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Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873

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Title: Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873

Author: Various


        
Release date: August 26, 2007 [eBook #22402]

Language: English

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Credits: Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Josephine Paolucci, and the
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE OF POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE, VOLUME 11, NO. 24, MARCH, 1873 ***




Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Josephine Paolucci, and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net.










LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE

OF

_POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE._

MARCH, 1873.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1873, by J. B.
LIPPINCOTT & Co., in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at
Washington.

Transcriber's Note: Minor typos have been corrected and footnotes moved
to the end of the article.




THE ROUMI IN KABYLIA.


[Illustration: ALGIERS FROM THE SEA.]

A fact need not be a fixed fact to be a very positive one; and Kabylia,
a region to whose outline no geographer could give precision, has long
existed as the most uncomfortable reality in colonial France.
Irreconcilable Kabylia, hovering as a sort of thunderous cloudland among
the peaks of the Atlas Mountains, is respected for a capacity it has of
rolling out storms of desperate warriors. These troops disgust and
confound the French by making every hut and house a fortress: like the
clansmen of Roderick Dhu, they lurk behind the bushes, animating each
tree or shrub with a preposterous gun charged with a badly-moulded
bullet. The Kabyle, when excited to battle, goes to his death as
carelessly as to his breakfast: his saint or marabout has promised him
an immediate heaven, without the critical formality of a judgment-day.
He fights with more than feudal faithfulness and with undiverted
tenacity. He is in his nature unconquerable. So that the French, though
they have riddled this thunder-cloud of a Kabylia with their shot,
seamed it through and through with military roads, and established a
beautiful _fort national_ right in the middle of it, on the plateau of
Souk-el-Arba, possess it to-day about as thoroughly as we Americans
might possess a desirable thunder-storm which should be observed hanging
over Washington, and which we should annex by means of electrical
communications transpiercing it in every direction, and a resident
governor fixed at the centre in a balloon. France has gorged Kabylia,
with the rest of Algeria, but she has never digested it.

[Illustration: "IMPREGNABLE KABYLIA."]

A trip through Algeria, such as we now propose, belongs, as a
pleasure-excursion, only to the present age. In the last it was made
involuntarily. Only sixty years ago the English spinster or spectacled
lady's-companion, as she crossed over from the mouth of the Tagus to the
mouth of the Tiber, or from Marseilles to Naples, looked out for capture
by "the Algerines" as quite a reasonable eventuality. (Who can forget
Toepfer's mad etchings for _Bachelor Butterfly_, of which this little
episode forms the incident?) Her respectable mind was filled with
speculations as to how many servants "a dey's lady" was furnished with,
and what was the amount of her pin-money. A stout, sound-winded
Christian gentleman, without vices and kind in fetters, sold much
cheaper than a lady, being worth thirty pounds, or only about one-tenth
the value of Uncle Tom.

[Illustration: BOUGIE, AND HILL OF GOURAYA.]

The opening up of Algeria to the modern tourist and Murray's guide-books
is in fact due to the American nation. So late as 1815 the Americans,
along with the other trading nations, were actually paying to the dey
his preposterous tribute for exemption from piratical seizure. In this
year, however, we changed our mind and sent Decatur over. On the 28th of
June he made his appearance at Algiers, having picked up and disposed of
some Algerine craft, the frigate Mashouda and the brig Estido. The
Algerines gave up all discussion with a messenger so positive in his
manners, and in two days Decatur introduced our consul-general Shaler,
who attended to the release of American captives and the positive
stoppage of tribute.

The example was followed by other nations. Lord Exmouth bombarded
Algiers in 1816, and reduced most of it to ashes. In 1827 the dey opened
war with France by hitting the French consul with his fan. Charles X.
retorted upon the fan with thirty thousand troops and a fleet. The fort
of Algiers was exploded by the last survivor of its garrison, a negro of
the deserts, who rushed down with a torch into the powder-cellar.
Algeria collapsed. The dey went to Naples, the janizaries went to
Turkey, and Algeria became French.

From this time the country became more or less open, according as France
could keep it quiet, to the inroads of that modern beast of ravin, the
tourist. The Kabyle calls the tourist _Roumi_ (Christian), a form,
evidently, of our word Roman, and referable to the times when the bishop
of Hippo and such as he identified the Christian with the Romanist in
the Moorish mind.

Modern Algiers, viewed from the sea, wears upon its luminous walls small
trace of its long history of blood. As we contemplate its mosques and
houses flashing their white profiles into the sky, it is impossible not
to muse upon the contrast between its radiant and picturesque aspect
and its veritable character as the accomplice of every crime and every
baseness known to the Oriental mind. To see that sunny city basking
between its green hills, you would hardly think of it as the abode of
bandits; yet two powerful tribes still exist, now living in huts which
crown the heights of Boudjareah overlooking the sea, who formerly
furnished the boldest of the pitiless corsairs. To the iron hooks of the
Bab (or gate) of Azoun were hung by the loins our Christian brothers who
would not accept the Koran; at the Bab-el-Oued, the Arab rebels, not
confounded even in their deaths with the dogs of Christians, were
beheaded by the yataghan; and in the blue depths we sail over, whose
foam washes the bases of the temples, hapless women have sunk for ever,
tied in a leather bag between a cat and a serpent.

The history, in truth, is the history--always a cruel one--of an
overridden nation compelled to bear a part in the wickedness of its
oppressors. This rubric of blood may be read in many a dismal page.
Algeria was a slave before England was Christian. The greatest African
known to the Church, Augustine, has left a pathetic description of the
conquest of his country by the Vandals in the fifth century: it was
attended with horrible atrocities, the enemy leaving the slain in
unburied heaps, so as to drive out the garrisons by pestilence. When
Spain overthrew the Moors she took the coast-cities of Morocco and
Algeria. Afterward, when Aruch Barbarossa, the "Friend of the Sea," had
seized the Algerian strongholds as a prize for the Turks, and his system
of piracy was devastating the Mediterranean, Spain with other countries
suffered, and we have a vivid picture of an Algerine bagnio and
bagnio-keeper from the pen of the illustrious prisoner Cervantes. "Our
spirits failed" (he writes) "in witnessing the unheard-of cruelties that
Hassan exercised. Every day were new punishments, accompanied with cries
of cursing and vengeance. Almost daily a captive was thrown upon the
hooks, impaled or deprived of sight, and that without any other motive
than to gratify the thirst of human blood natural to this monster, and
which inspired even the executioners with horror."

While our fancy traces the figure of the author of _Don Quixote_, a
plotting captive, behind the walls of Algiers, the steamer is
withdrawing, and the view of the city becomes more beautiful at every
turn of the paddles. We pass through a whole squadron of fishing-boats,
hovering on their long lateen sails, and seeming like butterflies
balanced upon the waves, which are blue as the petal of the iris.
Algiers gradually becomes a mere impression of light. The details have
been effaced little by little, and melted into a general hue of gold and
warmth: the windowless houses and the walls extending in terraces
confuse interchangeably their blank masses. The dark green hills of
Boudjareah and Mustapha seem to have opened their sombre flanks to
disclose a marble-quarry: the city, piled up with pale and blocklike
forms, appears to sink into the mountains again as the boat retires,
although the picturesque buildings of the Casbah, cropping out upon the
summit, linger long in sight, like rocks of lime. As we pass Cape
Matifou we see rising over its shoulder the summits of the Atlas range,
among whose peaks we hope to be in a fortnight, after passing Bona,
Philippeville and Constantina.

Sailing along this coast of the Mediterranean resembles an excursion on
one of the Swiss lakes. Four hours after passing Algiers, in going
eastwardly toward the port of Philippeville, we come in sight of Dellys,
a little town of poor appearance, where the hussars of France first
learned the peculiarities of Kabyle fighting. This warfare was something
novel. In place of the old gusty sweeps of cavaliers on horseback,
falling on the French battalions or glancing around them in whirlwinds,
the soldiers had to extirpate the Kabyles hidden in the houses. It was
not fighting--it was ferreting. Each house in Dellys was a fort which
had to be taken by siege. Each garden concealed behind its palings the
"flower" of Kabyle chivalry, only to be uprooted by the bayonet. The
women fought with fury.

We follow our course along these exquisite blue waters, and soon have a
glimpse, at three miles distance, of an isolated, abrupt cone, trimmed
at the summit into the proportions of a pyramid. It is the hill of
Gouraya, an enormous mass of granite which lifts its scarped summit over
the port of Bougie, called Salda by Strabo. We approach and watch the
enormous rock seeming to grow taller and taller as we nestle beneath it
in the beautiful harbor. Bougie lies on a narrow and stony beach in the
embrace of the mountain, white and coquettish, spreading up the rocky
wall as far as it can, and looking aloft to the protecting summit two
thousand feet above it. We abstain from dismounting, but sweep the city
with field-glasses from the deck of the ship, recollecting that Bougie
was bombarded in the reign of the Merrie Monarch by Sir Edward Spragg.
We trace the ravine of Sidi-Touati, which breaks the town in half as it
splits its way into the sea. Here, in 1836, the French commandant,
Salomon de Mussis, was treacherously shot while at a friendly conference
with the sheikh Amzian, the pretext being the murder of a marabout by
the French sentinels. The incident is worth mentioning, because it
brought into light some of the nobler traits of Kabyle character. The
sheikh, for killing a guest with whom he had just taken coffee, was
reproached by the natives as "the man who murdered with one hand and
took gifts with the other," and was forced by mere popular contempt from
his sheikhship, to perish in utter obscurity.

[Illustration: ROMAN RELICS AT PHILIPPEVILLE.]

Putting on steam again, we recede from Bougie, and passing Djigelly,
with its overpoweringly large barracks and hospital, doubling Cape
Bougarone and sighting the fishing-village of Stora, we arrive at the
new port-city of Philippeville. This colony, a plantation of Louis
Philippe's upon the site of the Roman Russicada, has only thirty-four
years of existence, and contains twenty Frenchmen for every Arab found
within it. It differs, however, from our American thirty-year-old towns
in the interesting respect of showing the traces of an older
civilization. French savants here examine the ruins of the theatre and
the immense Roman reservoirs in the hillside, and take "squeezes" of
inscriptions marked upon the antique altar, column or cippus. On an
ancient pillar was found an amusing grafita, the sketch of some Roman
schoolboy, showing an _aquarius_ (or water-carrier) loaded with his twin
buckets. Philippeville, nursed among these glowing African hills, has
the look of some bad melodramatic joke. Its European houses, streets
laid out with the surveyor's chain, pompous church, and arcades like a
Rue de Rivoli in miniature, make a foolish show indeed, in place of the
walls, white, unwinking and mysterious, which ordinarily enclose the
Eastern home or protect the Arab's wife behind their blinded windows.

[Illustration: LION-SHAPED ROCK, HARBOR OF BONA.]

If we leave Philippeville in the evening, we find ourselves next morning
in the handsome roadstead of Bona. This, for the present, will terminate
our examination of the coast, for, however fond we may be of level
traveling, we cannot reasonably expect to get over the Atlas Mountains
by hugging the shore. The harbor of Bona, though broad and beautiful, is
somewhat dangerous, concealing numbers of rocks which lurk at about the
surface of the water. Other rocks, standing boldly out at the entrance
of the port, offer a singular aspect, being sculptured into strange
forms by the sea. One makes a very good statue of a lion, lying before
the city as its guard, and looking across the waves for an enemy as the
foam caresses its monstrous feet.

Dismounting from shipboard, we become landsmen for the remainder of our
journey, and wave adieu to the steamboat which has brought us as we
linger a moment on the mole of Bona. This city is named from the ancient
Hippo, out of whose ruins, a mile to the southward, it was largely
built. The Arabs call it "the city of jujube trees"--Beled-el-Huneb. To
the Roumi (or Christian) traveler the interest of the spot concentrates
in one historic figure, that of Saint Augustine. In the basilica of
Hippo, of which the remains are believed to have been identified in some
recent excavations, the sainted bishop shook the air with his learned
and penetrating eloquence. Here he exhorted the faithful to defend their
religious liberty and their lives, uncertain if the Vandal hordes of
Genseric were not about to sweep away the faith and the language of
Rome. Here, where the forest of El Edoug spreads a shadow like that of
memory over the scene of his walks and labors, he brought his grand life
of expiation to a holy close, praying with his last breath for his
disciples oppressed by the invaders. We reach the site of Hippo (or
Hippone) by a Roman bridge, restored to its former solidity by the
French, over whose arches the bishop must have often walked, meditating
on his youth of profligacy and vain scholarship, and over the abounding
Divine grace which had saved him for the edification of all futurity.

[Illustration: SHOPKEEPER AT BONA.]

Bona has a street named Saint Augustine, but it is, by one of the
strange paradoxes which history is constantly playing us, owned entirely
by Jews, and those of one sole family. This fact indicates how the
thrifty race has prospered since the French occupancy. Formerly
oppressed and ill-treated, taxed and murdered by the Turks, and only
permitted to dress in the mournfulest colors, the Jew of Algeria hid
himself as if life were something he had stolen, and for which he must
apologize all his days. Now, treated with the same liberality as any
other colonist, the Jew indulges in every ostentation of dress except as
to the color of the turban, which, in small towns like Bona, still
preserves the black hue of former days of oppression. On Saturdays the
children of Jacob fairly blaze with gold and gay colors. On their
working days they line the principal streets, eyeing the passers-by with
a cool, easy indifference, but never losing a chance of business. In
Algeria this race is generally thought to present a picture of
arrogance, knavery and rank cowardice not equaled on the face of the
globe. An English traveler saw an Arab, after maddening himself with
opium and absinthe, run a-mok among the shopkeepers who lined the
principal street of Algiers. Selecting the Hebrews, he drove before him
a throng of twenty, dressed in all the colors of the rainbow, who
allowed themselves to be knocked down with the obedience of ninepins. A
Frenchman stopped the maniac after he had killed one Jew and wounded
several, none of them making any effort at defence.

A few narrow streets, bordered with Moorish architecture, contain the
native industry of Bona. It is about equally divided between the Jews
and the M'zabites, who, like the Kabyles, are a remnant of the
stiff-necked old Berber tribe. The M'zabites preserve the pure Arab
dress--the haik, or small bornouse without hood, the broad breeches
coming to the knee, the bare legs, and the turban rolled up into a coil
of ropes. Thus accoutred, and squatting in the ledges of their small
booths, the jewelers, blacksmiths and tailors of Bona are found at their
work.

Returning to Philippeville by land, and remaining as short a time as
possible in this unedifying city, which is a bad and overheated
imitation of a French provincial town, we concede only so much to its
modern character as to hire a fine open carriage in which to proceed
inland toward Constantina. This city is reached after a calm, meditative
ride through sunny hills and groves. After so quiet a preparation the
first view of Constantina is fairly astounding. Encircled by a grand
curve of mountainous precipices, rises a gigantic rock, washed by a moat
formed of the roaring cascades of the river Rummel. On the flat top of
this naked rock, like the Stylites on his pillar, stands Constantina.
The Arabs used to say that Constantina was a stone in the midst of a
flood, and that, according to their Prophet, it would require as many
Franks to raise that stone as it would of ants to lift an egg at the
bottom of a milk-pot.

[Illustration: CONSTANTINA.]

This city, under its old Roman name of Cirta, was one of the principal
strongholds of Numidia. In 1837 it was one of the most hotly-defended
strongholds of the Kabyles. The French have renamed, as "Gate of the
Breach," the old Bab-el-Djedid, where Colonel Lamoriciere entered at the
head of his Zouaves. The city had to be conquered in detail, house by
house. Lamoriciere himself was wounded: the Kabyles, driven to their
last extremity, evacuated the Casbah on the summit of the rock, and let
down their women by ropes into the abyss; the ropes, overweighted by
these human clusters, broke, piling the bodies and fragments of bodies
in heaps beneath the precipice, while some of the natives descended the
steep rock safely with the agility of goats.

Of all the large Algerian cities, Constantina is that which has best
preserved its primitive signet. In most quarters it remains what it was
under the Turks. These quarters are still undermined, rather than laid
out, with close and crooked streets, where the rough white houses are
pierced with narrow windows, closed to the inquisitive eye of the Roumi.
The roofs are of tile, for the winters on the hills are too severe to
permit the flat, terraced roofs of Algiers or Bona. These white houses,
roofed with brown, give a perfectly original aspect to the city as seen
from any of the neighboring eminences. The plateau of Mansourah is
connected with the town by a magnificent Roman bridge, two stories in
height, restored by the French.

[Illustration: ROMAN BRIDGE AT CONSTANTINA.]

From this bridge, which is three hundred feet high by three hundred and
fifteen feet in length, and has five arches, you look down into the bed
of the Rummel, while the vultures and eagles scream around you, and you
recite the words of the poet El Abdery, who called this river a bracelet
which encircles an arm. The gorge opens out into a beautiful plain rich
with pomegranates, figs and orange trees. The sea is forty-eight miles
away.

The last bey of Constantina, not knowing that he was merely building for
the occupancy of the French governors who were to come after him,
decreed himself, some fifty years ago, a stately pleasure-dome, after
the fashion of Kubla Khan. From the ruins of Constantina, Bona and
Tunis, Ahmed Bey picked up whatever was most beautiful in the way of
Roman marbles and carving. With these he built his halls, while the
Rummel, through caverns measureless to man, ran on below. Some
Frenchman of importance will now-a-days give you the freedom of this
curious piece of Turkish construction, where, among storks and ibises
gravely perched on one stilt, you examine the relics of Roman history,
preserved by its very destroyers, according to the grotesque providence
that watches over the study of archaeology.

[Illustration: BEY'S PALACE, CONSTANTINA.]

You are told how Ahmed, wishing to adorn the walls of his gallery or
loggia with frescoes, of which he had heard, but which he had no artist
capable of executing, whether Arab, Moor or Jew, applied to a prisoner.
The man was a French shoemaker, who had never touched a brush: he vainly
tried to decline the honor, but the bey was inflexible: "You are a vile
liar: all the Christians can paint. Liberty if you succeed, death if you
disobey me."

[Illustration: SHAMPOOING THE ROUMI.]

Extremely nervous was the hand which the painter _malgre lui_ applied to
the unlooked-for task. From the laborious travail of his brain issued at
length an odd mass of arabesques with which the walls were somehow
covered. His invention exhausted, he awaited in an agony of fear the
inspection of his Turkish master. He came, and was enchanted. The
painter was free, and the bey observed: "The dog wanted to deceive me: I
knew that all the Christians could paint."

You are amazed to find, in this nest of Islamite savagery and among
these wild rocks, the uttermost accent of modern French politeness. Your
presence is a windfall in quarters so retired, and you sit among orange
plants and straying gazelles, while the military band throws softly out
against the inaccessible crags the famous tower-scene from the fourth
act of _Il Trovatore_. As night draws on, tired of your explorations,
you seek a Moorish bath.

Let no tourist, experienced only in the effeminate imitations of the
hummum to be found in New York or London, expect similar considerate
treatment in Algeria. He will be more likely to receive the attention of
the M'zabite bather after the fashion narrated in the following
paragraph, which is a quotation from an English journalist in the land
of the Kabyles:

"We were told to sit down upon a marble seat in the middle of the hall,
which we had no sooner done than we became sensible of a great increase
of heat: after this each of us was taken into a closet of milder
temperature, where, after placing a white cloth on the floor and taking
off our napkins, they laid us down, leaving us to the further operations
of two naked, robust negroes. These men, newly brought from the interior
of Africa, were ignorant of Arabic; so I could not tell them in what way
I wished to be treated, and they handled me as roughly as if I had been
a Moor inured to hardship. Kneeling with one knee upon the ground, each
took me by a leg and began rubbing the soles of my feet with a pumice
stone. After this operation on my feet, they put their hands into a
small bag and rubbed me all over with it as hard as they could. The
distortions of my countenance must have told them what I endured, but
they rubbed on, smiling at each other, and sometimes giving me an
encouraging look, indicating by their gestures the good it would do me.
While they were thus currying me they almost drowned me by throwing warm
water upon me with large silver vessels, which were in the basin under a
cock fastened in the wall. When this was over they raised me up, putting
my head under the cock, by which means the water flowed all over my
body; and, as if this was not sufficient, my attendants continued plying
their vessels. Then, having dried me with very fine napkins, they each
of them very respectfully kissed my hand. I considered this as a sign
that my torment was over, and was going to dress myself, when one of the
negroes, grimly smiling, stopped me till the other returned with a kind
of earth, which they began to rub all over my body without consulting my
inclination. I was as much surprised to see it take off all the hair as
I was pained in the operation; for this earth is so quick in its effect
that it burns the skin if left upon the body. This being finished, I
went through a second ablution, after which one of them seized me behind
by the shoulders, and setting his two knees against the lower part of my
back, made my bones crack, so that for a time I thought they were
entirely dislocated. Nor was this all, for after whirling me about like
a top to the right and left, he delivered me to his comrade, who used me
in the same manner: and then, to my no small satisfaction, opened the
closet door."

[Illustration: HAMMO-EL-ZOUAOUI.]

This is the true Moorish bath. Meantime, the M'zabite or negro, as he
dislocates your legs, cracks your spinal column or dances over you on
his knees, drones forth a kind of native psalmody, which, melting into
the steamy atmosphere of the place, seems to be the litany of happiness
and of the pure in heart. Clean in body and soul as you never were
before, skinned, depilated, dissected, you emerge for a new life of
ideal perfection, feeling as if you were suddenly relieved of your body.

[Illustration: "BALEK!"]

[Illustration: A STREET IN CONSTANTINA.]

There is held every Friday at Constantina a grand assembly of the
fire-eating marabouts, the fanatics who have given so much trouble to
their French rulers. Every revolution among the Kabyles is a religious
movement, set in motion by the wild enthusiasm of the "saints." The
religious orders of Kabylia, all of them differing in various degrees
from Turkish Mohammedanism, are of some half dozen varieties, adapted to
minds of various cultivation. Some, as that of Sidi-Yusef-Hansali, are
mild in their rites and of a purely didactic or religious nature. This
latter sect originated in Constantina, comprises two thousand brothers
or khouans, and was in 1865 under the authority of Hammo-el-Zouaoui, a
direct descendant of Yusef-Hansali. An hour passed in the college of
this order, where the whole formula of worship consists in saying a
hundred times "God forgive!" then, a hundred other times, "Allah ill'
Allah: Mohammed ressoul Allah!" may be monotonous, but it is not
revolutionary. From this tautological brotherhood, through various
degrees of emotional activity, you arrive at the wild doings of the
fire-eaters, or followers of Mohammed-ben-Aissa. This Aissa was a native
of Meknes in Morocco, where he died full of years and piety three
hundred years ago. His legend states that being originally very poor, he
attempted to support his family in the truly Oriental manner, not by
working for them, but by spending his whole time at the mosque in prayer
for their miraculous sustenance. His inertia and his faith were
acceptable to Mohammed, who appeared to Aissa's wife with baskets of
food, and to Aissa with the order to found a sect. The allegory
expressed by the disgusting actions of the order would seem to be that
anything is nourishment to the true believer. They therefore exhibit
themselves as eating red-hot iron, scorpions and prickly cactus. Various
travelers, some of them cool hands and accurate observers, have seen
these khouans at their horrible feasts without being able to explain
the imposture. A British soldier, an experienced Indian officer,
happened to be in Kabylia just before the breaking out of the great
Sepoy rebellion in India, and was introduced to one of the fire-eating
orgies by Major Deval at Tizi-ouzou, where our journey into Kabylia is
to terminate. With his own eyes he saw a khouan, excited by half an
hour's chanting and beating the tom-tom, drive a sword four inches deep
into his chest by hitting it with a tile. The man marched around and
exhibited it to the congregation as it quivered in his naked body.
Another seared his face and hands with a large red-hot iron, holding it
finally with his mouth without other support. Another chewed up an
entire leaf of a cactus with its dangerous spikes, which sting one's
hands severely and remain rankling in the flesh. Another filled his
mouth with live coals from a brazier, and walked around blowing out
sparks. Another swallowed a living scorpion, a small snake, broken glass
and nails. The spectator was in the midst of these enthusiasts, being
touched by them in their antics, yet he could detect no foul play,
except that he imagined the sword in the first-named experiment to have
been driven into an old wound or between the skin and the flesh. It was
to counteract the influence of the fire-eating marabouts that the French
government sent over Robert Houdin, the ingenious mechanician, but
though he eclipsed their wonders by tricks of electricity and sleight,
he has left but a lame explanation of the "juggleries" of the Algerine
saints.

[Illustration: THE GREAT MOSQUE, CONSTANTINA.]

The worst attribute of these khouans is, that after having excited the
ignorant Kabyles to many a losing war by their magnetism, they remain
themselves behind the curtain, safe and sarcastic.

In the Moorish quarter of Constantina, where the streets are about five
feet wide, you sit down to watch the perpetual come-and-go of the
inhabitants. Taking a cup of fragrant coffee--which, as the reader
knows, is in Eastern countries eaten at the same time that it is
drunk--you sit on a stone bench of the coffee-house and contemplate
mules, horses, asses, passengers, buyers, sellers, loungers, Arabs,
Turks, Kabyles, Jews, Moors and spahis. On every side you hear the cry
of "Balek! balek!" This means "Look out!" and the word is closely
followed by the causative fact. The street is unpaved, the horse is
unshod, the hoofs cannot be heard, and you have hardly time to efface
yourself against a wall when a cavalier passes by like a careless
torrent, scattering the white bornouses centrifugally from his pathway
as he advances. The streets, as we observed, are very narrow. Each has
its own manufacture. Here are the tailors; here, in this deafening
alley, are the blacksmiths; farther on are the shoemakers, and you are
driven mad with wonder at the quantities of slippers made for a people
which goes eternally barefoot. Springing out of this daedal intricacy of
booths and workshops rise the slender minarets of prayer, of which the
principal one belongs to a mosque said to be the most beautiful in
Algeria. The interior of this chief mosque is not deprived of ornament,
having its columns of pink marble, its elliptical Moorish arches, and
its tiles of painted fayence set in the walls. In the centre is the
pulpit, coarsely painted red and blue, where the imaum recites his
prayers. Three small, lofty windows are filled with carved lacework. The
floor is spread with carpets for the knees of the rich, with matting for
the poor. Over all rises the square, crescent-crowned minaret--no
_belfry_, but a steeple where the chimes are rung by the human voice.
Night and day, from the heights of their slender towers, the muezzins
toll out their vibrating notes like a bell, inviting the faithful to
prayers with the often-heard signal: "Allah ill' Allah: Mohammed resoul
Allah!"

[TO BE CONTINUED.]




THE NATIONAL TRANS-ALLEGHANY WATER-WAY.


[Illustration: VIEW OF NEW RIVER.]

The offices of running water have afforded a fertile theme for the poet
and the philosopher. In the ruder ages of the world the water-ways which
carve their course over the face of the globe were regarded only in the
light of natural barriers against hostile invasion; and thus arose the
historic principle--

    Lands intersected by a narrow frith
    Abhor each other.

But civilization has demonstrated that they subserve a much higher
purpose, that the rivers of a country are its great arteries and
highways of trade, and that they fulfill functions as numerous and
benign in the political economy as in the physical geography of the
regions they furrow. In the Old World, the advancing streams of culture,
science and commerce, and even the migrations of nations, have ebbed and
flowed along the classic valleys of the Rhine, the Rhone and the Danube;
and the banks of the Tigris, the Euphrates and the Nile are rich in
memories of the world's mightiest and most splendid empires. In America
the fertile watersheds of the Ohio, the Mississippi and the Missouri are
fast becoming what their antitypes of the great continent have been in
the past. The outspreading wave of civilization and population has
already reached westward to the foot of the Rocky Mountains from the
Gulf of Mexico to Montana and Idaho, while even the basin of the
Columbia River is rapidly filling up with an active, thriving and busy
people, who can smile at the poet's vision:

    Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound
    Save its own dashings.

The water-courses of a country are not less valuable to it than the
little Pactolus was to the ancient city of Sardis, through whose streets
it ran freighted with gold. But these natural highways of human
intercourse, like most of Nature's provisions, are capable of indefinite
artificial extension and multiplication. Our finest modern canals are
scarcely smaller, and certainly capable of more uninterrupted, safe and
heavy navigation, than many of the rivers which have figured in history,
and which Pascal so graphically described as "_moving roads_ that carry
us whither we wish to go."

Such considerations as these have a profound bearing on many of the
great economic problems of the age, but on none more than upon the grand
problem which is now agitating the national mind in the United States:
_How to connect its seaboard and central regions by water_. A glance at
the map of the Union shows that its vast interior lies ensconced between
the two mountain-walls of the Rocky chain on its western side and the
Appalachian chain on its eastern side. Hemmed in by these barriers is
the immense expanse of the most prolific, populous and prosperous
section on the continent, which, taking its name from "the Father of
Waters," is geographically designated as the _Mississippi Valley_,
estimated by Professor J. W. Foster of the Chicago University to contain
an area of two million four hundred and fifty-five thousand square
miles, equal to that of all Europe excepting Russia, Norway and Sweden.
Unlike the inland basin of Asia, in which the vast, mountain-girt Desert
of Gobi stretches out its seas of sand, stony, sterile and desolate, the
inland basin of America is its garden-spot and granary. Swept by the
vapor-bearing winds and rain-distilling clouds from the Gulf of Mexico,
and blessed with an excellent climate, it contains all the physical
elements of an empire within itself. Its position makes it the national
strong-hold, so that with military men it has grown into an adage,
"Whoever is master of the Mississippi is lord of the continent." It is
yet but half developed, but no far-seeing mind can form any estimate of
its future growth and opulence. "With a varied and splendid
entourage--an imperial cordon of States--nothing," says Dr. John W.
Draper of New York, "can prevent the Mississippi Valley from becoming in
less than three centuries the centre of human power." The only wall of
partition that shuts it off from the great marts of the world is formed
by the chain of the Alleghanies, which stretch along the Atlantic
seaboard, from south-west to north-east, for twelve hundred miles. This
natural barrier, with a mean altitude of two thousand feet, is destitute
of a central axis, and consists, as the two Rogerses, who have most
fully explored its ridges, showed, of a series of convex and concave
flexures, "giving them the appearance of so many colossal
entrenchments." With a broad artificial channel cut through its sunken
defiles and picturesque gorges, there would at once be opened a gateway
for the flow and reflow of the heavy commerce of the Western World.

In 1781 the practical and philosophic eye of Thomas Jefferson perceived
the national necessity for a great trans-Alleghany water-line, and early
in the year 1786, though still tossed on the wave of the Revolution, and
not yet recovered from the shock of British invasion, the State which
gave birth to the author of the "Declaration of Independence" declared
for the enterprise. With all the means and energy at its command it
pushed forward the work from year to year, and directed it, as Mr.
Jefferson had proposed, so as to connect the head-waters of the James
River, flowing from the Alleghany summits to the ocean, with the
mountain-river known as the Great Kanawha, which rises near the
fountains of the upper James and descends into the broad bosom of the
Ohio. Although this undertaking was prosecuted slowly at first, it was
permanently recognized as one that must go on; in 1832 and 1835 it
received new impulses; and in 1840 it had reached the piedmont
districts. In 1847 a powerful impetus was given to the work, and it was
thenceforth, till 1856, forced rapidly westward up the eastern slopes of
the Alleghanies, as a complete and working structure, above a point
three hundred miles from the Atlantic capes, and two hundred miles from
Richmond, leaving an unfinished gap to the upper or navigable part of
Kanawha River of a little over one hundred and fifty miles. This
enormous work was more than half finished at an outlay of $10,436,869--a
sum which, during the economic period of its expenditure, went as far as
nearly twice that amount would go now.

By recent legislation the State of Virginia proposes to turn over the
entire property of the canal to the United States, on the sole condition
of its being finished by the government and converted into a national
water-highway for the good of the common country--in other words, upon
the one condition of its _nationalization_.

It is sometimes contended that the day of canals has passed, and
henceforward the railway must take their place. But this notion is
opposed to the present economic necessities of the world, as well as to
the provisions of Nature, which evidently point to the utilization of
the hydraulic systems of the globe. The lavish and prodigal use of the
coal-deposit of the earth, and the deforesting of vast tracts of soil to
supply fuel for the locomotive and the stationary engine, have already
wrought incalculable and almost irremediable evils. The past year has
seen the prices of all English coals go up at least eighty per cent.,
and the coal-famine of Great Britain, foreseen some years ago, has
already threatened to sap the vigor of her industrial systems and
destroy her manufacturing supremacy, or, at any rate, place her at the
mercy of the United States for the fuel with which to operate them. The
denudation of the vast territories of the United States by the axe of
emigration has already told in a marked degree upon the condition of its
climate, and greatly affected its meteorology and rainfall; while the
railroads, which have spread their Briarean arms over the whole country,
by their immense consumption of wood for cross-ties, sills, fuel,
snow-sheds, bridges, etc., have wellnigh stripped the land of its
timber, leaving its bosom exposed to the biting blasts of winter and to
the fiery blaze of the summer sun.

The problem of more rapid canal navigation is speedily approaching
solution, and to give up the water-lines of the larger sections would be
fatal to their commercial development. "The Erie Canal," said a
distinguished citizen of New York a short time ago, "now conveys
one-fourth of the whole export of that vast interior region I have
described (the Mississippi drainage), and as much of it during its six
months of uninterrupted navigation as all of the trunk railways together
during the same time." "Every canal-boat," he added, "which comes to
Albany with an average cargo is more than the average of the New York
Central Railroad trains. In the busy canal season more than one hundred
and fifty such boats come daily to tide-water, and the New York Central
Railroad traffic never reaches thirty trains a day." Such a canal
traffic would make more than twenty miles of uninterrupted
railroad-cars, which could not, by any possibility, be handled by the
largest force of railroad employes with expedition or convenience. The
_furore_ which the steam-engine has excited and so long maintained in
the mechanical world is decidedly abating. Engineers are everywhere at
work studying the practicability of employing new forces. The solar
heat, the wind-power, the water-power of rivers, and even the tidal
energy of the sea, have been and are now being harnessed to the
machineries of Europe. These reservoirs of force are kept perennially
full by the sun and the moon, to whose action they are due, and at a
future period, when men have prodigally squandered their heritage of
coal and wood wealth, they will be invoked by the mechanic and
manufacturer to furnish their chief motive-power. As an economist of the
force-_capital_ deposited by the sun's influence in the bowels of the
earth during its carboniferous epoch, and as using, instead of it, the
force-_interest_ received annually from the sun through the medium of
rain and wind, the water-way will and must become one of the most
generally employed engines of the higher civilizations yet to be.

So long as the subject of trans-Alleghany water-communication was viewed
as one merely affecting individual States, it possessed no national
interest. But in its present aspect it is of vast moment, both national
and international. While many overcrowded portions of the Old World are
often confronted with both the spectre and the reality of gaunt famine,
and their breadless thousands are looking wistfully to the fresh and
prolific fields of the New, for relief, there are annually lost to the
country and the world vast stores of corn, which the Western farmers
cannot afford to send by railroad to the seaboard for foreign shipment,
and freely use as a substitute for fuel. This fact is suggestive and
significant. To understand its import we have only to look at the
geographical position of the West and the Mississippi Valley, isolated
in the heart of a continent.

There are three outlets for the commerce of these sections seeking New
York, the emporium of the New World, and the chief trans-Atlantic
markets: 1. By the Mississippi River to New Orleans, and thence by
transhipment to New York and Europe. 2. By the northern lakes to the St.
Lawrence Valley, or by the former to the Erie Canal. 3. By the costly
transportation of railroads over the Alleghanies or along the
lake-shores eastward.

[Illustration: THE CANAL BASIN AT LEXINGTON, VIRGINIA.]

The first of these routes is of course the longest, both in time and
distance. It takes the merchandise by an extensive detour, which, from
the mouth of the Ohio River, _via_ the Gulf, to New York, exceeds three
thousand miles. Although lying in the powerful current of the Gulf
Stream, which is a propelling force speeding forward the vessel that
trusts its warm, blue waters, this route is exposed to the most violent
cyclonic storms, and navigators shun and evade it during the equinoctial
or hurricane season. But, barring danger and distance, no country with
such an outlet to the sea as the Mississippi River affords can be
considered dependent upon any artificial communication. Notwithstanding
the objections which exist to this long route (which is both expensive
and long), its trade is rapidly increasing from the very exigencies of
the case. The introduction of the barge-system on the great Western
rivers has greatly facilitated and cheapened transportation. Steam-tugs,
carrying neither passengers nor freight, are substituted for the
steamboat. These tugs never stop except to coal and attach the barges,
already loaded before their arrival at a city, and proceed with great
despatch. Steaming steadily on, night and day, they make the trip from
St. Louis to New Orleans almost as quickly as the oft-detained
steamboat. The distance has been made between these cities by a tug,
with ten heavily-freighted barges, in six days. The tugs plying on the
Minnesota River carry with good speed barges containing thirty thousand
bushels of wheat, and the freight of a single trip would fill more than
eighty railroad-cars. This transportation is cheap, because the tugs
require less than one-fourth the expense for running and management
required by the steamboats. The carriage of grain from Minnesota to New
Orleans by this method costs no more than the freightage from the same
point to Chicago by rail. A boatload of wheat from St. Paul, taking the
river route, is not once handled until it is put aboard ship at the
Crescent City. The mighty energy of the North-west--"the Germany of
America," as it has been well called by Dr. Draper--has long since
discovered that the Mississippi is the best existing route to European
markets. Grain can be shipped by way of St. Louis and New Orleans to New
York and Europe twenty cents a bushel cheaper than it can be carried by
the other existing routes. As long ago as 1868 the Illinois Central
Railroad took hold of the West India and Southern trade through the
river route, and offered such commercial inducements to Western
importers that "Havana sends her products by this route to the
North-west, instead of by New York."[A] As the North-west expands and
multiplies in resources and population, it will be compelled to transact
its foreign and seaboard commerce through the noble navigable waters of
the Mississippi, unless it can obtain a short and cheap transportation
to New York by some trans-Alleghany water-line. In the event of the
North-western trade being diverted southward along the great natural
artery of the continent, where no tolls, no tariffs and no transhipments
are required, the loss will fall most heavily upon New York and the
seaboard marts. The increasing stream of South American commerce, in the
same event, must inevitably take the short, speedy and entirely
inexpensive route to the North-west (through the broad and free highway
of the "Father of Waters"), rather than encounter the delay, danger and
expense of the Gulf-Stream route to New York, and thence by rail or the
Lakes to its destination. The longer the present trade-status continues,
and the mammoth corporations of the railroads force the transportation
of the North-west, the West and the Mississippi Valley to take the river
and Gulf route to the sea, the greater and more fixed becomes the
diversion of this incalculable commerce from the great markets of the
Middle and Eastern States. So far, therefore, from the far West being at
the mercy of the East in this matter, the former has the advantage. The
East, rather than allow the present tendency of the commercial current
to set well in toward the Gulf, and wear a channel for itself, should
strain every nerve to keep it steadily moving toward its own maritime
cities. The great cities of the Atlantic seaboard can better afford to
construct a water-line over the mountains at their own cost than to run
the risk of the Mississippi River becoming the commercial avenue for its
vast valley and drainage, and thus bearing the golden stream away from
their harbors and streets.

The Utopian idea that Norfolk may become the rival of the great seaports
and centres of capital, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York and Boston, is
without the field of discussion. It is not more possible than that a
magnetized knife-blade should exert a more powerful attraction than the
largest lodestone or the mightiest electro-magnet.

The Lake route from the Mississippi Valley to the East was made
continuous and complete by the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825. The
day of the old flat-boats had not then closed, and the application of
steam to river navigation was still in its infancy. The growth of the
West--which has always outstripped its internal improvements--like an
immense river long dammed up, bursting the barriers that confined it,
forced its way toward the sea. Although it was said at first that the
canal would never pay, "the opening of this work," as the Superintendent
of the Census says, "was an announcement of a new era in the internal
grain-trade of the United States. To the pioneer, the agriculturist and
the merchant the grand avenue developed a new world. From that period do
we date the rise and progress of the North-west." This splendid
structure is to-day the great artery of Eastern wealth; and but for the
fact that for six months in the year, when the vast sea of Western
commerce would seek an outlet through its banks to the East, it is
locked by ice, it would be widened into a ship-canal. It lies in the
very track of the great north-westerly winds, which descend with
torrential rush and polar cold over the Lakes, and thence through
Northern New York. Last year, as late as the third of March, when the
vegetation of the Middle States was beginning to spring forth in vernal
beauty, the whole of the lower Lake region and Western and Northern New
York were swept by these Arctic tempests; and this is the climatic rule
rather than an exceptional case. Even in the season of open water the
Lakes are exposed to the most violent storms, and within their narrow
shores hundreds of vessels are annually lost. The mariner overtaken by
what would be a moderate gale in a broad sea is in imminent peril for
want of sea-room; and in a snow-storm, however light--whose winds
elsewhere he would court to fill his sails and propel his craft--his
course is beset with danger and difficulty. For more than half the year
navigation is suspended by the thickening terrors of the tempest and the
accumulated obstacles of ice.[B] And yet, with all the obstacles which
impair the utility of the Lake route while it is in operation, the
volume of Western produce prefers it, or rather is forced by the
necessities of the case to employ it. And these necessities will
continue to increase. With the aid of all the railroads now or to be
constructed, the rapid expansion of Western commerce has distanced the
facilities of transport. The iron horse, as has been well said, has
always stimulated industry and production beyond his power to carry it.
It was the forcible remark of the English traveler Sir Morton Peto that
the American railroads from West to East were "choked with traffic." So
great is the inadequacy of all existing outlets for conveying the more
than Amazonian streams of trans-Alleghany merchandise that it has long
since become the interest of every great corporation, as well as of
every citizen of the country, to open for them new and national
highways.

From this digression, embracing facts and views which seemed essential
to an intelligent discussion of the main subject, we pass on to examine
the Appalachian outlet by which the great Western empire of America may
find its way to the sea. The bird's-eye view here presented will show
the Appalachian mountain-chain, and the waters which thread their way
along its gentle slopes eastward to the Atlantic basin and westward to
the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys. The Alleghanies bear a striking
geographic resemblance to the Highlands of Scotland, so famed in song
and story. Like the central Grampian Hills--those majestic buttresses in
whose recesses the old Caledonians found secure and impregnable asylums
from the Roman legions--except that they are richer in verdure and less
lofty, they form the grand natural rampart of the American Union. To use
the words of Lavallee, the French military historian and statistician,
"Mountains play the principal part in military operations: true ramparts
of states, they interrupt the development of strategic movements, and
render the greatest efforts necessary for their passage and possession.
They are the poetical part of the theatre of the art of war." If the day
ever comes, as come it may, when the kingly powers of the world combine
to crush the republican institutions of the United States, and swarm the
harbors and bays of our Atlantic seaboard with their allied navies, the
defiles of the Alleghanies will prove the Thermopylaes of the Union; and
against their eastern base the surging wave of invasion must be stayed,
if stayed at all. Like the Scottish peaks,

    The grisly champions that guard
    The infant rills of Highland Dee,

or the Spanish wall of the Pyrenean chain, on whose Sierras, in 1808,
Wellington's blazing lines of Torres Vedras arrested Massena's march,
the mountains that look out on our Atlantic sea-front must ever be of
the highest military importance.

To throw across their central ridges a great aqueduct is no mean
undertaking of merely local significance, but may take rank with the old
Roman aqueducts, with the magnificent roads constructed by Napoleon over
the Alps, and with the more modern and now triumphant tunnels through
Mont Cenis and the Hoosac Mountains, and the rapidly-progressing railway
over the Andes from Callao to the Amazon Valley.

The broad and national features of the proposed trans-Alleghany
water-way have so strongly commended themselves to President Grant that
in his last message he recommends preliminary Congressional action, and
in a more recent address to a number of distinguished visitors at the
Executive Mansion he used much stronger and bolder language in assuring
them that "he hoped Congress would give such encouragement to the
measure as to secure the completion of the canal." He has in these words
only repeated the sentiments of his illustrious predecessors, George
Washington and Thomas Jefferson, in behalf of the value of the work. We
have already alluded to Mr. Jefferson's early advocacy of a water-line
by the James and Kanawha Rivers. The first idea of this enterprise seems
to have been suggested to Washington as early as the year 1753, after
his celebrated trip from Jamestown to Fort Duquesne as an envoy of
Governor Dinwiddie. At the close of the Revolutionary war he made an
arduous and personal exploration of the country for many hundred miles.
He kept a journal in which were minutely recorded his conversations with
all intelligent persons he met respecting the facilities for internal
navigation afforded by the rivers rising in the Alleghany Mountains and
flowing either east or west. Returning to Mount Vernon October 4, 1784,
he wrote, as the result of his observations, to the then governor of
Virginia, the father of William Henry Harrison: "I shall take the
liberty now, my dear sir, to suggest a matter which would (if I am not
too short-sighted a politician) mark your administration as an important
era in the annals of this country. It has been my decided opinion that
the _shortest_, _easiest_ and _least expensive_ communication with the
invaluable and extensive country back of us would be by one or both of
the rivers of this State which have their sources in the Appalachian
Mountains." General Washington, on the 26th of August, 1785, became the
first president of the company authorized by the legislation which he
had suggested previously to Governor Harrison. It is well known that the
same views entertained by Washington and Jefferson were held and
advocated by Mr. Madison, long before the most prescient statesman could
descry the faintest image of that colossal empire of population, wealth
and rapid development now lying west of the Alleghanies.

For the great future water-ways which are needed for the Western, the
North-western and the Mississippi Valley trade there are several routes
that have been demonstrated to be practicable. One of these is by a
projected canal to connect the Coosa River with the Alabama River, and
thence following that stream to the Gulf of Mexico. This, if ever
carried out, as eventually it is probable will be the case, would avoid
the bars and dangers of the navigation of the lower Mississippi, and in
a measure obviate the necessity of the proposed sub-canals in Louisiana
and other engineering expedients to remove or turn the very serious
river-obstacles to an outlet south of New Orleans. Another proposal is
to connect the Ohio and Tennessee Rivers, and to run a canal from the
latter to the Ocmulgee or Savannah River, and thence by the use of slack
water to reach the harbors of Savannah and Charleston. This scheme has
been clearly proved to be feasible, although the distance seems
objectionable. The third (or central) water-line proposed is that so
long agitated since the beginning of the present century, so often
surveyed and re-surveyed by the most eminent engineers, and not long
since by the United States Engineer Corps under the direction of General
A. A. Humphreys, the chief engineer of the United States army. It is the
shortest and most direct line, and has the advantage that it is, as we
have seen, already nearly half completed, from the head of tide-water on
the James River, above Lexington, to Buchanan, near the summit-level of
the mountains. The engineers who have reported upon it--among whom are
the late Colonel E. Lorraine, Benjamin H. Latrobe, Esq., and other
eminent engineers--estimate that the largest sum required for its
completion to the Kanawha River is $37,364,000, and the length of time
required four years. "Of this large sum, however," they say, "it can be
clearly shown that there will be no need of any other advance by
government than the interest which will accumulate while the work is in
progress, which, by issuing the bonds every six months, as required,
will not reach the sum of _six million dollars. And this is every cent
that will ever be required to be advanced_. Should the government
undertake to make the work a fine one, it will of course cost the whole
amount estimated, but this would be more than made up by its increased
benefits to the whole country.

"The work when completed, even at a low rate of tolls--not over about
half the rate charged on the Erie Canal--will return the advance, pay
the interest and redeem the principal in less than twenty years.

[Illustration: BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF THE TRANS-ALLEGHANY WATER-LINE.]

"In considering this question we are not left to mere conjecture. The
wonderful history of the Erie Canal, and a comparison of the
circumstances connected with the operations of that great work with
those under which this enterprise will be inaugurated and accompanied,
furnish sufficient data for reliable conclusions."

When we consider that the Erie Canal, though frozen up and useless for
half the year, has not only long since paid for its construction out of
its tolls, but makes a present of itself to the State, with _about
thirty millions of dollars_ of net profit, and that it does more than
five times the business of the great New York Central Railroad,
transporting annually over five million tons of cargo (which exceeds the
total foreign commerce of New York City), and yet is "choked" and gorged
with freight, the close figuring of the engineers does not appear to be
questionable.

The immense saving in the cost of water-carriage as compared with that
of railway-transportation is hardly conceived by the public mind. Many
of the railroads carry produce at very low and reasonable rates, but
they cannot afford to take it at much if any less than _three times the
amount_ charged by the canals. It appears from the report of the New
York State Engineer for 1868 that the average receipts per ton per mile
on the New York Central Railroad and the Erie Railway was 2.92 cents and
2.42 cents respectively; while on the New York State canals it was 1
cent only, tolls included. But a trans-Alleghany canal would, after
getting fully into operation, be able to transport produce more cheaply
than the New York canals, which are frozen over about five months of the
year, and during the very period when the great tide of Western
freightage and the ingathered crops is pressing most heavily for an
outlet to the East.[C] There are many products of the West and the
Mississippi Valley that will not bear the cost of transportation to the
Eastern cities, either by rail, Gulf or Lake route, because they would
consume _in transitu_ for freight between sixty and seventy per cent. of
their market value in Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore.

These views have been ably and earnestly pressed time and again upon
Congress by Eastern and Western statesmen, merchants and citizens of all
classes, by the press of all parties, and by the boards of trade and
commercial conventions. The surveys cover every foot of the proposed
James River Canal extension to the Ohio Valley, which, by general
consent, seems to be regarded as the most eligible because it is the
most direct central route, and because the State of Virginia has most
munificently offered to remand the half-completed work to the general
government on the sole condition of its _nationalization_.

If, as history has always testified, it be true that

              Mountains interposed
    Make enemies of nations, which had else,
    Like kindred drops, been mingled into one,

it would be difficult, as it is unnecessary, even to attempt to form an
adequate estimate of this great trans-Alleghany highway as a benign and
powerful agent in the political reconstruction and moral unification of
the American States.

After leaving Buchanan, the proposed route for the extension of the
James River and Kanawha Canal runs westward to the mouth of Fork Run, a
small mountain-river, and ascends that stream to the summit-level,
seventeen hundred feet above tide-water. It then pierces the main range
of the Alleghanies, passing under Tuckahoe and Katis Mountains by a
tunnel nearly eight miles long, and emerges into the valley of the
Greenbrier River on the western mountain-slope. Its water-line pursues
its course by slack-water navigation down the Greenbrier to New River,
and down New River to Lyken's Shoals on the Kanawha, eighty-five miles
above its mouth. The last distance of eighty-five miles will be
traversed by open navigation, as the Kanawha Valley permits it. Major W.
B. Craighill of the Engineer Corps, in his able report to General A. A.
Humphreys on this central water-line, says: "The recent completion of
the Mont Cenis Tunnel in Europe, and the rapid progress made with the
Hoosac Tunnel in this country, with the experience gained in these
works, and the improved facilities daily coming into use for carrying on
such operations, induce us to approach such an undertaking as the
Lorraine tunnel not only without apprehension of failure, but with a
feeling of assured certainty of success. It is no longer an
extraordinary, but an ordinary, undertaking."

The practical capacity of the water-line when completed will be of
almost unlimited extent, while the canal proper with its locks will have
a capacity of from fifteen to twenty millions of tons annually. In the
fall and early winter, after the harvests are over, and during the very
season that the highway is most needed, and when the northern routes are
blocked by ice, this trans-Alleghany water-way will be open.

The local trade in its path would alone justify its construction. It
will penetrate the finest mineral lands of Virginia and West Virginia,
which have been so long locked up from the world. The great Kanawha
coal-fields and iron- and salt-mines are unsurpassed by any now known in
any part of the globe. In the large demand from England and Europe for
coal, which is finding expression in the large orders sent to
Philadelphia and Baltimore for Pennsylvania and Maryland coal,[D] there
is the best possible evidence that the local trade of the national canal
would be enormous. So highly thought of is the Kanawha cannel coal that
it is now shipped down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to New Orleans,
and sent thence by sea to New York, where it brings per ton about three
times the price of anthracite in that market. It is equal to the best
English and Nova Scotia cannel, while the Kanawha bituminous and splint
coals are unsurpassed by any others. The veins lie horizontally, and
vary from three to fifteen feet in thickness, the aggregate thickness of
the various strata amounting in some localities to forty or fifty feet
of the solid carbon.

But, great as are the local interests and the trade of the water-line,
they are entirely lost sight of in the national aspect of the question.

The population now demanding a direct and central highway for its great
inland commerce, according to the best estimates (those of Poor), cannot
fall short of fifteen millions, and most probably exceeds that number.
It is now conclusively established that the centre of gravity of our
national population has crossed the Appalachian chain. Professor Hilgard
of the Coast Survey prepared a year ago, at the request of the Hon. J.
A. Garfield of Ohio, a series of calculations to ascertain this centre
of gravity by the four last censuses. Supposing a plane of the exact
shape and size of the United States, exclusive of Alaska, loaded with
the actual population, he determined the points on which it would
balance. In the recently-published words[E] of Mr. Garfield we give the
following results of Professor Hilgard's calculations: By this process
he found that in 1840 the centre of gravity of the population was at a
point in Virginia near the eastern foot of the Appalachian chain, and
near the parallel of 39 deg. N. latitude. In 1850 this centre had moved
westward fifty-seven miles across the mountains, to a point nearly south
of Parkersburg, Virginia. In 1860 it had moved westward eighty-two
miles, to a point nearly south of Chillicothe, Ohio. In 1870 it had
reached a point near Wilmington, Clinton county, Ohio, about forty-five
miles north-east of Cincinnati. In no case had it widely departed from
the thirty-ninth parallel. If the same rate be maintained during the
next three decades, which I doubt, it will fall in the neighborhood of
Bloomington, Indiana, by 1900. Professor Hilgard also found that a line
drawn from Lake Erie, at the north-eastern corner of Ohio, to Pensacola
in Florida, would divide the population of the United States, as it
stood in 1870, into two equal parts. This line is nearly parallel to the
line of the Atlantic coast. From these calculations it will appear that
both the "centre of gravity" and the line that divides the population in
half are more than one hundred and fifty miles west of the Appalachian
chain.

If these computations be correct, Poor's figures are too low by two or
three millions at least. But, apart from the demand for an
inter-continental canal by the population on the west of the Appalachian
chain, the seaboard States and cities east of the Appalachians are, as
we have already shown, as profoundly interested in such a national cheap
thoroughfare as is the former section. Careful estimates have shown that
the surplus produce[F] of the trans-Alleghany sections and the
Mississippi Valley cannot be less than twenty-five million tons; and
this would immediately seek an outlet through the Virginia water-line
to the sea. The saving that would result to the West and to the whole
country would be enormous; and at a very moderate calculation the amount
would be an average of two dollars per ton on the river route, _via_ New
Orleans, and ten dollars per ton over the railroad routes. The
completion of a comparatively short canal of eighty miles, to cover the
gap from Buchanan to the upper Kanawha, would without the shadow of
exaggeration save the West forty millions of dollars a year; and the
central water-line would yield an interest of ten to fifteen per cent.
on the capital invested, while opening a continuous water-road from
Liverpool to Omaha, running nearly due west, fifty-nine hundred miles in
length! By reducing the freights on the other present thoroughfares
through the influence of wholesome competition, it would perhaps at once
lessen the cost of inland transportation by nearly one hundred millions
of dollars annually!

These considerations, and the added fact that for many years the
chambers of commerce of the great Western cities, the many commercial
conventions that have met, and the legislatures of the States bordering
on the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, have earnestly and unanimously
memorialized Congress in behalf of the completion of this great
inter-continental highway, fully establish the _national_ character of
the measure now pending in the national councils.

                        THOMPSON B. MAURY.

FOOTNOTES:

[A] New York _Times_.

[B] From the 3d to the 6th of March, last year, the thermometer at
Rochester was several degrees _below zero_; at Troy, New York, on the
5th it stood at -14 deg. (_below zero_); at Ogdensburg, New York, at -32 deg.
(_below zero_); at Watertown, New York, -34 deg. (_below zero_)! These
intense colds recur as late as April.

[C] The average of twenty years shows that the James River and Kanawha
Canal was closed annually by ice only fifteen days; the longest period
in any one year was fifty-six days.

[D] A single English order for Cumberland coal, to be shipped by a
Baltimore dealer last December, was for three hundred thousand tons.

[E] New York _Nation_, December 19, 1872.

[F] Last year's grain-yield in the Mississippi Valley was one billion
and thirty-six millions of bushels. In many parts of the West, for want
of transportation, corn is now sold for as little as eighteen and twenty
cents per bushel, and the husks are worth, for fuel, nearly as much as
the grain. One of the great newspapers of the West, the Chicago
_Inter-Ocean_ (January 8th) in discussing editorially "The Reason
Farming does not Pay" in that country, forcibly says: "A charge of
thirty cents per bushel for the carriage of corn, when the freight
should be only fifteen cents, absorbs _one-half the value of the crop_;
and this process, repeated from year to year during the whole period of
a decade, exhausts what would otherwise become the surplus of the
farmer, and finally impoverishes the entire agricultural community."




A PRINCESS OF THULE.

BY WILLIAM BLACK, AUTHOR OF "THE STRANGE ADVENTURES OF A PHAETON."


CHAPTER I.

"LOCHABER NO MORE."

On a small headland of the distant island of Lewis an old man stood
looking out on a desolate waste of rain-beaten sea. It was a wild and a
wet day. From out of the louring south-west fierce gusts of wind were
driving up volumes and flying rags of clouds, and sweeping onward at the
same time the gathering waves that fell hissing and thundering on the
shore. Far as the eye could reach the sea and the air and the sky seemed
to be one indistinguishable mass of whirling and hurrying vapor, as if
beyond this point there were no more land, but only wind and water, and
the confused and awful voices of their strife.

The short, thick-set, powerfully-built man who stood on this solitary
point paid little attention to the rain that ran off the peak of his
sailor's cap or to the gusts of wind that blew about his bushy gray
beard. He was still following, with an eye accustomed to pick out
objects far at sea, one speck of purple that was now fading into the
gray mist of the rain; and the longer he looked the less it became,
until the mingled sea and sky showed only the smoke that the great
steamer left in its wake. As he stood there, motionless and regardless
of everything around him, did he cling to the fancy that he could still
trace out the path of the vanished ship? A little while before it had
passed almost close to him. He had watched it steam out of Stornoway
harbor. As the sound of the engines came nearer and the big boat went
by, so that he could have almost called to it, there was no sign of
emotion on the hard and stern face, except, perhaps, that the lips were
held firm and a sort of frown appeared over the eyes. He saw a tiny
white handkerchief being waved to him from the deck of the vessel; and
he said, almost as though he were addressing some one there, "My good
little girl!"

But in the midst of that roaring of the sea and the wind how could any
such message be delivered? And already the steamer was away from the
land, standing out to the lonely plain of waters, and the sound of the
engines had ceased, and the figures on the deck had grown faint and
visionary. But still there was that one speck of white visible; and the
man knew that a pair of eyes that had many a time looked into his
own--as if with a faith that such intercommunion could never be
broken--were now trying, through overflowing and blinding tears, to send
him a last look of farewell.

The gray mists of the rain gathered within their folds the big vessel
and all the beating hearts it contained, and the fluttering of that
little token disappeared with it. All that remained was the sea,
whitened by the rushing of the wind and the thunder of waves on the
beach. The man, who had been gazing so long down into the south-east,
turned his face landward, and set out to walk over a tract of wet grass
and sand toward a road that ran near by. There was a large wagonette of
varnished oak and a pair of small, powerful horses waiting for him
there; and having dismissed the boy who had been in charge, he took the
reins and got up. But even yet the fascination of the sea and of that
sad farewell was upon him, and he turned once more, as if, now that
sight could yield him no further tidings, he would send her one more
word of good-bye. "My poor little Sheila!" That was all he said; and
then he turned to the horses and sent them on, with his head down to
escape the rain, and a look on his face like that of a dead man.

As he drove through the town of Stornoway the children playing within
the shelter of the cottage doors called to each other in a whisper, and
said, "That is the King of Borva."

But the elderly people said to each other, with a shake of the head, "It
iss a bad day, this day, for Mr. Mackenzie, that he will be going home
to an empty house. And it will be a ferry bad thing for the poor folk of
Borva, and they will know a great difference, now that Miss Sheila iss
gone away, and there iss nobody--not anybody at all--left in the island
to tek the side o' the poor folk."

He looked neither to the right nor to the left, though he was known to
many of the people, as he drove away from the town into the heart of the
lonely and desolate land. The wind had so far died down, and the rain
had considerably lessened, but the gloom of the sky was deepened by the
drawing on of the afternoon, and lay heavily over the deary wastes of
moor and hill. What a wild and dismal country was this which lay before
and all around him, now that the last traces of human occupation were
passed! There was not a cottage, not a stone wall, not a fence, to break
the monotony of the long undulations of moorland, which in the distance
rose into a series of hills that were black under the darkened sky. Down
from those mountains, ages ago, glaciers had slowly crept to eat out
hollows in the plains below; and now in those hollows were lonely lakes,
with not a tree to break the line of their melancholy shores. Everywhere
around were the traces of the glacier-drift--great gray boulders of
gneiss fixed fast into the black peat-moss or set amid the browns and
greens of the heather. The only sound to be heard in this wilderness of
rock and morass was the rushing of various streams, rain-swollen and
turbid, that plunged down their narrow channels to the sea.

The rain now ceased altogether, but the mountains in the far south had
grown still darker, and to the fisherman passing by the coast it must
have seemed as though the black peaks were holding converse with the
louring clouds, and that the silent moorland beneath was waiting for the
first roll of the thunder. The man who was driving along this lonely
route sometimes cast a glance down toward this threatening of a storm,
but he paid little heed to it. The reins lay loose on the backs of the
horses, and at their own pace they followed, hour after hour, the rising
and falling road that led through the moorland and past the gloomy
lakes. He may have recalled mechanically the names of those stretches of
water--the Lake of the Sheiling, the Lake of the Oars, the Lake of the
Fine Sand, and so forth--to measure the distance he had traversed; but
he seemed to pay little attention to the objects around him, and it was
with a glance of something like surprise that he suddenly found himself
overlooking that great sea-loch on the western side of the island in
which was his home.

He drove down the hill to the solitary little inn of Garra-na-hina. At
the door, muffled up in a warm woolen plaid, stood a young girl,
fair-haired, blue-eyed, and diffident in look.

"Mr. Mackenzie," she said, with that peculiar and pleasant intonation
that marks the speech of the Hebridean who has been taught English in
the schools, "it wass Miss Sheila wrote to me to Suainabost, and she
said I might come down from Suainabost and see if I can be of any help
to you in the house."

The girl was crying, although the blue eyes looked bravely through the
tears as if to disprove the fact.

"Ay, my good lass," he said, putting his hand gently on her head, "and
it wass Sheila wrote to you?"

"Yes, sir, and I hef come down from Suainabost."

"It is a lonely house you will be going to," he said absently.

"But Miss Sheila said I wass--I wass to--" But here the young girl
failed in her effort to explain that Miss Sheila had asked her to go
down to make the house less lonely. The elderly man in the wagonette
seemed scarcely to notice that she was crying: he bade her come up
beside him; and when he had got her into the wagonette he left some
message with the innkeeper, who had come to the door, and drove off
again.

They drove along the high land that overlooks a portion of Loch Roag,
with its wonderful network of islands and straits, and then they stopped
on the lofty plateau of Callernish, where there was a man waiting to
take the wagonette and horses.

"And you would be seeing Miss Sheila away, sir?" said the man; "and it
wass Duncan Macdonald will say that she will not come back no more to
Borva."

The old man with the big gray beard only frowned and passed on. He and
the girl made their way down the side of the rocky hill to the shore,
and here there was an open boat awaiting them. When they approached, a
man considerably over six feet in height, keen-faced, gray-eyed,
straight-limbed and sinewy in frame, jumped into the big and rough boat
and began to get ready for their departure. There was just enough wind
to catch the brown mainsail, and the King of Borva took the tiller, his
henchman sitting down by the mast. And no sooner had they left the shore
and stood out toward one of the channels of this arm of the sea, than
the tall, spare keeper began to talk of that which made his master's eye
grow dark. "Ah, well," he said, in the plaintive drawling of his race,
"and it iss an empty house you will be going to, Mr. Mackenzie; and it
iss a bad thing for us all that Miss Sheila hass gone away; and it iss
many's ta time she will hef been wis me in this very boat--"

"---- ---- ---- ---- you, Duncan Macdonald!" cried Mackenzie, in an
access of fury, "what will you talk of like that? It iss every man,
woman and child on the island will talk of nothing but Sheila! I will
drive my foot through the bottom of the boat if you do not hold your
peace!"

The tall gillie patiently waited until his master had exhausted his
passion, and then he said, as if nothing had occurred, "And it will not
do much good, Mr. Mackenzie, to tek ta name o' God in vain; and there
will be ferry much more of that now since Miss Sheila iss gone away, and
there will be much more of trinking in ta island, and it will be a great
difference, mirover. And she will be so far away that no one will see
her no more--far away beyond ta Sound of Sleat, and far away beyond
Oban, as I hef heard people say. And what will she do in London, when
she has no boat at all, and she will never go out to ta fishing? And I
will hear people say that you will walk a whole day and never come to ta
sea, and what will Miss Sheila do for that? And she will tame no more o'
ta wild-ducks' young things, and she will find out no more o' ta nests
in the rocks, and she will hef no more horns when the deer is killed,
and she will go out no more to see ta cattle swim across Loch Roag when
they go to ta sheilings. It will be all different, all different, now;
and she will never see us no more. And it iss as bad as if you wass a
poor man, Mr. Mackenzie, and had to let your sons and your daughters go
away to America, and never come back no more. And she ta only one in
your house! And it wass the son o' Mr. Macintyre of Sutherland he would
hef married her, and come to live on ta island, and not hef Miss Sheila
go away among strangers that doesna ken her family, and will put no
store by her, no more than if she wass a fisherman's lass. It wass Miss
Sheila herself had a sore heart tis morning when she went away; and she
turned and she looked at Borva as the boat came away, and I said, Tis
iss the last time Miss Sheila will be in her boat, and she will not come
no more again to Borva."

Mr. Mackenzie heard not one word or syllable of all this. The dead,
passionless look had fallen over the powerful features, and the deep-set
eyes were gazing, not on the actual Loch Roag before them, but on the
stormy sea that lies between Lewis and Skye, and on a vessel
disappearing in the midst of the rain. It was by a sort of instinct that
he guided this open boat through the channels, which were now getting
broader as they neared the sea, and the tall and grave-faced keeper
might have kept up his garrulous talk for hours without attracting a
look or a word.

It was now the dusk of the evening, and wild and strange indeed was the
scene around the solitary boat as it slowly moved along. Large
islands--so large that any one of them might have been mistaken for the
mainland--lay over the dark waters of the sea, remote, untenanted and
silent. There were no white cottages along these rocky shores; only a
succession of rugged cliffs and sandy bays, but half mirrored in the
sombre water below. Down in the south the mighty shoulders and peaks of
Suainabhal and its sister mountains were still darker than the darkening
sky; and when at length the boat had got well out from the network of
islands and fronted the broad waters of the Atlantic, the great plain of
the western sea seemed already to have drawn around it the solemn mantle
of the night.

"Will you go to Borvabost, Mr. Mackenzie, or will we run her into your
own house?" asked Duncan--Borvabost being the name of the chief village
on the island.

"I will not go on to Borvabost," said the old man peevishly. "Will they
not have plenty to talk about at Borvabost?"

"And it iss no harm tat ta folk will speak of Miss Sheila," said the
gillie with some show of resentment: "it iss no harm tey will be sorry
she is gone away--no harm at all, for it wass many things tey had to
thank Miss Sheila for; and now it will be all ferry different--"

"I tell you, Duncan Macdonald, to hold your peace!" said the old man,
with a savage glare of the deep-set eyes; and then Duncan relapsed into
a sulky silence and the boat held on its way.

In the gathering twilight a long gray curve of sand became visible, and
into the bay thus indicated Mackenzie turned his small craft. This
indentation of the island seemed as blank of human occupation as the
various points and bays they had passed, but as they neared the shore a
house came into sight, about half-way up the slope rising from the sea
to the pasture-land above. There was a small stone pier jutting out at
one portion of the bay, where a mass of rocks was imbedded in the white
sand; and here at length the boat was run in, and Mackenzie helped the
young girl ashore.

The two of them, leaving the gillie to moor the little vessel that had
brought them from Callernish, went silently toward the shore, and up the
narrow road leading to the house. It was a square, two-storied
substantial building of stone, but the stone had been liberally oiled to
keep out the wet, and the blackness thus produced had not a very
cheerful look. Then, on this particular evening the scant bushes
surrounding the house hung limp and dark in the rain, and amid the
prevailing hues of purple, blue-green and blue the bit of scarlet coping
running round the black house was wholly ineffective in relieving the
general impression of dreariness and desolation.

The King of Borva walked into a large room, which was but partially lit
by two candles on the table and by the blaze of a mass of peats in the
stone fireplace, and threw himself into a big easy-chair. Then he
suddenly seemed to recollect his companion, who was timidly standing
near the door, with her shawl still round her head.

"Mairi," he said, "go and ask them to give you some dry clothes. Your
box it will not be here for half an hour yet." Then he turned to the
fire.

"But you yourself, Mr. Mackenzie, you will be ferry wet--"

"Never mind me, my lass: go and get yourself dried."

"But it wass Miss Sheila," began the girl diffidently--"it wass Miss
Sheila asked me--she asked me to look after you, sir--"

With that he rose abruptly, and advanced to her and caught her by the
wrist. He spoke quite quietly to her, but the girl's eyes, looking up at
the stern face, were a trifle frightened.

"You are a ferry good little girl, Mairi," he said slowly, "and you will
mind what I say to you. You will do what you like in the house, you will
take Sheila's place as much as you like, but you will mind this--not to
mention her name, not once. Now go away, Mairi, and find Scarlett
Macdonald, and she will give you some dry clothes; and you will tell her
to send Duncan down to Borvabost, and bring up John the Piper and
Alister-nan-Each, and the lads of the _Nighean dubh_, if they are not
gone home to Habost yet. But it iss John the Piper must come directly."

The girl went away to seek counsel of Scarlett Macdonald, Duncan's wife,
and Mr. Mackenzie proceeded to walk up and down the big and half-lit
chamber. Then he went to a cupboard, and put out on the table a number
of tumblers and glasses, with two or three odd-looking bottles of
Norwegian make, consisting of four semicircular tubes of glass meeting
at top and bottom, leaving the centre of the vessel thus formed open. He
stirred up the blazing peats in the fireplace. He brought down from a
shelf a box filled with coarse tobacco, and put it on the table. But he
was evidently growing impatient, and at last he put on his cap again and
went out into the night.

The air blew cold in from the sea, and whistled through the bushes that
Sheila had trained about the porch. There was no rain now, but a great
and heavy darkness brooded overhead, and in the silence he could hear
the breaking of the waves along the hard coast. But what was this other
sound he heard, wild and strange in the stillness of the night--a shrill
and plaintive cry that the distance softened until it almost seemed to
be the calling of a human voice? Surely those were words that he heard,
or was it only that the old, sad air spoke to him?--

    For Lochaber no more, Lochaber no more,
    Maybe to return to Lochaber no more.

That was the message that came to him out of the darkness, and it seemed
to him as if the sea and the night and the sky were wailing over the
loss of his Sheila. He walked away from the house and up the hill
behind. Led by the sound of the pipes, that grew louder and more
unearthly as he approached, he found himself at length on a bit of high
table-land overlooking the sea, where Sheila had had a rude bench of
iron and wood fixed into the rock. On this bench sat a little old man,
humpbacked and bent, and with long white hair falling down to his
shoulders. He was playing the pipes--not wildly and fiercely, as if he
were at a drinking-bout of the lads come home from the Caithness
fishing, nor yet gayly and proudly, as if he were marching at the head
of a bridal-procession, but slowly, mournfully, monotonously, as though
he were having the pipes talk to him.

Mackenzie touched him on the shoulder, and the old man started. "Is it
you, Mr. Mackenzie?" he said in Gaelic. "It is a great fright you have
given me."

"Come down to the house, John. The lads from Habost and Alister, and
some more will be coming; and you will get a ferry good dram, John, to
put wind in the pipes."

"It is no dram I am thinking of, Mr. Mackenzie," said the old man. "And
you will have plenty of company without me. But I will come down to the
house, Mr. Mackenzie--oh yes, I will come down to the house--but _in a
little while_ I will come to the house."

Mackenzie turned from him with a petulant exclamation, and went along
and down the hill rapidly, as he could hear voices in the darkness. He
had just got into the house when his visitors arrived. The door of the
room was opened, and there appeared some six or eight tall and stalwart
men, mostly with profuse brown beards and weatherbeaten faces, who
advanced into the chamber with some show of shyness. Mackenzie offered
them a rough and hearty welcome, and as soon as their eyes had got
accustomed to the light bade them help themselves to the whisky on the
table. With a certain solemnity each poured out a glass and drank
"_Shlainte!_" to his host as if it were some funeral rite. But when he
bade them replenish their glasses, and got them seated with their faces
to the blaze of the peats, then the flood of Gaelic broke loose. Had the
wise little girl from Suainabost warned these big men? There was not a
word about Sheila uttered. All their talk was of the reports that had
come from Caithness, and of the improvements of the small harbor near
the Butt, and of the black sea-horse that had been seen in Loch
Suainabhal, and of some more sheep having been found dead on the Pladda
Isles, shot by the men of the English smacks. Pipes were lit, the peats
stirred up anew, another glass or two of whisky drunk, and then, through
the haze of the smoke, the browned faces of the men could be seen in
eager controversy, each talking faster than the other, and comparing
facts and fancies that had been brooded over through solitary nights of
waiting on the sea. Mackenzie did not sit down with them: he did not
even join them in their attention to the curious whisky-flasks. He paced
up and down the opposite side of the room, occasionally being appealed
to with a story or a question, and showing by his answers that he was
but vaguely hearing the vociferous talk of his companions. At last he
said, "Why the teffle does not John the Piper come? Here, you men--you
sing a song, quick! None of your funeral songs, but a good brisk one of
trinking and fighting."

But were not nearly all their songs--like those of all dwellers on a
rocky and dangerous coast--of a sad and sombre hue, telling of maidens
whose lovers were drowned, and of wives bidding farewell to husbands
they were never to see again? Slow and mournful are the songs that the
northern fishermen sing as they set out in the evening, with the
creaking of their long oars keeping time to the music, until they get
out beyond the shore to hoist the red mainsail and catch the breeze
blowing over from the regions of the sunset. Not one of these Habost
fishermen could sing a brisk song, but the nearest approach to it was a
ballad in praise of a dark-haired girl, which they, owning the _Nighean
dubh_, were bound to know. And so one young fellow began to sing, "Mo
Nighean dubh d'fhas boidheach dubh, mo Nighean dubh na treig mi,"[G] in
a slow and doleful fashion, and the others joined in the chorus with a
like solemnity. In order to keep time, four of the men followed the
common custom of taking a pocket handkerchief (in this case an immense
piece of brilliant red silk, which was evidently the pride of its owner)
and holding it by the four corners, letting it slowly rise and fall as
they sang. The other three men laid hold of a bit of rope, which they
used for the same purpose. "Mo Nighean dubh," unlike most of the Gaelic
songs, has but a few verses; and as soon as they were finished the young
fellow, who seemed pleased with his performances, started another
ballad. Perhaps he had forgotten his host's injunction, perhaps he knew
no merrier song, but at any rate he began to sing the "Lament of
Monaltrie." It was one of Sheila's songs. She had sung it the night
before in this very room, and her father had listened to her describing
the fate of young Monaltrie as if she had been foretelling her own, and
scarcely dared to ask himself if ever again he should hear the voice
that he loved so well. He could not listen to the song. He abruptly left
the room, and went out once more into the cool night-air and the
darkness. But even here he was not allowed to forget the sorrow he had
been vainly endeavoring to banish, for in the far distance the pipes
still played the melancholy wail of Lochaber.

    Lochaber no more! Lochaber no more!

--that was the only solace brought him by the winds from the sea; and
there were tears running down the hard gray face as he said to himself,
in a broken voice, "Sheila, my little girl, why did you go away from
Borva?"


CHAPTER II.

THE FAIR-HAIRED STRANGER.

"Why, you must be in love with her yourself!"

"I in love with her? Sheila and I are too old friends for that!"

The speakers were two young men seated in the stern of the steamer
Clansman as she ploughed her way across the blue and rushing waters of
the Minch. One of them was a tall young fellow of three-and-twenty, with
fair hair and light blue eyes, whose delicate and mobile features were
handsome enough in their way, and gave evidence of a nature at once
sensitive, nervous and impulsive. He was clad in light gray from head to
heel--a color that suited his fair complexion and yellow hair; and he
lounged about the white deck in the glare of the sunlight, steadying
himself from time to time as an unusually big wave carried the Clansman
aloft for a second or two, and then sent her staggering and groaning
into a hissing trough of foam. Now and again he would pause in front of
his companion, and talk in a rapid, playful, and even eloquent fashion
for a minute or two; and then, apparently a trifle annoyed by the slow
and patient attention which greeted his oratorical efforts, would start
off once more on his unsteady journey up and down the white planks.

The other was a man of thirty-eight, of middle height, sallow complexion
and generally insignificant appearance. His hair was becoming
prematurely gray. He rarely spoke. He was dressed in a suit of rough
blue cloth, and indeed looked somewhat like a pilot who had gone ashore,
taken to study and never recovered himself. A stranger would have
noticed the tall and fair young man who walked up and down the gleaming
deck, evidently enjoying the brisk breeze that blew about his yellow
hair, and the sunlight that touched his pale and fine face or sparkled
on his teeth when he laughed, but would have paid little attention to
the smaller, brown-faced, gray-haired man, who lay back on the bench
with his two hands clasped round his knee, and with his eyes fixed on
the southern heavens, while he murmured to himself the lines of some
ridiculous old Devonshire ballad or replied in monosyllables to the
rapid and eager talk of his friend.

Both men were good sailors, and they had need to be, for although the
sky above them was as blue and clear as the heart of a sapphire, and
although the sunlight shone on the decks and the rigging, a strong
north-easter had been blowing all the morning, and there was a
considerable sea on. The far blue plain was whitened with the tumbling
crests of the waves, that shone and sparkled in the sun, and ever and
anon a volume of water would strike the Clansman's bow, rise high in
the air with the shock, and fall in heavy showers over the forward
decks. Sometimes, too, a wave caught her broadside, and sent a handful
of spray over the two or three passengers who were safe in the stern;
but the decks here remained silvery and white, for the sun and wind
speedily dried up the traces of the sea-showers.

At length the taller of the young men came and sat down by his
companion: "How far to Stornoway yet?"

"An hour."

"By Jove, what a distance! All day yesterday getting up from Oban to
Skye, all last night churning our way up to Loch Gair, all to-day
crossing to this outlandish island, that seems as far away as
Iceland;--and for what?"

"But don't you remember the moonlight last night as we sailed by the
Cuchullins? And the sunrise this morning as we lay in Loch Gair? Were
not these worth coming for?"

"But that was not what you came for, my dear friend. No. You came to
carry off this wonderful Miss Sheila of yours, and of course you wanted
somebody to look on; and here I am, ready to carry the ladder and the
dark lantern and the marriage-license. I will saddle your steeds for you
and row you over lakes, and generally do anything to help you in so
romantic an enterprise."

"It is very kind of you, Lavender," said the other with a smile, "but
such adventures are not for old fogies like me. They are the exclusive
right of young fellows like you, who are tall and well-favored, have
plenty of money and good spirits, and have a way with you that all the
world admires. Of course the bride will tread a measure with you. Of
course all the bridesmaids would like to see you marry her. Of course
she will taste the cup you offer her. Then a word in her ear, and away
you go as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and as if the
bridegroom was a despicable creature merely because God had only given
him five feet six inches. But you couldn't have a Lochinvar five feet
six."

The younger man blushed like a girl and laughed a little, and was
evidently greatly pleased. Nay, in the height of his generosity he began
to protest. He would not have his friend imagine that women cared only
for stature and good looks. There were other qualities. He himself had
observed the most singular conquests made by men who were not
good-looking, but who had a certain fascination about them. His own
experience of women was considerable, and he was quite certain that the
best women, now--the sort of women whom a man would respect--the women
who had brains--

And so forth and so forth. The other listened quite gravely to these
well-meant, kindly, blundering explanations, and only one who watched
his face narrowly could have detected in the brown eyes a sort of amused
consciousness of the intentions of the amiable and ingenuous youth.

"Do you really mean to tell me, Ingram," continued Lavender in his rapid
and impetuous way--"do you mean to tell me that you are not in love with
this Highland princess? For ages back you have talked of nothing but
Sheila. How many an hour have I spent in clubs, up the river, down at
the coast, everywhere, listening to your stories of Sheila, and your
praises of Sheila, and your descriptions of Sheila! It was always
Sheila, and again Sheila, and still again Sheila. But, do you know,
either you exaggerated or I failed to understand your descriptions; for
the Sheila I came to construct out of your talk is a most incongruous
and incomprehensible creature. First, Sheila knows about stone and lime
and building; and then I suppose her to be a practical young woman, who
is a sort of overseer to her father. But Sheila, again, is romantic and
mysterious, and believes in visions and dreams; and then I take her to
be an affected school-miss. But then Sheila can throw a fly and play her
sixteen-pounder, and Sheila can adventure upon the lochs in an open
boat, managing the sail herself; and then I find her to be a tom-boy.
But, again, Sheila is shy and rarely speaks, but looks unutterable
things with her soft and magnificent eyes; and what does that mean but
that she is an ordinary young lady, who has not been in society, and who
is a little interesting, if a little stupid, while she is unmarried, and
who after marriage calmly and complacently sinks into the dull domestic
hind, whose only thought is of butchers' bills and perambulators?"

This was a fairly long speech, but it was no longer than many which
Frank Lavender was accustomed to utter when in the vein for talking. His
friend and companion did not pay much heed. His hands were still clasped
round his knee, his head leaning back, and all the answer he made was to
repeat, apparently to himself, these not very pertinent lines:

    "In Ockington, in Devonsheer,
    My vather he lived vor many a yeer;
    And I his son with him did dwell,
    To tend his sheep: 'twas doleful well.
                        Diddle-diddle!"

"You know, Ingram, it must be precious hard for a man who has to knock
about in society, and take his wife with him, to have to explain to
everybody that she is in reality a most unusual and gifted young person,
and that she must not be expected to talk. It is all very well for him
in his own house--that is to say, if he can preserve all the sentiment
that made her shyness fine and wonderful before their marriage--but a
man owes a little to society, even in choosing a wife."

Another pause.

    "It happened on a zartin day
    Four-score o' the sheep they rinned astray:
    Says vather to I, 'Jack, rin arter 'm, du!'
    Sez I to vather, 'I'm darned if I du!'
                        Diddle-diddle!"

"Now you are the sort of a man, I should think, who would never get
careless about your wife. You would always believe about her what you
believed at first; and I dare say you would live very happily in your
own house if she was a decent sort of woman. But you would have to go
out into society sometimes; and the very fact that you had not got
careless--as many men would, leaving their wives to produce any sort of
impression they might--would make you vexed that the world could not
off-hand value your wife as you fancy she ought to be valued. Don't you
see?"

This was the answer:

    "Purvoket much at my rude tongue,
    A dish o' brath at me he vlung,
    Which so incensed me to wrath,
    That I up an' knack un instantly to arth.
                        Diddle-diddle!"

"As for your Princess Sheila, I firmly believe you have some romantic
notion of marrying her and taking her up to London with you. If you
seriously intend such a thing, I shall not argue with you. I shall
praise her by the hour together, for I may have to depend on Mrs. Edward
Ingram for my admission to your house. But if you only have the fancy as
a fancy, consider what the result would be. You say she has never been
to a school; that she has never had the companionship of a girl of her
own age; that she has never read a newspaper; that she has never been
out of this island; and that almost her sole society has been that of
her mother, who educated her and tended her, and left her as ignorant of
the real world as if she had lived all her life in a lighthouse.
Goodness gracious! what a figure such a girl would cut in South
Kensington!"

"My dear fellow," said Ingram at last, "don't be absurd. You will soon
see what are the relations between Sheila Mackenzie and me, and you will
be satisfied. I marry her? Do you think I would take the child to London
to show her its extravagance and shallow society, and break her heart
with thinking of the sea, and of the rude islanders she knew, and of
their hard and bitter struggle for life? No. I should not like to see my
wild Highland doe shut up in one of your southern parks among your tame
fallow-deer. She would look at them askance. She would separate herself
from them; and by and by she would make one wild effort to escape, and
kill herself. That is not the fate in store for our good little Sheila;
so you need not make yourself unhappy about her or me.

    'Now all ye young men, of every persuasion,
    Never quarl wi' your vather upon any occasion;
    For instead of being better, you'll vind you'll be wuss,
    For he'll kick you out o' doors, without a varden in your puss!
                        Diddle-diddle!'

Talking of Devonshire, how is that young American lady you met at
Torquay in the spring?"

"There, now, is the sort of woman a man would be safe in marrying!"

"And how?"

"Oh, well, you know," said Frank Lavender. "I mean the sort of woman who
would do you credit--hold her own in society, and that sort of thing.
You must meet her some day. I tell you, Ingram, you will be delighted
and charmed with her manners and her grace, and the clever things she
says; at least, everybody else is."

"Ah, well!"

"You don't seem to care much for brilliant women," remarked the other,
rather disappointed that his companion showed so little interest.

"Oh yes, I like brilliant women very well. A clever woman is always a
pleasanter companion than a clever man. But you were talking of the
choice of a wife; and pertness in a girl, although it may be amusing at
the time, may become something else by and by. Indeed, I shouldn't
advise a young man to marry an epigrammatist, for you see her shrewdness
and smartness are generally the result of experiences in which _he_ has
had no share."

"There may be something in that," said Lavender carelessly; "but of
course, you know, with a widow it is different; and Mrs. Lorraine never
does go in for the _ingenue_."

The pale blue cloud that had for some time been lying faintly along the
horizon now came nearer and more near, until they could pick out
something like the configuration of the island, its bays and
promontories and mountains. The day seemed to become warmer as they got
out of the driving wind of the Channel, and the heavy roll of the sea
had so far subsided. Through comparatively calm water the great Clansman
drove her way, until, on getting near the land and under shelter of the
peninsula of Eye, the voyagers found themselves on a beautiful blue
plain, with the spacious harbor of Stornoway opening out before them.
There, on the one side, lay a white and cleanly town, with its shops
and quays and shipping. Above the bay in front stood a great gray
castle, surrounded by pleasure-grounds and terraces and gardens; while
on the southern side the harbor was overlooked by a semicircle of hills,
planted with every variety of tree. The white houses, the blue bay and
the large gray building set amid green terraces and overlooked by wooded
hills, formed a bright and lively little picture on this fresh and
brilliant forenoon; and young Lavender, who had a quick eye for
compositions which he was always about to undertake, but which never
appeared on canvas, declared enthusiastically that he would spend a day
or two in Stornoway on his return from Borva, and take home with him
some sketch of the place.

"And is Miss Sheila on the quay yonder?" he asked.

"Not likely," said Ingram. "It is a long drive across the island, and I
suppose she would remain at home to look after our dinner in the
evening."

"What? The wonderful Princess Sheila look after our dinner! Has she
visions among the pots and pans, and does she look unutterable things
when she is peeling potatoes?"

Ingram laughed: "There will be a pretty alteration in your tune in a
couple of days. You are sure to fall in love with her, and sigh
desperately for a week or two. You always do when you meet a woman
anywhere. But it won't hurt you much, and she won't know anything about
it."

"I should rather like to fall in love with her, to see how furiously
jealous you would become. However, here we are."

"And there is Mackenzie--the man with the big gray beard and the peaked
cap--and he is talking to the chamberlain of the island."

"What does he get up on his wagonette for, instead of coming on board to
meet you?"

"Oh, that is one of his little tricks," said Ingram with a good-humored
smile. "He means to receive us in state, and impress you, a stranger,
with his dignity. The good old fellow has a hundred harmless ways like
that, and you must humor him. He has been accustomed to be treated _en
roi_, you know."

"Then the papa of the mysterious princess is not perfect?"

"Perhaps I ought to tell you now that Mackenzie's oddest notion is that
he has a wonderful skill in managing men, and in concealing the manner
of his doing it. I tell you this that you mayn't laugh and hurt him when
he is attempting something that he considers particularly crafty, and
that a child could see through."

"But what is the aim of it all?"

"Oh, nothing."

"He does not do a little bet occasionally?"

"Oh dear! no. He is the best and honestest fellow in the world, but it
pleases him to fancy that he is profoundly astute, and that other people
don't see the artfulness with which he reaches some little result that
is not of the least consequence to anybody."

"It seems to me," remarked Mr. Lavender with a coolness and a shrewdness
that rather surprised his companion, "that it would not be difficult to
get the King of Borva to assume the honors of a papa-in-law."

The steamer was moored at last: the crowd of fishermen and loungers drew
near to meet their friends who had come up from Glasgow--for there are
few strangers, as a rule, arriving at Stornoway to whet the curiosity of
the islanders--and the tall gillie who had been standing by Mackenzie's
horses came on board to get the luggage of the young men.

"Well, Duncan," said the elder of them, "and how are you, and how is Mr.
Mackenzie, and how is Miss Sheila? You have not brought her with you, I
see."

"But Miss Sheila is ferry well, whatever, Mr. Ingram, and it is a great
day, this day, for her, tat you will be coming to the Lewis; and it wass
tis morning she wass up at ta break o' day, and up ta hills to get some
bits o' green things for ta rooms you will hef, Mr. Ingram. Ay, it iss
a great day, tis day, for Miss Sheila."

"By Jove, they all rave about Sheila up in this quarter!" said Lavender,
giving Duncan a fishing-rod and a bag he had brought from the cabin. "I
suppose in a week's time I shall begin to rave about her too. Look
sharp, Ingram, and let us have audience of His Majesty."

The King of Borva fixed his eye on young Lavender, and scanned him
narrowly as he was being introduced. His welcome of Ingram had been most
gracious and friendly, but he received his companion with something of a
severe politeness. He requested him to take a seat beside him, so that
he might see the country as they went across to Borva; and Lavender
having done so, Ingram and Duncan got into the body of the wagonette,
and the party drove off.

Passing through the clean and bright little town, Mackenzie suddenly
pulled up his horses in front of a small shop, in the window of which
some cheap bits of jewelry were visible. The man came out, and Mr.
Mackenzie explained with some care and precision that he wanted a silver
brooch of a particular sort. While the jeweler had returned to seek the
article in question, Frank Lavender was gazing around him in some wonder
at the appearance of so much civilization on this remote and
rarely-visited island. There were no haggard savages, unkempt and
scantily clad, coming forth from their dens in the rocks to stare wildly
at the strangers. On the contrary, there was a prevailing air of comfort
and "bienness" about the people and their houses. He saw handsome girls
with coal-black hair and fresh complexions, who wore short and thick
blue petticoats, with a scarlet tartan shawl wrapped round their bosom
and fastened at the waist; stalwart, thick-set men, in loose blue jacket
and trowsers and scarlet cap, many of them with bushy red beards; and
women of extraordinary breadth of shoulder, who carried enormous loads
in a creel strapped on their back, while they employed their hands in
contentedly knitting stockings as they passed along. But what was the
purpose of these mighty loads of fish-bones they carried--burdens that
would have appalled a railway porter of the South?

"You will see, sir," observed the King of Borva in reply to Lavender's
question, "there is not much of the phosphates in the grass of this
island; and the cows they are mad to get the fish-bones to lick, and it
iss many of them you cannot milk unless you put the bones before them."

"But why do the lazy fellows lounging about there let the women carry
those enormous loads?"

Mr. Mackenzie stared: "Lazy fellows! They hef harder work than any you
will know of in your country; and besides the fishing they will do the
ploughing and much of the farm-work. And iss the women to do none at
all? That iss the nonsense that my daughter talks; but she has got it
out of books, and what do they know how the poor people hef to live?"

At this moment the jeweler returned with some half dozen brooches
displayed on a plate, and shining with all the brilliancy of cairngorm
stones, polished silver and variously-colored pebbles.

"Now, John Mackintyre, this is a gentleman from London," said Mackenzie,
regarding the jeweler sternly, "and he will know all apout such fine
things, and you will not put a big price on them."

It was now Lavender's turn to stare, but he good-naturedly accepted the
duties of referee, and eventually a brooch was selected and paid for,
the price being six shillings. Then they drove on again.

"Sheila will know nothing of this--it will be a great surprise for her,"
said Mackenzie, almost to himself, as he opened the white box and saw
the glaring piece of jewelry lying on the white cotton.

"Good heavens, sir!" cried Frank Lavender, "you don't mean to say you
bought that brooch for your daughter?"

"And why not?" said the King of Borva in great surprise.

The young man perceived his mistake, grew considerably confused, and
only said, "Well, I should have thought that--that some small piece of
gold jewelry, now, would be better suited for a young lady."

Mackenzie smiled shrewdly: "I had something to go on. It wass Sheila
herself was in Stornoway three weeks ago, and she wass wanting to buy a
brooch for a young girl who has come down to us from Suainabost and is
very useful in the kitchen, and it wass a brooch just like this one she
gave to her."

"Yes, to a kitchen-maid," said the young man meekly.

"But Mairi is Sheila's cousin," said Mackenzie with continued surprise.

"Lavender does not understand Highland ways yet, Mr. Mackenzie," said
Ingram from behind. "You know we in the South have different fashions.
Our servants are nearly always strangers to us--not relations and
companions."

"Oh, I hef peen in London myself," said Mackenzie in somewhat of an
injured tone; and then he added with a touch of self-satisfaction, "and
I hef been in Paris, too."

"And Miss Sheila, has she been in London?" asked Lavender, feigning
ignorance.

"She has never been out of the Lewis."

"But don't you think the education of a young lady should include some
little experience of traveling?"

"Sheila, she will be educated quite enough; and is she going to London
or Paris without me?"

"You might take her."

"I have too much to do on the island now, and Sheila has much to do. I
do not think she will ever see any of those places, and she will not be
much the worse."

Two young men off for their holidays, a brilliant day shining all around
them, the sweet air of the sea and the moorland blowing about
them,--this little party that now drove away from Stornoway ought to
have been in the best of spirits. And indeed the young fellow who sat
beside Mackenzie was bent on pleasing his host by praising everything he
saw. He praised the gallant little horses that whirled them past the
plantations and out into the open country. He praised the rich black
peat that was visible in long lines and heaps, where the townspeople
were slowly eating into the moorland. Then all these traces of
occupation were left behind, and the travelers were alone in the
untenanted heart of the island, where the only sounds audible were the
humming of insects in the sunlight and the falling of the streams. Away
in the south the mountains were of a silvery and transparent blue.
Nearer at hand the rich reds and browns of the moorland softened into a
tender and beautiful green on nearing the margins of the lakes; and
these stretches of water were now as fair and bright as the sky above
them, and were scarcely ruffled by the moorfowl moving out from the
green rushes. Still nearer at hand great masses of white rock lay
embedded in the soft soil; and what could have harmonized better with
the rough and silver-gray surface than the patches of rose-red
bell-heather that grew up in their clefts or hung over their summits?
The various and beautiful colors around seemed to tingle with light and
warmth as the clear sun shone on them and the keen mountain-air blew
over them; and the King of Borva was so far thawed by the enthusiasm of
his companions that he regarded the far country with a pleased smile, as
if the enchanted land belonged to him, and as if the wonderful colors
and the exhilarating air and the sweet perfumes were of his own
creation.

Mr. Mackenzie did not know much about tints and hues, but he believed
what he heard; and it was perhaps, after all, not very surprising that a
gentleman from London, who had skill of pictures and other delicate
matters, should find strange marvels in a common stretch of moor, with a
few lakes here and there, and some lines of mountain only good for
sheilings. It was not for him to check the raptures of his guest. He
began to be friendly with the young man, and could not help regarding
him as a more cheerful companion than his neighbor Ingram, who would sit
by your side for an hour at a time without breaking the monotony of the
horses' tramp with a single remark. He had formed a poor opinion of
Lavender's physique from the first glimpse he had of his white fingers
and girl-like complexion; but surely a man who had such a vast amount of
good spirits and such a rapidity of utterance must have something
corresponding to these qualities in substantial bone and muscle. There
was something pleasing and ingenuous too about this flow of talk. Men
who had arrived at years of wisdom, and knew how to study and use their
fellows, were not to be led into these betrayals of their secret
opinions; but for a young man--what could be more pleasing than to see
him lay open his soul to the observant eye of a master of men? Mackenzie
began to take a great fancy to young Lavender.

"Why," said Lavender, with a fine color mantling in his cheeks as the
wind caught them on a higher portion of the road, "I had heard of Lewis
as a most bleak and desolate island, flat moorland and lake, without a
hill to be seen. And everywhere I see hills, and yonder are great
mountains which I hope to get nearer before we leave."

"We have mountains in this island," remarked Mackenzie slowly as he kept
his eye on his companion--"we have mountains in this island sixteen
thousand feet high."

Lavender looked sufficiently astonished, and the old man was pleased. He
paused for a moment or two, and said, "But this iss the way of it: you
will see that the middle of the mountains it has all been washed away by
the weather, and you will only have the sides now dipping one way and
the other at each side o' the island. But it iss a very clever man in
Stornoway will tell me that you can make out what wass the height o' the
mountain, by watching the dipping of the rocks on each side; and it iss
an older country, this island, than any you will know of; and there were
the mountains sixteen thousand feet high long before all this country
and all Scotland and England wass covered with ice."

The young man was very desirous to show his interest in this matter, but
did not know very well how. At last he ventured to ask whether there
were any fossils in the blocks of gneiss that were scattered over the
moorland.

"Fossils?" said Mackenzie. "Oh, I will not care much about such small
things. If you will ask Sheila, she will tell you all about it, and
about the small things she finds growing on the hills. That iss not of
much consequence to me; but I will tell you what is the best thing the
island grows: it is good girls and strong men--men that can go to the
fishing, and come back to plough the fields and cut the peat and build
the houses, and leave the women to look after the fields and the gardens
when they go back again to the fisheries. But it is the old people--they
are ferry cunning, and they will not put their money in the bank at
Stornoway, but will hide it away about the house, and then they will
come to Sheila and ask for money to put a pane of glass in their house.
And she has promised that to every one who will make a window in the
wall of their house; and she is very simple with them, and does not
understand the old people that tell lies. But when I hear of it, I say
nothing to Sheila--she will know nothing about it--but I hef a watch put
upon the people; and it wass only yesterday I will take back two
shillings she gave to an old woman of Borvabost that told many lies.
What does a young thing know of these old people? She will know nothing
at all, and it iss better for some one else to look after them, but not
to speak one word of it to her."

"It must require great astuteness to manage a primitive people like
that," said young Lavender with an air of conviction; and the old man
eagerly and proudly assented, and went on to tell of the manifold
diplomatic arts he used in reigning over his small kingdom, and how his
subjects lived in blissful ignorance that this controlling power was
being exercised.

They were startled by an exclamation from Ingram, who called to
Mackenzie to pull up the horses just as they were passing over a small
bridge.

"Look there, Lavender! did you ever see salmon jumping like that? Look
at the size of them!"

"Oh, it iss nothing," said Mackenzie, driving on again. "Where you will
see the salmon, it is in the narrows of Loch Roag, where they come into
the rivers, and the tide is low. Then you will see them jumping; and if
the water wass too low for a long time, they will die in hundreds and
hundreds."

"But what makes them jump before they get into the rivers?"

Old Mackenzie smiled a crafty smile, as if he had found out all the ways
and the secrets of the salmon: "They will jump to look about them--that
iss all."

"Do you think a salmon can see where he is going?"

"And maybe you will explain this to me, then," said the king with a
compassionate air: "how iss it the salmon will try to jump over some
stones in the river, and he will see he cannot go over them; but does he
fall straight down on the stones and kill himself? Neffer--no, neffer.
He will get back to the pool he left by turning in the air: that is what
I hef seen hundreds of times myself."

"Then they must be able to fly as well as see in the air."

"You may say about it what you will please, but that is what I
know--that is what I know ferry well myself."

"And I should think there were not many people in the country who knew
more about salmon than you," said Frank Lavender. "And I hear, too, that
your daughter is a great fisher."

But this was a blunder. The old man frowned: "Who will tell you such
nonsense? Sheila has gone out many times with Duncan, and he will put a
rod in her hands: yes, and she will have caught a fish or two, but it
iss not a story to tell. My daughter she will have plenty to do about
the house, without any of such nonsense. You will expect to find us all
savages, with such stories of nonsense."

"I am sure not," said Lavender warmly. "I have been very much struck
with the civilization of the island, so far as I have seen it; and I
can assure you I have always heard of Miss Sheila as a singularly
accomplished young lady."

"Yes," said Mackenzie somewhat mollified, "Sheila has been well brought
up: she is not a fisherman's lass, running about wild and catching the
salmon. I cannot listen to such nonsense, and it iss Duncan will tell
it."

"I can assure you, no. I have never spoken to Duncan. The fact is,
Ingram mentioned that your daughter had caught a salmon or two--as a
tribute to her skill, you know."

"Oh, I know it wass Duncan," said Mackenzie, with a deeper frown coming
over his face. "I will hef some means taken to stop Duncan from talking
such nonsense."

The young man, knowing nothing as yet of the child-like obedience paid
to the King of Borva by his islanders, thought to himself, "Well, you
are a very strong and self-willed old gentleman, but if I were you I
should not meddle much with that tall keeper with the eagle beak and the
gray eyes. I should not like to be a stag, and know that that fellow was
watching me somewhere with a rifle in his hands."

At length they came upon the brow of the hill overlooking
Garra-na-hina[H] and the panorama of the western lochs and mountains.
Down there on the side of the hill was the small inn, with its little
patch of garden; then a few moist meadows leading over to the estuary of
the Black River; and beyond that an illimitable prospect of heathy
undulations rising into the mighty peaks of Cracabhal, Mealasabhal and
Suainabhal. Then on the right, leading away out to the as yet invisible
Atlantic, lay the blue plain of Loch Roag, with a margin of yellow
seaweed along its shores, where the rocks revealed themselves at low
water, and with a multitude of large, variegated and verdant islands
which hid from sight the still greater Borva beyond.

They stopped to have a glass of whisky at Garra-na-hina, and Mackenzie
got down from the wagonette and went into the inn.

"And this is a Highland loch!" said Lavender, turning to his companion
from the South. "It is an enchanted sea: you could fancy yourself in the
Pacific, if only there were some palm trees on the shores of the
islands. No wonder you took for an Eve any sort of woman you met in such
a paradise!"

"You seem to be thinking a good deal about that young lady."

"Well, who would not wish to make the acquaintance of a pretty girl,
especially when you have plenty of time on your hands, and nothing to do
but pay her little attentions, you know, and so forth, as being the
daughter of your host?"

There was no particular answer to such an incoherent question, but
Ingram did not seem so well pleased as he had been with the prospect of
introducing his friend to the young Highland girl whose praises he had
been reciting for many a day.

However, they drank their whisky, drove on to Callernish, and here
paused for a minute or two to show the stranger a series of large
so-called Druidical stones which occupy a small station overlooking the
loch. Could anything have been more impressive than the sight of these
solitary gray pillars placed on this bit of table-land high over the
sea, and telling of a race that vanished ages ago, and left the
surrounding plains and hills and shores a wild and untenanted solitude?
But, somehow Lavender did not care to remain among those voiceless
monuments of a forgotten past. He said he would come and sketch them
some other day. He praised the picture all around, and then came back to
the stretch of ruffled blue water lying at the base of the hill. "Where
was Mr. Mackenzie's boat?" he asked.

They left the high plain, with its _Tuir-sachan_,[I] or Stones of
Mourning, and descended to the side of the loch. In a few moments,
Duncan, who had been disposing of the horses and the wagonette,
overtook them, got ready the boat, and presently they were cutting
asunder the bright blue plain of summer waves.

At last they were nearing the King of Borva's home, and Ingram began to
study the appearance of the neighboring shores, as if he would pick out
some feature of the island he remembered. The white foam hissed down the
side of the open boat. The sun burned hot on the brown sail. Far away
over the shining plain the salmon were leaping into the air, catching a
quick glint of silver on their scales before they splashed again into
the water. Half a dozen sea-pyes, with their beautiful black and white
plumage and scarlet beaks and feet, flew screaming out from the rocks
and swept in rapid circles above the boat. A long flight of solan geese
could just be seen slowly sailing along the western horizon. As the
small craft got out toward the sea the breeze freshened slightly, and
she lay over somewhat as the brine-laden winds caught her and tingled on
the cheeks of her passengers from the softer South. Finally, as the
great channel widened out, and the various smaller islands disappeared
behind, Ingram touched his companion on the shoulder, looked over to a
long and low line of rock and hill, and said, "Borva!"

And this was Borva!--nothing visible but an indefinite extent of rocky
shore, with here and there a bay of white sand, and over that a
table-land of green pasture, apparently uninhabited.

"There are not many people on the island," said Lavender, who seemed
rather disappointed with the look of the place.

"There are three hundred," said Mackenzie with the air of one who had
experienced the difficulties of ruling over three hundred islanders.

He had scarcely spoken when his attention was called by Duncan to some
object that the gillie had been regarding for some minutes back.

"Yes, it iss Miss Sheila," said Duncan.

A sort of flush of expectation passed over Lavender's face, and he
sprang to his feet. Ingram laughed. Did the foolish youth fancy he
could see half as far as this gray-eyed, eagle-faced man, who had now
sunk into his accustomed seat by the mast? There was nothing visible to
ordinary eyes but a speck of a boat, with a single sail up, which was
apparently, in the distance, running in for Borva.

"Ay, ay, ay," said Mackenzie in a vexed way, "it is Sheila, true enough;
and what will she do out in the boat at this time, when she wass to be
at home to receive the gentlemen that hef come all the way from London?"

"Well, Mr. Mackenzie," said Lavender, "I should be sorry to think that
our coming had interfered in any way whatever with your daughter's
amusements."

"Amusements!" said the old man with a look of surprise. "It iss not
amusements she will go for: that is no amusements for her. It is for
some teffle of a purpose she will go, when it iss the house that is the
proper place for her, with friends coming from so great a journey."

Presently it became clear that a race between the two boats was
inevitable, both of them making for the same point. Mackenzie would take
no notice of such a thing, but there was a grave smile on Duncan's face,
and something like a look of pride in his keen eyes.

"There iss no one, not one," he said, almost to himself, "will take her
in better than Miss Sheila--not one in ta island. And it wass me tat
learnt her every bit o' ta steering about Borva."

The strangers could now make out that in the other boat there were two
girls--one seated in the stern, the other by the mast. Ingram took out
his handkerchief and waved it: a similar token of recognition was
floated out from the other vessel. But Mackenzie's boat presently had
the better of the wind, and slowly drew on ahead, until, when her
passengers landed on the rude stone quay, they found the other and
smaller craft still some little distance off.

Lavender paid little attention to his luggage. He let Duncan do with it
what he liked. He was watching the small boat coming in, and getting a
little impatient, and perhaps a little nervous, in waiting for a
glimpse of the young lady in the stern. He could vaguely make out that
she had an abundance of dark hair looped up; that she wore a small straw
hat with a short white feather in it; and that, for the rest, she seemed
to be habited entirely in some rough and close-fitting costume of dark
blue. Or was there a glimmer of a band of rose-red round her neck?

The small boat was cleverly run alongside the jetty: Duncan caught her
bow and held her fast, and Miss Sheila, with a heavy string of lythe in
her right hand, stepped, laughing and blushing, on to the quay. Ingram
was there. She dropped the fish on the stones and took his two hands in
hers, and without uttering a word looked a glad welcome into his face.
It was a face capable of saying unwritten things--fine and delicate in
form, and yet full of an abundance of health and good spirits that shone
in the deep gray-blue eyes. Lavender's first emotion was one of surprise
that he should have heard this handsome, well-knit and proud-featured
girl called "little Sheila," and spoken of in a pretty and caressing
way. He thought there was something almost majestic in her figure, in
the poising of her head and the outline of her face. But presently he
began to perceive some singular suggestions of sensitiveness and
meekness in the low, sweet brow, in the short and exquisitely-curved
upper lip, and in the look of the tender blue eyes, which had long black
eyelashes to give them a peculiar and indefinable charm. All this he
noticed hastily and timidly as he heard Ingram, who still held the
girl's hands in his, saying, "Well, Sheila, and you haven't quite
forgotten me? And you are grown such a woman now: why, I mustn't call
you Sheila any more, I think. But let me introduce to you my friend, who
has come all the way from London to see all the wonderful things of
Borva."

If there was any embarrassment or blushing during that simple ceremony,
it was not on the side of the Highland girl, for she frankly shook hands
with him, and said, "And are you very well?"

The second impression which Lavender gathered from her was, that nowhere
in the world was English pronounced so beautifully as in the island of
Lewis. The gentle intonation with which she spoke was so tender and
touching--the slight dwelling on the _e_ in "very" and "well" seemed to
have such a sound of sincerity about it, that he could have fancied he
had been a friend of hers for a lifetime. And if she said "ferry" for
"very," what then? It was the most beautiful English he had ever heard.

The party now moved off toward the shore, above the long white curve of
which Mackenzie's house was visible. The old man himself led the way,
and had, by his silence, apparently not quite forgiven his daughter for
having been absent from home when his guests arrived.

"Now, Sheila," said Ingram, "tell me all about yourself: what have you
been doing?"

"This morning?" said the girl, walking beside him with her hand laid on
his arm, and with the happiest look on her face.

"This morning, to begin with. Did you catch those fish yourself?"

"Oh no, there was no time for that. And it was Mairi and I saw a boat
coming in, and it was going to Mevaig, but we overtook it, and got some
of the fish, and we thought we should be back before you came. However,
it is no matter, since you are here. And you have been very well? And
did you see any difference in Stornoway when you came over?"

Lavender began to think that Styornoway sounded ever so much more
pleasant than mere Stornoway.

"We had not a minute to wait in Stornoway. But tell me, Sheila, all
about Borva and yourself: that is better than Stornoway. How are your
schools getting on? And have you bribed or frightened all the children
into giving up Gaelic yet? How is John the Piper? and does the Free
Church minister still complain of him? And have you caught any more
wild-ducks and tamed them? And are there any gray geese up at
Loch-an-Eilean?"

"Oh, that is too many at once," said Sheila, laughing. "But I am afraid
your friend will find Borva very lonely and dull. There is not much
there at all, for all the lads are away at the Caithness fishing. And
you should have shown him all about Stornoway, and taken him up to the
castle and the beautiful gardens."

"He has seen all sorts of castles, Sheila, and all sorts of gardens in
every part of the world. He has seen everything to be seen in the great
cities and countries that are only names to you. He has traveled in
France, Italy, Russia, Germany, and seen all the big towns that you hear
of in history."

"That is what I should like to do if I were a man," said Sheila; "and
many and many a time I wish I had been a man, that I could go to the
fishing and work in the fields, and then, when I had enough money, go
away and see other countries and strange people."

"But if you were a man, I should not have come all the way from London
to see you," said Ingram, patting the hand that lay on his arm.

"But if I were a man," said the girl, quite frankly, "I should go up to
London to see you."

Mackenzie smiled grimly, and said, "Sheila, it is nonsense you will
talk."

At this moment Sheila turned round and said, "Oh, we have forgotten poor
Mairi. Mairi, why did you not leave the fish for Duncan? They are too
heavy for you. I will carry them to the house?"

But Lavender sprang forward, and insisted on taking possession of the
thick cord with its considerable weight of lythe.

"This is my cousin Mairi," said Sheila; and forthwith the young,
fair-faced, timid-eyed girl shook hands with the gentlemen, and said,
just as if she had been watching Sheila, "And are you ferry well, sir?"

For the rest of the way up to the house Lavender walked by the side of
Sheila; and as the string of lythe had formed the introduction to their
talk, it ran pretty much upon natural history. In about five minutes she
had told him more about sea-birds and fish than ever he knew in his
life; and she wound up this information by offering to take him out on
the following morning, that he might himself catch some lythe.

"But I am a wretchedly bad fisherman, Miss Mackenzie," he said. "It is
some years since I tried to throw a fly."

"Oh, there is no need for good fishing when you catch lythe," she said
earnestly. "You will see Mr. Ingram catch them. It is only a big white
fly you will need, and a long line, and when the fish takes the fly,
down he goes--a great depth. Then when you have got him and he is
killed, you must cut the sides, as you see that is done, and string him
to a rope and trail him behind the boat all the way home. If you do not
do that, it iss no use at all to eat. But if you like the
salmon-fishing, my papa will teach you that. There is no one," she added
proudly, "can catch salmon like my papa--not even Duncan--and the
gentlemen who come in the autumn to Stornoway, they are quite surprised
when my papa goes to fish with them."

"I suppose he is a good shot too," said the young man, amused to notice
the proud way in which the girl spoke of her father.

"Oh, he can shoot anything. He will shoot a seal if he comes up but for
one moment above the water; and all the birds--he will get you all the
birds if you will wish to take any away with you. We have no deer on the
island--it is too small for that--but in the Lewis and in Harris there
are many, many thousands of deer, and my papa has many invitations when
the gentlemen come up in the autumn; and if you look in the game-book of
the lodges, you will see there is not any one who has shot so many deer
as my papa--not any one whatever."

At length they reached the building of dark and rude stone-work, with
its red coping, its spacious porch and its small enclosure of garden in
front. Lavender praised the flowers in this enclosure: he guessed they
were Sheila's particular care; but in truth there was nothing rare or
delicate among the plants growing in this exposed situation. There were
a few clusters of large yellow pansies, a calceolaria or two, plenty of
wallflower, some clove-pinks, and an abundance of sweet-william in all
manner of colors. But the chief beauty of the small garden was a
magnificent tree-fuchsia which grew in front of one of the windows, and
was covered with deep rose-red flowers set amid its small and deep-green
leaves. For the rest, a bit of honeysuckle was trained up one side of
the porch, and at the small wooden gate there were two bushes of
sweetbrier that filled the warm air with fragrance.

Just before entering the house the two strangers turned to have a look
at the spacious landscape lying all around in the perfect calm of a
summer day. And lo! before them there was but a blinding mass of white
that glared upon their eyes, and caused them to see the far sea and the
shores and the hills as but faint shadows appearing through a silvery
haze. A thin fleece of cloud lay across the sun, but the light was
nevertheless so intense that the objects near at hand--a disused boat
lying bottom upward, an immense anchor of foreign make, and some such
things--seemed to be as black as night as they lay on the warm road. But
when the eye got beyond the house and the garden, and the rough hillside
leading down to Loch Roag, all the world appeared to be a blaze of calm,
silent and luminous heat. Suainabhal and its brother mountains were only
as clouds in the south. Along the western horizon the portion of the
Atlantic that could be seen lay like a silent lake under a white sky. To
get any touch of color, they had to turn eastward, and there the
sunlight faintly fell on the green shores of Borva, on the narrows of
Loch Roag, and the loose red sail of a solitary smack that was slowly
coming round a headland. They could hear the sound of the long oars. A
pale line of shadow lay in the wake of the boat, but otherwise the black
hull and the red sail seemed to be coming through a plain of molten
silver. When the young men turned to go into the house the hall seemed a
cavern of impenetrable darkness, and there was a flush of crimson light
dancing before their eyes.

When Ingram had had his room pointed out, Lavender followed him into it
and shut the door.

"By Jove, Ingram," he said, with a singular light of enthusiasm on his
handsome face, "what a beautiful voice that girl has! I have never heard
anything so soft and musical in all my life; and then when she smiles
what perfect teeth she has! And then, you know, there is an appearance,
a style, a grace about her figure--But, I say, do you seriously mean to
tell me you are not in love with her?"

"Of course I am not," said the other impatiently, as he was busily
engaged with his portmanteau.

"Then let me give you a word of information," said the younger man, with
an air of profound shrewdness: "she is in love with you."

Ingram rose with some little touch of vexation on his face: "Look here,
Lavender: I am going to talk to you seriously. I wish you wouldn't fancy
that every one is in that condition of simmering love-making you delight
in. You never were in love, I believe--I doubt whether you ever will
be--but you are always fancying yourself in love, and writing very
pretty verses about it, and painting very pretty heads. I like the
verses and the paintings well enough, however they are come by; but
don't mislead yourself into believing that you know anything whatever of
a real and serious passion by having engaged in all sorts of imaginative
and semi-poetical dreams. It is a much more serious thing than that,
mind you, when it comes to a man. And, for Heaven's sake, don't
attribute any of that sort of sentimental make-believe to either Sheila
Mackenzie or myself. We are not romantic folks. We have no imaginative
gifts whatever, but we are very glad, you know, to be attentive and
grateful to those who have. The fact is, I don't think it quite fair--"

"Let us suppose I am lectured enough" said the other, somewhat stiffly.
"I suppose I am as good a judge of the character of a woman as most
other men, although I am no great student, and have no hard and dried
rules of philosophy at my fingers' ends. Perhaps, however, one may learn
more by mixing with other people and going out into the world than by
sitting in a room with a dozen of books, and persuading one's self that
men and women are to be studied in that fashion."

"Go away, you stupid boy, and unpack your portmanteau, and don't quarrel
with me," said Ingram, putting out on the table some things he had
brought for Sheila; "and if you are friendly with Sheila and treat her
like a human being, instead of trying to put a lot of romance and
sentiment about her, she will teach you more than you could learn in a
hundred drawing-rooms in a thousand years."


CHAPTER III.

THERE WAS A KING IN THULE.

He never took that advice. He had already transformed Sheila into a
heroine during the half hour of their stroll from the beach and around
the house. Not that he fell in love with her at first sight, or anything
even approaching to that. He merely made her the central figure of a
little speculative romance, as he had made many another woman before. Of
course, in these little fanciful dramas, written along the sky-line, as
it were, of his life, he invariably pictured himself as the fitting
companion of the fair creature he saw there. Who but himself could
understand the sentiment of her eyes, and teach her little love-ways,
and express unbounded admiration of her? More than one practical young
woman, indeed, in certain circles of London society, had been informed
by her friends that Mr. Lavender was dreadfully in love with her; and
had been much surprised, after this confirmation of her suspicions, that
he sought no means of bringing the affair to a reasonable and sensible
issue. He did not even amuse himself by flirting with her, as men would
willingly do who could not be charged with any serious purpose whatever.
His devotion was more mysterious and remote. A rumor would get about
that Mr. Lavender had finished another of those charming heads in
pastel, which, at a distance, reminded one of Greuze, and that Lady
So-and-so, who had bought it forthwith, had declared that it was the
image of this young lady who was partly puzzled and partly vexed by the
incomprehensible conduct of her reputed admirer. It was the fashion, in
these social circles, to buy those heads of Lavender when he chose to
paint them. He had achieved a great reputation by them. The good people
liked to have a genius in their own set whom they had discovered, and
who was only to be appreciated by persons of exceptional taste and
penetration. Lavender, the uninitiated were assured, was a most
cultivated and brilliant young man. He had composed some charming songs.
He had written, from time to time, some quite delightful little poems,
over which fair eyes had grown full and liquid. Who had not heard of the
face that he painted for a certain young lady whom every one expected
him to marry?

The young man escaped a great deal of the ordinary consequences of this
petting, but not all. He was at bottom really true-hearted, frank and
generous--generous even to an extreme--but he had acquired a habit of
producing striking impressions which dogged and perverted his every
action and speech. He disliked losing a few shilling at billiards, but
he did not mind losing a few pounds: the latter was good for a story.
Had he possessed any money to invest in shares, he would have been
irritated by small rises or small falls; but he would have been vain of
a big rise, and he would have regarded a big fall with equanimity, as
placing him in a dramatic light. The exaggerations produced by this
habit of his fostered strange delusions in the minds of people who did
not know him very well: and sometimes the practical results, in the way
of expected charities or what not, amazed him. He could not understand
why people should have made such mistakes, and resented them as an
injustice.

And as they sat at dinner on this still, brilliant evening in summer, it
was Sheila's turn to be clothed in the garments of romance. Her father,
with his great gray beard and heavy brow, became the King of Thule,
living in this solitary house overlooking the sea, and having memories
of a dead sweetheart. His daughter, the princess, had the glamour of a
thousand legends dwelling in her beautiful eyes; and when she walked by
the shores of the Atlantic, that were now getting yellow under the
sunset, what strange and unutterable thoughts must appear in the wonder
of her face! He remembered no more how he had pulled to pieces Ingram's
praises of Sheila. What had become of the "ordinary young lady, who
would be a little interesting, if a little stupid, before marriage, and
after marriage sink into the dull, domestic hind"? There could be no
doubt that Sheila often sat silent for a considerable time, with her
eyes fixed on her father's face when he spoke, or turning to look at
some other speaker. Had Lavender now been asked if this silence had not
a trifle of dullness in it, he would have replied by asking if there
were dullness in the stillness and the silence of the sea. He grew to
regard her calm and thoughtful look as a sort of spell; and if you had
asked him what Sheila was like, he would have answered by saying that
there was moonlight in her face.

The room, too, in which this mystic princess sat was strange and
wonderful. There were no doors visible, for the four walls were
throughout covered by a paper of foreign manufacture, representing
spacious Tyrolese landscapes and incidents of the chase. When Lavender
had first entered this chamber his eye had been shocked by these coarse
and prominent pictures--by the green rivers, the blue lakes and the
snow-peaks that rose above certain ruddy chalets. Here a chamois was
stumbling down a ravine, and there an operatic peasant, some eight or
ten inches in actual length, was pointing a gun. The large figures, the
coarse colors, the impossible scenes--all this looked, at first sight,
to be in the worst possible taste; and Lavender was convinced that
Sheila had nothing to do with the introduction of this abominable
decoration. But somehow, when he turned to the line of ocean that was
visible from the window, to the lonely shores of the island and the
monotony of colors showing in the still picture without, he began to
fancy that there might be a craving up in these latitudes for some
presentation, however rude and glaring, of the richer and more
variegated life of the South. The figures and mountains on the walls
became less prominent. He saw no incongruity in a whole chalet giving
way, and allowing Duncan, who waited at table, to bring forth from this
aperture to the kitchen a steaming dish of salmon, while he spoke some
words in Gaelic to the servants at the other end of the tube. He even
forgot to be surprised at the appearance of little Mairi, with whom he
had shaken hands a little while before, coming round the table with
potatoes. He did not, as a rule, shake hands with servant-maids, but was
not this fair-haired, wistful-eyed girl some relative, friend or
companion of Shiela's? and had he not already begun to lose all
perception of the incongruous or the absurd in the strange pervading
charm with which Sheila's presence filled the place?

He suddenly found Mackenzie's deep-set eyes fixed upon him, and became
aware that the old man had been mysteriously announcing to Ingram that
there were more political movements abroad than people fancied. Sheila
sat still and listened to her father as he expounded these things, and
showed that, although at a distance, he could perceive the signs of the
times. Was it not incumbent, moreover, on a man who had to look after a
number of poor and simple folks, that he should be on the alert?

"It iss not bekass you will live in London you will know everything,"
said the King of Borva, with a certain significance in his tone. "There
iss many things a man does not see at his feet that another man will see
who is a good way off. The International, now--"

He glanced furtively at Lavender.

"--I hef been told there will be agents going out every day to all
parts of this country and other countries, and they will hef plenty of
money to live like gentlemen, and get among the poor people, and fill
their minds with foolish nonsense about a revolution. Oh yes, I hear
about it all, and there iss many members of Parliament in it; and it iss
every day they will get farther and farther, all working hard, though no
one sees them who does not understand to be on the watch."

Here again the young man received a quiet, scrutinizing glance; and it
began to dawn upon him, to his infinite astonishment, that Mackenzie
half suspected him of being an emissary of the International. In the
case of any other man he would have laughed and paid no heed, but how
could he permit Sheila's father to regard him with any such suspicion?

"Don't you think, sir," he said boldly, "that those Internationalists
are a lot of incorrigible idiots?"

As if a shrewd observer of men and motives were to be deceived by such a
protest! Mackenzie regarded him with increased suspicion, although he
endeavored to conceal the fact that he was watching the young man from
time to time. Lavender saw all the favor he had won during the day
disappearing, and moodily wondered when he should have a chance of
explanation.

After dinner they went outside and sat down on a bench in the garden,
and the men lit their cigars. It was a cool and pleasant evening. The
sun had gone down in red fire behind the Atlantic, and there was still
left a rich glow of crimson in the west, while overhead, in the pale
yellow of the sky, some filmy clouds of rose-color lay motionless. How
calm was the sea out there, and the whiter stretch of water coming into
Loch Roag! The cool air of the twilight was scented with sweetbrier. The
wash of the ripples along the coast could be heard in the stillness. It
was a time for lovers to sit by the sea, careless of the future or the
past.

But why would this old man keep prating of his political prophecies?
Lavender asked of himself. Sheila had spoken scarcely a word all the
evening; and of what interest could it be to her to listen to theories
of revolution and the dangers besetting our hot-headed youth? She merely
stood by the side of her father, with her hand on his shoulder. He
noticed, however, that she paid particular attention whenever Ingram
spoke; and he wondered whether she perceived that Ingram was partly
humoring the old man, at the same time that he was pleasing himself with
a series of monologues, interrupted only by his cigar.

"That is true enough, Mr. Mackenzie," Ingram would say, lying back with
his two hands clasped round his knee, as usual: "you've got to be
careful of the opinions that are spread abroad, even in Borva, where not
much danger is to be expected. But I don't suppose our young men are
more destructive in their notions than young men always have been. You
know every young fellow starts in life by knocking down all the beliefs
he finds before him, and then he spends the rest of his life in setting
them up again. It is only after some years he gets to know that all the
wisdom of the world lies in the old commonplaces he once despised. He
finds that the old familiar ways are the best, and he sinks into being a
commonplace person, with much satisfaction to himself. My friend
Lavender, now, is continually charging me with being commonplace. I
admit the charge. I have drifted back into all the old ways and
beliefs--about religion and marriage and patriotism, and what not--that
ten years ago I should have treated with ridicule."

"Suppose the process continues?" suggested Lavender, with some evidence
of pique.

"Suppose it does," continued Ingram carelessly. "Ten years hence I may
be proud to become a vestryman, and have the most anxious care about the
administration of the rates. I shall be looking after the drainage of
houses and the treatment of paupers and the management of Sunday
schools--But all this is an invasion of your province, Sheila," he
suddenly added, looking up to her.

The girl laughed, and said, "Then I have been commonplace from the
beginning?"

Ingram was about to make all manner of protests and apologies, when
Mackenzie said, "Sheila, it wass time you will go in-doors, if you have
nothing about your head. Go in and sing a song to us, and we will listen
to you; and not a sad song, but a good merry song. These teffles of the
fishermen, it iss always drownings they will sing about from the morning
till the night."

Was Sheila about to sing in this clear, strange twilight, while they sat
there and watched the yellow moon come up behind the southern hills?
Lavender had heard so much of her singing of those fishermen's ballads
that he could think of nothing more to add to the enchantment of this
wonderful night. But he was disappointed. The girl put her hand on her
father's head, and reminded him that she had had her big greyhound Bras
imprisoned all the afternoon, that she had to go down to Borvabost with
a message for some people who were leaving by the boat in the morning,
and would the gentlemen therefore excuse her not singing to them for
this one evening?

"But you cannot go away down to Borvabost by yourself, Sheila," said
Ingram. "It will be dark before you return."

"It will not be darker than this all the night through," said the girl.

"But I hope you will let us go with you," said Lavender, rather
anxiously; and she assented with a gracious smile, and went to fetch the
great deerhound that was her constant companion.

And lo! he found himself walking with a princess in this wonder-land
through that magic twilight that prevails in northern latitudes.
Mackenzie and Ingram had gone on in front. The large deerhound, after
regarding him attentively, had gone to its mistress's side, and remained
closely there. Lavender could scarcely believe his ears that the girl
was talking to him lightly and frankly, as though she had known him for
years, and was telling him of all her troubles with the folks at
Borvabost, and of those poor people whom she was now going to see. No
sooner did he understand that they were emigrants, and that they were
going to Glasgow before leaving finally for America, than in quite an
honest and enthusiastic fashion he began to bewail the sad fate of such
poor wretches as have to forsake their native land, and to accuse the
aristocracy of the country of every act of selfishness, and to charge
the government with a shameful indifference. But Sheila brought him up
suddenly. In the gentlest fashion she told him what she knew of these
poor people, and how emigration affected them, and so forth, until he
was ready to curse the hour in which he had blundered into taking a side
on a question about which he cared nothing and knew less.

"But some other time," continued Sheila, "I will tell you what we do
here, and I will show you a great many letters I have from friends of
mine who have gone to Greenock and to New York and Canada. Oh yes, it is
very bad for the old people: they never get reconciled to the
change--never; but it is very good for the young people, and they are
glad of it, and are much better off than they were here. You will see
how proud they are of the better clothes they have, and of good food,
and of money to put in the bank; and how could they get that in the
Highlands, where the land is so poor that a small piece is of no use,
and they have not money to rent the large sheep-farms? It is very bad to
have people go away--it is very hand on many of them--but what can they
do? The piece of ground that was very good for the one family, that is
expected to keep the daughters when they marry, and the sons when they
marry, and then there are five or six families to live on it. And hard
work--that will not do much with very bad land and the bad weather we
have here. The people get downhearted when they have their crops spoiled
by the long rain, and they cannot get their peats dried; and very often
the fishing turns out bad, and they have no money at all to carry on the
farm. But now you will see Borvabost."

Lavender had to confess that this wonderful princess would persist in
talking in a very matter-of-fact way. All the afternoon, while he was
weaving a luminous web of imagination around her, she was continually
cutting it asunder, and stepping forth as an authority on the growing of
some wretched plants or the means by which rain was to be excluded from
window-sills. And now, in this strange twilight, when she ought to have
been singing of the cruelties of the sea or listening to half-forgotten
legends of mermaids, she was engaged with the petty fortunes of men and
girls who were pleased to find themselves prospering in the Glasgow
police-force or educating themselves in a milliner's shop in Edinburgh.
She did not appear conscious that she was a princess. Indeed, she seemed
to have no consciousness of herself at all, and was altogether occupied
in giving him information about practical subjects in which he professed
a profound interest he certainly did not feel.

But even Sheila, when they had reached the loftiest part of their route,
and could see beneath them the island and the water surrounding it, was
struck by the exceeding beauty of the twilight; and as for her
companion, he remembered it many a time thereafter as if it were a dream
of the sea. Before them lay the Atlantic--a pale line of blue, still,
silent and remote. Overhead, the sky was of a clear, pale gold, with
heavy masses of violet cloud stretched across from north to south, and
thickening as they got near to the horizon. Down at their feet, near the
shore, a dusky line of huts and houses was scarcely visible; and over
these lay a pale blue film of peat-smoke that did not move in the still
air. Then they saw the bay into which the White Water runs, and they
could trace the yellow glimmer of the river stretching into the island
through a level valley of bog and morass. Far away, toward the east, lay
the bulk of the island--dark green undulations of moorland and pasture;
and there, in the darkness, the gable of one white house had caught the
clear light of the sky, and was gleaming westward like a star. But all
this was as nothing to the glory that began to shine in the south-east,
where the sky was of a pale violet over the peaks of Mealasabhal and
Suainabhal. There, into the beautiful dome, rose the golden crescent of
the moon, warm in color, as though it still retained the last rays of
the sunset. A line of quivering gold fell across Loch Roag, and touched
the black hull and spars of the boat in which Sheila had been sailing in
the morning. That bay down there, with its white sands and massive
rocks, its still expanse of water, and its background of mountain-peaks
palely colored by the yellow moonlight, seemed really a home for a magic
princess who was shut off from all the world. But here, in front of
them, was another sort of sea and another sort of life--a small
fishing-village hidden under a cloud of pale peat-smoke, and fronting
the great waters of the Atlantic itself, which lay under a gloom of
violet clouds.

"Now," said Sheila with a smile, "we have not always weather as good as
this in the island. Will you not sit on the bench over there with Mr.
Ingram, and wait until my papa and I come up from the village again?"

"May not I go down with you?"

"No. The dogs would learn you were a stranger, and there would be a
great deal of noise, and there will be many of the poor people asleep."

So Sheila had her way; and she and her father went down the hillside
into the gloom of the village, while Lavender went to join his friend
Ingram, who was sitting on the wooden bench, silently smoking a clay
pipe.

"Well, I have never seen the like of this," said Lavender in his
impetuous way: "it is worth going a thousand miles to see. Such colors
and such clearness! and then the splendid outlines of those mountains,
and the grand sweep of this loch! This is the sort of thing that drives
me to despair, and might make one vow never to touch a brush again. And
Sheila says it will be like this all the night through."

He was unaware that he had spoken of her in a very familiar way, but
Ingram noticed it.

"Ingram," he said suddenly, "that is the first girl I have ever seen
whom I should like to marry."

"Stuff!"

"But it is true. I have never seen any one like her--so handsome, so
gentle, and yet so very frank in setting you right. And then she is so
sensible, you know, and not too proud to have much interest in all sorts
of common affairs--"

There was a smile in Ingram's face, and his companion stopped in some
vexation: "You are not a very sympathetic confidant."

"Because I know the story of old. You have told it me about twenty
women, and it is always the same. I tell you, you don't know anything at
all about Sheila Mackenzie yet: perhaps you never may. I suppose you
will make a heroine of her, and fall in love with her for a fortnight,
and then go back to London and get cured by listening to the witticisms
of Mrs. Lorraine."

"Thank you very much."

"Oh, I didn't mean to offend you. Some day, no doubt, you will love a
woman for what she is, not for what you fancy her to be; but that is a
piece of good-fortune that seldom occurs to a youth of your age. To
marry in a dream, and wake up six months afterward--that is the fate of
ingenuous twenty-three. But don't you let Mackenzie hear you talk of
marrying Sheila, or he'll have some of his fishermen throw you into Loch
Roag."

"There, now, that _is_ one point I can't understand about her," said
Lavender eagerly. "How can a girl of her shrewdness and good sense have
such a belief in that humbugging old idiot of a father of hers, who
fancies me a political emissary, and plays small tricks to look like
diplomacy? It is always 'My papa can do this,' and 'My papa can do
that,' and 'There is no one at all like my papa.' And she is continually
fondling him, and giving little demonstrations of affection, of which he
takes no more notice than if he were an Arctic bear."

Ingram looked up with some surprise in his face. "You don't mean to say,
Lavender," he said slowly, "that you are already jealous of the girl's
own father?"

He could not answer, for at this moment Sheila, her father and the big
greyhound came up the hill. And again it was Lavender's good fortune to
walk with Sheila across the moorland path they had traversed some little
time before. And now the moon was still higher in the heavens, and the
yellow lane of light that crossed the violet waters of Loch Roag
quivered in a deeper gold. The night-air was scented with the Dutch
clover growing down by the shore. They could hear the curlew whistling
and the plover calling amid that monotonous plash of the waves that
murmured all around the coast. When they returned to the house the
darker waters of the Atlantic and the purple clouds of the west were
shut out from sight, and before them there was only the liquid plain of
Loch Roag, with its pathway of yellow fire, and far away on the other
side the shoulders and peaks of the southern mountains, that had grown
gray and clear and sharp in the beautiful twilight. And this was
Sheila's home.

[To be continued.]

FOOTNOTES:

[G] "My black-haired girl, my pretty girl, my black-haired girl, don't
leave me." _Nighean dubh_ is pronounced _Nyean du_.

[H] Literally, _Gearaidh-na'h-Aimhne_--"the cutting of the river."

[I] Another name given by the islanders to these stones is
_Fir-bhreige_, "false men." Both names, False Men and the Mourners,
should be of some interest to antiquarians, for they will suit pretty
nearly any theory.




WINTER.


    The golden sunshine has fled away,
    The clouds o'erhead hang heavy and gray,
    The world is woefully sad to-day;

    And I am thinking of you, dear, you.
    The cold clay hides from the rain and dew
    The tenderest heart that the world e'er knew.

    Why should I think of you when the rain
    Smiteth so sharply the window-pane,
    And the wild winds round the old house 'plain?

    You were so sweet and sunny and bright,
    Ever your presence brought life and light,
    And I recall you in storm and night.

    When snow-shrouds hang on the corpse-cold trees,
    When sharp frosts sting and the north winds freeze,
    What has your mem'ry to do with these?

    O fair lost love! O love that is dead!
    The pleasant days from my life are fled,
    The rosy morns and the sunsets red.

    The light has faded from out my life,
    Leaving the clouds and the stormy strife,
    And the keen sharp cold that cuts like a knife.

    The days and the months, how slow they glide,
    Gray-robed and cold-breathed and frozen-eyed!
    The summer died for me when you died.

    O world of woe and of want and pain!
    O heaven of clouds and storm and rain!
    When shall I find my summer again?


                        LUCY H. HOOPER.




NEW WASHINGTON.


A stranger visiting the national capital should begin by leaving it. He
should cross the Anacostia River at the Navy-yard, climb the heights
behind the village of Uniontown, be careful to find exactly the right
path, and seat himself on the parapet of old Fort Stanton. His feeling
of fatigue will be overcome by one of astonishment that the scene should
contain so much that is beautiful in nature, so much that is exceedingly
novel if not very good in art, and so much that has the deepest
historical interest. From the blue hills of Prince George's county in
Maryland winds the Anacostia, whose waters at his feet float all but the
very largest vessels of our navy, while but six miles above they float
nothing larger than a Bladensburg goose. To the left flows the Potomac,
a mile wide. Between the rivers lies Washington. A vast amphitheatre,
its green or gray walls cloven only by the two rivers, appears to
surround the city. "Amphitheatre" is the word, for within the great
circle, proportioned to it in size and magnificence, dwarfing all other
objects, stands the veritable arena where our public gladiators and wild
beasts hold their combats. This of course is the Capitol, whose white
dome rises like a blossoming lily from the dark expanse below.

Along these summits are the remains of a chain of earthworks that
completely enveloped the capital. They are all overgrown by verdure, and
are fast disappearing; but whenever the site of one is relieved against
the clear sky a grassy embrasure or a bit of rampart may yet be seen
from a distance. Here stretched

    The watchfires of a hundred circling camps,

whose light is in the "Battle-Hymn of the Republic," for it was a
personal view of them, and of these altars built in the evening dews and
damps, which gave form to the great lyric. Here in a few years, when
more of the business-men of Washington shall have learned how to do
business, or when her social development shall have detained the
cultured and wealthy who now come and go, will be found a circle of
beautiful villas and nearly all the luxuries of summer life.

Below the high bank opposite, where the Congressional Cemetery skirts
the city, where some famous men are actually buried, and where Congress
places cenotaphs that look like long rows of antiquated beehives for all
who die while members of that body, a line of black dots crosses the
Anacostia like the corks of a fisherman's seine. They are the piles that
upheld a bridge in the summer of 1814. On the hills to the right the
little army of five thousand redcoats made a feint toward this bridge,
and caused the Americans to burn it. Away to the left, across the
Potomac, stretches Long Bridge, which was also fired the next night by
the British and by the fleeing inhabitants of the captured town.

The eight miles of Virginia shore visible from Washington contain really
but three objects. Two or three dark chimneys and steeples and a few
misty outlines are all one needs to see of Alexandria, which is six
miles down the river, and appears about as ancient as its Egyptian
namesake. Nearer, the monotony is broken by the tower of Fairfax
Seminary; nearer still, among the oaks of Arlington, by the mansion of
Custis-Lee, imposing, pillared and cream-colored; or it was the last in
the days when cream had a color.

Descending from the old fort, the stranger should go at once to
Georgetown and climb up into the little burying-ground of Holyrood. The
view thence will give him all that was excluded from the other. He will
now be prepared to examine Washington in detail, and as this is not a
guide-book he shall go his way alone. But the "gentle reader" is
requested to linger an hour longer upon the natural walls and look down
with me on the dark city.

Below is such a growth of beautiful and strange that we can understand
it only by remembering that we look down on all the United States. Into
that problem of squares and circles and triangles wise men from the East
plunge and see Beacon street; wise men from the West plunge and see
Poker Flat; and from the highest ground we can find we will try to see
the whole of Washington. We cannot distinguish a friend's house from an
enemy's. The lines are mingled and the colors blended by our distance.
Individuals are lost to sight entirely. What would be such a conflict of
sounds down there that we should never be certain of what we heard, is
now so faint a hum that it does not disturb us or affect our speech. We
have risen into a better atmosphere, and find that some things which
were ugly have grown good and graceful.

To allude to all the noted and novel things in this complicated scene
would be to fill a book, and enough pre-Raphaelites are already browsing
there. Giving due attention to particulars in their places, we must yet
give effects in sweeping strokes, steering as best we can between the
Scylla of didactic details and the Charybdis of glittering generalities.

The candid observer wonders not that Washington is so far below what it
ought to be, but that it exists as a city at all. It has suffered
calamities that would have extinguished any other place. The vitality
that could survive them would seem capable of surviving anything. Other
towns have had to contend against natural disadvantages, but they have
had the aid of citizens who knew what they wanted, and who used the
public money and energy and brains for the public good. But here has
been the novel sight of a city having every natural advantage, yet
compelled to fight its own citizens for life; to see the public money
and energy and brains--what little there were--used to kill not only the
town, but the people in it; to support men of weight in the community
who really did not want it polluted by trade or manufactures or any
such vulgar things.

The Capitol, which now, like the Irishman's shanty, has the front door
on the back side, was made to face the east because in that direction
lay as fine a site as ever a town possessed, and there the city was to
be built. To the westward the ground was such that men are living who as
boys waded for reed-birds and caught catfish where now is the centre of
business. The necessity of transforming this tract in the very beginning
of trade retarded the general growth incalculably. The owners of the
good ground didn't want to do anything themselves, and were too greedy
to let anybody else. The Executive Mansion, a mile to the westward,
attracted other public buildings about it; the people who had to support
themselves bought real estate in the swamps; those who lived without
business of their own followed them of course; and the fine plateau
prepared by Nature has been touched only so far as improvement has been
compelled by forces radiating from the other side of the Capitol. The
life and trade that tend to crystallize around one centre are still much
dissipated by the policy that ruined Capitol Hill; but as this can no
longer endanger the general prosperity, it is now more a blessing than a
calamity. It makes sure and speedy the reclamation of the waste places,
while the improvement of all the good ones must take place at last. The
owners of the barren sites which yet break the continuity of blocks in
good localities can sit still and "hold on" if they please, but they
must expect to see the "worthless" tracts--Swampoodle, Murder Bay and
Hell's Bottom--fill with life and rise in value faster than their own.

Another calamity, which has grown with the city instead of being
outgrown, is the changes that have been permitted to take place in the
Potomac. Long Bridge, instead of being built so as to permit an
uninterrupted flow of the stream, was composed for a great distance of
an earthen road--a dam--arresting half the water of the river. This
temporarily benefited the Georgetown channel, no doubt, by forcing all
the water into it. But a marsh is rising in the middle of the stream,
creeping rapidly up to the Washington wharves, threatening the health of
the city, and so crippling its commerce that an expensive remedy must be
speedily applied. There is some difference of opinion as to the
comparative injuries and benefits arising from the bridge, but the fact
remains clear that this important river has suffered needless injury to
a degree that is deplorable. In the past, however, the fault has been as
much with the city as with Congress. That body cannot improve rivers
where there is no commerce to be benefited, nor give new facilities to
towns that do not make the most of what they have. But the gazer from
Fort Stanton--glancing beyond the Navy-yard and the shot-battered
monitors that lie there, across Greenleaf's Point and the Arsenal, made
tragic by the death of many a British soldier and of the Lincoln-Seward
assassins half a century later--overlooking the wharves of Washington
and dimly descrying the masts at Georgetown, now sees a traffic that has
earned a consideration it has not received. A few weeks ago we paused in
an after-dinner walk, down there on the Arsenal boulevard, to watch the
troubles of a crew and the labors of a tug which were altogether too
suggestive. A senseless fellow of a captain came sailing up the river
from a foreign port, his vessel laden with a valuable cargo, and
attempted a landing at Washington. He knew no better than to suppose
that the capital of this nation, on one of our finest rivers, possessing
all its days a navy-yard, would permit itself to be approached by a
merchantman. He stuck in the mud within a hundred yards of the wharf.
There he spent three or four days in anxiety and chagrin, and finally
got a tug to pull him back into navigable water. He swung about, made
haste down the river and took his vessel to another port, uttering some
natural oaths, no doubt, and wondering what kind of country he had got
into. A small vessel going from Washington to Georgetown heads for
Chesapeake Bay, passes up around the island of filth accumulated by the
bridge, and sails four miles in ascending two.

Bordering the broad belt of grass and trees which we see sweeping
gracefully through the heart of the city from the Capitol to the
President's, where rise the towers of the Smithsonian, the roof of the
Agricultural Bureau, and all that is built of the Washington Monument,
there stretched another calamity, which existed some fifty years, which
was at last extinguished during 1872 at an immense cost to the city,
which was one of the "improvements" of the past, which once employed the
public money and energy--we cannot repeat brains--to kill not only the
town, but the people in it. This was the great pestiferous open sewer
that stole into a filthy existence under the name of the Washington
Canal.

But there was a greater misfortune than any of these. Slavery need only
be mentioned. More of Washington's present defects are attributable to
it in one way or another than to all else. Yet under this crowning
calamity, added to the others, the undulating plain before us, which
appears so sluggish from the height to which we have climbed, has within
seventy-five years passed from a wilderness into a city of one hundred
and eleven thousand inhabitants. Although the general government kept
the breath of life in it during a period when perhaps nothing else could
have done so, yet such a growth, under all the circumstances, cannot be
accounted for without recognizing an inherent strength that has never
been acknowledged by the multitudes who come to "see" Washington. It
proves that she may have a significance of her own. The visitor should
remember that New York and Boston are enjoying, and Philadelphia has
nearly reached, the third century of their lives.

This scene from the heights is a fascinating one for the day-dreamer.
Everything is in harmony with the past character of the capital.
Everything is misty, vast, uncertain, grand and ill-defined. One does
not see clearly the boundaries--the city and country are one. Every
street we trace in the distance, almost every building, almost every
foot of ground, has gathered something of tradition from the lives of
the statesmen, generals, jurists, diplomates who have lived and wrought
here for three-quarters of a century. The visions that passed before the
eyes of Washington as he stood on the Observatory Hill there, a
subaltern under Braddock, contemplating the wilderness about him and
imagining the future; the pictures that filled the fancy of the
intractable L'Enfant as he defined the great mall and thought of the
gardens between the Tuileries and the Chamber of Deputies; Andrew J.
Downing giving his last days to such an arrangement of the trees and
grass as would be worthy of the design; President Madison and his
cabinet, with a useless little army at their heels, flying in despair
from yonder bloody hillside; Admiral Cockburn derisively riding an old
mare up Pennsylvania Avenue; the burning Capitol and White House
lighting up the gloom of that hideous night; Stephen Decatur shot to
death just round the bend of the Anacostia there; the conflicts by
tongue and pen that have again and again gone on here till the whole
country swayed; Gamaliel Bailey silencing a mob at his door; the
histories that lie buried under the thirty thousand headboards that
gleam like an army of ghosts among the trees of Arlington; Abraham
Lincoln gasping his life away in that little Tenth street house; his
assassin dashing in darkness across the bridge at our feet, over which
we have just passed, and spurring almost into the shadow of the parapet
where we stand;--all these things, and a hundred more as tempting to the
dreamer, come crowding on the mind at every glance. Yet who stops to
call Washington a romantic city? When the White House, just visible from
those tree-tops, shall have ceased, as it soon must do, to be the home
of the chief magistrate, what future magician shall summon down those
cheerless stairways the ghostly procession of dead Presidents, as our
first literary necromancer marshaled the shades of royal governors
across the threshold of the Province House? We turn from all this to
speak of the practical affairs of to-day which await us in the city,
with a reluctance that delays our feet as we descend.

A phrase applied, we believe, by Dickens, when writing of the avenues
here many years ago, and illustrating his remarkable faculty of telling
the most truth when he exaggerated most, rises so constantly to mind
when one considers what Washington has been, that we are tempted to make
it a kind of text. He described the great houseless thoroughfares as
"beginning nowhere and ending in nothing." That phrase sets old
Washington before the reader as the literal truth could never do.

But the reader must now remember that old Washington is going--that a
new Washington has come. The city is no longer disposed to make
apologies, wait for generosity or beg for patronage. It is disposed--and
has proved its disposition--to take off its seedy coat and go to work in
its own way. Its waiting is now only for enlightened judgment from
others, and its begging is only for justice.

The change of local government in 1871, when Congress gave the District
of Columbia a legislature and a representative, was the particular event
from which may be dated such innovations as make necessary a revision of
the popular opinion. The visitors who come this month, and who have not
been here since the last inauguration, will have to learn the capital
anew. While the establishment of the territorial government and the
organization of its outgrowths--particularly the Board of Public
Works--mark the new departure by physical changes, all will understand
that it was the first gun at Charleston, startling the stagnant pool
here, which set in motion the successive waves that carried the city up
to this departure. The public affairs of the city became practically
unmanageable. A joint-stock company could not organize for the most
trifling business without depending on the slow and uncertain action of
Congress for a charter. A few active men, who saw that the old order of
things could be endured no longer, met quietly in 1870 at the house of
an honored citizen on K street to see what further they could see. They
continued to meet at each other's homes, lightening their interchange of
thought for the public by such an extension of hospitality as drew into
their circle many influential Congressmen, and converted them to the new
idea that there was something in Washington besides the national
service. The result was, that the city government was abolished; a
legislative assembly was created; a governor was appointed by the
President of the United States; and a delegate was sent to Congress,
instead of a crowd of lobbyists, to represent the District of Columbia.
This delegate is always to be a member of the committee on the District,
Congress has the constitutional right of exclusive legislation, and the
Assembly cannot impose taxes of any consequence without especial
authority from the people.

The wisdom of the change was doubted at first by many real friends of
progress, who thought they saw grave legal complications arising; who
knew what popular government in a large city, with no restriction of the
election franchise, might mean; who at times thought of New York with a
shudder; who knew that as Washington was the centre of everything
political, it was necessarily the centre of political corruption; that
her alleys were crowded with ignorant freedmen; that her ward
politicians were as unscrupulous and skillful as the same class in other
cities; and who thought it safer to trust the average Congressman than
the small political trader and his chattels. But Congress sits as a
perpetual court of appeal on the spot where its members can judge from
personal knowledge, ready to overrule any act of the Assembly that can
be shown to be a bad one; and one house of the Assembly, with the
governor and executive boards, is appointed by the President. The
election of the larger house and of the delegate to Congress is
sufficient security to the people, and Washington is to-day in most
respects the best-governed city of its size in the United States. The
powers of the little Assembly are very limited: the governor can veto
its measures; Congress can override them both; the President can veto
the acts of Congress; two-thirds of Congress can still surmount this
veto. This complicated system may retard good measures, but it is not
probable that any very bad one can long survive under it.

The Baron Haussmann here is the Board of Public Works. It is grading,
filling, paving, planting, fencing, parking, and making the
thoroughfares what they would never have become by ordinary means. At
last we see what Washingtonians never saw before--vast public operations
having a consistent and tangible shape; obeying a purpose that can be
understood, defined and executed; beginning somewhere and ending in
something. Within its sphere this Board has despotic power: it would be
worthless with any less. It dares to strike without fear or favor, and
hit whoever stands in the way: the way would never be cleared if it did
not. It makes bitter enemies by its inexorable exactions: the public
cannot be served except at the expense of the individual. A strong party
has fought it by injunctions and failed: the same persons will no doubt
continue to fight, while the Board will no doubt continue to vindicate
itself and go on with its work. It made some mistakes which wrought
hardships to individuals who wished it well, but such were the
difficulties before it at the outset that it might have made greater
mistakes and still been forgiven. It is to be hoped that it will have
enemies enough to watch it closely, criticise it sharply and hold it to
a strict accountability; but should it have enough to really interfere
with its present course, then we shall have to add one more, and a great
one, to the list of Washington's calamities. The new blood that created
it is able to sustain it, while the air it has done so much to purify is
already laden with blessings from the lips of strangers.

In the matter of public improvements an equitable adjustment of
relations--always heretofore uncertain and unsatisfactory--between the
District and the general government still remains to be accomplished,
and at this writing is impatiently awaited by the city. Congress should
explicitly define for itself a course that can be depended upon, so that
the city can go ahead and know what it ought to do. The general
government, promising great things which began nowhere and ended in
nothing, laid out the city for its own use, and gave more space to
streets and ornamental grounds than to buildings. The plan was wise and
good, but did not appear so until the liberal citizens, unable to endure
the disgrace of such a city as the nation thrust upon them, taxing
themselves six millions of dollars for street purposes, went generously
to work, with their own money improved the immense fronts of the
government property, which pays no taxes, evolved something tangible out
of the old cloudy-magnificent plan, and gave the country, so far as they
could, a decent capital.

There is another important matter for adjustment. The city has left
nothing undone that money and labor could do to make the public schools
the best in the United States. It is doubtful whether there has ever
before been seen in any city or State an expenditure for public schools
so generous, under all the circumstances, as that of Washington within
the past few years. The best school-houses here are the best the
Prussian commissioners, who lately came to inspect them, had ever seen.
A very great number of the pupils educated by the city are the children
of government servants whose homes are in the States, and who pay no
considerable taxes here. Every State and Territory has received a
liberal allotment of public land for school-purposes except the District
of Columbia, which has probably done more for schools without the
endowment, considering the time and taxable property at command, than
any State has ever done with it.

Of course the city has received many benefits from the general
government, but the considerable ones have been indirect. The excellent
water-works, for instance, costing about three millions of dollars, were
built with the nation's money and by army engineers, because the nation
needed them, and show how entirely identical are the interests of both
parties. Their respective duties, while they need defining anew, are so
wedded that there is no room for serious difference. It is really a
matter for congratulation that the general government held back and did
not take more of the improvements into its own hands. The city's present
claims are by so much stronger: the two governments can work in harmony,
and any efforts that are now made will not be thrown away. Had Congress
acted sooner we might have had more Washington canals, and Washington
and Georgetown street-cars, and similar Congressional "improvements,"
beginning nowhere but in ignorance or selfishness, and ending in nothing
but nuisances. The improvement of the interiors of the national grounds,
however, by the general government, is now keeping pace with that of the
exteriors by the city as nearly as is possible under present
legislation, and their superintendence has become at last an office of
some practical consequence to Washington. The general government owns
about one-half of the property in the District, and during seventy years
has expended for the improvement of the thoroughfares a little over one
million of dollars. The city during the same time has expended for the
same purpose nearly fourteen millions of dollars.

The old Washington idea seems to have consisted in finishing a city
before it was begun. To use an architectural figure, the capital of the
column has been well designed and partly carved, but the base is not yet
laid. Those characteristics which the builders thought would be a sure
foundation of greatness have proved insufficient in the past and will
prove so in the future. The infusion of new blood has done wonders
within ten years, but there is still needed the admixture of another
current. Wealth and ideality--supposed to be possessed by all who are
attracted hither--do not raise a man above material wants or fail to
multiply them. When Washington shall give her utmost attention to
satisfying the vulgarest common wants of common people, she will have
taken her first real step toward--anything. She has had enough of fog
and moonshine. She wants for a proper period the most unmitigated
materiality--not as an end, of course, but as the first means of making
something else possible. She will be made our republican Paris, if made
so at all, by the aid of the shops, the wonderful skilled labor, the
economical living of poor people, on which rested, as well as on higher
things, the splendors of the imperial Paris. The average American lady
goes to that city to buy "things," as well as to visit the Louvre, and
while the late emperor endeavored to make his capital the social centre
of the world, he did not scorn to make it a fashionable market and
foster a Palace of Industry.

That Washington is an admirable place for manufactures is clear to all
who have sought the facts. Whether she will ever become a manufacturing
city is a question that must be settled by the citizens themselves.
Whoever doubts that the growth of skilled labor here will be an
indispensable condition of the higher growth that is sought fails to
understand modern civilization, and should not have survived the days
when things began nowhere and ended in nothing. The old thoroughbred
Washingtonian will never invest a dollar to build a railroad or a modern
workshop, of course. He does not know anything about them, and does not
want to. His idea of business is to get real estate, and "hold on" till
somebody else makes it valuable. Gentlemen of new Washington, Hercules
will stand idle till he sees your own shoulders at the wheel. When you
shall have the faithful, enlightened manual labor of New England, you
may expect such flowers as Yale and Harvard and the aesthetic fruits they
enfold. You may be unable to see any intimate connection between such
labor and such culture, but nevertheless it exists. Old Washington could
not see it, and now you are compelled to bury old Washington out of
sight. It is time for Mohammed to start if he wants his mountain.

There are a few business-men in Washington who are as enlightened, as
liberal, as trustworthy as any in the country; and abundant is their
reward. There are a few who deal only in good wares, who always sell
them at a reasonable profit, who believe that any kind of deception is a
blunder, who manage their establishments with economy, who are aware
that the more money they permit their customers to make the more they
will ultimately make themselves,--who, in short, have learned the
principles of business and have the character to stand by them. But so
many fall short--often through ignorance--in one or more of these
respects that the average business character is low. If a lady wishes to
spend twenty-five dollars in shopping, she can generally travel eighty
miles--to Baltimore and back--and save enough of that small sum to pay
her for going, besides being sure of finding what she wants. The
Washington shopkeepers may really think that they cannot help this. They
_must_ help it, or consent to be soon shoved aside by those who can.
Instead of being troubled by the sight of his best customers going as
far as New York whenever they have anything of consequence to buy, the
genuine old Washington retailer seems to take a calm satisfaction in
putting such fastidious buyers to so much inconvenience. Here it is
rather the exception than the rule for the man of small business to do
just what he promises to do. He don't know the value of another's time,
is used to disappointments himself, and somehow or other will manage to
disarrange your most careful calculations. Unable himself to meet an
engagement thoroughly and exactly, he seems determined that nobody else
shall.

But you cease censuring the average business-man when you begin to deal
with the average Washington mechanic. There are some good ones, but they
are absorbed by the large and experienced dealers in labor, and are
beyond the knowledge or reach of ordinary mortals. You want a little
job done at your house; you call on a "boss;" certainly--it shall be
done instantly; a workman will be sent in a few minutes; two days
afterward he comes and "looks at it;" the next day he returns with
another man and they both look at it; another day passes, and an
apprentice-boy, with a lame negro to wait on him, comes and makes your
home hideous by pretending to begin; when they have given your family a
proper amount of information, and torn things to pieces sufficiently,
they go away. Two more days elapse, and you go again to the boss; he is
surprised--he supposed the work had been done, for he had given
"orders;" at the end of a week perhaps the job that should have consumed
two hours of honest work is done; then, if you pay the boss no more than
the work actually cost him, you know that the sum is twice as much as it
should have cost him. As a generalization this is a true picture of
Washington labor.

These things are trifles? They are just what determine the permanent
residence of multitudes of valuable citizens. They are the trifles that
in the aggregate make the difference between civilization and barbarism.
For every broken promise or slighted piece of work the city suffers.
Civilized people like to live smoothly and comfortably. Washington,
thinking of something besides hotels and boarding-houses, and the people
of leisure who come once a year to fill them for a few weeks, must
provide for a permanent population of moderately poor people. The word
of a merchant or banker is supposed to be as good as his bond; his
occupation is gone when this ceases to be the case; his standing is
reported in a business guide-book, and dealers with him act accordingly.
Cannot some of the methods that enforce integrity in higher branches of
business be more systematically applied by dealers in manual labor? The
men who are reforming the city's outward appearance have an opportunity
of doing something in this direction. A Northern mechanic who reverences
his conscience, and makes the most of his opportunities to gain
knowledge and character, cannot emigrate to a better place than
Washington.

Yet when one looks into the past he thinks that perhaps labor is
improving as fast as other things here. He is inclined to admire it when
he remembers how much worse 

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