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Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 20, August 1877

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Title: Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 20, August 1877

Author: Various


        
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Language: English

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  LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE

  OF

  _POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE._

  AUGUST, 1877.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1877, by J. B.
LIPPINCOTT & CO., in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at
Washington.

VOL. XX.




DOWN THE RHINE.

CONCLUDING PAPER.


[Illustration: CASTLE OF ELTZ.]

Coblenz is the place which many years ago gave me my first associations
with the Rhine. From a neighboring town we often drove to Coblenz, and the
wide, calm flow of the river, the low, massive bridge of boats and the
commonplace outskirts of a busy city contributed to make up a very
different picture from that of the poetic "castled" Rhine of German song
and English ballad. The old town has, however, many beauties, though its
military character looks out through most of them, and reminds us that the
Mosel city (for it originally stood only on that river, and then crept up
to the Rhine), though a point of union in Nature, has been for ages, so
far as mankind was concerned, a point of defence and watching. The great
fortress, a German Gibraltar, hangs over the river and sets its teeth in
the face of the opposite shore: all the foreign element in the town is due
to the deposits made there by troubles in other countries, revolution and
war sending their exiles, _émigrés_ and prisoners. The history of the town
is only a long military record, from the days of the archbishops of
Trèves, to whom it was subject, to those of the last war. It has, however,
some pleasanter points: it has long been a favorite summer residence of
the empress of Germany, who not long before I was there had by her tact
and toleration reconciled sundry religious differences that threatened a
political storm. Such toleration has gone out of fashion now, and the
peacemaking queen would have a harder task to perform now that the two
parties have come to an open collision. There is the old "German house" by
the bank of the Mosel, a building little altered outwardly since the
fourteenth century, now used as a food-magazine for the troops. The church
of St. Castor commemorates a holy hermit who lived and preached to the
heathen in the eighth century, and also covers the grave and monument of
the founder of the "Mouse" at Wellmich, the warlike Kuno of Falkenstein,
archbishop of Trèves. The Exchange, once a court of justice, has changed
less startlingly, and its proportions are much the same as of old; and
besides these there are other buildings worth noticing, though not so old,
and rather distinguished by the men who lived and died there, or were born
there, such as Metternich, than by architectural beauties. Such houses
there are in every old city. They do not invite you to go in and admire
them: every tourist you meet does not ask you how you liked them or
whether you saw them. They are _homes_, and sealed to you as such, but
they are the shell of the real life of the country; and they have somehow
a charm and a fascination that no public building or show-place can have.
Goethe, who turned his life-experiences into poetry, has told us something
of one such house not far from Coblenz, in the village of Ehrenbreitstein,
beneath the fortress, and which in familiar Coblenz parlance goes by the
name of "The Valley"--the house of Sophie de Laroche. The village is also
Clement Brentano's birthplace.

The oldest of German cities, Trèves (or in German _Trier_), is not too far
to visit on our way up the Mosel Valley, whose Celtic inhabitants of old
gave the Roman legions so much trouble. But Rome ended by conquering, by
means of her civilization as well as by her arms, and _Augusta
Trevirorum_, though claiming a far higher antiquity than Rome herself, and
still bearing an inscription to that effect on the old council-house--now
called the Red House and used as a hotel--became, as Ausonius
condescendingly remarked, a second Rome, adorned with baths, gardens,
temples, theatres and all that went to make up an imperial capital. As in
Venice everything precious seems to have come from Constantinople, so in
Trier most things worthy of note date from the days of the Romans; though,
to tell the truth, few of the actual buildings do, no matter how classic
is their look. The style of the Empire outlived its sway, and doubtless
symbolized to the inhabitants their traditions of a higher standard of
civilization. The Porta Nigra, for instance--called Simeon's Gate at
present--dates really from the days of the first Merovingian kings, but it
_looks_ like a piece of the Coliseum, with its rows of arches in massive
red sandstone, the stones held together by iron clamps, and its low,
immensely strong double gateway, reminding one of the triumphal arches in
the Forum at Rome. The history of the transformations of this gateway is
curious. First a fortified city gate, standing in a correspondingly
fortified wall, it became a dilapidated granary and storehouse in the
Middle Ages, when one of the archbishops gave leave to Simeon, a wandering
hermit from Syracuse in Sicily, to take up his abode there; and another
turned it into a church dedicated to this saint, though of this change few
traces remain. Finally, it has become a national museum of antiquities.
The amphitheatre is a genuine Roman work, wonderfully well preserved; and
genuine enough were the Roman games it has witnessed, for, if we are to
believe tradition, a thousand Frankish prisoners of war were here given in
one day to the wild beasts by the emperor Constantine. Christian emperors
beautified the basilica that stood where the cathedral now is, and the
latter itself has some basilica-like points about it, though, being the
work of fifteen centuries, it bears the stamp of successive styles upon
its face. To the neighborhood, and also to strangers, one of its great
attractions lies in its treasury of relics, the gift of Constantine's
mother, Saint Helena, for many hundred years objects of pilgrimage, and
even to the incredulous objects of curiosity and interest, for the robe of
a yellowish brown--supposed to have been once purple--which is shown as
Our Lord's seamless garment, has been pronounced by learned men to be of
very high antiquity. But what possesses the Rhine tourist to moralize? He
is a restless creature in general, more occupied in staring than in
seeing--a gregarious creature too, who enjoys the evening table d'hôte,
the day-old _Times_ and the British or American gossip as a reward for his
having conscientiously _done_ whatever Murray or Baedeker bade him. Cook
has only transformed the tourist's mental docility into a bodily one: the
guidebook had long drilled his mind before the tour-contractor thought of
drilling his body and driving willing gangs of his species all over the
world.

[Illustration: RUINS OF THE CASTLE OF AUERBACH.]

There is a funny, not over-reverent, legend afloat in Trier to account
for the queer dwarf bottles of Mosel wine used there: it refers to a trick
of Saint Peter, who is supposed to have been travelling in these parts
with the Saviour, and when sent to bring wine to the latter drank half of
it on his way back, and then, to conceal his act, cut the cup down to the
level of the wine that remained. These measures are still called
_Miseräbelchen_, or "wretched little remainders."

The Mosel has but few tributary streams of importance: its own course is
as winding, as wild and as romantic as that of the Rhine itself. The most
interesting part of the very varied scenery of this river is not the
castles, the antique towns, the dense woods or the teeming vineyards
lining rocks where a chamois could hardly stand--all this it has in common
with the Rhine--but the volcanic region of the Eifel, the lakes in ancient
craters, the tossed masses of lava and tufa, the great wastes strewn with
dark boulders, the rifts that are called valleys and are like the Iceland
gorges, the poor, starved villages and the extraordinary rusticity, not to
say coarseness, of the inhabitants. This grotesque, interesting
country--unique, I believe, on the continent of Europe--lies in a small
triangle between the Mosel, the Belgian frontier and the Schiefer hills of
the Lower Rhine: it goes by the names of the High Eifel, with the High
Acht, the Kellberg and the Nürburg; the Upper (_Vorder_) Eifel, with
Gerolstein, a ruined castle, and Daun, a pretty village; and the
Snow-Eifel (_Schnee Eifel_), contracted by the speech of the country into
Schneifel. The last is the most curious, the most dreary, the least
visited. Walls of sharp rock rise up over eight hundred feet high round
some of its sunken lakes--one is called the Powder Lake--and the level
above this abyss stretches out in moors and desolate downs, peopled with
herds of lean sheep, and marked here and there by sepulchral,
gibbet-looking signposts, shaped like a rough [Symbol: T] and set in a
heap of loose stones. It is a great contrast to turn aside from this
landscape and look on the smiling villages and pretty wooded scenery of
the valley of the Mosel proper; the long lines of handsome, healthy women
washing their linen on the banks; the old ferryboats crossing by the help
of antique chain-and-rope contrivances; the groves of old trees, with
broken walls and rude shrines, reminding one of Southern Italy and her
olives and ilexes; and the picturesque houses in Kochem, in Daun, in
Trarbach, in Bernkastel, which, however untiring one may be as a
sightseer, hardly warrant one as a writer to describe and re-describe
their beauties. Klüsserath, however, we must mention, because its
straggling figure has given rise to a local proverb--"As long as
Klüsserath;" and Neumagen, because of the legend of Constantine, who is
said to have seen the cross of victory in the heavens at this place, as
well as at Sinzig on the Rhine, and, as the more famous legend tells us,
at the Pons Milvium over the Tiber.

The Mosel wine-industry has much the same features as that of the Rhine,
but there is a great difference between the French wines, which are mostly
red, and the German, which are mostly white. Among the latter hundreds of
spurious, horrible concoctions for the foreign market usurp the name of
Mosel wine. It is hardly necessary even to mention the pretty names by
which the real wines are known, and which may be found on any wine-card at
the good, unpretending inns that make Mosel travelling a special delight.
The Saar wines are included among the Mosel, and the difference is not
very perceptible.

The last glance we take at the beauties of this neighborhood is from the
mouth of the torrent-river Eltz as it dashes into the Eifel, washing the
rock on which stands the castle of Eltz. The building and the family are
an exception in the history of these lands: both exist to this day, and
are prosperous and undaunted, notwithstanding all the efforts of enemies,
time and circumstances to the contrary. The strongly-turreted wall runs
from the castle till it loses itself in the rock, and the building has a
home-like, inhabited, complete look; which, in virtue of the quaint
irregularity and magnificent natural position of the castle, standing
guard over the foaming Eltz, does not take from its romantic appearance,
as preservation or restoration too often does.

[Illustration: VIEW OF COBLENZ FROM PFAFFENDORF.]

Not far from Coblenz, and past the island of Nonnenwerth, is the old
tenth-century castle of Sayn, which stood until the Thirty Years' War, and
below it, quiet, comfortable, large, but unpretending, lies the new house
of the family of Sayn-Wittgenstein, built in 1848, where, during a stay at
Ems, we paid a visit of two days. The family were great Italian
travellers, and we had met in Rome more than twenty years before, when the
writer and the boys, whom I met again--the one as an officer of the
Prussian army, and the other as a Bonn student--were children together. At
dinner one evening at this new Sayn house, as we were tasting some Russian
dish of soured milk (the mother was a Russian), we reminded each other of
our ball on Twelfth Night at Rome, when the youngest of these boys
happened to become king "by the grace of the bean," and spent some hours
seated in state with gilt-paper crown and red-velvet mantle till he was
too sleepy to oversee his subjects' revels any longer; of a day when the
pope was to "create" several cardinals, and of the young "king's" unshaken
belief that _he_ would have the scarlet hat sent him if he only waited
long enough at the window to look out for the messengers, and of his
consequent watch all day, seeing the carriages pass and repass and the
bustle of a _festa_ go on, till the sunset flushed over St. Peter's in the
distance, and the disappointment became certain at last. Of not much more
manly pastimes did the Bonn student have to tell, for the slitting of
noses was then in high favor, and a bit of advice was gravely recounted as
having come from a doctor to an obstinate duellist, "not to get his nose
cut off a _fifth_ time, as the sewing had got so shaky by repetition that
he could not answer for the nose sticking on if touched once more." The
house was really beautiful, and furnished with a taste which had something
Parisian, and yet also something individual, about it. The parquet floors
of inlaid and polished wood used in Germany were here seen to their
greatest perfection in some of the rooms; but what most struck me was a
Moorish chamber lighted from above--a small, octagon room, with low divans
round the walls and an ottoman in the centre, with flowers in concealed
pots cunningly introduced into the middle of the cushions, while glass
doors, half screened by Oriental-looking drapery, led into a small grotto
conservatory with a fountain plashing softly among the tropical plants.
There was also a good collection of pictures in a gallery, besides the
paintings scattered through the living rooms; but the garden was perhaps
as much a gem to its owner's mind as anything in the house, as an
"English" garden always is to a foreigner. There, in the late afternoon of
that day, came one of the Prussian royal family and paid the mistress of
the house an informal friendly visit, taking "five-o'clock tea" in the
English fashion, and with a retinue of two or three attendants making the
tour of the close-shaven lawns, the firm gravelled walks and the broad and
frequent flights of steps that led from one terraced flower-garden to
another. These were courtly and educated descendants of terrible scourges
of mankind in old days--of Sayns who were simply robbers and highwaymen,
levying bloody toll on the Coblenz merchants' caravans, and of
Brandenburgs who were famous for their ravages and raids. Times have
changed no less than buildings, and the houseful of pictures and treasures
is no more unlike the robber-nest destroyed in war by other robbers than
the young Bonn student is unlike his rough-and-ready forefathers.

As we push our way down the Rhine we soon come to another such contrast,
the little peaceful town of Neuwied, a sanctuary for persecuted Flemings
and others of the Low Countries, gathered here by the local sovereign,
Count Frederick III. He gave them each a plot of land, built their houses
and exempted them from all dues and imposts, besides granting them full
freedom of worship; but not for them alone was this boon, for as other
wars made other exiles, so were all and every welcome to Neuwied, and the
place even now contains Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, Mennonites and
Quakers, all living in peace together. The United Brethren (or Moravians)
founded a colony here in 1750. The honesty of these people is proverbial,
their simplicity of life is patriarchal, and the artist at least will not
object to their manners, for the sake of the pleasing costume of their
women, whose white caps look akin to the peaceful, rural background of
their life, red and blue bands on these caps respectively distinguishing
the married from the unmarried women. The little brook that gives its name
to the village runs softly into the Rhine under a rustic bridge and amid
murmuring rushes, while beyond it the valley gets narrower, rocks begin to
rise over the Rhine-banks, and the scenery after Andernach becomes again
what we so admired at Bingen and Bornhofen.

[Illustration: ORTENSTEIN.]

Andernach is the Rocky Gate of the Rhine, and if its scenery were not
enough, its history, dating from Roman times, would make it interesting.
However, of its relics we can only mention, _en passant_, the parish
church with its four towers, all of tufa, the dungeons under the
council-house, significantly called the "Jews' bath," and the old
sixteenth-century contrivances for loading Rhine-boats with the millstones
in which the town still drives a fair trade. At the mouth of the Brohl we
meet the volcanic region again, and farther up the valley through which
this stream winds come upon the retired little watering-place of
Tönnistein, a favorite goal of the Dutch, with its steel waters; and
Wassenach, with what we may well call its dust-baths, stretching for miles
inland, up hills full of old craters, and leaving us only at the entrance
of the beech-woods that have grown up in these cauldron-like valleys and
fringe the blue Laachersee, the lake of legends and of fairies. One of
these Schlegel has versified, the "Lay of the Sunken Castle," with the
piteous tale of the spirits imprisoned; and Simrock tells us in rhyme of
the merman who sits waiting for a mortal bride; while Wolfgang Müller
sings of the "Castle under the Lake," where at night ghostly torches are
lighted and ghostly revels held, the story of which so fascinates the
fisherman's boy who has heard of these doings from his grandmother that as
he watches the enchanted waters one night his fancy plays him a cruel
trick, and he plunges in to join the revellers and learn the truth. Local
tradition says that Count Henry II. and his wife Adelaide, walking here by
night, saw the whole lake lighted up from within in uncanny fashion, and
founded a monastery in order to counteract the spell. This deserted but
scarcely-ruined building still exists, and contains the grave of the
founder: the twelfth-century decoration, rich and detailed, is almost
whole in the oldest part of the monastery. The far-famed German tale of
Genovefa of Brabant is here localized, and Henry's son Siegfried assigned
to the princess as a husband, while the neighboring grotto of Hochstein is
shown as her place of refuge. On our way back to the Rocky Gate we pass
through the singular little town of Niedermendig, an hour's distance from
the lake--a place built wholly of dark gray lava, standing in a region
where lava-ridges seam the earth like the bones of antediluvian monsters,
but are made more profitable by being quarried into millstones. There is
something here that brings part of Wales to the remembrance of the few who
have seen those dreary slate-villages--dark, damp, but naked, for moss and
weeds do not thrive on this dampness as they do on the decay of other
stones--which dot the moorlands of Wales. The fences are slate; the
gateposts are slate; the stiles are of slate; the very "sticks" up which
the climbing roses are trained are of slate; churches, schools, houses,
stables, are all of one dark iron-blue shade; floors and roofs are alike;
hearth-stones and threshold-stones and grave-stones, all of the same
material. It is curious and depressing. This volcanic region of the Rhine,
however, has so many unexpected beauties strewn pell-mell in the midst of
stony barrenness that it also bears some likeness to Naples and Ischia,
where beauty of color, and even of vegetation, alternate surprisingly with
tracts of parched and rocky wilderness pierced with holes whence gas and
steam are always rising.

Sinzig, on the left bank of the last gorge of the Rhine, besides its
legend of Constantine has a convent said to have been built by the empress
Helena; and in this convent a mummied body of a long-dead monk, canonized
by popular tradition, and remarkable for the journey to Paris which his
body took and returned from unharmed in the days of Napoleon I. On the
opposite shore, not much lower down, is another of the numberless
pilgrimage-chapels with which the Rhine abounds, and the old city of
Linz, with an authentic history dating from the ninth century, telling of
an independence of any but nominal authority for some time, and at last of
a transfer of the lordship of the old town from the Sayns to the
archbishops of Cologne. This supremacy had to be kept up by the "strong
hand," of which the ruined fortress is now the only reminder; but there is
a more beautiful monument of old days and usages in the thirteenth-century
church of St. Martin, not badly restored, where the stained-glass windows
are genuinely mediæval, as well as the fresco on gold ground representing
the "Seven Joys of Mary," painted in 1463. Just above Remagen lies the
Victoria-berg, named after the crown-princess of Prussia, the
princess-royal of England, and this is the evening resort of weary
Remageners--a lovely public garden, with skilfully-managed vistas, and a
"Victoria temple," placed so as to command the five prettiest views up and
down the stream, as well as over the woodland behind the town. Let not the
classic name of "temple" deceive us, however, for this is a genuine German
arbor, picturesque and comfortable, with a conical roof of stately and
rustic pillars, seats and balustrade rising from the steep bank on which
the "lookout" is perched. The winding Ahr, coming from the tufa-plateau of
the Eifel and watering a pretty valley full of old castles and churches,
rolls its waters into the Rhine in this neighborhood, and in summer no
trip is so pleasant to the citizens of Bonn and Cologne, and indeed to
many tourists if they have time to breathe. But in winter the scenery is
worthy of the New World. The dark rocks and narrow slits of valleys piled
with snow and crusted with ice, the locked waterfalls and caves with
portcullises of icicles let down across their mouths, make a pendant for
the splendid and little-known scenery of American mountains in January. By
one of the castles, a ruin belonging to the Steins of Nassau, poetically
called _Landskröne_, or the "Land's Crown," from its beautiful situation
on a basalt hill, is a perfectly-preserved chapel perched on the top of
the rock, where, says the legend, the daughter of the besieged lord of the
castle once took refuge during a local war. The sacristy has an unusual
shape, and is hewn out of the rock itself; and here it was that the maiden
sat in safety, the rock closing over the cleft by which she had crept in,
and a dove finding its way in every day with a loaf to feed her, while a
spring within the cave supplied her with water. Legends have grown over
every stone of this poetic land like moss and lichen and rock-fern; and at
Beul, a small bathing-place with a real geyser and a very tolerable circle
of society, we come across the universal story of a golden treasure sunk
in a castle-well and guarded by a giant. The old, world-forgotten town has
its hall of justice and all the shell of its antique civic paraphernalia,
while at present it is a sleepy, contented, rural place, with country
carts and country riders by families crowding it on market-days, and
making every yard of the old street a picture such as delights the
traveller from cities whose plan is conveniently but not picturesquely
that of a chess-board. The baths, like those of Schlangenbad, are in great
favor with nervous women, and like that neighborhood too, so has this its
miniature Olivet and Calvary, the devout legacy of some unknown crusader,
who also founded at Ahrweiler the Franciscan monastery called Calvary
Hill. These "calvaries," in many shapes and degrees, are not uncommon in
Catholic Germany; "stations of the cross"--sometimes groups of painted
figures, life-size, sometimes only small shrines with a framed picture
within--mark the distances up the hill, at the top of which is a
representation of the crucifixion; and as the agony in the garden is not
included in the "stations," there is generally at the foot of the hill an
additional shrine in a natural cave or surrounded by artificial rock-work.
The prettiest part of the Ahr valley is at and about Walporzheim, which
the Düsseldorf artists have, by reason of its famous wine quite as much as
of its romantic scenery, chosen for the place of their frequent feasts,
half picnic, half masque, when their get-up rivals that of any carnival,
not even excepting that of the "Krewe of Komus" or those other displays
peculiar to Belgium and Holland of which the late celebration of the
"Pacification of Ghent" was an example.

[Illustration: COURT OF JUSTICE, AHRWEILER.]

The Rhine once more! and now indeed we shall hardly leave it again, but
this is the last part in which we can enjoy the peculiar beauties that
make it different from any other river in the world. The Swiss Rhine is a
mountain-torrent, the Dutch Rhine a sluggish mud puddle, but the German
Rhine is an historic river. Quite as legendary as historic, however; and
perhaps that has made its charm in the eyes of foreigners even more than
its national associations, dear to the native mind; and here, between
Rolandseck, Nonnenwerth and Drachenfels, poetry takes precedence of
history, and we do not want the antiquary to come and shatter the legend
of Roland of Roncesval's fidelity to the Lady of Drachenfels, even after
her vows in Nonnenwerth convent, with his pitiless array of dates and
parade of obvious impossibilities. But I pass over the legendary details
that make this region so interesting. What will better bear repetition is
some description of the scenery lying inland from the shores, the natural
Quadrilateral, containing minor mountains, such as the Siebengebirge (or
the Seven Hills) and the Bonner Alps, and encircling also the volcanic
region between Honnef and Dollendorf. These hills with their
step-and-terrace formation were once fortified by Valentinian against the
formidable Frankish hordes, and German poetry early began to find scenery
in them worthy of its national epic, and so laid the scene of the Saga of
Wilkina among these mountains and valleys. Here, above the legends of
Roland and Siegfried and the Christian captive, who, exposed to the dragon
of the rock, vanquished him by the cross, so that he fell backward and
broke his neck, is the solid remembrance of castles built on many of these
Rhine-hills, defences and bulwarks of the archbishops of Cologne against
the emperors of Germany. But Drachenfels keeps another token of its legend
in its dark-red wine, called "dragon's blood." (Could any teetotaller have
invented a more significant name?) One has often heard of the unbelieving
monk who stumbled at the passage in Scripture which declares that a
thousand years are but as one day to the Lord, and the consequent taste of
eternity which he was miraculously allowed to enjoy while he wandered off
for a quarter of an hour, as he thought, but in reality for three hundred
years, following the song of a nightingale. The abbey of Heisterbach
claims this as an event recorded in its books, and its beautiful ruins and
wide naves with old trees for columns are, so says popular rumor, haunted
by another wanderer, an abbot with snow-white beard, who walks the
cloisters at night counting the graves of his brethren, and vainly seeking
his own, which if he once find his penance will be over. This part of the
Rhine was the favorite home of many of the poets who have best sung of the
national river: a cluster of townlets recalls no less than five of them to
our mind--Unkel, where Freiligrath chose his home; Menzerberg, where
Simrock lived; Herresberg, Pfarrins's home; Königswinter, Wolfgang
Müller's birthplace; and Oberkassel, that of Gottfried Kinkel. Rhondorf
shows us a monument of one of the last robber-lords of Drachenfels, and
Honnef a smiling modern settlement, a very Nice of the North, where the
climate draws together people of means and leisure, _littérateurs_,
retired merchants and collectors of art-treasures, as well as
health-seekers. These little colonies, of which most of the large cities
on the Rhine have a copy in miniature, even if it be not a bathing-place,
are the places in which to seek for that domestic taste and refinement
which some hasty and prejudiced critics have thought fit to deny to the
Fatherland.

[Illustration: DRACHENFELS.]

The scenery of the Rhine begins to lose its distinctive features as we
near Bonn: plains replace rocks, and the waters flow more sluggishly. Bonn
is alive enough: its antiquities of Roman date are forgotten in its
essentially modern bustle, for the heart of its prosperity is of very
recent date, the university having been founded only in 1777, and after
the troubles of the Revolution reorganized in 1818. It has grown with a
giant growth, and has reckoned among its professors Niebuhr, Schlegel,
Arndt, Dahlmann, Johann Müller, Ritschl, Kinkel, Simrock and other less
world-famous but marvellous specialists. Then there is the memory of
Beethoven, the honor of the town, which is his birthplace and has put up a
monument to him, and the last modern element that has effaced the old
recollections--the numerous English colony--not to mention the rich
foreigners whom perhaps the university, perhaps the scenery, and perhaps
the heedless fashion that sets in a tide now toward this place, now toward
that, have drawn to the new Bonn. Poppelsdorf Castle, now the museum of
natural history, and the fine groves and gardens attached to it, now a
public promenade, have the brisk, business-like look of a "live" place:
the building, it is true, is modern, having been built in 1715. But if we
are obstinate enough to search for signs of the days when archbishops
ruled instead of dukes and kings, we shall find old remains, the cathedral
of course included, and nowhere a more curious one than the Kreuzberg, a
place of pilgrimage, where the church of 1627 has replaced an old
wood-shrine: its rich gateway was intended to represent the front of
Pontius Pilate's palace at Jerusalem, and on it are frescoes of the
various scenes of the Passion. Within this thirty marble steps lead up
into a vestibule in imitation of the _Scala Santa_ in Rome, and pilgrims
went up these stairs only on their knees. The vaults used until lately to
contain a quantity of dried or mummied bodies of Servite monks (that order
once had a convent here), reminding one of the ghastly Capuchin crypts in
Rome, in Syracuse and in Malta. This neighborhood is rich in
pilgrimage-shrines and legends, and Simrock has preserved a tale of the
Devil which is a little out of the common run. He and the Wind, it is
said, once went by a certain Jesuit church in company, and the former
begged the latter to wait a moment for him, as he had some business
within. The Devil never reappeared, and the Wind is still blowing
perpetually round the building, waiting and calling in vain. The old myth
of Barbarossa waiting in his cave, his beard grown round and round the
stone table on which he leans his sleepy head, which in another form meets
us in the Mosel Valley, repeats itself in Wolfsberg, not far from
Siegburg, near Bonn. I wonder whether the English anglers and oarsmen, and
the pretty girls ready to flirt with the students and give away the prizes
at an archery-meeting or a regatta, ever think of these musty old legends
looked up by scholars out of convent chronicles and peasants' fireside
talk? The difference between past and present is not greater or more
startling than is their likeness, the groundwork of human nature being the
same for ever. Especially in these old lands, how like the life of to-day
to that of hundreds of years ago in all that makes life real and intense!
The same thing in a mould of other shape, the same thoughts in a speech a
little varied, the same motives under a dress a little less natural and
crude--even the same pleasures in a great degree, for the wine-flask
played fully as great a part in old German times as it does now.

[Illustration: MARKET-PLACE AT WORMS.]

"Holy Cologne" seems at first an impersonation of the olden time, but its
busy wharves, crowded shipping and tall warehouses tell us another tale.
Indeed, Cologne is more rich than holy, and its commercial reputation is
quite as old as its religious one. The country around is flat and
uninteresting, but Cologne merchants have made Brühl a little paradise in
spite of this; and their country-houses of all styles, with balconies,
verandas, porches, piazzas, English shrubbery and flower-gardens,
conservatories and gay boats, lawns and statues, make even the monotonous
banks of the sluggish Rhine beautiful in spite of Nature. Then comes a
reminder of old times--the towers and fortifications, which are still
standing, though now turned into public gardens and drives that stretch
out both on the river and the land side; but the former, _Am Thürmchen_,
forming a sort of parapeted quay, crossed by massive battlemented
gateways, is the most fashionable and commands the best views. The trees
almost hide the shipping, as their predecessors no doubt did eighteen
hundred years ago and more, when the Ubier tribe of barbarians, a
commercial as well as warlike people, undertook to ferry over the whole of
Cæsar's army to the right bank of the Rhine in their own boats. The quays
swarm now with hotels, and these in summer swarm with strangers from all
countries--pilgrims of Art and Nature, if no longer of religion--and the
old town becomes in their eyes less a solid, real city with a long history
than a museum opened for their special behoof. And indeed these German
places seem to take kindly to this part, for they rival each other in
modern amusements and gauds set out to lure the light-minded. Music-halls
and beer-gardens, theatres and cafés, illuminated promenades and stalls
full of tempting flagons labeled "genuine eau de Cologne," are cunningly
arrayed to turn away the mind from the stately antique churches and houses
of Cologne. Every one has heard of the cathedral, many have seen it, and
more have seen at least photographs of great accuracy, and pictures of it
which, if less strict in detail, give it a more lifelike look and include
some of its surroundings. The church of St. Gereon, a martyr of the Theban
Legion massacred at Cologne to a man for refusing to worship the imperial
ensigns, under which no one denied that they had fought like lions, is a
massive Romanesque building older than the cathedral, dating from the days
of Constantine and Saint Helena. The church of the Holy Apostles is a
basilica with rounded apse and four octagon towers, one at each corner of
the nave. St. Peter's church, the interior terribly modernized by the
Renaissance, has for an altar-piece Rubens's picture of the _Crucifixion
of Saint Peter_. The Gürzenich House, now used for public balls and
imperial receptions, is a magnificent fifteenth-century building, adorned
with dwarf towers at each corner, a high, carved and stone-roofed niche
with statue over the round-arched door, transom windows filled with
stained glass, and carvings of shields, animal heads, colonnettes and
other devices between and above these windows. The council-house or
town-hall has a beautiful colonnade supporting arches, and a quaint
nondescript creature whose abyss-like maw opens wide and gapes horribly at
the beholder each time the clock strikes. A bas-relief in the hall
represents a curious incident in the civic history of the town, the
successful struggle of Burgomaster Gryn with a lion, the show and pet of
some treacherous nobles who invited Gryn to dinner, and under pretence of
showing him their very unusual acquisition, pushed him into the stone
recess and closed the gate upon him. The burgomaster thrust his hand and
arm, wrapped in his thick cloak, down the animal's throat, while he
pierced him through and through with the sword in his other hand. The
struggles between Cologne and her archbishops were hot and incessant, much
as they were in other ecclesiastical sovereignties. Of these there is no
longer a trace in the present, though the might of the burghers exists
still, and the city that was once called the kernel of the Hanseatic
League, and boasted of its Lorenzo de' Medici in the person of the good
and enlightened Matthias Overstolz, has now almost as proud a place among
merchants as Hamburg or Frankfort. Before we pass to more modern things
let us not forget the shrine of the Three Kings in the cathedral, which is
simply a mass of gold and jewelry, in such profusion as to remind one of
nothing less than the golden screen studded with uncut gems called the
_Palla d'Oro_ at San Marco, directly behind the high altar, and the Golden
Frontal of St. Ambrose at Milan--golden altar it might more fitly be
named, as each side of the altar is a slab of solid gold, almost hidden by
its breastplate of precious stones. The same warrior-archbishop, Conrad of
Hochstaden, who, driven from Cologne, transferred his see to Bonn, was the
first founder of the cathedral, though in those days of slow and solid
building to found was not to finish. The cathedral is not _finished_ even
yet. The present scenes in which Cologne shines are many--for instance,
its lively market on the Neumarkt, and the country costumes one sees there
each week as the stalls and carts, easily drawn by dogs and donkeys, are
set up in the square; the parade of the old guard, called the "Sparks of
Cologne" from their scarlet uniforms; and the Carnival, a high opportunity
for fun and display, and specially seized upon to reproduce historic
figures and incidents, such as the half-comic _Gecker-Berndchen_, a
typical figure in red and white, the colors of the town, with a shield in
one hand and a wooden sabre in the other, shouting the traditional warning
cry, "_Geck los Geck elans!_" the antique procession of burgher youths and
maidens, the latter with large white caps and aprons, and the former in
three-cornered hats, black breeches and stockings and thick low shoes.
Then follows a fancy ball in the Gürzenich House, in which the lineal
descendants of the burgomasters and councillors of old come out in ancient
family trappings of black cloth or velvet, stiff white ruff and heavy gold
chain from shoulder to shoulder, which their forefathers once wore in
earnest. Among the museums and other additions of modern taste is the
beautiful botanical garden and large conservatory, where flourish tropical
plants in profusion--a thing we find in many even of the secondary German
towns.

[Illustration: RHEINFELS.]

The Rhine itself is becoming so uninteresting that it is hardly worth
while lingering on its banks, and as we get near thrifty Holland the river
seems to give itself up wholly to business, for between Cologne and Aachen
(Aix-la-Chapelle) are miles upon miles of manufactories, workshops and
mills; warehouses connected with coal-mines; dirty barges blackening the
water; iron-works and carpet-mills; cloth and paper-mills and
glass-works--a busy region, the modern translation of the myth of gnomes
making gold out of dross in the bowels of the earth.

Aachen has a double life also, like many Rhine towns: it is the old
imperial coronation city, the city of Charlemagne, with a corona of
legends about it; and it is also the modern spa, the basket of tempting
figs with a concealed asp somewhere within, a centre of fashion, gossip
and gambling. How is it that people who profess to fly from the great
capitals for the sake of a "little Nature" are so unable to take Nature at
her word and confess her delights to be enough for them? They want a
change, they say; yet where is the change? The table is the same,
high-priced, choice and varied; the society is the same, the gossip is the
same, the amusements are the same, the intrigues the same; the costume
equally elaborate and expensive; the restless idleness as great and as
hungry for excitement: all the artificiality of life is transported bodily
into another place, and the only difference lies in the frame of the
picture. Exquisites from the capital bring their own world with them, and
their humbler imitators scrape together their hard winter's earnings and
spend them in making an attempt cavalierly to equal for a short time the
tired-out "man of the world" and "woman of fashion." Some come to find
matches for sons and daughters; others to put in the thin end of the wedge
that is to open a way for them "into society;" others come to flirt;
others to increase their business relations; others to out-dress and
out-drive social rivals; others to while away the time which it is
unfashionable to spend cheaply in the city; others for--shall we say
higher? because--political causes: few indeed for health, fewer still for
rest. You see the same old wheel go round year after year, with the same
faces growing more and more tired and more and more hopeless.

[Illustration: "AM THÜRMCHEN," COLOGNE.]

Of Aachen's legendary, historical, romantic side who has not heard?--of
the castle of Frankenburg on the outskirts, where Charlemagne's daughter
carried her lover Eginhardt through the snow, that their love might not be
betrayed by a double track of footsteps; of Charlemagne's palace, where
his school, the Palatine, presided over by English Alcuin, was held; and
the baths where a hundred men could swim at ease at one time; and
Charlemagne's cathedral, of which the present one has preserved only the
octagonal apse; of his tomb, where he sat upright after death in imperial
robes and on a marble throne (the latter is still shown); of the columns
brought from Rome and Ravenna; of the marvellous and colossal corona of
wax-lights which hangs by a huge iron chain from the vaulted roof; of the
bronze doors of the western gateway, now closed, but whose legend of the
Devil is commemorated by the iron figure of a she-wolf with a hole in her
breast, and that of a pineapple, supposed to represent her spirit, of
which she mourns the loss with open jaws and hanging tongue? The Devil is
always cheated in these legends, and one wonders how it was that he did
not show more cleverness in making his bargains. The cathedral still
claims to possess precious relics--of the Passion, the Holy Winding-sheet,
the robe of the Blessed Virgin and the blood-stained cloth in which the
body of Saint John the Baptist was wrapped. These involve a yearly
pilgrimage from the nearer places, and a great feast every seventh year,
when a holy fair is kept up for weeks round the cathedral. There is no
better living specimen of the Middle Ages than such gatherings, and no
doubt then, as now, there was some undercurrent of worldly excitement
mingling with the flow of genuine devotion. Aachen's old cornhouse, the
bridge gate and the many houses full of unobtrusive beauties of carving
and metal-work lead us by hook and by crook--for the streets are very
winding--out on the road to Burtschied, the hot-water town, whose every
house has a spring of its own, besides the very gutters running mineral
water, and the cooking spring in the open street boiling eggs almost
faster than they can be got out again in eatable condition. This is
another of the merchant _villeggiaturas_ of Germany; and a good many
foreigners also own pretty, fantastic new houses, planted among others of
every age from one to eight hundred years.

It is so strange to come upon a purely modern town in this neighborhood
that Exefeld strikes us as an anachronism. It is wholly a business place,
created by the "dry-goods" manufactures that have grown up there, and are
worth twenty million thalers a year to the enterprising owners, who rival
French designs and have made a market for their wares in England and
America. This is a great foil to old Roman Neuss, with its massive gates,
its tower attributed to Drusus--after whom so many bridges and towers on
the Rhine are named--and even to Düsseldorf, which, notwithstanding its
modern part, twice as large as its old river front, has some beautiful
antique pictures to show us, both in the costumes of its market-women, who
wear red petticoats with white aprons and flapping caps, and stand
laughing and scolding in a high key by their dog-drawn carts, and in its
council-house, an early Renaissance building with square, high-roofed
turrets overlooking the market-place. In that little house, in a narrow
street leading to the market, Heine was born; in that wretched little
architectural abortion, the theatre, a critical audience listened to
Immermann's works; and in the Kurzenstrasse was born Peter von Cornelius,
the restorer of German art. Schadow succeeded him at the head of the
Academy, and a new school of painting was firmly established in the old
city, which had energy enough left in it to mark out another successful
path for itself in trade. The new town is handsome, monotonous, rich and
populous, but the galleries and museums somewhat make up for the lack of
taste in private architecture. One of the most beautiful of the town's
possessions is the old Jacobi house and garden, rescued from sale and
disturbance by the patriotic artist-guild, who bought it and gave the
garden to the public, while the house where Goethe visited his friend
Jacobi became a museum of pictures, panelling, tapestry, native and
foreign art-relics, etc., all open to the public. The gardens, with their
hidden pools and marble statues, their water-lilies and overarching trees,
their glades and lawns, have an Italian look, like some parts of the Villa
Borghese near Rome, whose groves of ilexes are famous; but these northern
trees are less monumental and more feathery, though the marble gods and
goddesses seem quite as much at home among them as among the laurel and
the olive.

LADY BLANCHE MURPHY.




VERONA


It was a matter of debate in our party whether we should stop at Verona.
The ayes had it, and twenty-four hours afterward the noes indignantly
denied that there had been any opposition, so completely had the dignity
and attraction of the place driven away the very recollection of their
contumacy. Yet if they had had their way when we left Milan we should have
gone straight through to Venice, as the great majority of travellers do.
We could not remember that any of our friends had ever told us to go
thither or had gone themselves. At the hotel, the Due Torri, there were
but two parties besides our own--both, like ours, composed of but two
members. We had gone to this inn on Murray's emphatic recommendation.
"Very comfortable, excellent in every respect," said that red liar: we
found it wretched, and the charges exceeded those at the Hôtel Cavour in
Milan, which we had just left--one of the finest houses in Europe. There
is only one other in the place, which has the forbidding name of the Tower
of London; so, in view of our discomfort and the small public, we agreed
that we had come to the wrong house. On the day when we went away,
however, we fell in with some old acquaintance, fellow-country folk, at
the railway station, who had been at the Torre di Londra, and they too
thought they had gone to the wrong house. They said it was almost empty;
which confirmed us in the belief that the greater proportion of the people
who fill the trains and crowd the hotels within a day's journey in every
direction pass by this incomparable city. Yet as we paced the broad marble
slabs of its pavement, looking right and left, we asked each other, "Why
does not everybody talk and write about Verona, rush to it, rave about
it?"

[Illustration: COURTYARD OF HOUSE IN VERONA]

The view from the railway, unlike that of many beautiful Italian cities,
is striking enough to make any traveller change his route, jump from the
train and forego all his plans. The situation is singularly fine. The town
sits in state, backed by the outposts of the Alps, fronting the Apennines
and looking over the plains of Lombardy spread out between: the rushing
Adige curves deeply inward, forming the city's western boundary, and then,
doubling on itself, flows through the heart and south-eastward to the
Adriatic. The surrounding hills are seamed and crested with fortifications
of every age, beginning with those of the Romans of the Later Empire,
followed by those of Theodoric the Goth, of Charlemagne the Frank, of the
mediæval Scaligeri, lords of Verona, of the Venetians in the sixteenth
century, and of the Austrians of our own day, when Verona was a point of
the once famous Quadrilateral. Within the walls are monuments of all these
dynasties. The housewives and tradesfolk pass on their daily errands along
the streets spanned by two noble arches which date from the days of the
emperor Galienus. Almost in the centre of the town is the grand Roman
amphitheatre; the petty, prosaic, middle-class life of an Italian
provincial town creeps, noisy yet sluggish, to its base; modern houses
abut against all that is left of its outer wall, which was thrown down by
an earthquake in 1184; small shops are kept in some of the lower cells. On
that side it has none of the silent emphasis of its greater contemporary,
the Coliseum. We found afterward that we might have approached from
another direction across an open space, the Piazza Brà, but I think the
contrast and effect would have been less. The surprise is more
overwhelming to emerge from the narrow street into the arena, and see the
seats which sustained the amusement of fifty thousand people rising tier
above tier in perfect preservation, forty-three vast ellipses, to the very
top. It is only two-thirds as large as the Coliseum, but when one has
clambered to the upper-most row and looks down from a height of sixty or
seventy feet upon an area of nearly a quarter of a mile, the mind takes no
cognizance of anything but the actual immensity before the eyes. Looking
outward, we beheld a splendid panorama: first, the irregular surface of
the city, broken by steep roofs, arcaded galleries on the housetops,
battlemented towers square or slim, lofty belfries, black conical skyward
cypresses; then the blue hills--blue as cobalt, although so near--striped
in zigzags with the ruddy bands of the serrate feudal fortifications,
marked at intervals by curious three- and five-sided bastions, which the
architect Sanmicheli put up for the conquering Venetian republic; farther
off more peaceful slopes, on which white villas cluster and bask like
pigeons on a gable; more distant still, sublimer peaks of pale azure
brushed with snow; on the other side, the olive-dun plain irregularly
mapped out by the windings of the two rivers, the Adige and Po, yellow as
gravel-walks, sprinkled thick with towns and villages like tufts of
daisies, and hedged by the purple Apennines.

It is easy enough to fix the different events and periods of the local
history by the monuments they have created or destroyed, but the
influence of an Italian city is wholly against a systematic study of
chronology: the relics of various ages are thrown together, sandwiched and
dovetailed, on every side, and it is the impression, the collective
impression, of the entire place which is pleasantest to get, and worth
most: the rest can be learned from books. There is a sort of epic chain
which runs through the associations of Verona, and binds them together in
heroic series by all sorts of strange, unexpected suggestions and hints.
After the ancient epic, represented by the fragments from Roman history,
itself one long epic, come the vestiges of Theodoric, one of the heroes of
the _Niebelungen Lied_, in which he is known as Dietrich of Bern
(otherwise Verona). His palace, adopted and used for centuries as the
device of the municipal seal, survived the violent vicissitudes of the
city's history, and remained, after repeated alterations and additions
which made it a sort of architectural chronicle, until the present
century. This magnificent memorial of earlier times, which had been
respected in turn by the mad fury of Gian Galeazzo of Milan and the
implacable rivalry of Venice, was blown up by the French in 1801: large
barracks now stand upon its site, so that the stones of its warlike
builder are not subverted to purposes unbefitting his memory. Then follows
Charlemagne--putative founder, more probably first restorer, of the
cathedral--in his most mythic and heroic aspect, fresh out of the _Chanson
de Roland_, while Roland and Oliver keep guard on each side of the porch,
the latter bearing a mace with a ball and chain, the former his famous
sword Durindal, the stone counterpart of the weapon preserved for nearly a
thousand years in the monastery of Roncesvalles. The great heroic satire
of the twelfth century, _Reineke Fuchs_, is suggested by figures and
groups such as are to be found in all old Gothic churches north of the
Alps, but seldom south of them--a hog, dressed as a monk, standing on his
hind legs and holding a breviary, on the portal of the cathedral, and in
the church of San Zenone two cocks marching off with a fox dangling from
a pole. All the associations of the place centre in and radiate from Dante
and his unearthly poem, so much of which was written here or hereabouts.
It is extraordinary how he has appropriated the memories of the place,
even down to Romeo and Juliet--who by virtue of their immortalized loves
belong as much to our times as to their own--by the single well-known
line:

    Vieni a veder Montecchi e Capelletti.

[Illustration: THE AMPHITHEATRE.]

There is a colossal statue of him by a modern Veronese sculptor, not
unworthy of the subject or place, standing in the quiet Piazza dei Signori
amid the deserted homes of the Della Scale, looking toward the palace of
Can Grande, whose generous hospitality could not sweeten the bread of
charity nor ease the steps of a patron's court to the proud exile. Dante
could not have been easy to live with upon any terms. "Eh, puir fellow! he
looks like a verra ill-tempered mon," quoth Carlyle once after a long
contemplation of the poet's portrait. He played the part of Mentor, and a
very morose one, to the splendid, gallant, good-natured prince and his gay
court, and Can Grande seems to have derived the same sort of diversion
from his diatribes as from the quips and cranks of his jesters. At last
Dante wore out his welcome, as he did everywhere until the patient earth
gave him an abiding-place at Ravenna. His whole life of disappointed
ambition, unrecognized patriotism, unspoken love, baffled hatred, lonely
rangings in awful spheres, banishment, poverty, mortification, unrest,
inspiration, conscious immortality, passes before one in this spot, which
he must have crossed and recrossed innumerable times, and his presence
even in the marble makes it all his own. Yet if the statue could wake to
life, the man would not know the familiar place, which has been wholly
transformed since his days. The principal ornament of the square is the
Palazzo del Consiglio, a beautiful example of _cinque-cento_ architecture,
its exuberant decoration still subordinate to the harmony and proportion
of the general design. This has been converted into a pantheon for the
celebrated men of Verona, whose statues surmount the building, and among
whom we recognize many old acquaintances--Cornelius Nepos, Catullus, Pliny
the Younger and others of later date and less renown.

[Illustration: JULIET'S HOUSE.]

The palaces of the Scaligeri, now assigned to the drowsy courts of law,
have been altered so often that an inalienable dignity of front is all
that marks them for having once been princely habitations. We must look a
few steps farther for the pomp of the Scaligers, where a small graveyard
before the church of Santa Maria l'Antica contains the tombs of the
dynasty. The whole space, as well as each separate grave, is enclosed by
an iron trellis of the rarest delicacy: it is, in fact, a flexible network
which shakes at a touch, but which has withstood the rough handling of
five centuries, composed of open quatrefoils and the ladder (_scala_),
the family bearing, and a few other fanciful patterns, constantly
repeated: it is the lace of an iron age. Within this precinct rest ten
princes of the line, who from being nobles of Verona were elected in 1261
by unanimous popular choice to succeed the atrocious Eccelin da Romano,
the tyrant of Padua, who also held Verona under his execrable rule. There
is every variety of tomb, from the plain, heavy sarcophagus of Mastino I.
to the magnificent four-storied monument of Can Signorio surmounted by his
equestrian statue, a rising succession of small columns, arches, niches,
statuettes, canopies, pinnacles, embowered in leafage, bud and flower, as
if the splendid art of the fourteenth century were blossoming before one's
eyes. The tomb of Can Grande is fine, although much simpler: it has three
stories. He lies on the lowest floor, in robes of state, composed to his
last sleep, while on the summit he looks down from his horse, a full-armed
warrior. Four big dogs, from whom he took his enigmatic cognomen (although
the canine proclivity did not begin with him, as his ancestor was
Mastino), support the tomb, each bearing a shield with the arms of the
family.

Verona is rich in tombs. From our windows in the Due Torri we looked
across to the monument of Guglielmo del Castelbarco, a friend of the Delle
Scale, whose massive sarcophagus stands beneath a high Gothic canopy over
the gateway of a building which once formed part of the convent of Sta.
Anastasia. As we gazed down into the square, with its fountain and groups
of old women drawing water, and sometimes setting down their ewers to go
and say a short prayer in the beautiful old church of Sta. Anastasia, we
used to think that if this outlook were included in the charge for our
rooms, we were not paying too much. Another fine monument, by the
architect Sanmicheli, to two brothers who rejoiced in the surname of
Verità encrusts the front of the church of Sta. Eufemia; and in the
cemetery of San Zenone are a tomb and sepulchral urn which claim that they
contain the mortal remains of Pepin, king of Italy, the son of
Charlemagne. Besides these, altar-tombs, pillared and canopied monuments
and mortuary chapels meet the eye everywhere inside and outside of the
churches. That which attracts most attention now-a-days is decidedly the
least ornamental--the doubly-doubtful tomb of Juliet. It is so
acknowledged a lion that the street-boys of the quarter beset you with
offers to show you the way. This is no new celebrity: Murray assures us
that in the last century, before readers of Shakespeare, native or
foreign, were common in Italy, a sarcophagus was regularly exhibited as
this sentimental relic. That no longer exists: the present one, which was
formerly used as a washing-trough, looks so much like that or a
horse-trough of the commonest sort that, even without knowing its claims
to be apocryphal, the most credulous sentimental tourist would suspect
that it had come up rather than gone down in the world. No matter: we were
not dupes, but perhaps the full sweetness and sadness of the story never
came home to us with such enfolding charm as on the gray autumn afternoon
when we stood beside the pseudo relic in the forlorn little garden of the
orphan asylum on the bank of the turbid Adige. The house which is pointed
out as Juliet's is less palatial than we expected, though it is a lofty
old brick edifice with rounded windows, a stone balcony and a large
courtyard: on the keystone of the arched entrance, on the inner side of
the court, is the cap (_cappello_) which gives its name to the street, and
is supposed to be the heraldic badge of the family, _armoiries parlantes_,
or punning devices, being a favorite fashion in old times all over Europe.
If the balcony which remains was Juliet's, Romeo must have had a long
ladder and a cooler head than he showed under other circumstances. There
is a stone projection at the window of a lower story which once may have
supported a small balcony. The Casa de' Cappelletti is now a livery-stable
and inn, the Osteria del Cappello.

[Illustration: PIAZZA DELLE ERBE.]

The street leads straight to the Piazza delle Erbe, the vegetable-market
(literally, "grass-market"), the forum in ancient times, the most
picturesque spot in all Verona, which seems to collect and concentrate in
itself all the reminiscences and characteristics of the town. It
communicates on one side with the Piazza dei Signori; and the imposing
campanile, or bell-tower, of the latter, a shaft of brickwork nearly three
hundred feet high, springing above the intervening palace-roofs, makes a
companion to the tall, slender clock-tower at the farther end of the
Piazza delle Erbe, one of the many munificent gifts of the Della Scala
princes. In the centre of the square is a fountain, originally of great
antiquity; near by it the market-cross; close to that a marble column on
which once stood the lion of St. Mark, set up by the Venetians when they
seized the city, and thrown down when the republic of Venice fell in 1799.
Not far from these two pillars is a sort of stone dais beneath a stone
canopy, which was the very focus of the historic and municipal life of the
place in mediæval days. Here, when Verona was a free city, the _capitano
del popolo_ was inaugurated; proclamations were read from it; criminals
heard their sentences pronounced from it. Here people who did not pay
their debts were compelled to undergo the grotesque penalty common in the
Italian republics for that offence, of sitting for a stated time on the
pavement--_in puris naturalibus_ as to the sitting portion of the person:
flagstones are to be seen worn to a comfortable concavity by the
delinquent convexity.

The buildings which enclose the square are of the utmost diversity of
style and period--rich palaces of the Late Renaissance, cumbered with
ornament; modern houses of light-colored stucco, with striped awnings and
Venetian shutters; solemn old bits of architecture of sterner times;
frescoed façades, arcades, balconies. And what balconies! Not the poor
railing to which we give that name, but projecting parapets of stone,
pierced into trefoils, quatrefoils, rosaces, cusps, brackets,
balustrades--sometimes running across the whole house-front, more often
guarding a single window, itself lofty, arched, mullioned and rich with
tracery. It is here that, for the traveller coming from the North,
Venetian architecture begins--not Byzantine of course, but the purest,
noblest Cisalpine Gothic. It imparts a highly patrician air to the streets
with their long lines of deserted palaces, which keep their caste through
every change of fortune. Verona has not the fallen look of some old
Italian capitals, nor the forsaken air of others, but suggests the idea
that once her aristocracy closed their houses and withdrew to some retreat
where they maintain their traditions, waiting for better times to return
to their former homes. Many of the vaulted carriage-ways frame a glimpse
of the rushing river which washes the massive foundations of the
courtyards, the blue hills and lines of forked battlement.

In Verona one first sees Venetian painting too, on canvases which are to
Titian and Tintoretto as the colors of dawn are to those of sunrise, but
the glory is in them. The radiant pencil of Paul Veronese was early lost
by his birthplace and given to Venice, in illustration of the parable, but
even without her most glorious son native art makes a fair show in the
picture-gallery and churches. The picture which struck me most was a
fresco by Brusasorci in San Stefano, whither I had been drawn by the
report of its antiquity, which is said to be greater than that of any
other church in the town, going back to the seventh century. As on many
other occasions, I found that a building may be too old, the pristine
venerableness having been overbuilt by subsequent ages; but I was consoled
for my disappointment by this beautiful fresco--Saint Stephen surrounded
by the Holy Innocents. In the church calendar Saint Stephen is the first
martyr, and the Innocents are commemorated two days later: in the picture
the youthful deacon looks down with an air of paternal pride and affection
upon the lovely babes trooping before him with palms in their little hands
as he presents them to our Saviour, above in glory. There is a tenderness
in the expression of the martyr's face and attitude, as well as in the
conception of the group, which appeals to the simplest human feeling. The
juxtaposition of the protomartyr and the children is a perfect instance of
true ecclesiastical sentiment: it was not until long afterward that I knew
it to be a fine work of art.

San Stefano is on the left bank of the river, in the smaller and
less-frequented part of the town, and it was in further exploring the same
quarter that I wandered into a curious church which had somehow the look
of a cast-off garment, owing perhaps to the frequent patching it had
evidently undergone, and its appearance of being owned by nobody. It stood
open, empty of worshippers, with not even a beggar on the steps in
receipt of charitable custom--alone on a little island. It is the church
of San Tomaso Cantuariense, otherwise Thomas à Becket, whom it was odd to
meet so far from home: he was revered all over Europe for a long time
after his canonization, as this church proves, since he was adopted as its
patron in 1316, nearly a hundred and fifty years after his so-called
martyrdom; but to judge by its desertion he must be pretty well forgotten
now. It is hereabouts that, on emerging from a cat's-cradle of little
narrow cross streets, a very fine view of Sta. Anastasia from the rear
breaks upon one, the pentagonal apse, the chapels, transepts, nave, and
towers rising one above another, a beautiful specimen of early Italian
Gothic, still strongly impressed with the Lombard spirit.

[Illustration: SANTA ANASTASIA.]

This Romanesque character is what gives the particular stamp to most of
the sacred buildings in Verona, making them a study as distinct in their
way as the Norman churches at Caen. They belong to one period and one
style, although this is a transitional one: the slender pillars of the
porches resting on crouching lions, the round-headed arches, the plain,
square, soaring _campanili_, a majestic boldness and simplicity in general
effect, an unconscious quaintness in detail, the line of the prevailing
red marble contrasting gratefully with the layers of many-toned gray
spread by time over the walls, produce a combination of form and color
delightful to the eye. The older, original edifice is seldom visible from
without: what remains of it is completely built in and over, and is
generally to be found in the crypt. Notwithstanding the stateliness and
interest of the cathedral, San Zenone was the church to which our steps
returned most persistently. It is composed of three churches of very
different date, the first having been erected soon after the year 800, the
second in 1138, the third three hundred years later. The main building,
which is of the twelfth century, is sunk far below the level of the
ground: one descends into it from the main portal by ten steps; and this
unusual mode of entrance, the depth, the great height, the rigid absence
of ornament, the grave colors, the long unbroken lines of the nave, give
the interior a remarkable solemnity, and create an impression and emotion
as different as possible from those excited by churches of a later
construction, with their florid architecture, their opulence of sculpture
and carving, their statues and ornate monuments, their gorgeous paintings,
their stained-glass windows--temples

    Where the awe of worship mingles with the throbbing of delight.

The austere grandeur of San Zenone turns the soul inward upon a range of
meditations which a Puritan need not disclaim. The nave terminates in one
double flight of steps leading up to the second, most modern church, which
is raised above the first and terminates in a pointed tribune; and another
double flight which leads down to the vast vaulted crypt, with its pillars
and recesses, which is the oldest part of the structure. This place
breathes of the earliest Christian antiquity, and somehow reminds one of
the Catacombs. The altars are older than the foundations: on one of them
are groups of pillars fastened together by a species of Runic knot, such
as are to be found in the rudest carving of the Hebrides; ancient
sarcophagi and bassirilievi line the walls; yet round one of the recesses
of this primitive-seeming sanctuary I found a branch of the _Ampelopsis
quinquefolia_, our Virginia creeper, which I had fondly believed a native
of America, painted with the utmost fidelity five hundred years before
America was heard of, its five dentated leaves and jointed sprays in
colors as rich as the masses we had seen trailing over the marble
banisters of the villas on Lake Como, dyeing the pellucid water with their
scarlet shadows. Throughout the church everything speaks of early times:
the few frescoes are of the twelfth or thirteenth century: the only
noteworthy picture is by the serious Mantegna. In the upper church Saint
Zeno sits in his episcopal chair with a long fishing-rod in his hand,
whence the Veronese, ignorant of sacred symbolism, infer that he was fond
of the sport, and have invented an appropriate legend. He was an African
by birth, became bishop of Verona A. D. 362, and is said to have suffered
martyrdom twenty years afterward under the emperor Julian: his swarthy
wooden effigy, of archaic stiffness, reminds one of the idol of some
barbarous tribe. One of the most curious bits of the past is a group among
the rude sculptures of the porch called _The Chase of Theodoric_: the dogs
have caught the stag, and a fiend is about to seize upon the rider.
Orthodox tradition has given the name, because Theodoric, like all the
Goths, was a heretic, an Arian, but probably it points to some very early
version of the story of the Wild Huntsman, an old German legend. One sees
the trace of German ideas--at any rate, of Northern thought--everywhere in
the mediæval monuments of Verona: it is the meeting of the genius of the
North and South which Ruskin finds in the architecture and sculpture, and
which imparts a peculiar and original physiognomy to the whole place. One
of its most striking features is the Castel Vecchio ("old castle") and
adjacent Ponte del Castello ("castle bridge"), for they seem but parts of
one great fortification, turreted and battlemented, built by Can Grande
II. in 1355. The bridge is an extraordinary structure, the arches being
extremely unequal in size: the span of the largest is about a hundred and
sixty feet. The mass, the irregularity, the strength of these piles, the
dark river hurrying below, give the spot a grimness not often found on the
sunny side of the Alps. The castle has been altered by many successive
hands of course, for the history of Verona, like that of most Italian
principalities, is the old story of the house out of which one devil was
driven by seven worse ones: to Eccelino succeeded the Delle Scale, soon to
become as bad as he, and be driven forth by the Visconti of Milan, who in
their turn were expelled by the envious, despotic Venetians; and each as
they came and went added and took away something of the beauty and might
of the town.

[Illustration: VERONA, FROM THE GIARDINO GIUSTI.]

But there is a gayer side to Verona than any which we have yet recalled.
It was here that we first made acquaintance with many lively humors of
Italian street-life which we had not met with in the more northern cities.
Here we first noticed the eternal cooking in the open air, the roasting,
frying, frizzling which are for ever going on, the people stopping at
every few yards to eat macaroni, chestnuts, and Goodness knows what other
nameless messes, until we began to wonder whether anything were cooked and
eaten at home. Here too I saw the drollest and most charming bit of
harlequinade between a rascal boy and an old woman carrying a heavy vessel
of water. He popped out from under an archway and struck her a light tap
on the shoulder with a bit of hollow cane: she turned round, but he had
flown through an open window. On she trudged, and out he came as lightly
as he had gone, and following her on tiptoe tickled the back of her neck
with his wand: round she turned again, but he was gone too quickly for my
eyes this time. She set down her ewer and stared in every direction,
muttering curses: he came running swiftly down an alley, seized the ewer,
and with every respectful demonstration of relieving her of the burden
darted off with it in another direction. She hobbled after him, raining
maledictions: back he came with a pantomime of courteous surprise--What!
she did not wish to be assisted?--and set the vessel on a high ledge,
whence she had much ado to lift it down. As she did so, splash! half the
water was spilled: then her tormentor went through a dumb show of sympathy
and sorrow until the crone seemed like to burst with fury. At last he
broke into a fit of shrill laughter, the first sound he had uttered, made
a macaronic gesture, and capered off with the airiest gambols and antics,
like a very devil's kid. A street-urchin teasing an old woman is no new
sight, but the nimbleness, spirit, grace and gentleness of this young
Pickle, the impossibility of guessing what he would do or where he would
be next, and the fine dramatic rage of the beldame, who looked like one of
Michael Angelo's Fates, kept us standing and staring at the two until the
fun was over as if we had been at a play.

In one respect we must have seen Verona under a disadvantage: there was no
sunshine during our short stay. The beautiful, lordly gardens of the
Palazzo Giusti on the declivity of a hillside on the left bank of the
Adige were dank and dripping; there was no temptation to linger near their
chilly statues and gloomy cypresses; even the view from their noble
terraces, formed partly by the wall of the town, was cold and colorless
under the November sky. Out-of-door life is so large a part of the
pleasure of being in Italy, fine weather adds so indescribably there to
the beauty of even the most glorious works of man, that to have seen them
only under a dull sky is like having seen a human countenance without its
smile. Perhaps at another season we should not have thought the streets so
melancholy: perhaps even in our admiration we did not pay full justice to

    L'eccelsa, graziosa, alma Verona.[A]

SARAH B. WISTER.

[A] The lofty, gracious, kindly Verona.




A LAW UNTO HERSELF.

CHAPTER III.


Captain Swendon, with the majority of his sex, was never less a hero than
when at home. Brute force, _od_, backbone, whatever you call the resistant
power which keeps a man erect among other men, weakens under the coddling
of feminine fingers and the smoke of conjugal incense. The aching tooth,
the gnawing passion or the religious problem that strikes across his life
like a blank wall, all of which he pooh-poohs out of sight in the street,
master him indoors. A woman puts on her noblest virtues with the fireside
slippers, but to a man they are a chance for remorse, for repining, for
turning God's mighty judgments on himself into a small drizzling shower of
miseries for his wife and the children. Give the same man his boots and
the fresh air, and he will go to the stake gallantly.

The captain, pacing up and down the garden-alleys that night, thinking of
the blow which would fall on his daughter in Laidley's threatened disposal
of his property, was not altogether unheroic. There was nothing mean in
the big gaunt figure with its uncertain strides, or in the high-featured,
mild-eyed face: neither was there anything mean in his wrath. It was all
directed against himself. His Swedish blood had infused a gentle laziness
into his temper, and he had forgiven Laidley long ago for his lifelong
swindle, as no American with English grandfathers would have done.

"It's Will's nature," he said now. "Will's a coward and desperately ill.
He wants to pay his way into heaven, and I can't blame him. But _I_--I'm
an incompetent fool! I can't even pay my girl's way on earth!" The
captain's life, in fact, was a long ague of feverish conceit and chills of
humility. Yesterday he was an inventor who would benefit the world: to-day
he was fit for nothing but to dig clams. Going up and down the lonely
walk, he summed up all the capital he had had to make his fortune in the
world's market--the education, the opportunities, the great inventions
that all fell just short of their aim. For himself, he did not want money.
His work-bench, his iron bed, a bowl of Jane's soup, a fishing-rod and a
tramp into the hills now and then with the girl,--if he had millions they
could buy him nothing better. But she--Why should she not be as other
women? Why could he not work for her as other fathers--?

He raised his right arm, and the empty sleeve fell back from the stump,
which burned and throbbed impotently. There was will enough in it to
conquer the whole world for her. There was that aching love which mothers
feel in his breast for her, as though his heart were physically wrenched.

But at breakfast the next morning, while quite as ready to die for her, he
nagged and scolded incessantly, and threw the blame of their ill-luck on
her, his voice sounding like the clatter of a brass kettle: "Omelette?
No--no omelette for me. I am quite content to breakfast on dry bread and
coffee. It is time we practiced economy. I'll make out a system for you,
Jane. A system, and I desire you to follow it."

Jane laughed and helped him to cherries, and then devoted herself in
earnest to her own breakfast. She never argued with anybody, and had that
impregnable good-humor which so often passes for lack of feeling. Little
griefs, either her own or those of other people, dwindled out of notice in
the atmosphere about her, like mosquitoes buzzing in a large sun-lighted
room.

"We certainly must practice economy. God knows where to-morrow's meals may
come from!"

"Jane's hens are in good laying condition, and there are the cherries on
the tree," said Miss Fleming tartly. She did not like Jane nor any other
woman, but she usually fought for her sex against men in a mannish
way--for the pleasure of fighting for the weaker party.

"Hens? Yes, and but for the whim of renting this tumble-down house with
its great gardens out on the suburb, we could have had snug rooms in some
business street, where I could have earned our bread and butter."

"It was your whim, captain. Why, she has kept up the table out of the
garden, and you know it. Don't interfere with the child. She can turn a
penny to the best advantage. Her ability is of the most practical kind."

The captain did not like her tone. He glanced uneasily at Jane, who ate
her cherries in calm unconsciousness.

"I might as well stick pins in the divine cow Audhumbla!" Miss Fleming
said to herself every day. This child, as she called her, irritated her,
just as a machine did, or an animal, or any other creature whose
motive-power she could by no means comprehend. She was herself a mass of
vitalized nerves, all of which centred in that secret I, Cornelia Fleming,
over whose hopes, nature and chances she brooded night and day. This other
woman, who simply grew in her place, concerning herself no more about her
own mind, body or future than the larch yonder did about its roots or
leaves, and who took praise and blame as indifferently as the tree, the
sun or rain, roused in her a feeling of active dislike. She called Jane
stolid to other people, but she was by no means satisfied that she was
stolid. She was often sorry that she had brought herself measurably under
the protection of Captain Swendon and his daughter by renting two of the
rooms in their house, though she had planned and manoeuvred a long time
to accomplish that end. When Miss Fleming came up to town to join the
art-class at the Academy, she was exceedingly careful not to join also the
emancipated lonely sisterhood, who set social laws at defiance. She might
live alone, but it must be under the roof of conventionally correct
people. She abjured the whole tribe of literary and artistic adventurers
who haunted the studios and lecture-halls. She wrote home to her old
mother that the Swendons, descended from the leaders of the first Swedish
settlers, that family of Svens from whom Penn bought the land for his
village of Philadelphia, had possessed culture and social rank, if no
money, for centuries. Miss Fleming found for herself a lodging-place under
their roof, with very much the motive of the low-born blackbird burrowing
in the high, bare nest of the osprey.

She was on her way to the Academy now, and touched her hat jauntily and
shook loose her flowing-sleeve as she said good-bye with a lingering look
at the captain, to which he did not reply.

The cold ague of despair was on him: he combed his grizzled beard with his
fingers, stared at the carpet and saw nobody. "Yes, I ought to have rented
two small rooms up town, and found work that would pay. I'll do it now,"
he grumbled.

Jane had uncovered a long table heaped with tools, glue-pots,
drawing-materials, models in wood, in paper, in clay, with others finely
draughted on large sheets of Bristol board. The captain preserved his
failures as sacredly as a Chinese the dead bodies of his ancestors. She
took up one of these models and studied it thoughtfully: "Very well,
father. I could go on with the business, I suppose."

The captain burst into a laugh: "Absurd! Though," relapsing into anxiety,
"this is, as you say, really my business. But I could easily find a place
as professor of Latin and Greek in some Western college which would
support us."

"Now, I don't quite understand the action of this screw, A, B,"
meditatively. "It interferes with the force of the piston, in my
judgment."

"Impossible!" hurrying over to the table. "I'll explain that in a moment,
Jane. Why, that screw is the finest idea in the machine. It's the meaning,
in fact. It all hinges on that."

In five minutes his smoking-cap was pushed back, his spectacles on his
hooked nose, and he was lost in the depths of valves, gauges and levers.

Jane took the place of a dozen lost hands. She made the models, she
draughted them, she worked with carpenter's tools, needles, pencils,
clay, by turns, and was both swift and skillful. She had been at this
daily work, indeed, since the time her father had lost his arm. Now and
then, being really nothing but a child in years, she clasped her hands
over her head and yawned when he was not looking, or, when she was sent to
the fire for the glue, sat down on the floor and began a rough-and-tumble
romp with the dog, or while she was at work, sang scraps of songs into
which the captain threw a fine rolling bass.

The morning was warm: the fire had burned down low in the grate, and both
windows were wide open. The wind which entered, though raw, had a breath
of spring in it. The scraggy plum trees outside were covered with deep
pink blossoms, yellow dandelions blazed up out of the grass, and even in
the muddy walks: a half-frozen bee buzzed among them feebly for a while,
and then lost his way into the room and fell with a thump on the table.

Jane dropped her tools, and put out her finger for him to crawl upon. "Now
you are too early afoot: you're greedy, you fellow," she said. "You are in
too great a hurry to be rich. Haven't you a comfortable house? And plenty
of honey?" She carried him to the window and set him in the sun on the
sill. "He'll fall in some puddle and be frozen to death; and serve him
right! I hate your early birds and ants and bees, always at work."

"It is work you hate, Jenny. Now tack this strip in place, child, and then
paste on the muslin. We must finish this before night, and there is more
than a day's work on it."

Jane tacked and measured diligently a while, and then dropped her elbows
on the table and rested her chin on her palms. Her face was just in front
of her father's. "I was thinking--"

"Yes."

"I mean that I saw in the paper this morning that there was a school of
black-fish on the coast, the largest for years. I suppose the Lantrims
will be out for them?"

"No doubt. The old captain wrote to me that he had bought Sutphen's
Tuckerton skiff."

"Aha? You did not tell me that. What else did he say?"

"Oh, nothing. 'Crabs would be scarce this season; and couldn't we come
down?' The larks were beginning to rise in the marshes."

Jane nodded thoughtfully: "A Tuckerton skiff? Now, I'm surprised at that,
father. I should prefer something heavier--a yawl, say--for coming in on
that beach. Well--The wind must be dead sou'-west to-day. It would bring
the spray right up into your face if you were lying on the sand."

She was silent for some time, looking steadily out of doors.

The captain glanced uneasily once or twice at the dark blue eyes and at a
ray of sunlight glistening in the loose yellow hair. "It _is_ sou'-west.
It really does begin to feel like summer," he said, dropping his pencil
and fumbling for his tobacco.

Jane brought his pipe and lighted it for him. "I am dreadfully tired!"
stretching her arm out, pushing up the sleeve, and looking at it as if it
had done a day's ploughing. "Now, I suppose the men are all out in their
boats by this time, but a person could easily rig Lantrim's little sloop
and join them; or we could camp on the marshes all day. The scent of the
pines would be heavy in this damp wind."

The captain nodded gravely and puffed in silence a while: "It's no use,
Jane," taking the pipe from his mouth. "I haven't a penny."

She sprang up, ran to a writing-desk and took out a glove-box. In it were
a pair of well-darned kid gloves and two tiny paper packages. She laid
them before him: "It's all in silver: this is for your summer hat, and
that for my shoes. What do you say, father? We are in time for the
eight-o'clock train. We should have nearly the whole day on the beach."

"Hat? What do I want with a hat? But your shoes are broken."

"They can be patched," with a gasp of delight. "Here! clear away the
work, father, while I put up a basket of dinner." She stopped by the
window, looking out: "Somebody is coming through the apple trees: I smell
a cigar. Now, remember, nothing must detain you. We can't break our
engagement."

The visitor came in sight from under the apple trees--a sombre, heavy man
in gray, the editor Neckart, to whom Mr. Waring had criticised the
Swendons with such freedom the night before. Mr. Neckart had known the
captain years ago. When he was a boy, too poor to pay for schooling, he
used to go to the captain at night for help in his Greek or mathematics.
Swendon had always preferred the companionship of younger men than
himself, and was never without a "following" of clever, unruly schoolboys,
whom he was as ready to help when they were lazy, as to tip with silver
half-dollars--when he had them. Some of them had brought young Neckart to
the captain, knowing nothing about him, except that he was miserably poor,
with a desire for knowledge which they thought insane enough. Now that
Neckart was a man, living in New York, and with very different problems to
work from those of Euclid, he had but little intercourse with the slow,
easy-going captain. They met occasionally, when Neckart came to
Philadelphia, at the club or at dinner somewhere, when there would be a
few minutes' hasty gossip about the old pranks of the boys--White, who
died in California, or Porter, who was now in the Senate--and then a shake
of the hand and good-bye, Neckart usually wondering to himself, as they
parted, how soon that fellow Laidley would cease to cumber the earth and
the captain would have his own and wear a decent coat again and the bits
of gaudy jewelry in which he used so to delight.

The old man hurried down the garden-walk now to meet him, and wrung his
hand heartily: "Bruce! is it possible? You have not crossed my threshold
since the old Epictetus days."

"No, and I interrupt you now? You are going out? I only called for a few
words on business."

"Plenty of time, plenty of time! My little girl and I were going to run
down to the shore to vagabondize for a day.--Jane, this is my old friend
Mr. Neckart.--We have plenty of time in which to catch the train. Sit
down, Bruce."

Mr. Neckart did not sit down, however. He found some difficulty now in
putting his business into a few concise words. He had heard Laidley's
avowal the night before that he proposed to leave the captain penniless.
All his boyish regard for the old man woke in force. His boyish feelings
were apt to waken and clog Mr. Neckart's strait-lined path to success. He
did not sentimentalize about his old teacher, but he set aside half an
hour in which to look in on him and see what could be done for him.
Anything could be done in half an hour by a man who chose to work hard
enough.

He expected to find the captain totally disheartened by this blow, but
here he was making ready for a day's fooling on the beach; for the
captain, finding that his visitor did not promptly broach the subject of
his errand, went on with his preparations.

So it happened that they fell into a brief silence. The old man by the
fire screwed his rod as though rods were the business of life: the young
girl sat by the window, a white-covered lunch-basket on the floor beside
her, sewing strings on a wide-rimmed hat which she meant to wear. Her
yellow hair was bound loosely about her head, fastened by a band of black
velvet: it made a faint shadow about the calm, delicate face. The dog sat
at her feet, his head on her knee, watching her intently. She took her
stitches slowly and with care, stopping now and then to put her hand on
Bruno's muzzle and nod at him significantly about the fun they were going
to have presently. It was a quiet, pretty picture.

Now, silence or leisurely calm of any kind was rare in Mr. Neckart's daily
life. He was the controller of a great journal: he was a leading
politician. He had been making his own way, and dragging and goading
slower men along, since he had left his cradle. Even his own party found
the indomitable energy of this dwarfish giant intolerable sometimes. But
his own action did not satisfy him. He had held his finger so long on the
world's pulse that affairs in New York or Washington seemed but small
matters. He liked to feel that they and he were linked by a thousand
sympathies to the chances and changes of every country on the globe. A
famine in India or an insurrection in Turkey were not mere newspaper items
to him, but significant movements of the outer levers and pulleys of the
great machine, part of which he was.

It is the straining horse that is always loaded, and there was no man in
the party from whom such work was exacted as from Neckart. The night
before he had received a deputation of French Communists proposing
emigration: this morning he was to meet in secret caucus the leaders who
would decide on the next candidate for the Presidency. So it went on day
after day. To fall suddenly into this little room, among people to whom a
day's fishing or sauntering with a dog through salt marshes was the object
of life, startled him.

For years, too, people who talked to Neckart, though in but a street
greeting, invariably recognized his power to help or harm them. If they
had no favors to ask, they bore themselves deferentially, as to a power
that could grant favors. To the captain he was still the boy Bruce, a good
fellow, though dull in Greek: to the girl, intent on her holiday, he saw
that he was an unwelcome guest, who would interfere with her journey. The
jar of falling to the common level was sudden, yet oddly pleasant.

The captain, to fill up the time, began to discuss the different makes of
fishing-rods. Mr. Neckart was used to give ten minutes each to men seeking
interviews: their words had to be sharp as arrows, and driven straight
home to the bull's eye of the matter to command his attention. Yet he
listened to this lazy talk. The damp wind drove the perfume of the
apple-blossoms in at the open window: the sunlight touched the glistening
rings of hair on Jane's throat. How slow-moving and calm the girl was! He
was quite sure that the blood had flowed leisurely in the veins under that
pearly skin ever since she was born. None of that true American vim,
sparkle, pushing energy here which he admired in his countrywomen.

"I really don't understand the new kinds of tackle," he said to Captain
Swendon: "I have not had a rod in my hand for fifteen years."

"No. Of course not. You have other work to do. But Jane and I run down to
the shore whenever we have money--I mean whenever we can manage to leave
home. She knows every fisherman's hut from Henlopen to Barnegat. No better
place to go for a breath of salt air than Sutphen's Point. You can troll
with him all day, or dig for roots in the pine woods, or sleep on the
beach in the sun."

Neckart smiled and glanced at his watch. At nine the committee would meet.
Sun? Sleeping on the beach? He was a stout, strongly-built man, with
muscles like steel, but, like most Americans who have urged their way
relentlessly up, his brain before middle age gave signs of disease. As any
other creature would, when overdriven for years it revolted, and failed in
its work now and then. Night after night he lay sleepless, conscious only
of a dull vacuity at the base of the brain; and by day, when some crisis
demanded his most vigilant, keenest thought, thought suddenly blurred into
momentary stupor. Any man who overworks his brain will understand how it
was with him, and why, for physical reasons, this glimpse of absolute
quiet and rest should touch his nerves as the taste of cordial would a
fainting man. A sudden vision opened before him of yellow, silent sands,
and dusky stretches of solemn pines, and the monotonous dash of the green
sea all day, all night long. No doubt there were "old Sutphens" there,
whole generations of people, outside of the living world, sleeping and
sunning themselves. It was like a glimpse into some newly-discovered,
silent, sunlit Hades.

Mr. Neckart put back his watch in his pocket, and looked irresolutely at
the captain. The foolish, kindly old face belonged to his boyhood--to the
time when his shoes were patched and his feet chilblained, but all the
world was waiting for him to be a man to do him honor. If he could sit for
an hour with the old man on the beach, would it bring the boyish feeling
back again? He was conscious of a purposeless temptation--unreasonable as
that which he had felt at the edge of a precipice to throw himself over.
Nonsense! The committee would be waiting; there were appointments for
every hour of his stay in Philadelphia; there was the leading article on
the situation which nobody but he could write, that must go to his paper
by the next mail.

He took up his hat: "It is time for you to catch the train, captain. Will
you take me with you?"

Captain Swendon looked at him hastily: "The very best thing you can do,
Bruce! Just what I should advise.--Jane, go on before with Bruno. Mr.
Neckart and I will follow."

Mr. Neckart was annoyed. He had forgotten that the girl was to go, and had
thought of the captain as his only companion. But she walked far in front
of them, through the apple trees, and down the quiet street, engrossed
with the dog. She probably would not be in his way.




CHAPTER IV.


Down on the coast the world suddenly broadened and lifted into larger
spaces. In lieu of eight-feet strips of pavement to walk on, there were
the gray sweeps of sand, and great marshes stained with patches of color
in emerald and brown, rolling off into the hazy background: instead of the
brick and wooden boxes wherein we shut ourselves up with bad air in town,
there were the vast uncovered plain of the sea, shapeless ramparts of fog
incessantly rising and fading, an horizon which retreated as you searched
for it into opening sunlit space, refusing to shut you in. The very boats
and ships in which these people lived were winged, ready for flight into
some yet farther region.

"Are you glad to come out of doors, Bruno? I am," said Miss Swendon to her
dog as she stood looking at the sea; and then they sauntered away
together.

Her father and Mr. Neckart went down to the mouth of the Inlet, where some
fishermen were patching a boat which they had drawn up on a heap of
mussel-shells. One or two crabbers, standing on the bow of their little
skiffs and poling them along the edge of the water by the handles of their
nets, had stopped to watch the job, which was being done with rusty nails
and a bit of barnacle-moulded iron from a wreck instead of a hammer. When
the iron and nails broke they all sat down and talked the matter over,
with any other subject which happened to be lying loosely about on the
fallow fields of their minds. When Captain Swendon came up they shook
hands gravely with him, and made room for him on the bottom of an
up-turned, worm-eaten scow. They were all captains as well as he, and he
was hail, fellow! well met! with them as with everybody.

Mr. Neckart, who was formally introduced, nodded curtly, but did not sit
down.

"A good day for the perch, Sutphen," said the captain, handing round a
bundle of cigars.

"Yaas."

"But you ought to have been on the banks by daylight." Mr. Neckart's
sharp, irritable voice jarred somehow on the quiet sunshine.

"Yaas. But I lent my boat last week, and this here one's out of
repair.--Give me more of them nails, David."

"The boat could have been mended at night, and ready for use," in the tone
which a teacher might use to idle boys.--"It is singular, Captain
Swendon," turning his back on the men as on so many mud-turtles, "that the
sea-air begets improvident habits in all coast-people. You cannot account
for it rationally, but it is a fact. Along the whole immediate shore-line
of Europe you find the same traits. Unreadiness, torpor of mind and
body.--Ah! Captain Swendon and I wish to hire a boat for the day," turning
to the fishermen again. "Can any of you men furnish us with one?"

Sutphen lighted his cigar leisurely: "We always manage to provide Captain
Swendon with a boat when he wants it. We kin obleege him," with a slight
stress on the pronoun.

"At what rates?" sharply.

"Waal, we kin talk of rates when the day's over. The captain and us won't
disagree, I reckon."

"I never do business in that way. Bring out your boat and put a price on
it."

"Come, Neckart," said the captain, rising hastily, "we will walk up the
beach a bit.--I'll see you about the boat presently, Sutphen.--You don't
know these fellows, Bruce," when they had passed out of hearing and found
a seat in the thin salt grass. "They are not used to being dealt with in
such a prompt, drill-major fashion."

"I deal with all men alike. Order and promptness have been necessary to me
in every step of my way. I must have them from others. I pay to a penny,
and I exact to a penny. It is not the money I want: it is discipline in
the people about me. They must move as if they were drilled if they move
to further my ends."

The captain took his cigar out of his mouth and turned blankly on him:
"'Further your ends?' But, Bruce?--"

Neckart laughed: "Oh, no doubt they were created with some other object in
view than to serve my purposes. But that is the cognizance which I take of
them. Really, captain, if you were in public life, and saw with what
eagerness masses of men follow feeble leaders who know the trick of piping
to them, and how willing they are to be manipulated, you would soon come
to look upon the American public simply as a machine ready for your own
use when you had the skill to work it."

The captain's cigar went out in his fingers as he sat staring with dull
perplexity at Neckart. There was a certain nobility in the carriage of the
powerful figure and black shaggy head, an occasional fire in the deep-set
eyes, a humor in the fine smile, which argued a different order of man
from this scheming, selfish politician.

"I can't place you at all, Bruce. Now, I should have thought you would
have been a reformer--worked for humanity--that line, you know. You were a
sensitive lad, like a girl."

"I am quite too warm-hearted a fellow to be a philanthropist," laughed
Neckart. "The philanthropists I know work for principles, liberty,
education and the like: they don't care a damn for the individual Tom and
Jerry. The chances are, that your reformer is a cold-blooded tyrant at
home: he makes a god of his one idea: his god makes him nervous,
ill-conditioned--the last man in the world to choose for a friend or a
husband."

"You amaze me! I should have said that they were the wisest and purest of
men. Next to clergymen, of course. I don't go to church myself, but I
respect the cloth. But speaking of yourself, Bruce, you were a most
affectionate little fellow. Do you remember how you referred every new
idea to your mother? I recollect you told me once that you read your
lessons in your school classics to her to amuse her. You must have cleaned
the translation sometimes to make it fit for her ear."

"Yes."

"And I remember, too," regardless of the sudden silence which had fallen
on his companion, "how you watched my wife making a cap one day--she had
nice fingers in such work, Virginie--and how you saved your money to buy
lace and ribbon for her to make your mother a cap; and how anxiously you
sat watching every stitch as it went in, and carried it off triumphantly
when it was done."

"I remember quite well. Mrs. Swendon was very kind to me in the matter."

The captain did not reply: he glanced at Neckart with sudden alarm. What
was it that he had heard of Bruce's mother? Some wretched story that came
out at the time of her death: had she committed a crime or gone mad? He
could not recall it, but something in the silence of his companion told
him that he had blundered. He began to smoke violently in contrition of
soul, and remained silent, while Neckart lay still in the sand, his hands
clasped behind his head, looking at the surf.

It was not the surf he saw.

It was that little silly cap which he had held on his boy's chapped fist
delighted and proud. Twenty years ago! He had earned the money to buy it
by work after the other boys in the shop had gone home. He could see the
very pattern now that was worked in the lace, and the ribbon--a pale blue,
just the color of his mother's eyes. He had carried it home in the
evening, and smoothed the gray hair over the gentle little face, and tied
it on her before he would let her go to the glass. She was just as pleased
as he, and kissed him with her arms tight about his neck and the tears in
her eyes. An hour afterward he had found her tearing it into bits with an
idiotic laugh. A little later--

He shut his eyes, as if to keep out some real sight before him.

It seemed to him as if his whole boyhood had been made up of just such
nights as this one which he remembered.

It was not often that Neckart looked back at that early time. He was
neither morbid nor addicted to self-torture. He had carefully walled up
this miserable background of youth from his busy, cheerful, wide-awake
life. Why should he go back to it? Something, however, in the air to-day,
in the moan of the sea through the sunlight, brought it all before him,
more real than the stretch of water and sand.

The captain smoked out his cigar and began to talk. Gaps of silence were
so much wasted time in the world; and besides, he owed a duty to Bruce.
Here was a man going headlong to the devil by the road of ambition, a
sweet, high nature becoming soured and tainted, all for the lack of honest
direction from somebody of age and experience.

When Neckart roused himself enough to understand, the captain was in the
full swing of his dictatorial oration. "I don't want to intrude with my
opinion. But no man should live for himself," he said. "Now, if my
scissors had turned out as I expected, I should have been worth a million
to-day. I'd have spent a good share of it--let me see--on churches, I
think. Small churches--at corners in place of grogshops. Pure Gothic,
say--"

"Stained glass and gargoyles instead of whiskey? You must bid higher for
souls in back alleys than that, captain."

"Well, schools, then--colleges, asylums, soup-houses. I tell you, Bruce,
if I had your opportunities, if I could work political machinery, I'd lift
this festering mass below us up--at least to civilization and
Christianity."

"I thought you meant me," laughing. "Go on."

"Of course I can't give you detailed advice. Take me on pistons and
screws, and I'm at home; but I know only the broad outlines of political
economy. My view," ponderously, "is purely philosophic. Our politics need
reform, sir. An honest man who would come to the front just now would save
the country. The masses would follow him to honesty. The Americans are a
just people by instinct. I tell you, sir, if I had your chances--Talk to
Pliny Van Ness, Bruce. There's a keen man of the world, who is as pure and
lofty in his notions as an enthusiastic woman. He has a scheme just now
for bettering the condition of the children of the dangerous classes of
Pennsylvania. I wish you knew Van Ness."

"I've seen him;" adding, after a moment's hesitation, "He is as upright a
man, I believe, as you say--the very man to be inspired with your heroic
rage for reform, and to carry it into effect. I am not the same kind of
material."

"Bruce, you belie yourself. I knew you as a boy--"

"Then you knew an ordinary, not bad sort of a fellow, captain, but no
hero. I have had one or two qualities which have pushed me up--a
skill--craft with using words, as you have with tools, for instance, an
inflexibility of purpose, a certain tact in influencing large bodies of
men. I have never had any affection for them. I have two or three stanch
friends. Other men and women are part of the world's furniture to me.
Nothing more."

"But the power which these qualities have gained for you? How do you mean
to use it?"

"You press me closely," with an amused scrutiny of the captain's
monitorial face. "I shall use it, just now, to make money. That is the
thing of which I have had the least in the world, and which has yielded me
most substantial pleasure. When I am a rich man I can command knowledge,
power and whatever else I covet." His eye kindled at the last words. There
was a darkened background in his thoughts, to which Neckart, with all his
easy frankness, admitted no man.

The captain studied him with perplexity: then his face lightened: "I have
it! You must marry! A wife and children are the very influences you need
to soften and broaden your aims. Yes, I know I'm speaking plainly.
But--have you never thought of it?"

Mr. Neckart did not reply for a few moments. "It is impossible that I
should ever marry," he said gravely. "There is an obstacle which would
make it simply criminal in me. I never think of it."

The captain colored: "I beg your pardon, Bruce: I did not know--"

"You have not intruded: you have not hurt me in the least," laying his
hand for an instant on the captain's knee. "It is not a matter about which
I have any soreness of feeling. The obstacle arose from circumstances: I
am not in any sense guilty."

Captain Swendon nodded and occupied himself with rebuckling his shoes. He
could neither answer to the purpose nor rid his face of the shocked alarm
visible in it. To have been told that Neckart was dying would have
startled him less, and seemed not so pitiable to him as to know that he
was shut out for life from love and marriage.

Neckart read his thoughts. "There's a difference in men," he said,
concealing a smile. "It would not suit you, captain, to go through life as
an anchorite or a Catholic priest, but it really agrees with me very well.
I am not a domestic man by taste, nor susceptible to woman's influence. I
have met a few women, of course, beautiful, and with the intellect and
wealth which would make them desirable wives; and I have no doubt if I had
been differently situated I should have loved and married. But it never
cost me a second thought to pass them by."

"But this obstacle--it may some day be removed?" ventured the captain.

Mr. Neckart's features settled into the hard lines again. "Not while I
live," he said.

If there was one quality in himself on which the captain could build with
confidence, it was his keen insight into other men. He read Neckart's life
as an open book. "Bruce is married already," he said to himself. "He was
precisely the kind of lad to be taken in by some creature that is now a
secret burden on him. Drinks or chews opium, I've no doubt, or has gone to
the devil with one jump. Tut! tut! He would not be divorced. I know what
his opinion is on that head. But she'll die: that sort of women never live
long.--It will all come right, Bruce," he said aloud. "There's more ruling
of eternal justice in all of our lives than we give God credit for. But
this matter astonishes me. I've heard of your intimacy with certain women
in Washington--leaders of society. I always thought of you as a marrying
man."

"Because I cannot marry I have the more right to accept whatever
entertainment or friendship women can give me," falling into his ordinary
easy tone. "I have the keenest appreciation for an ambitious woman who has
intellect and culture, and is alive with energy and coquetry. I know such
women. They seem to be full of subtle flame. Certainly, I would make a
friend of such a one. Why not? I would marry her if I could."

A moment after he looked up the beach, and seeing the captain's daughter,
smiled to think what an absolute contrast she was to this ideal live,
brilliant woman. She was sitting on a log, the dog asleep at her feet, her
hands clasped about her knees, looking out to sea, and he could swear she
had sat there motionless as the stretch of gray sand about her for an
hour. Such torpidity revolted Neckart. Neither did it appease him that the
nobly-cut, dim-lighted face, the mass of yellowish hair rolling down from
its black band, the coarse brown dress which hung about her in thick
folds, all gave him pleasure. In the moment he had met her first he had
felt an odd repulsion to this girl. The women with whom he had fraternized
were akin to himself: Jane, child as she was, was antagonistic. He felt
for her the same kind of irritated dislike as that which Miss Fleming gave
to her, and which people of active brains are apt to give to any creature
whose animus is totally different from their own.

What did the girl sit there for, thinking her own thoughts? Young women at
her time of life blushed and fluttered and plumed themselves when a man
came near who was of the right age to love and marry. And so they ought,
so they ought! Neckart was used to see women of any age plume themselves
when he was in sight. It was simple admission of his position. They knew
their own capital of beauty or wit, and showed him the best of every
point, just as a pheasant turns every golden feather to the sun when a
passer-by comes near. He liked these radiant, self-asserting women, to be
sure, very much as he did the silly fowl or a Skye terrier conscious of
its beauty in every hair. But beauty was so much wasted material on this
daughter of Swendon's, who did not seem to know she had it.

Besides, Mr. Neckart had always been thrown into contact with women who
had careers and aims. Each one of them wished she had been born a man, and
did what she could to snatch a man's prerogatives. One wrote, another
painted, a third sang; this one strove for political power in the lobbies
of Congress, that for money, the majority for husbands: they were wits,
littérateurs, society women. But for a young girl to jog on from year to
year striving neither for knowledge nor lovers, making her world of the
whims and wants of a weak-minded old man, composedly building up every
day models which she knew would prove failures to-morrow,--here was a most
inane life.

Any eye which had grown used to the flash and flutter of brilliant
tropical birds in a cage would be apt to find the little dull-breasted
swallow sitting motionless by her nest a very insipid subject of study.
Probably no other man, as active and busy in the world as Neckart, would
have wasted so much thought on a chance young girl sitting on a log. But
women being forbidden fruit to him, he was morbidly curious about them
all. Old Chrysostom, barred into his cave by an impassable line, was much
more inquisitive about the princess asleep outside than if he had been a
hearty young fellow free to go out and kiss and make love to her.

Miss Swendon came up presently, the dog marching alongside. "Father," she
said, "you are spending the whole day with Mr. Neckart. You have not told
Sutphen the town news. I am afraid the old man will be hurt."

"That's a fact: I'll go over directly. You will like to be alone a while,
Neckart, at any rate.--Come, Jane."

Neckart rose: "You are not going over to those rough fellows, Miss
Swendon? There are no women there."

Jane laughed. "_I_ am a woman," with an arch little nod. "One queen-bee
makes the whole hive proper, conventionally."

"Of course. But really those men are vulgar and fishy to such a
degree--Nothing but a missionary spirit can take you to them?"

"On the contrary," gravely, "they are the best-bred men I know. Their talk
is fuller of adventure and sincerity than any book I ever read."

"Still, stay with me. I have feelings to consider as well as Sutphen."

"Very well.--I will come over presently, father. Tell the little boys to
make a fire clear enough to broil the fish for dinner." She sat down and
called Bruno to her feet. There was a grave, childish simplicity in her
motions which was a new study to Neckart.

"I believe," watching her keenly, "you would rather have gone. Sutphen
would have been a better companion than I?"

"I don't know as yet. I have never tried you. I do know Ichabod."

"Or perhaps the truer courtesy would be to leave you alone with the sea?
You were making a picture of it in your mind a while ago?"

"No," knitting her brows. "I could not do that. I know people who look at
the sea or mountains or sky as so much canvas and gamboge and burnt umber
and bits of effect. They are very tiresome."

"You have imagination rather than fancy, then? You hear the secret words
in that everlasting moan yonder? You know what the mountains say to you at
nightfall?" Neckart vaguely remembered the jargon of sentimental novels,
the heroines of which always keep their heads on Nature's breast. He did
not mean to chaff any woman, but he would gladly have proved this one
sentimental and weak to explain his strong antipathy to her.

"No, I never thought of those things. But one grows tired in
town--housekeeping, models and all of it. My work is very light, but I do
not like to work at all. And here--the beach is silent and the sky blue
and the sea rolls--rolls all day long: it is like coming home after one
has been out on the streets."

"About as keen comprehension of Nature as the tree yonder," thought
Neckart contemptuously. But, after all, the tree was warmed, and its sap
ran stronger, and it grew and broadened in the sun and air; and that was
more than he could say of painter or poet.

He lay at her feet, leaning on his elbow, for an hour or more. He had
meant to gauge her intellect, experience and character in a few minutes.
It was a recreation which had sometimes amused him when with women. As
soon as his curiosity was satisfied he was done with them. But the
discoveries he had made in those pretty little dwellings innocently
opening their doors to wandering hearts of marriageable men! The miserable
shams inside, the traps, the dark rooms full of all uncleanness! To-day he
forgot his system of exploration. He began to feel the physical effect of
coming from close streets and striving work into this vast open space--the
drowsiness which men experience on high mountains or by the sea, and which
has a subtle, lasting enchantment in it. The damp wind bent and whitened
the stretches of salt grass in the meadows behind him; brown clouds swept
from west to east overhead in endless procession; the great dun-colored
plane of the sea rose and fell steadily: for the rest, except the shrill
pipe of a fishhawk perched on a dead tree by its nest, there was silence.
He spoke to Jane now and then, but for the most part forgot her. She had
fallen into the motionless quiet which seemed habitual to her. Some of the
brilliant women he knew would have dug holes in the sand, or chattered
gossip, or interpreted to him with much intellectual force the meaning of
land and sky, or have taken their last love-affair or other private little
misery to give words to the complaint of the sea. This girl seemed only a
part of the shore, as much as sea or sand. The sun warmed, the air blew on
her as on them: if they gave her anything besides, she too kept their
secret.

Occasionally Neckart roused himself to talk briefly to her, and noticed
then a blunt directness in her speech that would have appalled an ordinary
hearer. It was her habit and choice to say nothing, but if pushed to the
wall what was there that she would not say?

The dog, lying at her feet watching him steadily, did not give up to him
the secret of its own being or its opinion of himself; but if it once did
speak it would do both, and with no white lies in the words either. "The
girl is like her dog," thought Neckart.

She rose at last, and went across the sands to her father. Neckart was
soon conscious of an uneasy change in everything about him. The atmosphere
of sunlit rest was broken. The clouds only meant rain, the sand was sand,
and the sea but a wet swash of water: he began to look at his watch and
think of the trains. The influence that had quieted him so unaccountably
had been in the girl, then? He shut his eyes and tried to recall the
erect figure, the fall of yellow hair, the clear Scandinavian face. He
felt the same strong repulsion from her, yet in their brief interview she
had certainly affected him uncontrollably--brought him back to old boyish
ways of thinking. It was perhaps, he thought, because he was unused to
such absolutely honest women.

He sauntered up the beach, and in five minutes wondered how he had based
such magniloquent ideas on a child out for a holiday. The fishermen on
this solitary beach apparently made a holiday whenever Swendon and Jane
came, and humored the latter in all her vagaries. No doubt they would have
preferred to eat properly in their own kitchens, but the cloth was spread
on the sand beside the fire. The captain, with the perspiration streaming,
was broiling ham at the end of a long stick; Sutphen cleaned the crabs;
Lantrim's wife cooked the perch, and Jane herself was making the coffee.

"Don't speak to me: I'm counting," as Mr. Neckart stopped beside her.
"Five, six, seven. You can't trifle when you make coffee," peering into
the pot with the gravity of a judge on the bench.

The smell of the broiling ham in the salt air suddenly brought back to
Neckart a day when he had gone fishing with his mother in the old place in
Delaware. How happy and hungry they were!

"Give me your stick, captain. You are burning up," he said, sitting down
on the log beside him.

"You've been on this beach afore, sir?" said Sutphen, who was his
neighbor, and felt it his duty to play host.

"Never but once, when the Argyle went ashore."

"You were here fur the Treasury Department?"

"Yes. Did you know anything about that case?" eying him with sudden
interest. "It was a muddled account that was sent up to Washington."

"Likely. Yes, I knew. I've been in the wracking and life-saving service
thirty years come June."

When Jane came to that side of the fire twenty minutes later, none of the
crabs were cleaned, and the ham and stick burned black together while
Neckart held them in the fire.

"I ought not to have allowed two men to sit together: I might have known
they would gossip," she said.

Mr. Neckart had just made up his mind that Sutphen and the two Lantrims
were as shrewd, common-sensed witnesses as he had ever examined. He was
hungry too, and as they ate together he borrowed Sutphen's clamp-knife,
and told some capital stories, and handed about his cigars when they had
all finished.

"I misjudged that black-a-vised fellow," said Ichabod to Lantrim. "He's
consid'able of a man."

Lantrim nodded ponderously. One story or slow monologue followed
another--of shipwrecks, frequent on that murderous coast, of rescues by
wreckers, of "vyages" down the coast or to India, Africa, with plenty of
sailors' superstition in it all. Neckart lay on his back smoking, his
hands under his head. It seemed as if he were the boy he was on that day's
fishing long ago. His blood quickened and heated at these tales of
adventure, just as it used to do when he pored over La Pérouse or the
_History of Great Navigators_. The afternoon was darkening, raw and cold;
their fire was a mere ruddy speck in the indistinct solitudes; a wall of
gray mist moved down the marshes toward them.

Jane, he noticed, was uneasy, watching her father anxiously after the
dinner was over, until Sutphen proposed to have some music and begged the
captain to sing. Then she was quite happy, sat closer to him, taking his
hand, and as his cracked voice piped manfully out some ancient
drinking-song she nodded complacently and beat the time softly with his
hand upon his arm.

Mr. Neckart watched her furtively through his half-shut eyes. She was
wrapped in her cloak, her head rose in clear relief against the background
of fog. The men and their wives, he saw, looked upon her as a child, a
straightforward little girl, with whom they had fished or cooked crabs
for years: very different from the ladies who came down in summer, and
were a fearfully and wonderfully made species of human being. Neckart
would have analyzed these women at a glance as easily as he could impale a
butterfly on a pin: why should he watch Jane as though she were the
Sphinx? The dark-blue eyes that met his now and then were the most frank
and friendly in the world, but the naked truth in them irritated him as
though it had been the gleam of a drawn sword. He sat erect, thinking that
if there was anything repulsive to him in a woman, it was physical
indolence, and a strength of any sort greater than his own.

Old Sutphen presently asked him if he too wouldn't give them a song. Now,
Neckart never sang except when alone, as his voice was a very remarkable
baritone, and he had no mind to make a reputation on that sort of capital.
He could not afford to be known as a troubadour. But he sang now, a
passionate love-song, of which, of course, he felt not a word: the air was
full of fervor, with an occasional gay jibing monotone. The words in
themselves meant nothing: the music meant that whatever of love or
earnestness was in the world was a sham. The men nodded over their pipes,
keeping time: Jane held her father's hand quiet in her own, looking
straight before her.

"Thank you, sir. Very lively toon that," said Lantrim when it was ended.

"Kind o' murnful too," ventured his wife.

Jane, with the last note, rose and walked hastily down the beach, where
the fog was heavy. She did not return. Mr. Neckart smiled: he could only
guess the result of his experiment, but he did guess it.

"Miss Swendon did not ask me to sing again," he said to the captain.

"Well, no. The song hurt her somehow. Jane had always an unaccountable
dislike to music," apologetically. "I'm exceedingly fond of it myself:
it's a passion with me. I enjoy anything from an organ to a jewsharp. But
she does not. When she was a baby it seemed to rouse her. She's a very
quiet little body, you see.--Go, Bruno: bring your mistress back."

She came in a few minutes, as they were making ready to meet the train.
She hurried to her father, caught his arm, and when they were seated in
the train still held him close: "Stay with me, father. Mr. Neckart does
not need you. Don't leave me alone again: _I_ need you."

"But, dear child, that is hardly courteous. He is our guest."

"He need not have made himself a guest. He has spoiled our whole holiday.
He has spoiled the whole dear old place for me," her eyes filling with
tears. "I shall never hear the sea again without hearing that song in it."

"It was a very good song, I assure you, Jane. I do wish you had a better
ear. Why, Bruce has a voice of remarkable compass. I fancied he struck a
false note once, though."

"It was all false--false and cruel!" vehemently. "And why should he sing
it there, where you and I have always had such good times?"

"I am astonished, Jane! But you never had any perception of character.
Bruce is such a thoroughly good fellow, I fancied you would be friends."

"I never saw any one before whom I disliked so much," slowly, as if to
collect her verdict with certainty. "He seems to me like so much
unmitigated brute force."

"Tut! tut!" said the captain absently, looking out to see how the early
wheat was coming on.

She touched his arm presently: "Father, you said you thought we should be
good friends. I never had a man for a friend but you."

"Certainly not. Good Heavens! what are you thinking of?"

"Most girls do," gravely, her color rising. "Oh, I know all about the
world. Miss Fleming told me that when she was my age she had a dozen
chums--hearty, good fellows."

The captain hastily put his arm about her: "All very well for Cornelia
Fleming, child. She's a middle-aged woman. But not for you."

"When I am middle-aged, then," looking up at him anxiously, "if I have a
friend I know precisely what he will be. Of fair complexion, placid,
truth-telling--"

"Yourself duplicated," laughed the captain. "But here is Mr. Neckart."

The two men took the seat in front of her, and as night came on and the
lamps burned dimly, Jane wrapped her veil about her head and fell asleep.
Mr. Neckart remembered at last the purpose of his visit in the morning.

"Surely something can be done to compel Laidley to leave the property to
its rightful owners. Have you stated the case to him plainly?" he asked.

"I? State it? Now, Bruce, how could I? If I were not the one to be
benefited by it, I'd put it to him forcibly enough. But as it is--No, I've
not the moral courage for that."

"But for your daughter's sake--"

"I know. I've thought it all over. But Jane and I can keep on in the old
way a little longer. Scanty and happy-go-lucky, but, on the whole,
comfortable." He was silent a while, and then in a cautious whisper said,
"I'll explain to you, Bruce. I might have made Jane's life easier if I had
worked. I know that. I know our friends look on me as a lazy, selfish dog,
a dead weight on the child. But--you are the first person to whom I have
ever told this--I have had for many years a disorder, an ailment, which
must in any case make my life a short one. Confinement and continued
exertion would bring on a crisis at once. My physician told me that five
years ago. Now you know why I have indulged myself. I still hoped some of
the infernal patents--" He choked, and turned to look out of the window.

"But your danger is another reason why you should not be kept out of your
property."

"Of course. But it's my luck."

"Does your daughter know this story?"

"No. Don't tell her, for God's sake!"

Nothing more was said until the train rolled into the station.

"Come, Jane, child," the captain called briskly. She rose and took his
arm.

Mr. Neckart took leave of them under the flaring lamps outside. "You have
left all the life and color of your face down in the salt air, Miss
Swendon," he said. "You will not mark this holiday with a white stone, I
fear."

"No," she said, waiting until he was gone before she spoke again.--"We
shall go to Cousin Will's now, father. I wish to say good-night to him."

"Very well, my dear. I'll leave you to read to him while I run round to
see if any letters have come. I feel confident somebody will answer my
advertisement about the scissors."




CHAPTER V.


A luxurious apartment, of which the most salient features were excess of
heat and color. A glowing fire burned in the grate. Persian rugs,
richly-tinted curtains, tiger and leopard skins, light and gilding on
every side, threw into more miserable contrast Laidley's pinched, pallid
face as he stood in the midst. His back was to the fire, his claw-like
hands behind him, opening and shutting mechanically as if to grasp the
heat, his pale eyes blinking through his eye-glasses on Jane standing
before him.

"Do I understand what you say?" in a tone of blank amazement. "That you, a
child, come here to a dying man to assert your claim to his property! It
is incredible that you came of your own free will. Who sent you?"

"Nobody, Cousin Will. It seemed to me the thing I ought to do. I do wish
you would sit down," anxiously. "You are not able to stand."

He sank into a chair: "Bring me some wine."

She brought the wine, tucked the leopard skins about him, wiped his
forehead tenderly, placed a cushion beneath his feet. He shivered, closed
his eyes for a moment, then fixed them on her: "Now go on."

She did go on without the slightest hesitation, without even a flush of
color, quick as her blood was to come and go when she was moved. The
thing she had to do evidently seemed to her exceedingly simple and easy:
"I knew you did not see the matter just as it is, or there would be no
difficulty about it. No one else seemed willing to speak to you, and so I
came myself."

He put out his hand toward the wine: she set it within his reach, and
resumed her place, one arm resting on the mantel-shelf, looking down at
him. There was only that sorrowful pity in her face with which any
large-hearted, healthy woman would look at a diseased, dying man.

"I don't deny," he said, coughing feebly, "that at first sight you have a
crude, illegal claim on my property--"

"My father--not I," throwing out her hand hastily.

"But even your claim admits of argument--argument," staring into the fire.
"Yet what if I should meet Virginie Morôt yonder, and she should tax me
with having wronged her child?" looking about him with a sudden turn.

A tricky girl could have gained her point now on the instant. But Jane,
dull and straightforward as usual, knelt quickly down and took his fingers
in her own cool, strong hands, as if she were dealing with a nervous
child.

"Put my mother out of the question. She is not going to blame you for
doing what seems to you just. I want you to see that it is not just. It is
of the living, not the dead, you ought to think."

"Give me that medicine, can't you? My blood is like fire. Oh, you stand
there," after he had swallowed it, "with your dogged, calm way of putting
the question, as if it were a matter of a new gown. Hush!" as she began to
speak. "You are but a child. You're not even a clever child. How can you
understand the relations of a dying man to his Maker? It has been shown to
me how with this money I could make peace with--with Him. The way has been
opened for me to give it to the poor and the churches. Why, the rich man
was commanded to 'sell all that he had and give to the poor, and he should
have treasure in heaven.' The place is marked in the Bible there." His
hands worked feebly together, and he looked from side to side, avoiding
the face in front with its steady dark eyes. "Why should I take from the
poor to give to your father?"

"Because it is not yours to take or give."

He waited for her to go on, but she said no more. "I haven't forgotten
you, Jane. I've planned for you as your father never would have done.
There's good-fortune waiting for you which any woman would envy you. Go
now--go!"

"I did not come to you with any claim of my own," the indignant lips
trembling. "You shall not think so meanly of me as that. I told you why my
father needs the money--all that he told to Mr. Neckart. Surely, you don't
understand?"

"Oh, I understand your father very well," smiling dryly. It suited him
just now to consider the captain a shrewd humbug, and his mysterious
ailment the last dodge to raise money and sympathy.

The man at that moment looked so ill, so small and spiteful, that Jane's
heart gave a sudden wrench of pity. It was a cruel, brutal thing, she
felt, in her to stop him on the edge of the grave and demand his money.
She put her hand to his forehead: it was cold and clammy. "Don't wrong my
father in this way," she said in a lower voice than before. "You have had
our money all the time, and our life has been hard--hard. I never said
that before, but it is true."

He looked at her now, his courage flickering up to meet the crisis: "I
hear you. Go on!"

"My father's life depends upon your honesty. I only ask you to remember
that."

"You use plain words. So shall I." He thrust his hand into a drawer of the
table before him, drew out a folded paper and pushed it toward her: "There
is your answer. That is my will. My property is left in the way it will do
God service. You can read it if you choose."

"And my father--?"

"I have not left him a dollar."

She turned on him, silent, a moment: he cowered and evaded her eyes.

"You shall not wrong him. He shall not die for the want of the money if I
can help it," in the same quiet voice. She took up the paper, passed him
and laid it on the fire, then watched it shrivel and burn to ashes. He
could not have detained her, any more than he could stay the scorching
flame with his hand.

She threw her cloak about her without a word, and drew the hood over her
head.

He pulled the bell violently: "You have only given me the trouble of
preparing a second copy. It shall be identical with the first."

Old Dave, coming in, observed that Miss Swendon's very lips were without
color. But as she went out of the room she halted to move a screen, so as
to protect Laidley from the draught.

She met her father on the stairs. "Do not go up," she said. "David is with
him, and I want you to take me home." ...

Before daylight the next morning Captain Swendon was summoned by David to
his master. A keen north-east wind had caused a sudden change in the
weather, and Mr. Laidley had sunk rapidly, and was now scarcely conscious.

"It is only what I anticipated," said the physician, meeting the captain
at the door. "Though if he had remained in the South he might have
lingered until midsummer. Not longer."

The captain nursed the dying man anxiously all day, and when he was dead
came home excited and haggard. It seemed to him by that time that one of
the most lovable fellows in the world had gone out of it. He always was
of that opinion at a funeral.

"Well, it's all over, Jane!" he cried, coming just at dusk into the room,
where she stood at the window, her back turned toward him. "Yes. Poor
Will! He was a good fellow years ago--witty, hospitable. You didn't know
him in his prime. Your mother liked him. That is, well--" He sat down by
the fire, staring at it with his owlish eyes, pulling off his old boots
and soaked coat, for it was raining hard, and wondering a little that Jane
had not a warm change of clothes ready for him as usual. But she did not
move. "Yes," with a groan. "He knows the great secret now, poor fellow! I
wish I'd been kinder to him. There's lots of things I might have done. But
that damned money! I suppose it soured me."

Jane turned. "I am glad _I_ did what was right to him," she said slowly.

The captain looked at her surprised. The shock had been too heavy on the
child, he thought: her eyes were quite sunken in her white face. "Yes,
yes. You were always a very nice, attentive little nurse. But when anybody
dies one is apt to remember one's shortcomings to them, and wish for even
an hour to set all right."

"I have done nothing to him which I would wish to set right," she said
again, her lips moving with difficulty.

Her father did not answer. But she was so unused to speak of herself in
any way that he observed her persistence now as peculiar.


REBECCA HARDING DAVIS.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]




IRISH SOCIETY IN THE LAST CENTURY.


Nations as well as individuals have the defects of their qualities, and
the Irish race has its faults as well as its virtues; but it will be
conceded on all sides that the _humdrum_ is not one of its attributes.
During the eighteenth century the social state of Ireland was peculiarly
anomalous. The penal laws were in full force for the most of that time.
The great families, Irish or Norman--the latter having long before become
_Hibernis ipsis Hiberniores_--had either conformed to the ruling faith or
had betaken themselves to more friendly shores, or, having lost their
estates by confiscation or treachery, had become confounded with the
oppressed and suffering multitude. The Irish nation was practically
divided into a "Protestant garrison" and a pariah caste. It would have
been strange, therefore, if the faults incident to their position had not
been developed in each of these classes. And yet when the beautiful and
accomplished Mrs. Pendarves visited the island in 1731 she found social
life in the capital worthy of commendation. The generality of the people,
she said, were much the same as in England--a mixture of good and bad. All
she met behaved themselves very decently according to their rank. "Now and
then," she adds, "an oddity breaks out, but none so extraordinary but that
I could match them in England. There is a heartiness among them that is
more like _Cornwall_ than any I have known, and great sociableness."
Cornwall, it must be remembered, is largely Celtic. She writes, again,
that she has too much gratitude to find fault where she was treated
kindly, even if there were room for it, but declares that she was never in
a place that more deservedly claimed her good word than Ireland.

It was to the famous earl of Strafford that the viceregal court first owed
its brilliancy. When he came to Dublin as lord deputy he found the Castle
falling to ruins. He had it restored, and lived there in the manner
described by a traveled eye-witness, who says that a most splendid court
was kept there, and that he had seen nothing like it in Christendom except
that of the viceroy of Naples. In one point of grandeur the lord deputy
went beyond the Neapolitan, for he could confer honors and dub knights,
which that viceroy could not do, or indeed any other he knew of. This
splendor was interrupted by the civil wars, but burst forth anew under the
viceroyalty of the great duke of Ormond. Matters seem then to have been
somewhat irregularly managed. It was a time of great politico-religions
excitement, and "Papists" were forbidden to have residences in Dublin.
Nevertheless, complaints were made that several Catholic nobles and
gentlemen, among whom were Colonel Talbot and the earl of Clancarty, not
only took houses, but were received at the Castle, where they joined the
duke and the earl of Arran at play, which was often continued till three
o'clock in the morning. It was said that they then passed through the
gates with their coaches, and drew upon the guard if they attempted to
stop them. This good-fellowship did not serve to cement a very close
friendship between the parties, for Colonel Talbot was afterward thrown
into the Tower on the charge of attempting the duke's life. He was soon
freed from captivity and loaded with favors by James II., who made him
duke of Tyrconnel and lord lieutenant of Ireland.

When Mrs. Pendarves (_née_ Mary Granville) paid her first visit to
Ireland, all was at least outwardly quiet. The Revolution was long past,
and the House of Hanover was firmly seated on the throne. The utmost
magnificence was displayed by the court at Dublin, and the lady's letters
are filled with descriptions of every kind of gayety. The witty dean of
St. Patrick's, though nearing the melancholy close of his career, was
still exciting by turns the wonder, the amusement and the gratitude of
the Irish public. In spite of much that would now be deemed very
inconsistent with his calling, Swift had a firm practical belief in the
truths he was bound to teach, and was scrupulously careful in the
discharge of his public duties. Mrs. Pendarves, who some years later
became the wife of Swift's friend, Dr. Delany, a celebrated preacher and
afterward dean of Down, was much attracted by the many virtues hidden
under the apparent misanthropy of this wonderful man, and kept up a
correspondence with him until his intellect failed. Her relative, Lord
Carteret, had been the dean's great friend long before he was sent to
Ireland as viceroy. A postscript which he added to one of his letters
written in 1737 shows what he thought of Swift as a patriot. It ran thus:
"When people ask me how I governed Ireland, I say that I pleased Dr.
Swift. 'Quæsitam meritis sume superbiam.'" Nevertheless, Swift was too
uncompromising to be trusted with power, even by Carteret. He wished very
much to be made a trustee of the linen manufactory or a justice of the
peace, and complained that he was refused because it was well known he
would not job or suffer abuses to pass, though he might be of service to
the public in both capacities; "but if he were a worthless member of
Parliament or a bishop who would vote for the court and betray his
country," then his request would be readily granted. Lord Carteret
replied: "What you say is literally true, and therefore you must excuse
me." When he asked the archbishop of Cashel and other trustees of the
linen manufacture why they would not elect him, the archbishop answered
that "he was too sharp a razor, and would cut them all."

Lord Carteret was a true courtier, and managed to keep fairly with both
parties. He had much wit and readiness, and parried the attacks of Swift
with such dexterity that on one occasion, the latter exclaimed, "What, in
God's name! do you do here? Get back to your own country, and send us our
boobies again." When we recollect that in London Swift enjoyed the
society of the first literary characters of the day, we need not wonder
that he looked on a residence in Ireland as a sort of banishment, and yet
he did not fail to use every opportunity of doing good in private and in
public. He gave half his annual income to decayed families, and kept five
hundred pounds in hand for the sole service of the industrious poor, which
he lent out in five pounds at a time, and took payment back by
installments of two shillings--of course without interest. He was thus the
means of helping them to help themselves, a species of charity which was
not then so well understood as it is now in process of becoming. His
indignation at the oppressive conduct of the English government in
destroying Irish trade and manufactures vented itself in many ways. "Do
not the corruptions and villainies of men eat your flesh and exhaust your
spirits?" said he to his friend Dr. Delany; and in another burst of the
same _sæva indignatio_ he exclaimed, on hearing some one spoken of as a
"fine old gentleman," "What! have you yet to learn that there is no such
thing as a fine old gentleman? If the man you speak of had either a mind
or a body worth a farthing, they would have worn him out long ago."

An incidental notice of the state of Irish trade at that date is afforded
in a letter of Mrs. Delany's to a friend in England: "They make mighty
good gloves here, but I shall not be able to send you any: _they are
prohibited_." Mrs. Delany was herself much interested for the people, and
brought Irish poplins into fashion at the viceregal court. She lost no
opportunity of expressing her liking for the tone of Irish society. When
herself residing in England she writes to her sister, Ann Granville,
afterward Mrs. Dewes, expressing a wish that they could both be
conveniently transported to Ireland for one year, that no place would suit
her sister's taste so well, and that "the good-humor and conversableness
of the people would please her extremely." This lady's descriptions of
life in the country parts of Ireland are perhaps more interesting than
even her experiences in the capital. At one time she describes her
entertainment after a picnic in a thatched house which she calls a
"cabin," and remarks that the people did not seem solicitous of having
good dwellings or more furniture than was absolutely necessary--hardly so
much--but they made it up in eating and drinking; adding that no people
could be more hospitable or obliging, and that there was not only great
abundance, but "great order and neatness." There is, unfortunately, a
reverse to the medal. She remarks that they cut down all their trees
instead of preserving them; that the poverty of the people as she passed
through the country "made her heart ache," as she never saw a greater
appearance of misery; and that they lived in great extremes, either
profusely or wretchedly. The same testimony is borne by all who knew the
state of Ireland at that time.

A family with which Mrs. Delany had much friendly intercourse was that of
the Wesleys, who then and long after lived at Dangan Castle in the county
of Meath, within two miles of Laracor, Dean Swift's first Irish living.
This residence is generally supposed to have been the birthplace of the
duke of Wellington, though No. 24 Upper Merrion street, Dublin, disputes
that honor. Mrs. Delany describes Dangan Castle as being a large, handsome
and convenient house. Mr. Richard Colley Wesley, who was then the
proprietor, planted and laid out the grounds with much taste. They lived
magnificently, and at the same time without ceremony. There was "a
charming large hall" with an organ and harpsichord, where all the company
met when they had a mind to be together, and where "music, dancing,
draughts, shuttlecock and prayers took their turn." The house is now in
ruins, having been sold to Roger O'Connor, and burnt accidentally
afterward. Mrs. Delany speaks of her friend, Richard Colley Wesley, the
ancestor of the duke, as having more virtues and fewer faults than any man
she knew. She adds a curious circumstance in connection with the ruins of
a castle in the town of Dangan. It belonged to King John, and his _butler,
gentleman-usher and standard-bearer_ were the ancestors of the duke of
Ormond (Butler), Mr. Usher (high sheriff of Dublin that year, 1733), and
Mr. Wesley. The first connection of these families with Ireland is
sometimes stated to have been in the time of Henry II., the surname of
Butler arising from the circumstance that Henry conferred the chief
butlership of Ireland on Theobald Fitzwater in 1177. It is also said that
_Wesley_ was the original form of the duke of Wellington's family name. On
the other hand, De Quincey says that _Wellesley_ was shortened to _Wesley_
by the same process which leads people to pronounce Marjoribanks
"Marshbanks," and St. Leger "Silliger." It was probably resumed to
distinguish a particular branch of the family. However this may be, it is
to be regretted that the "iron duke," who was Irish both by birth and long
descent, should have habitually affected Anglicanism. When in a celebrated
speech he frequently used the words "As an Englishman," he provoked the
remark of an Irish wit: "The duke reminds me of a countryman of mine who
was accosted by President Jefferson in the United States: 'Well, Paddy,
and why have you come to America?'--'Begor, yer honor, I jist come over to
be a native.'"

The viceregal court has never been without its traditions of beauty, wit
and fashion. The two Gunnings, whose fame has come down to our day in the
letters of Walpole, made their début at the Castle when the earl of
Harrington was lord lieutenant. They were the daughters of an Irish
gentleman of old family who had married the Hon. Bridget Bourke, a
daughter of Lord Mayo. Their father seems to have been improvident, for
they were said to be so poor that they thought of being actresses, and
when they were presented they had to borrow clothes from Mrs. Woffington.
Walpole speaks of them as two young Irish girls of no fortune who were
declared the handsomest women alive, and says that they could not walk in
the Park or go to Vauxhall but such crowds followed them that they were
generally obliged to go away. Some years after he writes to Miss Berry:
"The two beautiful sisters (Gunning) were going on the stage when they
were at once exalted almost as high as they could be--were countessed and
double-duchessed." This last expression was in allusion to the marriage of
one of the sisters first to the duke of Hamilton, and afterward to the
duke of Argyll. She thus united two rival families and became the
ancestress of the present duke.

A still more remarkable belle in many respects was Miss Eleanor Ambrose.
This lady, who was exquisitely beautiful and of very fascinating manners,
was the brightest star in the viceregal court of the celebrated earl of
Chesterfield. She was the daughter of a Catholic gentleman of good family
and connected with the leading Catholic aristocracy. The professions were
at that time closed against members of the old faith, and, in spite of the
prejudice which then existed against trade, some of the younger sons of
good Catholic families betook themselves to commerce. Hence the father of
Miss Ambrose gained wealth as a brewer in Dublin, and left a considerable
sum between his two daughters. The earl of Chesterfield, being warned
before he came to Ireland that he would have much trouble from the
Catholic party, wrote back soon after his arrival that the only "dangerous
Papist" he met was Miss Ambrose, a title by which she was known ever
after. Many graceful compliments paid to her by the courtly earl testify
to his admiration of her beauty and accomplishments. On seeing her wear an
orange lily on the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne he addressed her
in the following impromptu:

    Say, lovely traitress, where's the jest
    Of wearing orange on thy breast,
    When underneath that bosom shows
    The whiteness of the rebel rose?

On another occasion, Miss Ambrose being present when the freedom of the
corporation of Drogheda was presented to the viceroy in a gold box of
exquisite workmanship, she laughingly asked him to give it to her.
"Madame," said Chesterfield, "you have too much of my freedom already."
The lady eventually married a county Mayo gentleman of large fortune
named Palmer, and lived to the age of ninety-eight, forming a connecting
link between two very distant periods. In her extreme old age Sheil paid
her a visit, the admiration which Lord Chesterfield was known to entertain
for her having induced him to seek an introduction to her. Although rich,
he found her occupying a small lodging in Henry street, where she lived
secluded and alone. "Over the chimney-piece of the front drawing-room was
suspended the picture of her Platonic idolater. It was a half-length
portrait, and had been given her by the man of whose adoration she was so
virtuously vain." While Sheil was striving to image to himself the
fascinations of the "dangerous Papist," the door was opened: a volume of
smoke had previously filled the room, and the rush of air causing it to
spread in huge wreaths around her, "a weird and withered form stood in the
midst of the dispersing vapor." Lady Palmer was a most vehement Catholic.
Lord Chesterfield and the Catholic question were the only subjects in
which she seemed to take any interest. On the wrongs of her country she
expatiated with both energy and eloquence, but when her visitor remarked
that he was not surprised at Lord Chesterfield's having called her "a
dangerous Papist," the patriot relapsed into the woman, and she looked up
at the picture with a melancholy smile.

The subject of society in Ireland during the eighteenth century would be
singularly incomplete without some notice of the disabilities under which
so large a portion of the nation lay. The penal laws were designed to
transfer all the property of the country to the hands of Protestants, and
they were effectual to a great extent, but in many instances they were
evaded by the friendship and good feeling of Protestants themselves.
Intermarriages often took place, and individuals of the favored party in
several cases held property secretly in trust for the real owners. By this
and other devices a portion of their estates was saved for Catholic
families. It may not be amiss to relate two or three illustrations of the
working of these laws, and also of the way in which they were evaded.

In the year 1776, Mr. Thomas Stephen Coppinger lived on his family estate
of Carhue in the county of Cork. His ancestors had eschewed politics, and
had retained their property and their religion for a century and a half
without molestation. Now, however, his first cousin, Thomas John
Coppinger, laid claim to half the estate on the plea that it should have
been "gaveled," or divided between the sons, when his grandfather died
without leaving a Protestant heir, such being the law at the time. In
order to force his cousin to consent, Thomas John became a Protestant and
threatened to file a bill of discovery; which meant that he would give
formal notice that his cousin was "discovered" to be a Catholic. By going
through this form he could claim the whole estate. Thomas Stephen was
advised to _go through the ceremony of conforming_, but refused on
principle. The case was tried, but in the existing state of the law there
was no redress, and half the estate, with the family residence, was given
up to Thomas John. It tells well for the family affection and forgiving
disposition of the Irish that far from this transaction originating a feud
between the Protestant and Catholic branches of the Coppingers, they were
always on the best terms. The year after this occurrence the law was
altered and some of the severest restrictions on the Catholics removed.

A few years before this change in the law a Mr. Duggan resided at the
"Park," near Killarney, a property which is still held by his descendants,
who have adopted the name of Cronin. A Protestant gentleman having taken
some dislike to Mr. Duggan, and being besides a furious bigot, resolved to
file a bill against him. Before he had time to execute his design a
relative named McCarthy, who had been living in Paris, came to see him.
This relative told him that he was very badly off and about to leave for
America. "Never mind," said Mr. ----: "I'm going to file a bill against
Duggan. The fellow is a Papist. I will get his property, and you shall
have a share." It is probable that Mr. ---- might have tried to quiet his
conscience by this intended application of the money, and to persuade
himself that he was not acting through love of gain. In a day or two after
the above conversation McCarthy was staying with Mr. Deane Freeman of
Castle Cor in the county of Cork. This gentleman being a Protestant and a
Tory, his guest told him of the plan against Duggan. But Mr. Freeman was
quite a different person from the others, and was besides a friend of Mr.
Duggan's. He went immediately to Mr. ---- 's house, and learned from his
own lips that he was about to commit this wrong. Mr. Freeman then said
that he also had business at Dublin, and proposed that they should go
together. Traveling was at that time both slow and dangerous, and Mr.
---- was glad of the addition to his party. They stopped the first night at
the house of a friend, who on a hint from Freeman managed to induce the
intended filer of the bill to partake so largely of his hospitality that
he was carried to bed the next morning in a state of insensibility. His
companion being thus put _hors de combat_, Mr. Freeman hastened to Dublin
and filed a bill in his own name. While this was on the file no other bill
could be proceeded with, but for further security he got Mr. Duggan to
make a fictitious sale of the property to him, and thus saved it for
better times.

The MacMahon estates in the county of Clare were saved in the following
way: Suspecting a "discoverer," a Miss MacMahon--who must have been own
cousin to Lever's Miss Betty O'Shea--resolved to become a Protestant. She
first, however, consulted a friar, and was told by him that if she did so
she would peril her soul. "Here goes, then!" cried the doughty damsel:
"better that the soul of an old maid should go the wrong way than that the
property of the MacMahons should go to the Protestants." She conformed and
saved the property. More than one estate was preserved to the Catholic
owner by the singular proceeding of his filing a bill against himself
under an assumed name.

A tragic occurrence, arising out of the working of these laws, is
commemorated by a tombstone in Kilcrea Abbey near Cork. Arthur O'Leary, a
member of the old Catholic family of that name, had served for a few years
in the Hungarian army, as the laws against the Catholics did not permit
them to hold commissions in the British service. On his return to Ireland
he married a daughter of the O'Connell who lived then at Derrynane, an
aunt of the "Liberator." He settled at a place called Raleigh, situated on
the river Lee, and became a country gentleman, holding considerable
personal property. From his descent and creed he was looked on as a
chieftain by the peasantry, which made him unpopular among his neighbors
of English blood. One of them, a Mr. Morris, took great pride in a fine
stud of horses. Having lost a race to O'Leary on which a heavy wager
depended, he was greatly mortified. Some one, perceiving his vexation,
unfortunately reminded him that the "Papist" could not legally keep a
horse exceeding five pounds in value. He tendered this sum to O'Leary, who
indignantly refused to give up his favorite animal. On his resisting the
warrant which was then made out for his arrest, he was outlawed. A party
of soldiers was sent after him, and he was shot in the encounter that
followed. This took place in the year 1773, when O'Leary was only
twenty-six years old. The tragedy did not end here. A brother of O'Leary's
was seized with an insane desire of vengeance, and made several attempts
on Mr. Morris's life, till the latter, in a state of chronic terror, left
his country residence and came into Cork to live. Here O'Leary watched day
after day, and at length succeeded in wounding him fatally. He then
escaped to America, where he died some years after. An ancestor of the
writer afterward resided at Hanover Hall, the place which Mr. Morris had
been thus forced to leave, and a member of the family used to relate how
she was shown when a child the marks of O'Leary's bullets in the doors and
wainscoting. It would seem as if a desire to brave the laws of the
"Saxon" was inherent in this family. A noted professor of the name in Cork
appeared a few years ago at a fancy ball clad in his ancestral clothing of
the sixteenth century and wearing the insignia of the chieftainship. He
boasted that in doing so he broke no fewer than three statute laws. But
times are altered now, and the learned professor was permitted to indulge
his whim in peace. No clansmen gathered round him, and no "Sassenach"
soldiery rent away his saffron robe.

Attempts at the abduction of heiresses were then of more frequent
occurrence than a lover of Ireland could desire. Mr. Froude has made the
most of this blot on their civilization, but he has forgotten that such
outrages were not in those days peculiar to Ireland. Mrs. Delany relates a
flagrant case which came under her immediate notice. Miss MacDermot was a
Connaught lady who with her sister had inherited a large estate. They were
originally Catholics, but decided on becoming Protestants. Their intention
was suspected, and their maternal uncle, whose name was Flinn, asked them
to his house to dine, the distance not being so great as to prevent them
from returning home in the evening. They had never had a quarrel with this
uncle, and could not well refuse the invitation, though they would rather
not have gone, the eldest sister having rejected an offer of marriage from
Flinn's only son. After dinner they prepared to leave, but the uncle
insisted on their remaining for the night. They refused firmly but
politely, and were then told that the chaise and servants had gone home,
but would return for them the next day. Miss MacDermot was much
frightened, but, as they had no redress, she concealed her feelings, and
they sat down to cards. While engaged in this way four men with masks
rushed into the room. The two sisters made their escape into the next
apartment, but were followed by the masked men. One of these seized upon
Miss Maria MacDermot, who had hid behind a bed, but when he saw which he
had he flung her from him with an oath, saying that she was not the right
sister. The portion of the elder being double that of the other explains
this ungallant proceeding. Miss MacDermot was then seized and dragged back
into the room, where her uncle was still standing by the fire. He took no
notice of her tears and entreaties, but allowed her to be forced into the
hall, where a crowd of Flinn's friends and followers were assembled. They
set her on a pillion behind the principal mask. She was a tall, strong
woman, and struggled so violently that she succeeded in getting off the
horse. While they were endeavoring to put her back again, she managed to
get the sword of one of the men, for they were all armed with swords and
bludgeons. Then, like a true Amazon,

    Her back against a tree she bore,
    And firmly placed her foot before,

and defended herself for some time, till one of the gang ran a sword up
her arm from her wrist to her elbow, and obliged her to drop her weapon.
Being no longer able to resist between extreme pain and loss of blood, she
was taken to a cabin, where the cousin came in with a priest and some
others. The priest told her that if she submitted to the ceremony of
marriage with Mr. Flinn, she should be treated with kindness and respect.
She declared she would rather die than marry one who had been guilty of
such outrageous conduct. They tried to force the ring on her finger, and
the priest was proceeding with the ceremony when the lady seized a jug of
milk which stood on a table near and dashed it in the face of "His
Reverence." Some of the party coming in gave the alarm to Flinn, saying in
a whisper that the country was raised and in pursuit of them. More
messengers came to confirm the news. The lady's arm was still bleeding
profusely, and they carried her out and plunged her up to the shoulder in
a bog, two men being left to guard her. This singular treatment stopped
the bleeding, but, though she was soon rescued, she remained twenty-one
days in great pain and danger. Her sister had previously escaped in time
to give the alarm. Some months after they came to Dublin and read their
recantation in Dr. Delany's church.

Miss MacDermot's courage was certainly admirable, but it must be admitted
that Mr. Flinn was not without his share of the same quality. Few men in
these degenerate times would care to have so brave a wife. Indeed, some of
these Irish dames were quite capable of defending both their rights and
their privileges against assailants belonging to what is called the
"stronger sex." Sir Jonah Barrington's great-aunt, Mrs. Elizabeth
Fitzgerald, and her husband held the castle of Moret against the O'Cahils,
who claimed it as having been originally theirs and taken from them by
another Elizabeth, the queen of England. They were repulsed with much
slaughter, but Squire Fitzgerald had the imprudence to venture outside the
walls, and was carried off by the survivors of the hostile faction. They
approached the castle again with their prisoner, and one of the party,
exhibiting a white cloth on a pike, came forward: "I'm a truce, my lady.
Look here!" (showing the terrified squire): "we have your husband in
hault: yees have yer castle sure enough. Now we'll change, if you please:
we'll render the squire, and you'll render the keep; and if yees won't do
that same, the squire will be throttled before your two eyes in half an
hour."--"Flag of truce," said the heroine with due dignity and without the
slightest hesitation, "mark the words of Elizabeth Fitzgerald of Moret
Castle: they may answer for your own wife upon some future occasion. Flag
of truce, I _won't_ render my keep, and I'll tell you why: Elizabeth
Fitzgerald may get another husband, but Elizabeth Fitzgerald may never get
another castle; so I'll keep what I have; and if you can't get off faster
than your legs can readily carry you, my warders will try which is the
hardest--your skull or a stone bullet." It were too long a story to relate
how this Irish Penelope, unsustained by the hope of the return of her
Ulysses, inasmuch as she had seen him hanged before her eyes, defended her
castle and her liberty against all the neighboring squires, who had agreed
to decide by lot which should carry her off. Nearly every one of them had
previously tried to persuade her to accept his hand, the proposal being
made by "flag of truce," till at length she threatened to hang the next
messenger.

These events took place in 1690. Later on, such women as Elizabeth
Fitzgerald became more rare, but there is one noted example of womanly
daring which must not be passed over. The celebrated "Lady Freemason"
confronted the terrors of a Masonic lodge, and, unlike our mother Eve, the
forbidden knowledge has brought no evil consequences on her posterity, who
continue to be reckoned among the most estimable and most respected
families of the county of Cork. The Hon. Elizabeth St. Leger, daughter to
Lord Doneraile, was descended from Robert de St. Leger, who accompanied
William the Conqueror to England, and cousin to the General St. Leger who
instituted the Doncaster St. Leger race. When a young girl she was seized
with a desire to see the mysteries of the initiation of a Mason which were
about to be celebrated at her father's house. The generally-received
tradition is that she concealed herself behind a large old-fashioned
eight-day clock, but another version of the story is that some alterations
being in progress, she picked a brick out of the partition which divided
the room occupied by the Masons from the adjoining apartment. However this
may be, the young lady got frightened and attempted to escape, but was
detected by the Mason on guard. Her life was spared, it is said, at the
intercession of her brother, but on condition of her becoming a member.
She afterward married Richard Aldworth of Newmarket, and lived and died
much respected. On public occasions she walked at the head of the
Freemasons wearing the apron and insignia of the order. Her portrait in
this attire is in the lodge-rooms of several Irish lodges and also in the
family mansion of the Aldworths. This family is of English descent, and
settled in the north-west of the county of Cork, where an ancestor of
theirs got a grant of land from James I. They patronized Curran's father,
and appointed him seneschal of their manor of Newmarket, in which town the
great wit and patriot was born.

The remarkable prevalence of dueling, which rose in Ireland to almost an
insane height toward the end of the eighteenth century, had at least the
good effect of encouraging a chivalrous feeling toward women, who
thenceforward depended on their male relatives and friends for protection.
It is said that if any gentleman presumed to pass between a lady and the
wall in walking the streets of Dublin, he was considered as offering a
personal affront to her escort, and if the parties wore swords, as was
then customary, the first salutation to the offender was usually "Draw,
sir!" However, such affairs mostly ended in an apology to the lady for
inadvertence. But if a man ventured to intrude into the boxes of the
theatre in his surtout or boots or with his hat on, it was regarded as a
general insult to every lady present, and he had little chance of escaping
without a shot or a thrust before the following night. It must be
confessed that this species of punctiliousness was carried too far. Some
say that dueling reached to such an extravagant pitch in Ireland because
the Protestant gentry were a garrison in a hostile country, and were
obliged to cultivate familiarity with the means of defence. It is possible
that this state of affairs may have originally led to the remarkable
prevalence of the custom, for when such transactions as that between Mr.
Morris and Arthur O'Leary were of frequent occurrence, there must have
been much to provoke the bitterest enmity. Nevertheless, it would seem
that there was really a good deal in the practice to warrant the old
saying that "the English fight for liberty, the French for glory and the
Irish for _fun_." A gentleman who is said to have been one of the most
humane men existing quieted his little son in this wise when the child was
crying for something: "Come, now, do be a good boy. Come, now, don't cry,
and I'll give you a case of nice little pistols to-morrow. Come, now,
don't cry, and _we'll shoot them all in the morning_."--"Yes, yes,"
responded the child, drying his little eyes and delighted at the
notion--"Yes, we'll shoot them all in the morning." In the regulations for
dueling, called in Galway the "Thirty-six Commandments," one of the rules
laid down was that when the seconds disagreed and resolved to exchange
shots, they should stand at right angles with the principals and all fire
together. A duel of this nature took place near Glinsk, the seat of Sir J.
Bourke, between that gentleman and a Mr. Bodkin, when the old family
steward and other servants brought out the son, then a child, and held him
on men's shoulders to see papa fight! Professed duelists were called
"fire-eaters," and the first two questions always asked as to a young
gentleman's respectability and qualifications, particularly when he
proposed for a wife, were, "What family is he of? Did he ever blaze?"

A Mr. Bagenal in the county Carlow, called King Bagenal from his absolute
sway within his extensive territories, was a polished gentleman of Norman
race. He used to have a brace of pistols laid before him on the
dinner-table, and when the claret was brought in after dinner--which was
always in an unbroached cask--Bagenal tapped it with a bullet from one
pistol, and kept the other _in terrorem_ for any of his guests who should
fail to do justice to the liquor. Some pigs belonging to a neighboring
gentleman having strayed into his flower-garden, Bagenal had them docked
of ears and tails, sending these trophies to the gentleman with an
intimation that the owner merited a like punishment. The gentleman, who
had only recently settled there, sent him a challenge, which he accepted
with alacrity, stipulating, however, that as he was nearly eighty, he
should fight sitting in his arm-chair. The duel was fought in this strange
fashion: Bagenal wounded his antagonist, but escaped unhurt himself.

Barristers who were good shots were retained at elections as "fighting"
counsel. A lawyer of this stamp, having conducted an election more
peaceably than his wont, was asked why he acted contrary to his usual
custom. He answered coolly, "Because my client does not pay me fighting
price." It was not usual for the Irish bar or the Irish members of
Parliament to calculate in this way when a chance of "blazing" was in
question. Mr. Toler, afterward Lord Norbury of punning celebrity, had some
words with Sir Jonah Barrington. They left the House to settle the dispute
outside, but the Speaker, perceiving them, sent the sergeant-at-arms with
his attendants to bring them back. They caught Toler just as the skirts of
his coat had become so entangled in a door-handle that they were torn
completely off. Sir Jonah, resisting the sergeant's satellites, was caught
up by one of them, brought back like a sack of meal on the man's
shoulders, and thrown down in the body of the House. The Speaker required
them both to pledge their honor that the matter should end there. When
Toler rose to reply the dilapidated condition of his coat became apparent,
upon which Curran stood up and said gravely that "it was the most
unparalleled insult ever offered to the House, as it appeared that one
honorable member had _trimmed_ another honorable member's _jacket_ within
those walls, and nearly within view of the Speaker."

The incessant play of wit and drollery then animating the Irish capital
has perhaps never had a parallel in any society. The House and the bar
were both overflowing with it. When the dull, matter-of-fact Lord
Redesdale first came over to take the position of lord chancellor, he felt
some curiosity as to the reputation of the latter for these qualities
which had reached his ears in England. At one of his first dinners to the
judges and higher law-officers he found himself unable to see any wit, or
perhaps any meaning, in Toler's jests, and turning to another barrister,
Mr. Garrat O'Farrell, he said that he believed his name and family were
very numerous and reputable in the county of Wicklow, as he had met
several of them in his late tour there. "Yes, my lord," said O'Farrell,
"we _were_ very numerous, but so many of us have been lately hanged for
sheepstealing that the name is getting rather scarce in that county."
This reply reduced his lordship to silence, and it was probably some time
before he made up his mind as to whether he had really been associating
with law-breakers of so disreputable a class. Mr. Plunket afterward
puzzled Lord Redesdale still more when arguing a cause in chancery. The
question was about "flying kites" (fictitious bills). His lordship took
the word literally, and declared he did not understand the matter. "It is
not to be expected that you should, my lord," said Plunket, "for in
England the wind raises the kite, but in Ireland the kite raises the
wind." The lord chancellor was no wiser than before, and the counsel was
obliged to have recourse to a less metaphorical explanation.

So late as the time of the Union old Irish families lived in the way
described by De Ounce. When a lad of fifteen he visited Ireland with his
young friend Lord Westport. He was even then a keen observer, and his
remarks on the Irish nobility of that date are worthy of attention. He
first notices that the tardiness and difficulty of communication, the want
of newspapers, etc., must in those times have kept the provinces two or
three generations in the rear of the metropolis, and accordingly the old
Irish rural nobility stood in this relation to English manners and
customs. The houses were often large and rambling, in the style of antique
English manorial chateaux, ill-planned as regarded convenience and
economy, with long winding galleries and innumerable windows, but
displaying in the dwelling-rooms a comfort and "coziness," combined with a
magnificence, not always so effectually attained in modern times. "Here
were old libraries, old butlers and old customs that seemed to belong to
the era of Cromwell, or even an earlier era than his; whilst the ancient
names, to one who had some acquaintance with the great events of Irish
history, often strengthened the illusion." In fact, the aristocracy of
Ireland was divided into two sections--the native Irish, who were
territorial fixtures, and those who spent so much of their time and
revenues at Bath, Cheltenham, Weymouth, London, etc. as to have become
almost entirely English. It was the former whom De Quincey saw most of,
and though they lived in the amplest comfort and exercised the most
unbounded hospitality, still they were greatly behind the English
commercial gentry as to modern refinements of luxury. There was at the
same time a strength of character and a raciness of manner which could not
fail to interest and impress a stranger. Although there was much sterling
worth to be found in this class, a high-handed lawlessness broke out now
and then. Doubtless, a daily familiarity with the wrongs perpetrated under
cover of the penal laws undermined their natural sense of justice. A
remarkable instance of the tyranny sometimes practiced occurred in a
family well known to the writer. A gentleman rented several hundred acres
of land from the earl of B----, a nobleman whose title is now extinct. The
tenant exercised some right that was permitted by the terms of his lease,
which had been granted by the former owner of the estate. Lord B----, who
was a haughty and irascible man, disputed the right, and the tenant came
with his lease in his pocket to explain the matter. It was winter, and
there was a large fire in the room. Lord B---- asked to see the lease, and
when he got it into his hands suddenly thrust it into the middle of the
fire, near which he stood. He then told the gentleman that he would
continue to let him hold _half the land_, but that he had another tenant
for the rest. As there were no witnesses to the transaction except Lord
B---- and the tenant, and the law's delays are always in favor of the
rich, the gentleman thought it better to submit. It is believed that a sum
of money had been paid on receiving the lease, which made the proceeding
the more unjust.

Irish roads in those days were probably as bad as those in England. They
could hardly have been worse, for De Quincey tells of his childish
interest in watching the postilions, who were employed, not by fits and
starts, but "always and eternally," in _quartering_--a word which he
explains to mean going from side to side to avoid the ruts and large
stones. A natural consequence of bad roads and inefficient police was the
prevalence of highwaymen, who were then to be met with in both countries.
They usually infested the roads which had to be passed by traders at fairs
or by men employed in collecting rents. A noted highwayman named Brennan
was the terror of all who traveled in the northern part of the county of
Cork. After some outrages more than usually daring, no one in the service
of a gentleman in that neighborhood could be found brave enough to pass
the lonely mountain-road to bring home a balance of rent remaining due. A
young lad volunteered, saying that he would go in his every-day garb, and
that no one would suspect him of carrying money about him. Having received
and secreted the cash, he was returning in apparent safety, but just as he
arrived at the loneliest part of the road Brennan leaped out from behind a
hedge and presented a loaded pistol. "Give up that money," said he to the
boy.--"Sure, then, I will if you give me time, but you won't have me go
home wid my finger in my mouth, widout looking as if I made a stand for
it, anyhow. Look here!" continued Jerry, dismounting and holding up the
ragged skirt of his coat, "couldn't you put a ball through this for
me?"--"'Tis riddled enough in all conscience, but here goes," said the
highwayman, firing off a pistol at it.--"Here's my ould caubeen now, and
I'll just give my face a scratch to draw the blood if you put a hole
through that too." The hat was riddled for him in the same way. "Well,
now, that's grand; but I think if the other skirt was tore, they couldn't
say a word then."--"Why, you omadhaun! haven't you enough of it? Give me
the rint. Do you think I have any more powder and ball to be wasting on
you, you spalpeen?"--"If you haven't, I have," cried Jerry, springing on
his horse, and pulling out a loaded pistol he was off and away before the
astonished highwayman had time to prevent him or to reload his weapon.

The legislative union forms a distinct epoch in Irish social life, and we
cannot more fitly close this paper than by giving an account of the last
meeting of the Irish House of Lords in the words of an observant and
dispassionate eye-witness. After expressing his surprise at the facility
with which their consent was gained, De Quincey adds: "They all rose from
their couches peers of Parliament, individual pillars of the realm,
indispensable parties to every law that could pass. To-morrow they will be
nobody--men of straw--_terræ filii_. What madness has persuaded them to
part with their birthright, and to cashier themselves and their children
for ever into mere titular lords?... The bill received the royal assent
without a muttering or a whispering or the protesting echo of a sigh.
Perhaps there might be a little pause, a silence like that which follows
an earthquake, but there was no plainspoken Lord Belhaven, as on the
corresponding occasion in Edinburgh, to fill up the silence with: 'So
there's an end of an auld sang.' All was, or looked, courtly and free from
vulgar emotion. Thus we were set at liberty from Dublin. Parliaments and
installations and masked balls, with all other secondary splendors in
celebration of primary splendors, reflex glories that reverberated the
original glories, at length had ceased to shine upon the Irish metropolis.
The 'season,' as it is called in great cities, was over--unfortunately,
the last season that was ever destined to illuminate the society or to
stimulate the domestic trade of Dublin."


ELIZA WILSON.




VINA'S "OLE MAN."

[Illustration: "DE LORD HAS DONE 'P'INTED YER TO BE A GUARDIAN ANGEL TO
DAT PO' CHILE."]


"Vina's got an idee she wants to git married." The speaker was a venerable
darkey, who stood twirling his rimless hat with a sheepish air in the
probate-office.

"Rather hard for you, Father Abram," said the judge kindly, "but it's a
way girls have. I presume my daughter will be leaving me some day in the
same ungrateful fashion. Bring around Vina's man and I will make out the
license."

Father Abram's manner became at once more confused and ludicrous: he
poised himself alternately on either foot, and scratched his head
vigorously, while his facial expression was something too comical for
description. Finally, through a series of embarrassed chuckles and
gurgles, he rippled into a broad guffaw, articulating indistinctly between
its paroxysms, "Bress de Lord, sah! I'se de man!"

"Shades of the mighty!" exclaimed the judge, in his astonishment dropping
his pen upon a virgin page in his docket. "But the United States is a
Christian country, Abram, and a man can't marry his own daughter here:
it's contrary to law and gospel."

"Yes, sah?" said the negro submissively. "Den dar ain't no way for me an'
Vina to git married, not even if we go over to Platte City? Vina'll be
mightily disappointed."

"Good Heavens! no. 'Twould be a State's prison offence, and I don't see
what ever put such a revolting idea into your head anyway, you
hoary-headed old sinner!"

'"Deed, sah, 'tain't no idee ob mine. I done tole yer dat it was all 'long
ob Vina, but I wouldn't see her outed for a sight" (_outed_ being a negro
expression for displeased). "An' don't yer t'ink, sah, de law might be
changed, jus' for dis one time, or dat Vina an' I could be sent to de
penitentium togedder? It's rather hard on both on us, 'specially on
Vina--'specially as she ain't no more my darter than you be."

"Why didn't you say so before, instead of having all this talk about it? I
don't know whether to believe you now: it is more than likely only a lie
that you have trumped up as a last resort."

"Wish I may die, sah, ef it ain't de honest truf; an' de fus' time dat
ebber I set eyes on Vina war in a slabe-pen in New Orleans eight years
ago, when we war sold to de same marster. Ef Massa John Brown war libbin'
he could prove it to yer; but dar ain't no udder libbin' human 'cept de
slabe-driber--and he war blowed up on his nex' trip up de ribber--dat
knows anyting about it."

The judge believed now that Abram had spoken the truth, for the time

    When Old John Brown, Ossawattomie Brown,
    Shall be a name to swear by in backwoods and in town,

had come. The time was the commencement of the war, and any reference to
his name on the part of a negro was equivalent to the most solemn oath.

"What did John Brown ever know about it?" asked the judge.

"Why, yer see, he war dar, sah: he come down de ribber on de same boat wid
de driber an' Vina. De driber he'd done bought up a heap ob likely young
gals all de way down t'roo' Missouri an' de udder towns what neighbored
on to de ribber--han'somest young women he could find, what'd bring a high
price in New Orleans--an' when he gits dar, what's he do but go roun' to
all de slabe-pens an' buy up a heap ob worn-out, or'nary old niggers, what
had been worked to def in de rice-swamps, an' nobody wouldn't gib five
dollars for. Den he marries de peartest ob de gals to de mizzablest ob de
ole men. When de time fur de auction come, dar was plenty ob buyers for de
gals, but nobody wanted dem good-for-nuffin' ole husbands. 'Can't help
it,' says de driber--'Can't help it, no way whatsumebber: it's ag'in our
principles to part families. Ef yer want de woman, yer mus' take her ole
man too.' An' so dey gin'rally did, an' paid a high price fur him too, fur
de sake ob gittin' de gal. Wall, as I was a-sayin', Massa John Brown he
come down in de same boat wid Vina: he'd took notice ob her, and he knowed
she hadn't any ole man. De nex' day he come walkin' down to de slabe-pen,
a-purtendin' to be a planter, and a-axin' de price ob de niggers. When dey
tole him I was Vina's husband, he says, 'Why, he's too ole to be anybody's
husband: I don't believe he's got a toof in his head.'--'Yes I has,
massa,' says I: 'I'se got t'ree left, and can chaw hoecake powerful, but I
don't crack no pecans in my mouf. Better buy me, sah: dar's a heap ob
sarbice in me yet. I'se only drawed up wid de rheumatiz, dat's
all.'--'Come ober heah to de light,' says he, 'an' let me look in yo'
mouf, an' see whedder yer _hab_ got any teef.' So I went wid him, an'
while he was a-purtendin' to find out my p'ints he says to me, very quiet,
'Yer ain't dat gal's husband, nohow,' says he, 'an' yer knows it.':--'I
knows it, massa,' says I, 'an' I'se skeered for my life ob her, fur she
done said she'd kill any one dey dar'd to mate wid her: she's done got a
husband ob her own up de ribber, I reckon.'--'Yes, dat am de truf,' says
Massa John Brown; 'but see here, uncle: de Lord has done 'p'inted yer to
be a guardian angel to dat po' chile. He calls yer to be a fader to her;
an' from dis day yer _is_ her fader--'member dat. But it may be jus' as
well for yer to purtend to be her husband: 'at will keep de udder boys
from pesterin' her. But 'member dis: de Lord will 'quire dat chile's
happiness of yo' han's, an' will so do by yer as yer do by her.'--'Be yer
de angel ob de Lord, massa?' says I. 'Clar' to goodness, sah! I was dat
skeered one knee knocked ag'in de udder like a woodpecker a-hammerin' a
rotten tree.--'Yes,' says he: 'I _be_ de messenger ob de Lord, an' my name
is John Brown, but I don't s'pose yer ebber heern tell ob it.'--'No,
massa,' says I, 'we don't see no powerful sight ob angels down in de
rice-swamps.'--'Well, keep a-watchin' an' a-waitin',' says he, 'an' yer
_will_ heer from me ag'in.' Wid dat de driber come up, and he tole him he
guessed he wouldn't buy me dat day; and den he went away.

"Vina said dis mornin' she 'lowed to go up to yo' house to do some washin'
for de missus; an' yer can ax her, sah, an' she'll tell yer dat all I'se
been a-sayin' is de libbin' truf."

The judge hardly needed any confirmation--Abram's story was too
straightforward and naïf to have been coined--but, telling him to call at
his house toward evening, and that he would have the necessary papers
there, and make them out if satisfied as to the eligibility of the parties
for such a contract, he dismissed the aspirant for marital honors. As the
judge entered the shaded coolness of his library after a distracting day
spent in the discussion of a complicated will-case, the refreshing
atmosphere of refinement and quiet and home exercised so powerful an
influence over his tired nerves that he straightway forgot all
professional and other cares, and stretching himself in his favorite
lazy-chair, was soon fast asleep.

As he drifted back to a semi-conscious state he became aware of voices
conversing on the back veranda, which shaded one of the library windows.
The voices were those of his wife and the girl Vina, and the words which
he first clearly comprehended were--

"I tell yer what, Miss' Fairdealer, dar ain't no niggerism about ole Fader
Abram."

As Father Abram approached the nearest to a pure-blooded Congo African of
any negro that he knew, the judge rubbed his forehead in the gentle
stimulating way which he always employed when he wished to convince
himself that he had heard aright and to assure some sophomorical young
lawyer that he had not been asleep at all, but had caught every word of
his long-winded statement of the case. The judge's ideas came back to him
with their usual easy flow, and before the next sentence was enunciated he
had made a mental summing-up of the case and given judgment for the
plaintiff.

"I mean," continued Vina, "dat Fader Abe's got de whitest soul ebber yer
see: he couldn't do a mean ting, no matter how much money de debbil 'greed
to pay him for't. Fus' time I ebber see him war down in Lousianny. My ole
marster had sole me away from my husband an' from John Brown: she war a
little ting den, only six mo'ths, an' oughtn't to have been weaned, but I
don't s'pose he cared whether she libbed or died, and de slabe-driber
wouldn't take her--"

"How _did_ you," interrupted Mrs. Judge Fairdealer with the curiosity of a
true woman, "ever give your little girl such an unsuitable name as _John_
Brown?"

("Why couldn't the woman let her go on with her story?" thought the judge.
What did he care how that impish little creature, whom he had always
regarded as old Abram's granddaughter, and who glared at him with such
savage malignity from her piercing black eye (no figure of speech, for she
had but one) when with his foot and cane he gently rolled her off the
door-mat, where he found her coiled up asleep on his entrance to the
house,--what did he care how that mixture of chimpanzee and evil sprite,
to whom were to be attributed nine-tenths of the mischief done in the
neighborhood, came by her unmaidenly cognomen?)

"John Brown didn' hab no name den: she war jus' my baby, dat war all. I
use to t'ink I'd call her for her fader, an' his name war George--mos'
consniptious rascal ebber yer see, de han'somest man in de whole township
(John Brown takes arter him a sight), but so powerful ugly" (_ugly_ being
used here in reference to disposition) "dat de only way de oberseer could
make him mind was to hab a parcel ob de boys hold him down while he kicked
him in de mouf. Wall, short time befo' John Brown was born he kicked one
of his eyes out dat ar way, and I nussed him an' tended him till he got
well; an' when John Brown come, 'clar' to goodness ef she didn' have jus'
only one eye too! Wall, I lubbed dat ar George wid all my soul, Miss'
Fairdealer. Mean an' sneakin' a nigger as ebber libbed, but I didn' know
it den; an', anyway, he war John Brown's fader, an' powerful han'some; an'
dat _do_ count for sumfin'. When dey sole me away from him I jus' t'ought
I should die. Dey let me take my baby wid me down to de
partin'-plank--dat's what dey called de gangway dey t'row out from de
steamboat--but dar de gals had to bid good-bye to all dar fren's. Such a
hollerin' and yellin' an' takin'-on you nebber heerd, Miss' Fairdealer. It
was a little lonesome, landin' in de midst ob a right smart piece ob
timber, like a many another along de Big Muddy, whar de boats stop to wood
up--fearsome-enough place any day, but at night, wid dem tar-barrels
a-flarin' an' dem women a-screechin'--some on 'em gone clean crazy, and
all on 'em actin' zif dey had--it war more like _dat_ place dan any
'scription I ebber heerd any minister gib ob it. I 'members one face, dat
ob a man dat leaned ober de railin' and looked at us bein' dribben on
board, dat looked so wild and mad-like. I allus t'ink de Lord will look
dat way when on de day ob judgment he says, ''Part from me, all ye
onb'lievin', backslidin' workers ob pernickety: don't want to see no more
ob yer.' He spoke to me once on our way down de ribber. 'Hab patience,
chile,' said he: 'de Lord ain't clean forgot yer. He'll bring yer an' yo'
baby togedder ag'in ef yer kin only wait His own good time. I'm on de
Lord's business: He's sent me down dis yeah ribber, same as he sent Moses
into Egyp', to 'quire into dis matter an' to preach deliberance to de
captive. Yer will all be free some day, but yer mus' hab patience, for de
time is not yet.' I heern some one say dat dat war John Brown, and somehow
de name heartened me up a little, do' I'd nebber heern it befo'."

Vina next told the incident of her so-called marriage at the slave-mart
with old Abram.

"'Pears like," said Vina, "I could hab killed dat man when dey tole me he
was my husband; but when he tole me 'twan't no sech ting, an' axed me if I
hadn't ebber heern 'bout Fader Abram at camp-meetin', an' dat _he_ wan't
no fader till de Lord sent His angel and called him to be one--same as He
called him to be a fader to me--den I listened to him, an' 'gan to b'lieve
de Lord reely had sent him. Den he tole me how Abram went down into Egyp'
wid his cousin Sarer, an' ole Pharaoh wanted to marry her, an' Abram he
purtended dat Sarer was his wife, so Pharaoh shouldn't get her--leastways,
it was sumfin' like dat--an' how de Lord bressed 'em, an' how when dey
cl'ar'd out ob Egyp' dey stole 'bout ebberyting Pharaoh had; an' dat John
Brown had done tole him to be anudder Fader Abram; an' I promised him I'd
be anudder Sarer to him, an' we'd pull de wool ober de white folks's eyes,
an' serbe de Lord till it done pleased Him to set us free."

Vina and Father Abram were bought by a planter who, with so many others in
1855, swarmed to the irrepressible conflict which was to decide whether
Kansas was to be a free or slave State. By the repeal of the Missouri
Compromise this question had been left for settlement to the people of the
Territory. Emigration flowed in rapidly, both from the South and the
North, and the terrible days of Border Ruffianism followed. Vina's master
settled upon a farm in Southern Kansas, on the banks of a little stream
called then by the picturesque name of the Marais des Cygnes, which has
since been changed to one of a more prosaic character. Here they heard
frequently of old John Brown of Ossawattomie, and began to have a clearer
understanding of the man and his mission. Vina spoke of her life on the
Marais des Cygnes as not a hard one, but her heart ached for her baby and
for George, and the longing to see them again grew with every day and
night. She felt sure that John Brown could help her, and one night Father
Abram said to her, "I'se gwine to run away, honey--gwine to keep agwine
till I find John Brown: den, when I'se foun' him, I'll keep agwine and
agwine and agwine till I finds yo' George: den I'll come back arter yer.
Reckon I'll be here in about a munf: yer kin look for me ebbery night
arter dat down by de big cottonwood tree on de ribber." And when the month
expired Father Abram came back, but he did not come alone: John Brown and
he had found George. He only waited to see their rapturous meeting, and
then bade good-bye to his "darter Vina," and heroically trudged away. Vina
and George fled away to John Brown's camp near Ossawattomie. Her first
question was for her baby. It had been cared for by one of the
negro-women, and was now three years old. The family had removed to Platte
City, Missouri, nine miles from the Kansas frontier, but the child was
still with them when George left.

"An' yer done luff dat bressed baby? Didn' car' what 'come ob her, so yo'
own mizzable self was safe!" exclaimed Vina in much disgust. George
explained that this was the only way--that it would have been utterly
impossible for him to have got away with the child--and promised that if
ever a raid was made in that direction, he would join it and bring her
away, at no matter what risk. In 1857 affairs began to be more settled in
Kansas. John Brown, having ended his work here, had gone East: Vina and
George were living in Leavenworth. Little by little, she had found out
that it would have been better for her if they had never met. George was
satisfied: freedom for him meant being supported by Vina, getting drunk
whenever he pleased, and ill-treating her by way of showing his gratitude.
Vina could have borne all this willingly enough, but at last a perfectly
safe opportunity for the rescue of her baby occurred, and George refused
to attempt it. They were well enough off as they were: he didn't see "what
she wanted ob dat chile to support--he was _sho_' he wouldn't do it;" and
as for adventuring his precious self among the Philistines again, he
utterly declined the proposition. Then Vina's anger rose, and with her
lifted mop she drove her liege lord from her cabin-door, which he ever
after found barred against him. George soon consoled himself with another
wife, and about a year later departed for parts unknown. The years that
followed were hard and lonely ones for Vina, but she never wept for
George: to use her own expression, "He wan't no cry-tear-un (_criterion_),
he wan't, and she wasn't going to cry no tears for him."

Father Abram had found his way to Leavenworth too, but it was not till
1860 that Providence again threw them together. He stood erect now with a
sense of freedom and manhood: a comparatively easy life had untied the
knots that rheumatism had twisted in his muscles, and the weight of fully
twenty years seemed to have been lifted from his shoulders. He heard her
story. "'Pears like de Lord has got more work for Fader Abram," he said
simply; and shortly after he found a way to do the Lord's work. When Vina
reached this point in her story the judge became aware that his wife and
himself were not the only listeners. Father Abram, true to his
appointment, had come around to see if the judge's scruples had been
overcome, and to ask for the marriage license.

"Fader Abram," said Vina, "tell Miss' Fairdealer how yer done foun' John
Brown."

[Illustration: "I JUS' TOTED HER ROUN' TO DE ICE-CREAM STAN'."]

"Couldn't help findin' her," replied the old man. "Dar she was, right 'fo'
my eyes. I reckon yer'd a foun' her ef de Lord had sot her down squar' in
front ob yer, as he did ob me.--Ye see, madam, dat ar spring I was workin'
for de Risin' Sun libbery-stable: Colonel Trott an' Cap'n Gallup run it
den. De colonel was what yer call a fas' man, one ob yo' racin', bettin'
characters, but right smart ob a gentleman same time; while de cap'n
b'longed to de Church, and war de meanes' man out of Missouri. 'Bout dat
time de firm owned Challenger, de fas'est 

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