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Gala-Days

by Gail Hamilton · English · Gutenberg #2385 · 596,574 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Gala-Days

Author: Gail Hamilton


        
Release date: November 1, 2000 [eBook #2385]
                Most recently updated: January 1, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2385

Credits: Produced by Pat Flieger.  HTML version by Al Haines.


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GALA-DAYS ***




Produced by Pat Flieger.  HTML version by Al Haines.








GALA-DAYS


by

Gail Hamilton

(Mary Abigail Dodge)



1863



CONTENTS

  GALA DAYS
  A CALL TO MY COUNTRYWOMEN
  A SPASM OF SENSE
  CAMILLA'S CONCERT
  CHERI
  SIDE-GLANCES AT HARVARD CLASS-DAY
  SUCCESS IN LIFE
  HAPPIEST DAYS




GALA-DAYS

PART I


Once there was a great noise in our house,--a thumping and battering
and grating.  It was my own self dragging my big trunk down from the
garret.  I did it myself because I wanted it done.  If I had said,
"Halicarnassus, will you fetch my trunk down?" he would have asked me
what trunk? and what did I want of it? and would not the other one be
better? and couldn't I wait till after dinner?--and so the trunk would
probably have had a three-days journey from garret to basement. Now I
am strong in the wrists and weak in the temper; therefore I used the
one and spared the other, and got the trunk downstairs myself.
Halicarnassus heard the uproar.  He must have been deaf not to hear it;
for the old ark banged and bounced, and scraped the paint off the
stairs, and pitched head-foremost into the wall, and gouged out the
plastering, and dented the mop-board, and was the most stupid, awkward,
uncompromising, unmanageable thing I ever got hold of in my life.

By the time I had zigzagged it into the back chamber, Halicarnassus
loomed up the back stairs.  I stood hot and panting, with the inside of
my fingers tortured into burning leather, the skin rubbed off three
knuckles, and a bruise on the back of my right hand, where the trunk
had crushed it against a sharp edge of the doorway.

"Now, then?" said Halicarnassus interrogatively.

"To be sure," I replied affirmatively.

He said no more, but went and looked up the garret-stairs. They bore
traces of a severe encounter, that must be confessed.

"Do you wish me to give you a bit of advice?" he asked.

"No!" I answered promptly.

"Well, then, here it is.  The next time you design to bring a trunk
down-stairs, you would better cut away the underpinning, and knock out
the beams, and let the garret down into the cellar.  It will make less
uproar, and not take so much to repair damages."

He intended to be severe.  His words passed by me as the idle wind.  I
perched on my trunk, took a pasteboard box-cover and fanned myself.  I
was very warm.  Halicarnassus sat down on the lowest stair and remained
silent several minutes, expecting a meek explanation, but not getting
it, swallowed a bountiful piece of what is called in homely talk,
"humble-pie," and said,--

"I should like to know what's in the wind now."

I make it a principle always to resent an insult and to welcome
repentance with equal alacrity.  If people thrust out their horns at me
wantonly, they very soon run against a stone-wall; but the moment they
show signs of contrition, I soften.  It is the best way.  Don't insist
that people shall grovel at your feet before you accept their apology.
That is not magnanimous. Let mercy temper justice.  It is a hard thing
at best for human nature to go down into the Valley of Humiliation; and
although, when circumstances arise which make it the only fit place for
a person, I insist upon his going, still no sooner does he actually
begin the descent than my sense of justice is appeased, my natural
sweetness of disposition resumes sway, and I trip along by his side
chatting as gaily as if I did not perceive it was the Valley of
Humiliation at all, but fancied it the Delectable Mountains.  So, upon
the first symptoms of placability, I answered cordially,--

"Halicarnassus, it has been the ambition of my life to write a book of
travels.  But to write a book of travels, one must first have
travelled."

"Not at all," he responded.  "With an atlas and an encyclopaedia one
can travel around the world in his arm-chair."

"But one cannot have personal adventures," I said.  "You can, indeed,
sit in your arm-chair and describe the crater of Vesuvius; but you
cannot tumble into the crater of Vesuvius from your arm-chair."

"I have never heard that it was necessary to tumble in, in order to
have a good view of the mountain."

"But it s necessary to do it, if one would make a readable book."

"Then I should let the book slide,--rather than slide myself."

"If you would do me the honor to listen," I said, scornful of his
paltry attempt at wit, "you would see that the book is the object of my
travelling.  I travel to write.  I do not write because I have
travelled.  I am not going to subordinate my book to my adventures.  My
adventures are going to be arranged beforehand with a view to my book."

"A most original way of getting up a book!"

"Not in the least.  It is the most common thing in the world. Look at
our dear British cousins."

"And see them make guys of themselves.  They visit a magnificent
country that is trying the experiment of the world, and write about
their shaving-soap and their babies' nurses."

"Just where they are right.  Just why I like the race, from Trollope
down.  They give you something to take hold of.  I tell you,
Halicarnassus, it is the personality of the writer, and not the nature
of the scenery or of the institutions, that makes the interest.  It
stands to reason.  If it were not so, one book would be all that ever
need be written, and that book would be a census report.  For a
republic is a republic, and Niagara is Niagara forever; but tell how
you stood on the chain-bridge at Niagara--if there is one there--and
bought a cake of shaving-soap from a tribe of Indians at a fabulous
price, or how your baby jumped from the arms of the careless nurse into
the Falls, and immediately your own individuality is thrown around the
scenery, and it acquires a human interest. It is always five miles from
one place to another, but that is mere almanac and statistics.  Let a
poet walk the five miles, and narrate his experience with birds and
bees and flowers and grasses and water and sky, and it becomes
literature.  And let me tell you further, sir, a book of travels is
just as interesting as the person who writes it is interesting.  It is
not the countries, but the persons, that are 'shown up.'  You go to
France and write a dull book.  I go to France and write a lively book.
But France is the same.  The difference is in ourselves."

Halicarnassus glowered at me.  I think I am not using strained or
extravagant language when I say that he glowered at me. Then he growled
out,--

"So your book of travels is just to put yourself into pickle."

"Say, rather," I answered, with sweet humility,--"say, rather, it is to
shrine myself in amber.  As the insignificant fly, encompassed with
molten glory, passes into a crystallized immortality, his own
littleness uplifted into loveliness by the beauty in which he is
imprisoned, so I, wrapped around by the glory of my land, may find
myself niched into a fame which my unattended and naked merit could
never have claimed."

Halicarnassus was a little stunned, but presently recovering himself,
suggested that I had travelled enough already to make out a quite
sizable book.

"Travelled!" I said, looking him steadily in the face,--"travelled!  I
went once up to Tudiz huckleberrying; and once, when there was a
freshet, you took a superannuated  broom and paddled me around the
orchard in a leaky pig's-trough!"

He could not deny it; so he laughed, and said,--

"Ah, well!--ah, well!  Suit yourself.  Take your trunk and pitch into
Vesuvius, if you like.  I won't stand in your way."

His acquiescence was ungraciously, and I believe I may say ambiguously,
expressed; but it mattered little, for I gathered up my goods and
chattels, strapped them into my trunk, and waited for the summer to
send us on our way rejoicing,--the gentle and gracious young summer,
that had come by the calendar, but had lost her way on the thermometer.
O these delaying Springs, that mock the merry-making of ancestral
England!  Is the world grown so old and stricken in years, that, like
King David, it gets no heat?  Why loiters, where lingers, the
beautiful, calm-breathing June?  Rosebuds are bound in her trailing
hair, and the sweet of her garments always used to waft a scented gale
over the happy hills.

   "Here she was wont to go! and here! and here!
   Just where the daisies, pinks, and violets grow;
   Her treading would not bend a blade of grass,
   Or shake the downy blow-ball from his stalk!
   But like the soft west-wind she shot along;
   And where she went the flowers took thickest root,
   As she had sowed them with her odorous foot."

So sang a rough-handed, silver-voiced, sturdy old fellow, harping
unconsciously the notes of my lament, and the tones of his sorrow wail
through the green boughs today, though he has been lying now these two
hundred years in England's Sleeping Palace, among silent kings and
queens.  Fair and fresh and always young is my lost maiden, and
"beautiful exceedingly." Her habit was to wreathe her garland with the
May, and everywhere she found most hearty welcome; but May has come and
gone, and June is still missing.  I look longingly afar, but there is
no flutter of her gossamer robes over the distant hills.  No white
cloud floats down the blue heavens, a chariot of state, bringing her
royally from the court of the King.  The earth is mourning her absence.
A blight has fallen upon the roses, and the leaves are gone gray and
mottled.  The buds started up to meet and greet their queen, but her
golden sceptre was not held forth, and they are faint and stunned with
terror. The censer which they would have swung on the breezes, to
gladden her heart, is hidden away out of sight, and their own hearts
are smothered with the incense.  The beans and the peas and the
tasselled corn are struck with surprise, as if an eclipse had staggered
them, and are waiting to see what will turn up, determined it shall not
be themselves, unless something happens pretty soon.  The tomatoes are
thinking, with homesick regret, of the smiling Italian gardens, where
the sun ripened them to mellow beauty, with many a bold caress, and
they hug their ruddy fruit to their own bosoms, and Frost, the
cormorant, will grab it all, since June disdains the proffered gift,
and will not touch them with her tender lips.  The money-plants are
growing pale, and biting off their finger-tips with impatience.   The
marigold whispers his suspicion over to the balsam-buds, and neither
ventures to make a move, quite sure there is something wrong.  The
scarlet tassel-flower utterly refuses to unfold his brave plumes.  The
Zinnias look up a moment, shuddering with cold chills, conclude there
is no good in hurrying, and then just pull their brown blankets around
them, turn over in their beds, and go to sleep again. The
morning-glories rub their eyes, and are but half awake, for all their
royal name.  The Canterbury-bells may be chiming velvet peals down in
their dark cathedrals, but no clash nor clangor nor faintest echo
ripples up into my Garden World.  Not a bee drones his drowsy song
among the flowers, for there are no flowers there.  One venturesome
little phlox dared the cold winds, and popped up his audacious head,
but his pale, puny face shows how near he is to being frozen to death.
The poor birds are shivering in their nests.  They sing a little, just
to keep up their spirits, and hop about to preserve their circulation,
and capture a bewildered bug or two, but I don't believe there is an
egg anywhere round.  Not only the owl, but the red-breast, and the
oriole, and the blue-jay, for all his feathers, is a-cold.  Nothing
flourishes but witch-grass and canker-worms.  Where is June?--the
bright and beautiful, the warm and clear and balm-breathing June, with
her matchless, deep, intense sky, and her sunshine, that cleaves into
your heart, and breaks up all the winter there?  What are these sleety
fogs about?  Go back into the January thaw, where you belong!  What
have the chill rains, and the raw winds, and the dismal, leaden clouds,
and all these flannels and furs to do with June, the perfect June of
hope and beauty and utter joy? Where is the June?  Has she lost her way
among the narrow, interminable defiles of your crooked old city
streets?  Go out and find her!  You do not want her there.  No blade
nor blossom will spring from your dingy brick, nor your dull, dead
stone, though you prison her there for a thousand years of wandering.
Take her by the hand tenderly, and bid her forth into the waiting
country, which will give her a queenly reception, and laurels worth the
wearing.  Have you fallen in love with her--on the Potomac, O soldiers?
Are you wooing her with honeyed words on the bloody soil of Virginia?
Is she tranced by your glittering sword-shine in ransomed Tennessee?
Is she floating on a lotus-leaf in Florida lagoons?  Has she drunk
Nepenthe in the orange-groves?  Is she chasing golden apples under the
magnolias?  Are you toying with the tangles of her hair in the bright
sea-foam?  O, rouse her from her trance, loose the fetters from her
lovely limbs, and speed her to our Northern skies, that moan her long
delay.

Or is she frightened by the thunders of the cannonade sounding from
shore to shore, and wakening the wild echoes?  Does she fear to breast
our bristling bayonets?  Is she stifled by the smoke of powder?  Is she
crouching down Caribbean shores, terror-stricken and pallid?  Sweet
June, fear not!  The flash of loyal steel will only light you along
your Northern road. Beauty and innocence have nothing to dread from the
sword a patriot wields.  The storm that rends the heavens will make
earth doubly fair.  Your pathway shall lie over Delectable Mountains,
and through vinelands of Beulah.  Come quickly, tread softly, and from
your bountiful bosom scatter seeds as you come, that daisies and
violets may softly shine, and sweetly twine with the amaranth and
immortelle that spring already from heroes' hearts buried in soldiers'
graves.

"But there is no use in placarding her," said Halicarnassus. "We shall
have no warm weather till the eclipse is over."

"So ho!" I said.  "Having exhausted every other pretext for delay, you
bring out an eclipse! and pray when is this famous affair to come off?"

"Tomorrow if the weather prove favorable, if not, on the first fair
night."

Then indeed I set my house in order.  Here was something definite and
trustworthy.  First an eclipse, then a book, and yet I pitied the moon
as I walked home that night.  She came up the heavens so round and
radiant, so glorious in her majesty, so confident in her strength, so
sure of triumphal march across the shining sky; not knowing that a
great black shadow loomed right athwart her path to swallow her up.
She never dreamed that all her royal beauty should pass behind a pall,
that all her glory should be demeaned by pitiless eclipse, and her dome
of delight become the valley of humiliation!  Is there no help? I said.
Can no hand lead her gently another way?  Can no voice warn her of the
black shadow that lies in ambuscade?  None.  Just as the young girl
leaves her tender home, and goes fearless to her future,--to the future
which brings sadness for her smiling, and patience for her hope, and
pain for her bloom, and the cold requital of kindness, or the
unrequital of coldness for her warmth of love, so goes the moon,
unconscious and serene, to meet her fate. But at least I will watch
with her.  Trundle up to the window here, old lounge! you are almost as
good as a grandmother. Steady there! broken-legged table.  You have
gone limping ever since I knew you; don't fail me tonight.  Shine
softly, Kerosena, next of kin to the sun, true monarch of mundane
lights! calmly superior to the flickering of all the fluids, and the
ghastliness of all the gases, though it must be confessed you don't
hold out half as long as you used when first your yellow banner was
unfurled.  Shine softly tonight, and light my happy feet through the
Walden woods, along the Walden shores, where a philosopher sits in
solitary state.  He shall keep me awake by the Walden shore till the
moon and the shadow meet.  How tranquil sits the philosopher, how
grandly rings the man!  Here, in his homespun house, the squirrels
click under his feet, the woodchucks devour his beans, and the loon
laughs on the lake.  Here rich men come, and cannot hide their lankness
and their poverty.  Here poor men come, and their gold shines through
their rags.  Hither comes the poet, and the house is too narrow for
their thoughts, and the rough walls ring with lusty laughter.  O happy
Walden wood and woodland lake, did you thrill through all your luminous
aisles and all your listening shores for the man that wandered there?

Is it begun?  Not yet.  The kitchen clock has but just struck eleven,
and my watch lacks ten minutes of that.  What if the astronomers made a
mistake in their calculations, and the almanacs are wrong, and the
eclipse shall not come off?  Would it be strange?  Would it not be
stranger if it were not so? How can a being, standing on one little
ball, spinning forever around and around among millions of other balls
larger and smaller, breathlessly the same endless waltz,--how can he
trace out their paths, and foretell their conjunctions?  How can a puny
creature fastened down to one world, able to lift himself but a few
paltry feet above, to dig but a few paltry feet below its surface,
utterly unable to divine what shall happen to himself in the next
moment,--how can he thrust out his hand into inconceivable space, and
anticipate the silent future? How can his feeble eye detect the quiver
of a world?  How can his slender strength weigh the mountains in
scales, and the bills in a balance?  And yet it is.  Wonderful is the
Power that framed all these spheres, and sent them on their great
errands; but more wonderful still the Power that gave to finite mind
its power, to stand on one little point, and sweep the whole circle of
the skies.  Almost as marvelous is it that man, being man, can divine
the universe, as that God, being God, could devise it.  Cycles of years
go by.  Suns and moons and stars tread their mysterious rounds, but
steady eyes are following them into the awful distances, steady hands
are marking their eternal courses.  Their multiplied motions shall yet
be resolved into harmony, and so the music of the spheres shall chime
with the angels' song, "Glory to God in the highest!"

Is it begun?  Not yet.

No wonder that eclipses were a terror to men before Science came
queening it through the universe, compelling all these fearful sights
and great signs into her triumphal train, and commanding us to be no
longer afraid of our own shadow.  The sure and steadfast Moon,
shuddering from the fullness of her splendor into wild and ghostly
darkness, might well wake strange apprehensions.  She is reeling in
convulsive agony. She is sickening and swooning in the death-struggle.
The principalities and powers of darkness, the eternal foes of men, are
working their baleful spell with success to cast the sweet Moon from
her path, and force her to work woe and disaster upon the earth.  Some
fell monster, roaming through the heavens, seeking whom he may
devour,--some dragon, "monstrous, horrible, and waste," whom no
Redcrosse Knight shall pierce with his trenchand blade, is swallowing
with giant gulps the writhing victim.  Blow shrill and loud your bugle
blasts!  Beat with fierce clangor your brazen cymbals!  Push up wild
shrieks and groans, and horrid cries,

   "That all the woods may answer, and your echoes ring,"

and the foul fiend perchance be scared away by deafening din.

O, sad for those who lived before the ghouls were disinherited; for
whom the woods and waters, and the deep places, were peopled with
mighty, mysterious foes; who saw evil spirits in the earth forces, and
turned her gold into consuming fire.  For us, later born, Science has
dived into the caverns, and scaled the heights, and fathomed the
depths, forcing from coy yet willing Nature the solution of her own
problems, and showing us everywhere, GOD.  We are not children of fate,
trembling at the frown of fairies and witches and gnomes, but the
children of our Father.  If we ascend up into heaven, he is there.  If
we take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of
the sea, even there shall his hand lead, and his right hand hold.

Is it begun?  Not--well, I don't know, though.  Something seems to be
happening up in the northwest corner.  Certainly, a bit of that round
disk has been shaved off.  I will wait five minutes.  Yes, the battle
is begun.  The shadow advances.  The moon yields.  But there are
watchers in the heaven as well as in the earth.  There is sympathy in
the skies.  Up floats an argosy of compassionate clouds, and fling
their fleecy veil around the pallid moon, and bear her softly on their
snowy bosoms.  But she moves on, impelled.  She sweeps beyond the sad
clouds.  Deeper and deeper into the darkness.  Closer and closer the
Shadow clutches her in his inexorable arms.  Wan and weird becomes her
face, wrathful and wild the astonished winds; and for all her science
and her faith, the Earth trembles in the night, and a hush of awe
quivers through the angry, agitated air.  On, still on, till the fair
and smiling moon is but a dull and tawny orb, with no beauty to be
desired; on, still on, till even that cold, coppery light wanes into
sullen darkness.  Whether it is a cloud kindly hiding the humbled
queen, or whether the queen is indeed merged in the abyss of the
Shadow, I cannot tell, and it is dismal waiting to see. The wildness is
gone with the moon, and there is nothing left but a dark night.  I
wonder how long before she will reappear? Are the people in the moon
staring through an eclipse of the Sun?  I should like to see her come
out again, and clothe herself in splendor.  I think I will go back to
Walden.  Ah! even my philosopher, aping Homer, nods.  It shimmers a
little, on the lake, among the mountains--of the moon.

I declare!  I believe I have been asleep.  What of it?   It is just as
well.  I have no doubt the moon will come out again all right,--which
is more than I shall do if I go on in this way. I feel already as if
the top of my head was coming off.  Once I was very unhappy, and I sat
up all night to make the most of it.  It was many hundred years ago,
when I was younger than I am now, and did not know that misery was not
a thing to be caressed and cosseted and coddled, but a thing to be
taken, neck and heels, and turned out doors.  So I sat up to revel in
the ecstasy of woe.  I went along swimmingly into the little hours, but
by two o'clock there was a great sameness about it, and I grew
desperately sleepy.  I was not going to give it up, however, so I
shocked myself into a torpid animation with a cold bath, it being
mid-winter, and betwixt bath and bathos, managed to keep agoing till
daylight.  Once since then I was very happy, and could not keep my eyes
shut.  Those are the only two times I ever sat up all night, and, on
the whole, I think I will go to bed; wherefore, O people on the earth,
marking eagerly the moon's eclipse, and O people on the moon, crowding
your craggy hills to see an eclipse of the sun, Good night!

Then the lost June came back.  Frost melted out of the air, summer
melted in, and my book beckoned me onward with a commanding gesture.
Consequently I took my trunk, Halicarnassus his cane, and we started on
our travels.  But the shadow of the eclipse hung over us still.  An
evil omen came in the beginning. Just as I was stepping into the car, I
observed a violent smoke issuing from under it.  I started back in
alarm.

"They are only getting up steam," said Halicarnassus.  "Always do, when
they start."

"I know better!" I answered briskly, for there was no time to be
circumlocutional.  "They don't get up steam under the cars."

"Why not?  Bet a sixpence you couldn't get Uncle Cain's Dobbin out of
his jog-trot without building a fire under him."

"I know that wheel is on fire," I said, not to be turned from the
direct and certain line of assertion into the winding ways of argument.

"No matter," replied Halicarnassus, conceding everything, "we are
insured."

Upon the strength of which consolatory information I went in. By and by
a man entered and took a seat in front of us.  "The box is all afire,"
chuckled he to his neighbor, as if it were a fine joke.  By and by
several people who had been looking out of the windows drew in their
heads, went into the next car.

"What do you suppose they did that for?" I asked Halicarnassus.

"More aristocratical.  Belong to old families.  This is a new car,
don't you see?  We are parvenus."

"Nothing of the sort," I rejoined.  "This car is on fire, and they have
gone into the next one so as not to be burned up."

"They are not going to write books, and can afford to run away from
adventures."

"But suppose I am burned up in my adventure?"

"Obviously, then, your book will end in smoke."

I ceased to talk, for I was provoked at his indifference.  I leave
every impartial mind to judge for itself whether the circumstances were
such as to warrant composure.  To be sure, somebody said the car was to
be left at Jeru; but Jeru was eight miles away, and any quantity of
mischief might be done before we reached it,--if indeed we were not
prevented from reaching it altogether.  It was a mere question of
dynamics. Would dry wood be able to hold its own against a raging fire
for half an hour?  Of course the conductor thought it would; but even
conductors are not infallible; and you may imagine how comfortable it
was to sit and know that a fire was in full blast beneath you, and to
look down every few minutes expecting to see the flames forking up
under your feet.  I confess I was not without something like a hope
that one tongue of the devouring element would flare up far enough to
give Halicarnassus a start; but it did not.  No casualty occurred.  We
reached Jeru in safety; but that does not prove that there was no
danger, or that indifference was anything but the most foolish
hardihood. If our burning car had been in mid-ocean, serenity would
have been sublimity, but to stay in the midst of peril when two steps
would take one out of it is idiocy.  And that there was peril is
conclusively shown by the fact that the very next day the Eastern
Railroad Depot took fire and was burned to the ground.  I have in my
own mind no doubt that it was a continuation of the same fire, and if
we had stayed in the car much longer, we should have shared the same
fate.

We found Jeru to be a pleasant city, with only one fault:  the
inhabitants will crowd into a car before passengers can get out;
consequently the heads of the two columns collide near the car-door,
and there is a general choke.  Otherwise Jeru is a delightful city.  It
is famous for its beautiful women.  Its railroad-station is a
magnificent piece of architecture.  Its men are retired East-India
merchants.  Everybody in Jeru is rich and has real estate.  The houses
in Jeru are three stories high and face on the Common.  People in Jeru
are well-dressed and well-bred, and they all came over in the Mayflower.

We stopped in Jeru five minutes.

When we were ready to continue our travels, Halicarnassus seceded into
the smoking-car, and the engine was shrieking off its inertia, a small
boy, laboring under great agitation, hurried in, darted up to me, and,
thrusting a pinchbeck ring with a pink glass in it into my face,
exclaimed, in a hoarse whisper,--

"A beautiful ring, ma'am!  I've just picked it up.  Can't stop to find
the owner.  Worth a dollar, ma'am; but if you'll give me fifty cents--"

"Boy!"

I rose fiercely, convulsively, in my seat, drew one long breath, but
whether he thought I was going to kill him,--I dare say I looked
it,--or whether he saw a sheriff behind, or a phantom gallows before, I
know not; but without waiting for the thunderbolt to strike, he rushed
from the car as precipitately as he had rushed in.  I WAS angry,--not
because I was to have been cheated, for I been repeatedly and
atrociously cheated and only smiled, but because the rascal dared
attempt on me such a threadbare, ragged, shoddy trick as that.  Do I
LOOK like a rough-hewn, unseasoned backwoodsman? Have I the air of
never having read a newspaper?  Is there a patent innocence of
eye-teeth in my demeanor?  O Jeru!  Jeru! Somewhere in your virtuous
bosom you are nourishing a viper, for I have felt his fangs.  Woe unto
you, if you do not strangle him before he develops into mature
anacondaism! In point of natural history I am not sure that vipers do
grow up anacondas, but for the purposes of moral philosophy the
development theory answers perfectly well.

In Boston we had three hours to spare; so we sent our luggage--that is,
my trunk--to the Worcester Depot, and walked leisurely ourselves.  I
had a little shopping to do, to complete my outfit for the journey,--a
very little shopping,--only a nightcap or two.  Ordinarily such a thing
is a matter of small moment, but in my case the subject bad swollen
into unnatural dimensions.  Nightcaps are not generally considered
healthy,--at least not by physicians. Nature has given to the head its
sufficient and appropriate covering, the hair. Anything more than this
injures the head, by confining the heat, preventing the soothing,
cooling contact of air, and so deranging the circulation of the blood.
Therefore I have always heeded the dictates of Nature, which I have
supposed to be to brush out the hair thoroughly at night and let it
fly. But there are serious disadvantages connected with this course.
For Nature will be sure to whisk the hair away from your ears where you
want it, and into your eyes where you don't want it, besides crowning
you with magnificent disorder in the morning.  But as I have always
believed that no evil exists without its remedy, I had long been
exercising my inventive genius in attempts to produce a head-gear which
should at once protect the ears, confine the hair, and let the skull
alone.  I regret to say that my experiments were an utter failure,
notwithstanding the amount of science and skill brought to bear upon
them.  One idea lay at the basis of all my endeavors. Every
combination, however elaborate or intricate, resolved into its simplest
elements, consisted of a pair of rosettes laterally to keep the ears
warm, a bag posteriorly to put the hair into, and some kind of a string
somewhere to hold the machine together.  Every possible shape into
which lace or muslin or sheeting could be cut or plaited or sewed or
twisted, into which crewel or cord could be crocheted or netted or
tatted, I make bold to declare was essayed, until things came to such a
pass that every odd bit of dry good lying round the house was, in the
absence of any positive testimony on the subject, assumed to be one of
my nightcaps; an utterly baseless assumption, because my achievements
never went so far as concrete capuality, but stopped short in the later
stages of abstract idealism.  However, prejudice is stronger than
truth; and, as I said, every fragment of every fabric that could not
give an account of itself was charged with being a nightcap till it was
proved to be a dish-cloth or a cart-rope.  I at length surrendered at
discretion, and remembered that somewhere in my reading I had met with
exquisite lace caps, and I did not that from the combined fineness and
strength of their material they might answer the purpose, even if in
form they should not be everything that was desirable,--and I
determined to ascertain, if possible, whether such things existed
anywhere out of poetry.

As you perceive, therefore, my Boston shopping was not everyday
trading.  It was to mark the abandonment of an old and the inauguration
of a new line of policy.  Thus it was with no ordinary interest that I
looked carefully at all the shops, and when I found one that seemed to
hold out a possibility of nightcaps, I went in.  Halicarnassus obeyed
the hint which I pricked into him with the point of my parasol, and
stopped outside.  The one place in the world where a man has no
business to be is the inside of a dry-goods shop.  He never looks and
never is so big and bungling as there.  A woman skips from silk to
muslin, from muslin to ribbons, from ribbons to table-cloths, with the
grace and agility of a bird.  She glides in and out among crowds of her
sex, steers sweepingly clear of all obstacles, and emerges triumphant.
A man enters, and immediately becomes all boots and elbows.  He needs
as much room to turn round in as the English iron-clad Warrior, and it
takes him about as long. He treads on all the flounces, runs against
all the clerks, knocks over all the children, and is generally
underfoot. If he gets an idea into his head, a Nims's battery cannot
dislodge it.  You thought of buying a shawl; but a thousand
considerations, in the shape of raglans, cloaks, talmas, and
pea-jackets, induce you to modify your views.  He stands by you.  He
hears all your inquiries and all the clerk's suggestions.  The whole
process of your reasoning is visible to his naked eye.  He sees the
sack or visite or cape put upon your shoulders and you walking off in
it, and when you are half-way home, he will mutter, in stupid
amazement, "I thought you were going to buy a shawl!"  It is enough to
drive one wild.

No!  Halicarnassus is absurd and mulish in many things, but he knows I
will not be hampered with him when I am shopping, and he obeys the
smallest hint, and stops outside.

To be sure he puts my temper on the rack by standing with his hands in
his pockets, or by looking meek, or likely as not peering into the
shop-door after me with great staring eyes and parted lips; and this is
the most provoking of all.  If there is anything vulgar, slipshod, and
shiftless, it is a man lounging about with his hands in his pockets.
If you have paws, stow them away; but if you are endowed with hands,
learn to carry them properly, or else cut them off.  Nor can I abide a
man's looking as if he were under control.  I wish him to BE
submissive, but I don't wish him to LOOK so.  He shall do just as he is
bidden, but he shall carry himself like the man and monarch he was made
to be.  Let him stay where he is put, yet not as if he were put there,
but as if he had taken his position deliberately.  But, of all things,
to have a man act as if he were a clod just emerged for the first time
from his own barnyard!  Upon this occasion, however, I was too much
absorbed in my errand to note anybody's demeanor, and I threaded
straightway the crowd of customers, went up to the counter, and
inquired in a clear voice,--

"Have you lace nightcaps?"

The clerk looked at me with a troubled, bewildered glance, and made no
reply.  I supposed he had not understood me, and repeated the question.
Then he answered, dubiously,--

"We have breakfast-caps."

It was my turn to look bewildered.  What had I to do with
breakfast-caps?  What connection was there between my question and his
answer?  What field was there for any further inquiry? "Have you
ox-bows?" imagine a farmer to ask.  "We have rainbows," says the
shopman.  "Have you cameo-pins?" inquires the elegant Mrs. Jenkins.
"We have linchpins."  "Have you young apple trees?" asks the
nursery-man.  "We have whiffletrees."  If I had wanted breakfast-caps,
shouldn't I have asked for breakfast-caps?  Or do the Boston people
take their breakfast at one o'clock in the morning?  I concluded that
the man was demented, and marched out of the shop. When I laid the
matter before Halicarnassus, the following interesting colloquy took
place.

I.  "What do you suppose it meant?"

H.  "He took you for a North American Indian."

I.  "What do you mean?"

H.  "He did not understand your patois."

I.  "What patois?"

H.  "Your squaw dialect.  You should have asked for a bonnet de nuit."

I.  "Why?"

H.  "People never talk about nightcaps in good society."

I.  "Oh!"

I was very warm, and Halicarnassus said he was tired; so he went into a
restaurant and ordered strawberries,--that luscious fruit, quivering on
the border-land of ambrosia and nectar.

"Doubtless," says honest, quaint, delightful Isaac,--and he never spoke
a truer word,--"doubtless God might have made a better berry than a
strawberry, but doubtless God never did."

The bill of fare rated their excellence at fifteen cents.

"Not unreasonable," I pantomimed.

"Not if I pay for them," replied Halicarnassus.

Then we sat and amused ourselves after the usual brilliant fashion of
people who are waiting in hotel parlors, railroad-stations, and
restaurants.  We surveyed the gilding and the carpet and the mirrors
and the curtains.  We hazarded profound conjectures touching the people
assembled.  We studied the bill of fare as if it contained the secret
of our army's delay upon the Potomac, and had just concluded that the
first crop of strawberries was exhausted, and they were waiting for the
second crop to grow, when Hebe hove in sight with her nectared ambrosia
in a pair of cracked, browny-white saucers, with browny-green silver
spoons.  I poured out what professed to be cream, but proved very
low-spirited milk, in which a few disheartened strawberries appeared
rari nantes.  I looked at them in dismay.  Then curiosity smote me, and
I counted them. Just fifteen.

"Cent a piece," said Halicarnassus.

I was not thinking of the cent, but I had promised myself a feast; and
what is a feast, susceptible of enumeration? Cleopatra was right.
"That love"--and the same is true of strawberries--"is beggarly which
can be reckoned."  Infinity alone is glory.

"Perhaps the quality will atone for the quantity," said Halicarnassus,
scooping up at least half of his at one "arm-sweep."

"How do they taste?" I asked.

"Rather coppery," he answered.

"It is the spoons!" I exclaimed, in a fright.  "They are German silver!
You will be poisoned!" and knocked his out of his hand with such
instinctive, sudden violence that it flew to the other side of the
room, where an old gentleman sat over his newspaper and dinner.

He started, dropped his newspaper, and looked around in a maze.
Halicarnassus behaved beautifully,--I will give him the credit of it.
He went on with my spoon and his strawberries as unconcernedly as if
nothing had happened.  I was conscious that I blushed, but my face was
in the shade, and nobody else knew it; and to this day I've no doubt
the old gentleman would have marvelled what sent that mysterious spoon
rattling against his table and whizzing between his boots, had not
Halicarnassus, when the uproar was over, conceived it his duty to go
and pick up the spoon and apologize for the accident, lest the
gentleman should fancy an intentional rudeness.  Partly to reward him
for his good behavior, partly because I never did think it worth while
to make two bites of a cherry, and partly because I did not fancy being
poisoned, I gave my fifteen berries to him. He devoured them with
evident relish.

"Does my spoon taste as badly as yours?" I asked.

"My spoon?" inquired he, innocently.

"Yes.  You said before that they tasted coppery."

"I don't think," replied this unprincipled man,--"I don't think it was
the flavor of the spoon so much as of the coin which each berry
represented."

If we could only have been at home!

I never made a more unsatisfactory investment in my life than the one I
made in that restaurant.  I felt as if I had been swindled, and I said
so to Halicarnassus.  He remarked that there was plenty of cream and
sugar.  I answered curtly, that the cream was chiefly water, and the
sugar chiefly flour; but if they had been Simon Pure himself, was it
anything but an aggravation of the offence to have them with nothing to
eat them on?

"You might do as they do in France,--carry away what you don't eat,
seeing you pay for it."

"A pocketful of milk and water would be both delightful and
serviceable; but I might take the sugar," I added, with a sudden
thought, upsetting the sugar-bowl into a "Boston Journal" which we had
bought in the train.  "I can never use it, but it will be a consolation
to reflect on."

Halicarnassus, who, though fertile in evil conceptions, lacks nerve to
put them into execution, was somewhat startled at this sudden change of
base.  He had no idea that I should really act upon his suggestion, but
I did.  I bundled the sugar into my pocket with a grim satisfaction;
and Halicarnassus paid his thirty cents, looking--and feeling, as he
afterwards told me--as if a policeman's grip were on his shoulders.  If
any restaurant in Boston recollects having been astonished at any time
during the summer of 1862 by an unaccountably empty sugar-bowl, I take
this occasion to explain the phenomenon. I gave the sugar afterwards to
a little beggar-girl, with a dime for a brace of lemons, and shook off
the dust of my feet against Boston at the "B. & W. R. R. D."

Boston is a beautiful city, situated on a peninsula at the head of
Massachusetts Bay.  It has three streets:  Cornhill, Washington, and
Beacon Streets.  It has a Common and a Frog-pond, and many sprightly
squirrels.  Its streets are straight, and cross each other like lines
on a chess-board. It has a state-house, which is the finest edifice in
the world or out of it.  It has one church, the Old South, which was
built, as its name indicates, before the Proclamation of Emancipation
was issued.  It has one bookstore, a lofty and imposing pile, of the
Egyptian style (and date) of architecture, on the corner of Washington
and School Streets. It has one magazine, the "Atlantic Monthly," one
daily newspaper, the "Boston Journal," one religious weekly, the
"Congregationalist," and one orator, whose name is Train, a model of
chaste, compact, and classic elegance.  In politics, it was a Webster
Whig, till Whig and Webster both went down, when it fell apart waited
for something to turn up,--which proved to be drafting.  Boston is
called the Athens of America. Its men are solid.  Its women wear their
bonnets to bed, their nightcaps to breakfast, and talk Greek at dinner.
I spent two hours and half in Boston, and I know.

We had a royal progress from Boston to Fontdale.  Summer lay on the
shining hills, and scattered benedictions.  Plenty smiled up from a
thousand fertile fields.  Patient oxen, with their soft, deep eyes,
trod heavily over mines of greater than Indian wealth.  Kindly cows
stood in the grateful shade of cathedral elms, and gave thanks to God
in their dumb, fumbling way.  Motherly, sleepy, stupid sheep lay on the
plains, little lambs rollicked out their short-lived youth around them,
and no premonition floated over from the adjoining pea-patch, nor any
misgiving of approaching mutton marred their happy heyday. Straight
through the piny forests, straight past the vocal orchards, right in
among the robins and the jays and the startled thrushes, we dashed
inexorable, and made harsh dissonance in the wild-wood orchestra; but
not for that was the music hushed, nor did one color fade.  Brooks
leaped in headlong chase down the furrowed sides of gray old rocks, and
glided whispering beneath the sorrowful willows.  Old trees renewed
their youth in the slight, tenacious grasp of many a tremulous tendril,
and, leaping lightly above their topmost heights, vine laughed to vine,
swaying dreamily in the summer air; and not a vine nor brook nor hill
nor forest but sent up a sweet-smelling incense to its Maker.  Not an
ox or cow or lamb or bird living its own dim life but lent its charm of
unconscious grace to the great picture that unfolded itself mile after
mile, in ever fresher loveliness to ever unsated eyes.  Well might the
morning stars sing together, and all the sons of God shout for joy,
when first this grand and perfect world swung free from its moorings,
flung out its spotless banner, and sailed majestic down the thronging
skies.  Yet, though but once God spoke the world to life, the miracle
of creation is still incomplete.  New every spring-time, fresh every
summer, the earth comes forth as a bride adorned for her husband.  Not
only in the dawn of our history, but now in the full brightness of its
noonday, may we hear the voice of the Lord walking in the garden.  I
look out upon the gray degraded fields left naked of the snow, and
inwardly ask, Can these dry bones live again?  And while the question
is yet trembling on my lips, lo! a Spirit breathes upon the earth, and
beauty thrills into bloom.  Who shall lack faith in man's redemption,
when every year the earth is redeemed by unseen hands, and death is
lost in resurrection?

To Fontdale sitting among her beautiful meadows we are borne swiftly
on.  There we must tarry for the night, for I will not travel in the
dark when I can help it.  I love it.  There is no solitude in the
world, or at least I have never felt any, like standing alone in the
doorway of the rear car on a dark night, and rushing on through the
darkness,--darkness, darkness everywhere, and if one could be sure of
rushing on till daylight doth appear!  But with the frightful and not
remote possibility of bringing up in a crash and being buried under a
general huddle, one prefers daylight.  You may not be able to get out
of the huddle even by daylight; but you will at least know where you
are, if there is anything of you left. So at Fontdale, Halicarnassus
branches off temporarily on a business errand, and I stop for the night
a-cousining.

You object to this?  Some people do.  For my part, I like it. You say
you will not turn your own house or your friend's house into a hotel.
If people wish to see you, let them come and make a visit; if you wish
to see them, you will go and make them one; but this touch and
go,--what is it worth?  O foolish Galatians! much every way.  For don't
you see, supposing the people are people you don't like, how much
better it is to have them come and sleep or dine and be gone than to
have them before your face and eyes for a week?  An ill that is
temporary is tolerable.  You could entertain the Evil One himself, if
you were sure he would go away after dinner.  The trouble about him is
not so much that he comes as that he won't go.  He hangs around.  If
you once open your door to him, there is no getting rid of him; and
some of his followers, it must be confessed, are just like him.  You
must resist them both, or they will never flee.  But if they do flee
after a day's tarry, do not complain.  You protest against turning your
house into a hotel. Why, the hotelry is the least irksome part of the
whole business, when your guests are uninteresting.  It is not the
supper or the bed that costs, but keeping people going after supper is
over and before bedtime is come.  Never complain, if you have nothing
worse to do than to feed or house your guests for a day or an hour.

On the other hand, if they are people you like, how much better to have
them come so than not to at all!  People cannot often make long
visits,--people that are worth anything,--people who use life; and they
are the only ones that are worth anything. And if you cannot get your
good things in the lump, are you going to refuse them altogether?  By
no means.  You are going to take them by driblets, and if you will only
be sensible and not pout, but keep your tin pan right side up, you will
find that golden showers will drizzle through all your life.  So, with
never a nugget in your chest, you shall die rich.  If you can stop
over-night with your friend, you have no sand-grain, but a very
respectable boulder.  For a night is infinite. Daytime is well enough
for business, but it is little worth for happiness.  You sit down to a
book, to a picture, to a friend, and the first you know it is time to
get dinner, or time to eat it, or time for the train, or you must put
out your dried apples, or set the bread to rising, or something breaks
in impertinently and chokes you at flood-tide.  But the night has no
end.  Everything is done but that which you would be forever doing.
The curtains are drawn, the lamp is lighted and veiled into exquisite
soft shadowiness.  All the world is far off. All its din and dole
strike into the bank of darkness that envelops you and are lost to your
tranced sense.  In all the world are only your friend and you, and then
you strike out your oars, silver-sounding, into the shoreless night.

But the night comes to an end, you say.  No, it does not.  It is you
that come to an end.  You grow sleepy, clod that you are.  But as you
don't think, when you begin, that you ever shall grow sleepy, it is
just the same as if you never did. For you have no foreshadow of an
inevitable termination to your rapture, and so practically your night
has no limit.  It is fastened at one end to the sunset, but the other
end floats off into eternity.  And there really is no abrupt
termination.  You roll down the inclined plane of your social happiness
into the bosom of another happiness,--sleep.  Sleep for the sleepy is
bliss just as truly as society to the lonely.  What in the distance
would have seemed Purgatory, once reached, is Paradise, and your
happiness is continuous.  Just as it is in mending.  Short-sighted,
superficial, unreflecting people have a way--which in time fossilizes
into a principle--of mending everything as soon as it comes up from the
wash,--a very unthrifty, uneconomical habit, if you use the words
thrift and economy in the only way in which they ought to be used,
namely, as applied to what is worth economizing.  Time, happiness,
life, these are the only things to be thrifty about.  But I see people
working and worrying over quince-marmalade and tucked petticoats and
embroidered chair-covers, things that perish with the using and leave
the user worse than they found him. This I call waste and wicked
prodigality.  Life is too short to permit us to fret about matters of
no importance.  Where these things can minister to the mind and heart,
they are a part of the soul's furniture; but where they only pamper the
appetite or the vanity, or any foolish and hurtful lust, they are
foolish and hurtful.  Be thrifty of comfort.  Never allow an
opportunity for cheer, for pleasure, for intelligence, for benevolence,
for kind of good, to go unimproved.  Consider seriously whether the
syrup of your preserves or juices of your own soul will do the most to
serve your race.  It may be that they are compatible,--that the
concoction of the one shall provide the ascending sap of the other; but
if it is not so, if one must be sacrificed, do not hesitate a moment as
to which it shall be.  If a peach does not become sweetmeat, it will
become something, it will not stay a withered, unsightly peach; but for
souls there is no transmigration out of fables.  Once a soul, forever a
soul,--mean or mighty, shrivelled or full, it is for you to say.
Money, land, luxury, so far as they are money, land, and luxury, are
worthless.  It is only as fast and as far as they are turned into life
that they acquire value.

So you are thriftless when you eagerly seize the first opportunity to
fritter away your time over old clothes.  You precipitate yourself
unnecessarily against a disagreeable thing.  For you are not going to
put your stockings on. Perhaps you will not need your buttons for a
week, and in a week you may have passed beyond the jurisdiction of
buttons. But even if you should not, let the buttons and the holes
alone all the same.  For, first, the pleasant and profitable thing
which you will do instead is a funded capital, which will roll you up a
perpetual interest; and secondly, the disagreeable duty is forever
abolished.  I say forever, because, when you have gone without the
button awhile, the inconvenience it occasions will reconcile you to the
necessity of sewing it on,--will even go further, and make it a
positive relief amounting to positive pleasure.  Besides, every time
you use it, for a long while after, you will have a delicious sense of
satisfaction, such as accompanies the sudden complete cessation of a
dull, continuous pain.  Thus what was at best characterless routine,
and most likely an exasperation, is turned into actual delight, and
adds to the sum of life.  This is thrift.  This is economy.  But, alas!
few people understand the art of living.  They strive after system,
wholeness, buttons, and neglect the weightier matters of the higher law.

--I wonder how I got here, or how I am to get back again.  I started
for Fontdale, and I find myself in a mending-basket. As I know no good
in tracing the same road back, we may as well strike a bee-line and
begin new at Fontdale.

We stopped at Fontdale a-cousining.  I have a veil, a beautiful--HAVE,
did I say?  Alas!  Troy WAS.  But I must not anticipate--a beautiful
veil of brown tissue, none of your woolleny, gruff fabrics, fit only
for penance, but a silken, gossamery cloud, soft as a baby's cheek.
Yet everybody fleers at it.  Everybody has a joke about it.  Everybody
looks at it, and holds it out at arms' length, and shakes it, and makes
great eyes at it, and says, "What in the world--" and ends with a huge,
bouncing laugh.  Why?  One is ashamed of human nature at being forced
to confess.  Because, to use a Gulliverism, it is longer by the breadth
of my nail than any of its contemporaries.  In fact, it is two yards
long.  That is all. Halicarnassus fired the first gun at it by saying
that its length was to enable one end of it to remain at home while the
other end went with me, so that neither of us should get lost. This is
an allusion to a habit which I and my property have of finding
ourselves individually and collectively left in the lurch.  After this
initial shot, everybody considered himself at liberty to let off his
rusty old blunderbuss, and there was a constant peppering.  But my veil
never lowered its colors nor curtailed its resources.  Alas! what
ridicule and contumely failed to effect, destiny accomplished.
Softness and plenitude are no shields against the shafts of fate.

I went into the station waiting-room to write a note.  I laid my
bonnet, my veil, my packages upon the table.  I wrote my note.  I went
away.  The next morning, when I would have arrayed myself to resume my
journey, there was no veil.  I remembered that I had taken it into the
station the night before, and that I had not taken it out.  At the
station we inquired of the waiting-woman concerning it.  It is as much
as your life is worth to ask these people about lost articles. They
take it for granted at the first blush that you mean to accuse them of
stealing.  "Have you seen a brown veil lying about anywhere?" asked
Crene, her sweet bird-voice warbling out from her sweet rose-lips.
"No, I 'a'n't seen nothin' of it," says Gnome, with magnificent
indifference.

"It was lost here last night," continues Crene, in a soliloquizing
undertone, pushing investigating glances beneath the sofas.

"I do' know nothin' about it.  _I_ 'a'n't took it"; and the Gnome
tosses her head back defiantly.  "I seen the lady when she was
a-writin' of her letter, and when she went out ther' wa'n't nothin'
left on the table but a hangkerchuf, and that wa'n't hern.  I do' know
nothin' about it, nor I 'a'n't seen nothin' of it."

O no, my Gnome, you knew nothing of it; you did not take it. But since
no one accused or even suspected you, why could you not have been less
aggressive and more sympathetic in your assertions?  But we will plough
no longer in that field.  The ploughshare has struck against a rock and
grits, denting its edge in vain.  My veil is gone,--my ample, historic,
heroic veil.  There is a woman in Fontdale who breathes air filtered
through--I will not say STOLEN tissue, but certainly through tissue
which was obtained without rendering its owner any fair equivalent.
Does not every breeze that softly stirs its fluttering folds say to
her, "O friend, this veil is not yours, not yours," and still
sighingly, "not yours!  Up among the northern hills, yonder towards the
sunset, sits the owner, sorrowful, weeping, wailing"?  I believe I am
wading out into the Sally Waters of Mother Goosery; but, prose or
poetry, somewhere a woman,--and because nobody of taste could
surreptitiously possess herself of my veil, I have no doubt that she
cut it incontinently into two equal parts, and gave one to her sister,
and there are two women,--nay, since niggardly souls have no sense of
grandeur, and will shave down to microscopic dimensions, it is every
way probable that she divided it into three unequal parts, and took
three quarters of a yard for herself, three quarters for her sister,
and gave the remaining half-yard to her daughter, and that at very
moment there are two women and a little girl taking their walks abroad
under the silken shadows of my veil!  And yet there are people who
profess to disbelieve in total depravity.

Nor did the veil walk away alone.  My trunk became imbued with the
spirit of adventure, and branched off on its own account up somewhere
into Vermont.  I suppose it would have kept on and reached perhaps the
North Pole by this time, had not Crene's dark eyes,--so pretty to look
at that one instinctively feels they ought not to be good for anything,
if a just impartiality is to be maintained, but they are,--had not
Crene's dark eyes seen it tilting into a baggage-crate, and trundling
off towards the Green Mountains, but too late.  Of course there was a
formidable hitch in the programme.  A court of justice was improvised
on the car-steps.  I was the plaintiff, Crene chief evidence,
baggage-master both defendant and examining-counsel. The case did not
admit of a doubt.  There was the little insurmountable check, whose
brazen lips could speak no lie.

"Keep hold of that," whispered Crene, and a yoke of oxen could not have
drawn it from me.

"You are sure you had it marked for Fontdale," says Mr. Baggage-master.

I hold the impracticable check before his eyes in silence.

"Yes, well, it must have gone on to Albany."

"But it went away on that track," says Crene.

"Couldn't have gone on that track.  Of course they wouldn't have
carried it away over there just to make it go wrong."

For me, I am easily persuaded and dissuaded.  If he had told me that it
must have gone in such a direction, that it was a moral and mental
impossibility should have gone in any other, and have it times enough,
with a certain confidence and contempt of any other contingency, I
should gradually have lost faith in my own eyes, and said, "Well, I
suppose it did." But Crene is not to be asserted into yielding one
inch, and insists that the trunk went to Vermont and not to New York,
and is thoroughly unmanageable.  The baggage-master, in anguish of
soul, trots out his subordinates, one after another,--

"Is this the man that wheeled the trunk away?  Is this? Is this?"

The brawny-armed fellows hang back, and scowl, and muffle words in a
very suspicious manner, and protest they won't be got into a scrape.
But Crene has no scrape for them.  She cannot swear to their identity.
She had eyes only for the trunk.

"Well," says Baggage-man, at his wits' end, "you let me take your
check, and I'll send the trunk on by express, when it comes."

I pity him, and relax my clutch.

"No," whispers Crene; "as long as you have your check, you as good as
have your trunk; but when you give that up, you have nothing.  Keep
that till you see your trunk."

My clutch re-tightens.

"At any rate, you can wait till the next train, and see if it doesn't
come back.  You'll get to your journey's end just as soon."

"Shall I?  Well, I will," compliant as usual.

"No," interposes my good genius again.  "Men are always saying that a
woman never goes when she engages to go.  She is always a train later
or a train earlier, and you can't meet her."

Pliant to the last touch, I say aloud,--

"No, I must go in this train"; and so I go, trunkless and crestfallen,
to meet Halicarnassus.

It is a dismal day, and Crene, to comfort me, puts into my hands two
books as companions by the way.  They are Coventry Patmore's "Angel in
the House," "The Espousals and the Betrothal."  I do not approve of
reading in the cars; but without is a dense, white, unvarying fog, and
within my heart it is not clear sunshine.  So I turn to my books.

Did any one ever read them before?  Somebody wrote a vile review of
them once, and gave the idea of a very puerile, ridiculous,
apron-stringy attempt at poetry.  Whoever wrote that notice ought to be
shot, for the books are charming,--pure and homely and householdy, yet
not effeminate.  Critics may sneer as much as they choose:  it is such
love as Vaughan's that Honorias value.  Because a woman's nature is not
proof against deterioration, because a large and long-continued
infusion of gross blood, and perhaps even the monotonous pressure of
rough, pitiless, degrading circumstances, may displace, eat out, rub
off the delicacy of a soul, may change its texture to unnatural
coarseness and scatter ashes for beauty, women do exist, victims rather
than culprits, coarse against their nature, hard, material, grasping,
the saddest sight humanity can see.  Such a woman can accept coarse
men. They may come courting on all fours, and she will not be shocked.
But women in the natural state wish men to stand godlike erect, to
tread majestically, and live delicately. Women do not often make an ado
about this.  They talk it over among themselves, and take men as they
are.  They quietly soften them down, and smooth them out, and polish
them up, and make the best of them, and simply and sedulously shut
their eyes and make believe there isn't any worst, or reason it
away,--a great deal more than I should think they would.  But if you
see the qualities that a woman spontaneously loves, the expression, the
tone, the bearing that thoroughly satisfies her self-respect, that not
only secures her acquiescence, but arouses her enthusiasm and commands
her abdication, crucify the flesh, and read Coventry Patmore.  Not that
he is the world's great poet, nor Arthur Vaughan the ideal man; but
this I do mean:  that the delicacy, the spirituality of his love, the
scrupulous respectfulness of his demeanor, his unfeigned inward
humility, as far removed from servility on the one side as from
assumption on the other, and less the opponent than the offspring of
self-respect, his thorough gentleness, guilelessness, deference, his
manly, unselfish homage, are such qualities, and such alone, as lead
womanhood captive.  Listen to me, you rattling, roaring, rollicking
Ralph Roister Doisters, you calm, inevitable Gradgrinds, as smooth, as
sharp, as bright as steel, and as soulless, and you men, whoever,
whatever, and wherever you are, with fibres of rope and nerves of wire,
there is many and many a woman who tolerates you because she finds you,
but there is nothing in her that ever goes out to seek you.  Be not
deceived by her placability.  "Here he is," she says to herself, "and
something must be done about it.  Buried under Ossa and Pelion
somewhere he must be supposed to have a soul, and the sooner he is dug
into the sooner it will be exhumed."  So she digs.  She would never
have made you, nor of her own free-will elected you; but being made,
such as you are, and on her hands in one way or another, she carves and
chisels, and strives to evoke from the block a breathing statue.  She
may succeed so far as that you shall become her Frankenstein, a great,
sad, monstrous, incessant, inevitable caricature of her ideal, the
monument at once of her success and her failure, the object of her
compassion, the intimate sorrow of her soul, a vast and dreadful form
into which her creative power can breathe the breath of life, but not
of sympathy.  Perhaps she loves you with a remorseful, pitying,
protesting love, and carries you on her shuddering shoulders to the
grave.  Probably, as she is good and wise, you will never find it out.
A limpid brook ripples in beauty and bloom by the side of muddy,
stagnant self-complacence, and you discern no essential difference.
"Water's water," you say, with your broad, stupid generalization, and
go oozing along contentedly through peat-bogs and meadow-ditches,
mounting, perhaps, in moments of inspiration, to the moderate sublimity
of a cranberry-meadow, but subsiding with entire satisfaction into a
muck-puddle:  and all the while the little brook that you patronize
when you are full-fed, and snub when you are hungry, and look upon
always,--the little brook is singing its own melody through grove and
orchard and sweet wild-wood,--singing with the birds and the blooms
songs that you cannot hear; but they are heard by the silent stars,
singing on and on into a broader and deeper destiny, till it pours, one
day, its last earthly note, and becomes forevermore the unutterable sea.

And you are nothing but a ditch.

No, my friend, Lucy will drive with you, and to talk to you, and sing
your songs; she will take care of you, and pray for you, and cry when
you go to the war; if she is not your daughter or your sister, she
will, perhaps, in a moment of weakness or insanity, marry you; she will
be a faithful wife, and float you to the end; but if you wish to be her
love, her hero, her ideal, her delight, her spontaneity, her utter rest
and ultimatum, you must attune your soul to fine issues,--you must
bring out the angel in you, and keep the brute under. It is not that
you shall stop making shoes, and begin to write poetry.  That is just
as much discrimination as you have.  Tell you to be gentle, and you
think we will have you dissolve into milk-and-water; tell you to be
polite, and you infer hypocrisy; to be neat, and you leap over into
dandyism, fancying all the while that bluster is manliness.  No, sir.
You may make shoes, you may run engines, you may carry coals; you may
blow the huntsman's horn, hurl the base-ball, follow the plough, smite
the anvil; your face may be brown, your veins knotted, your hands
grimed; and yet you may be a hero.  And, on the other hand, you may
write verses and be a clown.  It is not necessary to feed on ambrosia
in order to become divine; nor shall one be accursed, though he drink
of the ninefold Styx.  The Israelites ate angels' food in the
wilderness, and remained stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and
ears.  The white water-lily feeds on slime, and unfolds a heavenly
glory.  Come as the June morning comes.  It has not picked its way
daintily, passing only among the roses.  It has breathed up the whole
earth.  It has blown through the fields and barnyards and all the
common places of the land.  It has shrunk from nothing. Its purity has
breasted and overborne all things, and so mingled and harmonized all
that it sweeps around your forehead and sinks into your heart as soft
and sweet and pure as the fragrancy of Paradise.  So come you, rough
from the world's rough work, all out-door airs blowing around you, and
all your earth-smells clinging to you, but with a fine inward grace, so
strong, so sweet, so salubrious that it meets and masters all things,
blending every faintest or foulest odor of earthliness into the
grateful incense of a pure and lofty life.

Thus I read and mused in the soft summer fog, and the first I knew the
cars had stopped, I was standing on the platform, and Coventry and his
knight were--where?  Wandering up and down somewhere among the
Berkshire hills.  At some junction of roads, I suppose, I left them on
the cushion, for I have never beheld them since.  Tell me, O ye
daughters of Berkshire! have you seen them,--a princely pair, sore
weary in your mountain-land, but regal still, through all their
travel-stain?  I pray you, entreat them hospitably, for their mission
is "not of an age, but for all time."



PART II.

The descent from Patmore and poetry to New York is somewhat abrupt, not
to say precipitous, but we made it in safety; and so shall you, if you
will be agile.

New York is a pleasant little Dutch city, on a dot of island a few
miles southwest of Massachusetts.  For a city entirely unobtrusive and
unpretending, it has really great attractions and solid merit; but the
superior importance of other places will not permit me to tarry long
within its hospitable walls. In fact, we only arrived late at night,
and departed early the next morning; but even a six-hours sojourn gave
me a solemn and "realizing sense" of its marked worth,--for, when,
tired and listless, I asked for a servant to assist me, the waiter said
he would send the housekeeper.  Accordingly, when, a few moments after,
it knocked at the door with light, light finger, (see De la Motte
Fouque,) I drawled, "Come in," and the Queen of Sheba stood before me,
clad in purple and fine linen, with rings on her fingers and bells on
her toes.  I stared in dismay, and perceived myself rapidly
transmigrating into a ridiculus mus.  My gray and dingy
travelling-dress grew abject, and burned into my soul like tunic of
Nessus.  I should as soon have thought of asking Queen Victoria to
brush out my hair as that fine lady in brocade silk and Mechlin lace.
But she was good and gracious, and did not annihilate me on the spot,
as she easily have done, for which I shall thank her as long as I live.

"You sent for me?" she inquired, with the blandest accents imaginable.
I can't tell a lie, pa,--you know I can't tell a lie; besides, I had
not time to make up one, and I said, "Yes," and then, of all stupid
devices that could filter into my brain, I must needs stammer out that
I should like a few matches!  A pretty thing to bring a dowager duchess
up nine pairs of stairs for!

"I will ring the bell," she said, with a tender, reproachful sweetness
and dignity, which conveyed without unkindness the severest rebuke
tempered by  womanly pity, and proceeded to instruct me in the nature
and uses of the bell-rope, as she would any little dairy-maid who had
heard only the chime of cow-bells all the days of her life.  Then she
sailed out of the room, serene and majestic, like a seventy-four
man-of-war, while I, a squalid, salt-hay gunlow, (Venetian blind-ed
into gondola,) first sank down in confusion, and then rose up in fury
and brushed all the hair out of my head.

"I declare," I said to Halicarnassus, when we were fairly beyond
ear-shot of the city next morning, "I don't approve of sumptuary laws,
and I like America to be the El Dorado of the poor man, and I go for
the largest liberty of the individual; but I do think there ought to be
a clause in the Constitution providing that servants shall not be
dressed and educated and accomplished up to the point of making people
uncomfortable."

"No," said Halicarnassus, sleepily; "perhaps it wasn't a servant."

"Well," I said, having looked at it in that light silently for half an
hour, and coming to the surface in another place, "if I could dress and
carry myself like that, I would not keep tavern."

"Oh! eh?" yawning; "who does?"

"Mrs. Astor.  Of course nobody less rich than Mrs. Astor could go
up-stairs and down-stairs and in my lady's chamber in Shiraz silk and
gold of Ophir.  Why, Cleopatra was nothing to her. I make no doubt she
uses gold-dust for sugar in her coffee every morning; and as for the
three miserable little wherries that Isabella furnished Columbus, and
historians have towed through their tomes ever since, if you know of
anybody that has a continent he wishes to discover, send him to this
housekeeper, and she can fit out a fleet of transports and Monitors for
convoy with one of her bracelets."

"I don't," said Halicarnassus, rubbing his eyes.

"I only wish," I added, "that she would turn Rebel so that government
might confiscate her.  Paper currency would go up at once from the
sudden influx of gold, and the credit of the country receive a new
lease of life.  She must be a lineal descendant of Sir Roger de
Coverley, for sure her finger sparkles with a hundred of his richest
acres."

Before bidding a final farewell to New York, I venture to make a single
remark.  I regret to be forced to confess that I greatly fear even this
virtuous little city has not escaped quite free, the general
deterioration of morals and manners. The New York hackmen, for
instance, are very obliging and attentive; but if it would not seem
ungrateful, I would hazard the statement that their attentions are
unremitting to the degree being almost embarrassing, and proffered to
the verge of obtrusiveness.  I think, in short, that they are hardly
quite delicate in their politeness.  They press their hospitality on
you till you sigh for a little marked neglect. They are not content
with simple statement.  They offer you their hack, for instance.  You
decline with thanks.  They say that they will carry you to any part of
the city.  Where is the pertinence of that, if you do not wish to go?
But they not only say it, they repeat it, they dwell upon it as if it
were a cardinal virtue.  Now you have never expressed or entertained
the remotest suspicion that they would not carry you to any part of the
city.  You have not the slightest intention or desire to discredit
their assertion.  The only trouble is, as I said before, you do not
wish to go to any part of the city. Very few people have time to drive
about in that general way; and surely, when you have once distinctly
informed them that you do not design to inspect New York, they ought to
see plainly that you cannot change your whole plan of operations out of
gratitude to them, and that the part of true politeness is to withdraw.
But they even go beyond a censurable urgency; for an old gentleman and
lady, evidently unaccustomed to travelling, had given themselves in
charge of a driver, who placed them in his coach, leaving the door open
while he went back seeking whom he might devour.  Presently a rival
coachman came up and said to the aged and respectable couple,--

"Here's a carriage all ready to start."

"But," replied the lady, "we have already told the gentleman who drives
this coach that we would go with him."

"Catch me to go in that coach, if I was you!" responded the wicked
coachman.  "Why, that coach has had the small-pox in it."

The lady started up in horror.  At that moment the first driver
appeared again; and Satan entered into me, and I felt in my heart that
I should like to see a fight; and then conscience stepped up and drove
him away, but consoled me by the assurance that I should see the fight
all the same, for such duplicity deserved the severest punishment, and
it was my duty to make an expose and vindicate helpless innocence
imposed upon in the persons of that worthy pair.  Accordingly I said to
the driver, as he passed me,--

"Driver, that man in the gray coat is trying to frighten the old lady
and gentleman away from your coach, by telling them it has had the
small-pox."

Oh! but did not the fire flash into his honest eyes, and leap into his
swarthy cheek, and nerve his brawny arm, and clinch his horny fist, as
he marched straightway up to the doomed offender, fiercely denounced
his dishonesty, and violently demanded redress?  Ah! then and there was
hurrying to and fro, and eagerness and delight on every countenance,
and a ring formed, and the prospect of a lovely "row,"--and I did it;
but a police-officer sprang up, full-armed, from somewhere underground,
and undid it all, and enforced a reluctant peace.

And so we are at Saratoga.  Now, of all places to stay at in the
summer-time, Saratoga is the very last one to choose.  It may have
attractions in winter; but, if one wishes to rest and change and root
down and shoot up and branch out, he might as well take lodgings in the
water-wheel of a saw-mill.  The uniformity and variety will be much the
same.  It is all a noiseless kind of din, narrow and intense.  There is
nothing in Saratoga nor of Saratoga to see or to hear or to feel. They
tell you of a lake.  You jam into an omnibus and ride four miles.  Then
you step into a cockle-shell and circumnavigate a pond, so small that
it almost makes you dizzy to sail around it.  This is the lake,--a very
nice thing as far as it goes; but when it has to be constantly on duty
as the natural scenery of the whole surrounding country, it is putting
altogether too fine a point on it.  The picturesque people will inform
you of an Indian encampment.  You go to see it, thinking of the forest
primeval, and expecting to be transported back to tomahawks, scalps,
and forefathers but you return without them, and that is all.  I never
heard of anybody's going anywhere.  In fact there did not seem to be
anywhere to go.  Any suggestion of mine to strike out into the
champaign was frowned down in the severest manner.  As far as I could
see, nobody ever did anything.  There never was any plan on foot.
Nothing was ever stirring.  People sat on the piazza and sewed.  They
went to the springs, and the springs are dreadful.  They bubble up
salts and senna.  I never knew anything that pretended to be water that
was half as bad.  It has no one redeeming quality. It is bitter.  It is
greasy.  Every spring is worse than the last, whichever end you begin
at.  They told apocryphal stories of people's drinking sixteen glasses
before breakfast; and yet it may have been true; for, if one could
bring himself to the point of drinking one glass of it, I should
suppose it would have taken such a force to enable him to do it that he
might go on drinking indefinitely, from the mere action of the original
impulse.  I should think one dose of it would render a person
permanently indifferent to savors, and make him, like Mithridates,
poison-proof.  Nevertheless, people go to the springs and drink.  Then
they go to the bowling-alleys and bowl.  In the evening, if you are
hilariously inclined, you can make the tour of the hotels.  In one you
see a large and brilliantly lighted parlor, along the four sides of
which are women sitting, solemn and stately, in rows three deep, a man
dropped in here and there, about as thick as periods on a page, very
young or very old or in white cravats.  A piano or a band or something
that can make a noise makes it at intervals at one end of the room.
They all look as if they waiting for something, but nothing in
particular happens.  Sometimes, after the mountain has labored awhile,
some little mouse of a boy and girl will get up, execute an antic or
two and sit down again, when everything relapses into its original
solemnity.  At very long intervals somebody walks across the floor.
There is a moderate fluttering of fans and an occasional whisper.
Expectation interspersed with gimcracks seems to be the programme.  The
greater part of the dancing that I saw was done by boys and girls.  It
was pretty and painful.  Nobody dances so well as children; no grace is
equal to their grace; but to go into a hotel at ten o'clock at night,
and see little things, eight, ten, twelve years old, who ought to be in
bed and asleep, tricked out in flounces and ribbons and all the
paraphernalia of ballet-girls, and dancing in the centre of a hollow
square of strangers,--I call it murder in the first degree.  What can
mothers be thinking of to abuse their children so?  Children are
naturally healthy and simple; why should they be spoiled?  They will
have to plunge into the world full soon enough; why should the world be
plunged into them?  Physically, mentally, and morally, the innocents
are massacred.  Night after night I saw the same  children led out to
the slaughter, and as I looked I saw their round, red cheeks grow thin
and white, their delicate nerves lose tone and tension, their brains
become feeble and flabby, their minds flutter out weakly in muslin and
ribbons, their vanity kindled by injudicious admiration, the sweet
child-unconsciousness withering away in the glare of indiscriminate
gazing, the innocence and simplicity and naturalness and childlikeness
swallowed up in a seething whirlpool of artificialness, all the fine,
golden butterfly-dust of modesty and delicacy and retiring girlhood
ruthlessly rubbed off forever before girlhood had even reddened from
the dim dawn of infancy.  Oh! it is cruel to sacrifice children so.
What can atone for a lost childhood?  What can be given in recompense
for the ethereal, spontaneous, sharply defined, new, delicious
sensations of a sheltered, untainted, opening life?

Thoroughly worked into a white heat of indignation, we leave the babes
in the wood to be despatched by their ruffian relatives, and go to
other hotel.  A larger parlor, larger rows, but still three deep and
solemn.  A tall man, with a face in which melancholy seems to be giving
way to despair, a man most proper for an undertaker, but palpably out
of place in a drawing-room, walks up and down incessantly, but
noiselessly, in a persistent endeavor to bring out a dance.  Now he
fastens upon a newly arrived man.  Now he plants himself before a bench
of misses.  You can hear the low rumble of his exhortation and the
tittering replies.  After a persevering course of entreaty and
persuasion, a set is drafted, the music galvanizes, and the dance
begins.

I like to see people do with their might whatsoever their hands or
their tongues or their feet find to do.  A half-and-half performance of
the right is just about as mischievous as the perpetration of the
wrong.  It is vacillation, hesitation, lack of will, feebleness of
purpose, imperfect execution, that works ill in all life.  Be monarch
of all you survey.  If a woman decides to do her own housework, let her
go in royally among her pots and kettles, and set everything a-stewing
and baking and broiling and boiling, as a queen might.  If she decides
not to do housework, but to superintend its doing, let her say to her
servant, "Go," and he goeth, to another, "Come," and he cometh, to a
third, "Do this," and he doeth it, and not potter about.  So, when
girls get themselves up and go to Saratoga for a regular campaign, let
their bearing be soldierly.  Let them be gay with abandonment.  Let
them take hold of it as if they liked it.  I do not affect the word
flirtation, but the thing itself is not half so criminal as one would
think from the animadversions visited upon it.  Of course, a deliberate
setting yourself to work to make some one fall in love with you, for
the mere purpose of showing your power, is abominable,--or would be, if
anybody ever did it; but I do not suppose it ever was done, except in
fifth-rate novels.  What I mean is, that it is entertaining, harmless,
and beneficial for young people to amuse themselves with each other to
the top of their bent, if their bent is a natural and right one.  A few
hearts may suffer accidental, transient injury; but hearts are like
limbs, all the stronger for being broken.  Besides, where one man or
woman is injured by loving too much, nine hundred and ninety-nine die
the death from not loving enough.  But these Saratoga girls did neither
one thing nor another.  They dressed themselves in their best, making a
point of it, and failed.  They assembled themselves together of set
purpose to be lively, and they were infectiously dismal.  They did not
dress well:  one looked rustic; another was dowdyish; a third was
over-fine; a fourth was insignificant.  Their bearing was not good, in
the main.  They danced, and whispered, and laughed, and looked like
milkmaids.  They had no style, no figure.  Their shoulders were high,
and their chests were flat, and they were one-sided, and they
stooped,--all of which would have been no account, if they had only
been unconsciously enjoying themselves:  but they consciously were not.
It is possible that they thought they were happy, but I knew better.
You are never happy, unless you are master of the situation; and they
were not.  They endeavored to appear at ease,--a thing which people who
are at ease never do.  They looked as if they had all their lives been
meaning to go to Saratoga, and now they had got there and were
determined not to betray any unwontedness. It was not the timid, eager,
delighted, fascinating, graceful awkwardness of a new young girl; it
was not the careless, hearty, whole-souled enjoyment of an experienced
girl; it was not the natural, indifferent, imperial queening it of an
acknowledged monarch:  but something that caught hold of the hem of the
garment of them all.  It was they with the sheen damped off. So it was
not imposing.  I could pick you up a dozen girls straight along, right
out of the pantries and the butteries, right up from the washing-tubs
and the sewing-machines, who should be abundantly able to "hoe their
row" with them anywhere. In short, I was extremely disappointed.  I
expected to see the high fashion, the very birth and breeding, the
cream cheese of the country, and it was skim-milk.  If that is birth,
one can do quite as well without being born at all.  Occasionally you
would see a girl with gentle blood in her veins, whether it were
butcher-blood or banker-blood, but she only made the prevailing
plebsiness more striking.  Now I maintain that a woman ought to be very
handsome or very clever, or else she ought to go to work and do
something.  Beauty is of itself a divine gift and adequate. "Beauty is
its own excuse for being" anywhere.  It ought not to be fenced in or
monopolized, any more than a statue or a mountain.  It ought to be free
and common, a benediction to all weary wayfarers.  It can never be
profaned; for it veils itself from the unappreciative eye, and shines
only upon its worshippers. So a clever woman, whether she be a painter
or a teacher or a dress-maker,--if she really has an object in life, a
career, she is safe.  She is a power.  She commands a realm.  She owns
a world.  She is bringing things to bear.  Let her alone.  But it is a
very dangerous and a very melancholy thing common women to be "lying on
their oars" long at a time.  Some of these were, I suppose, what
Winthrop calls "business-women, fighting their way out of vulgarity
into style."  The process is rather uninteresting, but the result may
be glorious.  Yet a good many of them were good honest, kind, common
girls, only demoralized by long lying around in a waiting posture.  It
had taken the fire and sparkle out of them.  They were not in a healthy
state.  They were degraded, contracted, flaccid.  They did not hold
themselves high.  They knew that in a market-point of view there was a
frightful glut of women.  The usually small ratio of men was unusually
diminished by the absence of those who gone to the war, and of those
who, as was currently reported, were ashamed that they had not gone.  A
few available men had it all their own way; the women were on the
lookout for them, instead of being themselves looked out for.  They
talked about "gentlemen," and being "companionable to GEN-tlemen," and
who was "fascinating to GEN-tlemen," till the "grand old name became a
nuisance. There was an under-current of unsated coquetry.  I don't
suppose they were any sillier than the rest of us; but when our
silliness is mixed in with housekeeping and sewing and teaching and
returning visits, it passes off harmless.  When it is stripped of all
these modifiers, however, and goes off exposed to Saratoga, and melts
in with a hundred other sillinesses, it makes a great show.

No, I don't like Saratoga.  I don't think it is wholesome.  No place
can be healthy that keeps up such an unmitigated dressing.

"Where do you walk?" I asked an artless little lady.

"O, almost always on the long piazza.  It is so clean there, and we
don't like to soil our dresses."

Now I ask if girls could ever get into that state in the natural course
of things!  It is the result of bad habits. They cease to care for
things which they ought to like to do, and they devote themselves to
what ought to be only an incident.  People dress in their best without
break.  They go to the springs before breakfast in shining raiment, and
they go into the parlor after supper in shining raiment, and it is
shine, shine, shine, all the way between, and a different shine each
time.  You may well suppose that I was like an owl among birds of
Paradise, for what little finery I had was in my (eminently)
travelling-trunk:  yet, though it was but a dory, compared with the
Noah's arks that drove up every day, I felt that, if I could only once
get inside of it, I could make things fly to some purpose.  Like poor
Rabette, I would show the city that the country too could wear clothes!
I never walked down Broadway without seeing a dozen white trunks, and
every white trunk that I saw I was fully convinced was mine, if I could
only get at it.  By and by mine came, and I blossomed.  I arrayed
myself for morning, noon, and night, and everything else that came up,
and was, as the poet says,--

   "Prodigious in change,
   And endless in range,"--

for I would have scorned not to be as good as the best.  The result
was, that in three days I touched bottom.  But then we went away, and
my reputation was saved.  I don't believe anybody ever did a larger
business on a smaller capital; but I put a bold face on it.  I cherish
the hope that nobody suspected I could not go on in that ruinous way
all summer,--I, who in three days had mustered into service every dress
and sash and ribbon and that I had had in three years or expected to
have in three more.  But I never will, if I can help it, hold my head
down where other people are holding their heads up.

I would not be understood as decrying or depreciating dress. It is a
duty as well as a delight.  Mrs. Madison is reported to have said that
she would never forgive a young lady who did not dress to please, or
one who seemed pleased with her dress. And not only young ladies, but
old ladies and old gentlemen, and everybody, ought to make their dress
a concord and not a discord.  But Saratoga is pitched on a perpetual
falsetto, and stuns you.  One becomes sated with an interminable piece
de resistance of full dress.  At the seaside you bathe; at the
mountains you put on stout boots and coarse frocks and go a-fishing;
but Saratoga never "lets up,"--if I may be pardoned the phrase.
Consequently, you see much of crinoline and little of character.  You
have to get at the human nature just as Thoreau used to get at
bird-nature and fish-nature and turtle-nature, by sitting perfectly
still in one place and waiting patiently till it comes out.  You see
more of the reality of people in a single day's tramp than in twenty
days of guarded monotone.  Now I cannot conceive of any reason why
people should go to Saratoga, except to see people.  True, as a general
thing, they are the last objects you desire to see, when you are
summering.  But if one has been cooped up in the house or blocked up in
the country during the nine months of our Northern winter, he may have
a mighty hunger and thirst, when he is thawed out, to see human faces
and hear human voices; but even then Saratoga is not the place to go
to, on account of this very artificialness.  By artificial I do not
mean deceitful.  I saw nobody but nice people there, smooth, kind, and
polite.  By artificial I mean wrought up.  You don't get at the heart
of things.  Artificialness spreads and spans all with a crystal
barrier,--invisible, but palpable.  Nothing was left to grow and go at
its own sweet will.  The very springs were paved and pavilioned.  For
green fields and welling fountains and a possibility of brooks, which
one expects from the name, you found a Greek temple, and a
pleasure-ground, graded and grassed and pathed like a cemetery, wherein
nymphs trod daintily in elaborate morning-costume. Everything took
pattern and was elaborate.  Nothing was left to the imagination, the
taste, the curiosity.  A bland, smooth, smiling surface baffled and
blinded you, and threatened profanity.  Now profanity is wicked and
vulgar; but if you listen to the reeds next summer, I am not sure that
you will not hear them whispering, under, "Thunder!"

For the restorative qualities of Saratoga I have nothing to say.  I was
well when I went there; nor did my experience ever furnish me with any
disease that I should consider worse than an intermittent attack of her
spring waters.  But whatever it may do for the body, I do not believe
it is for the soul.  I do not believe that such places, such scenes,
such a fashion of life ever nourishes a vigorous womanhood or manhood.
Taken homeopathically, it may be harmless; but become a habit, a
necessity, it must vitiate, enervate, destroy.  Men can stand it, for
the sea-breezes and the mountain-breezes may have full sweep through
their life; but women cannot, for they just go home and live air-tight.


If the railroad-men at Saratoga tell you that you can go straight from
there to the foot of Lake George, don't you believe a word of it.
Perhaps you can, and perhaps you cannot; but you are not any more
likely to "can" for their saying so. We left Saratoga for
Fort-William-Henry Hotel in full faith of an afternoon ride and a
sunset arrival, based on repeated and unhesitating assurances to that
effect.  Instead of which, we went a few miles, and were then dumped
into a blackberry-patch, where we were informed that we must wait seven
hours.  So much for the afternoon ride through summer fields and
"Sunset on Lake George," from the top of a coach.  But I made no
unmanly laments, for we were out of Saratoga, and that was happiness.
We were among cows and barns and homely rail-fences, and that was
comfort; so we strolled contentedly through the pasture, found a
river,--I believe it was the Hudson; at any rate, Halicarnassus said
so, though I don't imagine he knew; but he would take oath it was
Acheron rather than own up to ignorance on any point whatever,--watched
the canal-boats and boatmen go down, marvelled at the arbor-vitae trees
growing wild along the river-banks, green, hale, stately, and
symmetrical, against the dismal mental background of two little
consumptive shoots bolstered up in our front yard at home, and dying
daily, notwithstanding persistent and affectionate nursing with
"flannels and rum," and then we went back to the blackberry-station and
inquired whether there was nothing celebrated in the vicinity to which
visitors of received Orthodox creed should dutifully pay their
respects, and were gratified to learn that we were but a few miles from
Jane McCrea and her Indian murderers.  Was a carriage procurable?
Well, yes, if the ladies would be willing to go in that.  It wasn't
very smart, but it would take 'em safe,--as if "the ladies" would have
raised any objections to going in a wheelbarrow, had it been necessary,
and so we bundled in.  The hills were steep, and our horse, the
property of an adventitious by-stander, was of the Rosinante breed; we
were in no hurry, seeing that the only thing awaiting us this side the
sunset was a blackberry-patch without any blackberries, and we walked
up hill and scraped down, till we got into a lane which somebody told
us led to the Fort, from which the village, Fort Edward, takes its
name.  But, instead of a fort, the lane ran full tilt against a pair of
bars.

"Now we are lost," I said, sententiously.

"A gem of countless price," pursued Halicarnassus, who never quotes
poetry except to destroy my equilibrium.

"How long will it be profitable to remain here?" asked Grande, when we
had sat immovable and speechless for the space of five minutes.

"There seems to be nowhere else to go.  We have got to the end," said
Halicarnassus, roaming as to his eyes over into the wheat-field beyond.

"We might turn," suggested the Anakim, looking bright.

"How can you turn a horse in this knitting-needle of a lane?" I
demanded.

"I don't know," replied Halicarnassus, dubiously, "unless I take him up
in my arms, and set him down with his head the other way,"--and
immediately turned him deftly in a corner about half as large as the
wagon.

The next lane we came to was the right one, and being narrow, rocky,
and rough, we left our carriage and walked.

A whole volume of the peaceful and prosperous history of our beloved
country could be read in the fact that the once belligerent,
life-saving, death-dealing fort was represented by a hen-coop; yet I
was disappointed.  I was hungry for a ruin,--some visible hint of the
past.  Such is human nature,--ever prone to be more impressed by a
disappointment of its own momentary gratification than by the most
obvious well-being of a nation but, glad or sorry, of Fort Edward was
not left one stone upon another.  Several single stones lay about,
promiscuous rather than belligerent.  Flag-staff and palisades lived
only in a few straggling bean-poles.  For the heavy booming of cannon
rose the "quauk!" of ducks and the cackling of hens.  We went to the
spot which tradition points out as the place where Jane McCrea met her
death.  River flowed, and raftsmen sang below; women stood at their
washing-tubs, and white-headed children stared at us from above; nor
from the unheeding river or the forgetful weeds came or cry or faintest
wail of pain.

When we were little, and geography and history were but printed words
on white paper, not places and events, Jane McCrea was to us no
suffering woman, but a picture of a low-necked, long-skirted, scanty
dress, long hair grasped by a naked Indian, and two unnatural-looking
hands raised in entreaty.  It was interesting as a picture, but it
excited no pity, no horror, because it was only a picture.  We never
saw women dressed in that style.  We knew that women did not take
journeys through woods without bonnet or shawl, and we spread a veil of
ignorant, indifferent incredulity over the whole.  But as we grow up,
printed words take on new life.  The latent fire in them lights up and
glows.  The mystic words throb with vital heat, and burn down into our
souls to an answering fire.  As we stand, on this soft summer day, by
the old tree which tradition declares to have witnessed that fateful
scene, we go back into a summer long ago, but fair, and just like this.
Jane McCrea is no longer a myth, but a young girl, blooming and
beautiful with the roses of her seventeen years.  Farther back still,
we see an old man's darling, little Jenny of the Manse, a light-hearted
child, with sturdy Scotch blood leaping in her young veins,--then a
tender orphan, sheltered by a brother's care,--then a gentle maiden,
light-hearted no longer, heavy-freighted, rather, but with a priceless
burden,--a happy girl, to whom love calls with stronger voice than
brother's blood, stronger even than life.  Yonder in the woods lurk
wily and wary foes.  Death with unspeakable horrors lies in ambush
there; but yonder also stands the soldier lover, and possible greeting,
after long, weary absence, is there.  What fear can master that
overpowering hope?  Estrangement of families, political disagreement, a
separated loyalty, all melt away, are fused together in the warmth of
girlish love.  Taxes, representation, what things are these to come
between two hearts?  No Tory, no traitor is her lover, but her own
brave hero and true knight.  Woe! woe! the eager dream is broken by mad
war-whoops! alas! to those fierce wild men, what is love, or
loveliness?  Pride, and passion, and the old accursed hunger for gold
flame up in their savage breasts.  Wrathful, loathsome fingers clutch
the long, fair hair that even the fingers of love have caressed but
with reverent half-touch,--and love and hope and life go out in one
dread moment of horror and despair. Now, through the reverberations of
more than fourscore years, through all the tempest-rage of a war more
awful than that, and fraught, we hope, with a grander joy, a clear,
young voice, made sharp with agony, rings through the shuddering woods,
cleaves up through the summer sky, and wakens in every heart a thrill
of speechless pain.  Along these peaceful banks I see a bowed form
walking, youth in his years, but deeper furrows in his face than can
plough, stricken down from the heights of ambition and desire, all the
vigor and fire of manhood crushed and quenched beneath the horror of
one fearful memory.

Sweet summer sky, bending above us soft and saintly, beyond your blue
depths is there not Heaven?


"We may as well give Dobbin his oats here," said Halicarnassus.

We had brought a few in a bag for luncheon, thinking it might help him
over the hills.  So the wagon was rummaged, the bag brought to light,
and I was sent to one of the nearest houses to get something for him to
eat out of.  I did not think to ask what particular vessel to inquire
for; but after I had knocked, I decided upon a meat-platter or a
pudding-dish, and with the good woman's permission finally took both,
that Halicarnassus might have his choice.

"Which is the best?" I asked, holding them up.

He surveyed them carefully, and then said,--

"Now run right back and get a tumbler for him to drink out of, and a
teaspoon to feed him with."

I started in good faith, from a mere habit of unquestioning obedience,
but with the fourth step my reason returned to me, and I returned to
Halicarnassus and--kicked him.  That sounds very dreadful and horrible,
and it is, if you are thinking of a great, brutal, brogan kick, such as
a stupid farmer gives to his patient oxen; but not, if you mean only a
delicate, compact, penetrative nudge with the toe of a tight-fitting
gaiter,--addressed rather to the conscience than the sole, to the
sensibilities rather than the senses.  The kick masculine is coarse,
boorish, unmitigated, predicable only of Calibans. The kick feminine is
expressive, suggestive, terse, electric,--an indispensable instrument
in domestic discipline, as women will bear me witness, and not at all
incompatible with beauty, grace, and amiability.  But, right or wrong,
after all this interval of rest and reflection, in full view of all the
circumstances, my only regret is that I did not kick him harder.

"Now go and fetch your own tools!" I cried, shaking off the yoke of
servitude.  "I won't be your stable-boy any longer!"

Then, perforce, he gathered up the crockery, marched off in disgrace,
and came back with a molasses-hogshead, or a wash-tub, or some such
overgrown mastodon, to turn his sixpenny-worth of oats into.

Having fed our mettlesome steed, the next thing was to water him.  The
Anakim remembered to have seen a pump with a trough somewhere, and they
proposed to reconnoitre while we should "wait BY the wagon" their
return.  No, I said we would drive on to the pump, while they walked.

"You drive!" ejaculated Halicarnassus, contemptuously.

Now I do not, as a general thing, have an overweening respect for
female teamsters.  There is but one woman in the world to whose hands I
confide the reins and my bones with entire equanimity; and she says,
that, when she is driving, she dreads of all things to meet a driving
woman.  If a man said this, it might be set down to prejudice.  I don't
make any account of Halicarnassus's assertion, that, if two women
walking in the road on a muddy day meet a carriage, they never keep
together, but invariably one runs to the right and one to the left, so
that the driver cannot favor them at all, but has to crowd between
them, and drive both into the mud.  That is palpably interested false
witness.  He thinks it is fine fun to push women into the mud, and
frames such flimsy excuses.  But as a woman's thoughts about women,
this woman's utterances are deserving of attention; and she says that
women are not to be depended upon.  She is never sure that they will
not turn out on the wrong side.  They are nervous; they are timid; they
are unreasoning; they are reckless.  They will give a horse a
disconnected, an utterly inconsequent "cut," making him spring, to the
jeopardy of their own and others' safety.  They are not concentrative,
and they are not infallibly courteous, as men are.  I remember I was
driving with her once between Newburyport and Boston.  It was getting
late, and we were very desirous to reach our destination before
nightfall. Ahead of us a woman and a girl were jogging along in a
country wagon.  As we wished to go much faster than they, we turned
aside to pass them; but just as we were well abreast, the woman started
up her horse, and he skimmed over the ground like a bird. We laughed,
and followed, well content.  But after he had gone perhaps an eighth of
a mile, his speed slackened down to the former jog-trot.  Three times
we attempted to pass before we really comprehended the fact that that
infamous woman was deliberately detaining and annoying us.  The third
time, when we had so nearly passed them that our horse was turning into
the road again, she struck hers up so suddenly and unexpectedly that
her wheels almost grazed ours.  Of course, understanding her game, we
ceased the attempt, having no taste for horse-racing; and nearly all
the way from Newburyport to Rowley, she kept up that brigandry, jogging
on, and forcing us to jog on, neither going ahead herself nor suffering
us to do so,--a perfect and most provoking dog in a manger.  Her
girl-associate would look behind every now and then to take
observations, and I mentally hoped that the frisky Bucephalus would
frisk his mistress out of the cart and break her ne--arm, or at least
put her shoulder out of joint.  If he did, I had fully determined in my
own mind to hasten to her assistance, and shame her to death with
delicate and assiduous kindness.  But fate lingered like all the rest
of us.  She reached Rowley in safety, and there our roads separated.
Whether she stopped there, or drove into Ethiopian wastes beyond, I
cannot say; but have no doubt that the milk which she carried into
Newburyport to market was blue, the butter frowy, and the potatoes
exceedingly small.

Now do you mean to tell me that any man would have been guilty of such
a thing?  I don't mean, would have committed such discourtesy to a
woman?  Of course not; but would a man ever do it to a man?  Never.  He
might try it once or twice, just for fun, just to show off his horse,
but he never would have persisted in it till a joke became an insult,
not to say a possible injury.

Still, as I was about to say, when that Rowley jade interrupted me,
though I have small faith in Di-Vernonism generally, and no large faith
in my own personal prowess, I did feel myself equal to the task of
holding the reins while our Rosinante walked along an open road to a
pump.  I therefore resented Halicarnassus's contemptuous tones, mounted
the wagon with as much dignity as wagons allow, sat straight as an
arrow on the driver's seat, took the reins in both hands,--as they used
to tell me I must not, when I was a little girl, because that was
women's way, but I find now that men have adopted it, so I suppose it
is all right,--and proceeded to show, like Sam Patch, that some things
can be done as well as others. Halicarnassus and the Anakim took up
their position in line on the other side of the road, hat in hand,
watching.

"Go fast, and shame them," whispered Grande, from the back-seat, and
the suggestion jumped with my own mood. It was a moment of intense
excitement.  To be or not to be. I jerked the lines.  Pegasus did not
start.

"C-l-k-l-k!"  No forward movement.

"Huddup!"  Still waiting for reinforcements.

"H-w-e."  (Attempt at a whistle.  Dead failure.)

(Sotto voce.)  "O you beast!"  (Pianiassimo.)  "Gee!  Haw! haw! haw!"
with a terrible jerking of the reins.

A voice over the way, distinctly audible, utters the cabalistic words,
"Two forty."  Another voice, as audible, asks, "Which'll you bet on?"
It was not soothing.  It did seem as if the imp of the perverse had
taken possession of that terrible nag to go and make such a display at
such a moment.  But as his will rose, so did mine, and my will went up,
my whip went with it; but before it came down, Halicarnassus made shift
to drone out, "Wouldn't Flora go faster, if she was untied?"

To be sure, I had forgotten to unfasten him, and there those two men
had stood and known it all the time!  I was in the wagon, so they were
secure from personal violence, but I have a vague impression of some
"pet names" flying wildly about in the air in that vicinity.  Then we
trundled safely down the lane.  We were to go in the direction leading
away from home,--the horse's.  I don't think he perceived it at first,
but as soon he did snuff the fact, which happened when he had gone
perhaps three rods, he quietly  turned around and headed the other way,
paying no more attention to my reins or my terrific "whoas!" than if I
were a sleeping babe.  A horse is none of your woman's-rights men.  He
is Pauline.  He suffers not the woman to usurp authority over him.  He
never says anything nor votes anything, but declares himself
unequivocally by taking things into his own hands, whenever he knows
there is nobody but a woman behind him,--and somehow he always does
know. After Halicarnassus had turned him back and set him going the
right way, I took on a gruff, manny voice, to deceive. Nonsense!  I
could almost see him snap his fingers at me.  He minded my whip no more
than he did a fly,--not so much as he did some flies.  Grande said she
supposed his back was all callous.  I acted upon the suggestion, knelt
down in the bottom of the wagon, and leaned over the dasher to whip him
on his belly, then climbed out on the shafts and snapped about his
ears; but he stood it much better than I.  Finally I found that by
taking the small end of the wooden whip-handle, and sticking it into
him, I could elicit a faint flash of light; so I did it with assiduity,
but the moderate trot which even that produced was not enough to
accomplish my design, which was to outstrip the two men and make them
run or beg.  The opposing forces arrived at the pump about the same
time.

Halicarnassus took the handle, and gave about five jerks.  Then the
Anakim took it and gave five more.  Then they both stopped and wiped
their faces.

"What do you suppose this pump was put here for?" asked Halicarnassus.

"A milestone, probably," replied the Anakim.

Then they resumed their Herculean efforts till the water came, and then
they got into the wagon, and we drove into the blackberries once more,
where we arrived just in season to escape a thunder-shower, and pile
merrily into one of several coaches waiting to convey passengers in
various directions as soon as the train should come.

It is very selfish, but fine fun, to have secured your own chosen seat
and bestowed your own luggage, and have nothing to do but witness the
anxieties and efforts of other people.  The exquisite pleasure we
enjoyed for fifteen minutes, edified at the last by hearing one of our
coachmen call out, "Here, Rosey, this way!"--whereupon a manly voice,
in the darkness, near us, soliloquized, "Respectful way of addressing a
judge of the Supreme Court!" and, being interrogated, the voice
informed us that "Rosey" was the vulgate for Judge Rosecranz; whereupon
Halicarnassus over the rampant democracy by remarking that the
diminutive was probably a term of endearment rather than familiarity;
whereupon the manly voice--if I might say it--snickered audibly in the
darkness, and we all relapsed into silence.  But could anything be more
characteristic of a certain phase of the manners of our great and
glorious country? Where are the Trollopes?  Where is Dickens?  Where is
Basil Hall?

It is but a dreary ride to Lake George on a dark and rainy evening,
unless people like riding for its own sake, as I do. If there are suns
and stars and skies, very well.  If there are not, very well too:  I
like to ride all the same.  I like everything in this world but
Saratoga.  Once or twice our monotony was broken up by short halts
before country inns. At one an excitement was going on.  "Had a
casualty here this afternoon," remarked a fresh passenger, as soon as
he was fairly seated.  A casualty is a windfall to a country village.
It is really worth while to have a head broken occasionally, for the
wholesome stirring-up it gives to the heads that are not broken.  On
the whole, I question whether collisions and collusions do not cause as
much good as harm.  Certainly, people seem to take the most lively
satisfaction in receiving and imparting all the details concerning
them.  Our passenger-friend opened his budget with as much complacence
as ever did Mr. Gladstone or Disraeli, and with a confident air of
knowing that he was going not only to enjoy a piece of good-fortune
himself, but to administer a great gratification to us.  Our "casualty"
turned out to be the affair of a Catholic priest, of which our informer
spoke only in dark hints and with significant shoulder-shrugs and
eyebrow-elevations, because it was "not exactly the thing to get out,
you know"; but if it wasn't to get out, why did he let it out? and so
from my dark corner I watched him as a cat does a mouse, and the
lamp-light shone full upon him, and I understood every word and shrug,
and I am going to tell it all to the world.  I translated that the holy
father had been "skylarking" in a boat, and in gay society had
forgotten his vows of frugality and abstinence and general
mortification of the flesh, and had become, not very drunk, but drunk
enough to be dangerous, when he came ashore and took a horse in his
hands, and so upset his carriage, and gashed his temporal artery, and
came to grief, which is such a casualty as does not happen every day,
and I don't blame people for making the most of it.  Then the moral was
pointed, the tale adorned, and the impression deepened, solemnized, and
struck home by the fact that the very horse concerned in the "casualty"
was to be fastened behind our coach, and the whole population came out
with interns and umbrellas to tie him on,--all but one man, who was
deaf, and stood on the piazza, anxious and eager to know everything
that had been and was still occurring, and yet sorry to give trouble,
and so compromising the matter and making it worse, as compromisers
generally do, by questioning everybody with a deprecating, fawning air.

Item.  We shall all, if we live long enough, be deaf, but we need not
be meek about it.  I for one am determined to walk up to people and
demand what they are saying at the point of the bayonet.  Deafness, if
it must be so, but independence at any rate.

And when the fulness of time is come, we alight at Fort-William-Henry
Hotel, and all night long through the sentient woods I hear the booming
of Johnson's cannon, the rattle of Dieskan's guns, and that wild
war-whoop, more terrible than all.  Again old Monro watches from his
fortress-walls the steadily approaching foe, and looks in vain for
help, save to his own brave heart.  I see the light of conquest shining
in his foeman's eye, darkened by the shadow of the fate that waits his
coming on a bleak Northern hill but, generous in the hour of victory,
he shall not be less noble in defeat,--for to generous hearts all
generous hearts are friendly, whether they stand face to face or side
by side.

Over the woods and the waves, when the morning breaks, like a
bridegroom coming forth from his chamber, rejoicing as a strong man to
run a race, comes up the sun in his might and crowns himself king.  All
the summer day, from morn to dewy eve, we sail over the lakes of
Paradise.  Blue waters, and blue sky, soft clouds and green islands,
and fair, fruitful shores, sharp-pointed hills, long, gentle slopes and
swells, and the lights and shadows of far-stretching woods; and over
all the potence of the unseen past, the grand, historic past,--soft
over all the invisible mantle which our fathers flung at their
departing,--the mystic effluence of the spirits that trod these wilds
and sailed these waters,--the courage and the fortitude, the hope that
battled against hope, the comprehensive outlook, the sagacious purpose,
the resolute will, the unhesitating self-sacrifice, the undaunted
devotion which has made this heroic ground; cast these into your own
glowing crucible, O gracious friend, and crystallize for yourself such
a gem of days as shall worthily be set forever in your crown of the
beatitudes.



PART III.

Sometimes I become disgusted with myself.  Not very often, it is true,
for I don't understand the self-abhorrence that I occasionally see long
drawn out in the strictly private printed diaries of good dead people.
A man's self-knowledge, as regards his Maker, is a matter that lies
only between his Maker and himself, of which no printed or written
(scarcely even spoken) words can give, or ought to give, a true
transcript; but in respect of our relations to other people I suppose
we may take tolerably accurate views, and state them without
wickedness, if it comes in the way; and since the general trend of
opinion seems to be towards excessive modesty, I will sacrifice myself
to the good of society, and say that, in the main, I think I am a
rather "nice" sort of person.  Of course I do a great many things, and
say a great many things, and think a great many things, that I ought
not; but when I think of the sins that I don't commit,--the many times
when I feel cross enough to "bite a ten-penny nail in two," and only
bite my lips,--the sacrifices I make for other people, and don't
mention it, and they themselves never know it,--the quiet cheerfulness
I maintain when the fire goes out, or unexpected guests arrive and
there is no bread in the house, or my manuscript is respectfully
declined by that infatuated editor,--when I reflect upon these things,
and a thousand others like unto them, I must say, I am lost in
admiration of my own virtues.  You may not like me, but that is a mere
difference of taste.  At any rate, I like myself very well, and find
myself very good company.  Many a laugh, and "lots" or "heaps"
(according as you are a Northern or a Southern provincial) of
conversation we have all alone, and are usually on exceeding good
terms, which is a pleasure, even when other people like me,  and an
immense consolation when they don't.  But as I was saying, I do
sometimes fall out with myself, and with human nature in general (and,
in fact, I rather think the secret of self-complacence lurks somewhere
hereabouts,--in a mental assumption that our virtues are our own, but
our faults belong to the race).  But to think that we were so puny and
puerile that we could not stand the beauty that breathed around us! I
do not mean that it killed us, but it drained us.  It did not cease to
be beautiful, but we ceased to be overpowered.  When the day began, eye
and soul were filled with the light that never was on sea or shore.  We
spoke low and little, gazing with throbbing hearts, breathless,
receptive, solemn, and before twelve o'clock we flatted out and made
jests.  This is humiliation,--that our dullard souls cannot keep up to
the pitch of sublimity for two hours; that we could sail through Glory
and Beauty, through Past and Present, and laugh.  Low as I sank with
the rest, though, I do believe I held out the longest:  but what can
one frail pebble do against a river? "How pretty cows look in a
landscape," I said; for you know, even if you must come down, it is
better to roll down an inclined plane than to drop over a precipice;
and I thought, since I saw that descent was inevitable, I would at
least engineer the party gently through aesthetics to puns.  So I said,
"How pretty cows look in a landscape, so calm and reflective, and sheep
harmoniously happy in the summer-tide."

"Yes," said the Anakim, who is New Hampshire born; "but you ought to
see the New Hampshire sheep, if you want the real article."

"I don't," I responded.  "I only want the picture."

"Ever notice the difference between Vermont and New Hampshire sheep?"
struck up Halicarnassus, who must always put in his oar.

"No," I said, "and I don't believe there is any."

"Pooh!  Tell New Hampshire sheep as far off as you can see 'em," he
persisted, "by their short legs and long noses.  Short legs to bring
'em near the grass, and long noses to poke under the rocks and get it."

"Yes, my boy, yes," said the Anakim pleasantly.  "I O U 1"

"He hath made everything beautiful in his time," murmured Grande,
partly because, gazing at the distant prospect, she thought so, and
partly as a praiseworthy attempt, in her turn, to pluck us out of the
slough into which we had fallen.

"I have heard," said Halicarnassus, who is always lugging in little
scraps of information apropos to everything,--"I have been told that
Dr. Alexander was so great an admirer of the Proverbs of Solomon, that
he used to read them over every three months."

"I beg your pardon," I interposed, glad of the opportunity to correct
and humiliate him, "but that was not one of the Proverbs of Solomon."

"Who said it was?" asked the Grand Mogul, savagely.

"Nobody; but you thought it was when she said it," answered his
antagonist, coolly.

"And whose proverb is it, my Lady Superior?"

"It is in Ecclesiastes," I said.

"Well, Ecclesiastes is next door to Solomon.  It's all one."
Halicarnassus can creep through the smallest knot-hole of any man of
his size it has ever been my lot to meet, provided there is anything on
the other side he wishes to get at.  If there is not, and especially if
anything is there which he wishes to shun, a four hundred and fifty
pounder cannot crash a hole large enough for you to push him through.
By such a pitiful chink as that did his Infallible Highness wriggle
himself out of the range of my guns, and pursue his line of remark.

"But I really cannot say that I have been able to detect the excessive
superiority of Solomon's proverbs.  If it were not for the name of it,
I think Sancho Panza's much better."

"Taisez-vous.  Hold your tongue," I said, without mitigation. If there
is anything I cannot away with, it is trivial apostasy.  I tolerate
latitudinarianism when it is hereditary. Where people's fathers and
mothers before them have been Pagans, and Catholics, and Mohammedans,
you don't blame THEM for being so.  You regret their error, and strive
to lead them back into the right path; only they are not inflammatory.
But to have people go out from the faith of their fathers with malice
aforethought and their eyes open--well, that is not exactly what I mean
either.  That is a sorrowful, but not necessarily an exasperating
thing.  What I mean is this:  I see people Orthodox from their cradles,
(and probably only from their cradles, certainly not from their
brains,) who think it is something pretty to become Unitarianistic.
They don't become Unitarians, as they never were Orthodox, because they
have not thought enough or sense enough to become or to be anything;
but they like to make a stir and attract attention. They seem to think
it indicates great liberality of character, and great breadth of view,
to be continually flinging out against their own faith, ridiculing
this, that, and the other point held by their Church, and shocking
devout and simple-minded Orthodox by their quasi-profanity.  Now for
good Orthodox Christians I have a great respect; and for good Unitarian
Christians I have a great respect; and for sincere, sad seekers, who
can find no rest for the sole of their foot, I have a great respect;
but for these Border State men, who are neither here nor there, on whom
you never can lay your hand, because they are twittering everywhere, I
have a profound contempt.  I wish people to be either one thing or
another. I desire them to believe something, and know what it is, and
stick to it.  I have no patience with this modern outcry against
creeds.  You hear people inveigh against them, without for a moment
thinking what they are.  They talk as if creeds were the head and front
of human offending, the infallible sign of bigotry and hypocrisy,
incompatible alike with piety and wisdom.  Do not these wise men know
that the thinkers and doers of the earth, in overwhelming majority,
have been creed men? Creeds may exist without religion, but neither
religion, nor philosophy, nor politics, nor society, can exist without
creeds.  There must be a creed in the head, or there cannot be religion
in the heart.  You must believe that Deity exists, before you can
reverence Deity.  You must believe in the fact of humanity, or you
cannot love your fellows.  A creed is but the concentration, the
crystallization, of belief.  Truth is of but little worth till it is so
crystallized.  Truth lying dissolved in oceans of error and nonsense
and ignorance makes but a feeble diluent.  It swashes everywhere, but
to deluge, not to benefit.  Precipitate it, and you have the salt of
the earth.  Political opposition, inorganic, is but a blind, cumbrous,
awkward, inefficient thing; but construct a platform, and immediately
it becomes lithe, efficient, powerful.  Even before they set foot on
these rude shores, our forefathers made a compact, and a nation was
born in that day.  It is on creeds that strong men are nourished, and
that which nourishes the leaders into eminence is necessary to keep the
masses from sinking.  A man who really thinks, will think his way into
light.  He may turn many a somersault, but he will come right side up
at last.  But people in general do not think, and if they refuse to be
walled in by other people's thoughts, they inevitably flop and flounder
into pitiable prostration.  So important is it, that a poor creed is
better than none at all. Truth, even adulterated as we get it, is a
tonic.  Bring forward something tangible, something positive, something
that means something, and it will do.  But this flowery, misty, dreamy
humanitarianism,--I say humanitarianism, because I don't know what that
is, and I don't know what the thing I am driving at is, so I put the
two unknown quantities together in a mathematical hope that minus into
minus may give plus,--this milk-and-watery muddle of dreary negations,
that remits the world to its original fluidic state of chaos, I spew it
out of my mouth.  It was not on such pap our Caesars fed that made them
grow so great.  I believe that the common people of early New England
were such lusty men, because they strengthened themselves by gnawing at
their tough old creeds.  Give one something to believe, and he can get
at it and believe it; but set out butting your head against nothing,
and the chances are that you will break your neck.  Take a good stout
Christian, or a good sturdy Pagan, and you find something to bring up
against; but with nebulous vapidists you are always slumping through
and sprawling everywhere.

Of course, I do not mean that sincere and sensible people never change
nor modify their faith.  I wish to say, for its emphasis, if you will
allow me, that they never do anything else; but generally the change is
a gradual and natural one,--a growth, not a convulsion,--a reformation,
not a revolution. When it is otherwise, it is a serious matter, not to
be lightly done or flippantly discussed.  If you really had a religious
belief, it threw out roots and rootlets through all your life. It
sucked in strength from every source.  It intertwined itself through
love and labor, through suffering and song, about every fibre of your
soul.  You cannot pull it up or dig it up, or in any way displace it,
without setting the very foundations of your life a-quivering.  True,
it may be best that you should do this.  If it was but a cumberer of
the ground, tear it up, root and branch, and plant in its stead the
seeds of that tree whose leaves are for the healing of the nations.
But such things are done with circumspection,--not as unto man.  If you
are gay and jovial about it, if you feel no darts of torture flashing
through be fastnesses of your life, do not flatter yourself that you
are making radical changes.  You are only pulling up pig-weed to set
out smart-weed, and the less you say about it the better.

Now Halicarnassus is really just as Orthodox as I.  He would not lie or
steal any quicker than I.  He would not willingly sacrifice one jot or
tittle of his faith, and yet he is always startling you with small
heresies.  He is like a calf tied to a tree in the orchard by a long
rope.  In the exuberance of his glee Bossy starts from the post, tail
up, in a hand gallop. You would think, from the way he sets out, that
he was going to race around the whole orchard, and probably he thinks
he is himself.  But by the time he is fairly under full headway, his
rope tightens up with a jerk, and away he goes heels over head. The
only difference is, that Halicarnassus knows the length of his tether,
and always fetches up in time to escape an overturn; but other people
do not know it, and they imagine he is going pell-mell into infidelity.
Now I was determined to have none of this trash in a steamboat.  One
has no desire to encounter superfluous risks in a country where life
and limb are held on so uncertain a tenure as in this.  There are quite
chances enough of shipwreck without having any Jonahs aboard. Besides,
in point of the fine arts, heterodoxy is worse than puns.  So I headed
him off at the first onset.  But I should not have been so entirely
successful in the attempt had I not been assisted by a pair of birds
who came to distract his and our attention from a neighboring thicket.
They wheeled--the gentle, graceful, sly, tantalizing things--in circles
and ellipses, now skimming along the surface of the water, now swooping
away in great smooth curves, then darting off in headlong flight and
pursuit.  "My kingdom for a gun!" exclaimed Halicarnassus with amateur
ardor.

"I am glad you have no gun," said compassionate Grande.  "Why should
you kill them?"

"Do not be alarmed," I said, soothingly, "a distaff would be as deadly
in his hands."

"Do you speak by the book, Omphale?" asked the Anakim, who still
carried those New Hampshire sheep on his back.

"We went a-ducking once down in Swampshire," I answered.

"Did you catch any?" queried Grande.

"Duckings? no," said Halicarnassus.

"Nor ducks either," I added.  "He made great ado with his guns, and his
pouches, and his fanfaronade, and knocking me with his elbows and
telling me to keep still, when no mouse could be more still than I, and
after all he did not catch one."

"Only fired once or twice," said Halicarnassus, "just for fun, and to
show her how to do it."

"How not to do it, you mean," said the Anakim.

"You fired forty times," I said quietly, but firmly, "and the ducks
would come out and look at you as interested as could be. You know you
didn't scare a little meadow-hen.  They knew you couldn't hit."

"Trade off your ducks against my sheep, and call it even?" chuckled the
Anakim; and so, chatting and happy, we glided along, enjoying, not
entranced, comfortable, but not sublime, content to drink in the sunny
sweetness of the summer day, happy only from the pleasant sense of
being, tangling each other in silly talk out of mere wantonness,
purling up bubbles of airy nothings in sheer effervescence of animal
delight; falling into periodic fits of useful knowledge, under the
influence of which we consulted our maps and our watches in a conjoint
and clamorous endeavor to locate ourselves, which would no sooner be
satisfactorily accomplished than something would turn up and set our
calculations and islands adrift, and we would have to begin new.  Dome
Island we made out by its shape, unquestionably; Whortleberry we
hazarded on the strength of its bushes; "Hen and Chicks," by a biggish
island brooding half a dozen little ones; Flea Island, from a certain
snappishness of aspect; Half-Way Island, by our distance from dinner;
Anthony's Nose, by its unlikeness to anything else, certainly not from
its resemblance to noses in general, let alone the individual nose of
Mark Antony, or Mad Anthony, or any Anthony between.  And then we
disembarked and posted ourselves on the coach-top for a six-mile ride
to Champlain; and Grande said, her face still buried in the map, "Here
on the left is 'Trout Brook' running into the lake, and a cross on it,
and 'Lt. Howe fell, 1758.'  That is worth seeing."

"Yes," I said, "America loved his brother."

"America loved HIM," howled Halicarnassus, thinking to correct me and
avenge himself.  Now I knew quite well that America loved him, and did
not love his brother, but with the mention of his name came into my
mind the tender, grieved surprise of that pathetic little appeal, and I
just said thought it aloud,--assuming historic knowledge enough in my
listeners to prevent misconception.  But to this day Halicarnassus
persists in thinking or at least in asserting, that I tripped over Lord
Howe.  As he does not often get such a chance, I let him comfort
himself with it as much as he can; but that is the way with your
whippersnapper critics.  They put on their "specs," and pounce down
upon some microscopic mote, which they think to be ignorance, but which
is really the diamond-dust of imagination.  "But let us see the place,"
said Grande.  "We must drive within sight of it."

"Yes," I said.  "Halicarnassus, ask the driver to be sure to tell us
where Lord Howe fell."

"Fell into the brook," said that Oracle, and sat as stiff as a post.

Ticonderoga,--up-hill and down-hill for six miles, white houses and
dark, churches and shops, and playing children and loungers, and mills,
and rough banks and haggard woods, just like any other somewhat
straggling country village.  O no!  O no!  There are few like this.
_I_ have seen no other. Churches and shops and all the paraphernalia of
busy, bustling common life there may be, but we have no eyes for such.
Yonder on the green high plain which we have already entered is a
simple guide-post, guiding you, not on to Canada, to New York, to
Boston, but back into the dead century that lived so fiercely and lies
so still.  We stand on ground over-fought by hosts of heroes.  Here
rise still the breastworks, grass-grown and harmless now, behind which
men awaited bravely the shock of furious onset, before which men rushed
as bravely to duty and to death.  Slowly we wind among the little
squares of intrenchments, whose deadliest occupants now are peaceful
cows and sheep, slowly among tall trees,--ghouls that thrust out their
slimy, cold fingers everywhere, battening on horrid banquets,--nay,
sorrowful trees, not so.  Your gentle, verdant vigor nourishes no lust
of blood.  Rather you sprang in pity from the cold ashes at your feet,
that every breeze quivering through your mournful leaves may harp a
requiem for Polydorus. Alighting at the landing-place we stroll up the
hill and among the ruins of the old forts, and breast ourselves the
surging battle-tide.  For war is not to this generation what it has
been.  The rust of long disuse has been rubbed off by the iron hand of
fate,--shall we not say, rather, by the good hand of our God upon
us?--and the awful word stands forth once more, red-lettered and real.
Marathon, Waterloo, Lexington, are no longer the conflict of numbers
against numbers, nor merely of principles against principles, but of
men against men.  And as we stand on this silent hill, the prize of so
many struggles, our own hearts swell with the hopes and sink with the
fears that its green old bluffs have roused.  Up from yon water-side
came stealing the Green-Mountain Boys, with their grand and
grandiloquent leader, and, at the very gateway where we stand, as
tradition says, (et potius Dii numine firment,) he thundered out, with
brave, barbaric voice, the imperious summons, "In the name of the great
Jehovah and the Continental Congress."  No wonder the startled,
half-dressed commander is confounded, and "the pretty face of his wife
peering over his shoulder" is filled with terror.  Well may such a
motley crew frighten the fair Europeanne.  "Frenchmen I know, and
Indians I know, but who are ye?"  Ah!  Sir Commander, so bravely
bedight, these are the men whom your parliamentary knights are to sweep
with their brooms into the Atlantic Ocean.  Bring on your besoms, fair
gentlemen; yonder is Champlain, and a lake is as good to drown in as an
ocean.  Look at them, my lords, and look many times before you leap.
They are a rough set, roughly clad, a stout-limbed, stout-hearted race,
insubordinate, independent, irrepressible, almost as troublesome to
their friends as to their foes; but there is good stock in them,--brain
and brawn, and brain and brawn will yet carry the day over court and
crown, in the name of the right, which shall overpower all things.  We
clamber down into arched passages, choked with debris, over floors
tangled with briers, and join in the wild wassail of the bold outlaw,
fired by his victorious career. We clamber up the rugged sides and wind
around to the headland. Brilliant in the "morning-shine," exultant in
the pride and pomp of splendid preparation, ardent for conquest and
glory, Abercrombie sails down the lovely inland sea, to sail back
dismantled and disgraced.  The retrieving fleet of Amherst follows, as
brilliant and as eager,--to gain the victory of numbers over valor, but
to lose its fruit, as many a blood-bought prize has since been lost,
snatched from the conqueror's hand by the traitor, doubt.  But this is
only the prologue of our great drama.  Allen leaps first upon the
scene, bucklered as no warrior ever was since the days of Homer or
before.  Then Arnold comes flying in, wresting laurels from
defeat,--Arnold, who died too late.  Here Schuyler walks up at night,
his military soul vexed within him by the sleeping guards and the
intermittent sentinels, his gentle soul harried by the rustic
ill-breeding of his hinds, his magnanimous soul cruelly tortured by the
machinations of jealousy and envy and evil-browed ambition.  Yonder on
the hill Burgoyne's battery threatens death, and Lincoln avenges us of
Burgoyne.  Let the curtain fall; a bloodier scene shall follow.

     *  *  *  *  *

And then we re-embark on Lake Champlain, and all the summer afternoon
sail down through phantom fleets, under the frowning ramparts of
phantom forts, past grim rows of deathful-throated cannon, through
serried hosts of warriors, with bright swords gleaming and strong arms
lifted and stern lips parted; but from lips of man or throat of cannon
comes no sound.  A thousand oars strike through the leaping waves, but
not a plash breaks on the listening ear.  A thousand white sails swell
to the coming breeze, that brings glad greeting from the inland hills,
but nothing breaks the silences of time.

And of all beautiful things that could have been thought of or hoped
for, what should come to crown our queen of days but a thunder-storm, a
most real and vivid thunder-storm, marshalling up from the west its
grand, cumulose clouds; black, jagged, bulging with impatient, prisoned
thunder biding their time, sharp and fierce against the brilliant sky,
spreading swiftly over the heavens, fusing into one great gray pall,
dropping a dim curtain of rain between us and the land, closing down
upon us a hollow hemisphere pierced with shafts of fire and deafening
with unseen thunders, wresting us off from the friendly skies and
shores, wrapping us into an awful solitude. O Princess Rohan, come to
me! come from the hidden caves, where you revel in magical glories,
come up from your coralline caves in the mysterious sea, come from
those Eastern lands of nightingale, roses, and bulbuls, where your
tropical soul was born and rocked in the lap of the lotus!  O sunny
Southern beauty, lost amongst Northern snows, flush forth in your
mystical splendor from the ruby wine of Hafiz, float down from your
clouds of the sunset with shining garments of light, open the golden
door of your palace domed in a lily, glide over these inky waves, O my
queen of all waters, come to me wherever you are, with your pencil
dipped in darkness, starry with diamond dews and spanned with the
softness of rainbows, and set on this land-locked Neptune your cross of
the Legion of Honor, assure to the angry god his bowl in Valhalla, that
the thunder-vexed lake may be soothed with its immortality!

But the storm passes on, the clouds sweep magnificently away, and the
glowing sky flings up its arch of promise.  The lucent waters catch its
gleam and spread in their depths a second arch as beautiful and bright.
So, haloed with magnificence, an earth-born bark on fairy waters,
completely circled by this glory of the skies and seas, we pass through
our triumphal gateway "deep into the dying day," and are presently
doused in the mud at Rouse's Point.  Rouse's Point is undoubtedly a
very good place, and they were good women there, and took good care of
us;  but Rouse's Point is a dreadful place to wake up in when you have
been in Dream-Land,--especially when a circus is there, singing and
shouting under your windows all night long. I wonder when circus-people
sleep, or do they not sleep at all, but keep up a perpetual ground and
lofty tumbling?  From Rouse's Point through Northern New York, through
endless woods and leagues of brilliant fire-weed, the spirit of the
dead flames that raved through the woods, past corn-fields that looked
rather "skimpy," certainly not to be compared to a corn-field I wot of,
whose owner has a mono-mania on the subject of corn and potatoes, and
fertilizes his fields with his own blood and brain,--a snort, a rush, a
shriek, and the hundred miles is accomplished, and we are at
Ogdensburg, a smart little town, like all American towns, with handsome
residences up, and handsomer ones going up, with haberdashers' shops,
and lawyers' offices, and judges' robes, and most hospitable
citizens,--one at least,--and all the implements and machinery of
government and self-direction, not excepting a huge tent for political
speaking and many political speeches, and everybody alert,
public-spirited, and keyed up to the highest pitch.  All this is
interesting, but we have seen it ever since we were born, and we look
away with wistful eyes to the north; for this broad, majestic river
stretching sky-ward like the ocean, is the Lawrence.  Up this river, on
the day of St. Lawrence, three hundred years ago, came the mariner of
St. Malo,--turning in from the sea till his straining eyes beheld on
both sides land, and planted the lilies of France.  Now it is the
boundary line of empires.  Those green banks on the other side are a
foreign country, and for the first time I am not monarch of all I
survey.  That fine little city, with stately trees towering from the
midst of its steeples and gray roofs, is Prescott.  At the right rise
the ramparts of Fort Wellington, whence cannon-balls came hissing over
to Ogdensburg some fifty years ago.  We stand within a pretty range,
suppose they should try it again!  Farther on still is a plain, gray
tower, where a handful of "patriots" intrenched and destroyed
themselves with perverse martyrophobia in a foolish and fruitless
endeavor.  The afternoon is before us; suppose we row over; here is a
boat, and doubtless a boatman, or the ferry-steamer will be here
directly.  By no means; a ferry-steamer is thoroughly commonplace; you
can ferry-steam anywhere.  Row, brothers, row, perhaps you will never
have the chance again. Lightly, lightly row through the green waters of
the great St. Lawrence, through the sedge and rank grass that wave
still in his middle depths, over the mile and a half of great rushing
billows that rock our little boat somewhat roughly:  but I am not
afraid,--for I can swim.

"You can, can you?" says the Anakim, incredulously.

"Indeed I can, can't I, Halicarnassus?" appealingly.

"Like a brick!" ejaculates that worthy, pulling away at the oars, and
on we shoot, steadily nearing the rustic stone city that looks so
attractive, so different from our hasty, brittle, shingly American
half-minute houses,--massive, permanent, full of character and solid
worth.  And now our tiny craft butts against the pier, and we ascend
from the Jesuit river and stand on British soil.  No stars and stripes
here, but Saint George and his dragon fight out their never-ending
brawl.  No war, no volunteering, no Congress here; but peace and a
Parliament and a Queen, God bless her! and this is her realm, a
kingdom.  Now if it had been a year ago I do not know that I should
not, like Columbus, have knelt to kiss these dingy stones, so much did
I love and reverence England, and whatever bore the dear English name.
But we--they, rather--have changed all that. Among the great gains of
this memorable year,--among the devotions, the sacrifices, the
heroisms,--all the mighty, noble, and ennobling deeds by which we stand
enriched forevermore,--there broods the shadow of one irreparable
loss,--the loss of England.  Success or failure can make no difference
there.  English gold, English steel, English pluck, stand today as
always; but English integrity, English staunchness, English love, where
are they?  Just where Prescott is, now that we have come to it; for the
substantial stone city a mile and a half away turns out to be a
miserable little dirty, butty, smutty, stagnant owl-cote when you get
into it. What we took for stone is stolidity.  It is old, but its age
is squalid, not picturesque. We stumble through the alleys that answer
for streets, and come to the "Dog and Duck," a dark, dingy ale-room,
famous for its fine ale, we are told, or perhaps it was beer:  I don't
remember. It is not in male nature to go by on the other side of such a
thing, and we enter,--they to test the beverage, Grande and I to make
observation of the surroundings.  We take position in the passage
between the bar-room and parlor.  A yellow-haired Saxon child, with
bare legs and fair face, crawls out from some inner hollow to the door,
and impends dangerous on the sill, throwing numerous scared backward
glances over his shoulder.  The parlor is taken bodily out of old
English novels, a direct descendant, slightly furbished up and
modernized, of the Village inn parlor of Goldsmith,--homely, clean, and
comfortless.  A cotton tidy over the rocking-chair bewrays, wrought
into its crocheted gorgeousness, the name of Uncle Tom.  This I cannot
stand. Time may bring healing, but now the wound is still fresh.  "O,
you did Uncle-Tom it famously," I hurl out, doubling my fist at the
British lion which glares at me from that cotton tidy. "I remember
those days.  O yes! you were rampant on Uncle Tom. You are a famous
friend of Uncle Tom, with your Exeter Halls, and your Lord
Shaftesburys, and your Duchess of Sutherlands! Cry your pretty eyes out
over Uncle Tom, dear, tender-hearted British women.  Write appealing
letters to your sisters over the waters, affectionate, conscientious
kindred; canonize your saint, our sin, in tidies, and chair-covers, and
Christmas slippers,--we know how to take you now; we have found out
what all that is worth we can appraise your tears by the bottle--in
pounds, shillings, and pence."  But the beer-men curtail my harangue,
so I shake my departing fist at the cowering lion, and, leaving this
British institution, proceed to investigate another British
institution,--the undaunted English army, in its development in Fort
Wellington.  A wall shuts the world out from those sacred premises; a
stile lets the world in,--over which stile we step and stand on the
fort grounds.  A party of soldiers are making good cheer in a corner of
the pasture,--perhaps I ought to say parade-ground.  As no sentinel
accosts us, we hunt up one, and inquire if the fort is accessible.  He
does not know, but inclines to the opinion that it is.  We go up the
hill, walk round the wall, and mark well her bulwarks, till we come to
a great gate, but it refuses to turn.  The walls are too high to scale,
besides possible pickets on the other side.  I have no doubt in the
world that we could creep under, for the gate has shrunk since it was
made, and needs to have a tuck let down; but what would become of
dignity?  Grande and the Anakim make a reconnaissance in force, to see
if some unwary postern-gate may not permit entrance.  Halicarnassus
fumbles in his pockets for edge-tools, as if Queen Victoria, who rules
the waves, on whose dominions the sun never sets, whose morning
drum-beat encircles the world, would leave the main gate of her main
fort on one of the frontiers of her empire so insecurely defended that
a single American can carry it with his fruit-knife.  Such ideas I
energetically enforce, till I am cut short by the slow retrogression of
the massive gate on ponderous hinges turning.

"What about the fruit-knife?" inquires Halicarnassus as I pass in.  The
reconnoitering party return to report a bootless search, and are
electrified to find the victory already gained.

"See the good of having been through college," exults Halicarnassus.

"How did you do it?" asks Grande, admiringly.

"By genius and assiduity," answers Halicarnassus.

"And lifting the latch," I append, for I have been examining the
mechanism of the gate since I came in, and have made a discovery which
dislodges my savant from his pinnacle; namely, that the only fastening
on the gate is a huge wooden latch, which not one of us had sense
enough to lift; but then who thinks of taking a fort by assault and
battery on the latch? Halicarnassus hit upon it by mere accident, and I
therefore remorselessly expose him.  Then we saunter about the place,
and, seeing a woman eying us suspiciously from an elevated window, we
show the white feather and ask her if we may come in, which, seeing we
have been in for some ten minutes, we undoubtedly may; and then we
mount the ramparts and peer into Labrador and Hudson's Bay and the
North Pole, and, turning to a softer sky, gaze from a "foreign clime"
upon our own dear land, home of freedom, hope of the nations, eye-sore
of the Devil, rent by one set of his minions, and ridiculed by another,
but coming out of her furnace-fires, if God please and man will,
heartier and holier, because freer and truer, than ever before.  O my
country, beautiful and beloved, my hope, my desire, my joy, and my
crown of rejoicing, immeasurably dearer in the agony of your bloody
sweat than in the high noon of your proud prosperity! standing for the
first time beyond your borders, and looking upon you from afar, now and
forevermore out of a full heart I breathe to you benedictions.



PART IV.

Down the St. Lawrence in a steamer, up the St. Lawrence on the maps, we
sail through another day full of eager interest. Everything is fresh,
new, novel.  Is it because we are in high latitudes that the river and
the country look so high?  I could fancy that we are on a plateau,
overlooking a continent.  Now the water expands on all sides like an
ocean meeting the sky, and now we are sailing through hay-fields and
country orchards, as if the St. Lawrence had taken a turn into our
back-yard. We hug the Canada shore, and thick woods come down the banks
dipping their summer tresses in the cool Northern river,--broad
pasture-lands stretch away, away from river to sky,--brown, dubious
villages sail by at long intervals.  On the distant southern shore
America has stationed her outposts, and unfrequent spires attest a
civilized, if remote life.  In the sunny day all things are sunny, save
when a Claude Lorraine glass lends a dark, rich mystery to every hill
and cloud.  The Claude Lorraine glass is a rara avus, and not only
gives new lights to the scenery, but brings out the human nature on
board in great force.  The Anakim tells us of one man who asked him in
a confidential aside, if it was a show, whereat we all laugh.  Even I
laugh at the man's ignorance,--I, a thief, an assassin, a traitor, who
six weeks ago had never heard of a Claude Lorraine glass; but nobody
can tell who has not tried it how much credit one gets for extensive
knowledge, if only he holds his tongue.  In all my life I am afraid I
shall never learn as much as I have been inferred to know simply
because I kept still.

Down the St. Lawrence in an English steamer, where everything is not so
much English as John Bull-y.  The servants at the table are thoroughly
and amusingly yellow-plush,--if that is the word I want, and if it is
not that, it is another; for I am quite sure of my idea, though not of
the name that belongs to it.  The servants are smooth and sleek and
intense.  They serve as if it was their business, and a weighty
business at that, demanding all the energies of a created being.
Accordingly they give their minds to it.  The chieftain yonder, in
white choker and locks profusely oiled and brushed into a resplendent
expanse, bears Atlas on his shoulders. His lips are compressed, his
brow contracted, his eyes alert, his whole manner as absorbed as if it
were a nation, and not a plum-pudding, that he is engineering through a
crisis.  Lord Palmerston is nothing to him, I venture to say.  I know
the only way to accomplish anything is to devote yourself to it; still
I cannot conceive how anybody can give himself up so completely to a
dinner, even if it is his business and duty. However, I have nothing to
complain of in the results, for we are well served, only for a trifle
too much obviousness.  Order and system are undoubtedly good things,
but I don't like to see an ado made about them.  Our waiters stand
behind, at given stations, with prophetic dishes in uplifted hands,
and, at a certain signal from the arch-waiter, down they come like the
clash of fate.  Now I suppose this is all very well, but for me I never
was fond of military life.  Under my housekeeping we browse
indiscriminately.  When we have nothing else to do, we have a meal.  If
it is nearer noon than morning, we call it dinner.  If it is nearer
night than noon, we call it supper, unless we have fashionable friends
with us, and then we call it dinner, and the other thing lunch; and ten
to one it is so scattered about that it has no name at all.  At
breakfast you will be likely to find me on the door-step with a bowl of
bread and milk, while Halicarnassus sits on the bench opposite and
brandishes a chicken-bone with the cat mewing furiously for it at his
feet.  A surreptitious doughnut is sweet and dyspeptic over the morning
paper, and gingerbread is always to be had by systematic and
intelligent foraging.  Consequently this British drill and discipline
are thoroughly alarming to me, and I am surprised and grateful to find
that we are not individually regulated by a time-table.  I expect a
drum-beat;--one, incision; two, mastication; three, deglutition;--but
what tyranny does one not expect to find under monarchical
institutions?  Put that into your next volume, intelligent British
tourist.

Down the St. Lawrence with millionaires, and artists, and gay young
girls, and sallow-faced invalids, and weary clergymen and men of
business who do not know what to do with their unwonted leisure and
find pleasuring a most unmitigated bore, and mothers with sick
children, dear little unnatural pale faces and heavy eyes,--may your
angels bring you health, tiny ones!--and, most interesting of all to
me, a party of priests and nuns on their travels.  They sit near me,
and I can see them without turning my head, and hear them without
marked listening.  The priests are sleekheaded men, and such as sleep
o' nights, ruddy, rotund, robust, with black hair and white bands,
well-dressed, well-fed, well-to-do, jolly, gentlemanly, clique-y,
sensible, shrewd, au fait.  The nuns--now I am vexed to look at them.
Are nuns expected to be any more dead to the world than priests?  Then
I should like to know why they must make such frights of themselves,
while priests go about like Christians?  Why shall a nun walk black,
and gaunt, and lank, with a white towel wrapped around her face, all
possible beauty and almost all attractiveness despoiled by her
hideously unbecoming dress, while priests wear their hair and their
hats and their coats and their collars like any other gentleman? Why
are the women to be set up as targets, while the men may pass unnoticed
and unknown?  If the woman's head must be shorn and shaven, why not the
man's?  It is not fair.  I can think of no reason, pretext, or excuse,
unless it is to be found in the fact that women are more beautiful than
men, and need greater disfigurement to make them ugly.  That is a fact
which I have long suspected, and observations made on this journey
confirm my suspicions,--intensify them into certainty.  An ugly woman
is handsomer than a handsome man,--if you examine them closely.  She is
finer-grained, more soft, more delicate.  Men are animals more than
women.  I do not now mean the generic sense in which we are all
animals, but specifically and superficially.  Men look more like horses
and cows.  See our brave soldiers returning from the wars--Heaven's
blessing rest upon them!--grand, but are they not gruff?  A woman's
face may be browned, roughened, and reddened by exposure, yet her skin
is always skin; but often when a man's face has been sheltered from
storm and shine, his skin is hide.  His mane is not generally so long
and flowing as a horse's, but there it is. Once, in a car, a man in
front of me put his arm on the back of his seat and fell asleep.
Presently his hand dropped over, and I looked at it,--a mass of broad,
brawny vitality, great pipes of veins, great crescents of nails, great
furrows at the joints, and you might cut a fine sirloin of beef off the
ball of the thumb; and this is a hand!  _I_ call it an ox.  A woman's
hand, by hard labor, spreads and cracks, and sprouts bunches at the
joints, and becomes tuberous at the ends of the fingers, but you can
see that it is a deformity and not nature. It tells a sad story of
neglect, of labor, perhaps of heartlessness, cruelty, suffering.  But
this man's hand was born so.  You would not think of pitying him any
more than you would pity an elephant for being an elephant instead of
an antelope.  A woman's hair is silky and soft, and, if not always
smooth, susceptible of smoothness.  A man's hair is shag.  If he tries
to make it anything else, he does not mend the matter. Ceasing to be
shag, it does not become beauty, but foppishness, effeminacy, Miss
Nancy-ism.  A man is a brute by the law of his nature.  Let him ape a
woman, and he does not cease to be brutal, though he does become
ridiculous.  The only thing for him to do is to be the best kind of a
brute.

In all of which remarks there is nothing derogatory to a man,--nothing
at which any one need take offence.  I do not say that manhood is not a
very excellent kind of creation.  Everything is good in its line.  I
would just as soon have been a beetle as a woman, if I had never been a
woman, and did not know what it was.  I don't suppose a horse is at all
crestfallen because he is a horse.  On the contrary, if he is a
thorough-bred, blood horse, he is a proud and happy fellow, prancing,
spirited, magnificent.  So a man may be so magnificently manly that one
shall say, Surely this is the monarch of the universe; and hide and
shag and mane shall be vitalized with a matchless glory.  Let a man
make himself grand in his own sphere, and not sit down and moan because
he is only a connecting link between a horse and a woman.

I suppose Mother Church is fully cognizant of the true state of
affairs, and thinks men already sufficiently Satyric, but woman must be
ground down as much as possible, or the world will not be fended off.
And ground down they are in body and soul.  O Mother Church! as I look
upon these nuns, I do not love you.  You have done many wise and right
deeds.  You have been the ark of the testimony, the refuge of the
weary, the dispenser of alms, the consoler of the sorrowful, the hope
of the dying, the blessing of the dead.  You are convenient now, wieldy
in an election, effective when a gold ring is missing from the toilette
cushion, admirable in your machinery, and astonishing in your
persistency and power.  But what have you done with these women?  In
what secret place, in what dungeon of darkness and despair, in what
chains of torpidity and oblivion, have you hidden away their souls?
They are twenty-five and thirty years old, but they are not women. They
are nothing in the world but grown-up children.  Their expression,
their observation, their interests, are infantile. There is no
character in their faces.  There are marks of pettishness, but not of
passion.  Nothing deep, tender, beneficent, maternal, is there.  Time
has done his part, but life has left no marks.  Their smiles and
laughter are the merriment of children, beautiful in children, but
painful here. Mother Church, you have dwarfed these women, helplessly,
hopelessly.  You accomplish results, but you deteriorate humanity.

Down the St. Lawrence, the great, melancholy river, grand only in its
grandeur, solitary, unapproachable, cut off from the companionship, the
activities, and the interests of life by its rocks and rapids; yet calm
and conscious, working its work in silent state.

The rapids are bad for traffic, but charming for travellers; and what
is a little revenue more or less, to a sensation? There is not danger
enough to awaken terror, but there is enough to require vigilance; just
enough to exhilarate, to flush the cheek, to brighten the eye, to
quicken the breath; just enough for spice and sauce and salt; just
enough for you to play at storm and shipwreck, and heroism in danger.
The rocking and splashing of the early rapids is mere fun; but when you
get on, when the steamer slackens speed, and a skiff puts off from
shore, and an Indian pilot comes on board, and mounts to the
pilot-house, you begin to feel that matters are getting serious.  But
the pilot is chatting carelessly with two or three bystanders, so it
cannot be much.  Ah! this sudden cessation of something!  This
unnatural quiet.  The machinery has stopped.  What! the boat is rushing
straight on to the banks.  H-w-k!  A whole shower of spray is dashed
into our faces.  Little shrieks and laughter, and a sudden hopping up
from stools, and a sudden retreat from the railing to the centre of the
deck.  Staggering, quivering, aghast, the boat reels and careens.
Seethe and plunge the angry waters, whirling, foaming, furious.  Look
at the pilot.  No chatting now, no bystanders, but fixed eyes and firm
lips, every muscle set, every nerve tense.  Yes, it is serious.
Serious! close by us, seeming scarcely a yard away, frowns a black
rock.  The maddened waves dash up its sullen back, the white,
passionate surf surges into its wrathful jaws.  Here, there, before,
behind, black rocks and a wild uproar of waters, through all which
Providence and our pilot lead us safely into the still deep beyond, and
we look into each other's faces and smile.

And now the sunset reddens on the water, reddens on the bending sky and
the beautiful clouds, and men begin to come around with cards and
converse of the different hotels in the Montreal that is to be; one
tells us that the Prince of Wales beamed royal light upon the St.
Lawrence Hall, and we immediately decide to make the balance true by
patronizing its rival Donegana, whereupon a man--a mere disinterested
spectator of course--informs us in confidence that the Donegana is
nothing but ruins; he should not think we would go there; burnt down a
few years ago,--a shabby place, kept by a grass widow; but when was
American ever scared off by the sound of a ruin?  So Donegana it is,
the house with the softly flowing Italian name; and then we pass under
the arch of the famous Victoria Bridge, whose corner-stone, or
cap-stone, or whatever it is that bridges have, was laid by the Prince
of Wales.  (And to this day I do not know how the flag-staff of our
boat cleared the arch.  It was ten feet above it, I should think, and I
looked at it all the time, and yet it shrivelled under in the most
laughable yet baffling manner.)  In the mild twilight we disembarked,
and were quickly omnibused to the relics of Donegana, which turned out
to be very well, very well indeed for ruins, with a smart stone front,
and I don't know but stone all the way through, with the usual
allowance of lace curtains, and carpets, and gilding in the parlors,
notwithstanding flames and conjugal desolation; also a hand welcomed us
in the gas-lit square adjoining, and we were hospitably entreated and
transmitted to the breakfast-table next morning in perfect sight-seeing
trim; only the Anakim was cross, and muttered that they had sent him
out in the village to sleep among the hens, and there was a cackling
and screaming and chopping off of heads all night long.  But the
breakfast-table assured us that many a cackle must have been the
swan-song of death.  Halicarnassus wondered if something might not be
invented to consume superfluous noise, as great factories consume their
own smoke, but the Anakim said there was no call for any new invention
in that line so long as Halicarnassus continued in his present
appetite,--with a significant glance at the plump chicken which the
latter was vigorously converting into mammalia, and which probably was
the very one that disturbed the Anakim's repose. And then we discussed
the day's plan of operations. Halicarnassus said he had been
diplomatizing for a carriage. The man in the office told him he could
have one for five dollars.  He thought that was rather high.  Man said
it was the regular price; couldn't get one for any less in the city.
Halicarnassus went out and saw one standing idle in the market-place.
Asked the price.  Three dollars.  For how long? Drive you all round the
city, Sir; see all the sights. Then he went back and told the man at
the office.

"Well," I said, after he had swallowed a wassail-bowl of coffee, and
showed no disposition to go on, "what did you do then?"

"Came in to breakfast."

"Didn't you tell the clerk you would not take his carriage?"

"No."

"Didn't you tell the other man you would take his?"

"No."

"What DID you do?"

"Let it work.  Don't be in a hurry.  Give a thing time to work."

"And suppose it should work you out of any carriage at all?"

"No danger."  And to be sure, when we had finished breakfast, the
three-dollar hack was there awaiting our pleasure.  Our pleasure was to
drive out into the British possessions, first around the mountain,
which is quite a mountain for a villa, though nothing to speak of as a
mountain, with several handsome residences on its sides, and a good
many not so handsome; but the mountain is a pet of Montreal, and, as I
said, quite the thing for a cockney mountain.  Then we went to the
French Cathedral, which is, I believe, the great gun of ecclesiastical
North America, but it hung fire with me.  It was large, but not great.
There was no unity.  It was not impressive.  It was running over with
frippery,--olla podrida cropping out everywhere.  It confused you.  It
distracted you.  It wearied you.  You sighed for somewhat simple,
quiet, restful.  The pictures were pronounced poor.  I don't know
whether they were or not.  I never can tell a picture as a cook tells
her mince-pie meat, by tasting it.  One picture is a revealer and one
is a daub; but they are alike to me at first glance.  For a picture has
an individuality all its own.  You must woo it with tender ardor, or it
will not yield up its heart.  The chance look sees only color and
contour; but as you gaze the color glows, the contour throbs, the
hidden soul heaves the inert canvas with the solemn palpitations of
life.  Art is dead no longer, but informed with divine vitality.  There
is no picture but Hope crowned and radiant, or pale and patient Sorrow,
or the tender sanctity of Love.  The landscape of the artist is neither
painting nor nature, but summer fields and rosy sunsets over-flooded
with his own inward light.  Only from her Heaven-anointed monarch, man,
can Nature receive her knightly accolade.  And shall one detect the
false or recognize the true by the minute-hand?  I suppose so, since
some do.  But I cannot.  People who live among the divinities may know
the goddess, for all her Spartan arms, her naked knee, and knotted
robe; but I, earth-born among earth-born, must needs behold the auroral
blush, the gliding gait, the flowing vestment, and the divine odor of
her purple hair.

In the vestibule of the French Cathedral, I believe it is, you will
behold a heart-rending sight in a glass case, namely, a group of
children, babies in long clothes and upwards, in a dreadful state of
being devoured by cotton-flannel pigs.  Their poor little white frocks
are stained with blood, and they are knocked about piteously in various
stages of mutilation.  A label in front informs you that certain
innocents in certain localities are subject to this shocking treatment;
and you are earnestly conjured to drop your penny or your pound into
the box, to rescue them from a fate so terrible.  You must be a
cannibal if you can withstand this appeal.  Suffering that you only
hear of, you can forget, but suffering going on right under your eyes
is not so easily disposed of.

Leaving the pigs and papooses, we will go to--which of the nunneries?
The Gray?  Yes.  But when you come home, everybody will tell you that
you ought to have visited the Black Nunnery. The Gray is not to be
mentioned in the same year.  Do not, however, flatter yourself that in
choosing the Black you will be any more enviable; there will not be
wanting myriads who will assure you, that, not having seen the Gray,
you might as well have seen nothing at all.  To the Gray Nunnery went
we, and saw pictures and altars and saints and candlesticks, and little
dove-cot floors of galleries jutting out, where a few women crossed,
genuflected, and mumbled, and an old woman came out of a door above one
of them, and asked the people below not to talk so loud, because they
disturbed the worshippers; but the people kept talking, and presently
she came out again, and repeated her request, with a little of the
Inquisition in her tones and gestures,--no more than was justifiable
under the circumstances:  but she looked straight at me; and O old
woman! it was not I that talked, nor my party.  We were noiseless as
mice.  It was that woman over there in a Gothic bonnet, with a bunch of
roses under the roof as big as a cabbage.  Presently the great doors
opened, and a procession of nuns marched in chanting their gibberish.
Of course they wore the disguise of those abominable caps, with gray,
uncouth dresses, the skirts taken up in front and pinned behind, after
the manner of washerwomen.  Yet there were faces among them on which
the eye loved to linger,--some not too young for their years, some
furtive glances, some demure looks from the yet undeadened youth under
those ugly robes,--some faces of struggle and some of victory.  O
Mother Church, here I do not believe in you! These natures are gnarled,
not nurtured.  These elaborately reposeful faces are not natural.
These downcast eyes and droning voices are not natural. Not one thing
here is natural. Whisk off these clinging gray washing-gowns, put these
girls into crinoline and Gothic bonnets, and the innocent finery that
belongs to them, and send them out into the wholesome daylight to talk
and laugh and make merry,--the birthright of their young years.  A
religion that deprives young girls or old girls of this boon is not the
religion of Jesus Christ. Don't tell me!

The nuns pass out, and we wander through the silent yard, cut off by
all the gloom of the medieval times from the din, activity, and good
cheer of the street beyond, and are conducted into the Old Men's
Department.  The floors and furniture are faultlessly and fragrantly
clean.  The kitchen is neat and susceptible of warmth and comfort, even
when the sun's short wooing is over.  The beds are ranged along the
walls plump and nice; yet I hope that, when I am an old man, I shall
not have to sleep on blue calico pillow-cases.  Here and there, within
and without, old men are basking in the rare sweet warmth of summer,
and with their canes and their sunshine seem very well bestowed.  Now I
like you, Mother Church.  You do better by your old men than you do by
your young women,--simply because you know more about them.  How can
you, Papa and Messrs. Cardinals, be expected to understand what is good
for a girl?  If only you would confine yourself to what you do
comprehend,--if only you would apply your admirable organizations to
legitimate purposes, and not run mad on machinery, you would do angels'
work.

From the old men's quarters we go upstairs where sewing and knitting
and all manner of fancy-work, especially in beads, are taught to long
and lank little girls by longer and lanker large girls, companioned by
a few old women, with commonplace knitting-work.  Everything everywhere
is thoroughly neat and comfortable; but I have a desperate pang of
home-sickness; for if there is one condition of life more intolerable
than any other, it is a state of unvarying, hopeless comfort.

From the Gray Nunnery to the English Church, which I like much better
than the French Cathedral.  There is a general tone of oakiness, solid,
substantial, sincere, like the England of tradition,--set off by a
brilliant memorial window and a memorial altar, and other memorial
things which I have forgotten, but which I make no doubt the people who
put them there have not forgotten.  Here also we find, as all along in
Canada, vestiges of his Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales. We are
shown the Bible which he presented to the Church, and we gaze with
becoming reverence upon the august handwriting,--the pew in which he
worshipped; and the loyal beadle sees nothing but reverence in our
momentary occupation of that consecrated seat.  Evidently there is but
a very faint line of demarcation in the old man's mind between his
heavenly and earthly king; but an old man may have a worse weakness
than this,--an unreasoning, blind, faithful fondness and reverence for
a blameless prince.  God bless the young man, in that he is the son of
his father and mother.  God help him, in that he is to be King of
England.

Chancel and window, altar, and arches and aisles and treasures,--is
there anything else?  Yes, the apple that Eve ate, transfixed to
oak,--hard to understood, but seeing is believing.  And then past
Nelson's monument, somewhat battered, like the hero whom it
commemorates; past the Champ de Mars, a fine parade-ground, hard and
smooth as a floor; past the barracks and the reservoir, to the new
Court-House, massive and plain.  Then home to dinner and lounging; then
travelling-dresses, and the steamer, and a most lovely sunset on the
river; and then a night of tranquillity running to fog, and a morning
approach to the unique city of North America,--the first and the only
walled city _I_ ever saw, or you either, I dare say, if you would only
be willing to confess it.  The aspect of the city, as one first
approaches it, is utterly strange and foreign,--a high promontory
jutting into the river, with a shelf of squalid, crowded, tall and
shaky, or low and squatty tenements at its base, almost standing on the
water and rising behind them, for the back of the shelf, a rough, steep
precipice abutted with the solid masonry of wall and citadel. A board
fastened somehow about half-way up the rocky cliff, inscribed with the
name of Montgomery, marks the spot where a hero, a patriot, a
gentleman, met his death.  Disembarking, we wind along a stair of a
road, up steep ascents, and enter in through the gates into the
city,--the walled, upper city,--walls thick, impregnable, gates
ponderous, inert, burly.  You did well enough in your day, old foes;
but with Armstrongs and iron-clads, and Ericsson still living, where
would you be?--answer me that.  Quaint, odd, alien old city,--a faint
phantasmagoria of past conflicts and forgotten plans, a dingy fragment
of la belle France, a clinging reminiscence of England, a dim, stone
dream of Edinburgh, a little flutter of modern fashion, planted upon a
sturdy rampart of antiquity, a little cobweb of commerce and
enterprise, netting over a great deal of church and priest and king
with an immovable basis of stolid existence,--that is the Quebec I
inferred from the Quebec I saw.  Nothing in it was so interesting to me
as itself.  But passing by itself for the nonce, we prudently took
advantage of the fine morning, and drove out to the Falls of
Montmorency with staring eyes that wanted to take in all views, before,
behind, on this side and that, at once; and because we could not, the
joints of my neck at least became so dry with incessant action that
they almost creaked.  Low stone cottages lined the road-sides, with
windows that opened like doors, with an inevitable big black stove
whenever your eye got far enough in, with a pleasant stoop in front,
with women perpetually washing the floors and the windows, with
beautiful and brilliant flowers blooming profusely in every window, and
often trailing and climbing about its whole area.  Here, I take it, is
the home of a real peasantry, a contented class, comfortable and
looking for no higher lot.  These houses seem durable and ultimate. The
roofs of both houses and piazzas are broken, projected, picturesque,
and often ornamented.  They shelter, they protect, they brood, they
embrace.  There are little trellises and cornices and fanciful
adornments.  The solid homeliness is fringed with elegance.  The people
and the houses do not own each other, but they are married.  There is
love between them, and pride, and a hearty understanding.  I can think
of a country where you see little brown or red clapboarded houses that
are neither solid nor elegant, that are both slight and
awkward,--angular and shingly and dismal.  The roofs are intended just
to cover the houses, and are scanty at that.  The sides are straight,
the windows inexorable; and for flowers you have a hollyhock or two,
and perhaps an uncomfortably tall sunflower, sovereign for hens. There
is no home-look and no home-atmosphere.  I love that country better
than I like this; but, if you kill me for it, this drive is
picturesque.  These dumpy little smooth, white, flounced and flowered
cottages look like wicker-gates to a happy valley,--born, not built.
The cottages of the country, in my thoughts, yes, and in my heart, are
neither born nor built, but "put up,"--just for convenience, just to
lodge in while waiting for something better, or till the corn is grown.
Coming man, benefactor of our race, you who shall show us how to be
contented without being sluggish,--how to be restful, and yet
aspiring,--how to take the goods the gods provide us, without losing
out of manly hearts the sweet sense of providing,--how to plant happy
feet firmly on the present, and not miss from eager eyes the
inspiriting outlook of the future,--how to make a wife of today, and
not a mistress of tomorrow,--come quickly to a world that sorely needs
you, and bring a fresh evangel.

The current of our thoughts is broken in upon by a new and peculiar
institution.  Every single child, and every group of children on the
road, leaves its play as we pass by, and all dart upon us on both sides
of the carriage, almost under the wheels, almost under the horses'
feet, with out-stretched blackened hands, and intense bright black
eyes, running, panting, shouting, "Un sou! un sou! un sou!"  I do not
think I am quite in love with this as an institution, but it is very
lively as a spectacle; and the little fleet-footed, long-winded beggars
show a touching confidence in human nature.  There is no servility in
their beggary; and when it is glossed over with a thin mercantile
veneering, by the brown little paws holding out to you a gorgeous
bouquet of one clover-blossom, two dandelions, and a quartette of
sorrel-leaves, why, it ceases to be beggarly, and becomes traffic
overlaid with grace, the acanthus capital surmounting the fluted shaft.
We meet also continual dog-carts, something like the nondescript which
"blind Carwell" used to drag.  Did you never see it?  Well, then, like
the cart in which the ark went up to Kirjath-jearim. Now you must know.
Stubborn two-wheeled vehicles, with the whole farm loaded into the
body, and the whole family on the seat.  Here comes one drawn by a cow,
not unnatural.  Unnatural! It is the key-note of the tune.  Everything
is cow-y,--slow and sure, firm, but not fast, kindly, sunny, ruminant,
heavy, lumbering, basking, content.  Calashes also we meet,--a
cumbrous, old-fashioned "one-hoss shay," with a yellow body, a
suspicion of springlessness, wheels with huge spokes and broad rims,
and the driver sitting on the dash-board.  Now we are at the Falls of
Montmorency.  If you would know how they look, go and see them. If you
have seen them, you don't need a description; and if you have not seen
them, a description would do no good.  From the Falls, if you are
unsophisticated, you will resume your carriage and return to the city;
but if you are au fait, you will cross the high-road, cross the
pastures, and wind down a damp, mossy wood-path to the steps of
Montmorency,--a natural phenomenon, quite as interesting as, and more
remarkable than, the Falls,--especially if you go away without seeing
it.  Any river can fall when it comes to a dam.  In fact, there is
nothing for it to do but fall; but it is not every river that can carve
out in its rage such wonderful stairways as this,--seething and foaming
and roaring and leaping through its narrow and narrowing channel, with
all the turbulence of its fiery soul unquelled, though the grasp of
Time is on its throat, silent, mighty, irresistible.

Montmorency,--Montmorenci,--sweet and storied name!  You, too, have
received the awful baptism.  Blood has mingled with your sacrifices.
The song of your wild waves has been lost in the louder thunders of
artillery, and the breezes sweeping through these green woods have
soothed the agonies of dying men.  Into one heart this ancient name,
heavy with a weight of disaster and fancied disgrace, sank down like
lead,--a burden which only death could cast off, only victory destroy;
and death came hand in hand with victory.

Driving home, we take more special note of what interested us
aggressively before,--Lord Elgin's residence,--the house occupied by
the Duke of Kent when a young man in the army here, long I suppose
before the throne of England placed itself at the end of his vista.
Did the Prince of Wales, I wonder, visit this place, and, sending away
his retinue, walk slowly alone under the shadows of these sombre trees,
striving to bring back that far-off past, and some vague outline of the
thoughts, the feelings, the fears and fancies of his grandfather, then,
like himself, a young man, but, not like himself, a fourth son, poor
and an exile, with no foresight probably of the exaltation that awaited
his line,--his only child to be not only the lady of his land, but our
lady of the world,--a warm-hearted woman worthily seated on the proud
throne of Britain,--a noble and great-souled woman, in whose sorrow
nations mourn, for whose happiness nations pray,--whose name is never
spoken in this far-off Western world but with a silent blessing.
Another low-roofed, many-roomed, rambling old house I stand up in the
carriage to gaze at lingeringly with longing, misty eyes,--the sometime
home of Field Marshal the Marquis de Montcalm. Writing now of this in
the felt darkness that pours up from abandoned Fredericksburg, fearing
not what the South may do in its exultation, but what the North may do
in its despondency, I understand, as I understood not then, nor ever
before, what comfort came to the dying hero in the certain thought, "I
shall not live to see the surrender of Quebec."

Now again we draw near the city whose thousands of silver (or perhaps
tin) roofs dazzle our eyes with their resplendence, and I have an
indistinct impression of having been several times packed out and in to
see sundry churches, of which I remember nothing except that I looked
in vain to see the trophies of captured colors that once hung there,
commemorating the exploits of the ancients,--and on the whole, I don't
think I care much about churches except on Sundays.  Somewhere in
Canada--perhaps near Lorette--is some kind of a church, perhaps the
oldest, or the first Indian church in Canada,--or may be it was
interesting because it was burnt down just before we got there.  That
is the only definite reminiscence I have of any church in Quebec and
its suburbs, and that is not so definite as it might be.  I am sure I
inspected the church of St. Roque and the church of St. John, because I
have entered it in my "Diary"; but if they were all set down on the
table before me at this moment, I am sure I could not tell which was
which, or that they had not been transported each and all from Boston.

But we ascend the cliff, we enter the citadel, we walk upon the Plains
of Abraham, and they overpower you with the intensity of life.  The
heart beats in labored and painful pulsations with the pressure of the
crowding past.  Yonder shines the lovely isle of vines that gladdened
the eyes of treacherous Cartier, the evil requiter of hospitality.
Yonder from Point Levi the laden ships go gayly up the sparkling river,
a festive foe.  Night drops her mantle, and silently the unsuspected
squadron floats down the stealthy waters, and debarks its fateful
freight.  Silently in the darkness, the long line of armed men writhe
up the rugged path.  The rising sun reveals a startling sight.  The
impossible has been attained.  Now, too late, the hurried summons
sounds.  Too late the deadly fire pours in.  Too late the thickets
flash with murderous rifles. Valor is no substitute for vigilance.
Short and sharp the grapple, and victor and vanquished alike lie down
in the arms of all-conquering death.  Where this little tree ventures
forth its tender leaves, Wolfe felt the bullet speeding to his heart.
Where this monument stands, his soldier-soul fled, all anguish soothed
away by the exultant shout of victory,--fled from passion and pain,
from strife and madness, into the eternal calm.

Again and again has this rock under my feet echoed to the tramp of
marching men.  Again and again has this green and pleasant plain been
drenched with blood, this blue, serene sky hung with the black pall of
death.  This broad level of pasture-land, high up above the rushing
waters of the river, but coldly wooed by the faint northern sun, and
fiercely swept by the wrathful northern wind, has been the golden bough
to many an eager seeker.  Against these pitiless cliffs full many a
hope has hurtled, full many a heart has broken.  Oh the eyes that have
looked longingly hither from far Southern homes!  Oh the thoughts that
have vaguely wandered over these bluffs, searching among the shouting
hosts, perhaps breathlessly among the silent sleepers, for household
gods!  Oh the cold forms that have lain upon these unnoting rocks!  Oh
the white cheeks that have pressed this springing turf!  Oh the dead
faces mutely upturned to God!

Struggle, conflict, agony,--how many of earth's Meccas have received
their chrism of blood!  Thrice and four times hopeless for humanity, if
battle is indeed only murder, violence, lust of blood, or power, or
revenge,--if in that wild storm of assault and defence and deathly hurt
only the fiend and the beast meet incarnate in man.  But it cannot be.
Battle is the Devil's work, but God is there.  When Montgomery cheered
his men up their toilsome ascent along this scarcely visible path over
the rough rocks, and the treacherous, rugged ice, was he not upborne by
an inward power, stronger than brute's, holier than fiend's, higher
than man's?  When Arnold flung himself against this fortress, when he
led his forlorn hope up to these sullen, deadly walls, when, after
repulse and loss and bodily suffering and weakness, he could still
stand stanch against the foe and exclaim, "I am in the way of my duty,
and I know no fear!" was it not the glorious moment of that dishonored
life? Battle is of the Devil, but surely God is there.  The
intoxication of excitement, the sordid thirst for fame and power, the
sordid fear of defeat, may have its place; but there, too, stand high
resolve, and stern determination,--pure love of country, the immortal
longing for glory, ideal aspiration, god-like self-sacrifice, loyalty
to soul, to man, to the Highest.  The meanest passions of the brute may
raven on the battle-field, but the sublimest exaltations of man have
found there fit arena.

From the moment of our passing into the citadel enclosure, a young
soldier has accompanied us,--whether from caution or courtesy,--and
gives us various interesting, and sometimes startling information.  He
assures us that these guns will fire a ball eight miles,--a long range,
but not so long as his bow, I fear.  I perceive several gashes or slits
in the stone wall of the buildings, and I ask him what they are.  "Them
are for the soldiers' wives hin the garrison," he replies promptly. I
say nothing, but I do not believe they are for the soldiers' wives.  A
soldier's wife could not get through them.  "How many soldiers in a
regiment are allowed to have wives?" asks Halicarnassus. "Heighty,
sir," is the ready response.  I am a little horror-struck, when we
leave, to see Halicarnassus hold out his hand as if about to give money
to this brave and British soldier, and scarcely less so to see our
soldier receive it quietly.  But I need not be, for my observation
should have taught me that small change--fees I believe it is
called--circulates universally in Canada.  Out doors and in, it is all
one.  Everybody takes a fee, and is not ashamed. You fee at the falls,
and you fee at the steps.  You fee the church, and here we have feed
the army; and if we should call on the Governor-General, I suppose one
would drop a coin into his outstretched palm, and he would raise his
hat and say, "Thank you, sir."  I do not know whether there is any
connection between this fact and another which I noticed; but if the
observation be superficial, and the connection imaginary, I shall be no
worse off than other voyageurs, so I will hazard the remark, that I saw
very few intellectual or elegant looking men and women in Quebec, or,
for that matter, in Canada.  Everybody looked peasant-y or shoppy,
except the soldiers, and they were noticeably healthy, hale, robust,
well kept; yet I could not help thinking that it is a poor use to put
men to.  These soldiers seem simply well-conditioned animals, fat and
full-fed; but not nervous, intellectual, sensitive, spiritual.
However, if the people of Canada are not intellectual, they are pious.
"Great on saints here," says Halicarnassus.  "They call their streets
St. Genevieve, St. Jean, and so on; and when they have run through the
list, and are hard up, they club them and have a Street of All Saints."

Canada seemed to be a kind of Valley of Jehoshaphat for Secessionists.
We scented the aroma somewhat at Saratoga; nothing to speak of, nothing
to lay hold of; but you were conscious of a chill on your warm loyalty.
There were petty smirks and sneers and quips that you could feel, and
not see or hear.  You SENSED, to use a rustic expression, the presence
of a class that was not palpably treasonable, but rather half cotton.
But at Canada it comes out all wool.  The hot South opens like a double
rose, red and full. The English article is cooler and supercilious.  I
say nothing, for my role is to see; but Halicarnassus and the Anakim
exchange views with the greatest nonchalance, in spite of pokes and
scowls and various subtabular hints.

"What is the news?" says one to the other, who is reading the morning
paper.

"Prospect of English intervention," says the other to one.

"Then we are just in season to see Canada for the last time as a
British province," says the first.

"And must hurry over to England, if we design to see St. George and the
dragon tutelizing Windsor Castle," says the second; whereupon a John
Bull yonder looks up from his 'am and heggs, and the very old dragon
himself steps down from the banner-folds, and glares out of those irate
eyes, and the ubiquitous British tourist, I have no doubt, took out his
notebook, and put on his glasses and wrote down for home consumption
another instance of the insufferable assurance of these Yankees.

"Where have you been?" I ask Halicarnassus, coming in late to breakfast.

"Only planning the invasion of Canada," says he, coolly, as if it were
a mere pre-prandial diversion, all of which was not only rude, but
quite gratuitous, since, apart from the fact that we might not be able
to get Canada, I am sure we don't want it.  I am disappointed.  I
suppose I had no right to be. Doubtless it was sheer ignorance, but I
had the idea that it was a great country, rich in promise if immature
in fact,--a nation to be added to a nation when the clock should strike
the hour,--a golden apple to fall into our hands when the fulness of
time should come.  Such inspection as a few days' observation can give,
such inspection as British tourists find sufficient to settle the facts
and fate of nations, leads me to infer that it is not golden at all,
and not much of an apple; and I cannot think what we should want of it,
nor what we should do with it if we had it.  The people are radically
different from ours.  Fancy those dark-eyed beggars and those
calm-mouthed, cowy-men in this eager, self-involved republic. They
might be annexed to the United States a thousand times and never be
united, for I do not believe any process in the world would turn a
French peasant into a Yankee farmer.  Besides, I cannot see that there
is anything of Canada except a broad strip along the St. Lawrence
River.  It makes a great show on the map, but when you ferret it out,
it is nothing but show--and snow and ice and woods and barrenness; and
I, for one, hope we shall let Canada alone.

"I think we shall be obliged to leave Quebec tomorrow evening," says
Halicarnassus, coming into the hotel parlor on Saturday evening.

"Not at all," I exclaim, promptly laying an embargo on that iniquity.

"Otherwise we shall be compelled to remain till Monday afternoon at
four o'clock."

"Which we can very contentedly do."

"But lose a day."

"Keeping the Sabbath holy is never losing a day," replies his guide,
philosopher, and friend, sententiously and severely, partly because she
thinks so, and partly because she is well content to remain another day
in Quebec.

"But as we shall not start till five o'clock," he lamely pleads, "we
can go to church twice like saints."

"And begin at five and travel like sinners."

"It will only be clipping off the little end of Sunday."

Now that is a principle the beginning of which is as when one letteth
out water, and I will no tolerate it.  Short weights are an abomination
to the Lord.  I would rather steal outright than be mean.  A highway
robber has some claims upon respect; but a petty, pilfering, tricky
Christian is a damning spot on our civilization.  Lord Chesterfield
asserts that a man's reputation for generosity does not depend so much
on what he spends, as on his giving handsomely when it is proper to
give at all; and the gay lord builded higher and struck deeper than he
knew, or at least said.  If a man thinks the Gospel does not require
the Sabbath to be strictly kept, I have nothing to say; but if he
pretends to keep it, let him keep the whole of it. It takes twenty-four
hours to make a day, whether it be the first or the last of the week.
I utterly reject the idea of setting off a little nucleus of Sunday,
just a few hours of sermon, and then evaporating into any common day.
I want the good of Sunday from beginning to end.  I want nothing but
Sunday between Saturday and Monday.  Week-days filtering in spoil the
whole.  What is the use of having a Sabbath-day, a rest-day, if Mondays
and Tuesdays are to be making continual raids upon it?  What good do
dinner-party Sundays and travelling Sundays and novel-reading Sundays
do?  You want your Sunday for a rest,--a change,--a breakwater.  It is
a day yielded to the poetry, to the aspirations, to the best and
highest and holiest part of man.  I believe eminently in this world.  I
have no kind of faith in a system that would push men on to heaven
without passing through a novitiate on earth. What may be for us in the
future is but vaguely revealed,--just enough to put hope at the bottom
of our Pandora's box; but our business is in this world.  Right through
the thick and thin of this world our path lies.  Our strength, our
worth, our happiness, our glory, are to be attained through the
occupations and advantages of this world.  Yet through discipline, and
not happiness, is the main staple here, it is not the only product. Six
days we must labor and do all work, but the seventh is a holiday.  Then
we may drop the absorbing now, and revel in anticipated joys,--lift
ourselves above the dusty duties, the common pleasures that weary and
ensoil, even while they ennoble us, and live for a little while in the
bright clear atmosphere of another life,--soothed, comforted,
stimulated by the sweetness of celestial harmonies.

   "O day most calm, most bright,
   The fruit of this, the next world's bud,
   The indorsement of Supreme delight,
   Writ by a Friend, and with his blood,--
   The couch of time, care's balm and bay,--
   The week were dark but for thy light,
       Thy torch doth show the way."

He is no friend to man who would abate one jot or tittle of our
precious legacy.

Afloat in literature may be found much objurgation concerning the
enforced strictures of the old Puritan Sabbath.  Perhaps there was a
mistake in that direction; but I was brought up on them, and they never
hurt me any.  At least I was never conscious of any harm, certainly of
no suffering.  As I look back, I see no awful prisons and chains and
gloom, but a pleasant jumble of best clothes,--I remember now their
smell when the drawer was opened,--and Sunday-school lessons, and baked
beans, and a big red Bible with the tower of Babel in it full of little
bells, and a walk to church two miles through the lane, over the bars,
through ten-acres, over another pair of bars, through a meadow, over
another pair of bars, by Lubber Hill, over a wall, through another
meadow, through the woods, over the ridge, by Black Pond, over a fence,
across a railroad, over another fence, through a pasture, through the
long woods, through a gate, through the low woods, through another
gate, out upon the high-road at last.  And then there was the long
service, during which a child could think her own thoughts, generally
ranging no higher than the fine bonnets around her, but never tired,
never willing to stay at home; and then Sunday school, and
library-books, and gingerbread, and afternoon service, and the long
walk home or the longer drive, and catechism in the evening and the
never-failing Bible.  O Puritan Sabbaths! doubtless you were sometimes
stormy without and stormy within; but looking back upon you from afar,
I see no clouds, no snow, but perpetual sunshine and blue sky, and ever
eager interest and delight,--wild roses blooming under the old stone
wall, wild bees humming among the blackberry-bushes, tremulous sweet
columbines skirting 

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