corn is very much injured by the same cause, it is not
rendered wholly useless, for it can be thrown to stock even when it is
unfit to be ground into meal. At a certain season the fields of this
grain along the river present a beautiful aspect, the mass of deep green
flecked by the white tops of the stalks resembling, at a distance,
level, unruffled waters; but sometimes a freshet descends upon it and
obliterates it from sight, the whole broad plain being then like a
highly-discolored lake, with rafts of planks and uprooted trees floating
upon its surface.

The general plantation is divided into three plantations of equal
extent, each tract being made up of several thousand acres of land; each
has its own overseer, and he has under him a band of laborers who are
never called away to work elsewhere, and who have all their possessions
around them. Each division has its stables, teams, and implements, and
its expenses and profits are entered in a separate account. In short,
the different divisions of the general plantation are conducted as if
they belonged to several persons instead of to one alone.

It is the duty of the overseer of each division to remain with his
laborers, however employed, and to overlook what they are doing. He sees
that the teams are well fed, the stock in good condition and in their
own bounds, the fences intact, and the implements sheltered from the
weather. He must hire additional hands when they are needed, and
discharge those guilty of serious delinquencies. His position is one of
responsibility, but at the same time of many advantages; for he is given
a comfortable house for his private use, with a garden, a smoke-house, a
store-room, and a stable,--a horse being furnished him to enable him to
get from one locality to another on the plantation under his charge with
ease and rapidity; and he is also supplied with rations for himself and
family every month. The social class to which he belongs is below the
highest,--namely, that of the planter,--and above that of the whites of
meanest condition. Formerly one of the three overseers on the plantation
which I am now describing was a colored man who had been a slave before
the war, a foreman in the field afterward, and was then promoted, in
consequence of his efficiency, to the responsible position which I have
named. He was a man of unusual intelligence, and gave the highest
satisfaction. His mind was almost painfully directed to the performance
of his duties, and the only fault that could be found with him was an
occasional inclination to be too severe with his own race. Very
naturally, he was looked up to by the latter as successful and
prosperous, and his influence in consequence was very great. Unlike most
of his fellows, he was given to hoarding what he earned, and in a few
years was able to buy a plantation of his own; and there he is now
engaged in cultivating his own land.

There is a population of about four hundred negroes on the three
divisions of the plantation, this number including both sexes and every
age and shade of color. All of the older set, with few exceptions, were
the slaves of their employer, and did not leave him even in the restless
and excited hour of their emancipation. Born on the place, they have
spent the whole of their long lives there, and consider it to be as much
their home as it is that of its owner. In fact, the negroes here are
remote from those influences that lead so many others to migrate. The
plantation is eighteen miles from a railroad and forty from a town, and
is set down in a very sparsely settled country that has been only
partially cleared of its forests. It has a teeming population of its
own, which satisfies the social instincts of its inhabitants as much as
if they were collected together in a small town. In consequence of all
these facts, and in spite of the new state of things which the war
produced, there survives in its confines something of that baronial
spirit which we observe on a landed estate in England at the present
day, where every man, woman, and child is accustomed to think of the
landlord as the fountain-head of power and benefits. A similar spirit of
loyal subordination prevails particularly among the oldest inhabitants
of the plantation, who were once the absolute chattels of its owner, and
who look upon that fact as creating an obligation in him to support them
in their decrepitude. Being too far in the sere and yellow leaf to work,
they are provided every month with enough rations to meet their wants,
and in total idleness they calmly await the inevitable hour when their
bones will be laid beside those of their fathers. There are few more
picturesque figures than are many of these old negroes, who passed the
heyday of their strength before they were freed, and who, born in
slavery, survived to a new era only to find themselves in the last
stages of old age. They are regarded by their race with as much
veneration as if they were invested with the authority of prophets and
seers. Some of them, in spite of their years, act occasionally as
preachers, and are listened to with awe and trepidation as they lift up
their trembling voices in exhortation or denunciation. As travellers
from a distant past, it is interesting to observe them sitting with bent
backs and hands resting on their sticks in the door-ways of their cabins
on bright days in summer, or by the warm firesides in winter, while
members of younger generations talk around them or play about their
knees.

The negro laborers marry in early life, and the size of their families
is often remarkable, the ratio of increase being, perhaps, greater with
them than with the families of the white laborers on the same
plantation, and the mortality among their children as small, for the
latter have an abundance of wholesome food, are well sheltered from cold
and dampness, and have good medical attendance. As soon as they are able
to walk so far, they are sent to the public school, which is situated on
the borders of the plantation, where they have a teacher of their own
race to instruct them, and they continue to attend until they are old
enough to work in the fields and stables. They are then employed there
at fair wages, which, until they come of age or marry, are appropriated
by their parents; and in consequence of this many of the young men seek
positions on the railroads or in the towns before they reach their
majority, in order that they may secure and enjoy the compensation of
their own labor. In a few years, however, the greater number wander back
and offer themselves as hands, are engaged, and establish homes of their
own.

Tobacco being a staple that requires work of some kind throughout the
whole of the year, a large force of laborers are hired for that length
of time. It is not like wheat, in the cultivation and manipulation of
which more energy is put forth at one season than at another, as, for
instance, when it is harvested or threshed. A certain number of laborers
are engaged on the plantation on the 1st of January, who contract to
remain at definite wages during the following twelve months. Whoever
leaves without consent violates a distinct agreement, under which he is
liable in the courts, if it were worth the time and expense to subject
him to the law. He is paid every month by an order on a firm of
merchants who rent a store that belongs to the owner of the plantation
and is situated on one of its divisions; and this order he can convert
into money, merchandise, or groceries, as he chooses, or he gives it up
in settlement of debts which he has previously made there in
anticipation of his wages. The credit of each man is accurately gauged,
and he is allowed to deal freely to a certain amount, but not beyond;
and this restriction puts a very wholesome check upon the natural
extravagance of his disposition.

On each division of the plantation there is a settlement where the
negroes live with their families. The houses of the "quarters," as the
settlement is called, are large weather-boarded cabins. In each there is
a spacious room below and a cramped garret above, which is used both as
a bedroom and a lumber-room, while the apartment on the first floor is
chamber, kitchen, and parlor in one, and there most of the inmates,
children as well as adults, sleep at night. The furniture is of a very
durable but rude character, consisting of a bed, several cots, tables
and cupboards, and half a dozen or more rough chairs of domestic
manufacture, while a few pictures, cut from illuminated Sunday books or
from illustrated papers, adorn the whitewashed walls. The brick
fire-place is so wide and open that the fire not only warms the room,
but lights it up so well that no candle or lamp is needed. The negroes
are always kept supplied with wood, and they use it with extravagance on
cold nights, when they often stretch themselves at full length on the
hearth-stone and sleep as calmly in the fierce glare as in the summer
shade, or nap and nod in their chairs until day, only rising from time
to time to throw on another log to revive the declining flames. They
like to gossip and relate tales under its comfortable influence, and it
is associated in their minds with the most pleasing side of their lives.
Those who can read con over the texts of their well-worn Bibles in its
light, while those who have a mechanical turn, as, for instance, for
weaving willow or white-oak baskets or making fish-traps or chairs, take
advantage of its illumination to carry on their work.

Each householder has his garden, either in front or behind his dwelling,
according to the greater fertility of the soil, and here he raises every
variety of vegetable in profusion: sweet and Irish potatoes, tomatoes,
beets, peas, onions, cabbages, and melons grow there in sufficient
abundance to supply many tables. Of these, cabbage is most valued, for
it can be stored away for consumption in winter, and is as fresh at that
season as when it is first cut. Around the houses peach-trees of a very
common variety have been planted, and these bear fruit even when the
buds of rarer varieties elsewhere have been nipped, both because they
are more hardy and because they are near enough to be protected by the
cloud of smoke that is always issuing from the chimneys. Every
householder is allowed to fatten two hogs of his own, the sty, for fear
of thieves, being erected in such close proximity to his dwelling that
the odor is most offensive with the wind in a certain quarter, and, one
would think, most unwholesome; but his family do not seem to suffer
either in health or in comfort. Every cabin has its hen-house, from
which an abundant supply of eggs is drawn, which find a ready sale at
the plantation store; and in spring the chickens are a source of
considerable income to the negroes. Their fare is occasionally varied by
an opossum caught in the woods, or a hare trapped in the fields; but
they much prefer corn bread and bacon as regular fare to anything else.
They dislike wheat bread, as too light and unsatisfying, and they always
grumble when flour is measured out to them instead of meal. Coffee is a
luxury used only on Sunday. The table is set off by a few china plates
and cups, but there are no dishes, the meat being served in the utensil
in which it is cooked. On working-days breakfast and dinner are carried
to the hands in the fields by a boy who has collected at the different
houses the tin buckets containing these meals.

The hands are as busy in winter as during any other part of the year.
Much of their time is then taken up in manipulating the tobacco, which
has been stored away in one large barn, and preparing it for market, the
first step toward which is to strip the leaves from the stalk and then
carefully separate those of an inferior from those of a superior
quality. Although there are many grades, the negroes are able to
distinguish them at a glance and assort them accordingly. They are not
engaged in this work of selection continuously from day to day, but at
intervals, for they can handle the tobacco only when the weather is damp
enough to moisten the leaf, otherwise it is so brittle that it would
crack and fall to pieces under their touch. They like this work, for the
barn is kept very comfortable by large stoves, they do not have to move
from their seats, and they can all sit very sociably together, talking,
laughing, and singing. It contrasts very agreeably with other work which
they are called upon to do at this season,--namely, the grubbing of new
grounds, from which they shrink with unconcealed repugnance, for outside
of a mine there is no kind of labor more arduous or exacting. The land
cleared is that from which the original forest has been cut, leaving
stumps thickly scattered over the surface, from which a heavy
scrub-growth springs up. Active, quick, and industrious as the negroes
may be in the tobacco-, corn-, or wheat fields, they show here great
indolence, and move forward very slowly with their hoes, axes, and
picks, piling up, as they advance, masses of roots, saplings, stumps,
and brush, which, when dry, are set on fire and consumed. The soil
exposed is a rich but thin loam of decayed leaves, in which tobacco
grows with luxuriance.

In February or March the laborers prepare the plant-patch, the initial
step in the production of a crop that remains on their hands at least
twelve months before it is ready for market. They select a spot in the
depths of the woods where the soil is very fertile from the accumulated
mould, and they then cut away the trees and underbrush until a clean
open surface, square in shape and about forty yards from angle to angle,
is left, surrounded on all sides by the forest. Having piled up great
masses of logs over the whole of this surface, they set them on fire at
one end of the patch, and these are allowed to burn until all have been
consumed, the object being to get the ash which is deposited, and which
is very rich in certain constituents of the tobacco-plant and is
especially conducive to its growth. The ploughmen then come and break up
the ground, hoers carefully pulverize every clod, and the seed is sown,
a mere handful being sufficient for a great extent of soil. The laborers
afterward cover the surface of the patch with bushes, and it is left
without further protection. In a short time the tobacco-plant springs up
in indescribable profusion, and in a few weeks it is in a condition to
be transferred to the fields.

Before this is done, however, the seed-corn has begun to sprout in the
ground. The first cry of the whippoorwill is the signal for planting
this cereal. The grains are dropped from the hand at regular intervals,
both men and women joining in this work; and they all move slowly along
together, the men bearing the corn in small bags, the women holding it
in their aprons. The wide low-grounds at this season expand to the
horizon without anything to obstruct the vision, a clear, unbroken sweep
of purple ploughed land. The laborers are visible far off, those who
drop the grains walking in a line ahead, the hoers following close
behind to cover up the seed. Still farther in the rear come the harrows,
that level all inequalities in the surface and crush the clods. Flocks
of crows wheel in the air above the scene, or stalk at a safe distance
on the ploughed ground. Blackbirds, which have now returned from the
South, sing in chorus on the adjacent ditch-banks, mingling their harsh
notes with the lively songs of myriads of bobolinks, while high overhead
whistles the plover. The newly-sprung grass paints the road-side a lush
green, the leaves are budding on weed and spray, and over all there hang
the exhilarating influences of spring.

As soon as the hands have planted the corn, they begin transplanting the
tobacco, which they find a more tedious task, for they can only
transfer the slips to the fields when the air is surcharged with
moisture and the ground is wet; otherwise the slips will wither on the
way or perish in the hill without taking root. But if the weather is
favorable they flourish from the hour they are thrust into the ground.
It takes the laborers but a short time to plant many acres; and when
their work is done the fields look as bare as before. The original
leaves soon die, but from the healthy stalk new ones shoot out and
expand very rapidly. The soil has been very highly fertilized with guano
and very carefully ploughed, so that every condition is favorable to the
growth of the plant if there is an abundance of rain. At a later period
it passes through a drought very well, being a hardy plant that recovers
even after it has wilted; but very frequently in its early stages the
laborers are compelled to haul water in casks from the streams to save
it from destruction.

The most jovial operation of the year to the hands is the wheat-harvest
in June; but the introduction of the mechanical reaper has taken away
something of its peculiar character. Much of the grain, however, is
still cut down with the cradle. The strongest negro always leads the
dozen or more mowers, and thus incites his fellows to keep closely in
his wake. As they move along, they sing, and the sound, sonorous and not
unmelodious, is echoed far and wide among the hills. Behind them follows
a band of men and women, who gather the grain into shocks or tie it in
bundles.

After the harvest is over, the time of the laborers is given up entirely
to the tobacco, which has now grown to a fair size. Their first task is
to "sucker" it,--that is, cut away the shoots that spring up at the
intersection of each leaf and the stalk, and which if left to grow would
absorb half the strength of the plant. They also examine the leaves very
carefully, to destroy the eggs and young of the tobacco-fly. Day after
day they go over the same fields, finding newly-laid eggs and
newly-hatched young where only twelve hours before they brushed their
counterparts off to be trampled under foot. As the tobacco ripens, it
becomes brittle to the touch and is covered with dark yellow spots, and
when this appearance is still further developed the time for cutting has
arrived, which generally is in the first month of autumn, and always
before frost, which is as fatal to this as to every other weed. The
plant is now about three feet in height, with eight or nine large
leaves, the stalk having been broken off at the top in the second stage
of its growth. On the appointed day a dozen or more men with coarse
knives split the stalk of each plant straight down its middle to within
half a foot of the ground. They then strike the plant from the hill and
lay it on one side. The leaves soon shrink under the rays of the sun and
fall. One of the laborers who follow the cutters then takes it up and
places it with nine or ten other plants on a stick, which is thrust
through the angle formed by the two halves of the plant separated from
each other except at one end. It is deposited with the rest in an open
ox-cart and transported to the barn. In the barn poles have been
arranged in tiers from bottom to top to support the sticks; and when the
building is full of tobacco the laborer in charge ignites the logs that
fill parallel trenches in the dirt floor, and a high rate of temperature
is soon produced, and is maintained for several days, during which a
watch is kept to replenish the flames and prevent a conflagration. As
soon as the tobacco has changed from a deep green to a light brown, it
is removed on a wet day to the general barn. The same process of curing
is going on in many barns on the same plantation, and occasionally one
is burned down; for the tobacco is very inflammable, a stray spark from
below being sufficient to set the whole on fire.

The principal work of the autumn is the gathering of the ripe corn. A
band of men go ahead and pull the ears from the stalks and throw them at
intervals of thirty yards into loose piles and another band following
behind them at a distance pick the ears up and pitch them into the
ox-carts, which, when fully loaded, return to the granary, around which
the corn is soon massed in long and high rows. When the whole crop has
been got in, a moonlight night is selected for stripping off the shucks;
and this is a gay occasion with the negroes, for they are allowed as
much whiskey as they can carry under their belts. The leading clown
among them is deputed to mount the pile and sing, while the rest sit
below and work. As he ends each verse, they reply in a chorus that can
be heard miles away through the clear, still, frosty air. Their songs
are the ancient ditties of the plantation, and are humorous or pathetic
in sound rather than in sense. And yet even to an educated ear they have
a certain interest, like everything, however trivial, connected with
this strange race.

Such, in general outline, are the tasks of the laborers on the
plantation during the four seasons of the year. It is beyond question
that they do their work thoroughly. It makes no difference how deep the
low-ground mud is, or how rough the surface, or how lowering the
weather, they go forward with cheerfulness and alacrity. Nothing can
repress or dampen their spirits. How often I have heard them as they
returned through the dusk, after hoeing or ploughing the whole day,
singing in a strain as gay and spontaneous as if they were just going
forth in the freshness of a vernal morning! Their sociable disposition
is displayed even in the fields, for they like to work in bands, in
order that they may converse and joke together. This companionableness
is one of the most conspicuous traits of their character. Even the
strict patrolling of slavery-times could not prevent them from running
together at night; and now that they are free to go where they choose,
they will put themselves to much trouble to gratify their love of
association with their fellows. One reason why a large plantation is so
popular with them is that the number of its inhabitants offers the most
varied opportunities of social enjoyment.

Sunday is the principal day on which the negroes exchange visits. There
is a settlement, as I have mentioned, on each division of the plantation
which I am now describing, and, although these settlements are situated
at some distance apart, this is not considered to be a serious
inconvenience. At every hour on Sunday, if the day is fair, men and
women, in couples or small parties, neatly and becomingly dressed, are
seen moving along the chief thoroughfare on their way to call on their
friends. The women are decked in gay calicoes, often further adorned
with bunches of wild flowers plucked by the road-side; while the men are
clothed in suits which they have bought at the "store," and they
frequently wear cheap jewelry which they have purchased at the same
establishment. The dandies in the younger set flourish canes and assume
all the languishing airs that distinguish the callow fops of the white
race. Many visitors are received at the most popular houses, and they
are observed sitting with the families of their hosts and hostesses
under the shade of the trees until a late hour of the afternoon. Some
pass from cabin to cabin, not stopping long at any one, but finding a
cordial welcome everywhere. Some linger very late, and make their way
back by the light of the moon. As they move along the low-ground road
their voices can be heard very distinctly from the hills above as they
talk and laugh together; and sometimes they vary the monotony of their
walk by singing a hymn, the sound of which is borne very far on the
bosom of the silence, and is sweet and soft in its cadence, mellowed as
it is by the distance and idealized by the nocturnal hour.

There are two church-edifices on the plantation, one of which is used
during the week as a public school, but the other was built expressly
for religious worship. Both are plain but comfortable structures, the
outer and inner walls of which have been whitewashed and the blinds
painted a dark green. Around them are wide yards, carefully swept;
otherwise their neighborhoods are rather forbidding, on account of the
silence and darkness of the forests in which they are situated, the only
proof of their connection with the world at large being the roads which
run by their doors. The pulpit of one is filled by a white preacher of
Northern birth and education, who removed to this section after the war;
and the only objection that can be urged against him is that he often
holds religious revivals at the time when the tobacco-worm is most
active in ravaging the ripening plant. The negroes who have to walk
several miles after their work is over to get to his church are kept up
till a late hour of night and in a state of high excitement, and are so
overcome with fatigue the following day that they dawdle over their
tasks. These revivals are also celebrated at the other church, but
always in proper season; for the minister there is not only sound and
orthodox in his doctrines, but he is also a planter on his own account,
and, therefore, able to understand that the interests of religion and
tobacco ought not to be brought into conflict.

Many parties are given every year, and they are attended by several
hundred negroes of both sexes, who have come from the different
"quarters," and even from other plantations in the vicinity. The owner
of the plantation always supplies an abundance of provisions--a sheep or
beef, flour and meal--for the feast that celebrates the general housing
of the crops, which is to the laborers what the harvest-supper is to the
peasantry of England. The year, with its varied labors and large
results, lies behind them, the wheat, tobacco, and corn have all been
gathered in, their hard work is done, and though in a few weeks the old
routine will begin again, they are now oblivious of it all. Hour after
hour they continue to dance, a new array of fresh performers taking the
place of those who are exhausted, and then the regular beating of their
feet on the floor can be heard at a considerable distance, with a dull,
monotonous sound, varied only by the hum of voices or noise of laughter
or the shrill notes of the musical instruments. These are the banjo and
accordion, the former being the favorite, perhaps because it is more
intimately associated with the social traditions of the negroes. Their
best performers play very skilfully on both, and indulge in as much
ecstatic by-play as musicians of the most famous schools. They throw
themselves into many strange contortions as they touch the strings or
keys, swaying from side to side, or rocking their bodies backward and
forward till the head almost reaches the floor, or leaning over the
instrument and addressing it in caressing terms. They accompany their
playing with their voices, but their _répertoire_ is limited to a few
songs, which generally consist in mere repetition of a few notes. All
their airs have been handed down from remote generations. Their words
deal with the ordinary incidents of the negro's life, and embody his
narrow hopes and aspirations, but they are rarely connected narratives.
As a rule, they are broken lines without relevancy or coherence, while
the choruses are so many meaningless syllables. The negroes seem to
derive no pleasure from music outside of those songs and airs which they
have so often heard at their own hearthstones, and which have come down
to them from their ancestors.

The Christmas holidays, extending from the 25th of December to the 2d of
January, are a period of entire suspension of labor on the plantation.
In anticipation of their arrival, a large quantity of fire-wood is
hauled from the forests and piled up around the cabins; but the negroes
spend very little of this interval of leisure in their own homes, unless
a bad spell of weather has set in and continues. They are either out in
the open air or at the "store." This latter serves the purpose of a
club, and is a very popular resort. Even at other times of the year it
is always packed at night; but during the Christmas holidays it is full
to overflowing in the day-time. At this gay season the fires are kept
burning very fiercely; the Sunday suits and dresses are worn every day;
the tables are covered with more abundant fare of the plainer as well
as rarer sort. All visitors are received with increased hospitality, and
work of every kind that usually goes on in the precincts of the dwelling
is, if possible, deferred until the opening of the new year. Many
strange faces are now seen on the plantation, and many faces that were
once familiar, but whose owners have removed elsewhere. The negro is as
closely bound in affection to the scenes of his childhood as the white
man, and he thinks that he has certain rights there of which absence
even cannot deprive him, although he may have left for permanent
settlement at a distance. When he dies elsewhere he is always anxious in
his last hours that his body shall be brought back and buried in the old
graveyard of the plantation where he was born and where he grew up to
manhood. And when he comes back to the well-known localities for a brief
stay, he feels as if he were at home again in the house of his fathers,
where he has an absolute and inalienable right to be.

PHILIP A. BRUCE.




SCENES OF CHARLOTTE BRONTÉ'S LIFE IN BRUSSELS.


We had "done" Brussels after the approved fashion,--had faithfully
visited the churches, palaces, museums, theatres, galleries, monuments,
and boulevards, had duly admired the beautiful windows and the exquisite
wood-carvings of the grand old cathedral of St. Gudule, the tower and
tapestry and frescos and façade of the magnificent Hôtel-de-Ville, the
stately halls and the gilded dome of the immense new Courts of Justice,
and the consummate beauty of the Bourse, had diligently sought out the
naïve boy-fountain, and had made the usual excursion to Waterloo.

This delightful task being conscientiously discharged, we proposed to
devote our last day in the beautiful Belgian capital to the
accomplishment of one of the cherished projects of our lives,--the
searching out of the localities associated with Charlotte Bronté's
unhappy school-life here, which she has so graphically portrayed. For
our purpose no guide was available, or needful, for the topography and
local coloring of "Villette" and "The Professor" are as vivid and
unmistakable as in the best work of Dickens himself. Proceeding from St.
Gudule, by the little street at the back of the cathedral, to the Rue
Royale, and a short distance along that grand thoroughfare, we reached
the park and a locality familiar to Miss Bronté's readers. Seated in
this lovely pleasure-ground, the gift of the empress Maria Theresa, with
its cool shade all about us, we noted the long avenues and the paths
winding amid stalwart trees and verdant shrubbery, the dark foliage
ineffectually veiling the gleaming statuary and the sheen of bright
fountains, "the stone basin with its clear depth, the thick-planted
trees which framed this tremulous and rippled mirror," the groups of
happy people filling the seats in secluded nooks or loitering in the
cool mazes and listening to the music,--we noted all this, and felt that
Miss Bronté had revealed it to us long ago. It was across this park that
Lucy Snowe was piloted from the bureau of the diligence by the
chivalrous stranger, Dr. John, on the night when she, despoiled,
helpless, and solitary, arrived in Brussels. She found the park deserted
and dark, the paths miry, the water "dripping from its trees." "In the
double gloom of tree and fog she could not see her guide, and could only
follow his tread" in the darkness. We recalled another scene under these
same tail trees, on a night when the iron gateway was "spanned by a
naming arch of massed stars." The park was a "forest with sparks of
purple and ruby and golden fire gemming the foliage," and Lucy, driven
from her couch by mental torture, wandered unrecognized amid the gay
throng at the midnight concert of the Festival of the Martyrs and looked
upon her lover, her friends the Brettons, and the secret junta of her
enemies, Madame Beck, Madame Walravens, and Père Silas.

The sense of familiarity with the vicinage grew as we observed our
surroundings. Facing us, at the extremity of the park, was the
unpretentious palace of the king, in the small square across the Rue
Royale at our right was the statue of General Béliard, and we knew that
just behind it we should find the Rue Fossette and Charlotte Bronté's
_pensionnat_, for Crimsworth, "The Professor," standing by the statue,
had "looked down a great staircase" to the door-way of the school, and
poor Lucy, on that forlorn first night in "Villette," to avoid the
insolence of a pair of ruffians, had hastened down a flight of steps from
the Rue Royale, and had come, not to the inn she sought, but to the
_pensionnat_ of Madame Beck.

From the statue we descended, by a quadruple series of wide stone
stairs, into a narrow street, old-fashioned and clean, quiet and
secluded in the very heart of the great city,--the Rue d'Isabelle,--and
just opposite the foot of the steps we came to the wide door of a
spacious, quadrangular, stuccoed old mansion, with a bit of foliage
showing over a high wall at one side. A bright plate embellishes the
door and bears the inscription,

PENSIONNAT DE DEMOISELLES
HÉGER-PARENT.

A Latin inscription in the wall of the house shows it to have been given
to the Guild of Royal Archers by the Infanta Isabelle early in the
seventeenth century. Long before that the garden had been the orchard
and herbary of a convent and the Hospital for the Poor.

We were detained at the door long enough to remember Lucy standing
there, trembling and anxious, awaiting admission, and then we too were
"let in by a _bonne_ in a smart cap,"--apparently a fit successor to the
Rosine of forty years ago,--and entered the corridor. This is paved with
blocks of black and white marble and has painted walls. It extends
through the entire depth of the house, and at its farther extremity an
open door afforded us a glimpse of the garden.

We were ushered into the little _salon_ at the left of the passage,--the
one often mentioned in "Villette,"--and here we made known our wish to
see the garden and class-rooms, and met with a prompt refusal from the
neat _portresse_. We tried diplomacy (also lucre) with her, without
avail: it was the _grandes vacances_, the ladies were out, M. Héger was
engaged, we could not be gratified,--unless, indeed, we were patrons of
the school. At this juncture a portly, ruddy-faced lady of middle age
and most courteous of speech and manner appeared, and, addressing us in
faultless English, introduced herself as Mademoiselle Héger,
co-directress of the _pensionnat_, and "wholly at our service." In
response to our apologies for the intrusion and explanations of the
desire which had prompted it, we received complaisant assurances of
welcome; yet the manner of our kind entertainer indicated that she did
not appreciate, much less share in, our admiration and enthusiasm for
Charlotte Bronté and her books. In the subsequent conversation it
appeared that Mademoiselle and her family hold decided opinions upon the
subject,--something more than mere lack of admiration. She was familiar
with the novels, and thought that, while they exhibit a talent certainly
not above mediocrity, they reflect the injustice, the untruthfulness,
and the ingratitude of their creator. We were obliged to confess to
ourselves that the family have apparent reason for this view, when we
reflected that in the books Miss Bronté has assailed their religion and
disparaged the school and the character of the teachers and pupils, has
depicted Madame Héger in the odious duad of Madame Beck and Mademoiselle
Reuter, has represented M. Héger as the scheming and deceitful M. Pelet
and the preposterous M. Paul, Lucy Snowe's lover, that this lover was
the husband of Madame Héger, and father of the family of children to
whom Lucy was at first _bonne d'enfants_, and that possibly the daughter
she has described as the thieving, vicious Désirée--"that tadpole,
Désirée Beck"--was this very lady now so politely entertaining us. To
all this add the significant fact that "Villette" is an autobiographical
novel, which "records the most vivid passages in Miss Bronté's own sad
heart's history," not a few of the incidents being "literal transcripts"
from the darkest chapter of her own life, and the light which the
consideration of this fact throws upon her relations with members of the
family will help us to apprehend the stand-point from which the Hégers
judge Miss Bronté and her work, and to excuse, if not to justify, a
natural resentment against one who has presented them in a decidedly bad
light.

_How_ bad we began to realize when, during the ensuing chat, we called
to mind just what she had written of them. As Madame Beck, Madame Héger
had been represented as lying, deceitful, and shameless, as heartless
and unscrupulous, as "watching and spying everywhere, peeping through
every keyhole, listening behind every door," as duplicating Lucy's keys
and secretly searching her bureau, as meanly abstracting her letters and
reading them to others, as immodestly laying herself out to entrap the
man to whom she had given her love unsought. In letters to her friend
Ellen, Miss Bronté complains that "Madame Héger never came near her" in
her loneliness and illness.

It was, obviously, some accession to the existing animosity between
herself and Madame Héger which precipitated Miss Bronté's final
departure from the _pensionnat_. Mrs. Gaskell ascribes their mutual
dislike to Charlotte's free expression of her aversion to the Catholic
Church, of which Madame Héger was a devotee, and hence "wounded in her
most cherished opinions;" but a later writer, in the "Westminster
Review," plainly intimates that Miss Bronté hated the woman who sat for
Madame Beck because marriage had given to _her_ the man whom Miss Bronté
loved, and that "Madame Beck had need to be a detective in her own
house." The recent death of Madame Héger has rendered the family, who
hold her now only as a sacred memory, more keenly sensitive than ever to
anything which would seem by implication to disparage her.

For himself it would appear that M. Héger has less cause for resentment,
for, although in "Villette" he (or his double) is pictured as "a waspish
little despot," as fiery and unreasonable, as "detestably ugly" in his
anger, closely resembling "a black and sallow tiger," as having an
"overmastering love of authority and public display," as basely playing
the spy and reading purloined letters, and in the Bronté epistles
Charlotte declares he is choleric and irritable, compels her to make her
French translations without a dictionary or grammar, and then has "his
eyes almost plucked out of his head" by the occasional English word she
is obliged to introduce, etc., yet all this is partially atoned for by
the warm praise she subsequently accords him for his goodness to her and
his "disinterested friendship," by the poignant regret she expresses at
parting with him,--perhaps wholly expiated by the high compliment she
pays him of making her heroine, Lucy, fall in love with him, or the
higher compliment it is suspected she paid him of falling in love with
him herself. One who reads the strange history of passion in "Villette,"
in conjunction with her letters, "will know more of the truth of her
stay in Brussels than if a dozen biographers had undertaken to tell the
whole tale."

Still, M. Héger can scarcely be pleased by the ludicrous figure he is
so often made to cut in the novels by having members of his school set
forth as stupid, animal, and inferior, "their principles rotten to the
core, steeped in systematic sensuality," by having his religion styled
"besotted papistry, a piece of childish humbug," and the like.

Something of the displeasure of the family was revealed in the course of
our conversation with Mademoiselle Héger, but the specific causes were
but cursorily touched upon. She could have no personal recollection of
the Brontés; her knowledge of them is derived from her parents and the
teachers,--presumably the "repulsive old maids" of Charlotte's letters.
One of the present teachers in the _pensionnat_ had been a classmate of
Charlotte's here. The Brontés had not been popular with the school.
Their "heretical" religion had something to do with this; but their
manifest avoidance of the other pupils during hours of recreation,
Mademoiselle thought, had been a more potent cause,--Emily, in
particular, not speaking with her school-mates or teachers except when
obliged to do so. The other pupils thought them of outlandish accent and
manners and ridiculously old to be at school at all,--being twenty-four
and twenty-six, and seeming even older. Their sombre and
grotesquely-ugly costumes were fruitful causes of mirth to the gay
young Belgian misses. The Brontés were not especially brilliant
students, and none of their companions had ever suspected that they were
geniuses. Of the two, Emily was considered to be, in most respects, the
more talented, but she was obstinate and opinionated. Some of the pupils
had been inclined to resist having Charlotte placed over them as
teacher, and may have been mutinous. After her return from Haworth she
taught English to M. Héger and his brother-in-law. M. Héger gave the
sisters private lessons in French without charge, and for some time
preserved their compositions, which Mrs. Gaskell copied. Mrs. Gaskell
visited the _pensionnat_ in quest of material for her biography of
Charlotte, and received all the aid M. Héger could afford: the
information thus obtained has, for the most part, we were told, been
fairly used. Miss Bronté's letters from Brussels, so freely quoted in
Mrs. Gaskell's "Life," were addressed to Miss Ellen Nussy, a familiar
friend of Charlotte's, whose signature we saw in the register at Haworth
Church as witness to Miss Bronté's marriage. The Hégers had no suspicion
that she had been so unhappy with them as these letters indicate, and
she had assigned a totally different reason for her sudden return to
England. She had been introduced to Madame Héger by Mrs. Jenkins, wife
of the then chaplain of the British Embassy at the Court of Belgium; she
had frequently visited that lady and other friends in Brussels,--among
them Mary and Martha Taylor and their relatives, and the family of a
Dr. ---- (_not_ Dr. John),--and therefore her life here need not
have been so lonely and desolate as it has been made to appear.

The Hégers usually have a few English pupils in the school, but have
never had an American.

Some American tourists had before called to look at the garden, but the
family are not pleased by the notoriety with which Miss Bronté has
invested it. However, Mademoiselle Héger kindly offered to conduct us
over any portion of the establishment we might care to see, and led the
way along the corridor, past the class-rooms and the _réfectoire_ on the
right, to the narrow, high-walled garden. We found it smaller than in
the time when Miss Bronté loitered here in weariness and solitude.
Mademoiselle Héger explained that, while the width remains the same, the
erection of class-rooms for the day-pupils has diminished the length by
some yards. Tall houses surround and shut it in on either side, making
it close and sombre, and the noises of the great city all about it
penetrate here only as a far-away murmur. There is a plat of verdant
turf in the centre, bordered by scant flowers and damp gravelled walks,
along which shrubs of evergreen and laurel are irregularly disposed. A
few seats are placed here and there within the shade, where, as in Miss
Bronté's time, the _externals_ eat the luncheon brought with them to the
school; and overlooking it all stand the great old pear-trees, whose
gnarled and deformed trunks are relics of the time of the hospital and
convent. Beyond these and along the gray wall which bounds the farther
side of the enclosure is the sheltered walk which was Miss Bronté's
favorite retreat,--the "_allée défendue_" of her novels. It is screened
by shrubs and perfumed by flowers, and, being secure from the intrusion
of pupils, we could well believe that Charlotte and her heroine found
here restful seclusion. The coolness and quiet and--more than all--the
throng of vivid associations which fill the place tempted us to linger.
The garden is not a spacious nor even a pretty one, and yet it seemed to
us singularly pleasing and familiar,--as if we were revisiting it after
an absence. Seated upon a rustic bench close at hand, possibly the very
one which Lucy Snowe had cleansed and "reclaimed from fungi and mould,"
how the memories came surging up into our minds! How often in the summer
twilight poor Charlotte had lingered here in restful solitude after the
day's burdens and trials with "stupid and impertinent" pupils! How
often, with weary feet and a dreary heart, she had paced this secluded
walk and thought, with longing almost insupportable, of the dear ones in
far-away Haworth parsonage! In this sheltered corner her other
self--Lucy Snowe--sat and listened to the distant chimes and thought
forbidden thoughts and cherished impossible hopes. Here she met and
talked with Dr. John. Deep beneath this "Methuselah of a pear-tree," the
one nearest the end of the alley, lies the imprisoned dust of the poor
young nun who was buried alive ages ago for some sin against her vow,
and whose perambulating ghost so disquieted poor Lucy. At the root of
this same tree one miserable night Lucy buried her precious letters, and
"meant also to bury a grief" and her great affection for Dr. John. Here
she had leant her brow against Methuselah's knotty trunk and uttered to
herself those brave words of renunciation which must have wrung her
heart: "Good-night, Dr. John; you are good, you are beautiful, _but you
are not mine_. Good-night, and God bless you!" Here she held pleasant
converse with M. Paul, and with him, spell-bound, saw the ghost of the
nun descend from the leafy shadows overhead and, sweeping close past
their wondering faces, disappear behind yonder screen of shrubbery into
the darkness of the summer night. By that tall tree next the class-rooms
the ghost was wont to ascend to meet its material sweetheart, Fanshawe,
in the great garret beneath yonder skylight,--the garret where Lucy
retired to read Dr. John's letter, and wherein M. Paul confined her to
learn her part in the vaudeville for Madame Beck's _fête_-day. In this
nook where we sat, Crimsworth, "The Professor," had walked and talked
with and almost made love to Mademoiselle Reuter, and from yonder window
overlooking the alley had seen that perfidious fair one in dalliance
with his employer, M. Pelet, beneath these pear-trees. From that window
M. Paul watched Lucy as she sat or walked in the _allée défendue_,
dogged by Madame Beck; from the same window were thrown the love-letters
which fell at Lucy's feet sitting here.

Leaves from the overhanging boughs were plucked for us as souvenirs of
the place; then, reverently traversing once more the narrow alley so
often traced in weariness by Charlotte Bronté, we turned away. From the
garden we entered the long and spacious class-room of the first and
second divisions. A movable partition divides it across the middle when
the classes are in session; the floor is of bare boards cleanly scoured.
There are long ranges of desks and benches upon either side, and a lane
through the middle leads up to a raised platform at the end of the room,
where the instructor's chair and desk are placed.

How quickly our fancy peopled the place! On these front seats sat the
gay and indocile Belgian girls. There, "in the last row, in the
quietest corner, sat Emily and Charlotte side by side, so absorbed in
their studies as to be insensible to anything about them;" and at the
same desk, "in the farthest seat of the farthest row," sat Mademoiselle
Henri during Crimsworth's English lessons. Here Lucy's desk was rummaged
by M. Paul and the tell-tale odor of cigars left behind. Here, after
school-hours, Miss Bronté taught M. Héger English, he taught her French,
and M. Paul taught Lucy arithmetic and (incidentally) love. This was the
scene of their _tête-à-têtes_, of his earnest efforts to persuade her
into his faith in the Church of Rome, of their ludicrous supper of
biscuit and baked apples, and of his final violent outbreak with Madame
Beck, when she literally thrust herself between him and his love. From
this platform Crimsworth and Lucy Snowe and Charlotte Bronté herself had
given instruction to pupils whose insubordination had first to be
confronted and overcome. Here M. Paul and M. Héger gave lectures upon
literature, and Paul delivered his spiteful tirade against the English
on the morning of his _fête_-day. Upon this desk were heaped his
bouquets that morning; from its smooth surface poor Lucy dislodged and
fractured his cherished spectacles; and here, _now_, seated in Paul's
chair, at Paul's desk, we saw and were presented to Paul Emanuel
himself,--M. Héger.

It was something more than curiosity which made us alert to note the
appearance and manner of this man, who has been so nearly associated
with Miss Bronté in an intercourse which colored her whole subsequent
life and determined her life work, who has been made the hero of her
best novels and has even been deemed the hero of her own heart's
romance; and yet we _were_ curious to know "what manner of man it is"
who has been so much as suspected of being honored with the love and
preference of the dainty Charlotte Bronté. During a short conversation
with him we had opportunity to observe that in person this "wise, good,
and religious" man must, at the time Miss Bronté knew him, have more
closely resembled M. Pelet of "The Professor" than any other of her
pen-portraits: indeed, after the lapse of more than forty years that
delineation still, for the most part, aptly applies to him. He is of
middle age, of rather spare habit of body; his face is fair and the
features pleasing and regular, the cheeks are thin and the mouth
flexible, the eyes--somewhat sunken--are of mild blue and of singularly
pleasant expression. We found him elderly, but not infirm; his
finely-shaped head is now fringed with white hair, and partial baldness
contributes an impressive reverence to his presence and tends to enhance
the intellectual effect of his wide brow. In repose his countenance
shows a hint of melancholy: as Miss Bronté has said, "his physiognomy is
_fine et spirituelle_;" one would hardly imagine it could ever resemble
the "visage of a black and sallow tiger." His voice is low and soft, his
bow still "very polite, not theatrical, scarcely French," his manner
_suave_ and courteous, his dress scrupulously neat. He accosted us in
the language Miss Bronté taught him forty years ago, and his accent and
diction do honor to her instruction. He was, at this time, engaged with
some patrons of the school, and, as his daughter had hinted that he was
averse to speaking of Miss Bronté, we soon took leave of him and were
shown through other parts of the school. The other class-rooms, used for
less advanced pupils, are smaller. In one of them, the third, Miss
Bronté had ruled as monitress after her return from Haworth. The large
dormitory of the _pensionnat_ was above the long class-room, and in the
time of the Brontés most of the boarders--about twenty in number--slept
here. Their cots were arranged along either side, and the position of
those occupied by the Brontés was pointed out to us at the extreme end
of the long room. It was here that Lucy suffered the horrors of
hypochondria, so graphically portrayed in "Villette," and found the
discarded costume of the spectral nun lying upon her bed, and here Miss
Bronté passed those nights of "dreary, wakeful misery" which Mrs.
Gaskell describes.

A long and rather narrow room in front of the class-rooms was shown us
as the _réfectoire_, where the Brontés, with the other boarders, took
their meals, presided over by M. and Madame Héger, and where, during the
evenings, the lessons for the ensuing days were prepared. Here were held
the evening prayers, which Charlotte used to avoid by escaping into the
garden. This, too, was the scene of M. Paul's whilom readings to
teachers and pupils, and of some of his spasms of petulance, which
readers of "Villette" will remember. From the _réfectoire_ we passed
again into the corridor, where we made our adieus to our affable
conductress. She gave us her card, and explained that, whereas this
establishment had formerly been both a _pensionnat_ and an _externat_,
having about seventy day-pupils and twenty boarders when Miss Bronté was
here, it is now, since the death of Madame Héger, used as a day-school
only,--the _pensionnat_ being at some little distance, in the Avenue
Louise, where Mademoiselle is a co-directress.

The genuine local color Miss Bronté gives in "Villette" enabled us to be
sure that we had found the sombre old church where Lucy, arrested in
passing by the sound of the bells, knelt upon the stone pavement,
passing thence into the confessional of Père Silas. Certain it is that
this old church lies upon the route she would naturally take in the walk
from the Rue d'Isabelle to the Protestant cemetery, which she had set
out to do that dark afternoon, and the narrow streets of picturesque old
houses which lie beyond the church correspond to those in which she was
lost. Certain, too, it is said to be that this incident is taken
directly from Miss Bronté's own experience. A writer in "Macmillan"
says, "During one of the long holidays, when her mind was restless and
disturbed, she found sympathy, if not peace, in the counsels of a priest
in the confessional, who pitied and soothed her troubled spirit without
attempting to enmesh it in the folds of Romanism."

Our way to the Protestant cemetery, a spot sadly familiar to Miss
Bronté, and the usual termination of her walks, lay past the site of the
Porte de Louvain and out to the hills a mile or so beyond the old city
limits. From our path we saw more than one tree-surrounded farm-house
which might have been the place of M. Paul's breakfast with his school,
and at least one old-fashioned manor-house, with green-tufted and
terraced lawns, which might have served Miss Bronté as the model for "La
Terrasse," the suburban home of the Brettons, and probably the temporary
abode of the Taylor sisters whom she visited here. From the cemetery are
beautiful vistas of farther lines of hills, of intervening valleys, of
farms and villas, and of the great city lying below. Miss Bronté has
well described this place: "Here, on pages of stone, of marble, and of
brass, are written names, dates, last tributes of pomp or love, in
English, French, German, and Latin." There are stone crosses all about,
and great thickets of roses and yew-trees,--"cypresses that stand
straight and mute, and willows that hang low and still;" and there are
"dim garlands of everlasting flowers."

Here "The Professor" found his long-sought sweetheart kneeling at a
new-made grave, under these overhanging trees. And here _we_ found the
shrine of poor Charlotte Bronté's many weary pilgrimages hither,--the
burial-place of her friend and schoolmate Martha Taylor, the Jessy Yorke
of "Shirley," the spot where, under "green sod and a gray marble
headstone, cold, coffined, solitary, Jessy sleeps below."

THEO. WOLFE.




COOKHAM DEAN.


For a long time "the Dean" had had a certain familiarity for us. We
heard it continually spoken of among our artist friends, and had even
come to recognize many of its picturesque features as we came across
them in our usual studio-haunts and in the exhibitions. We seemed to
know those green, billowy swells at sight, as well as the thatched and
tiled roofs and old-fashioned gardens, the swinging barred gates and
stagnant, goose-tormented pools,--even the coarse-limbed rustics in
weather-beaten "store-clothes," picturesque only in mellow fadedness.

We knew all this; yet, when we set eyes and feet upon Cookham Dean for
the first time, behold, the half had not been told us! We had directed
many a letter to Cookham Dean, and knew them to have been duly delivered
by a bucolic postman on a tricycle. But a hundred canvases, and almost
as many tongues, had failed to tell us of the sunny slopes and shadowy
glades, the sylvan lanes and ribbon-like roads, the old stone inn with
open porch and sign swinging from lofty post set across the way, as
Italian campanile stand away from their churches, all coming under the
name of "Cookham Dean," although that "Dean," properly speaking, is only
their geographical and artistic centre.

Long before we reached _Ye Hutte_ from Cookham station--Ye Hutte set
amid bushy and climbing roses upon a prominent knoll of the many-knolled
Dean--we ceased to wonder that our picturesque imaginings of the region
we were passing through had been so various. Artists were before us,
artists behind us, artists on every side of us, two sketching-umbrellas
glinting like great tropical flowers in a corn-field, another like a
huge daisy in the dim vista of a long lane.

"C---- lodges in that red cottage, B---- in the next one, H---- in this
tumble-down farm-house, the L----s in that row of laborers' cottages,
the D----s in the inn," said Mona, tripping lightly over well-known
names, whose most accustomed place is in the exhibition catalogues.

Through the open windows of a hideous brick row, built to hold as many
laborers' families all the year round and as many Bohemian summer
artists as can crowd therein, we caught glimpses of tapestries worth
their weight in gold. One well-known artist has taken possession of the
end of this uncomely row, intended for a supply-shop to the
neighborhood. This shop is his studio, which he has filled with
treasures of Japanese art. As a Cookhamite assured us, "Mr. C---- goes
in for the _Japanesque_;" and he screens the large display-windows
intended for cheese, raisins, and potted meats with smiling mandarins
and narrow-eyed houris under octopus-like trees.

At the rear of the same "Row" we recognized a broad-hatted figure once
familiar to us in the Quartier Latin and the artistic _auberges_ of the
Forest of Fontainebleau. The very personification of _insouciance_ and
_laissez-aller_, he whose tiny bedroom-studio up-stairs ran riot with
color caught among California mountains, in cool gray France and
ochreous England, was bending the whole force of his mind to sketching a
pouter pigeon preening itself upon a barrel.

Still another of the ugly cottages, cursed by artists but inhabited by
them, was hired at ten pounds a year by two young landscapists. A
charwoman came every morning to quell the mad riots in which the
household gods (or demons) diurnally engaged, but at all other times the
landscapists manoeuvred for themselves. That the domestic manoeuvring of
young landscapists is not always _toute rose_ we saw reason later to
believe. For not once, twice, nor yet so seldom as a dozen times, have
we seen these young manoeuvrers begin to dine at four, when shadows
were growing too long upon field, thicket, and stream, only to finish we
knew not when, so late into darkness was that "finish" projected. We
could see one of the diners passing along the road from the public
house, an eighth of a mile away, at four, with the _pièce de résistance_
of the meal in an ample dish enveloped in a towel. Ten minutes later the
other rushes by, contrariwise of direction, in pursuit of beer and the
forgotten bread. A little later, and a scudding white dust-cloud in the
road informs us that one of the dining 'scapists flees breathlessly
vinegar- or salt-ward. Still another five minutes, and the other diner
hies him in chase of the white scud, calling vigorously to it that there
is no butter for the rice, no sugar for the fruit.

We saw at once that this Berkshire corner abounds more in dulcet and
sylvan landscape bits than in picturesque motifs for those who paint
_genre_. The peasants have a certain inchoate picturesqueness, as of
beings roughly evolved from the life of this fair material nature, and
sometimes, in silhouette against dun-gray skies and amid rugged fields,
give one vague feeling of Millet's pathos of peasant life and labor. The
yokel himself, however,--and particularly _herself_,--seems determined
to deny all poetic and picturesque relations, by clothing himself--and
herself--in coarse, shop-made rubbish, in battered, _démodé_ town-hats
and flounced gowns from Petticoat Lane.

From certain points of the "Dean" the distances are dreamy and wide,
with high horizon-lines touching wooded hills and shutting the Thames
into a middle distance toward which a hundred little hills either
descend abruptly or decline gently upon broad green meadows. Nature here
smiles, not with pure pagan blitheness, but with a tenderer grace, as of
a soul grown human and fraught with countless memories of man's smiles
and tears, his hard, bitter labor, his sins, sorrows, and longings. But
it is very tender, and not even the wildest storm-effects raise the
landscape to any expression of tragic grandeur, but only suede its fair
hues and soft outlines to the wan pathos peculiar to English moorlands.

_Ye Hutte_ is a misnomer for the extraordinary establishment, studio and
domicile combined, at which we dismounted. It is not a _hut_, and
neither in architectural motive nor the artistic proclivities of its
inmates has it aught to do with the centuries when our English tongue
was otherwise written or spoken than it is to-day. Ye Hutte is a vast,
barn-like building, plain and bare save for an inviting vine-grown porch
vaguely Gothic in reminiscence, although nondescript in fact. It was
erected by some dissenting society for public worship: hence its
interior is one immense vaulted room, with cathedral-like windows and
choir-gallery across one end. "The body of the house," to speak
ecclesiastically, is cumbered with easels and the usual chaotic
_impedimenta_ of painters. The choir, ascended by a ladder, holds three
tiny cot-beds, while beneath the choir and concealed by beautiful
draperies are stored the domestic and culinary paraphernalia,--pots,
pans, brushes, dishes, and, above all, the multiplicity of petroleum- and
spirit-stoves in which the Bohemian artistic soul delights. Ye Hutte is
an artist's studio, and its name may be found in all the exhibition
catalogues, for several generations of painters drift through it every
year. As one inmate rushes off to the Continent, the sea-shore, or the
mountains, another takes his place. Yet Ye Hutte holds scant place in
its real owner's esteem compared with that larger studio owned by all
the Dean artists in common, where all their summer's work is done, and
which is parquetted with grain-field gold and meadow emerald, walled
with rainbow horizons, and roofed with azure festooned with spun silk.
Ye Hutte is better appreciated as evening rendezvous for the
palette-bearing hosts, both male and female, who, sunbrowned and tired,
partake there of restful social converse as well as of the hospitable
cup that cheers. Evening after evening, by twos and threes, they sit in
the moonlight under the silver-touched vines and dewy blossoms of the
porch, listening to the far-away cry of night-birds, the murmur of
drowsy bells upon cattle stirring in sleep, or of human voices idealized
by remoteness into faint haunting music, while before them white light
touches the wooded heights of Cliefden,--distant heights full of
picturesque mystery and passionate history,--touches and idealizes into
a semblance of poetic realism the sham ruins of Hedsor, and spreads a
pearly sheen over the unseen Valley of the Shadow of Light through which
winds the quiet Thames.

To the usual artistic circle of Ye Hutte is often added a not
uncongenial element from the outside world, sometimes even from within
the borders of Philistia. Story-tellers, moved by the subtile magnetism
of the artistic creative faculty, whether of brush, chisel, or pen, come
up sometimes from London, bringing with them an atmosphere of
publishers' offices, of romance in high and low life, of professional
gossip and criticism. Often a stalwart bicyclist rolls up from the
capital, bringing with him such a breeze from the world of newspapers,
theatres, and crack restaurants that Ye Hutte straightway determines to
order some weekly journal, waxes ardent for flesh-pots other than of
Cookham, and resolves upon having a Lyceum twice a week when the Dean
shall be swept by the blasts and St. John's Wood studios swallow us up
for the winter.

The Dean is little favored of the ordinary fashionable visitor, for whom
artistic accommodations are quite too scantily luxurious. Now and then,
for the sake of the river, a rustic cot is taken for a few weeks by a
party of boating-people. Then the quaint, old-fashioned gardens blossom
with a sudden luxuriance of striped tents and flaming umbrellas, while
bright women in many-hued boating-costumes flit among cabbages and
onions like curious tropical birds and butterflies. As a rule, however,
the Dean is abandoned to its usual rustic population and to artists,
numbers of the latter remaining all winter in the haunts whence the
majority of their kind have flown.

The social and artistic peculiarities of the Dean are, of course, too
many to be specified. In a collection of various nationalities, many of
whose number have drifted like thistledown hither and yon over the fair
earth, how could it well be otherwise? It may be observed, however, that
here, as everywhere else in this right little tight little isle, where
habit is the very antithesis of the airy license of "Abroad," it is
_not_, as it is in the artistic haunts of the Continent, _en règle_ to
vaunt one's self on the paucity of one's shekels or to acknowledge
acquaintance with the Medici's pills in their modern form of the Three
Golden Balls.

Once upon a time, in a Barbizon _auberge_, a certain famous artist and
incorrigible Bohemian brought down the table by describing an incident
of his releasing a friend's valuables from durance.

"The moment I turned in at the Mont de Piété," he said, "_my_ watch took
fright, and stopped ticking on the spot."

That same Bohemian, after years of the Latin Quarter and Mont de Piété,
found himself one summer on the Dean. One evening at the porch of Ye
Hutte he met a lively group of painters and paintresses, just returned
from corn-field and meadow.

During the short halt the Bohemian's watch was so largely and frequently
_en évidence_ as to attract attention.

"Yes," he said, with colossal, adamantine impudence, "I've just got it
back from a two-years' visit to 'my uncle'."

Only a few evenings later the same party met again in the same spot.

"What time is it, Mr. S----?" asked Sophia Primrose, amiably disposed to
resuscitate a forlorn joke.

A mammoth blush submerged the luckless Bohemian. For Dean propriety was
already becoming engrafted upon Continental habit, and he crimsoned at
having to confess what once he would have proclaimed upon the
house-top,--that his watch was again with his "uncle."

Probably nine-tenths of the Continental artists who are not entirely
beyond the dread of yet eating "mad cow" travel third-class. But Dean
artists, however they may travel when out of England, generally slip
quietly away from the sight of their acquaintances when their tickets
are other than at least second. Our Bohemian was once presented with a
second-class ticket to London. As he scrambled in upon the unwonted
luxury of cushioned seats, he saw familiar faces blushing furiously.

"The first time we ever travelled second-class in our lives," murmured
Materfamilias.

"I too," responded the cheeky Bohemian.

Another difference between Dean Bohemianism and Continental is
characteristic of the whole race whose land this is. Whereas artists in
France, Italy, and Germany are of gregarious habit and gather for their
summers in rural inns, where they form a community by themselves, the
Dean artist sets up his own vine and fig-tree and has a temporary home,
if ever so small and mean. The farm-houses and cottages of the Dean are
filled with lodgers, all dining at separate tables and living as aloof
from each other as the true Briton always lives. There are advantages in
this aloofness, but it certainly lacks the _camaraderie_, the jolly
good-fellowship, of those picturesque _auberges_ and _osterie_ where
twenty or thirty of one calling are gathered together under one roof,
meeting daily at table, where artistic criticism is pungent and free,
artistic assistance ungrudging, tales of artistic experience and
adventure racy, the atmosphere stimulative to the spreading out of every
artistic theory possible to the sane and insane mind.

In one of these Continental _auberges_ rough boards a foot in width ran
in one unbroken line round the four sides of the _salle-à-manger_. These
boards were perhaps hazily intended for seats, but their real office
was to hold all the artistic rubbish--smashed color-tubes, broken
stretchers, ragged canvases, discarded palettes, disreputable paint-rags
and oil-tubes--the _auberge_ possessed. But every sunset, as the stream
of artists set in from forest and field, the boards came into other
service. All the work of the day was ranged upon them along the wall,
and while the painters sat at meat comment and criticism grew rampant,
every canvas coming in for its share. That many good lessons were given
and taken in this wise _va sans dire_. That also artistic progress was
punctuated not unseldom with "_bêtise_," "_imbécile_," "_nom du chien_,"
"you're a goose," and "you're another," goes equally without saying to
all who know the unrestraint of artistic Bohemia and the usual attitude
of the human mind under criticism.

The walls of this _salle-à-manger_ were--and are--arranged with panels,
in which _messieurs les artistes_ exercised their skill. It is a marked
peculiarity of these artistic communities that no branch of art is so
popular as caricature. Sometimes these caricatures are amiable,
sometimes the reverse. Thus, when a certain blithe widow was represented
colossally upon the wall with a little man in her eye, the likenesses
were so good and the truth of the caricature so palpable that the widow
herself was moved to as quick laughter as the others. But when American
Palmer worked all day upon a panel to create a sunny sea laughing
radiantly back at a sunny sky, while fantastic lateen-sailed craft
floated like bits of jewelled color between, it was mean, to say the
least, of Scotch Willie to take advantage of the American's departure
and paint out those fairy boats, filling their places with horrible
bloated corpses, floating upon the bright water like a nightmare upon
innocent sleep.

It was in this same _auberge_ that our landlady made this piteous
supplication: "Caricature each other on the walls, _messieurs et
mesdames, si vous voulez_; make portrait busts of the bread and
figurines of the potatoes, and decorate the plates in whatever style of
art you please; but don't, _je vous en supplie_, don't blacken the
table-cloths before they are three days old."

Alas! this was eloquence lost; for, at that very dinner, conversation
chancing to turn upon the subtile malignity of Fanny Matilda's smiles,
Fanny Matilda being there present, in less time than it takes to tell it
twenty crayon smiles writhed and wriggled upon the spick-span cloth.

"_Mon Dieu! mon Dieu_!" moaned Madame. "And only yesterday every
handkerchief upon the line came in bearing the noses of _messieurs et
mesdames_!"

Aloofly though the Deanite lives, he is not altogether an unsocial
being. Neither are his domestic habits always as invisible to the finite
eye as he perhaps intends them to be. Tent-life has scant privacy, and
the circumscribed accommodation of the Dean leads to frequent "slopping
over" into cloth annexes.

Opposite our windows a certain painter spent no inconsiderable time in
the peak-roofed tent upon the grass-plot. There the young
foreign-looking wife, in scarlet _birette_ and jaunty petticoats just
touching high boot-tops, with long, flowing hair, as bright and
effective as any pictured _vivandière_, made tea and coffee over a
petroleum-stove, laid the table, sat at her sewing, posed for her
husband, received her callers, as charming a gypsy picture as ever
brightened canvas.

For the very best of reasons, we were not 'cyclists, although in a
country set with 'cycles as the fields with flowers or the sky with
stars.

For reasons equally good, we were not boatists, although the watery way
from Oxford to the sea flowed so near our door, and our village was one
of the gayest head-quarters not only of the fresh-water navy, whose arms
are flashing oars and whose oaths are of the universities, but equally
that of regiments of painters, whose arms are sketching-umbrellas and
easels and who swear not at all,--or at least not to feminine hearing.

Our lodgings were among the artists in the region farther back from the
river than that monopolized by the boating-people. We were back among
the sunny slopes and smiling meadows, the red-tiled farm-houses and
dusky lanes, of the still primitive natives of the region, while the
navy covered the shining river by day and overran the river-side
hostelries by night.

Our lodgings were not picturesque, if truth must be told, although
surrounded by picturesqueness as by a garment,--a circular cloak of it,
so to say. We had the chief rooms of a staring new and square brick
cottage, glaring with white walls inside, shutterless outside, majestic
with a bow-window too high to look from except upon one's legs, owned by
my Lady H----'s gardener, and elegantly named "Ethel Cottage," as a
stucco plaque in its frieze bore witness. We should have preferred
accommodations in any of the ivy-grown, steep-roofed cots about us, or
in the old stone inn, with its peaked porch, where honest yokels quaffed
nutty ale and a sign-board creaked and groaned from its gibbet across
the road. But we had come too late in the painting-season for any other
than Hobson's choice: the tidbits of grime and squalor were all taken,
and we must e'en content ourselves to be mocked and reviled for the
philistinism of our domestic establishing, or else hie us hence where
artists were not and Ethel Cottages as yet unknown.

But where, tell me where, are not artists in England? And where, tell me
where, do artists gather in squads that Ethel Cottages do not spring up
like the tents of an army with banners? For even painters must eat and
be lodged, the aboriginal habitations are not of elastic capacity, the
inns are of feeble digestion, and the third summer of an artistic
invasion is sure to find "Ethels" and "Mabels" in red brick and stunning
whitewash, and, like our row of laborers' cottages, cursed by artists,
but inhabited by them.

It was a _soulagement_ of our æsthetic discomfort that so long as we
remained hidden within it we never realized our own hideousness. Now and
then we saw the ugly squareness of our afternoon shadow upon our
aristocratically-gravelled front yard, but ordinarily we saw only dreamy
distances melting into piny duskiness against the far-off sky, the
serpent-like windings of the tranquil river, upon which its navy looked
like dust-motes, fair fields of golden grain, and the farm-houses and
cottages which looked upon our blank brickness with admiration and
wondered why we were despised of our less beautifully housed kind, when
our forks were four-pronged and of silvery seeming and our floors
carpeted to our sybaritic feet. It was only when we returned to our
Ethel after long tramps over the country-side, from a four-miles-distant
Norman tower or a ten-miles-away pre-Reformation abbey, now stable or
granary, that we figuratively beat our breasts and tore our hair because
Fate had not made us _real_ tramps, privileged to sleep in
pre-Reformation stables or 'neath pre-Reformation stars, rather than the
imitation tramps we were, wedded to the habits but loathing the aspect
of red-faced, staring Ethels.

What would we not have given for an invitation to pass a time, as Miss
Muloch was, in one of those Thames monsters concerning which she wrote
her fascinating pages, "A Week in a House-Boat"! We could scarce catch a
glimpse of the river upon our tramps--and it was our constant silvery
accompaniment, as the treble to a part-song--without coming across these
ungraceful, unwieldy creatures, seeming like bloated denizens of depths
below come to bask upon the surface. Hundreds of them dot the river
between Teddington and Oxford: once we counted ten between Ethel and the
wooded island whither we rowed every Sunday to dine from ponderous
hampers upon a huge tree-stump. Many of them are owned and occupied by
artists, who have them towed by horses up and down the river every week
or two, or moor them for months in one place while painting
river-scenery. Some are inhabited by maniacal fishermen, who sit day
after day all day long at the end of poles protruding from front or
back doors or bedroom windows. Some are inhabited by Londoners in whom
primeval instincts for air, space, sunshine, and liberty break out every
summer from under the thick crust of modern habits and conventions and
cause them to breathe, as we did, not angelical aspirations, but "I want
to be a gypsy."

Some of these house-boats are miracles of microscopic luxury, doll-like
bedrooms and dining-rooms for pygmies. In some, also, marvels of
culinary skill are evolved in pocket-space by French _chefs_ who spend
their days creating the banquets to which the boaters invite their
_convives_ at evening, when the cold river-mists have driven the navy
into harbor for the night. Others are much simpler in construction and
furnishing, and the inhabitants live largely upon tinned and potted
viands and such light cooking as comes within the possibilities of
oil-stoves and fires of fagots on the banks. Still others--and we often
saw their lordly and corpulent owners reading the "Times" upon the
handkerchief space which serves for porch or piazza before their front
doors--move up and down the river from crack hotel to cracker, taking no
note of picturesque "bits" or of mooring-places where Paradise seems
come down to lodge between Berks and Bucks, caring naught that at this
point four exquisite churches and two interesting manor-houses are
within tramping-distance, at that a feudal castle and the fairest inland
picture that England and nature can offer their lovers, caring only that
at the "King" the trout are the best cooked on the whole river, at the
"Queen" the chops are divine, while at the "Prince" the _perdrix aux
truffes_ are worth mooring there a week for. These house-boaters are
generally accompanied by garish wives and daughters, who spend their
time in the streets of the town where they chance to be moored,--and
they seldom are moored elsewhere than at the larger towns,--exchanging
greetings and chatting with such acquaintances as they there meet, or
idling up and down the river in the luxurious small boats of their
river-made friends. This type of house-boater himself is generally
spoken of in brisk naval asides as a "duffer," the kitchen of his boat
is a wine-closet, and, to look at him poring for hours over his paper,
one may well believe that time is heavy on his hands and that he arrives
during every summer vacation at depths of mortal ennui where "nothing
new is, and nothing true is, and no matter!"

Americans personally unacquainted with England can form little idea of
the extent to which physical culture is carried here, and the universal
summer madness for athletic sports and out-of-door amusements. The
equable climate, never too hot, never too cold, for river-pull or
cricket, is Albion's advantage in this respect over almost all the rest
of the world, and particularly over our fervid and freezing clime. Even
although this is pious England, where the gin-shops cannot open after
the noon of Sunday until the bells ring for the evening service and
"Pub" and church spring open and alight simultaneously, even in pious
England Sunday is the day of all the week on which the river takes on
its merriest aspect, and from the multitudes of familiar faces and
frequency of friendly greetings reminds one of Regent Street and the
Parks. All prosperous and proper London--the amusement is too costly for
'Arry--seems to float itself upon Thames water that day, coming up forty
land-miles from the metropolis to do so. Boats are furiously in demand,
every picnic nook is pre-empted from earliest morning, the river-side
tea-gardens are thronged, the inns are depleted of men and women in
yachting-costumes, and the locks are jammed as full as they can be of
highly-draped boats, gayly-dressed women, and circus-costumed men, the
whole scene gayer, brighter, more fantastic than any Venetian carnival
since the days of the most sumptuous of the Adriatic doges.

One or two real Venetian gondolas are kept at that river-reach where we
spent our summer. The owner of the principal one is an English nobleman
who lived long in Italy and whose twelve daughters were born there. It
is a sight to see those twelve beautiful sisters, from six years of age
to twenty-four, poled down the river to church every Sunday morning by a
swarthy and veritable Venetian gondolier. Whether or not that
hearse-like craft has sacred associations in the minds of the twelve
maidens all in a row, or whether its grimness and want of swiftness seem
out of place amid the carnival brilliancy of Sunday afternoon, it is
certain that it is never used except for church-going, and the maidens
appear later in the day each in her own swift little canoe, or two or
three sisters together in a larger one, darting to and fro, hither and
yon, with almost incredible swiftness, almost more like winged thoughts
than like even swallows on the wing. The gabled and ivy-wreathed
Elizabethan manor-house which is the summer home of the maidens stands
but a few rods from the river's bank. Here, amidst decorous shrubbery,
upon smooth shaven and rolled turf, where marble vases overflow with
gorgeous flowers, sit Pater and Mater among their dozens of guests. Some
of the gentlemen are in correct morning dress, some in boating-costumes,
and some in that last stage of unclothedness or first of clothedness
which is the English bathing-dress. In their striped tights on land
these last look exactly like saw-dust and rope ring clowns, but when
they dive into the water from that well-bred lawn and dart in wild
pursuit of the maidens, who beat them off with oars from climbing into
the canoes, amid shouts of aquatic and terrestrial laughter, one would
almost swear they were neither the clowns they looked a moment ago, nor
yet the English gentlemen they really are, but fantastic mermen bent
upon carrying earth-brides back with them into their cool native depths
beneath the bright water.

That is what it looks like. But a single glimpse into those cool dappled
depths, where the sunny water is shoal enough to show bottom, reveals,
alas! how little mermaiden and romantic those depths are. For London
does not disport itself every Sunday on the Thames without leaving ample
traces of that disporting. We see those traces gleaming and glooming
there,--empty beer- and wine-bottles, devitalized sardine-boxes, osseous
remains of fish, flesh, and fowl, scooped cheese-rinds, egg-shells, the
buttons of defrauded raiment, and the parted rims of much-snatched-at
and vigorously-squabbled-for straw hats.

A favorite boating-trip is from Teddington up to Oxford, or _vice
versa_, spending a week or two on the way, and stopping at river-side
inns at night. In the season these inns are full to overflowing, and the
roughest and smallest of water-side hamlets holds its accommodations at
lofty premiums. A number of public pleasure-steamers and many private
steam-launches ply up and down, making the whole trip in two or three
days, drawing up at night at towns, and by day provoking curses both
loud and deep by the swash of their tidal waves against the liliputian
navy. Many of the merry boating-parties of men and women seek only
sleeping-accommodations at the inns, and do their own cooking upon bosky
islands, on the wooded or sunny banks of the river, by means of
kerosene- or charcoal-stoves and tiny tents. How appetizingly we have
thus smelt the broiling steak and grilled chop done to a turn even in a
camp frying-pan, as we tramped along the river heights and looked down
upon chatting groups below! How like airs of Araby the Blest the odors
of steaming coffee! how more stimulating than breath of fair Spice Isles
the pungent incense of hissing onions!

As a consequence of this return of Nature's children to Nature's breast,
the _genii loci_, the sylvan sprites, are all frightened inland from the
borders of the beautiful river. Except here and there where huge boards
threaten trespassers and announce that landing is forbidden upon this
Private Property, wild flowers will not grow, the grass looks trampled
and dim, the soft summer zephyrs play among empty paper bags and
relics of grocers' parcels, with sound and sentiment vastly unlike their
natural music among green, waving leaves. The river is spoiled for the
poet and the dreamer, and even the artist must choose his bits with
care. Hyde Park and Piccadilly have come up to the Thames; and what does
Hyde Park care for the poetry of dreaming nature, or what the
river-madmen for aught else than glorious expansion of muscle and
strengthening of sinew and the godlike sense of largeness and lightness
which comes with that strengthening and expanding?

Gliding up and down the river, one would suppose all London had taken to
boats. But we as trampists came to other conclusions as we pegged along
the white Berkshire highways, smooth and even as parquetted floors, day
after day. There the bicycle holds its own, and more too, being largely
adopted not only by genuine 'cyclists, but by others as well whose only
interest is to cover the ground as quickly as possible,--amateur
photographers lashed all over with apparatus, artists shapelessly ditto,
and pastoral postmen square-backed with letter-pouches. Women
tricyclists are only less numerous, and the dignity and modesty must be
crude indeed that find objections to this manner of feminine
peregrination. The costume is simple and plain,--close-fitting upper
garments, without fuss of furbelow, and plain close skirts, met at the
ankles by high buttoned boots. A lady's seat upon a tricycle is far less
conspicuous than upon a horse, her bodily motion is less, and the
movement of her feet scarcely more than is necessary to run a
sewing-machine. She sits at her ease in a perfectly lady-like manner,
and flies over the ground like a courser of the desert, if she pleases,
or rolls quietly and smoothly along, chatting easily with the
pedestrians who amble at her side.

Lady tricyclists attract no attention whatever in Oxford Street. Imagine
one flying down Broadway!

As trampists our femininely-encumbered party in those delicious English
days considered fourteen quotidian miles not discreditable to us,
particularly when taking into consideration the bleats and baas and
whimpering laggardness with which we returned from three-mile excursions
during the first few days we were in the tramping-line. By degrees we
thus explored the whole country within a radius of seven miles of Ethel.
With this we were content, yea, even proud; for did not many of our
boating women-neighbors grumble even at their walk to the river and
declare they would rather row five miles than walk one? We were proud,
for we knew every church, every picturesque cottage and ruin, within our
radius, while our aquatic friends knew only those bordering the river.
We were proud--until, ah me! until that desolate day when a merrily,
merrily flying squad swooped down upon us and declared they had 'cycled
every inch of the _twenty-mile_ periphery of which Ethel's neighboring
church tower was the centre!

That cutting down of our pedal pride resulted in our subscribing to a
daily paper. Every morning before stretching out to our regular day's
tramp we had been wont to trot through dewy lanes, over stiles, and
across subtly-colored turnip- and cabbage-fields, to purchase in the town
of M---- a luxury not to be had in our own hamlet,--the "Daily News."
Rain or shine, that trot must be trotted, for there were those among us
who would have tramped sulkily all day and sniffed the sniff of wrath at
ivied church and thatched cottage were the acid of their natures not
made frothy and light by the alkali of their morning paper. It had never
occurred to us, not even when we camped beneath wayside shade around our
sandwiches and ale or in some stiff and dim inn-parlor and listened to
the reading of the "News," that in reality the town of M----, and not
the brickhood of Ethel, was thus the centre of all our ambulatory
circumferences. It had never before dawned upon us that we thus added
three uncounted miles to our fourteen diurnally counted ones. What
astonishment at our own pedometric weakness of calculation! What disgust
to find our periphery thus three whole miles smaller than it need have
been!

The next day we subscribed to the "News," and walked nine miles as the
bee flies from the front door of Ethel even unto the ruins of Medmenham.
And we vowed by all our plaster gods and painted goddesses that another
summer we would tramp no more. We would 'cycle.

A mile away from Ethel is the village proper of Cookham. It is a sleepy
town, save in the boating-season; and whoever enters the post-office in
any season finds it empty and inhospitable. Raps upon a tightly-closed
inner door call a woman attendant from rattling sewing or noisy gossip
of the invisible penetralia; and as soon as the business is done the
inhospitable door swings shut again in the stranger's face.

Cookham houses are quaint, often timbered, frequently ivy-grown from
basement to roof. One imagines them assuming a half-sullen air at this
yearly breaking of their dreamy repose by incursions of parti-colored
hordes for whom life seems to hold but two supreme objects,--boats and
pictures.

The most picturesque feature of the place is the old church, set amid
tombs whose mossy and time-gnawed cherubs have exchanged grins for two
hundred years and more. The old flint tower is grave and grim, but
softened by a wonderful centuries old ivy in a veil of living green. A
pathetic interest to artists hallows the venerable church-yard. Here
sleeps Frederick Walker, a genius cut off before his meridian, and
resting now amid his kindred in a lowly grave, over which the Thames
waters surge every spring, leaving the grave all the rest of the year
the sadder for its cold soddenness and for the humid mildew and decay
eating already into the headstone, as yet but twelve years old. In the
church itself is Thorneycroft's mural tablet to the dead artist, a
portrait head of him who was born almost within the old church's shadow,
and whose pencil dealt always so lovingly with the poetic aspects of his
native region.

MARGARET BERTHA WRIGHT.




BIRDS OF A TEXAN WINTER.


White of Selborne was, on the whole, tolerably content to plunge his
swallows, or a good proportion of them, into the mud and deposit them
for the winter at the bottom of a pond. Professionally conservative, as
a fine old Church-of-England clergyman, though constitutionally
sceptical, as became one of the earliest of really observant
naturalists, he was loath to break flatly with the consensus of
contemporary opinion, rustic and philosophic, and found a _modus
vivendi_ in the theory that a great many, perhaps a majority, of the
swifts and barn-swallows did go to Africa. He had seen them organizing
their emigration-parties and holding noisy debate over the best time to
start and the best route to take. The sea-part of the travel was of
trifling length, and baiting-places were plenty in France, Spain, and
Italy. Sometimes, such was their power of wing, they were known to take
the outside route and strike boldly across the Bay of Biscay, for they
had alighted on vessels. Probably the worthy old man was reluctant to
wrench from the rural mind a harmless remnant of superstition,--if
superstition it might be called, in view of the fact that sundry
saurians and chelonians, held by classifiers to be superior in rank to
birds, do hibernate under water, and that, more marvellous than all, the
quarrymen of his day, like those of ours, insisted that living frogs
occasionally sprang from under their chisel, leaving an unchallengeable
impress in the immemorial rock. It must indeed have been up-hill work to
extinguish the old belief in the minds of men who had seen the
water-ouzel pattering in perfect ease and comfort along the floor of the
pellucid pool, and who had heard from their fisher friends from the
north coast of the gannets that were drawn up in the herring-nets.

Most of us, even _color chi sanno_, like to retain a spice of mystery in
our mental food. It may constitute no part of the nutriment, and may
often be deleterious, but it meets a want, somehow or other, and wants,
however undefinable, must be recognized. It is a spur that titillates
the absorbent surfaces and helps to keep them in action. It is a craving
that the race is never going to outlive, and that will afford occupation
and subsistence to a considerable class of its most intelligent and
respectable members until the year one million, as it has done since the
year one. The great mass of us like to see the absolute reign of reason
tempered by the incomprehensible, and are ever ready to lend a kindly
ear to men and things that humor that liking.

Where do all the birds, myriads in number and scores in species, go when
they leave the North in the winter? A small minority lags, not
superfluous, for we are delighted to have them, but in a subdued,
pinched, and hand-to-mouth mode of existence in marked contrast to their
summer life and perceptibly marring the pleasure of their society. They
flock around our homes and assume a mendicant air that is a little
depressing. Unlike the featherless tramps, they pay very well for their
dole; but we should prefer them, as we do our other friends, to be
independent, and that although we know they are but winter friends and
will coolly turn their backs upon us as soon as the weather permits. The
spryest and least dependent of them all, the snow-bird, who sports
perpetual full dress, jerks at us his expressive tail and is off at the
first thaw, black coat, white vest, and all. No tropics or sub-tropics
for him. He can stand our climate and our company with a certain
condescending tolerance so long as we keep the temperature not too much
above zero, but grows contemptuous when Fahrenheit grows effeminate and
forty. Nothing for it then but to cool off his thin and unprotected legs
and toes in the snows of Canada. "The white North hath his" heart. Our
winter is his summer. There is nothing in his anatomy to explain this
idiosyncrasy. His physical construction closely resembles that of his
insessorial brethren, most of whom go when he comes. He has no
discoverable provision against cold. Adaptation to environment does not
seem to cover his case. It does not cover his legs. They remain
unfeathered. We shudder to see his translucent little tarsi on top of
the snow, which he obviously prefers as a stand-point to bare spots
where the snow has been blown away. Compared with the ptarmigan and the
snowy owl, or even the ruffed grouse, all so well blanketed, he suggests
a survival of the unfittest.

The movements of this tough little anti-Darwinian are overlapped by the
bluebird and the robin,--our robin, best entitled to the name, inasmuch
as it is accorded him by fifty-odd millions against thirty millions who
give it to the redbreast,--who are usually with him long before he gets
away. They never move very far southward, but watch the cantonments of
Frost, ready to advance the moment his outposts are drawn in and signs
appear of evacuation. Their climate, indeed, is determined in winter
rather by altitude than by latitude. The low swamps and pineries that
skirt tide-water in the Middle States furnish them a retreat. Thence
they scatter themselves over the tertiary plain as it widens southward
beneath the granite bench that divides all the great rivers south of the
Hudson into an upper and a lower reach. Detachments of them extend their
tour to the Gulf. Readers of "A Subaltern on the Campaign of New Orleans
in 1814-15" will recall his mention of the assemblage of robins hopping
over the Chalmette sward that were the first living inhabitants to
welcome the weary invaders on emerging from the palmetto marshes. They
can hardly be said to reach the particular region of which we propose to
speak, both species, the bluebird especially, being almost strangers to
it.

Other species, the cardinal grosbeak among them, may be said to stop,
as it were, just out of hearing, the echo of their song slumbering in
the thin, keen air, ready to swell again into unmistakable reality.
Between these stubborn fugitives and those who follow the butterflies to
the tropics there is a wide variety in the extent of travel in which our
winged compatriots indulge.

Quadrupeds, whose movements are less speedy and more limited, have to
adapt themselves to the Northern winter as best they may. Hard and long
training has made them less the creatures of climate than their
feathered associates, who might themselves in many cases have learned
perforce to stay where they were reared but for possessing the light and
agile wings which woo them to wander. We may fancy Bruin, with his
passion for sweet mast and luscious fruits, eying with envy the martin
and the wild fowl as they sweep over his head to the teeming Southland,
and wondering, as he huddles shivering into his snowy lair, why Nature
should be so partial in her gifts. The call of the trumpeting swan, the
bugler crane, and the Canada goose falls idly upon his ear. To their
breezy challenge, "A new home,--who'll follow?" he cannot respond.

Let us join this tide of travel and move sunward with some of those who
take through-tickets. We can easily keep up with them now. Steam is not
slower than wings,--often faster. Sitting at ease, yet moved by iron
muscles, we can time the coursers of the air. A few decades ago, when
this familiar motor was a new thing comparatively, we could not do so.
At the jog of twenty miles an hour, even the sparrow could pass us on a
short stretch, and the dawdling crow soon left us in the rear. Our gain
upon their time is so recent that the birds have not yet fully realized
it. Unaccustomed to being beaten by anything _on earth_, they will skim
along abreast of a train till, to their unspeakable, or at least
unspoken, wonderment, they find that what they are fleeing from is
fleeing from them. One morning last winter I was speeding eastward to
the Crescent City, the freshest of my memories a struggle at Houston
with one of those breakfasts which so atrociously distinguish the reign
of the magnate who is said to supply under contract all the meals of the
Southern railway-restaurants, and who, "if ever fondest prayer for
others' woe avail on high," will certainly be booked, with the vote of
some of his victims, for a post-mundane berth a good deal warmer than
his coffee and more sulphurous than his eggs. Afar off to the right the
sun was rounding up from the Gulf and clearing the haze from his broad,
red face, the better to look abroad over the glistening prairie and see
if the silhouetted pines and cattle were where he had left them the day
before. Glancing to the left, which was my side of the car, I became
aware of a large bird suspended in the air, not motionless, for his
wings were doing their best, but to all appearance as stationary as the
scattered trees and cattle, and about fifteen yards distant. Every
feature and marking of the "chicken," or pinnated grouse, was as
distinct to the eye as though, instead of making thirty-two miles an
hour, he were posing for his photograph. For full two hundred yards he
sustained the race, until, finding that his competitor had the better
wind, he gave it up and shot suddenly into the sedge. How much longer
the match had lasted I could not say. He must have got up near the
engine--of course losing some time in the act of rising--and fallen back
gradually to my place, which was in a rear car. But when a schedule for
birds comes to be framed, it is safe to set down _Tetrao cupido_ at
about the speed above named. Timed from a rail-car, that is; for, looked
at over a gun, he seems to move five times as fast. The double-barrel is
a powerful binocular.

Steam, then, soon carries us to the resort of the lost truants, who have
travelled with the lines of longitude by guides and tracks over that
invisible road as unerring as those of the railway. We shall find them
in close companionship with friends unknown in our latitude, whose
abiding-places are at the South, as those left behind are fixed dwellers
at the North.

From the window at which I sit on this morning late in January and this
parallel of thirty degrees,--window open, as well as the door, for no
norther is on duty to-day,--I see flocks of our familiar redwings,
cowbirds, and blackbirds, all mingled together as though the hard and
fast lines of species had been obliterated and made as meaningless as
the concededly evanescent shades of variety, trooping busily over the
lawn and blackening the leafless China-trees. But they have a crony
never seen by us. This is the crow-blackbird of the South, or jackdaw as
it is wrongly called, otherwise known as the boat-tailed grackle, from
his over-allowance of rudder that pulls him side-wise and ruins his
dead-reckoning when a wind is on. His wife is a sober-looking lady in a
suit of steel-gray, and the pair are quite conspicuous among their
winter guests. The latter are far less shy than we are accustomed to
find them, a majority being young in their first season and with little
or no experience of human guile. No one cares to shoot them, in the
abundance of larger game, and the absence of stones from the fat
prairie-soil places them out of danger from the small boy. Their only
foe is the hawk, who levies blackmail on them as coolly and regularly as
any other plumed cateran. Partly, perhaps, by reason of this outside
pressure, they are cheek by jowl with the poultry,--the cow-bunting,
which is the pet prey of the hawk, following them into the back porch
and insisting sometimes on breakfasting with Tray,--or rather with
Legion, for that is the name of the Texas dog. In this familiarity they
are approached, though not equalled, by that more home-staying bird the
meadow-lark, who is here a dweller of the lawn and garden and adds his
mellow whistle to the orchestra of the mocking-bird. This so-called lark
is classed by most naturalists among the starlings, as are two of the
blackbirds, which two he resembles in some of his habits, but not in
migrating, being about as much of a continental as any other biped
American. Nor is he like his cousins in changes of dress. Out of a dozen
of the latter that may be brought down at a shot, you will scarcely find
three exactly alike. They moult at the South, and the young pass
gradually into adult plumage. The male redwing, up to his first autumn,
is hardly distinguishable in dress from his mother. Here he dons his
epaulettes, beginning with the threadbare worsted yellow of the private,
and rising in grade to the rich scarlet and gold of the officer fully
commissioned to flame upon the marsh and carry havoc among its humblest
inhabitants.

A month or two hence, the plover, as shy in his Northern haunts as the
lark, will, in three species, be as much at home upon the lawn. Youth
and inexperience must, as in the case of the other birds, be one
explanation of this unwonted familiarity. Among other reasons is the
abundance of food, under a mild sky, with but rare frosts to bind the
earth and no snows to cover it. The temperature of an average winter day
is 60° or 65°. A norther is apt to blow three or four times in the
season, and it brings the mercury down to freezing-point or some degrees
lower. After the two or three days of its duration, the first warm
morning covers the walks and most other bare parts of the soil with
worm-casts,--revealing the larders of the smaller birds. At an average,
too, of four or five places in an acre one notices a hillock two or
three feet in diameter tipped with a yellowish spot that deepens into
orange and broadens as the air grows warm. These erections are the work
of ants, the emergence of which intelligent insects in greater or less
numbers, according to the temperature, causes the coloring which we
observe. Intelligent we cannot help terming a creature so remarkable in
its various species for the evidences of calculation furnished by its
habits of life,--evidences nowhere better worth studying than among the
leaf-cutting, slave-holding, and shade-planting ants of Texas; but we
are sometimes tempted to deny the character to this particular species
when we perceive the utter indifference to safety with which it selects
a site for its communistic abode. One of these is located in the middle
of the principal (sandy and unpaved) street of a village, within twenty
steps of the railroad-track, and subject to the impact of wheels and
mule-, ox-, or horse-hoof many times an hour; yet the semblance of a
dwelling is maintained, and the little tawny cloud comes up smiling
whenever the sun allows, asking no other permission. These ant-hills, I
am persuaded, supply a foundation to certain tufts of low trees which
spring up in dampish places where the spring fires have less sweep. The
hillocks are well drained, as appears from their composition of clear
gravel, a material of which you will find more in one of them than on a
surface of many feet around; and you may see the sweeter grasses
gradually mantling them, these being followed by herbage of larger
growth, which, accumulating humors at their roots, bourgeon into
arborescence, until, one vegetable entity shouldered into substance and
thrift by another, the nucleus built by our tiny red friends has
broadened into a tree-clad knoll. The mezquit, not many years ago
confined for the most part to the arid region beyond the Nueces, is
spreading eastward, and the clumps of it which begin to skirt the
original copses here may be supposed to owe their first foothold to the
ant. This humble promoter of forestry is duly appreciated, if only as a
viand, by his neighbors. Full-grown, and still more in the larval stage,
he is esteemed by them as both a toothsome and a beaksome bit. He--or,
more numerously, she, if we insist on sex and decline the more
practically correct _it_--forms thus the lowest term in an ascending
series of animal life that grows out of the ant-hill like the tree. So
much may one such settlement in a rood of ground do for the maintenance
of organic existence.

A still more diffused, perhaps, if less productive, source of life
exists in another burrower and mound-builder, the crawfish. Unlike the
ant, which likes to drain, he is an advocate of irrigation. In this art
he can give our well-diggers odds in the game. His genius for striking
water is wonderful. On the dryest parts of the prairie, miles from any
permanent stream, his ejections of mud may be found. Shallow or deep,
his borings always reach water. He is always at home, but less
accessible to callers than the ant. To the smaller birds he is forbidden
fruit. In wet weather, when his vestibule is shallow, the sand-hill
crane may burglarize him, or even get a snap judgment on him at the
front door. The bill of the great curlew cannot be sent in so
effectively, not being so rightly drawn; but that bird, more common in
the season than anywhere else away from the coast, finds plenty of other
food. He is not here in the winter. His place just now is filled by the
jacksnipe, which flutters up from every boggy place and comes to bag in
a condition anything but suggestive of short commons. The snipe's
terrestrial surface lies two and a half inches beneath ours. At that
distance he strikes hard pan; but it is margin enough for his
operations, and he is not often caught among the shorts. Gourmands
assure us that he lives "by suction," and that there is consequently no
harm in eating his trail. There is comfort in this creed, whatever may
be our private belief in the substantiality of what the bird absorbs;
and we cheerfully eat, after the suggestion of Paul, "asking no
questions," the while tacitly assuring ourselves, like old Fuller with
the strawberry, that a better bird might doubtless have been made, but
as certainly never was. For game flavor not even the partridge (Bob
White), also exceptionally abundant here, is his superior.

But think, ye snow-bound, of the state of things implied in this
embarrassment of riches,--of a mid-winter table balanced between such a
choice, or, better, balanced by the adoption of both, one at each end!
Nor would this be near telling the whole story. Excluding fur and
sticking to feather, we have a wide range beyond. The larger birds we
may begin on, very moderately, with crane-steak, a transverse section
of our stately but distant friend the sand-hill. That is the form in
which he is thought to appear to best advantage. By the time you have
circumvented him by circumscribing him in the gradually narrowing
circuit of a buggy,--for stalking him, unless in higher grass than is
common at this season, is but vexation of spirit,--you will feel vicious
enough to eat him in any shape. His brother, the beautiful white bugler,
you will hardly meet at dinner, he being the shyest of his kind. A
Canada goose--not the tough and fishy bird of the Northern coast, but
grain- and grass-fed from fledging-time--is tender, delicate, and
everyway presentable. From the back upper gallery that looks upon the
prairie you are likely to see a company or battalion of his brethren,
their long black necks and white ties "dressing" capitally in line, and
their invisible legs doing the goose-step as the inventors of that
classic manoeuvre ought to do it. This bird seems to affect the
_militaire_ in all his movements. What can be more regular than the
wedge, like that so common in tactical history, in which he begins his
march, moving in "a column of attack upon the pole"? Even when startled
and put to flight, he goes off smoothly and quietly, company-front. In
foraging he is strictly systematic, and never forgets to set sentinels.
We cannot fail to respect him while doing him the last honors. Of not
inferior claim is his prairie chum and remote cousin the mallard. They
are not often in close companionship, though I have seen a dozen and a
half of each rise from the border and the bosom of a pond forty yards
across,--one loving the open, and the other taking repose, if not food,
upon the water. That there should be ponds upon these prairies is as
striking to one accustomed to hill and dale as that so unpromising a
surface should so teem with life. The prairie is as flat as if cast like
plate-glass and rolled out,--only the table is slightly tilted toward
the Gulf at the rate of two or three hundred feet in a hundred miles. At
night you may see the head-light of an engine fifteen miles away, like
a low star that you wonder does not rise. It grows slowly in size, a
Sirius, a Venus, a moon, as though the earth had stopped rotating and
adopted a direct motion toward the heavenly bodies. Early on fine
mornings the horizon gets tired, as it were, of being suppressed, and
looms up in a mirage, with an outfit of imaged trees and hills reflected
in an imaginary lake,--a pictured protest of Nature against monotony.
There are local depressions, nevertheless, which you would not believe
in but for the shallow little ponds which fill them and which are
indicated from a distance at this season by the lead-colored grass that
veils them and conceals their glitter. And there are longer swells,
begotten of drainage, sometimes of eight or ten feet in a mile, which
deceive you, as you advance, into the expectation of a grand prospect
when once you shall have got to the top of them. That, practically, you
never do. Arrived at what seems to be the crest of a ridge, you see
nothing but more flat. The eye, in despair, gives, when you come in
sight of it, an inclination to the water. The pond-surface ceases to be
horizontal. The principle of gravitation stands contradicted
point-blank.

The most frequent vedette of these miniature lakes is the
heron,--usually the blue, sometimes the larger white, the latter a most
beautiful bird. Yet neither is common. Still rarer in such situations is
the bittern, the Timon of birds, the rushes being seldom high enough to
afford him the strict concealment he likes. The mallard has to be his
own sentinel, as a rule. He does not depend on these ponds for food,
and, like other wild creatures, he reserves his chief vigilance for
feeding-time. They are places of repose, at mid-day and at night, for
the ducks of this and two or three other species, notably the blue- and
green-winged teal, which at other times haunt the clumps of oak and
pecan that skirt the sparse streams and their summer-dry affluents,
where nuts and acorns in great variety, those of the live-oak being very
sweet, supply unfailing winter provision. The thickets of ilex that
shade off these wooded reaches into the treeless prairie are the resort
of many partridges. You are led back into the open ground by another
game-bird, the pinnated grouse, the widest ranger of its genus, but at
the North disappearing only less rapidly than the buffalo. As yet his
most destructive foe in this region is perhaps the hawk, although he is
raided from the timber by the opossum, raccoon, and three species of
cat, while on the open his nest has marked attractions for the skunk and
probably the coyote. He has survived these dumb discouragers so long,
and the heat at his proper season is so trying to his human foe, that he
may long find a refuge here and proudly lead forth his young Texans for
scores of Augusts. He and his family will often quietly walk off while
the panting pointer seeks the shade of the wagon and the gunner cools
off under the heavy felt sombrero that is here found to be the best
headgear for summer. A very moderate game-law, well executed, would
sustain this fine bird indefinitely in the struggle for existence. But
law of any kind seems a foreign idea on these sea-like primeval plains.
It is like thinking of a parliament in the Pleiocene, or of a
court-house on the Grand Banks.

Any transcendentalist who wishes to furbish up his philosophic furniture
will find this a good workshop for the purpose. There is ample room for
any school, positive or negative,--plenty of cloud-land for all
conceits. Kant could have picked up pure reason among the crowds of
simply reasoning creatures who have possessed the scene since long
before the brain of man was created. Covies of immemorial Thoreaus
bivouac under those hazy woods, and pre-glacial Emersons are circling
overhead. The problem of successfully living they have all solved. What
more have any of us done? The greatest good of the greatest number they
unpresumingly display as a practically triumphant principle; and the
greatest number is not by any means with them, any more than with us,
number one. Had it been, they would all have been extinct long ago.
Nature may be "red with tooth and claw," but not suicidally so. It is to
quite a peaceable, if not wholly loving, world that she invites us. And
just here we can see so much of it; we can study it so broadly and so
freely. Concord and Walden dwindle into the microscopic. It was under
precisely such a sun as this, in a warm, dry atmosphere, on a nearly
treeless soil, that the Stagyrite did all the thinking of sixty
generations. Could he have done it in an overcoat and muffler, with a
chronic catarrh?

If, impatient of a host of inarticulate instructors, we prefer communing
with our kind and falling back on human story, some of that, too, is at
hand. Half a century ago, to a year, a short string of forlorn and
forlorn-looking people crossed the prairie close by, from west to east,
from the Colorado to the Brazos. The head of it was Sam Houston's
"army," three or four hundred strong, with all its _matériel_ in one
wagon. The rest consisted of the débris of all the Anglo-American
settlements, women, children, cows, and what poor household stuff could
be moved. Slowly ferrying the Brazos, and as slowly making its way down
the left bank, picking up as it went the rest of the homesteads and some
more fighting-men, it turned to the right at the head of the estuary.
Then the little column, strengthened with some sea-borne supplies and
relieved of its wards, turned to face its pursuers. These were twice its
numbers, with four or five thousand reserves some days behind.
Generalship was given the go-by on both sides, the _cul-de-sac_ of San
Jacinto being closed at both ends. Thirty minutes of noise and smoke,
and the empire of Cortez and Montezuma was split in two. Clio nibbed
another quill, steel pens not having then been invented. The gray geese
who might have supplied it recomposed themselves on the prairie, and all
the rest of their feathered friends followed their example, as the
military interlude melted away and left them their ancient solitary
reign.

Of the feathered spectators of the scene we have episodically glanced
at, the most interested were those constant supervisors, the vultures.
Of these there are three species, one of which--the Mexican vulture--is
but an occasional visitor. The other two--the black vulture and the
turkey-buzzard--are monopolists in their peculiar line. They constitute
here, as generally throughout the warmer parts of the continent and its
islands, the recognized sanitary police. No law protects them, but they
do not need it. They are too useful not to command that popular sympathy
which is the higher law. The flocks and herds upon a thousand plains are
theirs. Every norther that freezes and every drought that starves some
of the wandering cattle and sheep brings to them provision. The
railroads also, not less than the winds of heaven, are their friends,
the fatal cow-catcher being an ever-busy caterer. The buzzards are, of
course, under such circumstances, warm advocates of internal improvement
and welcome the opening of every new railway. Their ardor in this
respect, however, has of late years been damped by the building of wire
fences along the track, an interference with vested rights and an
assault upon the hoary claims of infant industries against which in
their solemn assemblies they doubtless often condole with each other.
Unfortunately for their cause, they cannot lobby.

Somehow, there seems to be always a wag or clown among each group of
animals,--some one species in which the amusing or the grotesque is
prominent. Among these clownish fellows I should class the black
vulture, or john-crow. He is not a crow at all, but gets that name
probably because so historic a tribe as Corvus must have some
representative, and the real crow, so common at the North, is one of the
few birds that are not much seen in this quarter. John unites in his
ways at once fuss and business. He alternates oddly between bustle and
gravity. Seated stately and motionless for hours on a leafless tree, he
will suddenly, as if struck by a new idea, start off on a tour that
might have been dictated by telegram. He does not sail and circle like
his friend and comrade, never being distracted by soaring pretensions,
but goes straight to his object. His flight is a regular succession of
short flaps, with quiescent intervals between the series. The flaps are
usually four, sometimes five or six. I am sure he counts them. You have
seen a pursy gentleman in black hurrying along the street and tapping
his boot with a cane, as though keeping time. Fancy this gentleman in
the air, dressed in feathers, his coat-skirt sheared off alarmingly
short and square, and looking like a cherub in jet, all head and
wings,--although John is not exactly a cherub in his habits. A white
spot on each wing adds a bit of the harlequin to his style.

Were I to seek a "funny man" among the quadrupeds, I should name another
dweller of the Southwestern prairies, the jack-rabbit,--John II. let us
call him. Nobody ever gets quite accustomed to the preternatural ears of
this hare. In proportion they are to those of others of the Leporidæ
nearly what the ears of the mule are to those of the horse. When this
bit of bad drawing, as big as a fawn and weighing ten pounds or so,
jumps up before you and bounds away at railroad speed, he makes you rub
your eyes. You expect the apparition to disappear like other
apparitions, especially as it moves off with vast rapidity. But it does
not. As suddenly as it started it is transformed into a prong like an
immense letter V, projecting in perfect stillness from the grass a
hundred yards off. You advance, and the same proceeding is repeated.
Jack is obviously deep in guns, and knows the difference in power
between a muzzle- and a breech-loader, if he has not ascertained, indeed,
what number shot you have in your cartridge. He varies his distance
according to these contingencies. Only, he has not as yet learned to
gauge the greyhound: that dog is frequently kept for his benefit.

A special endowment of this immediate locality is a large and permanent
sheet of water, three or four miles by one, which bears, and deserves,
the name of Eagle Lake. For, though overhung by no cliffs or lofty
pines, it is far more the haunt of eagles, of both the bald and the gray
species, than most tarns possessing those appendages of the romantic.
Its dense fringe of fine trees, among them live-oaks a single one of
which would make the fortune of an average city park, can well spare the
Conifers. They are all hung with Spanish moss, a feature which conflicts
with the impression of lack of moisture conveyed by the light ashen
color of the bark and short annual growth of many of the smaller trees.
Here and there tiny inlets are overhung with undergrowth which supplies
a safe nesting-place to a multitude of birds of many kinds. The surface
of the lake I have never seen free from ducks of one species or another,
and generally of half a dozen. Almost the whole family, if we except the
canvas-back and the red-head, visit it at one or another period. One
item in their bill of fare is the nut of the water-lily, the receptacles
of which, resembling the rose of a watering-pot, dot the shallows in
great quantity. The green, cable-like roots of this plant are afloat,
forming at some points heavy windrows. Some say they are torn up from
the bottom by the alligators; but it is more probable that they are
loosened and broken by the continual tugging of the divers. The
alligators are not vegetarians, and they are not using their snouts much
at this season. The young shoots of the Nymphæa are doubtless tempting
food, as those of the Vallisneria are on the Chesapeake and the North
Carolina sounds. Sustenance may be drawn also from the roots of the
rushes and reeds which cover with their yellow stems and leaves many
acres of the lake, and are thronged now by several species of small
birds.

Hawks, of course, are always in sight, and that in astonishing variety,
from the osprey down to two or three varieties of the sparrow-hawk. A
monograph on the Raptores of Eagle Lake would be a most comprehensive
work. The osprey, notwithstanding the abundance of his scaly prey, is
not common: probably the field is too limited for him. Ducks are the
attraction of the other large species. In summer, ducks are rather
secondary among the water-birds, the ibis, water-turkey, and flamingo
imparting a tropical character to the scene that somewhat obscures the
more familiar forms. There is even a survival here of birds that have
nearly disappeared from the American fauna,--the paroquet, once so
common in the Mississippi Valley as far north as the Ohio, being
sometimes seen, and, if I mistake not, a second species of humming-bird
straying north by way of Mexico.

From where we stand, under a canopy of rich green leaves, looking out
upon the sunny water through a banian-like colonnade of mighty trunks
and hanging vines, the pearly moss tempering the light like jalousies,
summer seems but a relative idea. Fly-catchers flit back and forth,
barn-swallows and sand-martins skim the lake, and an occasional splash
or ripple at our feet shows that humbler life is getting astir. The
highest life, or what modest man calls such, we have all to ourselves.
Yet not quite; for there is visible yonder, beneath the outer tip of a
live-oak which we have found to stretch and droop twenty-four paces from
the seven-foot trunk, a little fleet of canoes. They belong to the
professional fisherman whose too tarry nets are quite an encumbrance
for some yards of the sandy beach, and whose well may be noticed about a
rifle-shot out from the shore. More than that, though Piscator is
absent, some one is inspecting his boats. In fact,--and it _is simple
fact_, and I am not smuggling in a bit of padding in the shape of
sentiment,--two persons become perceptible, both with their backs
towards us, now and studiedly all the time. One, a man, chooses a boat
after trying several, and, with similar show of unavoidable delay, is
cushioning the seats with carefully-arranged moss in four times the
necessary quantity. During this absorbing process he rips one of his
cuffs, or tears off a button from it, or smears it with the tar that
besets the boat and its oars. This calamity supplies the lady, a neat
young person, with a pretext for occupation, and she uses it to the
fullest and most affectionate extent. It is growing late, and unless we
relieve the couple of our obviously detected presence we shall deprive
them of their Sunday-afternoon row. That it is a row with the stream we
find ten days later, when their wedding becomes the sensation of the
little village.

The old, old story! how pat it comes in! How could it have failed to
come in, when the talk is of birds?

EDWARD C. BRUCE.




THE FERRYMAN'S FEE.

I.


"I am going," said the professor to his friend Miss Eldridge, "to marry
a young woman whose mind I can mould."

Somebody was uncharitable enough to say that he couldn't possibly make
it any mouldier than his own. This was a slander. In the high dry Greek
atmosphere which surrounded and enclosed his mind, mould, which requires
dampness before it can exist, was an impossibility.

When an engagement is announced, it is almost invariably followed by one
question, with a variable termination. The dear five hundred friends
exclaim, with uplifted hands,--

"What could have possessed him," or "her"?

In the present case the latter termination was adopted, with but one
dissenting voice: Miss Christina Eldridge said, in low, shocked tones,
"Alas that a man of his simply colossal mind should have been ensnared
by a pretty face, whose soulless beauty will depart in a few short
years!"

The professor would have been very indignant had any one ventured to
suggest to him that the pretty face had anything to do with it. He
imagined himself entirely above and beyond such flimsy considerations.
Yet it is sadly doubtful whether an example in long division, on a
smeared slate, brought to him with tears and faltering accents by Miss
Christina, would have produced the effect which followed when Miss
Rosamond May betrayed her shameful ignorance by handing him the slate
and saying forlornly, "I've done it seven times, and it comes out
differently wrong every time. Can _you_ see what's the matter?" and two
wet blue eyes looked into his through his spectacles, with an expression
which said plainly, "You are my last and only hope."

She was standing by the massive marble-topped table which was the
central feature of the parlor of their boarding-house. One plump
hand--with dimples where the knuckles should have been--rested upon the
unresponsive marble, in the other she held the slate. She was a teacher
of some of the lowest classes in Miss Christina Eldridge's academy for
young ladies, and only Miss Christina knew the almost fathomless depths
of her ignorance.

But her father had been a professor, and a widower; and shortly before
he died he had manifested an appreciation of the stately principal
which, but for his untimely death,--he was only seventy,--might have
expanded into "that perfect union of souls" for which her disciplined
heart secretly pined.

So when it was first whispered, and then exclaimed, that Professor May
had left nothing, absolutely nothing, for his daughter but a very small
life-insurance premium and the furniture of their rented house, with a
little old-fashioned jewelry and silverware of the smallest possible
intrinsic value, Miss Christina called upon Miss May and told her that,
if she would accept it, there was a vacancy in the academy, with a
salary of two hundred dollars a year and board, but not lodging.

"And if you remain with me, my dear, as I hope you will, I can give you
a room next year, after the new wing is added; and, meanwhile, I know of
a vacant room, at two dollars a week, in a highly-respectable
lodging-house."

"You are very kind," replied Rosamond, in a quivering voice. "But indeed
I am afraid I don't know enough to teach even the very little girls. So
I'm afraid you'd better get somebody else. Don't you think you had?"

"No," said Miss Christina, patting the useless little hand which lay on
her lap. "You will only be obliged to hear spelling- and reading-lessons,
and teach the class of little girls who have not gone beyond the first
four rules of arithmetic, and perhaps you will help them to play on
their holidays: you could impart an element of refinement to their
recreations more readily than an older teacher could."

"Is _that_ all?" exclaimed Rosamond, almost cheerfully. "Oh, I can
easily do that much. I love little girls. I will be so good to all the
homesick ones. When shall I come?"

"As soon as you can, my dear," replied Miss Christina.

In a few weeks Rosamond had settled into the routine of her new
life,--going every morning to the academy, where she spent the day in
hearing lessons, binding up broken hearts, playing heartily with her
scholars in the intermissions, and being idolized by them in each of her
various capacities. She did not forget her father, but it was impossible
for her sweet and childlike nature to remain in mourning long.

Professor Silex had felt a profound pity for his old friend's daughter,
and had come down out of the clouds long enough to express it in
scholarly terms and to offer any assistance in his power. They met
sometimes on the stairs and in the dreary parlor, and his eyes beamed
with such a friendly light upon her over the top of his spectacles that
she began to tell him her small troubles and to ask his advice in a
manner which sometimes completely took his breath away. He had never had
a sister, his mother died before his remembrance, and he had been
brought up by two elderly aunts. Fancy, then, his consternation when he
was suddenly and beseechingly asked, "Oh, Professor Silex, _would_ you
get a little felt bonnet, if you were me, or one of those lovely
wide-brimmed beaver hats? The hats are a dollar more; but they _are_ so
lovely and so becoming!"

"My dear child," stammered the professor, "have you no female friend
with whom you can consult? I am profoundly ignorant. Miss Eldridge--"

"She says to get the felt," pouted the dear child; "just because it's
cheaper. And papa used always to advise me, when I asked him, to get
what I liked best." The blue eyes filled, as they still did at the
mention of her father.

"My dear," said the professor hurriedly,--they were standing on the
first landing, and he heard the feet of students coming down the
stairs,--"I should advise you, by all means, to get the--the one you
like best. Excuse my haste, but I--I have a class."

She was wearing the beaver when she next met him, and she beamed with
smiles as she called his attention to it. He looked at her more seeingly
than he had yet done, and a feeling like a very slight electric shock
penetrated his brain.

"See!" she cried gayly. "It _is_ becoming, isn't it?"

"It is, indeed," he answered cordially. "And I should think it would be
quite--quite warm,--there is so much of it, and it looks so soft."

"I told Miss Eldridge you advised me to get it," continued she
triumphantly, "and she didn't say another word."

The professor was aghast. He felt a warm wave stealing over his face.
This must be stopped, and at once. Fancy his class, his brother
professors, getting hold of such a rare bit of gossip! But he would not
hurt her feelings. She was so young, so innocent, and her frank blue
eyes were so like those of his dead friend.

"My child," he said softly, "you honor me by your confidence; but may
I--might I ask you, when you seek my advice upon subjects--ah--not
congruous to my age and profession, not to repeat the result of our
conferences? With thoughtless people it might in some slight measure be
considered derogatory to my professional dignity. Not that I think it
so," he hastily added. "All that concerns you is of great, of heartfelt
interest to me."

"I didn't tell anybody but Miss Eldridge," said the culprit penitently;
"and I know she won't repeat it; and I'll never do so any more, if
you'll let me come to you with my foolish little troubles. It seems
something like having papa again."

Now, why this touching tribute should have irritated the professor who
can say? He was startled, shocked, at the irritation, and he strove to
banish all trace of it from his voice and manner as he said, gravely and
kindly, "Continue to come to me with your troubles, my dear, if I can
afford you either help or comfort."

A few days passed, and she waylaid him again. Her pretty face was pale,
and her soft yellow hair was pushed back from her forehead, showing the
blue veins in her temples.

"I don't know what I shall do," she said, in a troubled voice. "Those
children have caught up with me in arithmetic, and by next week they'll
be ahead of me; and I feel as if I oughtn't to take Miss Eldridge's
money if I can't do all she engaged me for. What would _you_ do if you
were me?"

"Could you not prepare yourself by study, and so keep in advance of your
little pupils?" he inquired kindly.

"I don't believe I could," she replied despondently. "I tried to do the
sums that came next, last night, and they wouldn't come right, all I
could do; and I got a headache besides."

"I have an hour to spare," said the professor, pulling out his watch:
"perhaps, if you will bring me your book and slate, I can elucidate the
rule which is perplexing you."

"Oh, will you _really_?" she exclaimed, a radiant smile lighting up her
troubled face. "I'll bring them right away. How kind, how _very_ kind
you are, to bother with my sums, when you have so much Greek in your
head!" And, obeying an impulse, as she so often did, she caught his hand
in both her own and kissed it heartily. Then she skimmed across the
parlor, and he heard her child's voice "lilting lightly up the" stairs
as he stood--in a position suggestive of Mrs. Jarley's wax-works--gazing
fixedly at the hand which she had kissed.

"She regards me as a father," he said to himself severely. "Am I going
mad? Or becoming childish? No; I am only sixty. But, even if it were
possible, it would be base, unmanly, to take advantage of her
loneliness, her gratitude. No, I will be firm."

So, when the offending "example" was handed to him, with the
above-quoted touching statement as to its total depravity, he looked
only at the slate. Gently and patiently, as if to a little child, he
pointed out the errors and expounded the rule, amply rewarded by her
joyful exclamation, "Oh, I see _exactly_ how it's done, now! You do
explain things beautifully. I really think I could have learned a good
deal if I'd had a teacher like you when I went to school."

"Come to me whenever your lessons perplex you, my dear," he answered,
still looking at the slate; "come freely, as if--as if I were your
father."

"Ah, how kind, how good you are to me!" she cried, seizing his slender,
wrinkled hand and holding it between her soft palms. "How glad papa must
be to know it! It almost seems like having him again. Must you go?
Good-night."

And, innocently, as if to her father, she held up her face for a kiss.

The professor turned red, turned pale, hesitated, faltered, and then
kissed her reverently on her forehead,--or, if the truth must be told,
on her soft, frizzled hair, which, according to the fashion of the day,
hung almost over her eyes.

Two evenings in the week after this were devoted to arithmetic. The
professor was firm--as a rule; but when her joyous "Oh, I see _exactly_
how it's done, now!" followed his patient reiteration of rules and
explanations, how could he help rewarding himself by a glance at the
glowing face? how could he keep his eyes permanently fixed upon that
stony-hearted slate?

So it went on through the winter and spring, till it was nearing the
time for the summer vacation. The professor knew only too well that
Rosamond had been invited to spend it with some distant
cousins,--distant in both senses of the word,--and that on her return
she would be swallowed up by the academy and would brighten the dingy
boarding-house no more. How could he bear it? His arid, silent life had
never had a song in it before. Must the song die out in silence?

When the last evening came, and when, realizing the long separation
before them, she once more held up her face for a kiss, with trembling
lips and blue eyes swimming in tears, as she told him how she should
miss him, how she did not see what she should do without him, his
hardly-won firmness was as chaff before the wind. He implored her to
marry him; he told her of the beautiful home he would make for her.

"For I am rich, Rosamond," he said hurriedly, before, in her surprise,
she could speak. "I have not cared for money, and I believe I have a
great deal. You shall do what you will with it, and with me. We will
travel: you shall see the Old World, with all its wonders. And I will
shield you: you shall never know a trouble or a care that I can take on
myself; for--I love you."

Then, as she remained silent, too much astonished to speak, he said
beseechingly,--

"You _do_ love me a little? You could not come to me as you do, with all
your little cares and perplexities, if you did not: could you?"

"But I came just so to papa," she said, finding voice at last; and her
childish face grew perplexed and troubled.

The professor had no answer for that. He hid his face in his hands. In a
moment her arms were about his neck, her kisses were falling on his
hands.

"You have been so good to me," she cried, "and I am making you unhappy,
ungrateful wretch that I am! Of course I love you; of course I will
marry you. Take away your hands and look at me--Paul!"

Ah, well! they tell in fairy-stories of the fountain of youth, and even
amid the briers of this work-a-day world it is found sometimes, I think,
by the divining-rod of Love. But many students gnashed their teeth, and,
as we have said, Miss Christina Eldridge alone, of all the dear five
hundred, said, "What possessed _him_?"


II.

The summer vacation was over, and students, more or less reluctantly,
had returned to college and academy. The professor came back in a
brand-new and very becoming suit of clothes; his hair and beard had been
trimmed by a fashionable barber, and his old-fashioned high "stock"
exchanged for a modern scarf, in the centre of which gleamed a modern
scarf-pin. He ran lightly up the steps of the academy and inquired for
Miss May. Courtesy, as his uneasy conscience told him, dictated an
inquiry for Miss Eldridge also, but he compounded with conscience: he
would ask to see her after he had seen Rosamond.

"Why, how very nice you look! You are really handsome!" And the
dignified professor was turned about, as if he had been a graven image,
by two soft little hands, which he caught in his own, and--so forth.

She was very sure now that she loved him, as in a certain sense she did.
But she would not consent to an immediate marriage, nor to the building
of a miniature palace for her reception. She owed it to Miss Eldridge,
she said, to fulfil her engagement and not to go away just as she was
beginning to be really useful. And as for a house, would it not be
pleasanter to live in lodgings and be free to come and go as they would?
So his wishes, as usual, were deferred to hers. The long fall evenings
began, and he brought, at her request, carefully-selected "improving"
books, to be interrupted, as he read, by earnest questions, such as,--

"_Would_ you embroider this linen dress with its own color or a
contrasting one, if you were me?"

Spring came again, and the professor, looking ten years younger than he
had looked a year ago, brought to his "rose of all the world" a bunch of
the first May roses.

"Oh, the lovely, lovely things!" she exclaimed delightedly. "You shall
have two kisses for them, Paul. Where _did_ they come from, so early in
May?"

"From the south side of the wall of an old garden which I used to weed
when I was a boy."

"Will you take me there? Is it near here?" she asked eagerly.

"I will take you there," he answered, "some day; but it is not near
here: it is more than a hundred miles away."

"And you sent all that way for them just for me? How good, how kind you
are! There, I will take two of the half-blown ones for my hat, and two
for my neck, and one for your button-hole--oh, yes, you shall! Hold
still till I pin it. Now just see how nice you look! And the rest I will
put in this glass, and then Miss Christina can enjoy them too; she's so
kind, and I can't do anything for her. Oh, that makes me think! I have
to go across the river this afternoon to hunt up a dress-maker she told
me about, a delightfully cheap and good one, and she said you would know
if there were any way of crossing anywhere near ---- Street, the bridge
is so far from where I want to go. Is there?"

"Yes," he replied, "there's a rather uncertain way: an old fellow who
owns a boat lives close by there, and if he's at home he will be only
too glad to row you over for a few cents. It would not make your walk
much longer to go round that way first and see. I have often crossed in
his boat, and I like to talk with him: he's an original character."

"Oh, that is charming!" she said delightedly. "Can't you come too? You
can sit and talk with him while I'm talking to the dress-maker."

"I wish I could," he answered, "but I promised to meet the president in
the college library at four, and--bless me! it only wants ten minutes of
it now. Try to get back by sunset, dear: the evenings are chilly yet."

"Yes, I will; I'm going right away," she said, with the deference to his
least wish which so often gave him a heartache. "You'll be in this
evening? Of course you will. Thank you so very, very much for the
roses."

She watched him go down the steps, waving her hand to him as she closed
the door, and then, with the roses still in her hat and at her throat,
walked toward the river-bank, whispering a gay little song to herself.
It was such a bright day! she was so glad "the winter was over and
gone!" how good and kind everybody was! how grateful she ought to be!


III.

"I wish," said Mr. Symington bitterly, "that I could find a commodious
desert island containing a first-class college and not a single girl. I
would have the island fortified, and death by slow torture inflicted
upon any woman who managed--as some of them would, in spite of all
precautions--to effect a landing."

"But the married girls are so stupid, my dear boy," ejaculated his
room-mate, Mr. Fielding. "You must admit that, if one must have either,
the single ones are decidedly preferable, or at least the young single
ones."

"Don't try to be funny," said Symington savagely: "you only succeed in
being weak. I have"--and he pulled out a note-book and glared at its
contents--"an engagement to take two to a concert this evening, other
two to a tennis-match on Saturday, and another one out rowing this
afternoon. And it's time for me to go now."

"It strikes me _you've_ been pretty middling weak," commented Fielding.
"Either that, or you're yarning tremendously about its being a bore: you
can take your choice."

"I leave it with you," said Symington wearily. "That Glover girl is
probably cooling her heels on the bank, and I must go."

"Alas, my brother! it is long since one of those Glover girls captured
me!"

The victim was a little late for his engagement, but no indignant Glover
girl lay in wait for him. The bank, green with the first soft grass of
spring, was deserted. Had she come and gone? He arranged himself
comfortably in the boat and began to sing, the balmy air and the
surroundings suggesting his song,--

    Oh, hoi-ye-ho, ho-ye-ho, who's for the ferry?

and went through the first verse, beginning softly, but unconsciously
raising his voice as he went on, until, as he came to the second, he was
singing very audibly indeed, and Rosamond, standing on the bank, looking
uncertainly about her for the old boatman, was in time to hear,

    She'd a rose in her bonnet, and, oh, she looked sweet
    As the little pink flower that grows in the wheat,
    With her cheeks like a rose and her lips like a cherry,--
    "And sure and you're welcome to Twickenham town."

The curious feeling which makes one aware of being looked at caused him
to turn and look up as he finished the verse, and he longed for the
self-possession of his room-mate as he vainly struggled to think of
something to say which should not be utterly inane. He felt himself
blushing, but he was well aware that a blush on his sunburned face was
not so charmingly becoming as it was to the vision on the bank. It was
she who spoke at last, with the ghost of a smile accompanying her
speech.

"I beg your pardon," she said, "but I was told that I should probably
find an old man here who would row me across. Do you know where he's
gone?"

"He is--that is--I think--I believe he's gone to dinner," stammered this
usually inflexible advocate of truth.

And it did not occur to Rosamond to suggest that between four and five
in the afternoon was an unusual dinner-hour for a ferryman.

She looked very much disappointed, and turned as if to go.

"Won't you--may I--" eagerly stammered the youth, and added desperately,
"I'm here in his place," mentally explaining to an outraged conscience
that this was literally true, for was not his boat tied to a stake, and
must not that stake have been driven by the old man for _his_ boat? Dr.
Watts has told us that

    Sinners who grow old in sin
    Are hardened in their crimes,

and the hardening process must sometimes take place with fearful
rapidity, for when Rosamond, having guilelessly accepted the statement
and allowed the ferryman to help her to the broad cushioned seat in the
stern of the boat, asked innocently, "How much is it--for both ways, I
mean? for I want to come back, if you don't mind waiting a little," he
answered, with a look of becoming humility, "It is five cents, please."

"You mean for one way?" she inquired, as she fished a very small purse
up from the depths of her pocket.

And he, reflecting that two and a half cents for one way would have an
air of improbability about it, answered promptly, "Yes, if you please."

She opened her purse and introduced a thumb and finger, but she withdrew
them with a promptness and a look of horror upon her face which
suggested the presence of some noxious insect.

"You'll have to take me back, please," she said faintly. "I forgot to
put any money in my purse, and I've only just found it out."

"It is not of the least consequence," he began hurriedly, adding, in
business-like tones, "You can make it all right the next time, you know.
I suppose it will not be long before you cross again?"

"I don't know," she replied. "That depends upon whether or not I find--"
and then, remembering that the professor had gently cautioned her about
talking over her small affairs with any one but himself, she changed the
end of her sentence into "I have to. But I will bring you the money
to-morrow afternoon, if you will be here," she went on. "I am so ashamed
that I forgot it; and you're _very_ kind to trust me, when I'm such a
perfect stranger to you. Don't people ever cheat you?"

"Sometimes," replied the ferryman; "and I don't trust everybody. I go a
good deal by people's faces."

It did not seem to Rosamond that this remark required an answer, so she
sat silent, while his vigorous strokes sent the little boat swiftly
across the river, when he beached it, and, giving her his hand, helped
her to spring to dry ground. Then she said,--

"That's where I'm going,--that white house across the first street; and
I shall only be a few minutes."

"Don't hurry," he said, as she turned away. "I've nothing more to do
this evening after I take you back."

He really did forget for the moment the "other two" and the concert.

The blissful meditation which enwrapped him made the fifteen minutes of
her absence seem as five. She came down the bank, blushing and smiling.

"'And, oh, she looked sweet!'" mentally ejaculated the ferryman.

"Did I keep you long?" she said, as he helped her in. "I hurried as much
as I could. And if you, or the old man, will be here to-morrow at
half-past four, I should like to cross again: it saves me such a long
walk. And I'll be _sure_ to bring the money."

"You didn't keep me--that is, waiting--at all," he answered dreamily;
"and I'll be here at half-past four, sharp, to-morrow. You may depend on
me."

"Very well," she said contentedly, as she settled herself among the
cushions, which in her absence he had arranged for her greater comfort,
adding, "What a very nice boat you have! I don't see how you keep it so
neat and fresh, taking so many people across, and being out, as I
suppose you must be, in all sorts of weather."

"It's a new boat," he said hurriedly, "and you're my first passenger.
Would you mind telling me your name?--your first name I mean, of
course?"--for the horrible idea occurred to him that she might think he
was anxious about his fare. "I haven't named her yet, and I thought,
perhaps, _as_ you're my first fare, you'd let me name her after
you,--for luck, you know."

"Is that considered lucky?" she asked innocently, "If it is, of course
you may. My name is Rosamond; but it seems to me that's rather long for
a boat. Suppose you call her the Rose. Papa--my father, I mean--used to
call me that oftener than Rosamond, and--one or two other people do
yet."

"I don't think Rosamond would be too long," he said thoughtfully, "but
it shall be as you wish, of course. I will have 'Rose' painted on the
stern, and I can call her Rosamond to myself. May I have one of your
roses, just to--to remember it by, till I can see the painter?"

"Why, yes, I suppose so." And she unfastened one of the two at her
throat, and handed it to him.

He placed it carefully in his pocket-book, which, as she observed with
some surprise, was of the finest Russia leather. Ferrying must be
profitable work, to provide the ferryman with such boats and
pocket-books.

There was a brief silence, and then she said, "You were singing as I
came down the bank. Would you mind singing again? It sounds so pretty on
the water."

He made no answer in words, but presently his voice arose, softly at
first, and then with passionate fervor, and this time his song was,
"Oh, wert thou in the cauld blast!"

"Thank you; that was beautiful," said Rosamond calmly, as he finished
and the boat grazed the bank at one and the same moment. "What a good
voice you have! And you must have taken lessons, to sing so correctly:
haven't you?"

"Yes,--a few," he answered, springing from the boat and drawing it up on
the bank. She rose to follow him, but stopped short, with a little
exclamation of dismay.

"Why, this isn't where we ought to have landed!" she exclaimed. "It's a
place a mile farther down the river."

He looked very much confused.

"I have made some stupid blunder," he stammered. "I owe you a thousand
apologies, but I was singing, and I suppose I passed the landing without
noticing it. I will not keep you long, though. I can row back in ten
minutes."

"I oughtn't to have asked you to sing when you were rowing," she said
remorsefully. "I'm so sorry you should have all that extra work."

"Oh, I don't mind that," he said, trying to speak coolly, "if the delay
won't incommode you."

"No," she said. "We shall be back before dark, and that will be time
enough. I _shouldn't_ like to have to walk home after dark."

Eager words rose to the ferryman's lips, but he wisely suppressed them,
bending to his oars till the little boat sprang through the water.

The sun dropped into the river, allowing the faintly-traced sickle of
the new moon to show, as the boat once more touched land,--at the right
place this time.

Rosamond tripped up the bank, with a friendly "Good-evening," and at the
top she met the professor. "Oh, how nice of you to come and meet me!"
she cried, slipping her hand through his arm. "It grows dark so quickly
after the sun goes down that I was beginning to be just a little
scared."

"I would have been here an hour ago," he said, "but the president kept
me. I called at Miss Eldridge's, thinking to find you returned, and
then, when she said you were still absent, I hurried down here, feeling
unaccountably disquieted. It was absurd, of course. But were you not
detained longer than you anticipated?"

"No, it wasn't absurd," she said, clasping her other hand over his arm
and giving it a little squeeze. The spring dusk had fallen around them
like a veil by this time, and they were still a little way from any
much-travelled street.

"It wasn't absurd _at all_," she repeated "there's nobody but you to
care whether I come in or go out, and I like you to be worried,--just a
little, I mean,--not enough to make you, really wretched. I've had the
funniest time! The old man wasn't there, and I was turning back, quite
disappointed, when a young man,--quite young, and very nice
looking,--who was singing in a foolish sort of way in a pretty little
boat tied to a stake, said he was there in the old boatman's place, and
asked me to go with him; and I went. At first I was puzzled, for he
looked like a gentleman in most respects, and I didn't think he could be
the son of the old man you told me about; but the longer I was with him
the more I saw that there was something queer about him. He was very
kind and polite, but had a sort of abrupt, startled manner, as if he
were afraid of something, and I came to the conclusion that he must be a
harmless insane person, and that they let him have the ferry because
there isn't anything else much that he could do. He had a most lovely
little boat, all cushioned at one end, and he rowed beautifully."

"But it was not safe," said the professor, in alarm. "If a man be ever
so slightly insane, there is no telling what form his insanity will
take: he might have imagined you to be inimical to him, and have thrown
you overboard." And Rosamond felt a nervous tremor through the arm upon
which she leaned. She laughed heartily.

"You'd not feel that way if you could see him, dear," she said. "He's
as gentle as a lamb, and a little sheepish into the bargain. And I
promised to let him row me over to-morrow afternoon at half-past four.
Indeed, there's no danger. The only really queer thing he did was to
carry me a mile down the river; and that was my fault, for I asked him
to sing again. He has a delightful voice, and he sang that song you like
so much,--'Oh, wert thou in the cauld blast!'--and while he was singing
he missed the landing. But he apologized, and rowed me back like
lightning: so it really didn't matter,--especially as you met me, like
the dear that you are."

If a member of the professor's class had used the figures of speech too
frequently employed by Rosamond, he would have received a dignified
rebuke for "hyperbolical and inelegant language;" but it never occurred
to the deluded man that anything but pearls of thought and diamonds of
speech could fall from those rosy lips.

"I prefer, however, that you should run no risk, however slight, my
Rose," said the professor, so gently that the words were more an
entreaty than a command.

"But I don't see how I can help it," she said, in dismayed tones, "for I
did such a dreadful thing that I shouldn't tell you of it if I hadn't
firmly made up my mind to tell you everything. I think
engaged--and--and--married people always ought to do that. I forgot to
take any money, and it was ten cents there and back, you know; and he
was so kind and polite about trusting me. I wanted him to take me back
as soon as I found it out, but he said he would trust me, that I could
bring it to him next time; and I promised to go to-morrow and pay him
for both trips at once: so, you see, I _must_."

"Very well," said the professor, after a moment's thought. "I do not
wish you to break your word, of course: so I will go with you. I can
have a little talk with this unfortunate young man while you are engaged
with your dress-maker, and perhaps his condition may be ameliorated. He
could surely engage in some more remunerative occupation than that which
he is at present pursuing; and there are institutions, you know, where
much light has been thrown upon darkened minds."

"How good, how kind you are!" she cried, her sweet eyes filling with
happy tears, unseen in the gathering darkness. "You're sure you've made
up your mind not to be disappointed when you find out just how foolish
and trifling I really am?" she asked timidly.

The professor's answer need not be recorded. It was satisfactory.

It is a curious thing that the "sixth sense," which draws our thoughts
to long-forgotten friends just before we hear from them, which leads our
eyes to meet other eyes fixed earnestly upon them, which enables people
to wake other people by staring at them, and does a variety of similar
things, admitted, but not accounted for, fails to warn the victims of
approaching fate. Serenely, blissfully, did Mr. Symington wend his way
to the bank on that golden afternoon. It had occurred to him to exchange
his faultless and too expensive boating-costume for a cheap jersey and
trousers; but he feared that this might excite suspicion: he had still
sense enough left to be aware that there had been no shadow of this in
the sweet blue eyes yesterday.

He had not sung

    She'd a rose in her bonnet, and, oh, she looked sweet!

more than five hundred times since the previous evening: so, by way of
variety, he was humming it softly to himself as he approached the bank.
He was a little early, of course. She had not come yet. So he dusted the
cushions, and sponged up a few drops of water from the bottom of the
boat, and then sat down to wait. He was not kept waiting long. He heard
voices approaching, then a clear, soft laugh, and she was there;
but--oh, retribution!--with her, supporting her on his arm, was
Professor Silex! Wild thoughts of leaping into the river and
swimming--under water--to the opposite bank passed through the brain of
this victim of his own duplicity; but he checked himself sternly,--he
was proposing to himself to act the part of a coward, and before her, of
all the world. No, he would face the music, were it the "Rogue's March"
itself. And then a faint, a very faint hope sprang up in his heart: the
professor was noted for his absent-mindedness: perhaps there would be no
recognition. Vain delusion.

"Your boatman has not kept his appointment," said the professor,
advancing inexorably down the bank; "but I see a member of my class--an
unusually promising young man--with whom I wish to speak. Will you
excuse me for a moment?"

Rosamond turned her puzzled face from one to the other, finally
ejaculating, "Why, _that's_ the ferryman!"

"There is some mistake here," said the professor, unaware of the
sternness of his tones.

They had continued to advance as they spoke, and the ferryman could not
avoid hearing the last words. He sprang from the boat and up the bank
with the expression of a whole forlorn hope storming an impregnable
fortress, and spoke before the professor could ask a question.

"I beg your pardon, Professor Silex," he said; "there is no mistake.
Miss--this lady, who is, I imagine, Miss May" (the professor bowed
gravely), "was looking yesterday for the old man who acts as ferryman
here sometimes. He was absent, and, seeing that Miss May seemed
disturbed, I volunteered to take his place. It gave me great pleasure to
be of even that small amount of use."

The professor's grave face relaxed into a smile. Memories of his youth
had of late been very present with him, and to them were added those of
Rosamond's estimate of the amateur boatman. He waved his hand
graciously; but, before he could speak, Rosamond indignantly exclaimed,
"But you told me it was ten cents, and that people sometimes cheated
you, and that you were here in that poor old man's place, and--oh, I
can't _think_ of all the--things you told me."

A burning blush scorched the face of the ferryman. This was speedy
judgment indeed. But his courage rose to the emergency. He met the blue
eyes steadily with his dark-brown ones as he said, "I told you no
untruths, Miss May. My boat was, literally speaking, in the place of
that which the old man actually keeps here: I knew it must be, because
there was only one stake. I have been cheated, frequently and
egregiously: few men of my age, I imagine, have not. And I have great
faith in physiognomy. You _were_ my first fare; and I meant to accept
the ten cents,--I assure you I did. If you can think of any of the other
'things,' I shall be happy to explain them."

"It's all sophistry," she began, with something very like a pout.

But the professor gently interrupted her: "Let us not judge a kind
action harshly. Mr. Symington meant only to relieve you from an annoying
dilemma, and he naturally concluded that this would be impossible should
he disclose his real name and position. It seems that he merely allowed
your inferences to go uncontradicted, and was, practically, most kind.
An introduction between you is now scarcely necessary; but I am glad
that you have met. But for the fact that a selection would have looked
invidious, I should have asked you ere this to permit me to bring Mr.
Symington to see you."

"And will you--may I?" asked the culprit eagerly, glancing from one to
the other.

"That must be as Miss May says," replied the professor, with a kind
smile.

And Rosamond, ashamed of her unwonted outburst, gave Mr. Louis Symington
her hand, saying penitently, "I was very rude just now, and unjust
besides: will you forgive me and come with the professor to see me?"

"With pleasure,--with the greatest pleasure," he answered eagerly. "And
you will let me row you across? You will not make me miserable by
refusing?"

Rosamond glanced at the professor.

"To be sure we will," he said cheerfully. "I shall be glad of the
opportunity for a little conversation with you while Miss May is
executing her errand."

So he rowed them across; and then, while Rosamond discussed plaits and
gores with the new dress-maker, he discoursed his best eloquence and
learning to the professor, with such good effect that the latter said to
Rosamond, as they walked home through the twilight, having been
persuaded to extend the row a little, "I am glad, dear, that this
opportunity of presenting young Symington to you without apparent
favoritism has arisen. He is a most promising young man, but a little
inclined, I fear, from what I hear of him in his social capacity, to be
frivolous. We may together exercise a restraining influence over him."

"I thought he talked most dreadfully sensibly," said Rosamond, laughing;
"but I like him, and I hope we shall see him often."

They did. He called at first with the professor, afterward, at odd
times,--never in the evening,--without him. He persuaded Rosamond to
continue her patronage of his boat. Sometimes the professor went,
sometimes he did not. Mr. Symington was frequently induced to sing when
they were upon the water, and once or twice Rosamond joined her voice to
his.

The 30th of June had at last been appointed for the wedding-day. They
were to go to Europe at once, and spend the vacation travelling wherever
Rosamond's fancy should dictate. All through the winter she had
discussed their journey with the liveliest interest, sometimes making
and rejecting a dozen plans in one evening. But of late she had ceased
to speak of it unless the professor spoke first; and this, with the
gentle tact which he had always possessed, but which had wonderfully
developed of late, he soon ceased to do.

She was sometimes unwarrantably irritable with him now, but each little
fit of petulance was always followed by a disproportionate penitence
and remorse. At such times she hovered about him, eagerly anxious to
render him some of the small services which he found so sweet. But she
was paler and thinner than she had ever been, and Miss Christina
noticed, with a kindly anxiety which did her credit, that Rosamond ate
less and less.

May was gone. It was the first day of June,--and such a day! Trees and
shrubs were in that loveliest of all states,--that of a half-fulfilled
promise of loveliness. Rosamond felt the spell, and, in spite of all
that was in her heart, an unreasoning gladness took possession of her.
She danced down the path of the long garden behind the seminary and
danced back again, stopping to pick a handful of the first June roses.
It was early morning, and the professor stopped--as he often did--for a
moment's sight of her on his way from the dreary boarding-house to the
equally dreary college. She caught both his hands and held up her face
for a kiss. Then she fastened a rosebud in his button-hole.

"You are not to take that out until it withers, Paul," she said,
laughing and shaking a threatening finger at him. "Do you know what it
means,--a rosebud? I don't believe you do, for all your Greek. It means
'confession of love;' and I _do_ love you,--I do, I do."

"I know you do, my darling," he said gently; "and it shall stay
there--till it withers. But that will not be long. I stopped to tell you
that I cannot go with you this afternoon; but you must not disappoint
Mr. Symington. I met him just now, and told him I should be detained,
but that you would go."

"You had no right to say so without asking me first," she said sharply.
"I don't wish to go. I _won't_ go without you. There!"

He was silent, but his deep, kind eyes were fixed pityingly upon her
flushed, excited face.

She dropped it on his arm and burst into tears, and he stroked her hair
gently, as if she had been a little child and he a patient, loving
father. She raised her face presently, smiling, though her lips still
quivered.

"Do you really and truly wish me to go with--this afternoon?"

It seemed to him that for a full minute he could not speak, but in
reality the pause was so brief that she did not notice it.

"Yes," he said quietly, "I really and truly do. It would not be fair to
disappoint Mr. Symington, after making the engagement."

"And can't you possibly go, dear?" she asked entreatingly.

I think only one man was ever known to pull the cord which set in motion
a guillotine that took off his own head. But there is much unknown, as
well as unwritten, history.

"Not without neglecting some work which I ought to do to-day," he said.

"I think you care more for your work sometimes than you do for me."
There was a little quaver in her voice as she spoke. "And I wish you'd
stop behaving as if I were your daughter. I don't know what ails you
this morning; but if you go on this way I shall call you Professor Silex
all the time. How would you like that?"

A passionate exclamation rose to his lips, and died there. A spasm of
bitter pain made his face for a moment hard and stern. Then he smiled,
and said gently, "I should not like it at all, as you know very well.
But I must go now, or I shall be late for my class. Good-by, dear
child." And, parting her soft, curling hair, he pressed a fatherly kiss
upon her forehead.

She threw her arms about his neck, crying, "No!--on my lips." And,
pressing an eager kiss upon his mouth, she added, "There! that is a
sealing, a fresh sealing, of our engagement; and I wish--oh, how I
wish!--that we were to be married to-morrow--to-day!"

The professor gently disengaged himself from her clinging arms, saying,
still with a smile, "But I thought the wedding-gown was still to make?
Good-by. I will come early this evening and hear all about the enchanted
island."

For the expedition which had been planned by the three for that
afternoon was to explore a little island far down the river, farther
than any of them had yet gone.

Rosamond wore no roses when she went slowly down the bank that day,--not
even in her cheeks.

And when Louis Symington saw her coming alone, only the sunbrown on his
face concealed the sudden rush of blood from it to his heart.

"The professor could not come," she said hurriedly, "so he made me come
without him; that is--I mean--" And she stopped, confused.

"If you prefer to wait until he can go with us, pray do not hesitate to
say so," he replied stiffly, and pausing--with her hand in his--in the
act of helping her into the boat.

"Oh, I did not mean to say anything rude," she exclaimed penitently; and
she stepped across the seats to the cushioned end of the boat. "Of
course we will go; but perhaps--would you mind--couldn't we just take a
little row to-day, and save the island until the professor can go?"

"Certainly," he said, still in the same constrained tone; and, without
another word, he helped her to her place and arranged the cushions about
her.

The silence lasted so long that she felt she could bear it no longer.

"Will you please sing something?" she said at last, desperately, "You
know you sang that first day; and it sounded so lovely on the water. Do
you remember?"

He looked at her fixedly for a moment. Then he said simply, "Yes, I
remember," and began at once to sing. But he did not sing "Twickenham
Ferry" to day. He would have given all he was worth, when he had sung
one line, if he could have changed it into a college song, a negro
melody,--anything. For this was what he found himself singing:

    "How can I bear to leave thee?
    One parting kiss I give thee,
    And then, whate'er befalls me,
    I go where Honor calls me."

She would not hide her face in her hands, but she might turn it away:
how was he to know that she was not watching with breathless interest
the young couple straying along the bank, arm closely linked in arm, in
the sweet June sunshine?

"Thank you," she said faintly, when the last trembling note had died
away: "that was--very pretty."

"I am glad you liked it," he said, with quiet irony in his tones.

And then there was another alarming pause. Anything was better than
that, and she began to talk almost at random, telling of various
laughable things which had occurred among her scholars, laughing
herself, somewhat shrilly, at the places where laughter was due.

He sat silent, unsmiling, through it all until they stepped from the
boat. Then he said, "It is really refreshing to see you in such good
spirits. I had always understood that even the happiest _fiancée_ was
somewhat pensive and melancholy as the day of fate drew near."

"You have no right to speak to me in that way,--in that tone," she
cried, with sudden heat.

He bowed low, saying, "Pardon me; I am only too well aware that I have
no rights of any kind so far as you are concerned. But it is impossible
to efface one's self entirely."

"Now you are angry with me," she said forlornly; "and I don't know what
I have done."

"I angry with _you_!" he cried. "Oh, Rosamond! Rosamond!"

"I am glad if you are not," she said,--"very glad; but I must go--the
professor--" And she sped up the bank before he could speak again.


IV.

The professor came early to the seminary that evening, but Rosamond was
ready for him, dressed in a gown of some soft white fabric which he had
noticed and praised. She had roses in her hair, at her throat, in her
belt, but the bright, soft color in her cheeks out-shone them all.

She began, almost as soon as they had exchanged greetings, to talk
about her father, asking the professor how long he had known him, and
what Dr. May had been like as a young man.

"Very shy and retiring," he replied. "I think that was the first link in
our friendship: we both disliked society, and finally made an agreement
with each other to decline all invitations and give up visiting. We
found that everything of the kind interfered materially with advancement
in our studies. But your father had already met your mother several
times when we made this agreement. Their tastes were very similar, and
her quiet, tranquil manner was extremely pleasant to him,--for, as you
know, he was somewhat nervous and excitable,--so he claimed an exception
in her favor; and, after two years of most pleasing intellectual
companionship, they were married. It was a rarely complete and happy
union."

"And I suppose," said Rosamond, with a curious touch of resentment in
her voice, "that because he had never been like other young people, had
never cared for young friends and pleasant times, it did not occur to
him that I ought to have them? Oh, I don't see how he dared to rob me of
my rights,--of my youth, which could only come once, of all life and
pleasure and sunshine!"

"My dear," said the professor, looking very much startled and shocked,
"he had no thought of robbing you: he loved you far too tenderly for
that. You always seemed happy and bright, and you were very young when
he died. No doubt, had he lived until you were of an age to enter
society--"

But here she interrupted him with bitter self-reproaches.

"Oh, what have I said?" she cried. "He was all goodness, all love to me,
and I have dared to find fault with him! Oh, what a base, wicked girl I
am!"

A choking sob stopped her, but only one. She conquered the rest, and
made a forlorn attempt to change the subject.

"I had something to tell you to-night, dear child," said the professor,
when she was quiet again: "you seem tired, so I will make it as brief
as possible."

A startled look came into her eyes, and she was about to speak, when he
continued:

"Let me first say what is upon my mind, and then you shall have your
turn. I wished to tell you that I think we--I--have made a mistake. I am
too confirmed an old bachelor to fall into home ways and make a good
husband. I shall always love you as a dear young daughter, I shall ask
you to let me take in every way your father's place, but I think, if you
will let me off, that we will not have that wedding on the 30th of June,
my little girl."

She raised her eyes in wondering incredulity to his face. He was
smiling! He was speaking playfully! He was giving her back her freedom
with a light heart and a good will. Plainly, the relief would be as
great for him as for her. Laughing and crying in a breath, she clasped
her arms about his neck.

"Ah, how good you are! How I love you _now_!" she said, as soon as she
could speak. "All the time we have been engaged,--yes, even
before,--from the first I have longed to tell you that I would so much
rather be your daughter than your wife; but I thought it would be so
ungracious, after all your kindness to me. _Now_ we shall be happy; you
will see how happy I shall make you. And, oh, how good, how noble you
are to tell me, when, if you had not spoken,--yes, I should have married
you, dear father. I shall always call you father now: papa will not mind
it, I know."

The professor had nothing more to do or say after that until he rose to
go. But when she held up her glowing, sparkling face for his good-night
kiss, he once more parted the curls and kissed her on her forehead,
whereat she pouted a little, saying, with half-pretended displeasure,
"Papa didn't kiss my forehead: he kissed me _right_."

The professor passed his hand, which trembled a little, over her shining
hair, saying, with a paternal smile, "I shall kiss my daughter in the
way that best pleases me. I am going to be a very strict and exacting
father."

She laughed gleefully, as if it were the best joke in the world, and her
merry "Good-night, dear father," followed him as he went out into the
darkness.

He held Mr. Symington to his engagement to row Rosamond and himself to
the island, but he took with him a large canvas bag and a geological
hammer. And how, pray, could any one talk to, or even stand very near,
him, when he was pounding off bits of rock for specimens with such
energy that fragments flew in all directions? The sound of the hammer
ceased as soon as his companions had disappeared among the trees; they
were going to look for a spring, but, strangely enough, they did not
notice this. No need now for him to school his face, his voice, his
trembling hands. They found the spring.

And did my professor die of a broken heart, and leave a lock of
Rosamond's hair and a thrilling heart-history, in the shape of a
neatly-written journal, to proclaim to the world his sacrifice? No; that
was not his idea of a sacrifice. He burnt that very night each
token--and there were many--which he had so jealously cherished,--each
little, crookedly-written, careless note, and, last, the long bright
curl which, before her heart awoke, she had so freely given him.

It is true that there was a gradual but very perceptible change in him.
He had been indifferent formerly to the members of his class, excepting
from an intellectual stand point. Now he began to take an interest in
that part of their lives which lay outside his jurisdiction, to ask them
to his rooms of an evening, to walk with them and win their confidence.
Not one of them ever regretted that it had been bestowed.

MARGARET VANDEGRIFT.




"WHAT DO I WISH FOR YOU?"

    What do I wish for you? Such swift, keen pain
      As though all griefs that human hearts have known
      Were joined in one to wound and tear your own.
    Such joy as though all heaven had come again
    Into your earth, and tears that fall like rain,
      And all the roses that have ever blown,
      The sharpest thorn, the sceptre and the throne,
    The truest liberty, the captive's chain.

    Cruel, you say? Alas! I've only prayed
      Such fate for you as everywhere, above
    All others, women wish,--that unafraid
      They clasp in eager arms. So, little dove,
    I give you to the hawk. Nay, nay, upbraid
      Me not. Have you not longed for love?

CARLOTTA PERRY.




LETTERS AND REMINISCENCES OF CHARLES READE.


I knew Charles Reade in England far back in "the days that are no more,"
and dined with him at the Garrick Club on the evening before I left
London for New York in 1860, when he gave me parting words of good
advice and asked me to write to him often. Then he added, "I am very
sorry you are going away, my dear boy; but perhaps you are doing a good
thing for yourself in getting out of this God-forsaken country. If I
were twenty years younger, and enjoyed the sea as you do, I might go
with you; but, if travel puts vitality into some men and kills others, I
should be one of the killed. What is one man's food is another's
poison."

He was my senior by more than twenty years, and no man that I have known
well was more calculated to inspire love and respect among his friends.
To know him personally, after only knowing him through his writings and
his tilts with those with whom he had "a crow to pick," was a
revelation. He had the reputation of being always "spoiling for a
fight," and the most touchy, crusty, and aggressive author of his time,
surpassing in this respect even Walter Savage Landor. But, though his
trenchant pen was sometimes made to do almost savage work, it was
generally in the chivalric exposure of some abuse or in the effort to
redress some grievous wrong. Then indeed he was fired with righteous
indignation. The cause had to be a just one, however, before he did
battle in its behalf, for no bold champion of the right ever had more
sterling honesty and sincerity in his character, or more common sense
and less quixotism.

His placid and genial manner and amiable characteristics in his
every-day home-life presented a striking contrast to his irritability
and indignation under a sense of injury; for whenever he considered
himself wronged or insulted his wrath boiled up with the suddenness of a
squall at sea. He resented a slight, real or imaginary, with unusual
outspokenness and vigor, and said, "I never forgive an injury or an
insult." But in this he may have done himself injustice. Generally, he
was one of the most sympathetic and even lovable of men, and his pure
and resolute manhood appeared in its truest light to those who knew him
best.

While genial in disposition, he could not be called either mirthful or
jovial, and so could neither easily turn any unpleasant incident off
with a joke or be turned off by one. He needed a little more of the
easy-going good humor and freedom from anxiety that fat men are
popularly supposed to possess to break the force of collisions with the
world. Had he been more of an actor and less of a student in the drama
of life, he would have been less sensitive.

His conscientiousness and honesty of purpose were really admirable; and
rather than break a contract or disappoint any one to whom he had made a
promise he would subject himself to any amount of inconvenience. For
example, he would, whenever necessary, retire to Oxford and write
against time in order to have his manuscript ready for the printer when
wanted. Much, too, as he disliked burning the midnight oil or any kind
of night-work, and the strain that artificial light imposed upon his
eyes, he would write late in his rooms, or read up on subjects he was
writing about in the reading-room in the Radcliffe Library building till
it closed at ten P.M. He had, it will be seen, a high sense of duty, and
"business before pleasure" was a precept he never neglected.

In personal appearance Charles Reade, without being handsome, was
strongly built and fine-looking. He was about six feet in height,
broad-chested and well proportioned, and without any noticeable
physical peculiarity. His head was well set on his shoulders, and,
though not unusually small, might have been a trifle larger without
marring the symmetry of his figure.

His features were not massive, but prominent, strong, and regular, and
his large, keen, grayish-brown eyes were the windows of his mind,
through which he looked out upon the world with an expressive, eager,
and inquiring gaze, and through which those who conversed with him could
almost read his thoughts before he uttered them. He had a good broad
forehead, well-arched eyebrows, and straight, dark-brown hair, parted at
the side, which, like his entirely unshaven beard, he wore short until
late in life. In his dress and manner he was rather _négligé_ than
precise, and he bestowed little thought on his personal appearance or
what Mrs. Grundy might say. Taking him all in all, the champion of James
Lambert looked the lion-hearted hero that he was.

In his personal habits and tastes he was always simple, quiet, regular,
and he was strictly temperate. He had no liking for dissipation of any
kind. He found his pleasure in his work, as all true workers in the
pursuit for which they are best fitted always do. The proper care he
took of himself accounted in part for his well-developed muscular system
and his good health until within a few years of his death,
notwithstanding his studious and sedentary life.

Among literary men he had few intimates, and he was not connected with
any clique of authors or journalists. He thought this was one reason why
the London reviewers--whom he once styled "those asses the
critics"--were so unfriendly toward him. He was not of their set, and
some of them regarded him as a sort of literary Ishmael, who had his
hand raised against all his contemporaries, a quarrelsome and
cantankerous although very able man, and therefore to be ignored or sat
down upon whenever possible. He once said, "I don't know a man on the
press who would do me a favor. The press is a great engine, of course,
but its influence is vastly overrated. It has the credit of leading
public opinion, when it only follows it; and look at the
rag-tag-and-bobtail that contribute to it. Even the London 'Times' only
lives for a day. My books have made their way in spite of the press."

Speaking of publishers, he said, "They want all the fat, and they all
lie about their sales. Unless you have somebody in the press-room to
watch, it is almost impossible to find out how many copies of a book
they print. Then there is a detestable fashion about publishers. I had
to fight a very hard battle to get the public to take a novel published
by Trübner, simply because he was not known as a novel-publisher; but I
was determined not to let Bentley or any of his kidney have all the fat
any longer."

Trübner, I may mention, published for him on commission, and under this
arrangement he manufactured his own books and assumed all risks.

In the sense of humor and quick perception of the ludicrous he was
somewhat deficient, and he was too passionately in earnest and too
matter-of-fact about everything ever to attempt a joke, practical or
otherwise. Life to him was always a serious drama, calling for tireless
vigilance; and he watched all the details of its gradual unfolding with
constant anxiety and care, in so far as it concerned himself.

His love for the glamour of the stage led him often to the theatre; but
whenever he saw anything "murdered" there, especially one of his own
plays, it incensed him, and sometimes almost to fury. He loved
music,--not, as he said, the bray of trumpets and the squeak of fiddles,
but melody; and occasionally, seated at a piano, he sang, in a voice
sweet and low and full of pathos, some tender English ditty.

Charles Reade had a real talent for hard work, not that occasional
exclusive devotion to it during the throes of composition to which
Balzac gave himself up night and day to an extent that utterly isolated
him from the world for the time being, but steady, systematic, willing
labor,--a labor, I might say, of love, for he never begrudged it,--which
began every morning, when nothing special interfered with it, after a
nine-o'clock breakfast and continued until late in the afternoon. He was
too practical and methodical to work by fits and starts. Generally he
laid down his pen soon after four P.M.; but often he continued writing
till it was time to dress for dinner, which he took either at home or at
the Garrick Club, as the spirit moved him, except when he dined out,
which was not very often,--for, although he was most genial and social
in a quiet way among his intimates, he had no fondness for general
society or large dinner-parties. Yet his town residence, at No. 6 Bolton
Row, was not only at the West End, but in Mayfair, the best part of it;
and, although a bachelor to the end of his days, he kept house. He
afterwards resided at No. 6 Curzon Street, also in Mayfair, and then
took a house at No. 2 Albert Terrace, Knightsbridge, but gave it up not
long before his death, which occurred in Blomfield Terrace, Shepherd's
Bush, a London suburb.

"This capacity, this zest of yours for steady work," I once remarked to
him, "almost equals Sir Walter Scott's. With your encyclopædic,
classified, and indexed note-books and scrap-books, you are one of the
wonders of literature."

"Well," he replied, "these are the tools of my trade, and the time and
labor I spend on them are well invested." Then he went on to say of
literary composition, "Genius without labor, we all know, will not keep
the pot boiling. But I doubt whether one may not put too much labor into
his work as well as too little, and spend too much time in polishing.
Rough vigor often hits the nail better than the most studied and
polished sentences. It doesn't do to write above the heads or the tastes
of the people. I make it a rule to put a little good and a little bad
into every page I write, and in that way I am likely to suit the taste
of the average reader. The average reader is no fool, neither is he an
embodiment of all the knowledge, wit, and wisdom in the world."

He valued success as a dramatic author more highly than as a novelist,
and was always yearning for some great triumph on the stage. In this
respect he was like Bulwer Lytton, who once said to me, "I think more of
my poems and 'The Lady of Lyons' and 'Richelieu' than of all my novels,
from 'Pelham' to 'What will he do with it?'" (which was the last he had
then written). "A poet's fame is lasting, a novelist's is comparatively
ephemeral." Moved by a similar sentiment, Reade once said, "The most
famous name in English literature and all literature is a dramatist's;
and what pygmies Fielding and Smollett, and all the modern novelists,
from Dickens, the head and front of them, down to that milk-and-water
specimen of mediocrity, A

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