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Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVI., December, 1880.

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Title: Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVI., December, 1880.

Author: Various


        
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Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE OF POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE, VOL. XVI., DECEMBER, 1880. ***




Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Janet Blenkinship and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net









Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1880, by J.B.
LIPPINCOTT & Co., in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at
Washington.


LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE

OF

_POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE_.

DECEMBER, 1880.




AN HISTORICAL ROCKY-MOUNTAIN OUTPOST.

[Illustration: GOING TO THE JUDGE'S.]


The day might have graced the month of June, so balmy was the air, so
warmly shone the sun from a cloudless sky. But the snow-covered
mountain-range whose base we were skirting, the leafless cottonwoods
fringing the Fontaine qui Bouille and the sombre plains that stretched
away to the eastern horizon told a different story. It was on one of
those days elsewhere so rare, but so common in Colorado, when a summer
sky smiles upon a wintry landscape, that we entered a town in whose
history are to be found greater contrasts than even those afforded by
earth and sky. Today Pueblo is a thriving and aggressive city, peopled
with its quota of that great pioneer army which is carrying civilization
over the length and breadth of our land. Three hundred and forty years
ago, as legend hath it, Coronado here stopped his northward march, and
on the spot where Pueblo now stands established the farthermost outpost
of New Spain.

The average traveller who journeys westward from the Missouri River
imagines that he is coming to a new country. "The New West" is a
favorite term with the agents of land--companies and the writers of
alluring railway-guides. These enterprising advocates sometimes indulge
in flights of rhetoric that scorn the trammels of grammar and
dictionary. Witness the following impassioned utterances concerning the
lands of a certain Western railroad: "They comprise a section of country
whose possibilities are simply _infinitesimal_, and whose developments
will be revealed in glorious realization through the horoscope of the
near future." This verbal architect builded wiser than he knew, for what
more fitting word could the imagination suggest wherewith to crown the
possibilities of alkali wastes and barren, sun-scorched plains?

A considerable part of the New West of to-day was explored by the
Spaniards more than three centuries ago. Before the English had landed
at Plymouth Rock or made a settlement at Jamestown they had penetrated
to the Rocky Mountains and given to peak and river their characteristic
names. Southern Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona have been the theatres
wherein were enacted deeds of daring and bravery perhaps unsurpassed by
any people and any age; and that, too, centuries before they became a
part of our American Union. The whole country is strewn over with the
ruins of a civilization in comparison with which our own of to-day seems
feeble. And he who journeys across the Plains till he reaches the Sangre
del Cristo Mountains or the blue Sierra Mojadas enters a land made
famous by the exploits of Coronado, De Vaca and perhaps of the great
Montezuma himself.

In the year 1540, Francisco Vasquez de Coronado was sent by the Spanish
viceroy of Mexico to explore the regions to the north. Those
mountain-peaks, dim and shadowy in the distance and seeming to recede as
they were approached, had ever been an alluring sight to the
gold-seeking Spaniards. But the coveted treasure did not reveal itself
to their cursory search; and though they doubtless pushed as far north
as the Arkansas River, they returned to the capital from what they
considered an unsuccessful expedition. The way was opened, however, and
in 1595 the Spaniards came to what is now the Territory of New Mexico
and founded the city of Santa Fé. They had found, for the most part, a
settled country, the inhabitants living in densely-populated villages,
or _pueblos_, and evincing a rather high degree of civilization. Their
dwellings of mud bricks, or _adobes_, were all built upon a single plan,
and consisted of a square or rectangular fort-like structure enclosing
an open space. Herds of sheep and goats grazed upon the hillsides, while
the bottom-lands were planted with corn and barley. Thus lived and
flourished the Pueblo Indians, a race the origin of which lies in
obscurity, but connected with which are many legends of absorbing
interest. All their traditions point to Montezuma as the founder and
leader of their race, and likewise to their descent from the Aztecs. But
their glory departed with the coming of Cortez, and their Spanish
conquerors treated them as an inferior race. Revolting against their
oppressors in 1680, they were reconquered thirteen years later, though
subsequently allowed greater liberty. By the treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo
in 1848 they became citizens of the United States. From one extreme of
government to another has drifted this remnant of a stately race, till
now at last it finds itself safely sheltered in the arms of our great
republic.

Such is the romantic history of a portion of our so-called "New West;"
but it was with a view of ascertaining some facts concerning occurrences
of more recent date, as well as of seeing some of the actors therein,
that we paid a visit to Pueblo. We found it a rather odd mixture of the
old and the new, the adobe and the "dug-out" looking across the street
upon the imposing structure of brick or the often gaudily-painted frame
cottage. It looked as though it might have been indulging in a Rip Van
Winkle sleep, except that the duration might have been a century or two.
High _mesas_ with gracefully rounded and convoluted sides almost
entirely surround it, and rising above their floor-like tops, and in
fine contrast with their sombre brown tints, appear the blue outlines of
the distant mountains. Pike's Peak, fifty miles to the north, and the
Spanish Peaks, the Wawatoyas, ninety to the south, are sublime objects
of which the eye never grows weary; while the Sierra Mojadas bank up the
western horizon with a frowning mountain-wall. A notch in the distant
range, forty miles to the north-west, indicates the place where the
Arkansas River breaks through the barriers that would impede its seaward
course, forming perhaps the grandest cañon to be found in all this
mighty mountain-wilderness. Truly a striking picture was that on which
Coronado and his mail-clad warriors gazed.

[Illustration: GENERAL VIEW OF PUEBLO, COLORADO, LOOKING
NORTH-WEST--PIKE'S PEAK IN THE DISTANCE.]

A motley throng compose the inhabitants of Pueblo. The dark-hued
Mexican, his round face shaded by the inevitable _sombrero_, figures
conspicuously. But if you value his favor and your future peace of mind
have a care how you allude to his nationality. He is a Spaniard, you
should know--a pure Castilian whose ancestor was some old hidalgo with
as long an array of names and titles as has the Czar of All the Russias
himself. Though he now lives in a forsaken-looking adobe hut with dirt
floor and roof of sticks and turf that serves only to defile the
raindrops that trickle through its many gaps--though his sallow wife
and ill-favored children huddle round him or cook the scanty meal upon
the mud oven in a corner of the room--he is yet a Spaniard, and glories
in it. The tall, raw-boned man, straight as a young cottonwood, whose
long black hair floats out from beneath his hat as he rides into town
from his ranch down the river, may be a half-breed who has figured in a
score of Indian fights, and enjoys the proud distinction of having
killed his man. There is the hungry-looking prospector, waiting with
ill-disguised impatience till he can "cross the Range" and follow again,
as he has done year after year, the exciting chase after the
ever-receding mirage--the visions of fabulous wealth always going to be,
but never quite, attained. The time-honored symbol of Hope must, we
think, give place to a more forcible representation furnished by the
peculiar genius of our times; for is not our modern Rocky-Mountain
prospector the complete embodiment of that sublime grace? His is a hope
that even reverses the proverb, for no amount of deferring is able to
make him heartsick, but rather seems to spur him on to more earnest
endeavor. Has he toiled the summer long, endured every privation,
encountered inconceivable perils, only to find himself at its close
poorer than when he began? Reluctantly he leaves the mountain-side where
the drifting snows have begun to gather, but seemingly as light-hearted
as when he came, for his unshaken hope bridges the winter and feeds upon
the limitless possibilities of the future. Full of wonderful stories are
these same hope-sustained prospectors--tales that are bright with the
glitter of silver and gold. Not a single one of them who has not
discovered "leads" of wonderful richness or "placers" where the sands
were yellow with gold; but by some mischance the prize always slipped
out of his grasp, and left him poor in all but hope. And in truth so
fascinating becomes the occupation that men who in other respects seem
cool and phlegmatic will desert an almost assured success to join the
horde rushing toward some unexplored district, impelled by the
ever-flying rumors of untold wealth just brought to light. The golden
goal this season is the great Gunnison Country; and soon trains of
_burros_, packed with pick and shovel, tent and provisions, will be
climbing the Range.

Pueblo has likewise its business-men, its men of to-day, who manage its
banks, who buy and sell and get gain as they might do in any
well-ordered city, though, truth to tell, there are very few of them who
do not sooner or later catch the prevailing infection--a part of whose
assets is not represented by some "prospect" away up in the mountains or
frisking about the Plains in herds of cattle and sheep. But perhaps the
most curiously-original character in all the town is Judge Allen A.
Bradford, of whose wonderful memory the following good story is told:
Years ago he, with a party of officers, was at the house of Colonel
Boone, down the river. While engaged in playing "pitch-trump," of which
the judge was very fond--and in fact the only game of cards with which
he was acquainted--a messenger rushed in announcing that a lady had
fallen from her horse and was doubtless much injured. The players left
their cards and ran to render assistance, and the game thus broken up
was not resumed. Some two years later the same parties found themselves
together again, and "pitch-trump" was proposed. To the astonishment of
all, the judge informed them how the score stood when they had so
hurriedly left the game, and with the utmost gravity insisted that it be
continued from that point!

On a bright sunny morning we sought out the judge's office, only to
learn that he had not yet for the day exchanged the pleasures of rural
life across the Fontaine for less romantic devotions at the shrine of
the stern goddess. Later we were informed, upon what seemed credible
authority, that upon the morning in question he was intending to sow
oats. Though cold March still claimed the calendar, and hence such
action on the part of the judge might seem like forcing the season, yet
reflections upon his advanced years caused us to suppress the rising
thought that perhaps some allusions to _wild_ oats might have been
intended. Hence we looked forward to a rare treat--judicial dignity
unbending itself in pastoral pursuits, as in the case of some Roman
magistrate. "A little better'n a mile" was the answer to our
interrogatory as to how far the judge's ranch might be from town; but
having upon many former occasions taken the dimensions of a Colorado
mile, we declined the suggestion to walk and sought some mode of
conveyance. There chanced to be one right at hand, standing patiently by
the wayside and presided over by an ancient colored gentleman. The coach
had been a fine one in its day, but that was long since past, and now
its dashboard, bent out at an angle of forty-five degrees, the faded
trimmings and the rusty, stately occupant of the box formed a complete
and harmonious picture of past grandeur seldom seen in the Far West. Two
dubious-looking bronchos, a bay and a white, completed this unique
equipage, in which we climbed the _mesa_ and then descended into the
valley of the Fontaine. The sable driver was disposed to be
communicative, and ventured various opinions upon current topics. He had
been through the war, and came West fourteen years ago.

"You have had quite an adventurous life," we remarked.

"Why, sah," he returned, "if the history ob my life was wrote up it
would be wuth ten thousand dollars."

While regarding the valuation as somewhat high, we yet regretted our
inability to profit by this unexpected though promising
business-opportunity, and soon our attention was diverted by a glimpse
of the judge's adobe, and that person himself standing by his carriage
and awaiting our by no means rapid approach. He was about to go to town,
and the oats were being sown by an individual of the same nationality as
our driver, to whom the latter addressed such encouraging remarks as
"Git right 'long dere now and sow dat oats. Don't stand roostin' on de
fence all day, like as you had the consumshing. You look powerful weak.
Guess mebbe I'd better come over dere and show you how."

[Illustration: THE JUDGE.]

Judge Bradford's career has been a chequered one, and it has fallen to
his lot to dispense justice in places and under circumstances as
various as could well be imagined. Born in Maine in 1815, he has lived
successively in Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska and Colorado, and held almost
every position open to the profession of the law. From the supreme
bench of Colorado he was twice called to represent the Territory as
delegate to Congress. In 1852, when he was judge of the Sixth Judicial
District of Iowa, his eccentricities of character seem to have reached
their full development. He exhibited that supreme disregard for dress
and the various social amenities which not infrequently betray the
superior mind. Never were his clothes known to fit, being invariably
too large or too small, too short or too long. As to his hair, the
external evidences were of a character to disprove the rumor that he
had a brush and comb, while the stubby beard frequently remained
undisturbed upon the judicial chin for several weeks at a time. The
atrocious story is even told that once upon a time, when half shaven,
he chanced to pick up a newspaper, became absorbed in its contents,
forgot to complete his task, and went to court in this most absurdly
unsymmetrical condition. But, despite these personal eccentricities, a
more honest or capable judge has rarely been called upon to vindicate
the majesty of the law. Upon the bench none could detect a flaw in his
assumption of that dignity so intimately associated in all minds with
the judiciary, but, the ermine once laid aside for the day, he was as
jolly and mirthful as any of his frontier companions. Judge Bradford
was no advocate, but by the action of a phenomenal memory his large
head was stored so full of law as to emphasize, to those who knew him,
the curious disproportion between its size and that of his legs and
feet. These latter were of such peculiarly modest dimensions as to call
to mind Goldsmith's well-known lines, though in this case we must, of
necessity, picture admiring frontiersmen standing round while

                   Still the wonder grew
    That two small feet could carry all he knew.

The judge's mind is of the encyclopædical type, and facts and dates are
his especial "strong holt." But his countenance fails to ratify the
inward structure when, pausing from a recital, he gazes upon your
reception of the knowledge conveyed with a kindly smile--a most innocent
smile that acts as a strong disposer to belief. Whether it has been a
simple tale of the early days enlivened with recollections of
pitch-trump and other social joys, or whether the performances of savage
Indians and treacherous half-breeds send a chill through the listener,
it is all the same: at its close the judge's amiable features wear the
same belief-compelling smile. Under its influence we sit for hours while
our entertainer ranges through the stores of his memory, pulling out
much that is dust-covered and ancient, but quickly renovated for our use
by his ready imagination and occasional wit. With a feeling akin to
reverence we listen--a reverence due to one who had turned his face
toward the Rocky Mountains before Colorado had a name, who had made the
perilous journey across the great Plains behind a bull-team, and who
has since been associated with everything concerned in the welfare and
progress of what has now become this great Centennial State, toward
which all eyes are turning. Not without its dark days to him has passed
this pioneer life, and none were more filled with discouragement than
those during which he represented the Territory in Congress. He
describes the position as one of peculiar difficulty--on one hand the
clamors of a people for aid and recognition in their rapid development
of the country, while on the other, to meet them, he found himself a
mere beggar at the doors of Congressional mercy and grace, voteless and
hence powerless. Truly, in the light of his experience, the office of
Territorial delegate is no sinecure.

No one has more closely observed the course of events in the Far West
than Judge Bradford, and his opinions on some disputed points are very
decided and equally clear. Many have wondered that Pueblo, which had the
advantage of first settlement, had long been a rendezvous of trappers
and frontier traders, and lay upon the only road to the then so-called
Pike's Peak mines, that _viâ_ the Arkansas Cañon--that this outpost,
situated thus at the very gateway of the Far West, should have remained
comparatively unimportant, while Denver grew with such astonishing
rapidity. But, in the judge's opinion, it was the war of the rebellion
that turned the scale in favor of the Queen City. The first emigrants
had come through Missouri and up the Arkansas, their natural route, and
as naturally conducting to Pueblo. But when Missouri and South-eastern
Kansas became the scenes of guerrilla warfare the emigrant who would
safely convey himself and family across the prairies must seek a more
northern parallel. Hence, Pueblo received a check from which it is only
now recovering, and Denver an impetus whose ultimate limits no man can
foresee.

Many strange things were done in the olden time. When the Plains Indians
had gathered together their forces for the purpose of persistently
harassing the settlement, the Mountain Utes, then the allies of the
whites, offered their services to help repel the common enemy. Petitions
went up to the governor and Legislature to accept the proffered
services, but they were steadily refused. Our long-headed judge gives
the reason: The administration was under the control of men who were
feeding Uncle Sam's troops with corn at thirteen cents per pound, and
other staples in proportion, and the Indian volunteers promised a too
speedy ending of such a profitable warfare.

Thus eventfully has passed the life of Judge Bradford. During his
threescore-and-five years he has moved almost across a continent, never
content unless he was on the frontier. Long may he live to ride in his
light coverless wagon in the smile of bright Colorado sunshine, honored
by all who know him, and affording his friends the enjoyment of his rare
good presence!

[Illustration: OLD ADOBE FORT.]

Thirty years ago this whole Rocky-Mountain region, now appropriated by
an enterprising and progressive people, contained, besides the native
Indians and the Mexicans in the south, only a few trappers and frontier
traders, most of them in the employ of the American Fur Company. These
were the fearless and intrepid pioneers who so far from fleeing danger
seemed rather to court it. Accounts of their adventures--now a struggle
with a wounded bear, again the threatened perils of starvation when lost
in some mountain-fastness--have long simultaneously terrified and
fascinated both young and old. We all have pictured their dress--the
coat or cloak, often an odd combination of several varieties of skins
pieced together, with fur side in; breeches sometimes of the same
material, but oftener of coarse duck or corduroy; and the slouched hat,
under whose broad brim whatever of the face that was not concealed by a
shaggy, unkempt beard shone out red from exposure to sun and weather.
The American Fur Company had dotted the country with forts, which served
the double purpose of storehouses for the valuables collected and of
places where the employés could barricade themselves against the
too-often troublesome savages. For such a purpose, though not actually
by the Fur Company, was built the old adobe fort the ruins of which are
still to be seen on the banks of the Arkansas at Pueblo. How old it may
have been no one seems to know, but certain it is that for long years,
and in the earliest times, it was a favorite rendezvous. Here was
always to be found a jolly good party to pass away the long winter
evenings with song and story. Here Kit Carson often stopped to rest from
his many perilous expeditions, enjoying, together with Fremont and other
noted Rocky-Mountain explorers, the hospitalities of the old fort. Many
times were its soft walls indented by the arrows of besieging Indians,
but its bloodiest tragedy was enacted in 1854, when the Utes surprised
the sleeping company and savagely massacred all.

While these events were transpiring at the old fort a party of Mexicans
had journeyed from the south, crossed the Arkansas River and formed a
settlement on the east side of the Fontaine. A characteristically
squalid and miserable place it was, with the dwellings--they scarce
deserved the name of houses--built in the side of the bluffs very much
as animals might burrow in the ground. Part dug-out and part adobe were
those wretched habitations, and the shed-like parts which projected from
the hill were composed of all conceivable and inconceivable kinds of
rubbish. Sticks, stones, bits of old iron, worn-out mattings and
gunny-sacks entered more or less into the construction of these dens,
all stuck together with the inevitable adobe mud. The settlement
extended some distance along the side of the bluff, and the sloping
plain in front was dignified as the _plaza_. Perhaps the dark-hued
immigrants expected a large town to spring from these unpromising
beginnings, and their plaza to take on eventually all the importance
which a place so named ever deserves in the Spanish and Mexican mind.
But the Pike's Peak excitement, originating in 1852 with the finding of
gold by a party of Cherokee Indians, and reaching its culmination in
1859, brought a far different class of people to our Rocky-Mountain
outpost, and a civilization was inaugurated which speedily compelled the
ancient Mexican methods to go by the board. Thus, Fontaine was soon
absorbed by the rising town of Pueblo, though the ancient dug-outs still
picturesquely dot the hillside, inhabited by much the same idle and
vagabond class from which the prosperous ranchman soon learns to guard
his hen-roost.

The growth of any of our Far Western towns presents a curious study. In
these latter days it frequently requires but a few months, or even
weeks, to give some new one a fair start upon its prosperous way.
Sometimes a mineral vein, sometimes the temporary "end of the track" of
a lengthening railway, forms the nucleus, and around it are first seen
the tents of the advance-guard. Before many weeks have elapsed some
enterprising individual has succeeded, in the face of infinite toil and
expense, in bringing a sawmill into camp. Soon it is buzzing away on the
neighboring hillside, and the rough pine boards and slabs are growing
into houses of all curious sizes and shapes, irregularly lining the main
street. Delightfully free from conventionality are matters in these new
towns. Former notions of things go for naught. Values are in a
highly-disturbed state, and you will probably be charged more for the
privilege of sleeping somewhere on the floor than for all the refined
elegancies of the Fifth Avenue. The board-walks along the street, where
they exist at all, plainly typify this absence of a well-defined dead
level or zero-point in the popular sentiment; for the various sections
are built each upon the same eccentric plan that obtains in the
corresponding house. The result is an irregular succession of steps
equally irregular, with enough literal jumping-off places to relieve any
possible monotony attending the promenade. If the growth of the town
seems to continue satisfactory, its houses--at least those in or near
its central portions--begin gradually to pass through the next stage in
their development. During this interesting period, which might be called
their chrysalid state, they are twisted and turned, sometimes sawn
asunder, parts lopped off here and applied elsewhere, and all those
radical changes made which would utterly destroy anything possessed of
protean possibilities inferior to those of the common Western frame
house. But, as a final result of this treatment and some small additions
of new material, at last emerges the shapely and often artistic
cottage, resplendent in paint, and bearing small resemblance to the
slab-built barn which forms its framework. If the sometime camp becomes
a city--if Auraria grows into a Denver and Fontaine develops into
Pueblo--the frame houses will sooner or later share a common fate, that
of being mounted on wheels or rollers for a journey suburbward, to make
room for the substantial blocks of brick or stone. By this curious
process of evolution do most of our Western towns rapidly acquire more
or less of a metropolitan appearance.

[Illustration: MEXICAN INTERIOR.]

Pueblo, while not a representative Western town in these respects, yet
in its early days presented some curious combinations, most of them
growing out of the heterogeneous human mixture that attempted to form a
settlement. The famous Green-Russell party, on its way from Georgia to
the Pike's Peak country, had passed through Missouri and Kansas in 1858,
and there found an element ripe for any daring and adventurous deeds in
unknown lands. Many of the border desperadoes, then engaged in that
hard-fought prelude to the civil war, found it desirable and expedient
to leave a place where their violent deeds became too well known; and
these, together with others who hoped to find in a new country relief
from the anarchy which reigned at home, fell into the wake of the
pioneers. Pueblo received its full share of Kansas outlaws about this
time, and, what with those it already contained, even a modicum of peace
seemed out of the question. Here, for instance, was found living with
the Mexicans by the plaza a quarrelsome fellow named Juan Trujillo,
better known by the sobriquet of Juan Chiquito or "Little John," which
his diminutive stature had earned for him. This worthy is represented as
a constant disturber of the peace, and he met the tragic fate which his
reckless life had invited. From being a trusted friend he had incurred
the enmitv of a noted character named Charley Antobees, than whom,
perhaps, no one has had a more varied frontier experience. Coming to the
Rocky Mountains in 1836 in the employ of the American Fur Company, he
has since served as hunter, trapper, Indian-fighter, guide to several
United States exploring expeditions, and spy in the Mexican war as well
as in the war of the rebellion. Antobees still lives on the outskirts of
Pueblo, and his scarred and bronzed face, framed by flowing locks of
jet-black hair, is familiar to all. The frame that has endured so much
is now bent, and health is at last broken, and about a year since an
effort was made by Judge Bradford and others to secure him a pension.
But twenty years back he was in his full vigor and able to maintain his
own against all odds. Whether or not it is true we cannot say, but
certain it is that he is credited with causing the death of Juan
Chiquito. An Indian called "Chickey" actually did the deed, lying in
ambush for his victim. Perhaps few were sorry at the Mexican's sudden
taking off, and in a country where Judge Lynch alone executes the laws
the whole transaction was no doubt regarded as eminently proper.

Among those who came to Pueblo with the influx of 1858 were two brothers
from Ohio, Josiah and Stephen Smith. Stalwart young men were these, of a
different type from the Kansans and Missourians, yet not of the sort to
be imposed upon. They were crack rifle-shots, and even then held decided
opinions on the Indian question--opinions which subsequent experiences
have served to emphasize, but not change. And what with constant
troubles with the savages, as well as with the scarcely less intractable
Kansans, their first years in the Far West could not be called
altogether pleasant. Many a time have their lives been in danger from
bands of outlaw immigrants, who, dissatisfied with not finding gold
lying about as they had expected, sought to revenge themselves upon the
settlers, whom they considered in fault for having led the way. Their
personal bravery went far toward bringing to a close this reign of
terror and transforming the lawless settlement into a permanent and
prosperous town. Still in the prime of life, they look back with
pleasure over their most hazardous experiences, for time has softened
the dangers and cast over them the glow of romance. And while none are
more familiar with everything concerning the early history of Pueblo, it
is equally true that none are more ready to gratify an appreciative
listener, and the writer is indebted for much that follows to their
inimitable recitals.

About the first work of any note undertaken in connection with the new
town was the building of a bridge across the Arkansas. This was
accomplished in 1860, when a charter was obtained from Kansas and a
structure of six spans thrown across the river. It was a toll-bridge,
and every crossing team put at least one dollar into the pockets of its
owners. But trouble soon overtook the management. While one of the
proprietors was in New Mexico, building a mill for Maxwell upon his
famous estate, the other was so unfortunate as to kill three men, and
was obliged, as Steph Smith felicitously expressed it, to "skip out."
Thus the bridge passed into other hands, where it remained till it was
partly washed away in 1863. The following little matter of history
connected with its palmy days will be best given in the narrator's own
words: "We had a blacksmith who misused his wife. The citizens took him
down to the bridge, tied a rope around his body and threw him into the
river. They kept up their lick until they nearly drowned the poor cuss,
then whispered to him to be good to his wife or his time would be short.
He took the hint, used his wife well, and everything was lovely. That
was the first cold-water cure in Pueblo, and I ain't sure but the last."
This incident serves to illustrate the inherent character of American
gallantry, for, however wild or in most respects uncivilized men may
appear to become under the influence of frontier life, instances are
rare in which women are not treated with all the honor and respect due
them. Indeed, I have sometimes thought that the general sentiment
concerning woman is more refined and reverential among the bronzed
pioneers at the outposts than under the influence of a higher
civilization.

The Arkansas, ever changing its winding course after the manner of
prairie-rivers, has long since shifted its bed some distance to the
south, leaving only a portion of the old bridge to span what in high
water becomes an arm of the river, but which ordinarily serves to convey
the water from a neighboring mill. We lean upon its guard-rail while
fancy is busy with the past. We picture the prairie-schooners winding
around the mesas and through the gap: soon they have come to the grove
by the river-bank; the horses are picketed and the camp-fire is blazing;
brown children play in the sand while their parents lie stretched out in
the shadow of the wagons. They left civilization on the banks of the
Missouri more than a month ago, and their eyes are still turned toward
those grand old mountain-ranges in the west over which the declining sun
is now pouring its transfiguring sheen. The brightness dazzles the eyes,
and the Mexican who rides by on a scarce manageable broncho with nose
high in air might be old Juan Chiquito bent upon some murderous errand.
But no: the rider has stopped the animal, and is soliciting the peaceful
offices of a blacksmith, whose curious little shop, bearing the
suggestive name of "Ute," is seen near the bridge. Here bronchos, mules
and burros are fitted with massive shoes by this frontier Vulcan and
sent rejoicing upon their winding and rocky ways. Our sleepy gaze
follows along Santa Fé Avenue, and the eye sees little that is
suggestive of a modern Western town. But soon comes noisily along a
one-horse street-car, which asserts its just claims to popular notice in
consequence of its composing a full half of a system scarce a fortnight
old by filling the air with direful screeches as each curve is
laboriously described. And later, when the magnificent overland train,
twenty-six hours from Kansas City, steams proudly up to the station,
fancy can no longer be indulged. The old has become new. The great
Plains have been bridged, and the outposts of but a decade ago become
the suburbs of to-day.

[Illustration: OLD BRIDGE.]

Doubtless Old Si Smith now and then indulges in reveries somewhat
similar, but his retrospections would be of a minute and personal
character. To warm up the average frontiersman, however--and Old Si is
no exception--into a style at once luminous and emphatic and embellished
with all the richness of the border dialect, it is only necessary to
suggest the Indian topic. However phlegmatically he may reel off his
yarns, glowing though they be with exciting adventure, it is the
red-skins that cause his eyes to flash and his rhetoric to become fervid
and impressive. To him the Indian is the embodiment of all that is
supremely vile, and hence merits his unmitigated hatred. Killing
Indians is his most delightful occupation, and the next in order is
talking about it. His contempt for government methods is unbounded, and
the popular Eastern sentiment he holds in almost equal esteem. The Smith
brothers have had a varied experience in frontier affairs, in which the
Indian has played a prominent part. They hold the Western views, but
with less prejudice than is generally found. They argue the case with a
degree of fairness, and many of their opinions and deductions are novel
and equally just. Said Stephen Smith to the writer: "We've got this
thing reduced right down to vulgar fractions, and the Utes have got to
go. The mineral lands are worth more to us than the Indians are"--this
with a suggestive shrug--"and if the government don't remove them from
the reserves, why, we'll have to do it ourselves. There's a great fuss
been made about the whites going on the Indian reserves; and what did it
all amount to? Maybe fifty or sixty prospectors, all told, have got over
the lines, dug a few holes and hurt nobody. But I suppose the Indians
always stay where they ought to! I guess not. Some of them are off their
reserves half the time, and they go off to murder and kill. Do they ever
get punished for that? Not much, except when folks do it on their own
account. But let a white man get found on the Indian reserves and
there's a great howl. I want a rule that will work both ways, and I
don't give much for a government that isn't able to protect me on the
Indian reserves the same as anywhere else. Some years ago Indian
troubles were reported at Washington, and Sherman was sent out to
investigate. Of course they heard he was coming, and all were on their
good behavior. They knew where their blankets and ponies and provisions
came from. Consequently, Sherman reported everything peaceful: he hadn't
seen anybody killed. That's about the kind of information they get in
the East on the Indian question.

"Misused? Yes, the Indians have been misused, badly misused. I know
that. But who have _they_ misused? This whole country is covered with
ruins, and they all go to show that it has been inhabited by a
highly-civilized race of people. And what has become of them? I believe
the Indians cleaned them out long years ago; and now their turn has
come. I find it's a law of Nature"--and here the narrator's tone grew
more reverent as if touching upon a higher theme--"that the weak go to
the wall. It's a hard law, but I don't see any way out of it. The old
Aztecs had to go under, and the Indians will have to follow suit."

Whatever humanitarians and archæologists may conclude concerning these
opinions, they are nevertheless extensively held in the Far West. The
frontiersman, who sees the Indian only in his native savagery, who has
found it necessary to employ a considerable part of his time in keeping
out of range of poisoned arrows, and who must needs be always upon the
alert lest his family fall a prey to Indian treachery, cannot be
expected to hold any ultra-humanitarian views upon the subject. He has
not been brought in contact with the several partially-civilized tribes,
in whose advancement many see possibilities for the whole race. He
cannot understand why the government allows the Indians to roam over
enormous tracts of land, rich in minerals they will never extract and
containing agricultural possibilities they will never seek to realize.
His plan would be to have only the same governmental care exercised over
the red man as is now enjoyed by the white, and then look to the law of
the survival of the fittest to furnish a solution of the problem. The
case seems so clear and the arguments so potent that he looks for some
outside reasons for their failure, and very naturally thinks he
discovers them in governmental quarters. "There's too many people living
off this Indian business for it to be wound up yet a while." Thus does a
representative man at the outposts express the sentiment of no
inconsiderable class.

Next to the Indian himself, the frontiersman holds in slight esteem the
soldiers who are sent for the protection of the border. The objects of
his supreme hatred still often merit his good opinion for their bravery
and fighting qualities, but upon raw Eastern recruits and West-Point
fledglings he looks with mild disdain. Having learned the Indian methods
by many hard knocks, he doubtless fails to exercise proper charity
toward those whose experiences have been less extended; and added to
this may be a lurking jealousy--which, however, would be stoutly
disclaimed--because the blue uniform is gaining honors and experience
more easily and under conditions more favorable than were possible with
him in the early days. "They be about the greenest set!" said an old
Indian-fighter to whom this subject was broached, "and the sight of an
Injun jest about scares 'em to death at first. I never saw any of 'em
_I_ was afraid of if I only had any sort of a show. Why, back in '59 I
undertook to take a young man back to the States, and we started off in
a buggy--a _buggy_, do you mind. When we got down the Arkansas a piece
we heard the red-skins was pretty thick, but we went right on, except
keeping more of a lookout, you know. But along in the afternoon we saw
fifteen or twenty coming for us, and we got ready to give 'em a
reception. We had a hard chase, but at last they got pretty sick of
the way I handled my rifle, and concluded to let us alone for a while.
They kept watch of us, though, and meant to get square with us that
night. Well, we travelled till dark, stopped just long enough to build
a big fire, and then lit out. When those Injuns came for us that night
we were some other place, and they lost their grip on that little
scalping-bee. They didn't trouble us any more, that's sure. And when we
got to the next post there were nigh a hundred teams, six stages and
two companies of soldiers, all shivering for fear of the Injuns. It
rather took the wind out of 'em to see us come in with that buggy, and
they didn't want to believe we had come through. But, like the man's
mother-in-law, we were _there_, and they couldn't get out of it. And,
sir, maybe you won't believe me, but those soldiers offered me
_seventy-five dollars_ to go back with them! That's the sort of an
outfit the government sends to protect us!"

[Illustration: SANTA FÉ AVENUE, PUEBLO, COLORADO.]

We have had frequent occasion since our frontier experiences began to
ponder the untrammelled opulence of this Western word, _outfit_. From
the Mississippi to the Pacific its expansive possibilities are
momentarily being tested. There is nothing that lives, breathes or
grows, nothing known to the arts or investigated by the
sciences--nothing, in short, coming within the range of the Western
perception--that cannot with more or less appropriateness be termed an
"outfit." A dismal broncho turned adrift in mid-winter to browse on the
short stubble of the Plains is an "outfit," and so likewise is the
dashing equipage that includes a shining phaeton and richly-caparisoned
span. Perhaps by no single method can so comprehensive an idea of the
term in question be obtained in a short time, and the proper qualifying
adjectives correctly determined, as by simply preparing for a
camping-expedition. The horse-trader with whom you have negotiated for a
pair of horses or mules congratulates you upon the acquisition of a
"boss outfit." When your wagon has been purchased and the mules are duly
harnessed in place, you are further induced to believe that you have a
"way-up outfit," though, obviously, this should now be understood to
possess a dual significance which did not before obtain, since the wagon
represents a component part. The hardware clerk displays a tent and
recommends a fly as forming a desirable addition to an even otherwise
"swell outfit." The grocer provides you with what he modestly terms a
"first-class outfit," albeit his cans of fruits, vegetables and meats
are for the delectation of the inner man. Frying-pans and dutch-ovens,
camp-stools and trout-scales, receive the same designation. And now
comes the crowning triumph of this versatile term, as well as a happy
illustration of what might be called its agglutinative and assimilating
powers; for when horses and wagon have received their load of tent and
equipments, and father, mother and the babies have filled up every
available space, this whole establishment, this _omnium gatherum_ of
outfits, becomes neither more nor less than an "outfit."

The last five years have witnessed a wonderful material progress in the
Far West. The mineral wealth discovered in Colorado and New Mexico has
caused a great westward-flowing tide to set in. The nation seems to be
possessed of a desire to reclaim the waste places and to explore the
unknown. Cities that were founded by "fifty-niners," and after a decade
seemed to reach the limits of their growth, have started on a new
career. And for none of these does the outlook seem brighter than in the
case of the city of Pueblo, the old outpost whose early history we have
attempted to sketch. Its growth has all along been a gradual one, and
its improvements have kept pace with this healthy advance. Its public
schools, like those of all Far Western towns which the writer has
visited are model institutions and an honor to the commonwealth. A
handsome brick court-house, situated on high ground, is an ornament to
the city, and differs widely from that in which Judge Bradford held
court eighteen years ago--the first held in the Territory, and that,
too, under military protection. Pueblo's wealth is largely derived from
the stock-raising business, the surrounding country being well adapted
to cattle and sheep. The _rancheros_ ride the Plains the year round, and
the cattle flourish upon the food which Nature provides--in the summer
the fresh grass, and in the winter the same converted into hay which has
been cured upon the ground. An important railway-centre is Pueblo, and
iron highways radiate from it to the four cardinal points. These
advantages of location should procure it a large share of the flood of
prosperity that is sweeping over the State. But enterprises are now in
progress which cannot fail to add materially to its importance as a
factor in the development of the country. On the highest lift of the
mesa south of the town, and in a most commanding position, it has been
decided to locate a blast-furnace which shall have no neighbor within a
radius of five hundred miles. With iron ore of finest quality easily
accessible in the neighboring mountains, and coal-fields of unlimited
extent likewise within easy reach, the production of iron in the Rocky
Mountains has only waited for the growth of a demand. This the
advancement and prosperity of the State have now well assured. Many
kindred industries will spring up around the furnace, the Bessemer
steel-works and the rail-mills that are now projected; and a few years
will suffice to transform the level mesa, upon which for untold
centuries the cactus and the yucca-lily have bloomed undisturbed, into a
thriving manufacturing city whose pulse shall be the throb of steam
through iron arms. The onlooking mountains, that have seen strange
sights about this old outpost, are to see a still stranger--the
ushering-in of a new civilization which now begins its march into the
land of the Aztecs.

Perhaps these thoughts were occupying our minds as we climbed the
bluffs for a visit to this incipient Pittsburg. The equipage did no
credit to the financial status of the iron company, as it consisted of
a superannuated express-wagon drawn by a dyspeptic white horse which
the boy who officiated as driver found no difficulty in restraining.
Two gentlemen in charge of the constructions, their visitor and two
kegs of nails comprised this precious load. The day was cloudless and
fine, albeit a Colorado "zephyr" was blowing, and the party, with
perhaps the single exception of the horse, felt in fine spirits. The
jolly superintendent, who both in face and mien reminded one of the
typical German nobleman, was overflowing with story, joke and witty
repartee. The site of the works was reached in the course of time.
Excavations were in progress for the blast-furnace and accessory
buildings, and developed a strange formation. The entire mesa seems
built up of boulders packed together with a sort of alkali clay, dry
and hard as stone, and looking, as our _distingué_ guide remarked, as
though not a drop of water had penetrated five feet from the surface
since the time of the Flood. Two blast-furnaces, each with a capacity
of five hundred tons, will be speedily built, to be followed by
rail-mills, a Bessemer steel-plant and all the accessories of vast
iron-and steel-works. With the patronage of several thousand miles of
railway already assured, and its duplication in the near future
apparently beyond doubt, the success of this daring frontier enterprise
seems far removed from the domain of conjecture.

[Illustration: OLD SI SMITH.]

All this was glowingly set forth by the courtly superintendent, who,
though but three months in the country, is already at heart a Coloradan.
That there are some things about frontier life which he likes better
than others he is free to admit. Among the few matters he would have
otherwise he gives the first place to the tough "range" or "snow-fed"
beef upon which the dwellers in this favored land must needs subsist. "I
heard a story once," said he, "about a young man, a tenderfoot, who,
after long wondering what made the beef so fearfully tough, at length
arrived at the solution, as he thought, and that quite by accident. He
was riding out with a friend, an old resident, when they chanced to come
upon a bunch of cattle. The young man's attention seemed to be
attracted, and as the idea began to dawn upon him he faced his
companion, and, pointing to an animal which bore the brand "B.C. 45,"
savagely exclaimed, 'Look there! How can you expect those antediluvians
to be anything but tough? Why don't you kill your cattle before they get
two or three times as old as Methuselah?'"

We took a long ride that afternoon under a peerless sky, with blue
mountain-ranges on one hand, whose ridges, covered with snow, seemed
like folds of satin, and on the other the great billowy Plains, bare and
brown and smooth as a carpet. The white horse, relieved of the kegs of
nails, really performed prodigies of travel, all the more appreciated
because unexpected. A stone-quarry for which we were searching was not
found, but a teamster was, who, while everything solemnly stood still
and waited, and amid the agonies of an indescribable stutter, finally
managed to enlighten us somewhat as to its whereabouts. These adventures
served to put us in excellent humor, so that when the road was found
barricaded by a barbed wire fence, it only served to give one of the
party an opportunity to air his views upon the subject--to argue, in
fact, that the barbed wire fence had been an important factor in
building up the agricultural greatness of the West. "For what
inducements," he exclaims, "does the top rail of such a fence offer to
the contemplative farmer? None, sir! His traditional laziness has been
broken up, and great material prosperity is the result."

Whatever causes have operated to produce the effect, certain it is that
the West is eminently prosperous to-day. Everywhere are seen growth,
enterprise and an aggressiveness that stops at no obstacles. Immigration
is pouring into Colorado alone at the rate of several thousands per
week. The government lands are being rapidly taken up, and the stable
industries of stock-raising and farming correspondingly extended.
Manufacturing, too, is acquiring a foothold, and many of the necessaries
of life, which now must be obtained in the East, will soon be produced
at home. The mountains are revealing untold treasures of silver and
gold, and the possibilities which may lie hid in the yet unexplored
regions act as a stimulus to crowds of hopeful prospectors. But while
Colorado is receiving her full share of the influx, a tide seems to be
setting in toward the old empire of the Aztecs, and flowing through the
natural gateway, our old Rocky-Mountain outpost. It is beginning to be
found out that the legends of fabulous wealth which have come down to us
from the olden time have much of truth in them, and mines that were
worked successively by Franciscan monks, Pueblo Indians, Jesuit priests
and Mexicans, and had suffered filling up and obliteration with every
change of proprietorship, are now being reopened; and that, too, under a
new dispensation which will ensure prosperity to the enterprise.
Spaniard and priest have long since abandoned their claim to the rich
possessions, and their doubtful sway, ever upon the verge of revolution
and offering no incentive to enterprise, has given place to one of a
different character. Under the protection of beneficent and fostering
laws this oldest portion of our Union may now be expected to reveal its
wealth of resources to energy and intelligent labor. And it may
confidently be predicted that American enterprise will not halt till it
has built up the waste places of our land, and in this case literally
made the desert to blossom as the rose. Thus gloriously does our new
civilization reclaim the errors of the past, building upon ancient ruins
the enlightened institutions of to-day, and grafting fresh vigor upon
effete races and nationalities. And now, at last, the Spanish Peaks,
those mighty ancient sentinels whose twin spires, like eyes, have
watched the slow rise and fall of stately but tottering dynasties in the
long ago, are to look out upon a different scene--a new race come in the
might of its freedom and with almost the glory of a conquering host to
redeem a waiting land from the outcome of centuries of avaricious and
bigoted misrule, and even from the thraldom of decay.

GEORGE REX BUCKMAN.

[Illustration]




LOST.


  I.

  I lost my treasures one by one,
    Those joys the world holds dear;
  Smiling I said, "To-morrow's sun
    Will bring us better cheer."
  For faith and love were one. Glad faith!
  All loss is naught save loss of faith.

  II.

  My truant joys come trooping back,
    And trooping friends no less;
  But tears fall fast to meet the lack
    Of dearer happiness.
  For faith and love are two. Sad faith!
  'Tis loss indeed, the loss of faith.

MARY B. DODGE.




ADAM AND EVE.




CHAPTER XXXVI.


From the day on which Adam knew that the date of Jerrem's trial was
fixed all the hope which the sight of Eve had rekindled was again
completely extinguished, and, refusing every attempt at consolation, he
threw himself into an abyss of despair a hundred-fold more dark and
bitter than before. The thought that he, captain and leader as he had
been, should stand in court confronted by his comrades and neighbors
(for Adam, ignorant of the disasters which had overtaken them, believed
half Polperro to be on their way to London), and there swear away
Jerrem's life and turn informer, was something too terrible to be dwelt
on with even outward tranquillity, and, abandoning everything which had
hitherto sustained him, he gave himself up to all the terrors of remorse
and despair. It was in vain for Reuben to reason or for Eve to plead: so
long as they could suggest no means by which this dreaded ordeal could
be averted Adam was deaf to all hope of consolation. There was but one
subject which interested him, and only on one subject could he be got to
speak, and that was the chances there still remained of Jerrem's life
being spared; and to furnish him with some food for this hope, Eve began
to loiter at the gates, talk to the warders and the turnkeys, and mingle
with the many groups who on some business or pretext were always
assembled about the yard or stood idling in the various passages with
which the prison was intersected.

One morning it came to her mind, How would it be for Adam to escape, and
so not be there to prove the accusation he had made of Jerrem having
shot the man? With scarce more thought than she had bestowed on many
another passing suggestion which seemed for the moment practical and
solid, but as she turned it round lost shape and floated into air, Eve
made the suggestion, and to her surprise found it seized on by Adam as
an inspiration. Why, he'd risk _all_ so that he escaped being set face
to face with Jerrem and his former mates. Adam had but to be assured the
strain would not be more than Eve's strength could bear before he had
adopted with joy her bare suggestion, clothed it with possibility, and
by it seemed to regain all his past energy. Could he but get away and
Jerrem's life be spared, all hope of happiness would not be over. In
some of those distant lands to which people were then beginning to go
life might begin afresh. And as his thoughts found utterance in speech
he held out his hand to Eve, and in it she laid her own; and Adam needed
nothing more to tell him that whither he went there Eve too would go.
There was no need for vows and protestations now between these two, for,
though to each the other's heart lay bare, a word of love scarce ever
crossed their lips. Life seemed too sad and time too precious to be
whiled away in pleasant speeches, and often when together, burdened by
the weight of all they had to say, yet could not talk about, the two
would sit for hours and neither speak a word. But with this proposition
of escape a new channel was given to them, and as they discussed their
different plans the dreadful shadow which at times had hung between them
was rolled away and lifted out of sight.

Inspired by the prospect of action, of doing something, Adam roused
himself to master all the difficulties: his old foresight and caution
began to revive, and the project, which had on one day looked like a
desperate extremity, grew by the end of a week into a well-arranged plan
whose success seemed more than possible. Filled with anxiety for Eve,
Reuben gave no hearty sanction to the experiment: besides which, he felt
certain that now neither Adam's absence nor presence would in any way
affect Jerrem's fate; added to which, if the matter was detected it
might go hard with Adam himself. But his arguments proved nothing to
Eve, who, confident of success, only demanded from him the promise of
secrecy; after which, she thought, as some questions might be put to
him, the less he knew the less he would have to conceal.

Although a prisoner, inasmuch as liberty was denied to him, Adam was in
no way subjected to that strict surveillance to which those who had
broken the law were supposed to be submitted. It was of his own free
will that he disregarded the various privileges which lay open to him:
others in his place would have frequented the passages, hung about the
yards and grown familiar with the tap, where spirits were openly bought
and sold. Money could do much in those days of lax discipline, and the
man who could pay and could give need have very few wants unsatisfied.
But Adam's only desire was to be left undisturbed and alone; and as this
entailed no undue amount of trouble after their first curiosity had been
satisfied, it was not thought necessary to deny him this privilege. From
constantly going in and out, most of the officials inside the prison
knew Eve, while to but very few was Adam's face familiar; and it was on
this fact, aided by the knowledge that through favor of a gratuity
friends were frequently permitted to outstay their usual hour, that most
of their hopes rested. Each day she came Eve brought some portion of the
disguise which was to be adopted; and then, having learnt from Reuben
that the Mary Jane had arrived and was lying at the wharf unloading, not
knowing what better to do, they decided that she should go to Captain
Triggs and ask him, in case Adam could get away, whether he would let
him come on board his vessel and give him shelter there below.

"Wa-al, no," said Triggs, "I woan't do that, 'cos they as I'se got here
might smell un out; but I'll tell 'ee what: I knaws a chap as has in
many ways bin beholden to me 'fore now, and I reckon if I gives un the
cue he'll do the job for 'ee."

"But do you think he's to be trusted?" Eve asked.

"Wa-al, that rests on how small a part you'm foaced to tell un of,"
said Triggs, "and how much you makes it warth his while. I'm blamed if
I'd go bail for un myself, but that won't be no odds agen' Adam's goin':
'tis just the place for he. 'T 'ud niver do to car'y a pitch-pot down
and set un in the midst o' they who couldn't bide his stink."

"And the crew?" said Eve, wincing under Captain Triggs's figurative
language.

"Awh, the crew's right enuf--a set o' gashly, smudge-faced raskils
that's near half Maltee and t' other Lascar Injuns. Any jail-bird that
flies their way 'ull find they's all of a feather. But here," he added,
puzzled by the event: "how's this that you'm still mixed up with Adam
so? I thought 'twas all 'long o' you and Reuben May that the Lottery's
landin' got blowed about?"

Eve shook her head. "Be sure," she said, "'twas never in me to do Adam
any harm."

"And you'm goin' to stick to un now through thick and thin? 'Twill niver
do for un, ye knaw, to set his foot on Cornish ground agen."

"He knows that," said Eve; "and if he gets away we shall be married and
go across the seas to some new part, where no one can tell what brought
us from our home."

Triggs gave a significant nod. "Lord!" he exclaimed, "but that's a poor
lookout for such a bowerly maid as you be! Wouldn't it be better for 'ee
to stick by yer friends 'bout here than--"

"I haven't got any friends," interrupted Eve promptly, "excepting it's
Adam and Joan and Uncle Zebedee."

"Ah, poor old Zebedee!" sighed Triggs: "'tis all dickey with he. The day
I started I see Sammy Tucker to Fowey, and he was tellin' that th' ole
chap was gone reg'lar tottlin'-like, and can't tell thickee fra that;
and as for Joan Hocken, he says you wouldn't knaw her for the same. And
they's tooked poor foolish Jonathan, as is more mazed than iver, to live
with 'em; and Mrs. Tucker, as used to haggle with everybody so, tends on
'em all hand and foot, and her's given up praichin' 'bout religion and
that, and 's turned quite neighborly, and, so long as her can save her
daughter, thinks nothin's too hot nor too heavy."

"Dear Joan!" sighed Eve: "she's started by the coach on her way up here
now."

"Whether she hath or no!" exclaimed Triggs in surprise. "Then take my
word they's heerd that Jerrem's to be hanged, and Joan's comin' up to be
all ready to hand for 't."

"No, not that," groaned Eve, for at the mere mention of the word the
vague dread seemed to shape itself into a certainty. "Oh, Captain
Triggs, don't say that if Adam gets off you don't think Jerrem's life
will be spared."

"Wa-al, my poor maid, us must hope so," said the compassionate captain;
"but 'tis the warst o' they doin's that sooner or later th' endin, of
'em must come. 'Twould never do to let 'em prosper allays," he added
with impressive certainty, "or where 'ud be the use o' parsons praichin'
up 'bout heaven and hell? Why, now, us likes good liquor cheap to Fowey;
and wance 'pon a time us had it too, but that ha'n't bin for twenty
year. Our day's gone by, and so 'ull theirs be now; and th' excise 'ull
come, and revenoos 'ull settle down, and folks be foaced to take to
lousterin' for the bit o' bread they ates, and live quiet and paceable,
as good neighbors should. So try and take heart; and if so be that Adam
can give they Bailey chaps the go-by, tell un to come 'longs here, and
us 'ull be odds with any o' they that happens to be follerin' to his
heels."

Charmed with this friendly promise, Eve said "Good-bye," leaving the
captain puzzled with speculations on women and the many curious
contradictions which seem to influence their actions; while, the hour
being now too late to return to the prison, she took her way to her own
room, thinking it best to begin the preparations which in case of Adam's
escape and any sudden departure it would be necessary to have completed.

Perhaps it was her interview with Captain Triggs, the sight of the wharf
and the ships, which took her thoughts back and made them bridge the
gulf which divided her past life from her present self. Could the girl
she saw in that shadowy past--headstrong, confident, impatient of
suffering and unsympathetic with sorrow--be this same Eve who walked
along with all hope and thought of self merged in another's happiness
and welfare? Where was the vanity, where were the tricks and coquetries,
passports to that ideal existence after which in the old days she had so
thirsted? Trampled out of sight and choked beneath the fair blossoms of
a higher life, which, as in many a human nature, had needed sorrow,
humiliation and a great watering of tears before there could spring
forth the flowers for a fruit which should one day ripen into great
perfection.

No wonder, then, that she should be shaken by a doubt of her own
identity; and having reached her room she paused upon the threshold and
looked around as if to satisfy herself by all those silent witnesses
which made it truth. There was the chair in which she had so often sat
plying her needle with such tardy grace while her impatient thoughts did
battle with the humdrum, narrow life she led. How she had beat against
the fate which seemed to promise naught but that dull round of
commonplace events in which her early years had passed away! How as a
gall and fret had come the thought of Reuben's proffered love, because
it shadowed forth the level of respectable routine, the life she then
most dreaded! To be courted and sought after, to call forth love,
jealousy and despair, to be looked up to, thought well of, praised,
admired,--these were the delights she had craved and these the longings
she had had granted. And a sigh from the depths of that chastened heart
rendered the bitter tribute paid by all to satiated vanity and outlived
desire. The dingy walls, the ill-assorted furniture (her mother's pride
in which had sometimes vexed her, sometimes made her laugh) now looked
like childhood's friends, whose faces stamp themselves upon our inmost
hearts. The light no longer seemed obscure, the room no longer gloomy,
for each thing in it now was flooded by the tender light of
memory--that wondrous gift to man which those who only sail along life's
summer sea can never know in all the heights and depths revealed to
storm-tossed hearts.

"What! you've come back?" a voice said in her ear; and looking round Eve
saw it was Reuben, who had entered unperceived. "There's nothing fresh
gone wrong?" he asked.

"No, nothing;" but the sad smile she tried to give him welcome with was
so akin to tears that Reuben's face assumed a look of doubt. "'Tis only
that I'm thinking how I'm changed from what I was," said Eve. "Why, once
I couldn't bear this room and all the things about it; but now--Oh,
Reuben, my heart seems like to break because perhaps 'twill soon now
come to saying good-bye to all of it for ever."

Reuben winced: "You're fixed to go, then?"

"Yes, where Adam goes I shall go too: don't you think I should? What
else is left for me to do?"

"You feel, then, you'd be happy--off with him--away from all
and--everybody else?"

"Happy! Should I be happy to know he'd gone alone--happy to know I'd
driven him away to some place where I wouldn't go myself?" and Eve
paused, shaking her head before she added, "If he can make another start
in life--try and begin again--"

"You ought to help him to it," said Reuben promptly: "that's very plain
to see. Oh, Eve, do you mind the times when you and me have talked of
what we'd like to do--how, never satisfied with what went on around, we
wanted to be altogether such as some of those we'd heard and read about?
The way seems almost opened up to you, but what shall I do when all this
is over and you are gone away? I can't go back and stick to trade again,
working for nothing more but putting victuals in myself."

For a moment Eve did not speak: then, with a sudden movement, she
turned, saying to Reuben, "There's something that before our lives are
at any moment parted I've wanted to say to you, Reuben. 'Tis that until
now, this time while we've been all together here, I've never known what
your worth is--what you would be to any one who'd got the heart to value
what you'd give. Of late it has often seemed that I should think but
very small of one who'd had the chance of your liking and yet didn't
know the proper value of such goodness."

Reuben gave a look of disavowal, and Eve continued, adding with a little
hesitation, "You mustn't think it strange in me for saying this. I
couldn't tell you if you didn't know how everything lies between Adam
and myself; but ever since this trouble's come about all my thoughts
seem changed, and people look quite different now to what they did
before; and, most of all, I've learnt to know the friend I've got, and
always had, in you, Reuben."

Reuben did not answer for a moment. He seemed struggling to keep back
something he was yet prompted to speak of. "Eve," he said at length,
"don't think that I've not made mistakes, and great ones too. When first
I fought to battle down my leaning toward you, why was it? Not because
of doubting that 'twould ever be returned, but 'cos I held myself too
good a chap in all my thoughts and ways to be taken up with such a
butterfly concern as I took you to be. I'd never have believed then that
you'd have acted as I've seen you act. I thought that love with you
meant who could give you the finest clothes to wear and let you rule the
roast the easiest; but you have shown me that you are made of better
woman's stuff than that. And, after all, a man thinks better of himself
for mounting high than stooping to pick up what can be had for asking
any day."

"No, no, Reuben: your good opinion is more than I deserve," said Eve,
her memory stinging her with past recollections. "If you want to see a
dear, kind-hearted, unselfish girl, wait until Joan comes. I do so hope
that you will take to her! I think you will, after what you've been to
Jerrem and to Adam. I want you and Joan to like each other."

"I don't think there's much fear of that," said Reuben. "Jerrem's spoke
so freely about Joan that I seem to know her before ever having seen
her. Let me see: her mind was at one time set on Adam, wasn't it?"

"I think that she was very fond of Adam," said Eve, coloring: "and, so
far as that goes, I don't know that there is any difference now. I'm
sure she'd lay her life down if it would do him good."

"Poor soul!" sighed Reuben, drawn by a friendly feeling to sympathize
with Joan's unlucky love. "Her cup's been full, and no mistake, of
late."

"Did Jerrem seem to feel it much that Uncle Zebedee 'd been took so
strange?" asked Eve.

"I didn't tell him more than I could help," said Reuben. "As much as
possible I made it out to him that for the old man to come to London
wouldn't be safe, and the fear of that seemed to pacify him at once."

"I haven't spoken of it to Adam yet," said Eve. "He hasn't asked about
his coming, so I thought I'd leave the telling till another time. His
mind seems set on nothing but getting off, and by it setting Jerrem
free."

But Reuben made no rejoinder to the questioning tone of Eve's words, and
after a few minutes' pause he waived the subject by reverting to the
description which Eve had given of Joan, so that, in case he had to meet
her alone, he might recognize her without difficulty. Eve repeated the
description, dwelling with loving preciseness on the various features
and points by which Joan might be known; and then Reuben, having some
work to do, got up to say good-bye.

"Good-bye," said Eve, holding out her hand--"good-bye. Every time I say
it now I seem to wonder if 'tis to be good-bye indeed."

"Why, no: in any way, you'd wait until the trial was over?"

"Yes, I forgot: of course we should."

"Well, then, do you think I'd let you go without a word? Ah, Eve, no!
Whatever others are, nobody's yet pushed you from your place, nor ever
will so long as my life lasts."




CHAPTER XXXVII


At length the dreaded day was over, the trial was at an end, and, in
spite of every effort made, Jerrem condemned to die. The hopes raised by
the knowledge of Adam's escape seemed crowned with success when, to the
court's dismay, it was announced that the prisoner's accuser could not
be produced: he had mysteriously disappeared the evening before, and in
spite of a most vigorous search was nowhere to be found. But, with minds
already resolved to make this hardened smuggler's fate a warning and
example to all such as should henceforth dare the law, one of the
cutter's crew, wrought upon by the fear lest Jerrem should escape and
baffle the vengeance they had vowed to take, was got to swear that
Jerrem was the man who fired the fatal shot; and though it was shown
that the night was dark and recognition next to impossible, this
evidence was held conclusive to prove the crime, and nothing now
remained but to condemn the culprit. The judge's words came slowly
forth, making the stoutest there shrink back and let that arrow from the
bow of death glance by and set its mark on him upon whose face the crowd
now turned to gaze.

"Can it be that he is stunned? or is he hardened?"

For Jerrem stands all unmoved and calm while, dulled by the sound of
rushing waters, the words the judge has said come booming back and back
again. A sickly tremor creeps through every limb and makes it nerveless;
a sense of growing weight presses the flesh down as a burden on the
fainting spirit; one instant a thousand faces, crowding close, keep out
the air; the next, they have all receded out of sight back into misty
space, and he is left alone, with all around faded and grown confused
and all beneath him slipping and giving way. Suddenly a sound rouses him
back to life: a voice has smote his ear and cleaved his inmost soul; and
lifting his head his eyes are met by sight of Joan, who with a piercing
shriek has fallen back, deathlike and pale, in Reuben's outstretched
arms.

Then Jerrem knows that hope is past and he must die, and in one flash
his fate, in all its misery and shame, stands out before him, and
reeling he totters, to sink down senseless and be carried off to that
dismal cell allotted to those condemned to death; while Reuben, as best
he can, manages to get Joan out of court and into the open air, where
she gradually comes back to life again and is able to listen to such
poor comfort as Reuben's sad heart can find to give her. For by reason
of those eventful circumstances which serve to cement friendships by
suddenly overthrowing the barriers time must otherwise gradually wear
away, Reuben May and Joan Hocken have (in the week which has intervened
between her arrival and this day of trial) become more intimate and
thoroughly acquainted than if in an ordinary way they had known each
other for years. A stranger in a large city, with not one familiar face
to greet her, who does not know the terrible feeling of desolation which
made poor Joan hurry through the crowded streets, shrinking away from
their bustle and throng toward Reuben, the one person she had to turn to
for sympathy, advice, assistance and consolation? With that spirit of
perfect trust which her own large heart gave her the certain assurance
of receiving, Joan placed implicit reliance in all Reuben said and did;
and seeing this, and receiving an inward satisfaction from the sight,
Reuben involuntarily slipped into a familiarity of speech and manner
very opposed to the stiff reserve he usually maintained toward
strangers.

Ten days were given before the day on which Jerrem was to die, and
during this time, through the various interests raised in his behalf, no
restriction was put upon the intercourse between him and his friends; so
that, abandoning everything for the poor soul's welfare, Reuben, Joan
and Jerrem spent hour after hour in the closest intercourse. Happily, in
times of great extremity the power of realizing our exact situation is
mostly denied to us; and in the case of Joan and Jerrem, although
surrounded by the terrors and within the outposts of that dreaded end,
it was nothing unfrequent to hear a sudden peal of laughter, which often
would have as sudden an end in a great burst of tears.

To point to hopes and joys beyond the grave when every thought is
centred and fixed on this life's interests and keen anxieties is but a
fruitless, vain endeavor; and Reuben had to try and rest contented in
the assurance of Jerrem's perfect forgiveness and good-will to all who
had shown him any malice or ill-feeling--to draw some satisfaction from
the unselfish love he showed to Joan and the deep gratitude he now
expressed to Uncle Zebedee.

What would become of them? he often asked when some word of Joan's
revealed the altered aspect of their affairs; and then, overcome by the
helplessness of their forlorn condition, he would entreat Reuben to
stand by them--not to forget Joan, not to forsake her. And Reuben,
strangely moved by sight of this poor giddy nature's overwrought
emotion, would try to calm him with the ready assurance that while he
lived Joan should never want a friend, and, touched by his words, the
two would clasp his hands together, telling each other of all the
kindness he had showed them, praying God would pay him back in blessings
for his goodness. Nor were theirs the only lips which spoke of gratitude
to Reuben May: his name had now become familiar to many who through his
means were kept from being ignorant of the sad fate which awaited their
boon companion, their prime favorite, the once madcap, rollicking
Jerrem--the last one, as Joan often told Reuben, whom any in Polperro
would have fixed on for evil to pursue or misfortune to overtake, and
about whom all declared there must have been "a hitch in the block
somewheres, as Fate never intended that ill-luck should pitch upon
Jerrem." The repetition of their astonishment, their indignation and
their sympathy afforded the poor fellow the most visible satisfaction,
harassed as he was becoming by one dread which entirely swallowed up the
thought and fear of death. This ghastly terror was the then usual
consignment of a body after death to the surgeons for dissection; and
the uncontrollable trepidation which would take possession of him each
time this hideous recollection forced itself upon him, although
unaccountable to Reuben, was most painful for him to witness. What
difference could it make what became of one's body after death? Reuben
would ask himself, puzzled to fathom that wonderful tenderness which
some natures feel for the flesh which embodies their attractions. But
Jerrem had felt a passing love for his own dear body: vanity of it had
been his ruling passion, its comeliness his great glory--so much so that
even now a positive satisfaction would have been his could he have
pictured himself outstretched and lifeless, with lookers-on moved to
compassion by the dead grace of his winsome face and slender limbs.
Joan, too, was caught by the same infection. Not to lie whole and decent
in one's coffin! Oh, it was an indignity too terrible for contemplation;
and every time they were away from Jerrem she would beset Reuben with
entreaties and questions as to what could be done to avoid the
catastrophe.

The one plan he knew of had been tried--and tried, too, with repeated
success--and this was the engaging of a superior force to wrest the body
from the surgeon's crew, a set of sturdy miscreants with whom to do
battle a considerable mob was needed; but, with money grown very scarce
and time so short, the thing could not be managed, and Reuben tried to
tell Joan of its impossibility while they two were walking to a place in
which it had been agreed they should find some one with a message from
Eve, who, together with Adam, was in hiding on board the vessel Captain
Triggs had spoken of. But instead of the messenger Eve herself arrived,
having ventured this much with the hope of hearing something that would
lessen Adam's despair and grief at learning the fate of Jerrem.

"Ah, poor sawl!" sighed Joan as Eve ended her dismal account of Adam's
sad condition: "'tis only what I feared to hear of. But tell un, Eve, to
lay it to his heart that Jerrem's forgived un every bit, and don't know
what it is to hold a grudge to Adam; and if I speak of un, he says,
'Why, doan't I know it ain't through he, but 'cos o' my own headstrong
ways and they sneaks o' revenoo-chaps?' who falsely swored away his
blessed life."

"Does he seem to dread it much?" asked Eve, the sickly fears which
filled her heart echoed in each whispered word.

"Not _that_ he don't," said Joan, lifting her hand significantly to her
throat: "'tis after. Oh, Eve," she gasped, "ain't it too awful to think
of their cuttin' up his poor dead body into bits? Call theyselves
doctors!" she burst out--"the gashly lot! I'll never let wan o' their
name come nighst to me agen."

"Oh, Reuben," gasped Eve, "is it so? Can nothing be done?"

Reuben shook his head.

"Nothing now," said Joan--"for want o' money, too, mostly, Eve; and the
guineas I've a-wasted! Oh, how the sight o' every one rises and chinks
in judgment 'gainst my ears!"

"If we'd got the money," said Reuben soothingly, "there isn't time. All
should be settled by to-morrow night; and if some one this minute
brought the wherewithal I haven't one 'pon whom I dare to lay my hand to
ask to undertake the job."

"Then 'tis no use harpin' 'pon it any more," said Joan; while Eve gave a
sigh, concurring in what she said, both of them knowing well that if
Reuben gave it up the thing must be hopeless indeed.

Here was another stab for Adam's wounded senses, and with a heavy heart
and step Eve took her way back to him, while Reuben and Joan continued
to thread the streets which took them by a circuitous road home to
Knight's Passage.

But no sooner had Eve told Adam of this fresh burden laid on poor Jerrem
than a new hope seemed to animate him. Something was still to be done:
there yet remained an atonement which, though it cost him his life, he
could strive to make to Jerrem. Throwing aside the fear of detection
which had hitherto kept him skulking within the little vessel, he set
off that night to find the Mary Jane, and, regardless of the terrible
shame which had filled him at the bare thought of confronting Triggs or
any of his crew, he cast himself upon their mercy, beseeching them as
men, and Cornishmen, to do this much for their brother-sailor in his sad
need and last extremity; and his appeal and the nature of it had so
touched these quickly-stirred hearts that, forgetful of the contempt and
scorn with which, in the light of an informer, they had hitherto viewed
Adam, they had one and all sworn to aid him to their utmost strength,
and to bring to the rescue certain others of whom they knew, by whose
help and assistance success would be more probable. Therefore it was
that, two days before the morning of his sentenced death, Eve was able
to put into Reuben's hand a scrap of paper on which was written Adam's
vow to Jerrem that, though his own life paid the forfeit for it,
Jerrem's body should be rescued and saved.

Present as Jerrem's fears had been to Reuben's eyes and to his mind,
until he saw the transport of agitated joy which this assurance gave to
Jerrem he had never grasped a tithe of the terrible dread which during
the last few days had taken such complete hold of the poor fellow's
inmost thoughts. Now, as he read again and again the words which Adam
had written, a torrent of tears burst forth from his eyes: in an ecstasy
of relief he caught Joan to his heart, wrung Reuben's hand, and from
that moment began to gradually compose himself into a state of greater
ease and seeming tranquillity. Confident, through the unbroken trust of
years, that Adam's promise, once given, might be implicitly relied on,
Jerrem needed no further assurance than these few written words to
satisfy him that every human effort would be made on his behalf; and the
knowledge of this, and that old comrades would be near, waiting to unite
their strength for his body's rescue, was in itself a balm and
consolation. He grew quite loquacious about the crestfallen authorities,
the surprise of the crowd and the disappointment of the ruffianly mob
deprived of their certain prey; while the two who listened sat with a
tightening grip upon their hearts, for when these things should come to
be the life of him who spoke them would have passed away, and the
immortal soul have flown from out that perishable husk on which his
last vain thoughts were still being centred.

Poor Joan! The time had yet to come when she would spend herself with
many a sad regret and sharp upbraiding that this and that had not been
said and done; but now, her spirit swallowed up in desolation and sunk
beneath the burden of despair, she sat all silent close by Jerrem's
side, covering his hands with many a mute caress, yet never daring to
lift up her eyes to look into his face without a burst of grief sweeping
across to shake her like a reed. Jerrem could eat and drink, but Joan's
lips never tasted food. A fever seemed to burn within and fill her with
its restless torment: the beatings of her throbbing heart turned her
first hot, then cold, as each pulse said the time to part was hurrying
to its end.

By Jerrem's wish, Joan was not told that on the morning of his death to
Reuben alone admittance to him had been granted: therefore when the eve
of that morrow came, and the time to say farewell actually arrived, the
girl was spared the knowledge that this parting was more than the shadow
of that last good-bye which so soon would have to be said for ever.
Still, the sudden change in Jerrem's face pierced her afresh and broke
down that last barrier of control over a grief she could subdue no
longer. In vain the turnkeys warned them that time was up and Joan must
go. Reuben entreated too that they should say good-bye: the two but
clung together in more desperate necessity, until Reuben, seeing that
further force would be required, stepped forward, and stretching out his
hand found it caught at by Jerrem and held at once with Joan's, while in
words from which all strength of tone seemed to die away Jerrem
whispered, "Reuben, if ever it could come to pass that when I'm gone you
and she might find it some day in your minds to stand
together--_one_--say 'twas the thing he wished for most before he went."
Then, with a feeble effort to push her into Reuben's arms, he caught her
back, and straining her close to his heart again cried out, "Oh, Joan,
but death comes bitter when it means good-bye to such as you!" Another
cry, a closer strain, then Jerrem's arms relax; his hold gives way, and
Joan falls staggering back; the door is opened--shut; the struggle is
past, and ere their sad voices can come echoing back Jerrem and Joan
have looked their last in life.




CHAPTER XXXVIII.


When Reuben found that to be a witness of Jerrem's death Joan must take
her stand among the lawless mob who made holiday of such sad scenes as
this, his decision was that the idea was untenable. Jerrem too had a
strong desire that Joan should not see him die; and although his
avoidance of anything that directly touched upon that dreaded moment had
kept him from openly naming his wishes, the hints dropped satisfied
Reuben that the knowledge of her absence would be a matter of relief to
him. But how get Joan to listen to his scruples when her whole mind was
set on keeping by Jerrem's side until hope was past and life was over?

"Couldn't 'ee get her to take sommat that her wouldn't sleep off till
'twas late?" Jerrem had said after Reuben had told him that the next
morning he must come alone; and the suggestion made was seized on at
once by Reuben, who, under pretence of getting something to steady her
shaken nerves, procured from the apothecary near a simple draught, which
Joan in good faith swallowed. And then, Reuben having promised in case
she fell asleep to awaken her at the appointed hour, the poor soul, worn
out by sorrow and fatigue, threw herself down, dressed as she was, upon
the bed, and soon was in a heavy sleep, from which she did not rouse
until well into the following day, when some one moving in the room made
her start up. For a moment she seemed dazed: then, rubbing her eyes as
if to clear away those happy visions which had come to her in sleep, she
gazed about until Reuben, who had at first drawn back, came forward to
speak to her. "Why, Reuben," she cried, "how's this? Have I been
dreamin', or what? The daylight's come, and, see, the sun!"

And here she stopped, her parched mouth half unclosed, as fears came
crowding thick upon her mind, choking her further utterance. One look at
Reuben's face had told the tale; and though she did not speak again, the
ashen hue that overspread and drove all color from her cheeks proclaimed
to him that she had guessed the truth.

"'Twas best, my dear," he said, "that you should sleep while he went to
his rest."

But the unlooked-for shock had been too great a strain on body and mind,
alike overtaxed and weak, and, falling back, Joan lay for hours as one
unconscious and devoid of life. And Reuben sat silent by her side,
paying no heed as hour by hour went by, till night had come and all
around was dark: then some one came softly up the stairs and crept into
the room, and Eve's whispered "Reuben!" broke the spell.

Yes, all had gone well. The body, rescued and safe, was now placed
within a house near to the churchyard in which Eve's mother lay: there
it was to be buried. And there, the next day, the commonplace event of
one among many funerals being over, the four thus linked by fate were
brought together, and Adam and Joan again stood face to face. Heightened
by the disguise which in order to avoid detection he was obliged to
adopt, the alteration in Adam was so complete that Joan stood aghast
before this seeming stranger, while a fresh smart came into Adam's open
wounds as he gazed upon the changed face of the once comely Joan.

A terrible barrier--such as, until felt, they had never dreaded--seemed
to have sprung up to separate and divide these two. Involuntarily they
shrank at each other's touch and quailed beneath each other's gaze,
while each turned with a feeling of relief to him and to her who now
constituted their individual refuge and support. Yes, strange as it
seemed to Adam and unaccountable to Joan, _she_ clung to Reuben, _he_ to
Eve, before whom each could be natural and unrestrained, while between
their present selves a great gulf had opened out which naught but time
or distance could bridge over.

So Adam went back to his hiding-place, Reuben to his shop, and Joan and
Eve to the old home in Knight's Passage, as much lost amid the crowd of
thronged London as if they had already taken refuge in that far-off land
which had now become the goal of Adam's thoughts and keen desires. Eve,
too, fearing some fresh disaster, was equally anxious for their
departure, and most of Reuben's spare time was swallowed up in making
the necessary arrangements. A passage in his name for himself and his
wife was secured in a ship about to start. At the last moment this
passage was to be transferred to Adam and Eve, whose marriage would take
place a day or two before the vessel sailed. The transactions on which
the successful fulfilment of these various events depended were mostly
conducted by Reuben, aided by the counsels of Mr. Osborne and the
assistance of Captain Triggs, whose good-fellowship, no longer withheld,
made him a valuable coadjutor.

Fortunately, Triggs's vessel, through some detention of its cargo, had
remained in London for an unusually long time, and now, when it did
sail, Joan was to take passage in it back to Polperro.

"Awh, Reuben, my dear," sighed Joan one evening as, Eve having gone to
see Adam, the two walked out toward the little spot where Jerrem lay,
and as they went discussed Joan's near departure, "I wish to goodness
you'd pack up yer alls and come 'longs to Polperro home with me: 't 'ud
be ever so much better than stayin' to this gashly London, where there
ain't a blow o' air that's fresh to draw your breath in."

"Why, nonsense!" said Reuben: "you wouldn't have me if I'd come."

"How not have 'ee?" exclaimed Joan. "Why, if so be I thought you'd come
I'd never stir from where I be until I got the promise of it."

"But there wouldn't be nothin' for me to do," said Reuben.

"Why, iss there would--oceans," returned Joan. "Laws! I knaws clocks by
scores as hasn't gone for twenty year and more. Us has got two
ourselves, that wan won't strike and t' other you can't make tick."

Reuben smiled: then, growing more serious, he said, "But do you know,
Joan, that yours isn't the first head it's entered into about going down
home with you? I've had a mind toward it myself many times of late."

"Why, then, do come to wance," said Joan excitedly; "for so long as they
leaves me the house there'll be a home with me and Uncle Zebedee, and
I'll go bail for the welcome you'll get gived 'ee there."

Reuben was silent, and Joan, attributing this to some hesitation over
the plan, threw further weight into her argument by saying, "There's the
chapel too, Reuben. Only to think o' the sight o' good you could do
praichin' to 'em and that! for, though it didn't seem to make no odds
before, I reckons there's not a few that wants, like me, to be told o'
some place where they treats folks better than they does down here
below."

"Joan," said Reuben after a pause, speaking out of his own thoughts and
paying no heed to the words she had been saying, "you know all about Eve
and me, don't you?"

Joan nodded her head.

"How I've felt about her, so that I believe the hold she's got on me no
one on earth will ever push her off from."

"Awh, poor sawl!" sighed Joan compassionately: "I've often had a feelin'
for what you'd to bear, and for this reason too--that I knaws myself
what 'tis to be ousted from the heart you'm cravin' to call yer own."

"Why, yes, of course," said Reuben briskly: "you were set down for Adam
once, weren't you?"

"Awh, and there's they to Polperro--mother amongst 'em, too--who'll tell
'ee now that if Eve had never shawed her face inside the place Adam 'ud
ha' had me, after all. But there! all that's past and gone long ago."

There was another pause, which Reuben broke by saying suddenly, "Joan,
should you take it very out of place if I was to ask you whether after a
bit you could marry me? I dare say now such a thought never entered
your head before."

"Well, iss it has," said Joan; 'and o' late, ever since that blessed
dear spoke they words he did, I've often fell to wonderin' if so be 't
'ud ever come to pass. Not, mind, that I should ha' bin put out if 't
had so happened that you'd never axed me, like, but still I thought
sometimes as how you might, and then agen I says, 'Why should he,
though?'"

"There's many a reason why _I_ should ask _you_, Joan," said Reuben,
smiling at her unconscious frankness, "though very few why you should
consent to take a man whose love another woman has flung away."

"Awh, so far as that goes, the both of us is takin' what's another's
orts, you knaw," smiled Joan.

"Then is it agreed?" asked Reuben, stretching out his hand.

"Iss, so far as I goes 'tis, with all my heart." Then as she took his
hand a change came to her April face, and looking at him through her
swimming eyes she said, "And very grateful too I'm to 'ee, Reuben, for I
don't knaw by neither another wan who'd take up with a poor heart-broke
maid like me, and they she's looked to all her life disgraced by others
and theyselves."

Reuben pressed the hand that Joan had given to him, and drawing it
through his arm the two walked on in silence, pondering over the
unlooked-for ending to the strange events they both had lately passed
through. Joan's heart was full of a contentment which made her think,
"How pleased Adam will be! and won't mother be glad! and Uncle Zebedee
'ull have somebody to look to now and keep poor Jonathan straight and
put things a bit in order;" while Reuben, bewildered by the thoughts
which crowded to his mind, semed unable to disentangle them. Could it be
possible that he, Reuben May, was going down to live at Polperro, a
place whose very name he had once taught himself to abominate?--that he
could be willingly casting his lot amid a people whom he had but lately
branded as thieves, outcasts, reprobates? Involuntarily his eyes turned
toward Joan, and a nimbus in which perfect charity was intertwined with
great love and singleness of heart seemed to float about her head and
shed its radiance on her face; and its sight was to Reuben as the first
touch of love, for he was smitten with a sense of his own unworthiness,
and, though he did not speak, he asked that a like spirit to that which
filled Joan might rest upon himself.

That evening Eve was told the news which Joan and Reuben had to tell,
and as she listened the mixed emotions which swelled within her
perplexed her not a little, for even while feeling that the two wishes
she most desired--Joan cared for and Reuben made happy--were thus
fulfilled, her heart seemed weighted with a fresh disaster: another
wrench had come to part her from that life soon to be nothing but a
lesson and a memory. And Adam, when he was told, although the words he
said were honest words and true, and truly he did rejoice, there yet
within him lay a sadness born of regret at rendering up that love so
freely given to him, now to be garnered for another's use; and
henceforth every word that Reuben spoke, each promise that he gave,
though all drawn forth by Adam's own requests, stuck every one a
separate thorn within his heart, sore with the thought of being an
outcast from the birthplace that he loved and cut off from those whose
faces now he yearned to look upon.

No vision opened up to Adam's view the prosperous life the future held
in store--no still small voice then whispered in his ear that out of
this sorrow was to come the grace which made success sit well on him and
Eve; and though, as years went by and intercourse became more rare,
their now keen interest in Polperro and its people was swallowed up amid
the many claims a busy life laid on them both, each noble action done,
each good deed wrought, by Adam, and by Eve too, bore on it the unseen
impress of that sore chastening through which they now were passing.

Out of the savings which from time to time Adam had placed with Mr.
Macey enough was found to pay the passage-money out and keep them from
being pushed by any pressing want on landing.

Already, at the nearest church, Adam and Eve had been married, and
nothing now remained but to get on board the vessel, which had already
dropped down the river and was to sail the following morning, Triggs had
volunteered to put them and their possessions safely on board, and
Reuben and Joan, with Eve's small personal belongings, were to meet them
at the steps, close by which the Mary Jane's boat would be found
waiting. The time had come when Adam could lay aside his disguise and
appear in much the same trim he usually did when at Polperro.

Joan was the first to spy him drawing near, and holding out both her
hands to greet the welcome change she cried, "Thank the Lord for lettin'
me see un his ownself wance more!--Awh, Adam! awh, my dear! 't seems as
if I could spake to 'ee now and know 'ee for the same agen.--Look to un,
Reuben! you don't wonder now what made us all so proud of un at home."

Reuben smiled, but Adam shook his head: the desolation of this sad
farewell robbed him of every other power but that of draining to the
dregs its bitterness. During the whole of that long day Eve and he had
hardly said one word, each racked with thoughts to which no speech gave
utterance. Mechanically each asked about the things the other one had
brought, and seemed to find relief in feigning much anxiety about their
safety, until Triggs, fearing they might outstay their time, gave them a
hint it would not do to linger long; and, with a view to their
leavetaking being unconstrained, he volunteered to take the few
remaining things down to the boat and stow them safely away, adding that
when they should hear his whistle given it would be the signal that they
must start without delay.

The spot they had fixed on for the starting-place was one but little
used and well removed from all the bustle of a more frequented landing.
A waterman lounged here and there, but seeing the party was another's
fare vouchsafed to them no further interest. The ragged mud-imps stayed
their noisy pranks to scrutinize the country build of Triggs's boat,
leaving the four, unnoticed, to stand apart and see each in the other's
face the reflection of that misery which filled his own.

Parting for ever! no hopes, no expectations, no looking forward, nothing
to whisper "We shall meet again"! "Good-bye for ever" was written on
each face and echoed in each heart. Words could not soothe that
suffering which turned this common sorrow into an individual torture,
which each must bear unaided and alone; and so they stood silent and
with outward calm, knowing that on that brink of woe the quiver of an
eye might overthrow their all but lost control.

The sun was sinking fast; the gathering mists of eventide were rising to
shadow all around; the toil of day was drawing to its close; labor was
past, repose was near at hand; its spirit seemed to hover around and
breathe its calm upon those worn, tried souls. Suddenly a shrill whistle
sounds upon their ears and breaks the spell: the women start and throw
their arms around each other's necks. Adam stretches his hand out, and
Reuben grasps it in his own.

"Reuben, good-bye. God deal with you as you shall deal with those you're
going among!"

"Adam, be true to her, and I'll be true to those you leave behind."

"Joan!" and Adam's voice sounds hard and strained, and then a choking
comes into his throat, and, though he wants to tell her what he feels,
to ask her to forgive all he has made her suffer, he cannot speak a
word. Vainly he strives, but not a sound will come; and these two, whose
lives, so grown together, are now to be rent asunder, stand stricken and
dumb, looking from out their eyes that last farewell which their poor
quivering lips refuse to utter.

"God bless and keep you, Eve!" Reuben's voice is saying as, taking her
hands within his own, he holds them to his heart and for a moment lets
them rest there.--"Oh, friends," he says, "there is a land where
partings never come: upon that shore may we four meet again!"

Then for a moment all their hands are clasped and held as in a vice, and
then they turn, and two are gone and two are left behind.

And now the two on land stand with their eyes strained on the boat,
which slowly fades away into the vapory mist which lies beyond: then
Reuben turns and takes Joan by the hand, and silently the two go back
together, while Adam and Eve draw near the ship which is to take them
to that far-off shore to which Hope's torch, rekindled, now is pointing.

Good-bye is said to Triggs, the boat pushes off, and the two left
standing side by side watch it away until it seems a speck, which
suddenly is swallowed up and disappears from sight. Then Adam puts his
arm round Eve, and as they draw closer together from out their lips come
sighing forth the whispered words, "Fare-well! farewell!"

_The Author of "Dorothy Fox"_.




OUR GRANDFATHERS' TEMPLES.


If on the fourteenth day of May, 1607, when the Rev. Robert Hunt
celebrated the first sacramental service of the Church of England on
American soil, there had suddenly sprung up at Jamestown the pillars and
arches of a fully-equipped cathedral, whose stones had remained to tell
us of the days when they first enshrined the worship of the earliest
colonists, our most ancient Christian church would still be less than
three hundred years old--a hopelessly modern structure in comparison
with many an abbey and cathedral of England and the Continent.

[Illustration: THE OLD SOUTH, BOSTON.]

In a comparative sense, we look in vain for old churches in a new
country, for in our architecture, if nowhere else, we are still a land
of yesterday, where age seems venerable only when we refuse to look
beyond the ocean, and where even a short two hundred years have taken
away the larger share of such perishable ecclesiastical monuments as we
once had. Our grandfathers' temples, whether they stood on the banks of
the James River or on the colder shores of Massachusetts Bay, were built
cheaply for a scanty population: their material was usually wood,
sometimes unshapen logs, and their sites, chosen before the people and
the country had become fitted to each other, were afterward often needed
for other uses. So long as London tears down historic churches, even in
the present days of fashionable devotion to the old and the quaint, and
so long as the Rome of 1880 is still in danger from vandal hands, we
need only be surprised that the list of existing American churches of
former days is so long and so honorable as it is. If we have no York
Minster or St. Alban's Abbey or Canterbury Cathedral, we may still turn
to an Old South, a St. Paul's and a Christ Church. It is something,
after all, to be able to count our most famous old churches on the
fingers of both hands, and then to enumerate by tens those other temples
whose legacy from bygone times is scarcely less rich.

[Illustration: KING'S CHAPEL, BOSTON, IN 1872.]

The American churches of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were
plain structures, unpretending without and unadorned within; and this
for other reasons than the poverty of the community, the lack of the
best building-materials, and the absence both of architects and of
artistic tastes. It was a simple ritual which most of them were to
house, and the absence of an ornate service demanded the absence of
ornamentation, which would be meaningless because it would symbolize
nothing. The influence of the Puritans in Massachusetts, the Baptists in
Rhode Island, the Dutch Reformed in New York, the Lutherans and
Presbyterians in the Middle and Southern colonies, and the Friends in
Pennsylvania, whatever their denominational differences, was a unit in
favor of the utmost simplicity consistent with decency and order; and
though there was a difference between Congregational churches like the
Old South in Boston and the Friends' meeting-houses in Philadelphia, the
difference was far less marked than that existing between the new and
old buildings of the Old South society, which the modern tourist may
compare at his leisure in the Boston of to-day. Even the Episcopalians
shared, or deferred to, the prevailing spirit of the time: they put no
cross upon their Christ Church in Cambridge, nearly a hundred and thirty
years after the settlement of the place, lest they should offend the
tastes of their neighbors. The Methodists, the "Christians," the
Swedenborgians, the Unitarians and the Universalists were not yet, and
the Moravians were a small and little-understood body in Eastern
Pennsylvania.

[Illustration: KING'S CHAPEL BOSTON, IN 1872.]

Nearly all the colonists, of whatever name, brought from Europe a
conscientious love of religious simplicity and unpretentiousness: for
the most part, the English-speaking settlers were dissenters from the
Church which owned all the splendid architectural monuments of the
country whence they came; and it was not strange that out of their
religious thought grew churches that symbolized the sturdy qualities of
a faith which, right or wrong, had to endure exile and poverty and
privation--privation not only from social wealth, but from the rich
store of ecclesiastical traditions which had accumulated for centuries
in cathedral choirs and abbey cloisters.

[Illustration: CHRIST CHURCH, BOSTON.]

Therefore, the typical New England meeting-house of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries may perhaps be taken as the best original example
of what America has to show in the way of church-building. To be sure,
its cost was modest, its material was perishable wood, its architectural
design was often a curious medley of old ideas and new uses, and even
its few ornaments were likely to be devoid of the beauty their designers
fancied that they possessed. But it was, at any rate, an honest
embodiment of a sincere idea--the idea of "freedom to worship God;" and
it was adapted to the uses which it was designed to serve. It stood upon
a hill, a square box with square windows cut in its sides--grim without
and grim within, save as the mellowing seasons toned down its ruder
aspects, and green grass and waving boughs framed it as if it were a
picture. Within, the high pulpit, surmounted by a sounding-board,
towered over the square-backed pews, facing a congregation kept orderly
by stern tithing-man and sterner tradition. There was at first neither
organ nor stove nor clock. The shivering congregation warmed itself as
best it might by the aid of foot-stoves; the parson timed his sermon by
an hour-glass; and in the singing-seats the fiddle and the bass--viol
formed the sole link (and an unconscious one) between the simple
song-service of the Puritan meeting-house and the orchestral
accompaniments to the high masses of European cathedrals. The men still
sat at the end of the pew--a custom which had grown up in the days when
they went to the meeting-house gun in hand, not knowing when they should
be hastily summoned forth to fight the Indians. In the earliest days the
drum was the martial summons to worship, but soon European bells sent
forth their milder call. Behind the meeting-houses were the horse-sheds
for the use of distant comers--a species of ecclesiastical edifice still
adorning the greater number of American country churches, and not likely
to disappear for many a year to come.

In the elder day there was no such difference as now between city and
country churches, for the limitations of money and material bore upon
both more evenly. But with growing wealth and the choice of permanent
locations for building came brick and stone; English architects received
orders; and the prevailing revival led by Sir Christopher Wren and his
followers dotted the Northern colonies with more pretentious churches,
boasting spires not wholly unlike those which were then piercing London
skies. With costlier churches of permanent material there came also the
English fashion of burial in churchyards and chancel-vaults, and mural
tablets and horizontal tombstones were laid into the mortar which has
been permitted, in not a few cases, to preserve them for our own eyes.

[Illustration: ST. MICHAEL'S, MARBLEHEAD, MASSACHUSETTS.]

But our oldest churches, as a rule, have been made more notable by the
political events with which they have been associated than by the
honorable interments that have taken place beneath their shadow. Their
connection with the living has endeared them to our memories more than
their relations to the dead. Not because it is Boston's Westminster
Abbey or Temple Church has the Old South been permitted to come down to
us as the best example of the Congregational meeting-houses of the
eighteenth century, but because of the Revolutionary episodes of which
it was the scene, and which are commemorated in the stone tablet upon
its front. The Old South Church, built in 1729, belonged to the common
class of brick structures which replaced wooden ones; for, like
Solomon's temple, its predecessor had been built of cedar sixty years
before. The convenient location of the Old South and the capaciousness
of its interior brought to it the colonial meetings which preceded the
Revolution, and especially that famous gathering of December 13, 1773,
whence marched the disguised patriots to destroy the taxed tea in Boston
harbor. The convenient access and spacious audience-room of the old
church also led to its occupancy as a riding-school for British cavalry
in 1775. Even now, in the quiet days following the recent excitement
attending its escape from fire and from sale and demolition, the ancient
church still finds occasional use as a place for lectures and public
gatherings. Its chequered days within the past decade have at least
served to make its appearance and its part in colonial history more
familiar to us, and have done something to save other churches from the
destruction which might have overtaken them.

As the Old South stands as the brick-and-mortar enshrinement of the best
Puritan thought of the eighteenth century, so King's Chapel in Boston,
built twenty-five years later, represents the statelier social customs
and the more conservative political opinions of the early New England
Episcopalians. Its predecessor, of wood, was the first building of the
Church of England in New England. The present King's Chapel, with its
sombre granite walls and its gently-lighted interior, suggests to the
mind an impression of independence of time rather than of age. One reads
on the walls, to be sure, such high-sounding old names as Vassall and
Shirley and Abthorp, and on a tomb in the old graveyard near by one sees
the inscriptions commemorating Governor John Winthrop of Massachusetts
and his son John, governor of Connecticut. But King's Chapel seems the
home of churchly peace and gracious content; so that, as we sit within
its quaint three-sided pews, it is hard to remember the stormy scenes in
which it has had part. Its Tory congregation, almost to a man, fled from
its walls when the British general, Gage, evacuated Boston; the sterner
worshippers of the Old South occupied its Anglican pews for a time; and
later it was the scene of a theological movement which caused, in 1785,
the first Episcopal church in New England--or rather its remnant--to
become the first Unitarian society in America.

In Salem street, Boston, left almost alone at the extreme north end of
the city, is Christ Church, built in 1723. Its tower contains the oldest
chime of bells in America, and from it, according to some antiquarians,
was hung the lantern which on April 18, 1775, announced to the waiting
Paul Revere, and through him to the Middlesex patriots in all the
surrounding country, that General Gage had despatched eight hundred men
to seize and destroy the military stores gathered at Concord by the
Massachusetts Committees of Safety and Supplies. Thus opened the
Revolutionary war, for the battles at Lexington and Concord took place
only the next day.

The white-spired building at the corner of Park and Tremont streets,
Boston, known as the Park Street Church, is hardly so old as its
extended fame would lead one to suppose, for it dates no farther back
than the first quarter of the present century. Its position as the
central point of the great theological controversies of 1820 in the
Congregational churches of Eastern Massachusetts has made it almost as
familiar as the "Saybrook Platform." The meeting-house was built at the
time when the greater part of the Boston churches were modifying their
creeds, and when the Old South itself would have changed its
denominational relations but for the vote of a State official, cast to
break a tie. Its inelegance and rawness are excused in part by its
evident solidity and sincerity of appearance. In its shadow rest
Faneuil, Revere, Samuel Adams and John Hancock.

Boston has other churches which, like the Park Street, are neither
ancient nor modern, the Hollis Street Church and the First Church in
Roxbury being good examples. New England has hardly a better specimen of
the old-fashioned meeting-house on a hill than this old weather-beaten
wooden First Church in Roxbury, the home of a parish to which John
Eliot, the apostle to the Indians, once ministered. Another quaint
memorial of the old colonial days survives in the current name,
"Meeting-house Hill," of a part of the annexed Dorchester district of
Boston.

[Ilustration: ST. PAUL'S CHAPEL, NEW YORK.]

St. Paul's Church, on Boston Common, was the first attempt of the
Episcopalians of the city, after the loss of King's Chapel,
to build a temple of imposing appearance. Controversies theological and
architectural rose with its walls, and young Edward Everett, if report
is to be credited, was the author of a tract, still in circulation, in
which its design and its principles formed the text for a criticism on
the religion to whose furtherance it was devoted. Standing as it does
next the United States court-house, the uses of the two buildings seem
to have been confused in the builders' minds; for there is something
ecclesiastical in the appearance of the hall of justice, which was
originally a Masonic temple, and something judicial in the face of the
church.

In Cambridge, three miles from Boston, the eighteenth-century
Episcopalians not only possessed a church, but also displayed to
unwilling eyes a veritable "Bishop's Palace"--the stately house of the
Rev. East Apthorp, "missionary to New England" and reputed candidate for
the bishopric of that region. Mr. Apthorp was rich and influential, but
his social and ecclesiastical lot was not an easy one, and he soon
returned to England discouraged, leaving his "palace" to come down to
the view of our own eyes, which find in it nothing more dangerous to
republican institutions than is to be discovered in a hundred other of
the three-story wooden houses which used so to abound in Massachusetts.
Christ Church, Cambridge, in which the bishop _in posse_ used to
minister, and which stands opposite Harvard College, was designed by the
architect of King's Chapel, and has always been praised for a certain
shapely beauty of proportion. For the last twenty years it has boasted
the only chime of bells in Cambridge, whose quiet shades of a Sunday
evening have been sweetly stirred by the music struck from them by the
hands of a worthy successor of the mediæval bell-ringers, to whom bells
are books, and who can tell the story of every ounce of bell-metal
within twenty miles of his tower. It was of this church, with its
Unitarian neighbor just across the ancient churchyard where so many old
Harvard and colonial worthies sleep, that Holmes wrote:

  Like sentinel and nun, they keep
    Their vigil on the green:
  One seems to guard, and one to weep,
    The dead that lie between.

The suburbs of Boston are not poor in churches of the eighteenth, or
even of the seventeenth, century. The oldest church in New England--the
oldest, indeed, in the Northern States--still standing in Salem, was
built in 1634, and its low walls and tiny-paned windows have shaken
under the eloquence of Roger Williams. It has not been used for
religious purposes since 1672. In Newburyport is one of the American
churches, once many but now few, in which George Whitefield preached,
and beneath it the great preacher lies buried. A curious little reminder
of St. Paul's, London, is found here in the shape of a whispering
gallery. Another landmark is the venerable meeting-house of the
Unitarian society in Hingham, popularly known as the "Old Ship." Built
in 1681, it was a Congregational place of worship for nearly a century
and a half. Its sturdiness and rude beauty form a striking illustration
of the lasting quality of good, sound wooden beams as material for the
sanctuary. Preparations have already been undertaken for celebrating the
second centennial of the ancient building. Nearly as old, and still more
picturesque with its quaint roof, its venerable hanging chandelier of
brass, its sober old reredos and its age-hallowed communion-service, is
St. Michael's, Marblehead, built in 1714, where faithful rectors have
endeavored to reach six generations of the fishermen and aristocracy of
the rocky old port. The antiquarian who has seen these old temples and
asks for others on the New England coast will turn with scarcely less
interest to St. John's, Portsmouth; the forsaken Trinity Church,
Wickford, Rhode Island, built in 1706; or Trinity, Newport, where Bishop
Berkeley used to preach. In Newport, indeed, one may also speculate
beneath the Old Mill on the fanciful theory that the curious little
structure was a baptistery long before the days of Columbus--the most
ancient Christian temple on this side the sea.

It is not uncommon to find comparatively new American churches to which
their surroundings or their sober material or their quiet architecture
have given a somewhat exaggerated appearance of age. Such is the case
with the curious row of three churches--the North and Centre
Congregational and Trinity Episcopalstanding side by side on the New
Haven green in a fashion unknown elsewhere in our own country. Any one
of these three churches looks quite as old as that shapely memorial of
pre-Revolutionary days, St. Paul's Chapel, New York, built in 1766 in
the prevailing fashion of the London churches. As with St. Paul's, there
was also no marked appearance of antiquity in the North Dutch Church,
New York, removed in recent years. The poor old Middle Dutch Church in
the same city, with its ignoble modern additions and its swarm of busy
tenants, would have looked old if it could have done so, but for modern
New Yorkers it has no more venerable memory, in its disfigurement and
disguise, than that furnished by its use, for a time, as the city
post-office.

[Illustration: OLD SWEDES' CHURCH, PHILADELPHIA.]

New York is poor in old buildings, and especially poor in old churches.
Besides St. Paul's, the comparatively modern St. John's Chapel and the
John Street Methodist Church, it really has nothing to show to the
tourist in search of ancient places of worship. The vicinity can boast a
few colonial temples--the quaint old Dutch church at Tarrytown, dear to
the readers of Irving; the Tennent Church on the battle-ground of
Monmouth, New Jersey, with its blood-stains of wounded British soldiers;
and a charmingly plain little Friends' meeting-house, no bigger than a
small parlor, near Squan, New Jersey, being the most strikingly
attractive. In Newark one notes the deep-set windows and solid stone
walls of the old First Presbyterian Church, and the quiet plainness of
Trinity Episcopal Church, which looks like Boston's King's Chapel, with
the addition of a white wooden spire.

Philadelphia is richer than any other American city in buildings of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On the older streets it is a
frequent sight to see quaint little houses of imported English brick
modestly laid in alternate red and black, curiously like the latest
modern fashion. The ample room for growth possessed by this
widespreading city has saved many an ancient house for present use as
dwelling or store. One is not surprised, therefore, to find on the old
streets near the Delaware three churches of weather-stained brick which
seem trying to make the piety of an elder age useful to the worshippers
of to-day. All three of these churches--Gloria Dei, Christ and St.
Peter's--now have their chief work among the poor people whom one always
finds in a business quarter near the river-front, but each attracts, by
its old-time associations and its modern missionary spirit, a goodly
circle of attendants from the western parts of the city. Gloria Dei
Church, the oldest of the three, was built in 1700 by Swedish Lutherans
on the spot where the Swedish predecessors of the Friends had located
their fortified log church twenty-three years earlier. Its bell and
communion-service and some of its ornamental woodwork were presented by
the king of Sweden. It is surrounded by the usual graveyard, in which
lies Alexander Wilson, the lover and biographer of birds, who asked to
be buried here, in a "silent, shady place, where the birds will be apt
to come and sing over my grave." The Old Swedes' Church retained its
Lutheran connection until recent years, when it became an Episcopal
parish.

Christ Church and St. Peter's were formerly united in one parochial
government, and to the two parishes ministered William White, the first
Church-of-England minister in Pennsylvania, the friend and pastor of
Washington, the chaplain of Congress and one of the first two bishops of
the American Church. The present structure of Christ Church was begun in
1727, but not finished for some years. The parish is older, dating from
1695. Queen Anne gave it a communion-service in 1708. In 1754 came from
England its still-used chime of bells, which were laboriously
transferred during the Revolution to Allentown, Pennsylvania, lest they
should fall into British hands and be melted up for cannon. At Christ
Church a pew was regularly occupied by Washington during his frequent
residence in Philadelphia; and here have been seated Patrick Henry,
Benjamin Franklin, James Madison and many another patriot, besides
Cornwallis, Howe, André and others on the English side. Around and
beneath the church are many graves covered by weather-worn stones, and
on the walls of the interior there are a number of mural tablets.

St. Peter's Church was begun in 1758, and completed three years later.
In quiet graciousness of appearance it is like another Christ Church,
and its interior arrangements are still more quaint, the chancel being
at the eastern end of the church, while the pulpit and lectern are at
the western. In the adjoining churchyard is a monument to Commodore
Decatur.

One cannot find in all America sweeter and quainter memorials of a
gentle past--memorials still consecrated to the gracious work of the
present--than the churches and other denominational houses in the old
Moravian towns of Pennsylvania. At Bethlehem, as one stands in the
little three-sided court on Church street and looks up at the heavy
walls, the tiny dormer windows and the odd-shaped belfry which mark the
"Single Sisters' House" and its wings, one may well fancy one's self, as
a travelled visitor has said, in Quebec or Upper Austria. Still more
quaint and quiet is Willow Square, behind this curious house, where,
beneath drooping willow-boughs, one finds one's self beside the door of
the old German chapel, with the little dead-house, the boys' school and
the great and comparatively modern Moravian church near by. Through
Willow Square leads the path to the burying-ground, where lie, beneath
tall trees, long rows of neatly-kept graves, each covered with a plain
flat stone, the men and the women lying on either side of the broad
central path. Several of the ancient Moravian buildings date from the
middle of the last century. The Widows' House stands, opposite the
Single Sisters' Range, and across the street from the large church is
the Moravian Seminary for Young Ladies, established in 1749, and by far
the oldest girls' school in the United States.

It was in 1778 that the Single Sisters gave to Pulaski that banner of
crimson, silk which is commemorated in Longfellow's well-known "Hymn of
the Moravian Nuns at Bethlehem." The poem, however, written in the
author's early youth, and preserved for its rare beauty of language and
fine choice of subject, rather than for its historical accuracy, has
done much to perpetuate a wrong idea of the Moravian spirit and ritual.
Mr. Longfellow writes in his first stanza

      When the dying flame of day
      Through the chancel shot its ray,
      Far the glimmering tapers shed
      Faint light on the cowled head,
      And the censer burning swung,
      When before the altar hung
      That proud banner, which, with care,
      Had been consecrated there;
  And the nuns' sweet hymn was heard the while,
  Sung low in the dim, mysterious aisle.

But the Moravians know nothing of chancels, tapers, cowled heads,
censers, altars or nuns. Their faith has always been the simplest
Protestantism, their churches are precisely such as Methodists or
Baptists use, and their ritual is plainer than that of the most
"evangelical" Episcopal parish. Their "single sisters' houses," "widows'
houses" and "single brethren's houses"--the last long disused--are
simply arrangements for social convenience or co-operative housekeeping.
Mr. Longfellow's poetic description applies to the Moravian ceremonial
no more accurately than to a Congregational prayer-meeting or a
Methodist "love-feast."

[Illustration: THE MORAVIAN CEMETERY, BETHLEHEM, PENNSYLVANIA.]

Beside the deep and silent waters of the James River in Virginia,
undisturbed by any sound save the flight of birds and the rustle of
leaves, stands all that is left of the first church building erected by
Englishmen in America. A good part of the tower remains, the arched
doorways being still intact, and it seems a pitiable misfortune that the
honestly-laid bricks of the venerable building could not have come down
to our day. But, as it is, this ancient square block of brick forms our
one pre-eminent American ruin. Nothing could be a more solemn monument
of the past than the lonely tower, surrounded by thick branches and
underbrush and looking down upon the few crumbling gravestones still
left at its base. Jamestown, long abandoned as a village, has now become
an island, the action of the waters having at last denied it the
remaining solace of connection with the mainland of the Old Dominion,
of whose broad acres it was once the chief town and the seat of
government--the forerunner of all that came to America at the hands of
English settlers.

In the slumberous old city of Williamsburg, three miles from Jamestown,
stands the Bruton parish church, two hundred and two years old, and
still the home of a parish of sixty communicants. Built of brick, with
small-paned windows and wooden tower, its walls have listened to the
eloquence of the learned presidents of the neighboring William and Mary
College, and its floor has been honored by the stately tread of many a
colonial governor, member of the legislature or Revolutionary patriot;
for Williamsburg was the capital and centre of Virginia until the end of
the eighteenth century, and shared whatever Virginia possessed of
political or personal renown. Washington, of course, was more than once
an attendant at Bruton Church, and so were Jefferson and Patrick Henry
and an honorable host. In the church and in the chapel of William and
Mary College--which the ambitious colonists used to think a little
Westminster Abbey--was the religious home of a good share of what was
stateliest or most honorable in the early colonial life of the South.

Other old churches still dot the Virginia soil--St. John's, Richmond;
Pohick Church, Westmoreland county; Christ Church, Lancaster county; St.
Anne's, Isle of Wight county. Their antiquities, and those of other
ancient sanctuaries of the Old Dominion, have been painstakingly set
forth by Bishop Meade and other zealous chroniclers, and their
attractiveness is increased, in most cases--as at Jamestown--by the
loneliness of their surroundings. Another old church, left in the midst
of sweet country sights and gentle country sounds, is St. James's, Goose
Creek, South Carolina. St. Michael's and St. Philip's at Charleston in
the same State have heard the roar of hostile cannon, but have come
forth unscathed. The demolished Brattle Street Church in Boston was not
the only one of our sacred edifices to be wounded by cannonballs, for
the exigences of the fight more than once, during the Revolution and
the civil war, brought flame and destruction within the altar-rails of
churches North and South.

The growth of the Roman Catholic Church in America has been so recent
that it can show but few historical landmarks. The time-honored
cathedral at St. Augustine, Florida, and the magnificent ruin of the San
José Mission near San Antonio, Texas, and one or two weather-stained
little chapels in the North-west, are nearly all the churches that bring
to us the story of the priestly work of the Roman ecclesiastics during
the colonial days.

We have no State Church, and the different Presidents have made a wide
variety of choice in selecting their places of worship in Washington.
St. John's, just opposite the White House, has been the convenient
Sunday home of some of them: others have followed their convictions in
Methodist, Presbyterian, Unitarian and other churches. But the city of
Washington is itself too young to be able to boast any very ancient
associations in its churches, and few of its temples have been permitted
to record the names of famous occupants during a series of years. Our
whole country, indeed, is a land of many denominations and a somewhat
wandering population; and older cities than Washington have found one
church famous for one event in its history, and another for another,
rather than, in any single building, a series of notable occurrences
running through the centuries. The nearest approach to the record of a
succession of worthies occupying the same church-seats year after year
is to be found in the chronicles of our oldest college-chapels, as, for
instance, at Dartmouth, where the building containing the still-used
chapel dates from 1786. But though poverty and custom unite in making
our colleges conservative, their growth in numbers demands, from time to
time, new and more generous accommodations for public worship; and so
the little buildings of an earlier day are either torn down or kept for
other and more ignoble uses, like Holden Chapel at Harvard. This quaint
little structure was built in 1744, and is now used for
recitation-rooms, but at one period in its career it served as the
workshop of the college carpenter.

[Illustration: RUINS OF THE OLD CHURCH-TOWER, JAMESTOWN, VIRGINIA.]

In the years since our grandfathers built their places of worship we
have seen strange changes in American church buildings--changes in
material, location and adaptation to ritual uses. We have had a revival
of pagan temple-building in wood and stucco; we have seen Gothic
cathedrals copied for the simplest Protestant uses, until humorists have
suggested that congregations might find it cheaper to change their
religion than their unsuitable new churches; we have ranged from four
plain brick walls to vast and costly piles of marble or greenstone; we
have constructed great audience-rooms for Sunday school uses alone, and
have equipped the sanctuary with all culinary attachments; we have built
parish-houses whose comfort the best-kept mediæval monk might envy, and
we have put up evangelistic tabernacles only to find the most noted
evangelists preferring to work in regular church edifices rather than in
places of easy resort by the thoughtless crowd of wonder-seekers. But
not all these doings have been foolish or mistaken: some of them have
been most hopeful signs, and the next century will find excellent work
in the church-building of our day. The Gothic and Queen Anne revivals,
at their best, have promoted even more than the old-time honesty in the
use of sound and sincere building-material; and not a few of our newer
churches prove that our ecclesiastical architects have something more to
show than experiments in fanciful "revivals" that are such only in name.
We shall continue to do well so long as we worthily perpetuate the best
material lesson taught by our grandfathers' temples--the lesson of
downright honesty of construction and of a union between the spirit of
worship and its local habitation.

CHARLES F. RICHARDSON.



WILL DEMOCRACY TOLERATE A PERMANENT CLASS OF NATIONAL OFFICE-HOLDERS?


It is no doubt a public misfortune that so much of that thoughtful
patriotism which, both on account of its culture and its independence,
must always be valuable to the country, should have been wasted, for
some time past, upon what are apparently narrow and unpractical, if not
radically unsound, propositions of reform in the civil service. There is
unquestionably need of reform in that direction: it would be too much to
presume that in the generally imperfect state of man his methods of
civil government would attain perfection; but it must be questioned
whether the subject has been approached from the right direction and
upon the side of the popular sympathy and understanding. At this time
propositions of civil-service reform have not even the recognition, much
less the comprehension, of the mass of the people. Their importance,
their limitations, their possibilities, have never been demonstrated: no
commanding intellectual authority has ever taken up the subject and
worked it out before the eyes of the people as a problem of our national
politics. It remains a question of the closet, a merely speculative
proposition as to the science of government.

What, then, are the metes and bounds of this reform? How much is
demanded? How much is practicable?

Not attempting a full answer to all of these questions, and intending no
dogmatic treatment of any, let us give them a brief consideration from
the point of view afforded by the democratic system upon which the whole
political fabric of the United States is established. We are to look at
_our_ civil-service reform from that side. Whatever in it may be
feasible, that much must be a work in accord with the popular feeling.
It may be set down at the outset, as the first principle of the problem,
that any practicable plan of organizing the public service of the United
States must not only be founded upon the general consent of the people,
but must also have, in its actual operation, their continual, easy and
direct participation. Any scheme, no matter by what thoughtful patriot
suggested, no matter upon what model shaped, no matter from what
experience of other countries deduced, which does not possess these
essential features can never be worth the serious attention of any one
who expects to accomplish practical and enduring results.

(Possibly this may seem dogmatic, to begin with; but if we agree to
treat the question as one in democratic politics, the principle stated
becomes perfectly apparent.)

It must be fair, then, and for the purposes of this article not
premature, to point out that the measure which is especially known as
"civil-service reform," and which has been occasionally recognized in
the party platforms along with other generalities, is one whose essence
is _the creation of a permanent office-holding class_. Substantially,
this is what it amounts to. A man looking forward to a place in the
public service is to regard it as a life occupation, the same as if he
should study for a professional career or learn a mechanical trade. Once
in office, after a "competitive examination" or otherwise, he will
expect to stay in: he will hold, as the Federal judges do, by a
life-tenure, "during good behavior." This is now substantially the
system of Great Britain, which, in the judgment of Mr. Dorman B. Eaton,
is so much better than our own as to actually reduce the rate of
criminality in that country, and which, he declares, only political
baseness can prevent us from imitating. A change of administration
there, Mr. Eaton adds, only affects a few scores of persons occupying
the highest positions: the great mass of the officials live and die in
their places, indifferent to the fluctuation of parliamentary
majorities or the rise and fall of ministries.

We must ask ourselves does this system accord with American democracy?

A little more than half a century has passed since John Quincy Adams,
unquestionably the best trained and most experienced American
administrator who ever sat in the Presidency, undertook to establish in
the United States almost precisely the same system as that which Great
Britain now has. Admission to the places was not, it is true, by means
of competitive examination, but the feature--the essential feature--of
permanent tenure was present in his plan. Mr. Adams took the government
from Mr. Monroe without considering any change needful: his Cabinet
advisers even included three of those who had been in the Cabinet of his
predecessor, and these he retained to the end, though at least one of
the three, he thought, had ceased to be either friendly or faithful to
him. Retaining the old officers, and reappointing them if their
commissions expired, selecting new ones, in the comparatively rare cases
of death, resignation or ascertained delinquency, upon considerations
chiefly relating to their personal capabilities for the vacant places,
Mr. Adams was patiently and faithfully engaged during the four years of
his Presidency in establishing almost the precise reform of the national
service which has been in recent times so strenuously urged upon us as
the one great need of the nation--the administrative purification which,
if effectually performed, would prove that our system of government was
fit to continue in existence. Mr. Adams's plan did, indeed, seem
excellent. It commanded the respect of honest but busy citizens absorbed
in their private affairs and desirous that the government might be
fixed, once for all, in settled grooves, so that its functions would
proceed like the steady progress of the seasons. It was an attempt to
run the government, as has been sometimes said, "on business
principles." The President was to proceed, and did proceed, as if he had
in charge some great estate which he was to manage and direct as a
faithful and exact trustee. This, no one can deny, had the superficial
look of most admirable administration.

But President Adams had left out of account largely what we are
compelled to sedulously consider--public opinion. He had acquired most
of his experience abroad, and his principal service at home, as
Secretary of State, had been in a remarkably quiet time, when party
movements were neither ebbing nor flowing, so that he had forgotten how
strong and vigorous the democratic feeling was amongst the population of
these States. This is a forgetfulness to which all men are liable who
long occupy official position, and who seldom have to submit themselves
to that severe and rude competitive examination which the plan of
popular elections establishes. Unfortunately for him, he was not
responsible to a court of chancery for the management of his trust, but
to a tribunal composed of a multitude of judges. His accounts were to be
passed upon not by one learned and conservative auditor guided by
familiar precedents and rules of law, but a great, tumultuous popular
assembly, which would approve or disapprove by a majority vote. When,
therefore, it appeared to the people that he was forming a body of
permanent office-holders--was recruiting a civil army to occupy in
perpetuity the offices which they, the mass, had created and were taxed
to pay for--the fierce, and in many respects scandalous, partisan
assault which Jackson represented, if he did not direct, gathered
overwhelming force. It seemed to the popular view that a narrow, an
exclusive, an aristocratic system was being formed. The President
appeared to be, while honestly and carefully preserving their trust from
waste or loss, committing it to a control independent of them--an
official body which, having a permanent tenure, would be altogether
indifferent to their varying desires. Such a scheme of government was
therefore no more than an attempt to stand the pyramid on its apex: Mr.
Adams's administration, supported chiefly by those whose aspirations
were for an honest and capable bureaucracy, and who could not or would
not face the rude questionings of democracy, ended with his first four
years, and went out in such a whirlwind of partisan opposition as
brought in, by reaction, the infamous "spoils system" that at the end of
half a century we are but partially recovered from.

To designate more particularly the great fact which had been disregarded
in this notable experiment of fifty years ago, and which is apparently
not sufficiently considered in the measures of reform that have been
more recently pressed upon us, we may declare that the government of the
United States is, as yet, the direct outcome of what may be called _the
political activity of the people_. Whether or not, having read history,
we must anticipate a time here when the many, weary of preserving their
own liberties, will resign their power to a few, it is certain that no
such inclination yet appears. The government is the product of the
public mind and will when these are moved with reference to the subject.
It is created freshly at short intervals, and the manner of the creation
is seldom languid or careless, but usually earnest, intense and heated.
Upon this point there has no doubt been much misapprehension. As it has
happened--perhaps rather oddly--that those of our thoughtful patriots
whose warnings and appeals have reached public notice have had their
experiences mostly in city life, surrounded by the peculiar conditions
which exist there, the conclusions they have drawn in some respects are
applicable only to their own surroundings. They have discovered persons
who had forgotten or did not believe that liberty could be bought only
with the one currency of eternal vigilance, and coupled with these
others who were too busy to attend to the active processes by which the
government is from time to time renewed; and they have concluded, with
fatal inaccuracy of judgment, that this exceptional disposition of a
small number of persons was a type of the whole population. Nothing
could be more absurdly untrue. Outside of a very limited circle no such
political fatigue exists. The people generally are deeply interested in
public affairs and willing to attend to their own public duties. Their
concern in regard to measures, methods and candidates is seldom laid
aside. The _political activity_ to which we have called attention thus
at some length is earnest, persistent and exacting.

It will be useful for the reformer of the civil service to give some
study to the manifestations of this activity. He will find it one of the
most marked and characteristic features in the life of the American
people. If he will take the pains to examine the civil organization of
the country, he will find that its roots run to every stratum of
society. The number of persons interested in politics, not as a
speculative subject, but as a practical and personal one, is wonderfully
great. Thus, in most of the States there exists that modification of the
ancient Saxon system of local action by "hundreds"--the township
organization. This alone carries a healthy political movement into the
farthest nook and corner of the body politic: every citizen of common
sense may well be consulted in this primary activity, and every
household may be interested in the question whether its results are good
or bad. But besides this, simple and slightly compensated as are the
positions belonging to the township, there are in every community many
willing to fill them. To be a supervisor of the roads,[1] to be township
constable and collector of the taxes, to audit the township accounts, to
be a member of the school board, to be a justice of the peace, is an
inclination--it may be a desire--entertained by many citizens; and if
the ambition may seem to be a narrow one, its modesty does not make it
unworthy or discreditable. But these men alone, active in the politics
of townships, form a surprising array. If we consider that in
Pennsylvania there are sixty-seven counties, with an average of say
forty townships in each, here are twenty-six hundred and eighty
townships, having each not less than ten officials, and making nearly
twenty-seven thousand persons actually on duty at one time in a single
State in this fundamental branch of the service. And if we estimate that
besides those who are in office at least two persons are inclined and
willing, if not actually desirous, to occupy the place now filled by
each one--a very moderate calculation--we multiply twenty-six thousand
eight hundred by three, and have over eighty thousand persons whose minds
are quick and active in local politics on this one account. But we may
proceed further. There are the cities and boroughs, their official
business more complex and laborious, and in most cases receiving much
higher compensation. The competition for these is in many instances very
great: in the case of large cities we need not waste words in
elaborating the fact. It is difficult to estimate the number of persons
to whom the municipal corporations give place and pay compensation in
the State of Pennsylvania, but five thousand is not an extravagant
surmise, while it would be equally reasonable to presume that for each
place occupied at least three others would be willing to fill it, so
that on this account we may make a total of twenty thousand. But there
are also the county offices. Besides the judicial positions, altogether
honorable, held by long terms of election and receiving liberal
compensation, there are in each county an average of fifteen other
officials, making in the State, in round numbers, one thousand. These,
again, may be multiplied by four: there are certainly three waiting
aspirants for each place. But ascend now to the State system, with its
several executive departments, the legislature, the charitable and penal
institutions and the appointments in the gift of the governor. Great and
small, these may reach one thousand (the Legislature alone, with its
officers and employés, accounts for over three hundred), and certainly
there are at least five persons looking toward each of the several
places.

Upon such an estimate, then, of the political activities of one State we
have such a showing as this:

Citizens politically active as to townships,           80,000
Citizens politically active as to cities and boroughs, 20,000
Citizens politically active as to counties,             4,000
Citizens politically active as to the State,            5,000
                  Making a total of                   109,000

Some allowance should be made, no doubt, for persons whose inclinations
for position cover all the different fields--who may be said to be
watching several holes. But we have not considered how many citizens of
Pennsylvania are inclined to national positions--the Presidency, seats
in Congress or some of the numerous places in the general service of the
Federal government. These two classes, it is probable, would offset each
other.

Subtracting, however, the odd thousands from the total stated, we may
fix at one hundred thousand the number of citizens in the one State who,
by reason of occupying some position of public duty or of being inclined
to fill one, are actively interested in the subject of politics. This is
almost exactly one-seventh of the whole number of voters in the State:
it presents the fact that in every group of seven citizens there is one,
presumably of more than the average in capacity and intelligence, whose
mind is quick and sensitive to every question affecting political
organization. We are brought thus to the same point which we reached by
an observation of the township system--the fact that every part of
society is permeated by the general political circulation. It is like
the human organism: nerves and blood-vessels extend, with size and
capacity proportioned for their work, to the most remote extremity, and
the whole is alive.

Let us, however, guard strictly, at this point, against a possible
misconception. It is not to be understood that these one hundred
thousand citizens are simply "office-seekers," using the ordinary and
offensive sense of the term. The activity in affairs which we describe
is distinct from a sordid desire to grab the emoluments of office. The
vast majority of the places, including all those in the
townships--which, with the aspirants to them, make four-fifths of the
whole--are either without any pay at all or have an amount so small as
to be beneath our consideration. But a small part of the offices which
we have enumerated carry emoluments sufficient to furnish a living for
the most economical incumbent. The inspiration of the political
interest evidenced by this one-seventh part of the citizenship is not an
unworthy one at all: on the contrary, it is that essential democratic
inclination without which our form of government must quickly stagnate.
It would be foolish to say that no selfish motive enters into this
tremendous manifestation of energy and effort (until humanity assumes a
higher form the moving power of the mercenary principle must be very
great), but it is fair and it is accurate to ascribe to the men in
affairs a much loftier and more honorable impulse--the aspiration to
share in the conduct of their own government, the unwillingness to be
ignored or excluded in the administration of what is universally
denominated a common trust. That they enjoy, if they do not covet, such
pecuniary advantage as their places bring is reasonable, but it is true,
to their credit, that they do appreciate more than this the honor that
attaches to the public station and the pleasure which may be experienced
in the discharge of its conspicuous duties.

Let us presume that even this imperfect study of the political
activities of a single State may present some conception of the
tremendous force and energy that go to the making, year by year, of the
various branches of our government. Certainly, any student of this field
may accept with respect the admonition that there is no languor, no
fatigue, no feeling of genteel disgust with politics, in what has thus
been presented him. If, then, his plan of reorganization for the civil
service is intended to be set up without consulting the popular
inclination, or possibly even in opposition to it, he may well stand
hesitant as to his likelihood of success. The question may confront him
at once: Is the organization of a permanent official class in the
administration of the general government likely to accord with the
desires of the people? And we may add, Is it consistent with the general
character of our form of government? Is it not attended by conclusive
objections?

It is not the purpose of this article to attempt answering these
questions fully. We do not propose to throw ourselves across the path
of those undoubtedly sincere, and probably wise, students of this
subject who have arrived at the positive conclusion that to establish a
permanent tenure for the great body of the national office-holders, and
to appoint to vacancies among them upon the tests of a competitive or
other examination, is the panacea for all our public disorders, the
regenerative process which will lift our whole system into a higher and
purer atmosphere. We do not say that these gentlemen may not be right,
but we are willing to examine the subject.

Upon viewing, then, the tremendous popular activity in local and State
affairs--and we must reflect that there is "more politics to the square
foot" in some of the newer States than there is in Pennsylvania--the
inquiry is natural whether this stops short of all national politics.
Certainly it does not. The offices in the general government, though
their importance and their influence are usually overestimated, are a
great object of attention with the whole country. The vehement
democratic movement toward them that marked the time of Jackson is still
apparent, though it proceeds with diminished force and is regulated and
tempered by the strong protest which has been made against the scandals
of the "spoils system," and against the theory that government by
parties must be a continual struggle for plunder. It is noticeable that
no administration has ever really attempted the formation of an
irremovable body of officials. No party has ever yet explicitly declared
itself in favor of such a policy. No actual leader of any party, bearing
the responsibility of its success or failure in the elections, has ever
yet sincerely and persistently advocated the measure. None wish to
undertake so tremendous a task. He would indeed be a powerful orator who
could carry a popular gathering with him in favor of the proposition
that hereafter the holding of office was to be made more exclusive--that
the people were to put away from themselves, by a renunciation of their
own powers, the expectancy of occupying a great part of the public
places. Rare as may be the persuasive ability of the true stump-orator,
and serene as his confidence may be in his powers, there would be but
few volunteers to enter a campaign upon such a platform as that. It
would be a forlorn hope indeed.

The view of the people undoubtedly is (1) that the public places are
common property; (2) that any one may aspire to fill them; and (3) that
the elevation to them is properly the direct or nearly direct result of
election. The elective principle is democratic. It has been, since the
beginning of the government, steadily consuming all other methods of
making public officers. In most States the appointing power of the
governor, which years ago was usually large, has been stripped to the
uttermost. It is thirty years in Pennsylvania since even the judiciary
became elective by the people. And in those States--of which Delaware
furnishes an example--where most of the county officers are still the
appointees of the governor, the tendency to control his action by a
display of the popular wish--such an array of petitions, etc. as amounts
to a polling of votes--is unmistakable. The governor is moved,
obviously, by the people. And if to some this general tendency toward
the elective idea seems dangerous, it must be answered that it is not
really so if the people are in fact capable of self-government.
Conceding this as the foundation of our system, we cannot, at this point
and that, expect to interpose a guardianship over their expression.

To the permanency of tenure it is that we have given, and expect will
generally be given, most attention. This is the essence of the proposed
"reform." The manner of selecting new appointees is of no great
consequence if the vacancies are to occur so seldom as must be the case
where incumbents hold for life. Whether the new recruits come in upon
the certificates of a board of examiners, such as the British
Civil-Service Commission, or upon the scrutiny of the Executive and his
advisers, as now, is a consideration of minor importance. It is the idea
of an official class, an order of office-holders, which appears to throw
itself across the path of the democratic activity which we have
attempted to describe. This is the point of conflict--if any. We might,
it is true, take many measures to ensure the colorless and harmless
character of the system. Up to a recent time the government clerks in
England were deprived of the suffrage, in order that they might be
perfectly indifferent to politics. It is probable that in time our own
officials would lose the ordinary instincts of a democratic citizenship,
and would regard with coldness, if not contempt, the activities that
lead to a renewal of the government. But however smoothly they might
move in the pursuance of their clerical routine, however faultless they
might become in their round of prescribed duties, would they not still
obstruct the public purpose? Would not even this emasculate order of
placemen, standing apart a sacrificed though favored class, still
present themselves as unpardonable offenders? When it should be
discovered that they claimed the possession in perpetuity of the offices
in the national government, and had organized themselves as a standing
army of placemen, can it be believed that they would not be swept aside
by the same iconoclastic onset which ended the Adams administration?

We do not pause here to represent the apparent inconsistency of desiring
to de-citizenize a large number of intelligent members of the community,
or the risk of creating a class in the republic forbidden to take any
active interest in the renewals of its organization, or the impolicy of
diminishing the force and courage of the popular will in its grapple
with the problem of self-government; but all these comments may suggest
themselves.

Popular expectancy, it may fairly be declared, follows all the stations
of public life with a jealous if not an eager eye. There is abundant
evidence of this in the county and township systems. Taking, for
example, the administration of county affairs in any of the States, it
will be found that the officers, by a rule that seems generally
satisfactory, hold during short terms, and are seldom re-elected
immediately to the same place. The rule is rotation--giving a large
number of persons their "turn"--and changes are regularly made. A man
disappointed this year for a particular place waits until the time comes
to fill it again, and in many counties, other things being about equal,
the fact that he has waited patiently and now presents the oldest claim
governs the selection. The antipathy to one who seeks to hold on to his
place beyond the ordinary term--the dislike for a grabber who desires
more than is usually assigned--is a perfectly well-known feature in
politics. The county system of Pennsylvania will afford abundant proof
of the statements here made: the terms of the officers, who are all
elective, do not average more than four years, even including such
court-officials as the clerks and prothonotaries, whose duties are in
some particulars technical and difficult, requiring an acquaintance with
the forms of legal procedure. But it is further true that in the States
where county officers are appointed by the governor no protracted tenure
results. On the contrary, the pressure upon him of the public
expectation seldom permits the reappointment of an officer whose
commission is expiring.

With this rule of change, primary as its application is, and within the
direct comprehension and control of the people, there does not appear to
be any general discontent. It is accepted, so far as we can discover, as
a just and proper system by which an equality of claims upon the common
favor is maintained. It is reasonable to presume, therefore, that
amongst a people fairly acquainted with their own business, and
possessing a fair education both of the schools and of experience in
life, many persons in every community are competent to serve as its
officials. At any rate, in the midst of these usages we discover no
demand that the terms of office be made permanent, and that the
place-holders be put beyond the reach of a removal. There is no apparent
realization that such a "reform" is demanded; and if it be difficult, as
has been stated, to awaken popular enthusiasm in behalf of a permanent
tenure in the national civil service, there seems to be nothing in the
rules of primary politics to help smooth the way.

It may be asked now whether it is not almost certainly true that some
sound principle lies in the methods which an intelligent community,
unrestrained by ancient conventional ideas or repressive systems of law,
applies to its own political organization. Is not this instinctive
democratic plan an essential principle of a government founded upon
equal rights? _Is it not a law of Change which characterizes the civil
service of a democracy, and not a law of Permanence?_

We can hardly doubt that the facts which have been stated concerning the
disposition of the people toward the offices in their government are
capable of a philosophical explanation; and as they proceed with evident
freedom and naturalness from the very bosom of communities accustomed to
independent thought and action, the conclusion is irresistible that this
is the temper and the tendency of a free government. Startling as it may
be to propose change rather than permanency in the civil service, that
may prove to be best adapted to our wants. Consciously or not, such a
rule has been established by the people themselves; and while it has
scarcely found a formal presentation, much less had careful examination
and argument, there can be little doubt that such a principle,
substantially as we have described, lies close to the hearts of the
people. The right of election, the idea that public officers should be
elective, and the expectation that there will be a rotation of duties
and honors, are popular principles which are unmistakable.

Apart from the consideration that whatever is fundamental in popular
government, whatever tends to the preservation of individual freedom and
equality of rights, must be a safe principle, there could be much said
from the most practical stand-point in favor of rotation in office. All
human experience proves the usefulness of change. Rest is the next thing
to rust. In physics things without motion are usually things without
life; and in government it is the bureaus least disturbed by change that
are most stagnated and most circumlocutory. The apparent misfortune of
having men experienced in public affairs make way, at intervals, for
others of less experience is itself greatly exaggerated. There are facts
so important in compensation that the assumed evil becomes one of very
moderate proportions. For it will be seen upon careful observation that
no important function of the government, not even in the national
service, calls for a character or qualification--sometimes, but rarely,
for any sort of special or technical skill--which is not being
continually formed and trained either in the movements of private life
and business experience or in the political schools which are furnished
by the State, the county and the township. The functions of the
government are substantially the guardianship of the same interests for
which the State, the county, the township and the individual exercise
concern. Government has lost its mystery: even diplomacy has somewhat
changed from lying and chicanery to common-sense dealing. The qualities
that are required in the government--industry, economy, integrity,
knowledge of men and affairs--are precisely those which are of value to
every individual citizen, and which are taught day by day everywhere--to
the lads in school and college and to the men in their occupations of
life. Such qualities a community fit to govern itself must abundantly
possess. There is nothing occult in the science of government. The
administration in behalf of the people of the organization which they
have ordered is nothing foreign to their own knowledge. They have ceased
to consider themselves unfit for self-rule: they no longer think of
calling in from other worlds a different order of beings to govern them.

We may accept without fear principles which seem startling, but which
are proved to be rooted in democratic ground, so long as we have faith
in the democratic system itself. There is no road open for the doubter
and questioner of popular rights but that which leads back to abandoned
ground. We may proceed, then, with an attempt to explain the philosophy
of the rule of Change. Shall it not be stated thus:

_That, due regard being had to the preservation of simplicity and
economy--forbidding thus the needless increase of offices and
expenses--it is then true that the active participation by the largest
number of persons in the practical administration of their own
government is an object highly to be desired in every democratic
republic._

The government must be the highest school of affairs. Shall it be
declared that to study there and to have its diploma is not desirable
for all? Is it not perfectly evident that the more who can learn to
actually discharge the duties belonging to their own social
organization, the better for them and the better for it?

All these propositions necessarily imply the existence of an intelligent
and patriotic people, at least of such a majority. So always does every
plan of popular government. Whatever of disappointment presents itself
to the author of any scheme of "reform," upon finding that he has
constructed a system which is ridden down by the political activity of
the people, he must blame the plan upon which our fabric is built. If he
is chagrined to find that his _imperium in imperio_ is not practicable,
and that nothing can make here a power stronger than the source of
power, he must solace his hurt feelings with the reflection that the
system was never adapted to his contrivance, and that our fathers, when
in the beginning they resolved to establish a government by the people,
gave consent thereby to all the apparent risks and inconveniences of
having the people continually minding their own affairs.

With a just comprehension of the democratic forces that give motion and
life to the governmental system of the United States, and of the manner
in which they affect the public service in all its departments, the wise
advocate of reform must approach his work. His patriotism and
thoughtfulness are both necessary. To proceed against the democratic law
is not practicable: to establish a new system which is inconsistent with
the abundant vitality and conscious strength of that already established
is a futile proposition indeed.




THE PRICE OF SAFETY.


Thirty-three years ago--that is, shortly before Christmas, 1847--I went
over to Paris to pass a few weeks with my family. The great railway
schemes of the two previous years in England had broken down a good many
men in our office--draughtsmen, surveyors and so on. I wonder if the
present public recollects those days, when the _Times_ brought out
double supplements to accommodate the advertisements of railroads, when
King Hudson was as much a potentate as Queen Victoria, when Brunel and
Stephenson were autocrats, and when everybody saw a sudden chance of
getting rich by shares or damages? Those days were the beginning of that
period of prosperity of which the recent "hard times" were the reaction.
_Then_ twenty guineas a night for office-work was sometimes paid to
youngsters not yet out of their teens. In the great offices the young
men worked all day and the alternate nights to get plans ready for
Parliament, sustained by strong coffee always on the tap, till some of
them went mad with the excitement and the strain.

I had worked hard both in the field and office during the closing months
of 1847, but I broke down at last, and was sent to recover my health
under the care of my family. That family consisted of my father--a
half-pay English officer--my mother and three sisters, then living _au
troisième_ in the Rue Neuve de Berri, not far from the newly-erected
Russian church, and the windows of the _appartement_ commanded a side
view down the Champs Élysées. I only needed rest and recreation, both of
which my adoring family eagerly provided me. My sisters were three
lively, simple-hearted, honest English girls, who had a large
acquaintance in Paris, and took great pride and pleasure in introducing
to it their only brother. We were not only invited to our embassy and on
visiting terms with all the English Colony (that colony whose annals at
that period are written in _The Adventures of Philip_, and to which
Thackeray's mother and nearest relatives, like ourselves, belonged), but
we were, in virtue of some American connections, admitted to the
American embassy on the footing of semi-Americans.

We enjoyed our American friends greatly. I formed the opinion then,
which I retain now, that cultivated Americans, the top-skimming of the
social cream, are some of the most charming people to be met with in
cultivated society. To all that constitutes "nice people" everywhere
they join a _soupçon_ of wild flavor which gives them individuality.
They are to society what their own wild turkeys and canvasbacks are to
the _menu_.

One of my sisters, Amy, the eldest, had been ill that winter, and was
not equal to joining in the gayeties that the others enjoyed. Her
principal amusement was walking in the Gardens of Monceaux, a private
domain of King Louis Philippe in the Batignolles, a quiet, humdrum spot,
where she could set her foot upon green turf and gravel. The streets of
Paris, the Boulevards, and the Champs Élysées were too attractive to a
pleasure-seeker like myself to allow me to content myself with the pale
attractions of Monceaux, but I went there with my sister once or twice,
because French etiquette forbade her walking even in these quiet
garden-paths alone.

One day it was proposed by her that we should go again. I could not, in
common humanity, refuse, and so consented. Poor Amy "put on her things,"
as our girls called it, and we descended to the porte-cochère, intending
to engage the first passing citadine. As we stepped into the street,
however, a gay carriage with high-stepping gray horses, a chasseur with
knife and feathers, and a coachman in a modest livery on a hammer-cloth
resplendent with yellow fringes and embroideries, drew up at our door: a
pretty hand was laid upon the portière and a voice cried, "Amy! Amy! I
was coming for you."

"My brother--Miss Leare," said Amy.

Miss Leare bowed to me gracefully and motioned to her chasseur to open
the carriage-door. "Get in," she said. "_I_ have the carriage for two
hours: what shall we do with it? Mamma is at the dentist's.--Amy, I
thought you would enjoy a drive, and so I came for you."

I helped Amy in, and was making my bow when Miss Leare stopped me. "Come
too," she said cordially: "Amy's brother surely need not be taboo. Shall
we drive to the Bois?"

"I was going to Monceaux," said Amy. "Would it be quite the thing for us
to drive alone to the Bois?"

"Oh-h-h!" said Miss Leare, prolonging her breath upon the
vocative.--"You see," she added, turning to me, "I am so unprepared by
previous training that I shall never become _au fait_ in French
proprieties. Indeed, I hold them in great reverence, but they seem to be
for ever hedging me in; nor can I understand the meaning of half of
them. In America I was guided by plain right and wrong.--Why shall we
not outrage etiquette, Amy, by 'going alone,' as you call it, to
Monceaux? Is it that the place is so stiff and solemn and out of the way
that we may walk there without a chaperon? I should have thought
seclusion made a place more dangerous, allowing that there be any danger
at all.--In America, Mr. Farquhar, your escort would be enough for us,
and the fact that Amy is your sister would give a sort of double
security to your protection."

"Oh, dear Miss Leare--" began Amy.

"Hermie, Amy--Hermione, which is English and American for Tasso's
Erminia.--Do you like my name, Mr. Farquhar? We have strange names in
America, English people are pleased to say.--Victor!" she went on,
calling to the chasseur without pausing for any reply, "stop at some
place where they sell candy. Mr. Farquhar will get out and buy us some."

Obediently to her order, we stopped at a confectioner's. I was directed
to put my hand into the carriage-pocket, where I should find some
"loose change," kept there for candy and the hurdy-gurdy boys. Then I
was directed to go into the "store" and choose a pound of all sorts of
"mixed candy."

I had not more than made myself intelligible to a young person behind
the counter when the carriage-door was opened and both the girls came
in, Miss Hermione declaring that she knew I should be embarrassed by the
multitude of "sweeties," and that I should need their experience to know
what I was about.

With dawdling, laughing and good-comradeship we chose our bonbons, and
getting back into the barouche we proceeded to crunch them as we drove
on to Monceaux. It was like being children over again, with a slight
sense of being out of bounds. I had never seen confectionery eaten
wholesale in that fashion. Such bonbons were expensive, too. Trained in
the personal economy of English middle-class life, it would never have
occurred to me to buy several francs' worth of sugar-plums and to eat
them by the handful. But as the fair American sat before me, smiling,
laughing, petting Amy and saying fascinating impertinences to myself, I
thought I had never seen so bewitching a creature. Her frame, though
_svelte_ and admirably proportioned, gave me an idea of vigor and
strength not commonly associated at that time with the girls of America.
Her complexion, too, was healthy: she was not so highly colored as an
English country girl, but her skin was bright and clear. Her face was a
perfect oval, her hair glossy and dark, her eyes expressive hazel. Her
points were all good: her ears, her hands, her feet, her upper lip and
nostrils showed blood, and the daintiness and taste of her rich dress
seemed to denote her good taste and fine breeding. My sisters, could not
tie their bonnet-strings as she tied hers, nor were their dresses
anything like hers in freshness, fit or daintiness of trimming.

We alighted at last at old Monceaux, and walked about its solemn alleys.
Sometimes Miss Leare talked sense, and talked it well. Those were
exciting days in Paris. It was February, 1848, and a great crisis was
nearer at hand in politics than we suspected; besides which there had
been several events in private life which had increased the general
excitement of the period--notably the murder of Marshal Sebastiani's
daughter, the poor duchesse de Praslin. Hermione could talk of these
things with great spirit, but sometimes relapsed into her grown-up
childishness. She talked, too, with animation of the freedom and
happiness of her American girlhood. My sister Amy had always taken life
_au grand sérieux_; Ellen was a little too prompt to flirt with officers
and gay young men, and needed repression; Lætitia went in for
book-learning, and measured every one by what she called their
"educational opportunities." My sisters were as different as possible
from this butterfly creature, who seemed to sip interest and amusement
out of everything.

At the end of two hours we drove back to Mrs. Leare's hôtel, which was
opposite our own apartment in the Rue Neuve de Berri, the hôtel that a
few weeks later was occupied by Prince Jerome. Here Hermione insisted
upon our coming in while the carriage drove to the dentist's for her
mother.

The reception-rooms in Mrs. Leare's hôtel were very showy. They were
filled with buhl and knick-knacks gathered on all parts of the
Continent, and lavishly displayed, not always in good keeping. A little
sister, Claribel, came running up to us when we entered, and clung
fondly to Hermione, who sat down at the Erard grand piano and sang to
us, without suggestion, a gay little French song. She was taking
lessons, Amy afterward told me, of the master most in vogue in Paris and
of all others the most expensive. Amy, who could sing well herself,
disparaged Hermione's voice to me, and sighed as she thought of the
waste of those inestimable lessons.

Then Miss Hermione lifted the top of an ormolu box on the chimney-piece
of a boudoir and showed Amy and me, under the rose as it were, some
cigarettes, with a laugh. "Mamma's," she said: "she has a _faiblesse_
that way."

"Oh, Hermione! you don't?" cried Amy.

"No, _I_ don't," said Hermione more gravely.

I was so amused by her, so fascinated, so completely at my ease with
her, that I could have stayed on without taking note of time had not Amy
remembered that it was our dinner-hour. We took our leave, and met Mrs.
Leare on the staircase ascending to her apartment. She greeted Amy with
as much effusion as was compatible with her ideas of fashion, and said
she was "right glad" to hear we had been passing the morning with
Hermione.

"I wish you would come very often. I like her to see English girls: you
do her so much good, Amy.--Mr. Farquhar, we shall hope to see you often
too. I have a little reception here every Sunday evening."

With that she continued her course up stairs, and we descended to the
porte-cochère.

She was a faded woman, "dressed to death," as Amy phrased it, and none
of my people had a good word for her.

"The Leares are rolling in riches, I believe," remarked my father, "and
an American who is rich has no hereditary obligations to absorb his
wealth, so that it becomes all 'spending-money,' as Miss Hermione says.
The head of the family--King Leare I call him--stays at home in some
sort of a counting-room in New York and makes money, giving Mrs. Leare
and Miss Hermione _carte blanche_ to spend it on any follies they
please. I never heard anything exactly wrong concerning Mrs. Leare, but
she does not seem to me the woman to be trusted with that very nice
young daughter. I feel great pity for Miss Leare."

"Miss Leare has plenty of sense and character," said my mother: "I do
not think her mother's queer surroundings seem to affect her in any way.
She moves among the Frenchmen, Poles and Italians of her mother's court
like that lady Shakespeare--or was it Spenser?--wrote about among the
fauns and satyrs. With all her American freedom she avoids improprieties
by instinct. I have no fears for her future if she marries the right
man."

"Indeed, mamma," said Amy, "I wish she would keep more strictly within
the limit of the proprieties. She makes me nervous all the time we are
together."

"My dear, you never heard her breathe a really unbecoming word or saw
her do an immodest thing?" said my mother interrogatively.

"Oh no, of course not," said Amy.

"They say Mrs. Leare wants to marry her to that Neapolitan marquis who
is so often there," put in Ellen. "_On dit_, she will have a _dot_ of
two millions of francs, or, as they call it, half a million of dollars."

"Such a rumor," I broke in, rather annoyed by this turn in the
conversation, "may well buy her the right to be a marchioness if she
will."

"Indeed it won't, then," said Ellen sharply, "for she thinks Americans
should not 'fix' themselves permanently abroad. She says she means to
marry one of her own folks, as she calls her countrymen."

"She knows an infinite variety of things, and has had all kinds of
masters," sighed Lætitia: "she speaks all the languages in Europe. I
believe Americans have a peculiar facility for pronunciation, like the
Russians, and she learned at her school in America philosophy, rhetoric,
logic, Latin, algebra, chemistry."

"I wonder she should be so sweet a woman," said my father. "She seems a
good girl--I never took her for a learned one--but her mother is a fool,
and I should think her father must be that or worse. I wonder what he
can be like? It seems to an Englishman so strange that a man should stay
at home alone for years, and suffer his wife and family to travel all
over the Continent without protection."

Though my father, mother and sisters declined the Sunday invitation of
Mrs. Leare, I went to her reception. The guests were nearly all
Italians, Poles, Spaniards or Frenchmen. There was no Englishman
present, but myself, and only one or two Americans. I felt at once how
out of place my mother, the country matron, and my father, _ce
respectable viellard,_ would have been in such a circle. But Mrs.
Leare's guests were not the _jeunesse dorée_ nor the dubious nobility I
had expected to meet in her _salon_. The Frenchmen among them were all
men whose names were familiar in French political circles--men of
revolutionary tendencies and of advanced opinions. I afterward
discovered they had taken advantage of Mrs. Leare's desire to be the
head of a salon to use her rooms as a convenient rendezvous. It was safe
ground on which to simmer their revolutionary cauldron. It was seething
and bubbling that night, although neither the Leares nor myself were
aware of what was brewing. The talk was all about the Banquets,
especially the impending reform banquet in the Rue Chaillot. The
gentlemen present were not exactly conspirators: they were for the most
part political reformers, who, being cut off from the usual modes of
expressing themselves through a recognized parliamentary opposition or
by the medium of petition, had devised a system of political banquets,
some fifty of which had already been held in the departments, and they
were now engaged in getting one up in Paris in the Twelfth
arrondissement.

At that time, in a population of thirty-five millions, there were but a
quarter of a million of French voters, and as in France all places (from
that of a railroad guard to a seat on the bench) were disposed of by the
government, it was very easy for ministers to control the legislature. A
reform, really needed in the franchise, was the object proposed to
themselves by the original heads of the Revolution of 1848, though when
they had set their ball in motion they could neither control it nor keep
up with it as it rolled downward.

The prevalent idea in Mrs. Leare's salon was that the banquet of the Rue
Chaillot would go off quietly, that the prefect of police would protest,
and that the affair would then pass into the law-courts, where it would
remain until all interest in the subject had passed away. One was
sensible, however, that there was a general feeling of excitement in the
atmosphere. Paris swarmed with troops, evidently under stricter
discipline than usual. People looked into each other's faces
interrogatively and read the daily papers with an anxious air.

Though I did not at the time fully appreciate what I saw, I was struck
by the business-like character of the men about me. The guests, I
thought, took very little notice of the lady of the house. I did not
then suspect that they were using her hospitality for their own
purposes, and that they felt secure in her total incapacity to
understand what they were doing. She, meantime, intent on filling her
reception-rooms with celebrities and titled persons, was charmed to have
collected so many distinguished men around her.

Hermione appeared bewildered, uncomfortable and restless, like a
spectator on the edge of a great crowd. "There are too many strangers
here to-night," she said: "mamma and I do not know one half of them.
They have been brought here by their friends. To have a salon is mamma's
ambition, but this is not my idea of it. I feel as if we were out of
place among these men, who talk to each other and hardly notice us at
all."

We sat together and exchanged our thoughts in whispers. It was one of
those crowds that create a solitude for lovers. Not that we talked
sentiment or that we were lovers. We conversed about the excitements of
the day--of the Leste affair, in which the king and the king's ministry
were accused of protecting dishonesty; of the Beauvallon and
D'Equivilley duel and the Praslin murder, in connection with both of
which the royal family and the ministry were popularly accused of
protecting criminals--and at last the conversation strayed away from
France to Hermione's own girlhood. She told me of her happy country home
in Maryland with her grandmother, and sighed. I asked her if she was
going to the English ball to be given on Wednesday night at the
beautiful Jardin d'Hiver in the Champs Élysées.

"I suppose so," she replied, "but I don't care for large assemblies: I
feel afraid of the men I meet. I wish your mother could chaperon me: it
would be much nicer to be with her than with my own. Mamma understands
nothing about looking after me; she wants to have a good time herself,
and I am only in her way. Do you know, Mr. Farquhar, I have a theory
that when women have missed anything they ought to have enjoyed in early
life, they always want to go back and pick it up. Mamma had no pleasures
in her youth, no attentions, no gayety. If I am to be chaperoned, I like
the real thing. If I were at home in Maryland, where my father came
from, I should need no one to protect me: _you_ could take me to the
ball."

"I, Miss Hermione?"

"Yes, you. You would call for me, and wait till I was ready to come
down. Then you and I would go _alone_," she added, enjoying my look of
incredulity. "It is the custom: no harm could come of it," she added.
"We would walk to our ball."

"No harm in the case that you have supposed, but in some other cases--"

"You suppose a good deal," she interrupted. "You suppose a girl without
self-respect or good sense, and perhaps a man without honor. Here, of
course, things cannot be like that. Society seems founded upon different
ideas from those prevalent with us about men and women. _Here_, I admit,
a girl finds comfort and protection and ease of mind in a good chaperon.
Yet it seemed strange to me to put on leading-strings when I came out
here: I had been used to take care of myself for so many years."

"Why, Miss Leare," I said, laughing, "you cannot have been many years in
society."

"I am twenty," she said frankly, "and we came to Europe about three
years ago. But before that time I had been in company a good deal. Not
in the city, for I was not 'out,' but in the hotels at Newport, at the
Springs and in the country. In America one has but to do what one knows
is kind and right, and no one will think evil: here one may do, without
suspecting it, so many compromising things."

"Does the instinct that you speak of to be kind and right always guide
the young American lady?"

"I suppose so--so far as I know. It _must_. She walks by it, and sets
her feet down firmly. Here I feel all the time as if I were walking
among traps blindfolded."

The ball of the Jardin d'Hiver in the Champs Élysées was a superb
success. The immense glass-house was fitted up for dancing, and all went
merry as a marriage-bell, with a crater about to open under our feet, as
at the duchess of Richmond's ball at Brussels.

Miss Leare was there, but quiet and dignified. There was not the
smallest touch of vulgarity about her. The coarse readiness to accept
publicity which distinguishes the underbred woman, whether in England or
America, the desire to show off a foreign emancipation from what appear
ridiculous French rules, were not in her.

Yet she might have amused herself as she liked with complete impunity,
for Mrs. Leare appeared to leave her entirely alone. I danced with her
as often as she would permit me, and my heart was no longer in my own
possession when I put-her into her carriage about dawn.

Two or three days after I called, but the ladies were not in, so that
except at church at the Hôtel Marboeuf on Sunday morning I saw nothing
of Miss Hermione. Monday, February 21st, was sunny and bright. The
public excitement was such that an unusual number of working-men were
keeping their St. Crispin. The soldiers, however, were confined to their
quarters: not a uniform was to be seen abroad. Our night had been
disturbed by the continuous rumble of carts and carriages.

"Is it a fine day for the banquet?" I heard Amy say as our maid opened
her windows on Tuesday morning.

"There is to be no banquet," was the answer. "_Voyez done_ the
proclamation posted on the door of the barrack at the corner of the Rue
Chaillot."

I sprang from my bed and looked out of my window. A strange change had
taken place in the teeming little caserne at the corner. Instead of the
usual groups of well-behaved boy-soldiers in rough uniforms, the barrack
looked deserted, and its lower windows had been closed up to their top
panes with bags of hay and mattresses. Not a soldier, not even a sentry,
was to be seen.

I dressed myself and went out to collect news. The carts that had
disturbed us during the night had been not only employed in removing all
preparations for the banquet, but in taking every loose paving-stone out
of the way. I found the Place de la Madeleine full of people, all
looking up at the house of Odillon Barrot, asking "What next?" and "What
shall we do?" Odillon Barrot was the hero of the moment--literally _of
the moment_. In forty-eight hours from that time his name had faded from
the page of history. In the Place de la Concorde there was more
excitement, for threats were being made to cross the bridge and to
insult the Chambers. The Pont de l'Institut, notwithstanding the efforts
of the garde municipale or mounted police, was greatly crowded. A party
of dragoons, on sorrel ponies barely fourteen hands high, rode up and
began to clear the bridge, but gently and gradually. The crowd was
retiring as fast as its numbers would permit, when some of the municipal
guard rode through the ranks of the dragoons and set themselves, with
ill-judged roughness, to accelerate the operation. The crowd grew angry,
and stones began to be thrown at the guard and soldiers.

Growing anxious for the women I had left in the Rue Neuve de Berri, I
returned home by side-streets. A crowd had collected on the Champs
Élysées about thirty yards from the corner of our street, and was
forming a barricade. All were shouting, all gesticulating. Citadines at
full speed were driving out of reach of requisition; horses were going
off disencumbered of their vehicles; the driver of a remise was seated
astride his animal, the long flaps of his driving-coat covering it from
neck to tail; a noble elm was being hewn down by hatchets and even
common knives. An omnibus, the remise, a few barrels and dining-tables,
a dozen yards of _pave_ torn up by eager hands, a sentry-box, some
benches and the tree, formed the barricade. _Gamins_ and _blouses_
worked at it. The respectables looked on and did not trouble the
workers. Suddenly there was a general stampede among them. A squadron of
about fifty dragoons charged up the Champs Élysées. One old
peasant-woman in a scanty yellow-and-black skirt, which she twitched
above her knees, led the retreat. But soon they stopped and turned
again, while the dragoons rode slowly back, breathing their horses.
Nobody was angry, for nobody had been hurt, but they were frightened
enough.

At this moment, stealing from a porte-cochère where she had taken refuge
during the fright and _sauve gui peut_, came a figure wrapped in dark
drapery. Could it be possible? Hermione Leare! In a moment I was at her
side. She was very pale and breathless, and she was glad to take my arm.
"What brings you here?" I whispered.

"Our servants have all run away: they think mamma is compromised.
Victor, our chasseur, broke open mamma's secretary and took his wages.
She is almost beside herself. She wanted to send a letter to the post,
and as it is steamer-day I thought papa had better know that thus far
nothing has happened to us. There was nobody to take the letter: I said
I would put it in the box in the Rue Ponthieu."

"And did you post it?"

"No: I could not get to the Rue Ponthieu. They were firing down the
street, and now I dare not."

"Trust it to me, Miss Leare, and promise me to send for me if you have
any more such errands. You must never run such risks again."

"I have to be the man of the family," she answered, almost with an
apologetic air.

"Do not say that again. I shall come over three times a day while this
thing lasts to see if you have any commissions."

She smiled and pressed my hand as she turned into her own porte-cochère.
Frightened servants and their friends were in the porter's lodge, who
gazed after her with exclamations as she went up the common stair.

The remainder of that day passed with very little fighting. Up to that
time it had been a riot apropos of a change of ministry, but in the
night the secret societies met and flung aside the previous question.

When we awoke on Wednesday morning, February 23d, we were struck by the
strange quiet of the streets. No provisions entered Paris through the
barrier, no vehicles nor venders of small wares. The absolute silence,
save when "Mourir pour la Patrie" sounded hoarsely in the distance, was
as strange as it was unexpected. I had always connected an insurrection
with noise. It was rumored that Guizot the Unpopular had been dismissed,
and that Count Mole, a man of half measures, had been called to the
king's councils. The affair looked to me as if it were going to die out
for want of fuel. But I was mistaken: the blouses, who had not had one
gun to a hundred the day before, had been all night arming themselves by
domiciliary requisitions. The national guard was not believed to be
firm.

The night before, an hour after I had parted with Miss Hermione, I had
made an attempt to see her and Mrs. Leare, without any success. Not even
bribery would induce the concierge to let me in. His orders were
peremptory: "_Pas un seul, monsieur, personne_"--madame received nobody.

Early on Wednesday morning I again presented myself: the ladies were not
visible. Later in the day I called again, and was again refused. But
several times Amy had seen Hermione at a window, and they had made signs
across the street to one another. I began to understand that Mrs. Leare
was overwhelmed by the responsibility she had incurred in opening her
salon to men whom she now perceived to have been conspirators, and that
she was obstinately determined not to compromise herself further by
giving admittance to any one.

Our bonne had been able to ascertain from the concierge of the Leare
house that madame was hysterical, and could hardly be controlled by
mademoiselle.

I was in the streets till five o'clock on Wednesday, when, concluding
all was over, I came home, intending to make another effort to see the
Leares, and if possible to take Miss Hermione, with Ellen and Lætitia,
to view the debris of the two days' fight--to let them get their first
glimpse of real war in the Place de la Concorde, where a regiment was
littering down its horses for the night, and a peep into the closed
gardens of the Tuileries.

When I got up to our rooms I found my sisters at a window overlooking
the courtyard of Mrs. Leare's hotel, and they all cried out with one
voice, "Mrs. Leare's carriage is just ready to drive away."

I looked. A travelling-equipage stood in the courtyard. On it the
concierge was hoisting trunks, and into it was being heaped a
promiscuous variety of knick-knackery and wearing apparel. A country
postilion--who, but for his dirt, would have looked more like a
character in a comedy than a real live, serviceable post-boy--was
standing in carpet slippers (having divested himself of his boots of
office) harnessing three undersized gray Normandy mares to an elegant
travelling-carriage.

Hermione herself, Claribel her little sister, Mrs. Leare and the old
colored nurse got quickly in. Mrs. Leare was in tears, with her head
muffled in a yard or two of green _barège_, then the distinctive mark of
a travelling American woman. The child's-nurse had long gold ear-drops
and a head-dress of red bandanna. There was not a man of any kind with
them except the postilion. The concierge opened the gates of the
courtyard.

"Stop! stop!" I cried, and rushed down our own staircase and out of our
front door.

As I ran past their entrance a woman put a paper into my hand. I had no
time to glance at it, for the carriage had already turned into the Rue
Ponthieu. For some distance I ran after it, encountering at every step
excited groups of people, some of whom seemed to me in search of
mischief, while some had apparently come out to gather news. There were
no other carriages in the streets, and that alone enabled me to track
the one I was in chase of, for everybody I met had noticed which way it
had turned. It wound its way most deviously through by-streets to avoid
those in which paving-stones had been torn up or barricades been formed,
and the postilion made all possible speed, fearing the carriage might be
seized and detached from his horses. But the day's work was finished and
the disorders of the night were not begun.

Forced at last to slacken my speed and to take breath, I glanced at the
paper that I still held in my hand. It contained a few words from
Hermione: "Thank you for all the kindness you have tried to show us,
dear sir. My mother has heard that all the English in Paris are to be
massacred at midnight by the mob, and directs me to give you notice,
which is the reason I address this note to you and not to Amy. Mamma is
afraid of being mistaken for an Englishwoman. We have secured
post-horses and are setting out for Argenteuil, where we shall take the
railway. Again, thank you: your kindness will not be forgotten by H.
LEARE."

This note reassured me. I no longer endeavored to overtake the carriage,
but I pushed my way as fast as possible beyond the nearest barrier. Once
outside the wall of Paris, I was in the Banlieu, that zone of rascality
whose inhabitants are all suspected by the police and live under the
ban. Of course on such a gala-day of lawlessness this hive was all
astir. At a village I passed through I tried to hire a conveyance to
Argenteuil. I also tried to get some railway information, but nobody
could tell me anything and all were ravenous for news. I secured,
however, without losing too much time, a seat with a stout young
country-man who 

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