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The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877

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Title: The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877

Author: Various


        
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Language: English

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THE GALAXY.

VOL. XXIII.--FEBRUARY, 1877.--No. 2.


Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1877, by SHELDON &
CO., in the office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.




ADMINISTRATION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN.


The second session of the Thirty-seventh Congress, from its commencement
to its close, tested the strength of the Government and the capability
of those who administered it. Disappointment, in consequence of no
decisive military success during the first few months of the war, had
caused a generally depressed feeling which begot discontent and distrust
that in various ways found expression in Congress. Democrats complained
more of the incapacity of the Executive than of the inefficiency of the
generals, and the entire Administration was censured and denounced by
them for acts which, if not strictly legal and constitutional in peace,
were necessary and unavoidable in war. Republicans, on the other hand,
were dissatisfied because so little was accomplished, and the factious
imputed military delay to mismanagement and want of energy in the
Administration. Indeed, but for some redeeming naval successes at
Hatteras and Port Royal preceding the meeting of Congress in December,
the whole belligerent operations would have been pronounced weak and
imbecile failures. Conflicting views in regard to the slavery question
in all its aspects prevailed; the Democrats insisting that fugitives
should be returned to their masters under the provisions of law, as in
time of peace. The Republicans were divided on this question, one
portion agreeing with the Democrats that all should be returned,
another claiming that only escaped slaves who belonged to loyal owners,
wherever they resided, should be returned; another portion insisted that
there should be no rendition of servants of rebel masters, even in loyal
or border States, who, by resisting the laws and setting the authorities
at defiance, had forfeited their rights and all Governmental protection.
Questions in regard to the treatment of captured rebels, and the
confiscation of all property of rebels, were agitated. What was the
actual condition of the seceding States, and what would be their status
when the rebellion should be suppressed, were also beginning to be
controverted points, especially among members of Congress. On these and
other questions which the insurrection raised, novel, perplexing, and
without law or precedent to guide or govern it, the Administration had
developed no well defined policy when Congress convened in December,
1861, but it was compelled to act, and that in such a manner as not to
alienate friends or give unnecessary offence, while maintaining the
Government in all its Federal authority and rights for the preservation
of the Union and the suppression of the rebellion.

The character and duration of the war, which many had supposed would be
brief, was still undetermined. While affairs were in this uncertain and
inchoate condition, and the Administration had no declared policy on
some of the most important questions, Congress came together fired with
indignation and revenge for a war so causeless and unprovoked. A large
portion of the members, exasperated toward the rebels by reason of the
war, and dissatisfied with delays and procrastination, which they
imputed chiefly to the Administration, were determined there should be
prompt and aggressive action against the persons, property,
institutions, and the States which had confederated to break up the
Union. There was, however, little unity among the complaining members as
to the mode and method of prosecuting the war. It was not difficult to
find fault with the Administration, but it was not easy for the
discontented to settle on any satisfactory plan of continuing it. The
Democrats complained that the President transcended his rightful
authority; the radical portion of the Republicans that he was not
sufficiently aggressive; that he was deficient in energy and too tender
of the rebels. It was at this period, after Congress had been in session
two months, and opinions were earnest but diverse and factious, with a
progeny of crude and mischievous schemes as to the conduct of affairs
and the treatment of the rebels, that Senator Sumner, in the absence of
a clearly defined policy on the part of the Administration, and while
things were not sufficiently matured to adopt one, submitted his project
for overthrowing the State governments and reducing them to a
territorial condition, and with the subversion of their governments the
abolition of slavery. It was the enunciation of a policy that was in
conflict with the Constitution, and would change the character of the
Government, but which he intended to force upon the Administration.
Though a scheme devised by himself, it had in its main features the
countenance of many and some able supporters.

President Lincoln had high respect for Mr. Sumner, but was excessively
annoyed with this presentation of the extreme, and, as he considered
them, unconstitutional and visionary theories of the Massachusetts
Senator, which were intended to commit the Government and shape its
course. It was precipitating upon the Administration issues on delicate
and deeply important subjects at a critical period--issues involving the
structure of the Government and the stability of our Federal system.
These questions might have to be ultimately met and disposed of, but it
was requisite that they should be met with caution and deliberate
consideration. The times and condition of the country were inauspicious
for considerate statesmanship. The matters in dispute, the consequences
and results of the war, were yet in embryo. There could be no union of
sentiment on Senator Sumner's plan, nor any other at that period, in the
free States, in Congress, or even in the Republican party. There were
half a dozen factions to be reconciled or persuaded to act together.
This plan was felt to be an element of discord, which, if it could not
be finally averted, might in that gloomy period, when the country was
threatened and divided, have been temporarily, at least, avoided. But
Senator Sumner, though scholarly and cultured, was not always judicious
or wisely discreet. The President, as he expressed himself, could not,
in the then condition of affairs, afford to have a controversy with
Sumner, but he so managed as to check violent and aggressive demands by
quietly interposing delay and non-action.

In the mean time, while the subjects of slavery, reconstruction, and
confiscation were being vehemently discussed, he felt the necessity of
adopting, or at least proposing, some measure to satisfy public
sentiment.

On the subject of confiscation there were differing opinions among the
Republicans themselves, in Congress, which called out earnest debate.
The Radicals, such as Thaddeus Stevens, who were in fact revolutionists
and intended that more should be accomplished by the Government than the
suppression of the rebellion and the preservation of the Union, were for
the immediate and unsparing confiscation of the property of the rebels
by act of Congress without awaiting judicial proceedings. In their view
and by their plan rebels, if not outlaws, were to be considered and
treated as foreigners, not as American citizens; the States in
insurrection were to be reduced to the condition of provinces; the
people were to be subjugated and their property taken to defray the
expenses of the war. Mr. Sumner, less crafty and calculating than
Stevens, but ardent and impulsive, was for proceeding to extreme
lengths; and, having the power, he urged that they should embrace "the
opportunity which God in his beneficence had offered" to extinguish by
arbitrary enactment slavery, and all claim to reserved sovereignty in
the States; but Judge Collamer, calm and considerate, and other milder
men were opposed to any illegal and unjustifiable enactment.

As is too often the case in high party and revolutionary times, the
violent and intriguing were likely to be successful, until it came to be
understood that the President would feel it obligatory to place upon the
extreme and unconstitutional measures his veto. A knowledge of this and
the attending fact, that his veto would be sustained, induced Congress
to pass a joint resolution, modifying the act, expounding and declaring
its meaning, instead of enacting a new and explicit law, which the
judiciary, whose province it is, would expound and construe.

The President, in order not to be misunderstood when informing the House
of Representatives that he had affixed his signature to the bill and
joint resolution, also transmitted a copy of the message he had prepared
to veto the act in its original shape, with his objections, in which he
said that by a fair construction of the act he considered persons "are
not punished without regular trials, in duly constituted courts, under
the forms and the substantial provisions of the law and the Constitution
applicable to their several cases." It was apprehended at that time, and
subsequent acts proved the apprehension well founded, that Congress or
its radical leaders were disposed to assume and exercise not only
legislative, but judicial and executive powers. Rebels were by Congress
to be condemned and their property confiscated and taken without trial
and conviction. Such was not the policy of the President, as was soon
well understood; and to reconcile him and those who agreed with him, a
provision was inserted that persons who should commit treason and be
"_adjudged guilty thereof_" should be punished. But to prevent
misconception from equivocal phraseology in a somewhat questionable act,
he explicitly made known that "regular trials in duly constituted
courts" were to be observed, and the rights of the executive and
judicial departments of the Government maintained. This precaution, and
the determination which he uniformly expressed to regard individual
rights, and not to impose penalty or inflict punishment for alleged
crimes, whether of treason or felony, until after trial and conviction,
was not satisfactory to the extremists, who were ready to treat rebels
as outlaws, and condemn them without judge or jury.

The Centralists in Congress, who were arrogating executive and judicial
as well as legislative power, authorized the President, by special
provision in this law, to extend pardon and amnesty on such occasions as
he might deem expedient. This was represented as special grace and a
great concession; but as the pardoning power is explicitly conferred on
the President by the Constitution, the permission or authorization given
by the act was entirely supererogatory. Congress could neither enlarge
nor diminish the authority of the Executive in that respect; but if the
President acquiesced, and admitted the right of the legislative body to
grant, it was evident the day was not distant that the same body, when
dissatisfied with his leniency, would claim the right to restrain or
prohibit. The ulterior design in this grant to the President of
authority which he already possessed, and of which they could not
legally deprive him, President Lincoln well understood, but felt it to
be his duty and it was his policy to have as little controversy with
Congress or any of the factions in that body as was possible, and he
therefore wisely forebore contention.

On the slavery question, the alleged cause of secession and war, there
were legal and perplexing difficulties which, in various ways,
embarrassed the Administration, and in the disturbed condition of the
country prevented, for a time, the establishment and enforcement of any
decisive policy. By the Constitution and laws, slavery and property in
slaves were recognized, and the surrender and rendition of fugitives
from service to their owners was commanded; but in a majority of the
seceding States the usurping governments and the rebel slave-owners were
in open insurrection, resisting the Federal authority, defying it and
making war upon it. Still there were many citizens in those States who
were opposed to secession, loyal to the Federal Government, and earnest
friends of the Union, who owned slaves. What policy could the
Administration adopt in regard to these two classes of citizens in the
same State? The fugitive slave law was not and could not be enforced in
States where there was organized rebellion. Should fugitive slaves be
returned to both, or either, or neither of the owners in insurrectionary
States? There were moreover five or six border States, where slavery
existed, which did not secede. The governments and a majority of the
people of those States were patriotic supporters of the Union, but there
was a large minority in each of them who were violent enemies of the
Government and of the Union. Many of them were serving in the rebel
armies. For a time there was no alternative but to return slaves to
their owners who resided in border States which had neither seceded nor
resisted the Government. The Administration was not authorized to
discriminate, for instance, between slave-owners on the eastern shore of
the Potomac in the lower counties of Maryland and those on the western
shore in Virginia. There were, however, no secessionists, through the
whole South, more malignantly hostile to the Federal Union than a large
portion of the slave-owners in the southern counties of Maryland; but
the State not having seceded, and there being no organized resistance to
the Government, masters who justified secession continued to reclaim
their slaves, while on the opposite side of the river, in Virginia,
slave-owners who claimed to be loyal or neutral, could not reclaim or
obtain a restoration of their escaped servants. The Executive was
compelled to act in each of these cases, and its policy, the dictate of
necessity in the peculiar war that existed, was denounced by each of the
disagreeing factions. Affairs were in this unsettled and broken
condition when Congress convened at its second session in December,
1861. The action of the President in these conflicting cases as they
arose, if not condemned, was not fully approved. Many, if not a
majority, in Congress were undetermined what course to take. Democrats
insisted that the laws must be obeyed in all cases, in war as in peace.
The radical portion of the Republicans began to take extreme opposite
grounds, and claim that the laws were inoperative in regard to
slavery--that slavery was at all times inconsistent with a republican
government, and should now be extinguished. Among the revolutionary
resolutions of Senator Sumner of the 11th of February were some on the
subject of slavery. Other but not dissimilar propositions, antagonistic
to slavery, found expression, increasing in intensity as the war was
prolonged. While it was evident to most persons that one of the results
of the insurrection would be, in some way or form, the emancipation of
the slaves, there was no person who seemed capable of devising a
constitutional, practical plan for its accomplishment, except by
subjugation and violence. To these the President was unwilling to
resort; yet the necessity of doing something that did not transcend the
law, was morally right, and would tend to the ultimate freedom of the
slaves was felt to be an essential and indispensable duty. Unavailing
but seductive appeals continued in the mean time to be made by the
secessionists to the people of the border slave States to unite with the
further South for the security and protection of slavery, in which they
had a common interest, and against which there was increasing hostility
through the North. It was under these circumstances, with a large and
growing portion of the North in favor of abolition--the slave States,
including the border States, opposed to the measure and for the
preservation of the institution--that the President was to prescribe a
policy on which the government in the disordered state of the country
was to be administered.

To surmount the difficulties, without setting aside the law, or giving
just offence to any, the President, with his accustomed prudence and
regard for existing legal rights, devised a course which, if acquiesced
in by those most in interest, would, he believed, in a legal way open
the road to ultimate, if not immediate, emancipation. Instead of
assenting to the demands of the radical extremists that he should, by
arbitrary proceedings, and in disregard of law and Constitution, decree
freedom to all slaves, he preferred milder and more conciliatory
measures. The authority or right of the national Government to abolish
or interfere with an institution that was reserved and belonged
exclusively to the States, he was not prepared to act upon or admit,
though entreated and urged thereto by sincere party friends, and also by
party supporters, whose sincerity was doubtful.

There could be no excuse or pretext for such interference but the
insurrection; and, even as a war measure, there were obstacles in the
condition of the border slave States, to say nothing of loyal, patriotic
citizens in the insurrectionary region, that could not be overlooked.

On the 6th of March, within less than three weeks after Senator Sumner
had submitted his revolutionary resolution, for reconstruction, and a
declaration that it is the duty of Congress "to see that everywhere in
this extensive (secession) territory slavery shall cease to exist
practically, as it has already ceased to exist constitutionally or
morally," that President Lincoln, not assenting to the assumption, sent
a message to Congress proposing a plan of voluntary and compensated
emancipation. In this message he suggested that "the United States ought
to co-operate with any State which may adopt gradual abolishment of
slavery, giving to each State pecuniary aid," etc., and he invited an
interview upon the 10th of March, with the representatives of the border
States, to consider the subject. They did not conclude at this interview
to adopt his suggestions, and some of them were much incensed that the
proposition had been made, believing it would alienate and drive many,
hitherto rightly disposed, into secession.

Nevertheless, the fact that slavery was doomed, and had received a death
blow from the war of secession, was so obvious, that the moderate and
reflecting began seriously to consider whether they ought not to give
the President's plan favorable consideration.

While the policy of voluntary emancipation, in which the States should
be aided by the national Government, was not immediately successful, it
made such advance as, by the aid of the Federal Government, led to the
abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. The advocates of
immediate, general, and forcible emancipation, if not satisfied with the
conciliatory policy of the President, could not well oppose it.

Warm discussions in Congress, and altercations out of it, on most of the
important questions growing out of the war, and particularly on those of
confiscation, emancipation, and reconstruction, or the restoration of
the States to their rightful position, and the reëstablishment of the
Union, were had during the whole of the second session of the
Thirty-seventh Congress. All of these were exciting and important
questions, the last involving grave principles affecting our federal
system, and was most momentous in its consequences. As time and events
passed on, the convictions and conclusions of the President became more
clear and distinct as to the line of policy which it was his duty and
that of the Administration to pursue.

Dissenting, wholly and absolutely, from the revolutionary views and
schemes of Senator Sumner and those who agreed with him, the President
became convinced, as the subject had been prematurely introduced and
agitated, with an evident intent to forestall and shape the action of
the Government, that the actual status of the rebel States and their
true relation to the Federal Government should be distinctly understood.
The resolution of Mr. Dixon, a gentleman of culture and intelligence,
who, as well as Mr. Sumner, was a New England Senator, and also of the
same party, was, it will be observed, diametrically opposed to the
principles and the project of the Massachusetts Senator on the great,
impending, and forthcoming subject of reconstruction. It was directly
known that the President coincided with the Connecticut Senator in the
opinion that all the acts and ordinances of secession were mere
nullities, and should be so treated; that while such acts might subject
_individuals_ to penalties and forfeitures, they did not in any degree
affect the _States_ as commonwealths, and their relations to the Federal
Government; that such acts were rebellious, insurrectionary, and hostile
on the part of the _persons_ engaged in them, but that the _States_,
notwithstanding the acts and conspiracies of individuals, were still
members of the Federal Union, and that the loyal citizens of these
States had forfeited none of their rights, but were entitled to all the
protection and privileges guaranteed by the Constitution.

The theory and principles set forth in Senator Dixon's resolutions were
the opinions and convictions of the President, deliberately formed and
consistently maintained while he lived, on the subject of reconstruction
and the condition of the States and people in the insurrectionary
region. In his view there was no actual secession, no dismembering of
the Union, no change in the Constitution and Government; the relative
position of the States and the Federal Government were unchanged; the
organic, fundamental laws of neither were altered by the sectional
conspiracy; the whole people, North and South, were American citizens;
each person was responsible for his own acts and amenable to law; and he
was also entitled to the protection of the law, and the rights and
privileges secured by the Constitution. The confiscation and
emancipation schemes concerning which there was so much excitement in
Congress were of secondary consideration to the all-absorbing one of
preserving the Union.

The second session of the Thirty-seventh Congress closed on the 17th of
July. Its proceedings had been confused and uneasy, with a good deal of
discontented and revolutionary feeling, which increased toward the
close. The decisive stand which the President had taken, and which he
calmly, firmly, and persistently maintained against the extreme measures
of some of the most prominent Republicans in Congress, was
unsatisfactory. It was insinuated that his sympathies on important
measures had more of a Democratic than Republican tendency; yet the
Democratic party maintained an organized and often unreasonable, if not
unpatriotic, opposition.

Military operations, aside from naval success at New Orleans and on the
upper Mississippi, had been a succession of military reverses.
Disagreement between the Secretary of War and the General-in-Chief,
which the President could not reconcile, caused the latter to be
superseded after the disastrous result before Richmond. Dissensions in
the army and among the Republicans in Congress, the persistent
opposition of Democrats to the Administration, and the general
depression that prevailed were discouraging. "In my position," said the
President, "I am environed with difficulties." Friends on whom he felt
he ought to be able to rely were dissatisfied with his conscientious
scruples and lenity, and party opponents were unrelenting against the
Administration.

A few days before Congress adjourned, the President made another but
unsuccessful effort to dispose of the slavery question, by trying to
induce the border States to take the initiative in his plan of
compensated emancipation. The interview between him and the
representatives of the border States, which took place on the 12th of
July, convinced him that the project of voluntary emancipation by the
States would not succeed. Were it commenced by one or more of the
States, he had little doubt it would be followed by others, and
eventuate in general emancipation by the States themselves. Failing in
the voluntary plan, he was compelled, as a war necessity, to proclaim
freedom to all slaves in the rebel section, if the war continued to be
prosecuted after a certain date. This bold and almost revolutionary
measure, which would change the industrial character of many States,
could be justified on no other ground than as a war measure, the result
of military necessity. It was an unexpected and startling demonstration
when announced, that was welcomed by a vast majority of the people in
the free States. In Congress, however, neither this nor his project of
compensated emancipation was entirely acceptable to either the extreme
anti-slavery or pro-slavery men. The radicals disliked the way in which
emancipation was effected by the President. But, carried forward by the
force of public opinion, they could not do otherwise than acquiesce in
the decree, complaining, however, that it was an unauthorized assumption
by the Executive of power which belonged to Congress.

The opponents of the President seized the occasion of this bold measure
to create distrust and alarm, and the result of the policy of
emancipation in the election which followed in the autumn of 1862 was
adverse to the Administration. Confident, however, that the step was
justifiable and necessary, the President persevered and consummated it
by a final proclamation on the 1st of January, 1863.

The fact that the Administration lost ground in the elections in
consequence of the emancipation policy served for a time to promote
unity of feeling among the members when Congress convened in December.
The shock occasioned by the measure when first announced had done its
work. The timid, who had doubted the necessity and legality of the act,
and feared its consequences, recovered their equipoise, and a reaction
followed which strengthened the President in public confidence. But the
radical extremists, especially the advocates of Congressional supremacy,
began in the course of the winter to reassert their own peculiar ideas
and their intention of having a more extreme policy pursued by the
Government.

Thaddeus Stevens embraced an early opportunity to declare his extreme
views, which were radically and totally antagonistic to those of the
President. But Stevens, whose ability and acquirements as a politician,
and whose skill and experience as a party tactician were unsurpassed if
not unequalled in either branch of Congress, made no open, hostile
demonstration toward the President. He restricted himself to
contemptuous expressions in private conversation against the Executive
policy and general management of affairs. Without an attack on the
President, whom he personally liked, the Administration was sneered at
as weak and inefficient, of which little could be expected until a more
aggressive and scathing policy was adopted. His personal intercourse
with members and his talents and eloquence on the floor of the House
gave him influence with the representatives on ordinary occasions, but
his ultra radical and revolutionary ideas caused the calm and
considerate to distrust and disclaim his opinions and his leadership. It
was not until a later period, and under another Executive, less affable
but not less honest and sincere than Mr. Lincoln, that the suggestions
of Stevens were much regarded. When his disciples and adherents became
more partisan and numerous, they, in order to give him power and
consequence and reconcile their constituents, denominated him the "Great
Commoner."

If his political hopes and party schemes had been sometimes successful,
his reverses and disappointments had been much greater. Many and severe
trials during an active, embittered, and often unscrupulous partisan
experience, had tempered his enthusiasm if they had not brought him
wisdom. Defeats can hardly be said to have made him misanthropic; but
having little philosophy in his composition, he vented his spleen when
there was occasion on his opponents in ironical remarks that made him
dreaded, and which were often more effective than arguments; but his
sagacity and knowledge of men taught him that a hostile and open
conflict with a chief magistrate whose honesty even he respected, and
whose patriotism the people so generally regarded, would be not only
unavailing, but to himself positively injurious. He therefore conformed
to circumstances; and while opposed to the tolerant policy of the
Administration toward the rebels and the rebel States, he had the tact
and address, with his wit and humor, to preserve pleasant social
intercourse and friendly personal relations with the President, who well
understood his traits and purpose, but avoided any conflict with him.

For the first five or six weeks of the third session of the
Thirty-seventh Congress, Stevens improved his time in free and sarcastic
remarks on the reconstruction policy of the Government, which he
characterized as puerile and feeble, and at length, on the 8th of
January, he gave utterance to his feelings, maintaining that "with
regard to all the Southern States in rebellion, the Constitution has no
binding influence or application." He averred that "in his opinion they
were not members of the Union"; that "the ordinances of secession took
them out of the Union"; that he "would levy a tax wherever he could upon
these conquered provinces"; said he "would not only collect the tax, but
he would, as a necessary war measure, take every particle of property,
real and personal, life estate and reversion, of every disloyal man, and
sell it for the benefit of the nation in carrying on this war."

Several members of Congress hastened to deny that these sentiments and
purposes were those of the Republican party; this Mr. Stevens admitted.
He said "a very mild denial from the pleasant gentleman from New York
[Mr. Olin], and the somewhat softened and modified repudiation of the
gentleman from Indiana" (Mr. Colfax), would, he hoped, satisfy the
sensitive gentlemen in regard to him, and he "desired to say he did not
speak the sentiments of this side of the House _as a party_."; that
"for the last fifteen years he [Stevens] had always been ahead of the
party in these matters, but he had never been so far ahead but that the
members of the party had overtaken and gone ahead; and they would again
overtake him and go with him before the infamous and bloody rebellion
was ended." "They will find that they must treat those States, now
outside of the Union, as conquered provinces, and settle them with new
men, and drive the present rebels as exiles from this country." "Nothing
but extermination, or exile, or starvation, will ever induce them to
surrender to the Government."

Not very consistent or logical in his policy and views, this
subsequently Radical leader proposed to treat the Southern people
sometimes as foreigners and at other times as rebel citizens; in either
case he would tax, starve, and exile them--make provinces of their
States, and overturn their old established governments. Few,
comparatively, of the Republicans were at that time prepared to follow
Stevens or adopt his vindictive and arbitrary measures. Shocked at his
propositions, the "Great Commoner" had at that day few acknowledged
adherents. When in vindication of his scheme it was asked upon what
ground the collection of taxes could be enforced in the Southern States,
Judge Thomas, one of the ablest and clearest minds of the Massachusetts
delegation, said, "Upon this ground, that the authority of this
Government at this time is as valid over those States as it was before
the acts of secession were passed; upon the ground that every act of
secession passed by those States is utterly null and void; upon the
ground that every act legally null and void cannot acquire force because
armed rebellion is behind it, seeking to uphold it; upon the ground that
the Constitution makes us not a mere confederacy, but a _nation_; upon
the ground that the provisions of that Constitution strike through the
State government and reach directly, not intermediately, the subjects.
Subjects of whom? Of the nation--of the United States." "Who ever heard,
as a matter of public law, that the authority of a government over its
rebellious subjects was lost until that revolution was successful--was a
fact accomplished?"

Shortly after the capture of New Orleans and the establishment of
Federal authority over Louisiana, two of the Congressional districts of
that State elected representatives to Congress. The admission or
non-admission of these representatives involved the question of the
political condition of the Southern States and people in the Federal
Union, and the whole principle, in fact, of restoration and
reconstruction.

The subject was long and deliberately considered and fully discussed in
Congress. The committee on elections reported in favor of their
admission, and Mr. Dawes of Massachusetts, the chairman, stated that
"more than ordinary importance is attached to the consideration of this
subject. It is not simply whether two gentlemen shall be permitted to
occupy seats in this House. The question whether they shall be admitted
involves the principles touching the present state of the country to
which the attention of the House has more than once been called." He
said, "The question now comes up, whether any reason exists that
requires any departure from the rules and principles which have been
adopted." "An adherence to these principles is vitally important in
settling the question, how there is to be a restoration of this Union
when this war shall be drawn to a close."

The subject of admitting these representatives and the principles of a
restoration of the Union which their admission involved, was debated
with earnestness for several days, and finally decided, on the 17th of
February, in favor of admitting them, by a vote of ninety-two in the
affirmative to forty-four in the negative.

An analysis of this vote, in view of the proceedings, acts, and votes
of many of the same members a few years subsequently, after Mr.
Lincoln's death, presents some curious and interesting facts. It was not
a strictly party vote. Among those who then favored the Administration
policy of restoration were Colfax, Dawes, Delano, Fenton, Fisher of
Delaware, Wm, Kellogg, J. S. Morrill of Vermont, Governor A. H. Rice of
Massachusetts, Shellabarger, and others who opposed the restoration
policy of President Lincoln after his death and the accession of
President Johnson.

In the negative with Thaddeus Stevens were Ashley, Bingham, the two
Conklings, Kelley, McPherson, and a few others. But when reconstruction
or exclusion actually took place after the termination of the war, great
changes occurred among the members of Congress, and Stevens, the "Great
Commoner," who in 1863 had a following of less than one-third of the
representatives, rallied, four years later, more than two-thirds to his
standard against restoration and for subjugation and exclusion.

Mr. Stevens was no ordinary man. At the bar he was astute and eloquent
rather than profound, but in the Legislature of Pennsylvania and in the
management of the affairs of that State, where for a period he actively
participated and was a ruling mind, he was often rash and turbulent, and
had, not without cause, the reputation of being a not over scrupulous
politician. Personally my relations with him, though not intimate, were
pleasant and friendly. I was first introduced to him at Harrisburg in
1836, when he was a member of the convention that revised the
Constitution of Pennsylvania. We occasionally met in after years. He
expressed himself pleased with my appointment in Mr. Lincoln's Cabinet,
and, notwithstanding we disagreed on fundamental principles, he
complimented my administration of the Navy Department, and openly and
always sustained my positions, and particularly so on the subject of the
blockade, on which there were differences in the Administration. In the
Pennsylvania convention of 1836 he was probably the most eloquent
speaker, but his ideas were often visionary and radical. He ultimately
refused to sign the Constitution because the colored people were denied
the elective franchise. Severe as he exhibited himself toward the rebels
during and subsequent to the civil war, Mr. Stevens was not by nature,
as might be supposed, inhuman in his feelings and sympathies toward his
fellow men. To the colored race he seemed always more attached and
tender than to the whites, perhaps because they were enslaved and
oppressed. He was opposed to slavery, to imprisonment for debt, and to
capital punishment. There were strange contradictions in his character.
In his political career he had ardent supporters, though many who voted
with him had not a high regard for his principles. His course and
conduct in the Legislature and government of Pennsylvania did much to
debauch the political morals of that State, and in the celebrated
"buck-shot war" he displayed the bold and reckless disregard of justice
and popular rights that distinguished the latter years of his
Congressional life, when he became the acknowledged leader of the
radical reconstruction party in Congress.

In his political career and management, though strongly sustained by a
local constituency, he had experienced a series of disappointments. The
defeat of John Quincy Adams, whom he greatly admired, in 1828, and the
election of General Jackson, against whom his prejudices were
inveterate, were to him early and grievous vexations.

The attempt of Mr. Adams on his retirement to establish a national
anti-Masonic party was warmly seconded by Stevens, and with greater
success in Pennsylvania than attended his distinguished leader in
Massachusetts. The failure of the attempt was more severely felt by the
disciple than by the master. After the annihilation of the anti-Masonic
organization and the discomfiture of the buck-shot war, Stevens was
less conspicuous, though prominent for a few months in 1840, when he
came forward as an earnest advocate of the nomination of General
Harrison in that singular campaign which resulted in the General's
election. His efficiency and zeal in behalf of both the nomination and
election of the "hero of Tippecanoe" were acknowledged, and he and his
friends anticipated they would be recognized and he rewarded by a seat
in the Cabinet. But he had given offence to the great Whig leader of
that day by his preference of Harrison for President, and had moreover
an unsavory reputation, which, with the declared opposition of Clay and
Webster, caused his exclusion. It was a sore disappointment, from which
he never fully recovered. Eight years later, with the advent of General
Taylor and the defeated aspirations of the Whig leaders, who had caused
his exclusion from Harrison's Cabinet, he sought and obtained an
election to the thirty-first Congress from the Lancaster district. In
1856 he strove with all his power to secure the Presidential nomination
for John McLane of the Supreme Court, who had or professed to have had
anti-Masonic tendencies. His ill success was another disappointment; but
in 1859 he was again elected to Congress, and thereafter until his death
he represented the Lancaster district.

Disappointments had made him splenetic, but he was not, as represented
by his opponents on the two extremes, either a charlatan or a miscreant,
though possibly not wholly exempt from charges against him in either
respect. In many of his ultra radical and it may be truly said
revolutionary views--revolutionary because they changed the structure of
the Government--he coincided with Senator Sumner, who was perhaps the
leading spirit in the Senate on the subject of reconstruction, but he
did not, like the Massachusetts Senator, make any pretence that his
project to subjugate the Southern people and reduce their States to the
condition of provinces was constitutional, or by authority of the
Declaration of Independence. President Lincoln well understood the
characteristics of both these men, and, though differing from each on
the subject of restoration and reconstruction, he managed to preserve
friendly personal relations with both--retained their confidence, and
while he lived secured their general support of his Administration.
Herein President Lincoln exhibited those peculiar qualities and
attributes of mind which made him a leader and manager of men, and
enabled him in a quiet and unostentatious way to exercise his executive
ability in administering the Government during the most troublesome
period of our national history.

                        GIDEON WELLES.




ART'S LIMITATIONS.


    This rich, rank Age--does it breed giants now--
    Dantes or Michaels, Raphaels, Shakespeares? Nay!
    Its culture is of other sort to-day.
    From the stanch stem (too ready to allow
    Growths that divide the strength that should endow
    The one tall trunk) who firmly lops away,
    With wise reserve, such shoots as lead astray
    The wasted sap to some collateral bough?

    Had Dante chiselled stone, had Angelo
    Intrigued with courts, had Shakespeare dulled his pen
    With critic gauge of Chaucer, Drummond, Ben--
    What lack there were of that life-giving shade,
    Which these high-tower'd, centurial oaks have made,
    Where walk the happy nations to and fro!

                        MARGARET J. PRESTON.




APPLIED SCIENCE.

A LOVE STORY IN TWO CHAPTERS.


CHAPTER II.

CONCLUSION.

The events of the last chapter happened on the night of Friday, July 17,
1874. The following day, Saturday, broke calm, clear, and warm. Elmer
awoke early, carefully looked out of a crack in his window curtain, and
found that the chimney-builder's room was empty.

"The enemy has flown. I wonder if Alma is up?"

He uncovered a small telegraphic armature and sounder standing on the
window-seat, and touched it gently. In an instant there was a response,
and Alma replied that she was up and dressed and would soon be down.

She met him in the library, smiling, and apparently happy.

"Oh, Elmer, he has gone away. He left a note on the breakfast table,
saying that he had gone to New York, and that he should not return till
Monday or Tuesday."

"That's very good; but I think it means mischief."

Just here the breakfast bell rang. The table was set for four, but Alma
and Elmer were the only ones who could answer the call, and they sat
down to the table alone. They talked of various matters of little
consequence, and when the meal was over Elmer announced that as the day
was quiet, he should make a little photographing expedition about the
neighborhood.

"My visit here is now more than a quarter over, and I wish to take home
some photos of the place. Will you not go with me?"

"With all my heart, if I can leave father. But please not talk of going
home yet. I hope you will not go till things are settled. We want you,
Elmer. You are so wise and strong, and--you know what I mean."

"Perhaps I do. At any rate I'm not going till I have paid up that
Belford for his insults."

"Oh, let's not talk of him to-day."

This was eminently wise. They had better enjoy the day of peace that was
before them. The shadow of the coming events already darkened their
lives, though they knew it not. Mr. Denny was so much better that he
could spare Alma, and about ten o'clock she appeared, paper umbrella in
hand, at the porch, and Elmer soon joined her bearing a small camera,
and a light wooden tripod for its support.

The two spent the morning happily in each other's company, and at one
o'clock returned to dinner with quite a number of negatives of various
objects of interest about the place. After dinner the young man
retreated to his room to prepare for the battle that he felt sure would
rage on the following Monday.

He did not know all the circumstances of the trouble that had invaded
the family, but he felt sure that the confidential clerk intended some
terrible shame or exposure that in some way concerned his cousin Alma.
So it was he came to call himself her Lohengrin, come to fight her
battles, not with a sword, but with the telegraph, the camera, and the
micro-lantern.

The Sabbath passed quietly, and the Monday came. After breakfast the
student retreated to his room and tried to study, but could not.

About ten o'clock he heard a carriage of some kind stop before the
house. His room being at the rear, he could not see who had come, and
thinking that it might be merely some stray visitor, and that at least
it did not concern him, he turned to his books and made another attempt
to read.

After some slight delay he heard the carriage drive away, and the old
house became very still. Then he heard a door open down stairs, and a
moment after one of the maids knocked at his door.

"Would Mr. Franklin kindly come down stairs? Mr. Denny wished to see him
in the library."

He would come at once; and picking up a number of unmounted photographs
from the table, he prepared to go down stairs. He hardly knew why he
should take the pictures just then. There seemed no special reason why
he should show them to Mr. Denny; still, an indefinite feeling urged him
to take them with him.

The library was a small room, dark, with heavy book shelves against the
walls, and crowded with tables, desk, and easy chairs. There was a
student lamp on the centre table, and in a corner stood a large iron
safe. Mr. Denny was seated at the table with his back to the door, and
with his head supported by his hand and arm. He did not seem to notice
the arrival of his visitor, and Elmer advanced to the table and laid the
photographs upon it.

"I am glad you have come, Mr. Franklin. I wish to talk with you. I wish
to tell you something. A great affliction has fallen upon us, and I wish
you, as our guest, to be prepared for it. I think I can trust you, Elmer
Franklin. I remember your mother, my boy. You have her features--and I
will trust you for her sake. We are ruined."

"How, sir? How is that possible, with all your property?"

"Not one cent of my property--not a foot of ground, or a single brick,
or piece of shafting in the mills--belongs to me."

"This is terrible, sir. How did it happen?"

"It is a short and sad story. I was my father's only child, and there
were no other heirs. My father's last illness was very sudden, and he
left no will. He told me when he died that he had left everything to me.
We never found any will that would bear out this assertion. However,
the ordinary process of law gave me the property, and I thought myself
secure. Suddenly a will was found, in which all the property was left to
a distant relative in New York, and I was merely mentioned with some
trifling gift. I contested the will and lost the case. It was an
undoubted will, and in my father's own handwriting, and dated more than
a year before he died and when I was rusticating from college. I thought
I must needs sow my wild oats, and day after to-morrow I pay for them
all by total beggary. The devisee, by the will, acted very strangely
about the property. He did not disturb me for a very long time. He
probably feared to do so; and then he made a mortgage of one hundred
thousand dollars on the property, took the money, and went abroad."

"And he left you here in possession?"

"Yes. The interest on the mortgage became due. There was no one to pay
it, and they even had the effrontery to come to me. I refused again and
again, and every time the interest was added to the mortgage till it
rolled up to an enormous amount. Meanwhile the devisee died, penniless,
in Europe, and on Wednesday Abrams, the lawyer who holds the mortgage,
is to take possession of everything--and we--we are to go--I know not
whither."

For a few moments there was a profound silence in the room. The elder
man mourned his dreadful fate, and the son of science was ready to shout
for joy. Restraining himself with an effort, he said, not without a
tremor in his voice:

"And have you searched for any other will?"

"That is an idle question, my son. We have searched these years. Then,
too, just as I need a staff for my declining years, it breaks under me."

"You refer to Mr. Belford, sir?"

"Yes. Since I injured my foot in the mill, I have trusted all my
affairs to him, and now I sometimes think he is playing me false. Even
now, when all this trouble has come upon me, he is absent, and I have no
one to consult, nor do I find any to aid or comfort me."

"Perhaps I can aid you, sir."

"I do not know. I fear no one can avail us now."

"May I be very frank with you, sir?"

"Certainly. I am past all pride or fear. There can be nothing worse
now."

"I think, sir, you have placed too much confidence in that man. He is
not trustworthy."

"How do you know? Can you prove it?"

"Yes, sir. You remember the new chimney?"

"Yes; but he explained that, and collected all the money that had been
paid on the supposed extra height of the chimney."

"That was very easy, sir, for he had it in his own pocket. I met some of
the work people in the village, and casually asked them how high the
chimney was to be, and every man gave the real height. Mr. Belford lied
to you about it, and pocketed the difference between his measurements
and mine. Of course, when detected he promptly restored the money, and
thought himself lucky to have escaped so easily. More than that, he
claimed that the chimney was capped with stone. It is not. It is brick
to the top, and the upper courses were rubbed over with colored
plaster."

"I can hardly believe it. Besides, how can you prove it?"

"That will, sir. Look at it carefully."

So saying, Elmer selected a photograph from those on the table and
presented it to Mr. Denny.

The old gentleman looked at it carefully for a few moments, and then
said with an air of conviction--

"It is a perfect fraud. I had no idea that the man was such a thief."

"Yes, sir. Look at that bare place where the plaster has fallen off.
You can see the brick----"

"Oh, I can see. There is no need to explain the picture. Have you any
more?"

"Yes, sir; quite a number. I'm glad I brought them with me."

Mr. Denny turned them over slowly, and commented briefly upon them.

"That's the house. Very well done, my boy. That's the mill. Excellent. I
should know it at once. And--eh! what's that? The batting mill?"

"Yes, sir. That's the new building going up beyond the millpond."

"Great heavens! What an outrageous fraud! Mr. Belford told me it was
nearly done. He has drawn almost all the money for it already, and
according to this picture only one story is up. When was this picture
taken?"

"On Saturday, sir. Alma was with me. She will tell you."

Mr. Denny rang a small bell that stood at his elbow, and a maid came to
the door.

"Will you call Miss Denny, Anna?"

The maid retired, and in a moment or two Alma appeared. She seemed pale
and dejected, and she sat down at once as if weary.

"What is it, father? Any new troubles?"

"Were you with your cousin when he took this photograph?"

She looked at it a moment, and then said wearily:

"Yes. It's the batting mill."

Just here the door opened, and Mr. Belford, hat and travelling bag in
hand, as if just from the station, entered the room. The two men looked
up in undisguised amazement, but Alma cast her eyes upon the floor, and
her face seemed to put on a more ashen hue than ever.

"Ah! excuse me. I did not mean to intrude. I'm just from New York, and I
have been so successful that I hastened to lay the news before you."

"What have you to say, Mr. Belford," said Mr. Denny coldly. "There are
none but friends here, and you need not fear to speak."

Mr. Franklin hastily gathered up the pictures together, and rolling them
up, put them in his pocket, with the mental remark that he "knew of one
who was not a friend--no, not much."

"I have arranged everything," said Mr. Belford, with sublime audacity.
"The note has been taken up. I have even obtained a release of the
mortgage, and here is the cancelled note and the release. To-morrow I
will have it recorded."

"We are in no mood for pleasantry, Mr. Belford. The sheriff was here
to-day, and Abrams is to take possession on Wednesday."

"Oh, I knew that. He did not get my telegram in time, or he would have
saved you all this unnecessary annoyance. And now everything is all
serene, and there is Abrams's release in full."

He took out a carefully folded paper, and gave it to Mr. Denny. He read
it in silence, and then said:

"It seems to be quite correct. We----"

Alma suddenly dropped her head upon her breast, and slid to the floor in
a confused heap. She thought she read in that fatal receipt her death
warrant. Nature rebelled, and mercifully took away her senses.

Elmer sprang to her rescue, but Mr. Belford intruded himself.

"It is my place, Mr. Franklin. She is to be my wife."

       *       *       *       *       *

The dreary day crept to its end. Alma recovered, and retired to her
room. Mr. Denny, overcome by the excitement of the interview, was quite
ill, and the visitor, oppressed with a sense of partial defeat, took a
long walk through the country. The enemy had made such an extraordinary
movement that for the time he was disconcerted, and he wished to be
alone, that he could think over the situation. About six o'clock in the
afternoon he returned looking bright and calm, as if he had thought out
his problem and had nerved himself up to do and dare all in behalf of
the woman he loved. He went quietly to his room and began his
preparations for a vigorous assault upon the enemy.

He rolled out his micro-lantern into the middle of the room, drew up the
curtains at the window that faced Mr. Belford's chamber, and prepared to
adjust the apparatus to a new and most singular style of lantern
projections. He had hardly finished the work to his satisfaction before
he heard Alma's knock at the door. He hastily drew down the curtains,
and then invited her to come in.

She opened the door and appeared upon the threshold, the picture of
resigned and heavy sorrow. She had evidently been weeping, and the dark
dress in which she had arrayed herself seemed to intensify the look of
anguish on her face. The son of science was disconcerted. He did not
know what to say, and, with great wisdom, he said nothing.

She entered the room without a word, and sat wearily down on a trunk.
Elmer quickly rolled out the great easy chair so that it would face the
open western window.

"Sit here, Miss Denny. This is far more comfortable."

"Oh, Elmer! Have you too turned against me?"

"Not knowingly. Sit here where there is more air, and before this view
and this beautiful sunset."

She rose, and with a forlorn smile took the great chair, and then gazed
absently out of the window upon the charming landscape, brilliant with
the glow of the setting sun. Elmer meanwhile went on with his work, and
for a little space neither spoke. Then she said, with a faint trace of
impatience in her voice--

"What are you doing, Elmer?"

"Preparing for war."

"It is useless. It is too late."

"Think so?"

"Yes. Everything has been settled, and in a very satisfactory
manner--at least father is satisfied, and I suppose I ought to be."

She smiled and held out her hand to him.

"How can I ever thank you, cousin Elmer? You will not forget me when I
am gone."

"Forget you, Alma! That was unkind."

He took her hand, glanced at the diamond ring upon her finger, and
looking down upon her as she lay half reclining in the great chair, he
said, with an effort, as if the words pained him:

"Alma, you have surrendered to him."

She looked up with a startled expression, and said:

"What do you mean?"

"You have renewed your engagement with Mr. Belford?"

"Yes--of course I have. He--he is to be my husband----"

"On Wednesday."

"Yes. How did you know it?"

Instead of replying he turned to a drawer and drew forth a long ribbon
of white paper. Holding it to the light, near the window, he began to
read the words printed in dots and lines upon it.

"Here is your own confession. Here are all the messages you sent me from
the parlor, when you broke your engagement with him----"

"Oh, Elmer! Did you save that? Destroy it--destroy it at once. If he
should find it, he would never forgive me."

"You need not fear. I shall not destroy it, and it shall never cause you
any trouble."

She had risen in her excitement, and stood upon her feet. Suddenly she
flushed a rosy red, and a strange light shone in her eyes. The sun had
sunk behind the hills, and it had grown dark. As the shadows gathered in
the room a strange, mystic light fell on the wall before her. A
picture--dim, ghostly, gigantic, and surpassingly beautiful--met her
astonished eyes. She gazed at it with a beating heart, awed into
silence by its mystery and its unearthly aspect. What was it? What did
it mean? By what magic art had he conjured up this vision? She stood
with parted lips gazing at it, while her bosom rose and fell with her
rapid, excited breathing. Suddenly she threw her arms above her head,
and with a cry fell back upon the chair.

"Oh, Elmer! My heart----"

He had been gazing absently out of the window at the fading twilight,
and hearing her cry of pain, he turned hastily and said:

"Alma, what is it? Are you----"

He caught sight of the picture on the wall. He understood it at once,
and went to the stereopticon that stood at the other end of the room and
opened it. The lamp was burning brightly, and he put it out and closed
the door. Then he drew out the glass slide, held it a moment to the
light to make sure that it was Alma's portrait, and then he kissed it
passionately, and shivered it into fragments upon the hearthstone.

She heard the breaking glass, and rose hastily and turned toward him.

"Elmer, that was cruel. Why did you destroy it?"

"Because it told too much."

"It was my picture?"

"Yes. I confess with shame that I stole it when you were asleep under
the influence of the gas I gave you. It happened to be in the lantern
when you came in."

"And so I saw it pictured on the wall?"

"Yes. In that way did it betray me. Forget it, Alma. Forget me. Forget
everything. Forget that I ever came here----"

"No--never. I cannot."

"You will be married soon and go away. I presume we may never meet
again."

"Oh, Elmer, forgive me. I am the one to be forgiven. I am alone to blame
for all this sorrow. I thought I alone should suffer. But--but, Elmer,
you will not forget me, and you see--you must see that what I do is for
the best. It is the only way. I cannot see my father beggared."

The clear-headed son of science seemed to be losing his self-control.
This was all so new, so exciting, so different from the calm and steady
flow of his student life, that he knew not what to say or do. He began
to turn over his books and papers in a nervous manner, as if trying to
win back control of his own tumultuous thoughts. Fortunately Alma came
to his rescue.

"Elmer, hear me."

"Yes," he said with an effort. "Tell me about it; then perhaps we can
understand each other better."

"I will. Come and sit by me. It grows dark, and I--well, it is no
matter. It will do me good to speak of it."

"Yes, do. Sorrow shared is divided by half."

"And joy shared is doubled," she added. "But we will not talk of 'the
might have been.'"

Then she paused and looked out on the gathering night for some minutes
in silence. Elmer sat at her feet upon a low stool, and waited till she
should speak.

"Elmer, say that you will forgive me whatever happens. No matter how
dark it looks for me, forgive me--and--do not forget me. I couldn't bear
that. On Wednesday I am to be married to Mr. Belford. It is the only way
by which I can save my father. There seems no help for it, and I
consented this afternoon. Mr. Belford took up the mortgage, and I am to
be his reward."

Elmer heard her through in silence, and then he stood up before her, and
his passion broke out in fury upon her.

"Alma Denny, you are a fool."

She cowered before him, and covered her face with her hands.

"Have you no sense? Can you not see the wide pit of deceit that is
spread before you? Do you believe what he says? Will you walk into
perdition to save your father?"

"Oh, Elmer! Elmer! Spare me, spare me, for my father's sake!"

Her sobs and tears choked her utterance, and she shrank away into the
depths of the chair, in shame and terror, thankful that the darkness hid
her from his view. Still his righteous indignation blazed upon her
hotly.

"Where have you lived? What have you done, that you should be so
deceived by this man? How can you save your father? If you cannot find
that missing will, of what avail is this withdrawal of the mortgage?"

"I do not know. Oh, Elmer! I am weak, and I have no mother, and father
is----I must save him if I can--at any price."

"You cannot save him. The devisee who held the will has heirs. They can
still claim the property. Besides, how could Mr. Belford pay off that
mortgage? Depend upon it, a gigantic fraud----"

"Elmer! Thank God, you have saved----"

She fainted quietly away, and slid down upon the floor at his feet. He
called two of the maids, and with their help he took her to her room and
placed her upon her own bed. Then, bidding them care for her properly,
he returned to his own room, and the heavy night fell down on the
sorrowful house.

Far away in the northwest climbed up a ragged mass of sombre clouds.
Afar off the deep voice of the thunder muttered fitfully. The son of
science drew up his curtains and looked out on the coming storm. There
was a solemn hush and calm in the air. Nature seemed resting, and
nerving herself for the warfare of the elements.

He too had need of calm. He drew a chair to the window, and sitting
astride of it, he rested his arms upon the back, and his chin upon his
folded hands, and for an hour watched the lightning flash from ragged
cloud to ragged cloud, and gave himself to deep and anxious thought. The
thunder grew nearer and nearer. The dark veil of clouds blotted out the
stars one by one. The roar of the water falling over the dam at the mill
seemed to fill all the air with its murmur. Every leaf and flower hung
motionless.

He heard the village clock strike nine, with loud, deep notes that
seemed almost at hand. Every nerve of his body seemed strung to electric
tension, and all nature tuned to a higher pitch as if dark and terrible
things were abroad in the night.

He heard a sound of closing blinds and windows. The servants were
shutting up the house, and preparing it for the storm.

One of them knocked at his door, and asked if she should come in and
close his windows.

He opened the door, thanked her, and said he would attend to it himself.
As he closed the door and stepped back into the room, he stood upon
something and there was a little crash. Thinking it might be glass, he
lit a candle and looked for the broken object, whatever it might be.

It was Alma's engagement ring, broken in twain. It had slipped from her
nerveless finger when they took her to her room. With a gesture of
impatience, he picked up the fragments, and threw them, diamond and all,
out of the window into the garden below.

Then for another hour he sat alone in the darkness of his room, watchful
and patient. He drew up the curtain toward Alma's room. There was a
light there, and he sat gazing at her white curtain till the light was
extinguished. The other lights were all put out one after the other, and
then it became very still.

The clock struck ten. The gathering storm climbed higher up the western
sky. The lightning flashed brighter and brighter. There was a sigh in
the tree tops as if the air stirred uneasily.

Suddenly there was another light. Mr. Belford's curtain was brightly
illuminated by his candle. Elmer moved his chair so that he could watch
the window, and waited patiently till the light was put out. Then he saw
the curtain raised and the window drawn down.

"All right, my boy! That's just what I wanted. Nemesis has a clear road,
and her shadowy sword shall reach you. Now for the closed circuit
alarm."

He silently pulled off his shoes, and then, with the tread of a cat, he
felt about his room till he found on the table two delicate coils of
fine insulated wire, and a couple of tacks. Carefully opening the door,
he crept down stairs and through the hall to the door of the library.
The door was closed, and kneeling down on the mat he pushed a tack into
the door near the jamb and stuck the other in the door post. From one to
another he stretched a bit of insulated wire. Then, aided by the glare
of the flashes of lightning, that had now grown bright and frequent, he
laid the wires under the mat and along the floor to the foot of the
stairs. Then in his stockinged feet he crept upward, dropping the wires
over into the well of the stairway as he went. In a moment or two the
wires were traced along the floor of the upper entry and under the door
into his room. Here they were secured to a small battery, and connected
with a tiny electric bell that stood on the mantle shelf. To stifle its
sound in case it rang, he threw his straw hat over the bell, and then he
felt sure that at least one part of his work was done.

Louder and louder rolled the thunder. The lightning flashed brightly and
lit up the bare, mean little room where the wretch cowered and shivered
in the bed, sleepless and fearful he knew not why. He feared the storm
and the night. He feared everything. His guilty heart made terrors out
of the night and nature's healthful workings. The very storm, blessed
harbinger of clearer days and sweeter airs, terrified him.

There was a sound of rushing wind in the air. A more vivid flash
blinded him. He sat up in bed and stopped his coward ears to drown the
splendid roll of the thunder. Another flash seemed to fill the room.

Ah! What was that? His eyes seemed to start from their sockets in
terror.

There, written in gigantic letters of fire upon the wall, glowed and
burned a single word:

    FRAUD!

He stared at it and rubbed his eyes. It would not be winked out. There
was a loud crash of thunder and a furious dash of rain against the
window; then another blinding stroke of lightning. He drew the clothing
over his head in abject terror. Again the thunder rolled as if in savage
comment on the writing on the wall.

It was a mistake, a delusion. He would face the horrid accusation.

It was gone, and in its place was a picture. It seemed the top of----

Ah! It was that chimney. Already the false stucco had fallen off, and
there, pictured upon his wall in lines of fire, were the evidences of
his fraud and crime.

He sprang from the bed with an oath and looked out of the window.
Darkness everywhere. The beating rain on the window pane ran down in
blinding rivulets. A vivid flash of lightning illuminated the garden and
the house. Not a living thing was stirring. He turned toward the bed.
The terrible picture had gone. With a muttered curse upon his weak,
disordered nerves, he crept into bed and tried to sleep.

Suddenly the terrible writing glowed upon the wall again, and he fairly
screamed with fright and horror:

    MURDER!

He writhed and turned upon the bed in mortal agony. He stared at the
letters of the awful word with ashen lips and chattering teeth. What
hideous dream was this? Had his reason reeled? Could it play him
phantom tricks like this? Or was it an avenging angel from heaven
writing his crimes upon the black night?

"Great God! What was that?"

The writing disappeared, and in its place stood a picture of his
wretched victim and himself. Her fair, innocent face looked down upon
him from the darkness, and he saw his own form beside her.

He raved with real madness now. Great drops of perspiration gathered on
his face. He dared not face those beautiful eyes so calmly gazing at
him. Where had high Heaven gained such knowledge of him? How could God
punish him with such awful cruelty?

"Hell and damnation have come," he screamed in frantic terror. The
thunder rolled in deep majesty, and none heard him. The wind and rain
beat upon the house, and his ravings disturbed no one.

"Take it away! Take it away!" he cried in sheer madness and agony.

It would not move. The lightning only made the picture more startling
and awful. The sweet and beautiful face of Alice Green lived before him
in frightful distinctness, and his very soul seemed to burn to cinder
before her serene, unearthly presence.

It was her ghost revisiting the earth. Was it to always thus torment
him?

"Thank God! It has gone."

The room became pitch dark, and he fell back upon the pillow in what
seemed to him a bloody sweat. He could not sleep, and for some time he
lay trembling on the bed and trying to collect his senses and decide
whether he was in possession of his reason or not.

Suddenly there was a flash of light, and a new vision sprang into
existence before him.

An angel in long white robes seemed to be flying through the air toward
him, and above her head she held a sword. Beneath her feet was the word
"NEMESIS!" in letters of glowing fire.

The poor wretch rose up in bed, kneeled down upon the mattress, and
facing the gigantic figure that seemed to float in the air above him,
cried aloud in broken gasps.

"Pardon! For--Christ----"

He threw up his arms and screamed in delirious terror.

The angel advanced through the air toward him and grew larger and
taller. She seemed ready to strike him to the ground--and she was gone.

He fell forward flat on his face, and tears gushed from his eyes in
torrents. For a while he lay thus moaning and crying, and then he rose,
staggered to the wash basin, bathed his face with cold water, and crept
shivering and trembling into bed.

       *       *       *       *       *

The storm moved slowly away. The lightning grew less frequent, and the
thunder rolled in more subdued tones. The wind subsided, but the rain
fell steadily and drearily. One who watched heard the clock strike
twelve and then one.

Slowly the laggard hours slipped away in silence. The rain fell in
monotonous showers. The darkness hung like a pall over everything.

The wretch in his bed tossed in sleepless misery. He hardly dared look
at the blackness of the night, for fear some new vision might affright
him with ghostly warnings. What had he better do? Another night in this
haunted room would drive him insane. Had he not better fly--leave all
and escape out of sight in the hiding darkness? Better abandon the
greater prize, take everything in reach, and fly from scenes so
terrible.

He rose softly, dressed completely, took a few essentials from his
table, did them up in a bundle, and then like a cat he crept out of the
room, never to return. The house was pitch dark and as silent as a tomb.
He had no need of a light, and, feeling his way along with his hands on
the wall, he stole down stairs and through the hall till he reached the
library door. With cautious fingers he turned the handle in silence and
pushed the door open. It seemed to catch on the threshold, but it was
only for an instant, and then he boldly entered the room.

Placing his bundle upon the table, he took out a small bunch of keys,
and with his hands outstretched before him he felt for the safe. It was
easily found, and then he put in the key, unlocked the door, and swung
it open. With familiar fingers he pulled out what he knew were mere
bills and documents, and then he found the small tin box in which--

A blinding glare, an awful flash of overpowering light blazed before
him. His eyes seemed put out by its bewildering intensity, and a little
scream of terror escaped from his lips. A hand seized him by the collar
and dragged him over backward upon the floor. The blazing, burning light
filled all the room with a glare more terrible than the lightning. He
recovered his sight, and saw Nemesis standing above him, revolver in
hand, and with a torch of magnesium wire blazing in horrid flames above
his head.

"Stir hand or foot, and--you understand. There are six chambers, and I'm
a good shot."

"Let me up, you fool, or I'll kill you."

"Oh! You surprise me, Mr. Belford. I thought it was a common robber."

"No, it is not--so lower your pistol."

"No, sir. You may rise, but make the slightest resistance, and I'll blow
your brains into muddy fragments. Sit in that chair, and when I've
secured you properly, I'll hear any explanation you may make. Your
conduct is very singular, Mr. Belford, to say the least. That's it. Sit
down in the arm chair. Now I'm going to tie you into it, and on the
slightest sign of resistance I shall fire."

The poor, cowed creature sank into the chair, and the son of science
placed his strange lamp upon the table. With the revolver still in
hand, he procured a match and lit a candle on the table. Then he
extinguished his torch, and the overpowering light gave place to a more
agreeable gloom. Then he took from his pocket a tiny electric bell and a
little battery made of a small ink bottle. Then he drew forth a small
roll of wire, and securing one end to the battery, with the revolver
still in hand, he walked round the chair three times, and bound the
thief into it with the slender wire.

"Stop this fooling, boy! Lower your revolver, and let me explain
matters."

"No, sir. When I have you fast so that you can do no harm, I talk with
you--not before. Hold back your head. That's it. Rest it against the
chair while I draw this wire over your throat."

"For God's sake, stop! Do you intend to garrote me?"

"No. Only I mean to make you secure."

"This won't hold me long. I'll break your wires in a flash, you little
fool."

"No, you will not. The moment the wire is parted that bell will ring,
and I shall begin firing, and keep it up till you are disabled or dead."

The man swore savagely, but the cold thread of insulated wire over his
throat thrilled his every nerve. It seemed some magic bond, mysterious,
wonderful, and dreadful. This cool man of science was an angel of awful
and incomprehensible power. His lamp of such mystic brilliance and that
battery quite unnerved his coward heart. What awful torture, what
burning flash of lightning might not rend him to blackened fragments if
the wires were broken! To such depths of puerile ignorance and terror
did the wretch sink in his guilty fancy. He dared not move a muscle lest
the wire break. The very thought of it filled him with unspeakable
agony. The son of science placed himself before his prisoner. With the
revolver at easy rest, he said:

"Mr. Belford, I am going to call help. Do not move while I open the
door."

In mortal terror the wretch turned his head round to see what was going
on. He managed to get a glimpse of the room without breaking the wire
round his throat, and he saw the young man stoop to the floor at the
door and pick up something. Then he made some strange and rapid motions
with the fingers of his right hand, while the left still steadied the
revolver.

For several minutes nothing happened. The two men glared at each other
in silence, and then there was a sound of opening doors. One closed with
an echoing slam that resounded strangely through the old house, and then
there were light footsteps in the hall.

"Oh! Elmer! What is it? What has happened?"

"Nothing very serious--merely a common burglar. I called you because I
wished help."

"Yes, I heard the bell, and I read your message in my room by the sound.
I dressed as quickly as possible. Is there no danger?"

"No. Stand back. Do not come into the room. Call the men, and let them
wake the gardener and his son. You yourself call your father, and bid
him dress and come down at once. And, Alma, keep cool and do not be
alarmed. I need you, Alma, and you must help me."

Then the house was very still, and the watcher paced up and down before
his prisoner in silence. There came a hasty opening of doors, and
excited steps and flaring lamps in the hall.

"'Tis the young doctor. Oh! By mighty! Here's troubles!"

"Quiet, men! Keep quiet. Come in. He cannot hurt you."

The three men, shivering and anxious, peered into the room with blanched
faces and chattering teeth.

"Have you a rope?"

The calm voice of the speaker reassured them, and all three volunteered
to go for one.

"No. One is enough. And one of you had better go to Mr. Denny's room and
help him down stairs. You, John, may stop with me."

"Gods! Sir, he will spring at me!"

"Never you fear. He's fastened into the chair. Besides----"

"Ay, sir, you've the little pet! That's the kind o' argiment."

"It is a rather nice weapon--six-shooter--Colt's."

Presently, with much clatter, the gardener's son brought a rope, and
then, under Mr. Franklin's directions, they bound the man in the chair
hand and foot.

A moment after they heard Mr. Denny's crutch stalking down the stairs,
and Alma's voice assuring him that there was indeed no danger--no danger
at all.

"What does this mean, Mr. Franklin?" said the old gentleman as he came
to the door.

"Burglary, sir. That is all. You need fear nothing. We have secured the
man."

Mr. Denny entered the room leaning on Alma's arm. He saw the open safe
and the papers strewed upon the floor, and he lifted his hand and shook
his head in alarm and trouble.

"A robbery! Would they ruin me utterly? Where is the villain?"

"There, sir."

Alma turned toward the man in the chair, and clung to her father in
terror. The old man lifted his crutch as if to strike.

"My curse be upon you and yours."

"Oh, father, come away. Leave the poor wretch. Perhaps he has taken
nothing."

The men gathered round in a circle, and Elmer drew near to Alma. She
felt his presence near her, and involuntarily put out her hand to touch
him.

"My curse fall on you! Who are you? What have I done to
you--you--viper?"

The man secured in the chair, and with the wire drawn tightly over his
throat, replied not a word.

Elmer advanced toward him, and Alma, with a little cry, tried to hinder
him.

"Do not fear. He cannot move. I will release his head, and perhaps you
will recognize him."

The wire about his throat was loosened, and the wretch lifted his head
into a more comfortable position.

"Ah!"

"Great Heavens! It is Mr. Belford!"

"Yes, sir," said he. "I forgot to put away some papers, and I came down
to secure them, and while I was here that wretch surprised me,
threatened to murder me, and finally overpowered me and bound me here as
you see. If you will ask him to release me, I will get up and explain
everything."

"It's a lie," screamed Mr. Denny, lifting his crutch. "I don't believe
you--you thief--you robber! It's a lie!"

"Oh, father!" cried Alma. "Release him--let him go. He will go away
then, and leave us. He has done wrong; but let him go. It must be some
awful mistake--some----"

"No! Never! never! ne--v----"

The word died away on his lips, for on the instant there was a loud ring
at the hall door. They all listened in silence. Again the importunate
bell pealed through the echoing house.

"It is some one in distress," said Elmer. "John, do you take a light and
go to the door. Ask what is wanted before you loose the chain, and tell
them to go away unless it is a case of life or death."

They listened in breathless interest to the confused sounds in the hall.
There was a moving of locks, and then rough voices talking in suppressed
whispers. The candles flared in the cold draught of wind that swept into
the room, and the sound of the rain in the trees filled the air. Then
the door closed, and John returned, and in an excited whisper said:

"It's Mr. Jones, the sheriff."

At this word Mr. Belford struggled with his bonds, and in a broken
voice he cried:

"Oh, Mr. Denny, spare me! Let me not be arrested. I will restore
every----"

"Silence, sir!" said Elmer. "Not a word till you are spoken to. What
does he want, John?"

"He says he must see Mr. Denny. It's very important--and, oh, sir, he's
a'most beside himself, and I wouldn't let him in."

"Call him in at once," said Mr. Denny. "It is a most fortunate arrival.
The very man we want."

John returned to the hall, and in a moment an old man, gray-haired and
wrinkled, but still vigorous and strong, stood before them. He seemed a
giant in his huge great-coat, and when he removed his hat his massive
head and thick neck seemed almost leonine.

"Ah! Mr. Sheriff, you have arrived at a most opportune moment. We were
just awakened from our beds by this robber. We captured him, and we have
him here."

"Beg pardon, sir. Sorry to hear it, but 'twere another errant that
brought me here. The widow Green's daughter, Alice, she that was
missing, has been found in the mill-race--dead."

They all gave expression to undisguised astonishment, and the prisoner
in the chair groaned heavily.

"And I have come for the key of the boat house, sir, that we may go for
the--body, sir."

"How horrible! When did all this happen?"

"We dunno, sir. I'd like the key ter once."

"Certainly--certainly, Mr. Sheriff. But this man--cannot you secure him
for the night?"

"Oh, ay. But the child, sir. The boys wants your boat to go for her."

"Poor, poor Alice!" cried Alma, wringing her hands.

"John," said Elmer, "get the key for Mr. Jones. Jake, you and your
father can go with the men, and, Mr. Jones, perhaps you had better wait
with us, for we have a little matter of importance to settle, and we
need you."

"Now," said Mr. Franklin, "I have one or two questions I wish to ask the
man, and then, Mr. Jones, you will do us a favor if you will take him
away.

"Lawrence Belford, as you value your soul, where did you obtain that
will?"

If a bolt from the storm overhead had entered the room, it could not
have produced a more startling impression than did this simple question.
Mr. Denny dropped his crutch, and raised both hands in astonishment.
Alma gave a half suppressed scream, and even the sheriff and John were
amazed beyond expression.

The man in the chair made no reply, and presently the breathless silence
was broken by the calm voice of the young man repeating his question.

"I found it in the leaves of a book in the old bookcase in the mill
office."

"What?" cried Mr. Denny, leaning forward and steadying himself by the
table. "My father's will! Did you find it? Release him, John. How can we
ever thank you, Mr. Belford? It is the missing will----"

"Oh, Lawrence!" said Alma. "Why did you not tell us? why did you not
show it? How much trouble it would have saved."

"Have patience, Alma. Let Mr. Belford rise and bring the will."

"No," said Mr. Franklin. "Hear the rest of the story. Mr. Belford, you
destroyed or suppressed that will, did you not?"

"Yes, I did--damn you!"

"Good Lord!" cried the sheriff. "Did ye hear that?--destroyed it! That's
State's prison."

"Oh, Mr. Franklin, Mr. Denny! have mercy on me! Do not let them arrest
me."

The poor creature seemed to be utterly cowed and crushed in an instant.

"Marcy!" said the sheriff, taking out a pair of handcuffs. "It's little
marcy ye'll git."

"You ask for mercy!" cried Mr. Denny, his face livid with passion.
"You--you wretch! Have you not ruined me? Have you not made my child a
beggar, and carried my gray hairs in sorrow to the grave? You knew the
value of this will--and you destroyed it! Your other crimes are as
nothing to this. I could forgive your monstrous frauds in my mills----"

Mr. Belford winced and looked surprised.

"Ay! wince you may. I have found out everything, thanks to--but I'll not
couple his name with yours. And the release of the mortgage--have you
that?"

"No, sir. It is in that bag on the table."

The old gentleman eagerly took up the bundle that lay on the table, and
began with trembling fingers to open it.

"Wait a moment, Mr. Denny," said Mr. Franklin. "I should like to ask
this man a question or two."

Mr. Denny paused, and there was a profound silence in the room.

"Lawrence Belford, if you are wise, you will speak the truth. That
release is a forgery--or at least it has no legal value."

"It is not worth a straw," replied the prisoner with cool impudence;
"and on the whole, I'm glad of it. The mortgage will be foreclosed
to-morrow."

"Your share will be small, Mr. Belford. I am afraid your partner will
find some difficulty in making a settlement with you, unless he joins
you in prison."

Mr. Denny sat heavily down in an arm-chair and groaned aloud. In vain
Alma, with choking voice, tried to comfort him. The blow was too
terrible for words, and for a moment or two there was a painful silence
in the room.

Mr. Franklin seemed nervous and excited. He fumbled in his pockets as if
in search of something. Presently he advanced toward the old gentleman
and said quietly:

"Mr. Denny, can you bear one more piece of news--one more link in this
terrible chain of crime?"

"Yes," he replied slowly. "There can be nothing worse than this. Speak,
my son--let us hear everything."

"I think, sir," said the young man reverently, "that I ought to thank
God that He has enabled me to bring such knowledge as He has given me to
your service."

Then after a brief pause he added:

"There is the will, sir."

With these words he held out a small bit of sheet glass about two inches
square.

"Where?" cried Mr. Denny in amazement. "I see nothing."

"There it is--on that piece of glass. That dusky spot in the centre is a
micro-photographic copy of your father's will."

"My son, my son, do not trifle with us in this our hour of trial."

"Far be it from me to do such a thing. Alma, will you please go to my
room and bring down my lantern? And John, you may go and help Miss
Denny. Bring a sheet from the spare bed also."

"I do not know what you mean, my son. You tell me the will is destroyed,
and you say you have a copy. Is it a legal copy? and how do you know it
is really my father's will? Have you read it?"

"Yes, sir. You shall read it too presently. I have already shown it to a
lawyer, and he pronounced it correct and perfectly legal."

"But why did you not tell us of it before?"

"I have only had it a few days, sir, and I wished first to crush or
capture this robber."

"Hadn't ye better let me take him off, sir?" said the sheriff. "He's
done enough to take him afore the grand jury. Besides, we have another
bitter bill against him down in the village."

"No," said Mr. Franklin. "Let him stay and see the will. It may interest
him to know that all his villainous plans are utterly overthrown."

"Shut up, you whelp," said the man in the chair.

"Shut up--ye," replied the sheriff, administering a stout cuff to the
prisoner's ear. "Ye best hold your tongue, man."

Just here Alma and John returned with the lantern. Under Elmer's
directions they hung the sheet over one of the windows, and then the
young man prepared his apparatus for a small trial of lantern
projections. Mr. Denny sat in his chair silent and wondering. He knew
not what to say or do, and watched these preparations with the utmost
attention.

"Mr. Sheriff, if you please, you will stand near Mr. Belford, to prevent
him from attempting mischief when I darken the room. John, you may put
out all the candles save one."

Alma took her father's hand and kneeled upon the floor beside him as if
to aid and comfort him.

"Now, John, set that candle just outside the door in the entry."

A sense of awe and fear fell on them all as the room became dark, and
none save the young son of science dared breathe. Suddenly a round spot
of light fell on the sheet, and its glare illuminated the room dimly.

"Before I show the will, Mr. Sheriff, I wish you to see a photo that may
be of use to you in that little matter in the village of which you were
speaking."

Two dusky figures slid over the disk of light. They grew more and more
distinct.

"Great God! It's Alice Green!"

A passion of weeping filled the room, and Elmer opened the lantern, and
the room became light. Alma, with her head bent upon her father's knee,
was bathed in tears.

"Poor, poor lost Alice!"

"And the fellow with her? Who is he?" cried the sheriff.

"That is Mr. Belford--Mr. Lawrence Belford," said Elmer with cool
confidence. "That picture was taken through a telescope from my room on
the morning of the 13th."

"The 13th! Why, man, that was the day she was missed."

"Yes. Mr. Belford was with her that day, and perhaps he can explain her
disappearance."

The prisoner groaned in abject terror and misery. He saw it all now. His
dream pictures were explained. His defeat and detection were
accomplished through the young man's science. That he should have been
overthrown by such simple means filled him with mortification and anger.

"You shall have the picture, Mr. Sheriff. You may need it at the trial.
And now for the will."

The room became again dark, and the figures on the wall stood out sharp
and distinct on the sheet. Then the picture faded away, and in its place
appeared writing--letters in black upon white ground:


                                "SALMON FALLS, June 1, 1863.

    "I, Edward Denny, do hereby leave and bequeath to my son, John
    Denny, all of my property, both real and personal. All other
    wills I have made are hereby annulled. My near death prevents a
    more formal will.

                                      "EDWARD DENNY.

          "Witness:

                "JOHN MAXWELL, M.D."

"My father's will. Thank----"

There was a heavy fall, and Elmer opened his lantern quickly. It was too
much for the old man. He had fallen upon the floor insensible.

"A light, John, quick."

They lifted him tenderly, and with Alma's help the old sheriff and the
serving man took him away to his room.

The moment the two men were alone, the prisoner in the chair broke out
in a torrent of curses and threats. The young man quietly took up his
revolver, and said sternly:

"Lawrence Belford, hold your peace. Your threats are idle. You insulted
me outrageously the day I came here. I bear you no malice, but when you
attempted your infamous plan to capture my cousin and to ruin her
father, I sprang to their rescue with such skill as I could command. We
shall not pursue you with undue rigor, but with perfect justice----"

"Oh, Mr. Franklin, have mercy upon me! Let me go! Let me escape before
they return. I will go away--far away! Save me, save me, sir! I never
harmed you. Have mercy upon me!"

"Had you shown mercy perhaps I might now. No, sir; justice before mercy.
Hark--the officer comes."

They unfastened the ropes about Belford, and released the wires, and in
silence he went away into the night, a broken-down, crushed, and ruined
man in the hands of his grisly Nemesis.

The young man flung himself upon the lounge in the library, and in a
moment was fast asleep.

       *       *       *       *       *

The red gold of the coming day crept up the eastern sky. The storm
became beautiful in its fleecy rains in the far south. As the stars
paled, the sweet breath of the cool west wind sprang up, shaking the
raindrops in showers from the trees. The birds sang and the day came on
apace.

To one who watched it seemed the coming of a fairer day than had ever
shone upon her life. The vanished storm, the fresh aspect of nature
moved her to tears of happiness. Long had she watched the stars. They
were the first signs of light and comfort she had discovered, and now
they paled before the sun. Thus she sat by the open window in the
library and watched with a prayer in her heart.

She looked at the mantel clock. Half past four. In half an hour the
house would be stirring. All was now safe. She could return to her room.
She rose and approached the sleeper on the lounge. He slept peacefully,
as if the events of the night disturbed him not.

He smiled in his dreams, and murmured a name indistinctly. She drew back
hastily and put her hand over her mouth, while a bright blush mounted to
her face. Just here, through the sweet, still air of the morning, came
the sound of the village bell. Tears gathered in her eyes and fell
unheeded upon her hands, clasped before her.

"Poor--lost--Alice--nineteen--just my----"

"Alma."

She turned toward the sleeper with a startled cry. He was awake and
sitting up.

"What bell is that?"

"It is tolling. They have found her."

"Yes, it is a sad story. Alma?"

She advanced toward him. He noticed her tears and the morning robe in
which she was dressed.

"What is it, Elmer? Do you feel better?"

"Yes. It was a sorry night for us."

"Yes, the storm has cleared away."

He did not seem to heed what she said.

"How long have you been up?"

"Since it happened. After I saw father up stairs, I came down and found
you here asleep. And Elmer--forgive me--it was wrong, but I did not mean
to stay here so long----"

"Alma!"

"You will pardon me?"

"Oh! Pardon you--pardon you--why should I? I dreamed the angels watched
me."

"I was anxious, and we owe you so much. We can never reward you--never!"

"Reward, Alma! I want none--save----"

"Save what?"

He opened his arms wide. A new and beautiful light came into her eyes.

"Can there be greater reward than love?"

"No. Love is the best reward--and it is yours."

                        CHARLES BARNARD.




THE MURDER OF MARGARY.


Our own politics have so absorbed the attention of the press and the
public for the last six months, that events of decided international
prominence have attracted merely a brief notice, instead of the careful
discussion which their importance warranted. Even the "Eastern
question," that has so long kept the European world in a state of
excitement and anxiety almost as intense and even more painful than that
in which our own country is now plunged, excited but a fitful interest
here. It was only by an effort that we could extend our political
horizon as far east as Constantinople. All beyond was comparative
darkness. In this darkness, however, history has gone steadily on
accumulating new and important data, which must be taken note of if we
would keep up with the record of the times.

The term "Eastern question" has come to mean the political complications
arising from the presence of the Turkish empire in Europe. The
expression might much more appropriately be applied to the serious
difficulties that have for the last year and a half existed between the
governments of England and China, and which have, as it now appears,
been brought to a reasonably satisfactory conclusion. These difficulties
sprang out of the murder of an English subject, Augustus Raymond Margary
by name, who was travelling in an official capacity in a remote part of
the Chinese empire. They were still further complicated by an almost
simultaneous attack upon a British exploring expedition that had just
crossed the Chinese frontier from Burmah, with the intention of
surveying and opening up to trade an overland route between that country
and the Middle Kingdom. To understand the matter it will be necessary to
give a brief recapitulation of some events that went before.

The vast importance of establishing an overland trade route between
India and China will be seen by a glance at the map. It has been the
unrealized dream of generations of India and China merchants. "The trade
route of the future" it has been called; and when we consider the vast
marts of commerce that such a highway would bring in direct contact, it
is impossible to think the name thus enthusiastically given an
exaggeration. An overland passage between China and Burmah has long been
known and made use of by the native merchants of these countries. From
time immemorial it has served as a highway for invading armies or
peaceful caravans. How highly the two governments appreciated its
importance to the commercial prosperity of their respective subjects is
shown by the clause in a treaty concluded by them in 1769, which
stipulated that the "gold and silver road" between the two countries
should always be kept open. European travellers in Eastern lands, from
the ubiquitous Marco Polo down, have also done their best to call
attention to it. It may therefore seem somewhat strange that England,
the commercial interest of whose Indian empire would be most directly
promoted by the opening up of this new channel of trade, should have
gone so long without paying much official attention to the matter.
Recent events, however, have proved, what was probably foreseen by those
whose business it was to study up the subject, that there were grave
practical difficulties to be overcome before the plan could be
successfully carried out.

In the first place it was necessary to secure the consent of both the
Burmese and Chinese governments--a task of almost insurmountable
difficulty because of the natural dislike of these two powers to share
with another the trade monopoly they had heretofore exclusively
enjoyed. Then again there lies between the civilizations of India and
China a broad tract of wild and mountainous country, inhabited by a
mongrel race of savages, known as Shans and Kakhyens, who, while
nominally owing allegiance to one or the other of their more civilized
neighbors, practically find their chief support in levying blackmail on
all people passing through their territory.

To fit out an exploring expedition strong enough to defy the attacks of
the savages, and yet small enough not to convey the idea of an invasion,
was, therefore, a work requiring much patience and diplomacy. At length,
however, in 1867, the British Government in India succeeded in gaining
the consent of the King of Burmah to the passage through his dominions
of a mission combining the necessary strength and limits. Under the
command of Major Slade, this little army made its way safely through the
debatable land of the Kakhyens and Shans, and, entering the province of
Yunnan, penetrated as far into the Chinese empire as the city of Momien.
But here its further progress was checked.

Yunnan was at the moment in the very crisis of a rebellion against the
imperial government. The population of the province is largely
Mohammedan. How the religion of the Prophet first obtained so firm a
foothold there is still for antiquaries to discover. A semi-historical
legend says that the germs of the faith were planted by a colony of
Arabs who settled in the country more than a thousand years ago. However
this may be, it is certain that the first Mohammedans were not Chinese.
By intermarriage, propagation, and adoption, they slowly but steadily
communicated their belief to the original inhabitants, until, at the
time of which we are writing, more than a tenth of the ten million
inhabitants were fanatical Mussulmans. To the mixed race that embrace
this creed the general name of Panthays has been given, though for what
reason is not known.

In 1855 the Panthays, oppressed, it is said, by the Chinese officials,
rose up in rebellion against the imperial government. Led by an obscure
Chinese follower of Mohammed, called Tu-win-tsen, the insurrection grew
rapidly in extent and success. One imperial city after the other fell
into the hands of the rebels, until the entire western section of the
province was in their possession and organized as a separate and
independent nation, under the sovereignty of Tu-win-tsen, who had in the
mean while assumed the more euphonious title of Sultan Soleiman.

It was when Soleiman had attained the height of his glory that Major
Slade's party entered Yunnan, and it was with him as the governor _de
facto_ that the British commander entered into negotiations. Such a
proceeding, though it may have been necessary, was fatal to the further
progress of the expedition. The Chinese authorities naturally refused to
pass on a party that had, however innocently, entered into friendly
relations with its rebellious subjects. Major Slade had the good sense
to understand this. The mission retraced its steps into Burmah, and the
exploration of the "trade route of the future" was indefinitely
postponed.

The visit of the English party to Momien was the signal for a rapid
downfall of Soleiman's power. The imperial government, seriously alarmed
at the practical recognition of the rebels' independence by an outside
power, now put forth all its might to reëstablish its authority. It was
successful.

Under the energetic command of one Li-sieh-tai, a famous general who had
once himself been a rebel, the Chinese armies wrested back the country,
foot by foot, to its former governors. In 1872 Tali-fu, the last and
most important stronghold of the rebellion, was closely invested. After
a desperate resistance, it was obliged to open its gates.

The end of Soleiman was dramatic in the extreme. He was told that his
followers should be spared if he himself would surrender. He agreed to
the terms, and, after administering a dose of poison to himself, his
three wives and five children, he mounted his chair, and was borne to
the camp of his enemies, where he arrived a corpse sitting erect, the
imperial turban on his head and the keys of his capital clasped tightly
in his hand. His head, preserved in honey, was sent to Peking. The
imperial troops poured into Tali-fu. A general massacre occurred. Those
Mohammedans that were not slaughtered fled to the mountains, where they
still continued to keep up a guerilla warfare. But the rebellion was
practically at an end, and by 1874 the authority of the central
government was firmly established throughout the province.

The trade between Burmah and China, which had ceased almost entirely
during the long years of the rebellion, again sprang into activity, and
once more the attention of the Indian government was attracted to it. In
1874 a new expedition of exploration was prepared and placed under the
command of Colonel Browne. The consent of the King of Burmah was
obtained, and the British minister in Peking, Mr. Thomas Wade, was
instructed to explain the object of the mission to the Chinese
government, so that it might receive no opposition upon crossing the
Chinese frontier. It was also arranged that a special messenger should
be despatched from Peking across China to the frontier to act as
interpreter to the expedition, and to prepare the mandarins along the
route for its approach. For this responsible and dangerous service,
Augustus Raymond Margary was selected--a young man attached to the
English consular department, a perfect master of the Chinese language
and customs, and a fine type of the best class of young Englishmen.

Provided with the necessary passports from the British minister,
countersigned by the Tsung-li-yamen, the Chinese foreign office, Mr.
Margary started on his journey. He went up the Yangtsze river as far as
Hankow in one of the huge American steamers of the Shanghai Steam
Navigation Company. At Hankow, on September 4, 1874, he bade good-by to
Western civilization, and, with a Chinese teacher and two or three
Chinese attendants, began his trip through a vast and populous country,
a _terra incognita_ to Europeans.

His diary of this journey has recently been published. It is interesting
in the extreme, though devoid of those startling episodes that generally
give charm to accounts of travels in unexplored lands.

He has no old theories to prove and no ambition to start new ones, but
simply jots down his impressions of people and things with no attempt at
elaboration. The result is, we have a plain, faithful, unvarnished
picture of Chinese life and manners, as seen by an intelligent,
unprejudiced man. Upon the whole, we think this picture most decidedly
favorable to the Chinese character.

Did space permit, we should like to follow Mr. Margary, stage by stage,
through his long journey of 900 miles. The first part, through the
provinces of Yunnan and Kwei-chow as far as the city of Ch'en-yuan-fu,
was made by boat--a long and monotonous trip of four weeks, through a
country so picturesque that the "sight was at last completely satiated
with the perpetual view of the most glorious scenery that ever made the
human heart leap with wonder and delight."

At Ch'en-yuan-fu he exchanged his boat for a chair, in which he
completed his journey; traversing Kwei-chow and Yunnan, and the
debatable hill land that lies between the latter province and Burmah;
arriving in Bhamo, on the Burmese side of the border, on January 17,
1875, where he joined the expedition of Colonel Browne that was
advancing to meet him.

Except in two or three instances, he was treated with courtesy by the
people and respect by the officials. In the exceptional cases a display
of his Chinese passports sufficed to quickly change the demeanor of the
mandarins; while a few calm words of rebuke upon their want of
politeness generally caused popular mobs to disperse abashed. An
instance of this is given by him in his account of his stay at Lo-shan,
a small naval station on the Yangtsze. In returning from a visit to the
mandarin of the place, he was surrounded by a dense crowd of street
rabble, leaping and screaming like maniacs, and shouting to one another:
"I say! Come along. Here's a foreigner. What a lark! Ha, ha, ha!"
Margary descended from his chair and delivered a short address:

"Why _do_ you crowd round me in this rude manner? Is this your courtesy
to strangers? I have often heard it said that China was of all things
distinguished for civility and courtesy. But am I to take this as a
specimen of it? Shall I go back and tell my countrymen that your boasted
civility only amounts to rudeness?" "I was astonished," he adds, "at the
effect this speech produced. They listened with silence, and when I had
done walked quietly back quite abashed. Only a few remained; and over
and again after this many an irrepressible youngster was severely
rebuked for any sign of disrespect by his elders."

Contrast this with the effect which such a speech as that of Margary's,
delivered by a Chinaman, would have had upon an English or American mob,
and we cannot repress a slight feeling of sympathy with the natives of
the Flowery Kingdom when they call us "outside barbarians."

His Chinese letters of recommendation, given him by the Tsung-li-yamen
to the viceroys of the three great provinces through which he passed,
proved of inestimable value. In the viceroy of Yunnan especially he
found an unexpected ally and friend, who issued instructions to the
officials all along the road to receive the foreigner with the utmost
respect. The extent to which these instructions were carried out
depended, of course, very largely on the temperament of the local
mandarins. "Some were obsequious, others reserved, but most of them met
me with high bred courtesy worthy of praise, and such as befits a
welcome from man to man."

"Taking all these experiences together," says Sir Rutherford Alcock,
formerly British minister to China, a gentleman by no means inclined to
judge Chinese officials favorably, "the impression left is decidedly to
the advantage of the central government so far as the _bona fides_ of
the safe-conduct given is concerned."

A great deal of Margary's success was also undoubtedly due to his
personal magnetism and thorough acquaintance with Chinese habits.
Indeed, no one can read this diary without deriving from it a high idea
of the genuine attractiveness and solidity of the author's character. In
sickness, in trouble, in delay, in vexation, there runs through it all a
refreshing, manly, Anglo-Saxon spirit. Knowing as we do what is coming,
we find ourselves involuntarily catching with hope at little incidents
that seem to delay onward march. Reading these pages, it is impossible
to realize that he who wrote them is dead. It is with a mournful feeling
of utter and fatalistic helplessness that we follow this young and
generous hero while he travels, all unconsciously, down to his death. To
the very last all seems to go well with him. At Manwyne, the last city
on his journey, the renowned and dreaded Li-sieh-tai, the suppressor of
the Mohammedan rebellion, actually prostrated himself before him and
paid him the highest honors, warning the assembled chiefs of the savage
hill people that they had best take good care of the stranger, as he
came protected by an imperial passport.

On the 16th of February, 1875, Colonel Browne's expedition, accompanied
by Margary, broke up their camp at Tsitkaw, in Burmah, and advanced
toward the Chinese frontier.

Arrangements had been made with the practically independent chieftains
of this wild region for the safe passage of the party through the hilly
country. As it advanced, however, ominous rumors of a projected attack
by the hill savages and Chinese frontiersmen reached the ears of its
members. Though these rumors were generally discredited, it was thought
best to send forward Margary as a pioneer, he being well known to the
people and officials of the Chinese border town of Manwyne. Margary
willingly undertook the mission. With his Chinese teacher and
attendants, he hastened on in advance, the rest of the expedition
following more slowly. The last communications that came from him were
dated "Seray," a town just inside the Chinese frontier. He reported that
thus far the road was unmolested and the people civil. On the strength
of these advices, Colonel Browne pressed on, crossed the Chinese
frontier, and advanced as far as Seray. It was here, on the morning of
February 21, that Margary and his attendants had all been murdered, near
Manwyne.

Hardly had the news been communicated when it was found that the
expedition was surrounded by a large body of armed men, who instantly
began an attack. The assailants, a motley crowd of Kakhyens and Chinese
border men, were soon repulsed; but as reports came streaming in that
large bodies of Chinese train bands were advancing to their aid, it was
thought best to beat a retreat. This was safely effected, and by the
26th of February the expedition found itself once more at Bhamo. Thus
mournfully ended the second attempt to explore "the trade route of the
future."

       *       *       *       *       *

The mere fact that a British subject had been murdered, and a British
exploring expedition attacked on Chinese soil, would in itself have
created a grave subject for diplomatic discussion between the
governments of England and China. But the matter was rendered doubly
serious by the presence of many circumstances tending to show that the
outrage had been committed with the tacit connivance, if not at the
direct instigation, of the provincial authorities of Yunnan. The whole
affair, it was claimed, was not the result of an outbreak of
booty-seeking savages, but the culmination of a systematic plot on the
part of the Chinese officials.

In laying the matter before Prince Kung, Mr. Wade, the English minister,
plainly implied that such was his opinion, and demanded from the Chinese
government the promptest and most searching investigation.

An imperial decree was at once issued, commanding the governor of Yunnan
to proceed at once to the spot and enter upon a thorough examination of
the case. Mr. Wade, however, demanded some securer guarantee that strict
justice should be done. He submitted to the Tsung-li-yamen an ultimatum
containing three principal conditions: that such British officials as he
might see fit to appoint should go to Yunnan and assist at the
investigation; that passports should be immediately issued, to enable
another expedition to enter Yunnan by the same route; and that a sum of
$150,000 be placed in his hands as a guarantee of good faith. The
Chinese government demurred at first to these demands, but the threat of
Mr. Wade to leave Peking unless they were accepted before a certain day
finally caused it to give a reluctant consent. Some months were then
spent in diplomatic wrangling over the conditions under which the
British officials should proceed to Yunnan, and what their powers should
be on their arrival there. The Chinese government showed, in the opinion
of Mr. Wade, a strong desire to avoid fulfilling its part of the
contract. The negotiations on several occasions assumed an acute
character of danger. Both parties prepared for war. The English minister
concentrated the English fleet in the China seas; the Chinese government
bought up large supplies of arms and ammunition. But Prince Kung and his
advisers had the good sense to see that the chances in a struggle of
arms would be too unequal, and always submitted at the last moment. At
last the Chinese government, having agreed to all the preliminary
conditions, and having also despatched a high officer, Li-hang-chang, to
Yunnan to thoroughly investigate the affair, "without regard to
persons," the British minister agreed to let the English mission of
investigation proceed. Mr. Grosvenor, a secretary of legation, was
placed at its head. Li-hang-chang went on in advance.

This high official seems to have done his duty in a spirit of strict
impartiality. His reports to the government make no attempt to conceal
the guilt of the provincial officials, or to shield them from deserved
punishment. He immediately ordered the arrest of the general commanding
at Momien and a number of other local officers, pushing his inquiries
with vigor and with what appears a sincere desire to arrive at the
ground facts. In the course of his labors he came to the conclusion that
Li-sieh-tai, whom we have already mentioned, was one of the instigators,
probably the chief one, of the attack on the mission. He at once
memorialized the throne to have him arrested and brought up for trial.
In this memorial he gives what seems to us, upon an unprejudiced
comparison of testimony, the truest version of the affair. He believes
the murder of Margary and his attendants to have been the work of
"lawless offenders," greedy of gain, but that the attack upon Colonel
Browne's party was made at the secret instigation of Li-sieh-tai and
other provincial officials, although that general was not on the spot,
nor were there any soldiers concerned in the assault. He shows that
Li-sieh-tai had already written to the governor of Yunnan, telling him
that he (Li) was "taking vigorous measures to protect the region against
invasion," and that the governor had written back commanding him to stop
all further proceedings and quiet the apprehensions of the people. This
command, however, was not received until after the murder and attack had
taken place. "It appears from this, consequently" (the report adds),
"that although Li-sieh-tai had no intention of committing murder, he is
liable to a charge of having laid plans to obstruct the expedition; and
your servants have agreed, after taking counsel together, that he should
not be suffered to take advantage of his official rank as a cover for
lying evasions, gaining time with false statements, in dread of
incurring punishment."

Immediately upon receipt of this memorial a decree appeared in the
Peking "Gazette" ordering Li-sieh-tai to be degraded from his rank, and
commanding him to proceed at once to Yunnan for trial before the high
commission.

As we have said before, we think Li-hang-chang's account is
substantially correct. There are a great many circumstances tending to
exculpate Li-sieh-tai from any wish to have Margary murdered. Had such
been his wish, he might more easily have disposed of him when he passed
through _en route_ for Burmah. Moreover, at the very time of Margary's
murder, Mr. Elias, a member of the expedition, who had struck off from
the main body in order to explore another route to Momien, was
entertained by Li-sieh-tai at Muangnow, a town at some distance from the
seat of the murder. Though completely in his power, Mr. Elias received
all possible civility compatible with a determined and successful
opposition to his further advance. Now it seems absurd to believe that
Li-sieh-tai felt any stronger personal dislike for Margary than he felt
for Mr. Elias.

In regard to his complicity in the attack on the expedition, the
evidence is just as strong on the other side. He had a deep and by no
means unnatural prejudice against English exploring parties. The last
mission of the kind had entered into negotiations, as we have already
mentioned, with the enemies against whom this Chinese general was
prosecuting bitter war. The smouldering embers of the rebellion were not
even yet entirely extinguished; the presence of an armed body of
foreigners, no matter how small, who had previously shown a friendly
disposition toward the Mohammedan usurpation, might awaken new hopes in
the breasts of the still surviving rebels. This feeling, combined with
the jealous wish of the border merchants, both Chinese and Burmese, to
retain a monopoly of the overland trade, undoubtedly inspired a general
feeling of hostility among the local officials and the people, which
found a ready instrument in the greedy and savage character of the
frontier tribes. Where so much combustible matter was heaped up, it
needed but a hint to bring on the catastrophe that followed.

While Li-hang-chang and the Chinese commission were conducting the
preliminary investigations, Mr. Grosvenor and his colleagues were
approaching. Their journey across the empire was attended not only with
no opposition or difficulty, but they were received everywhere with
great and even obsequious respect. Upon arriving in Yunnan they found an
immense pile of evidence awaiting their inspection. Mr. Grosvenor's
report has not yet been published, we believe, but from general rumor,
and the fact that nothing has been heard to the contrary, we are
justified in believing that he found the state of the case to be
substantially as it was reported by the Chinese high commissioner. After
having reviewed the evidence presented, after having witnessed the
execution of a number of wretches convicted of direct complicity in the
murder of Margary, the Grosvenor commission pursued its way, escorted by
troops that had been despatched from Burmah for the purpose.

Diplomatic negotiations were once more transferred to Peking, and turned
upon the compensation to be offered by China for the violation of
international law that had occurred upon her soil. The demands of the
British minister, who had in the mean time been knighted as Sir Thomas
Wade by the Queen, as a just acknowledgment of his efficient services,
were considered too severe by the Chinese government, and at one time it
looked as if all further negotiations would be broken off.

Sir Thomas finally carried his threat to leave Peking into execution.
Prince Kung had evidently not expected so decided a step, and was
seriously alarmed by it, for the Chinese government have shown
throughout the affair a very wise disposition not to push matters to the
last extreme. Li-wang-chang (a brother, we believe, of the official who
was sent to Yunnan), the governor of the province of Chihli, the highest
and most powerful statesman in the country, was immediately granted
extraordinary powers, and sent after the English minister. After some
diplomatic fencing Sir Thomas agreed to meet the Chinese envoy at
Chefoo--a seaport about half way between Shanghai and Peking, a great
summer resort of the foreigners in China--the Newport of the eastern
world. Here, in the month of September, 1876, with much surrounding pomp
and ceremony, a convention was signed between the English and the
Chinese plenipotentiaries. The final settlement of the difficulty was
celebrated by a grand banquet, given by Li-wang-chang to Sir Thomas and
the other foreign ambassadors, who had been drawn to Chefoo by their
interest in the negotiations.

The following is a synopsis of the agreement:

     1. An imperial edict to be published throughout the Chinese
     empire, setting forth the facts of the affair, subject to the
     directions and approval of the British minister.

     2. Consular officials to visit the various towns and public
     places to see that the said imperial edict is posted where all
     can see it.

     3. The family of Margary to be paid about $250,000 indemnity.

     4. A further indemnity to be given, covering all expenses of
     the unsuccessful expedition under Colonel Browne.

     5. A special embassy of apology to be sent to England.

Then follow a number of concessions with regard to placing on a better
footing the relations of foreign ambassadors to the Chinese authorities,
the enlargement of the foreign settlement at Shanghai, etc.

But by far the most important clause is that opening up to foreign trade
four new ports on the Yangtsze river. This concession is virtually
equivalent to throwing open the whole interior of the country to foreign
merchants.

Altogether the British minister has certainly won a triumph that well
deserved a knighthood.

Undoubtedly he had a very strong indictment against the Chinese
authorities, although we cannot help regarding the matter of the murder
and the attack as more the misfortune than the fault of the central
government. Nevertheless, western nations are fully justified in rigidly
holding the Peking authorities responsible for any violation of
international duties committed anywhere within their jurisdiction; and
it is not only fair, but expedient, that when such cases do occur some
practical and important reparation should be made for them. The
concessions obtained by Sir Thomas Wade, though sweeping, are not, in
our opinion, excessive. On the other hand, the Chinese government by
granting them has fully satisfied the demands of justice. It could not
have gone further without losing the respect and incurring the dangerous
opposition of its people. Indeed, throughout the negotiations Prince
Kung and his advisers have had to contend against a powerful
anti-foreign party in the court and the nation. Strong fears were
entertained more than once that the reactionary element would get the
upper hand. Some idea of Prince Kung's difficulties may be conceived
when we read that one morning the walls of Peking were found covered
with placards bitterly denouncing the policy of the government, and
calling upon all good subjects to rise up against such unpatriotic
leaders.

When Li-wang-chang, who enjoys great popularity in his province, was en
route for Chefoo to negotiate with Sir Thomas Wade, the people of
Tien-tsin made the most determined efforts to prevent him from going
further. For a time he was literally besieged in his own _yamen_, and it
was only by the publication of a proclamation warning the people that
they were guilty of rebellion against the emperor when they hindered the
progress of his representatives, that the opposition was withdrawn.

Sir Thomas deserves the highest praise for going just far enough and no
further in his demands. Yet the last mail from China brings the news
that the foreign residents there are intensely dissatisfied with the
result of the settlement. This was to be expected. Any settlement short
of one effected by war would have met the disapproval of these gentry.
The interests of the Chinese and the foreign merchants are too
antagonistic to admit of impartial judgment on questions of this sort.
England, in their opinion, could gain greater concessions by war than by
negotiations--ergo, they would have all such troubles settled by "blood
and iron."

The London "Times" puts it very well when it says:

"Those Englishmen who reside in the treaty ports are not impartial
judges of the concessions. Too often they go to Canton or Shanghai in a
frame of mind that would exasperate a much less vain people than the
Chinese. They sometimes talk as if they thought it a mere impertinence
on the part of an inferior race to have a pride of its own, and they act
as if the chief end of the Chinese were to minister to the demands of
British trade."

                        WALTER A. BURLINGAME.




THE LETTERS OF HONORÉ DE BALZAC.


The first feeling of the reader of the two volumes which have lately
been published under the foregoing title is that he has almost done
wrong to read them. He reproaches himself with having taken a shabby
advantage of a person who is unable to defend himself. He feels as one
who has broken open a cabinet or rummaged an old desk. The contents of
Balzac's letters are so private, so personal, so exclusively his own
affairs and those of no one else, that the generous critic constantly
lays them down with a sort of dismay, and asks himself in virtue of what
peculiar privilege, or what newly discovered principle it is, that he is
thus burying his nose in them. Of course he presently reflects that he
has not broken open a cabinet nor violated a desk, but that these
repositories have been very freely and confidently emptied into his lap.
The two stout volumes of the "Correspondence de H. de Balzac,
1819-1850,"[1] lately put forth, are remarkable, like many other French
books of the same sort, for the almost complete absence of editorial
explanation or introduction. They have no visible sponsor; only a few
insignificant lines of preface and the scantiest possible supply of
notes. Such as the book is, in spite of its abruptness, we are thankful
for it; in spite, too, of our bad conscience. What we mean by our bad
conscience is the feeling with which we see the last remnant of charm,
of the graceful and the agreeable, removed from Balzac's literary
physiognomy. His works had not left much of this favoring shadow, but
the present publication has let in the garish light of full publicity.
The grossly, inveterately professional character of all his activity,
the absence of leisure, of contemplation, of disinterested experience,
the urgency of his consuming money-hunger--all this is rudely exposed.
It is always a question whether we have a right to investigate a man's
life for the sake of anything but his official utterances--his results.
The picture of Balzac's career which is given in these letters is a
record of little else but painful processes, unrelieved by reflections
or speculations, by any moral or intellectual emanation. To prevent
misconception, however, we hasten to add that they tell no disagreeable
secrets; they contain nothing for the lovers of scandal. Balzac was a
very honest man, but he was a man almost tragically uncomfortable, and
the unsightly underside of his discomfort stares us full in the face.
Still, if his personal portrait is without ideal beauty, it is by no
means without a certain brightness, or at least a certain richness of
coloring. Huge literary ogre as he was, he was morally nothing of a
monster. His heart was capacious, and his affections vigorous; he was
powerful, coarse, and kind.

The first letter in the series is addressed to his elder sister, Laure,
who afterward became Mme. de Surville, and who, after her illustrious
brother's death, published in a small volume some agreeable
reminiscences of him. For this lady he had, especially in his early
years, a passionate affection. He had in 1819 come up to Paris from
Touraine, in which province his family lived, to seek his fortune as a
man of letters. The episode is a strange and gloomy one. His vocation
for literature had not been favorably viewed at home, where money was
scanty; but the parental consent, or rather the parental tolerance, was
at last obtained for his experiment. The future author of the "Père
Goriot" was at this time but twenty years of age, and in the way of
symptoms of genius had nothing but a very robust self-confidence to
show. His family, who had to contribute to his support while his
masterpieces were a-making, appear to have regretted, the absence of
further guarantees. He came to Paris, however, and lodged in a garret,
where the allowance made him by his father kept him neither from
shivering nor from nearly starving. The situation had been arranged in a
way very characteristic of French manners. The fact that Honoré had gone
to Paris was kept a secret from the friends of the family, who were told
that he was on a visit to a cousin in the South. He was on probation,
and if he failed to acquire literary renown, his excursion should be
hushed up. This pious fraud did not contribute to the comfort of the
young scribbler, who was afraid to venture abroad by day lest he should
be seen by an acquaintance of the family. Balzac must have been at this
time miserably poor. If he goes to the theatre, he has to pay for the
pleasure by fasting. He wishes to see Talma (having to go to the play,
to keep up the fiction of his being in the South, in a latticed box). "I
shall end by giving in.... My stomach already trembles." Meanwhile he
was planning a tragedy of "Cromwell," which came to nothing, and writing
the "Héritière de Birague," his first novel, which he sold for one
hundred and sixty dollars. Through these early letters, in spite of his
chilly circumstances, there flows a current of youthful ardor, gayety,
and assurance. Some passages in his letters to his sister are a sort of
explosion of animal spirits:

     Ah, my sister, what torments it gives us--the love of glory!
     Long live grocers! they sell all day, count their gains in the
     evening, take their pleasure from time to time at some
     frightful melodrama--and behold them happy! Yes, but they pass
     their time between cheese and soap. Long live rather men of
     letters! Yes, but these are all beggars in pocket, and rich
     only in conceit. Well, let us leave them all alone, and long
     live every one!

Elsewhere he scribbles: "Farewell, _soror_! I hope to have a letter
_sororis_ to answer _sorori_, then to see _sororem_," etc. Later, after
his sister is married, he addresses her as "_the box that contains
everything pleasing; the elixir of virtue, grace, and beauty; the jewel,
the phenomenon of Normandy; the pearl of Bayeux, the fairy of St.
Lawrence, the virgin of the Rue Teinture, the guardian angel of Caen,
the goddess of enchantments, the treasure of friendship_."

We shall continue to quote, without the fear of our examples exceeding,
in the long run, our commentary. "Find me some widow, a rich heiress,"
he writes to his sister at Bayeux, whither her husband had taken her to
live. "You know what I mean. Only brag about me. Twenty-two years old, a
good fellow, good manners, a bright eye, fire, the best dough for a
husband that heaven has ever kneaded. I will give you five per cent. on
the dowry." "Since yesterday," he writes in another letter, "I have
given up dowagers and have come down to widows of thirty. Send all you
find to Lord Rhoone [this remarkable improvisation was one of his early
_noms de plume_]; that's enough--he is known at the city limits. Take
notice. They are to be sent prepaid, without crack or repair, and they
are to be rich and amiable. Beauty isn't required. The varnish goes, and
the bottom of the pot remains!"

Like many other young men of ability, Balzac felt the little rubs--or
the great ones--of family life. His mother figures largely in these
volumes (she survived her glorious son), and from the scattered
reflection of her idiosyncrasies the attentive reader constructs a
sufficiently vivid portrait. She was the old middle-class Frenchwoman
whom he has so often seen--devoted, active, meddlesome, parsimonious,
exacting veneration, and expending zeal. Honoré tells his sister:

     The other day, coming back from Paris much bothered, it never
     occurred to me to thank _maman_ for a black coat which she had
     had made for me; at my age one isn't particularly sensitive to
     such a present. Nevertheless, it would not have cost me much to
     seem touched by the attention, especially as it was a
     sacrifice. But I forgot it. _Maman_ began to pout, and you know
     what her aspect and her face amount to at those moments. I fell
     from the clouds, and racked my brain to know what I had done.
     Happily Laurence [his younger sister] came and notified me,
     and two or three words as fine as amber mended _maman's_
     countenance. The thing is nothing--a mere drop of water; but
     it's to give you an example of our manners. Ah, we are a jolly
     set of originals in our holy family. What a pity I can't put us
     into novels!

His father wished to find him an opening in some profession, and the
thought of being made a notary was a bugbear to the young man: "Think of
me as dead, if they cap me with that extinguisher." And yet, in the next
sentence, he breaks out into a cry of desolate disgust at the aridity of
his actual circumstances: "They call this mechanical rotation
living--this perpetual return of the same things. If there were only
something to throw some charm or other over my cold existence. I have
none of the flowers of life, and yet I am in the season in which they
bloom. What will be the use of fortune and pleasures when my youth has
departed? What need of the garments of an actor if one no longer plays a
part? An old man is a man who has dined, and who watches others eat; and
I, young as I am--my plate is empty, and I am hungry. Laure, Laure, my
two only and immense desires, _to be famous and to be loved_--will they
ever be satisfied?"

These occasional bursts of confidence in his early letters to his sister
are (with the exception of certain excellent pages, addressed in the
last years of his life to the lady he eventually married) Balzac's most
delicate, most emotional utterances. There is a touch of the ideal in
them. Later, one wonders where he keeps his ideal. He has one of course,
artistically, but it never peeps out. He gives up talking sentiment, and
he never discusses "subjects"; he only talks business. Meanwhile,
however, at this period, business was increasing with him. He agrees to
write three novels for eight hundred and twenty dollars. Here begins the
inextricable mystery of Balzac's literary promises, pledges, projects,
and contracts. His letters form a swarming register of schemes and
bargains through which he passes like a hero of the circus, riding half
a dozen piebald coursers at once. We confess that in this matter we have
been able to keep no sort of account; the wonder is that Balzac should
have accomplished the feat himself. After the first year or two of his
career, we never see him working upon a single tale; his productions
dovetail and overlap, and dance attendance upon each other in the most
bewildering fashion. As soon as one novel is fairly on the stocks he
plunges into another, and while he is rummaging in this with one hand,
he stretches out a heroic arm and breaks ground in a third. His plans
are always vastly in advance of his performance; his pages swarm with
titles of books that were never to be written. The title circulates with
such an assurance that we are amazed to find, fifty pages later, that
there is no more of it than of the cherubic heads. With this, Balzac was
constantly paid in advance by his publishers--paid for works not begun,
or barely begun; and the money was as constantly spent before the
equivalent had been delivered. Meanwhile more money was needed, and new
novels were laid out to obtain it; but prior promises had first to be
kept. Keeping them, under these circumstances, was not an exhilarating
process; and readers familiar with Balzac will reflect with wonder that
these were yet the circumstances in which some of his best tales were
written. They were written, as it were, in the fading light, by a man
who saw night coming on, and yet couldn't afford to buy candles. He
could only hurry. But Balzac's way of hurrying was all his own; it was a
sternly methodical haste, and might have been mistaken, in a more
lightly-weighted genius, for elaborate trifling. The close tissue of his
work never relaxed; he went on doggedly and insistently, pressing it
down and packing it together, multiplying erasures, alterations,
repetitions, transforming proof-sheets, quarrelling with editors,
enclosing subject within subject, accumulating notes upon notes.

The letters make a jump from 1822 to 1827, during which interval he had
established, with borrowed capital, a printing house, and seen his
enterprise completely fail. This failure saddled him with a mountain of
debt which pressed upon him crushingly for years, and of which he rid
himself only toward the close of his life. Balzac's debts are another
labyrinth in which we do not profess to hold a clue. There is scarcely a
page of these volumes in which they are not alluded to, but the reader
never quite understands why they should bloom so perennially. The
liabilities incurred by the collapse of the printing scheme can hardly
have been so vast as not to have been for the most part cancelled by ten
years of heroic work. Balzac appears not to have been extravagant; he
had neither wife nor children (unlike many of his comrades, he had no
illegitimate offspring), and when he admits us to a glimpse of his
domestic economy, we usually find it to be of a very meagre pattern. He
writes to his sister in 1827 that he has not the means either to pay the
postage of letters or to use omnibuses, and that he goes out as little
as possible, so as not to wear out his clothes. In 1829, however, we
find him in correspondence with a duchess, Mme. d'Abrantès, the widow of
Junot, Napoleon's rough marshal, and author of those voluminous memoirs
upon the imperial court which it was the fashion to read in the early
part of the century. The Duchess d'Abrantès wrote bad novels, like
Balzac himself at this period, and the two became good friends.

The year 1830 was the turning point in Balzac's career. Renown, to which
he had begun to lay siege in Paris in 1820, now at last began to show
symptoms of self-surrender. Yet one of the strongest expressions of
discontent and despair in the pages before us belongs to this brighter
moment. It is also one of the finest passages:

     Sacredieu, my good friend, I believe that literature, in the
     day we live in, is no better than the trade of a woman of the
     town, who prostitutes herself for a dollar. It leads to
     nothing. I have an itch to go off and wander and explore, make
     of my life a drama, risk my life; for, as for a few miserable
     years more or less!... Oh, when one looks at these great skies
     of a beautiful night, one is ready to  unbutton----

But the modesty of the English tongue forbids us to translate the rest
of the phrase. Dean Swift might have related how Balzac wished to
express his contempt for all the royalties of the earth. Now that he is
in the country, he goes on:

     I have been seeing real splendors, such as fine, sound fruit
     and gilded insects; I have been quite turning philosopher, and
     if I happen to tread upon an anthill, I say, like that immortal
     Bonaparte, "These creatures are men: what is it to Saturn, or
     Venus, or the North Star?" And then my philosopher comes down
     to scribble "items" for a newspaper. _Proh pudor!_ And so it
     seems to me that the ocean, a brig, and an English vessel to
     sink, if you must sink yourself to do it, are rather better
     than a writing-desk, a pen, and the Rue St. Denis.

But Balzac was fastened to the writing desk. In 1831 he tells one of his
correspondents that he is working fifteen or sixteen hours a day. Later,
in 1837, he describes himself repeatedly as working eighteen hours out
of the twenty-four. In the midst of all this (it seems singular), he
found time for visions of public life, of political distinction. In a
letter written in 1830 he gives a succinct statement of his political
views, from which we learn that he approved of the French monarchy
having a constitution, and of instruction being diffused among the lower
orders. But he desired that the people should be kept "under the most
powerful yoke possible," so that in spite of their instruction they
should not become disorderly. It is fortunate, probably, both for Balzac
and for France, that his political rôle was limited to the production of
a certain number of forgotten editorials in newspapers; but we may be
sure that his dreams of statesmanship were brilliant and audacious.
Balzac indulged in no dreams that were not.

Some of his best letters are addressed to Mme. Zulma Carraud, a lady
whose acquaintance he had made through his sister Laure, of whom she
was an intimate friend, and whose friendship (exerted almost wholly
through letters, as she always lived in the country) appears to have
been one of the brightest and most salutary influences of his life. He
writes to her in 1832:

     There are vocations which we must obey, and something
     irresistible draws me on to glory and power. It is not a happy
     life. There is within me the worship of woman (_le culte de la
     femme_), and a need of love which has never been fully
     satisfied. Despairing of ever being loved and understood by
     such a woman as I have dreamed of, having met her only under
     one form, that of the heart, I throw myself into the
     tempestuous sphere of political passions and into the stormy
     and desiccating atmosphere of literary glory. I shall fail
     perhaps on both sides; but, believe me, if I have wished to
     live the life of the age itself, instead of running my course
     in happy obscurity, it is just because the pure happiness of
     mediocrity has failed me. When one has a fortune to make, it is
     better to make it great and illustrious; because, pain for
     pain, it is better to suffer in a high sphere than in a low
     one, and I prefer dagger blows to pin pricks.

All this, though written at thirty years of age, is rather juvenile;
there was to be much less of the "tempest" in Balzac's life than is here
foreshadowed. He was tossed and shaken a great deal, as we all are, by
the waves of the time, but he was too stoutly anchored at his work to
feel the winds.

In 1832 "Louis Lambert" followed the "Peau de Chagrin," the first in the
long list of his masterpieces. He describes "Louis Lambert" as "a work
in which I have striven to rival Goethe and Byron, Faust and Manfred. I
don't know whether I shall succeed, but the fourth volume of the
'Philosophical Tales' must be a last reply to my enemies and give the
presentiment of an incontestable superiority. You must therefore forgive
the poor artist his fatigue [he is writing to his sister], his
discouragements, and especially his momentary detachment from any sort
of interest that does not belong to his subject. 'Louis Lambert' has
cost me so much work! To write this book I have had to read so many
books! Some day or other, perhaps, it will throw science into new paths.
If I had made it a purely learned work, it would have attracted the
attention of thinkers, who now will not drop their eyes upon it. But if
chance puts it into their hands, perhaps they will speak of it!" In this
passage there is an immense deal of Balzac--of the great artist who was
so capable at times of self-deceptive charlatanism. "Louis Lambert," as
a whole, is now quite unreadable; it contains some admirable
descriptions, but the "scientific" portion is mere fantastic verbiage.
There is something extremely characteristic in the way Balzac speaks of
its having been optional with him to make it a "purely learned" work.
His pretentiousness was simply colossal, and there is nothing surprising
in his wearing the mask even _en famille_ (the letter we have just
quoted from is, as we have said, to his sister); he wore it during his
solitary fifteen-hours sessions in his study. But the same letter
contains another passage, of a very different sort, which is in its way
as characteristic:

     Yes, you are right. My progress is real, and my infernal
     courage will be rewarded. Persuade my mother of this too, dear
     sister; tell her to give me her patience in charity; her
     devotion will be laid up in her favor. One day, I hope, a
     little glory will pay her for everything. Poor mother, that
     imagination of hers which she has given me throws her for ever
     from north to south and from south to north. Such journeys tire
     us; I know it myself! Tell my mother that I love her as when I
     was a child. As I write you these lines my tears start--tears
     of tenderness and despair; for I feel the future, and I need
     this devoted mother on the day of triumph! When shall I reach
     it? Take good care of our mother, Laure, for the present and
     the future.... Some day, when my works are unfolded, you will
     see that it must have taken many hours to think and write so
     many things; and then you will absolve me of everything that
     has displeased you, and you will excuse, not the selfishness of
     the man (the man has none), but the selfishness of the worker.

Nothing can be more touching than that; Balzac's natural affections were
as robust as his genius and his physical nature. The impression of the
reader of his letters quite confirms his assurance that the man proper
had no selfishness. Only we are constantly reminded that the man had
almost wholly resolved himself into the worker, and we remember a
statement of Sainte-Beuve's, in one of his malignant foot-notes, to the
effect that Balzac was "the grossest, greediest example of literary
vanity that he had ever known"--_l'amour-propre littéraire le plus avide
et le plus grossier que j'aie connu_. When we think of what Sainte-Beuve
must have known in this line, these few words acquire a portentous
weight.

By this time (1832) Balzac was, in French phrase, thoroughly _lancé_. He
was doing, among other things, some of his most brilliant work, certain
of the "Contes Drôlatiques." These were written, as he tells his mother,
for relaxation, as a rest from harder labor. One would have said that no
work would have been much harder than compounding the marvellously
successful imitation of mediæval French in which these tales are
written. He had, however, other diversions as well. In the autumn of
1832 he was at Aix-les-Bains with the Duchess of Castries, a great lady,
and one of his kindest friends. He has been accused of drawing portraits
of great ladies without knowledge of originals; but Mme. de Castries was
an inexhaustible fund of instruction upon this subject. Three or four
years later, speaking of the story of the "Duchesse de Laugeais" to one
of his correspondents, another _femme du monde_, he tells her that as a
_femme du monde_ she is not to pretend to find flaws in the picture, a
high authority having read the proofs for the express purpose of
removing them. The authority is evidently the Duchess of Castries.

Balzac writes to Mme. Carraud from Aix: "At Lyons I corrected 'Lambert'
again. I licked my cub, like a she bear.... On the whole, I am
satisfied; it is a work of profound melancholy and of science. Truly, I
deserve to have a mistress, and my sorrow at not having one increases
daily; for love is my life and my essence.... I have a simple little
room," he goes on, "from which I see the whole valley. I rise pitilessly
at five o'clock in the morning, and work before my window until
half-past five in the evening. My breakfast comes from the club--an egg.
Mme. de Castries has good coffee made for me. At six o'clock we dine
together, and I pass the evening with her. She is the finest type (_le
type le plus fin_) of woman; Mme. de Beauséant [from "Le Père Goriot"]
improved; only, are not all these pretty manners acquired at the expense
of the soul?"

During his stay at Aix he met an excellent opportunity to go to Italy;
the Duke de Fitz-James, who was travelling southward, invited him to
become a member of his party. He discourses the economical problem (in
writing to his mother) with his usual intensity, and throws what will
seem to the modern traveller the light of enchantment upon that golden
age of cheapness. Occupying the fourth place in the carriage of the
Duchess of Castries, his quarter of the total travelling expenses from
Geneva to Rome (carriage, beds, food, etc.) was to be fifty dollars! But
he was ultimately prevented from joining the party. He went to Italy
some years later.

He mentions, in 1833, that the chapter entitled "Juana," in the superb
tale of "The Maranas," as also the story of "La Grenadière," was written
in a single night. He gives at the same period this account of his
habits of work: "I must tell you that I am up to my neck in excessive
work. My life is mechanically arranged. I go to bed at six or seven in
the evening, with the chickens; I wake up at one in the morning and work
till eight; then I take something light, a cup of pure coffee, and get
into the shafts of my cab until four; I receive, I take a bath, or I go
out, and after dinner I go to bed. I must lead this life for some months
longer, in order not to be overwhelmed by my obligations. The profit
comes slowly; my debts are inexorable and fixed. Now, it is certain that
I will make a great fortune; but I must wait for it, and work for three
years. I must go over things, correct them again, put everything _en
état monumental_; thankless work, not counted, without immediate
profit." He speaks of working at this amazing rate for three years
longer; in reality he worked for fifteen. But two years after the
declaration we have just quoted, it seemed to him that he should break
down: "My poor sister, I am draining the cup to the dregs. It is in vain
that I work my fourteen hours a day; I can't do enough. While I write
this to you I find myself so weary that I have just sent Auguste to take
back my word from certain engagements that I had formed. I am so weak
that I have advanced my dinner hour in order to go to bed earlier; and I
go nowhere." The next year he writes to his mother, who had apparently
complained of his silence: "My good mother, do me the charity to let me
carry my burden without suspecting my heart. A letter for me, you see,
is not only money, but an hour of sleep and a drop of blood."

We spoke just now of Balzac's sentimental consolations; but it appears
that at times he was more acutely conscious of what he missed than of
what he enjoyed. "As for the soul," he writes to Mme. Carraud in 1833,
"I am profoundly sad. My work alone sustains me in life. Is there then
to be no woman for me in this world? My physical melancholy and _ennui_
last longer and grow more frequent. To fall from this crushing labor to
nothing--not to have near me that soft, caressing mind of woman, for
whom I have done so much!" He had, however, a devoted feminine friend,
to whom none of the letters in these volumes are addressed, but who is
several times alluded to. This lady, Mme. de Berny, died in 1836, and
Balzac speaks of her ever afterward with extraordinary tenderness and
veneration. But if there had been a passion between them, it was only a
passionate friendship. "Ah, my dear mother," he writes on New Year's
day, 1836, "I am harrowed with grief. Mme. de Berny is dying; it is
impossible to doubt it. No one but God and myself knows what my despair
is. And I must work--work while I weep!" He writes of Mme. de Berny at
the time of her death as follows. The letter is addressed to a lady with
whom he was in correspondence more or less sentimental, but whom he
never saw: "The person whom I have lost was more than a mother, more
than a friend, more than any creature can be for another. The term
_divinity_ only can explain her. She had sustained me by word, by act,
by devotion, during my worst weather. If I live, it is by her; she was
everything for me. Although for two years illness and time had separated
us, we were visible at a distance for each other. She reacted upon me;
she was a moral sun. Mme. de Mortsauf, in the 'Lys dans la Vallée,' is a
pale expression of this person's slightest qualities." Three years
afterward he writes to his sister: "I am alone against all my troubles,
and formerly, to help me to resist them, I had with me the sweetest and
bravest person in the world; a woman who every day is born again in my
heart, and whose divine qualities make the friendships that are compared
with hers seem pale. I have now no adviser in my literary difficulties;
I have no guide but the fatal thought, 'What would she say if she were
living?'" And he goes on to enumerate some of his actual and potential
friends. He tells his sister that she herself might have been for him a
close intellectual comrade if her duties of wife and mother had not
given her too many other things to think about. The same is true of Mme.
Carraud: "Never has a more extraordinary mind been more smothered; she
will die in her corner unknown! George Sand," he continues, "would
speedily be my friend; she has no pettiness whatever in her soul--none
of the low jealousies which obscure so many contemporary talents. Dumas
resembles her in this; but she has not the critical sense. Mme. Hanska
is all this; but I cannot weigh upon her destiny." Mme. Hanska was the
Polish lady whom he ultimately married, and of whom we shall speak.
Meanwhile, for a couple of years (1836 and 1837), he carried on an
exchange of opinions, of the order that the French call _intimes_, with
the unseen correspondent to whom we have alluded, and who figures in
these volumes as "Louise." The letters, however, are not love letters;
Balzac, indeed, seems chiefly occupied in calming the ardor of the lady,
who was evidently a woman of social distinction. "Don't have any
friendship for me," he writes; "I need too much. Like all people who
struggle, suffer, and work, I am exacting, mistrustful, wilful,
capricious.... If I had been a woman, I should have loved nothing so
much as some soul buried like a well in the desert--discovered only when
you place yourself directly under the star which indicates it to the
thirsty Arab."

His first letter to Mme. Hanska here given bears the date of 1835; but
we are informed in a note that he had at that moment been for some time
in correspondence with her. The correspondence had begun, if we are not
mistaken, on Mme. Hanska's side, before they met; she had written to him
as a literary admirer. She was a Polish lady of great fortune, with an
invalid husband. After her husband's death, projects of marriage defined
themselves more vividly, but practical considerations kept them for a
long time in the background. Balzac had first to pay off his debts, and
Mme. Hanska, as a Polish subject of the Czar Nicholas, was not in a
position to marry from one day to another. The growth of their intimacy
is, however, amply reflected in these volumes, and the dénouement
presents itself with a certain dramatic force. Balzac's letters to his
future wife, as to every one else, deal almost exclusively with his
financial situation. He discusses the details of this matter with all
his correspondents, who apparently have--or are expected to have--his
monetary entanglements at their fingers' ends. It is a constant
enumeration of novels and tales begun or delivered, revised or bargained
for. The tone is always profoundly sombre and bitter. The reader's
general impression is that of lugubrious egotism. It is the rarest thing
in the world that there is an allusion to anything but Balzac's own
affairs, and to the most sordid details of his own affairs. Hardly an
echo of the life of his time, of the world he lived in, finds its way
into his letters; there are no anecdotes, no impressions, no opinions,
no descriptions, no allusions to things heard, people seen, emotions
felt--other emotions, at least, than those of the exhausted or the
exultant worker. The reason of all this is of course very obvious. A man
could not be such a worker as Balzac and be much else besides. The note
of animal spirits which we observed in his early letters is sounded much
less frequently as time goes on; although the extraordinary robustness
and exuberance of his temperament plays richly into his books. The
"Contes Drôlatiques" are full of it, and his conversation was also full
of it. But the letters constantly show us a man with the edge of his
spontaneity gone--a man groaning and sighing, as from Promethean lungs,
complaining of his tasks, denouncing his enemies, and in complete ill
humor generally with life. Of any expression of enjoyment of the world,
of the beauties of nature, art, literature, history, human character,
these pages are singularly destitute. And yet we know that such
enjoyment--instinctive, unreasoning, essential--is half the inspiration
of the poet. The truth is that Balzac was as little as possible of a
poet; he often speaks of himself as one, but he deserved the name as
little as his own Canalis or his own Rubempré. He was neither a poet nor
a moralist, though the latter title in France is often bestowed upon
him--a fact which strikingly helps to illustrate the Gallic lightness of
soil in the moral region. Balzac was the hardest and deepest of
_prosateurs_; the earth-scented facts of life, which the poet puts under
his feet, he had put above his head. Obviously there went on within him
a vast and constant intellectual unfolding. His mind must have had a
history of its own--a history of which it would be most interesting to
have an occasional glimpse. But the history is not related here, even in
glimpses. His books are full of ideas; his letters have almost none. It
is probably not unfair to argue from this fact that there were few ideas
that he greatly cared for. Making all allowance for the pressure and
tyranny of circumstances, we may believe that if he had greatly cared to
_se recueillir_, as the French say--greatly cared, in the Miltonic
phrase, "to interpose a little ease"--he would sometimes have found an
opportunity for it. Perpetual work, when it is joyous and salubrious, is
a very fine thing; but perpetual work, when it is executed with the
temper which more than half the time appears to have been Balzac's, has
in it something almost debasing. We constantly feel that his work would
have been vastly better if the Muse of "business" had been elbowed away
by her larger-browed sister. Balzac himself, doubtless, often felt in
the same way; but, on the whole, "business" was what he most cared for.
The "Comédie Humaine" represents an immense amount of joy, of
spontaneity, of irrepressible artistic life. Here and there in the
letters this occasionally breaks out in accents of mingled exultation
and despair. "Never," he writes in 1836, "has the torrent which bears me
along been more rapid; never has a work more majestically terrible
imposed itself upon the human brain. I go to my work as the gamester to
the gaming-table; I am sleeping now only five hours and working
eighteen; I shall arrive dead.... Write to me; be generous; take nothing
in bad part, for you don't know how, at moments, I deplore this life of
fire. But how can I jump out of the chariot?" We had occasion in
writing of Balzac in these pages more than a year ago[2] to say that his
great characteristic, far from being a passion for ideas, was a passion
for _things_. We said just now that his books are full of ideas; but we
must add that his letters make us feel that these ideas are themselves
in a certain sense "things." They are pigments, properties, frippery;
they are always concrete and available. Balzac cared for them only if
they would fit into his inkstand.

He never "jumped out of his car"; but as the years went on he was able
at times to let the reins hang more loosely. There is no evidence that
he made the great fortune he had looked forward to; but he must have
made a great deal of money. In the beginning his work was very poorly
paid, but after his reputation was solidly established he received large
sums. It is true that they were swallowed up in great part by his
"debts"--that dusky, vaguely outlined, insatiable maw which we see
grimacing for ever behind him, like the face on a fountain which should
find itself receiving a stream instead of giving it out. But he
travelled (working all the while en route). He went to Italy, to
Germany, to Russia; he built houses, he bought pictures and pottery. One
of his journeys illustrates his singular mixture of economic and
romantic impulses. He made a breathless pilgrimage to the island of
Sardinia to examine the scoriæ of certain silver mines, anciently worked
by the Romans, in which he had heard that the metal was still to be
found. The enterprise was fantastic and impracticable; but he pushed his
excursion through night and day, as he had written the "Père Goriot." In
his relative prosperity, when once it was established, there are strange
lapses and stumbling-places. After he had built and was living in his
somewhat fantastical villa of Les Jardies at Sèvres, close to Paris, he
invites a friend to stay with him on these terms: "I can take you to
board at forty sous a day, and for thirty-five francs you will have
fire-wood enough for a month." In his joke he is apt to betray the same
preoccupation. Inviting Charles de Bernard and his wife to come to Les
Jardies to help him arrange his books, he adds that they will have fifty
sous a day and their wine. He is constantly talking of his expenses, of
what he spends in cab hire and postage. His letters to the Countess
Hanska are filled with these details. "Yesterday I was running about all
day: twenty-five francs for carriages!" The man of business is never
absent. For the first representations of his plays he arranges his
audiences with an eye to effect, like an _impresario_ or an agent. In
the boxes, for "Vautrin," "I insist upon there being handsome women."
Presenting a copy of the "Comédie Humaine" to the Austrian ambassador,
he accompanies it with a letter calling attention, in the most elaborate
manner, to the typographical beauty and the cheapness of the work; the
letter reads like a prospectus or an advertisement.

In 1840 (he was forty years old) he thought seriously of marriage--with
this remark as the preface to the announcement: "_Je ne veux plus avoir
de coeur!..._ If you meet a young girl of twenty-two," he goes on,
"with a fortune of 200,000 francs, or even of 100,000, provided it can
be used in business, you will think of me. I want a woman who shall be
able to be what the events of my life may demand of her--the wife of an
ambassador, or a housewife at Les Jardies. But don't speak of this; it's
a secret. She must be an ambitious, clever girl." This project, however,
was not carried out; Balzac had no time to marry. But his friendship
with Mme. Hanska became more and more absorbing, and though their
project of marriage, which was executed in 1850, was kept a profound
secret until after the ceremony, it is apparent that they had had it a
long time in their thoughts.

For this lady Balzac's esteem and admiration seem to have been
unbounded; and his letters to her, which in the second volume are very
numerous, contain many noble and delicate passages. "You know too well,"
he says to her somewhere, with a happy choice of words belonging to the
writer, whose diction was here and there as felicitous as it was
generally intolerable--"_Vous savez trop bien que tout ce qui n'est pas
vous n'est que surface, sottise et vains palliatifs de l'absence._" "You
must be proud of your children," he writes to his sister from Poland;
"such daughters are the recompense of your life. You must not be unjust
to destiny; you may now accept many misfortunes. It is like myself with
Mme. Hanska. The gift of her affection explains all my troubles, my
weariness, and my toil; I was paying to evil, in advance, the price of
such a treasure. As Napoleon said, we pay for everything here below;
nothing is stolen. It seems to me that I have paid very little.
Twenty-five years of toil and struggle are nothing as the purchase money
of an attachment so splendid, so radiant, so complete."

Mme. Hanska appears to have come rarely to Paris, and when she came to
have shrouded her visits in mystery; but Balzac arranged several
meetings with her abroad, and visited her at St. Petersburg and on her
Polish estates. He was devotedly fond of her children, and the tranquil,
opulent family life to which she introduced him appears to have been one
of the greatest pleasures he had known. In several passages which, for
Balzac, may be called graceful and playful, he expresses his
homesickness for her chairs and tables, her books, the sight of her
dresses. Here is something, in one of his letters to her, which is worth
quoting: "In short, this is the game that I play; four men will have
had, in this century, an immense influence--Napoleon, Cuvier, O'Connell.
I should like to be the fourth. The first lived on the blood of Europe;
_il s'est inoculé des armées_; the second espoused the globe; the third
became the incarnation of a people; I--I shall have carried a whole
society in my head. But there will have been in me a much greater and
much happier being than the writer--and that is your slave. My feeling
is finer, grander, more complete, than all the satisfactions of vanity
or of glory. Without this plenitude of the heart I should never have
accomplished the tenth part of my work; I should not have had this
ferocious courage." During a few days spent at Berlin, on his way back
from St. Petersburg, he gives his impressions of the "capital of
Brandenburg" in a tone which almost seems to denote a prevision of the
style of allusion to this locality and its inhabitants which was to
become fashionable among his countrymen thirty years later. Balzac
detested Prussia and the Prussians.

     It is owing to this charlatanism [the spacious distribution of
     the streets, etc.] that Berlin has a more populous look than
     Petersburg; I would have said "more animated" look if I had
     been speaking of another people; but the Prussian, with his
     brutal heaviness, will never be able to do anything but crush.
     To produce the movement of a great European capital you must
     have less beer and bad tobacco, and more of the French or
     Italian spirit; or else you must have the great industrial and
     commercial ideas which have produced the gigantic development
     of London; but Berlin and its inhabitants will never be
     anything but an ugly little city, inhabited by an ugly big
     people.

"I have seen Tieck _en famille_," he says in another letter. "He seemed
pleased with my homage. He had an old countess, his contemporary in
spectacles, almost an octogenarian--a mummy with a green eye-shade, whom
I supposed to be a domestic divinity.... I am at home again; it is
half-past six in the evening, and I have eaten nothing since this
morning. Berlin is the city of _ennui_; I should die here in a week.
Poor Humboldt is dying of it; he drags with him everywhere his nostalgia
for Paris."

Balzac passed the winter of 1848-'49 and several months more at
Vierzschovnia, the Polish estate of Mme. Hanska and her children. His
health had been gravely impaired, and the doctors had absolutely
forbidden him to work. His inexhaustible and indefatigable brain had at
last succumbed to fatigue. But the prize was gained; his debts were
paid; he was looking forward to owning at last the money that he should
make. He could afford--relatively speaking at least--to rest. His fame
had been solidly built up; the public recognized his greatness. Already,
in 1846, he had written: "You will learn with pleasure, I am sure, that
there is an immense reaction in my favor. At last I have conquered! Once
more my protecting star has watched over me.... At this moment the
public and the papers turn toward me favorably; more than that, there is
a sort of acclamation, a general consecration.... It is a great year for
me, dear Countess."

To be ill and kept from work was, for Balzac, to be a chained
Prometheus; but there was much during these last months to alleviate his
impatience. His letters at this period are easier, less painfully
preoccupied than at any other; and he found in Poland better medical
advice than he deemed obtainable in Paris. He was preparing a house in
Paris to receive him as a married man--preparing it apparently with
great splendor. At Les Jardies the pictures and divans and tapestries
had mostly been nominal--had been present only in grand names, chalked
grotesquely upon the empty walls. But during the last years of his life
Balzac appears to have been a great collector. He bought many pictures
and other objects of value; in particular, there figures in these
letters a certain set of Florentine furniture which he was willing to
sell again, but to sell only to a royal purchaser. The King of Holland
appears to have been in treaty for it. Readers of the "Comédie Humaine"
have no need to be reminded of the author's passion for furniture;
nowhere else are there such loving or such invidious descriptions of it.
"Decidedly," he writes once to Mme. Hanska, "I will send to Tours for
the Louis XVI. secretary and bureau; the room will then be complete.
It's a matter of a thousand francs; but for a thousand francs what can
one get in modern furniture? _Des platitudes bourgeoises, des misères
sans valeur et sans goût._"

Old Mme. de Balzac was her son's factotum and universal agent. His
letters from Vierzschovnia are filled with prescriptions of activity for
his mother, accompanied always with the urgent reminder that she is to
use cabs _ad libitum_. He goes into the minutest details (she was
overlooking the preparation of his house in the Rue Fortunée, which must
have been converted into a very picturesque residence): "The carpet in
the dining-room must certainly be readjusted. Try and make M. Henry send
his carpet-layer. I owe that man a good _pour-boire_; he laid all the
carpets, and I once was rough with him. You must tell him that in
September he can come and get his present. I want particularly to give
it to him myself."

His mother occasionally annoyed him by unreasonable exactions and
untimely interferences. There is an episode of a letter which she writes
to him at Vierzschovnia, and which, coming to Mme. Hanska's knowledge,
endangers his prospect of marriage. He complains bitterly to his sister
that his mother _cannot_ get it out of her head that he is still fifteen
years old. But there is something very touching in his constant
tenderness toward her--as well as something very characteristically
French--very characteristic of the French sentiment of family
consistency and solidarity--in the way in which, by constantly counting
upon her practical aptitude and zeal, he makes her a fellow worker
toward the great total of his fame and fortune. At fifty years of age,
at the climax of his distinction, announcing to her his brilliant
marriage, he signs himself _Ton fils soumis_. To his old friend Mme.
Carraud he speaks thus of this same event: "The dénouement of that
great and beautiful drama of the heart which has lasted these sixteen
years.... Three days ago I married the only woman I have loved, whom I
loved more than ever, and whom I shall love until death. I believe that
this union is the recompense that God has held in reserve for me through
so many adversities, years of work, difficulties suffered and
surmounted. I had neither a happy youth nor a flowering spring; I shall
have the most brilliant summer, the sweetest of all autumns." It had
been, as Balzac says, a drama of the heart, and the dénouement was of
the heart alone. Mme. Hanska, on her marriage, made over her large
fortune to her daughter.

Balzac had at last found rest and happiness, but his enjoyment of these
blessings was brief. The energy that he had expended to gain them left
nothing behind it. His terrible industry had blasted the soil it passed
over; he had sacrificed to his work the very things he worked for. One
cannot do what Balzac did and live. He was enfeebled, exhausted, broken.
He died in Paris three months after his marriage. The reader feels that
premature death is the logical, the harmonious completion of such a
career. The strongest man has but a certain fixed quantity of life to
expend, and we may expect that if he works habitually fifteen hours a
day, he will spend it while, arithmetically speaking, he is yet young.

We have been struck in reading these letters with the strong analogy
between Balzac's career and that of the great English writer whose
history was some time since so expansively written by Mr. Forster.
Dickens and Balzac take much in common; as individuals they strongly
resemble each other; their differences are chiefly differences of race.
Each was a man of affairs, an active, practical man, with a temperament
of almost phenomenal vigor and a prodigious quantity of life to expend.
Each had a character and a will--what is nowadays called a
personality--which imposed themselves irresistibly; each had a
boundless self-confidence and a magnificent egotism. Each had always a
hundred irons on the fire; each was resolutely determined to make money,
and made it in large quantities. In intensity of imaginative power, the
power of evoking visible objects and figures, seeing them themselves
with the force of hallucination, and making others see them all but just
as vividly, they were almost equal. Here there is little to choose
between them; they have had no rivals but each other and Shakespeare.
But they most of all resemble each other in the fact that they treated
their extraordinary imaginative force as a matter of business; that they
worked it as a gold mine, violently and brutally; overworked and ravaged
it. They succumbed to the task that they had laid upon themselves, and
they are as similar in their deaths as in their lives. Of course, if
Dickens is an English Balzac, he is a very English Balzac. His fortune
was the easier of the two, and his prizes were greater than the other's.
His brilliant opulent English prosperity, centred in a home and diffused
through a progeny, is in strong contrast with the almost scholastic
penury and obscurity of much of Balzac's career. But the analogy is
still very striking.

In speaking formerly of Balzac in these pages we insisted upon the fact
that he lacked charm; but we said that our last word upon him should be
that he had incomparable power. His letters only confirm these
impressions, and above all they deepen our sense of his strength. They
contain little that is delicate, and not a great deal that is positively
agreeable; but they express an energy before which we stand lost in
wonder, in an admiration that almost amounts to awe. The fact that his
devouring observation of the great human spectacle has no echo in his
letters only makes us feel how concentrated and how intense was the
labor that went on in his closet. Certainly no solider intellectual work
has ever been achieved by man. And in spite of the massive egotism, the
personal absoluteness, to which these pages testify, they leave us with
a downright kindness for the author. He was coarse, but he was tender;
he was corrupt in a way, but he was hugely natural. If he was
ungracefully eager and voracious, awkwardly blind to all things that did
not contribute to his personal plan, at least his egotism was exerted in
a great cause. The "Comédie Humaine" has a thousand faults, but it is a
monumental excuse.

                        HENRY JAMES, JR.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Paris: Calmann Lévy. 1876.

[2] December, 1875.




LOVE'S REQUIEM.


                 I.

      Bring withered autumn leaves!
      Call everything that grieves,
    And build a funeral pyre above his head!
      Heap there all golden promise that deceives,
      Beauty that wins the heart and then bereaves--
        For love is dead.


                 II.

      Not slowly did he die!
      A meteor from the sky
    Falls not so swiftly as his spirit fled;
      When with regretful, half-averted eye
      He gave one little smile, one little sigh--
        And so was sped.


                 III.

      But, oh, not yet, not yet
      Can my lost soul forget
    How beautiful he was while he did live;
      Or, when his eyes were dewy and lips wet,
      What kisses, tenderer than all regret,
        My love would give!


                 IV.

      Strew roses on his breast!
      He loved the roses best;
    He never cared for lilies or for snow.
      Let be this bitter end of his sweet quest!
      Let be the pallid silence that is rest--
        And let all go!

                        WILLIAM WINTER.




STORY OF A LION.


When Smith's Circus and Menagerie Combination Company went to Utica
James Rounders was a lusty fellow of twenty, of some natural sagacity,
and no school education. An interest in wild beasts had been developing
in him for several years, and the odor of sawdust had become grateful to
his nostrils. It was, however, only one kind of wild beast with which he
was especially occupied. The quadruped of the noble aspect, stately
gait, and tremendous roar--the lion--was the animal of Rounders's
predilection and the object of his study.

He had gotten together some leading facts--so far as the stories of
lion-killers may be regarded as such--concerning his favorite animal. He
had heard how a lion had galloped off from the suburbs of the Cape of
Good Hope with a two years' old heifer in his mouth, and jumped over a
hedge twelve feet high, taking his burden over with him. In the same
region of southern Africa another lion was seen bearing off a horse at a
canter, the neck in his mouth and the body slung behind across his back.
According to one who hunted the animal in the interior of Africa, a lion
one day sprang on an ox, his hind feet on the quarters, his fore feet
about the horns, and drew the head backward with such force as to break
the back of the animal. On another occasion the same hunter saw a lion
who took a heifer in his mouth, and though its legs trailed on the
ground, he carried it off as a cat would a rat, and jumped across a wide
ditch without difficulty. These accounts of the lion's strength were
articles of faith with James Rounders. He had been told that the royal
Bengal tiger of Asia was the equal in strength, if not the superior, of
the African lion, he having been known to smash the head of a bullock by
a single blow of his paw; but this Rounders did not believe.

He read with some difficulty, moving his lips as he did so, in order to
get the matter clearly before his mind. He regarded it as a laborious
task, and would sooner have chopped a cord of wood than read for half an
hour. Notwithstanding the irksomeness of reading, there were two books
which led him conscientiously through their pages to the end--those of
Gordon Cumming and Jules Gérard on the hunting and killing of lions. The
two volumes comprised his library, and furnished his mind with all the
literary nutriment which it required.

Rounders went to the opening performance of Smith's Circus and Menagerie
Combination Company. The ground leading up to the front of the canvas
was garnished in the usual way. There were two small parasitic tents
near the great one, on which primitive pictures hung of the woman of
enormous girth and the calf with six legs. A man stood at the flap
entrance of each, inviting people to enter and see these wonders of
nature for a moderate sum. Near by was the lemonade wagon, whose
proprietor was handing out glasses of his fluid with a briskness that
showed that many were athirst.

When he entered the great tent the brass band was blowing blatantly,
four cavaliers in rusty spangles and four dowdy women were riding round
the ring, going through the old-time preliminary called the grand entry;
for whatever else may change, the circus remains faithful to its
traditions. The Yorick of the sawdust soon followed, and said the things
which convulsed us with laughter in our tender years, and which cause us
to smile in our maturity in the recollections they bring back. It was
the same bold joke and the same grimace. The quips and quirks force on
us the fact that there is but little originality in the human mind, and
this was substantially the reflection of Rounders as he turned an
indifferent ear to the wearisome wit. He prided himself on his acumen,
and was not to be taken in with such worn buffoonery. Yet I trow that
even Rounders envied the children who gave themselves over body and soul
to the accredited man of humor.

He looked at the woman going through the hoops, the trick pony seeking
for the hidden handkerchief, and the bareback rider turning a summerset,
with a mild interest, for he had seen them or something like them
before. The strong man who threw up the cannon balls into the air, and
allowed them to fall on his nape, to roll down the hollow of his back to
the ground, hardly aroused this indifferent spectator. What he looked
forward to with curiosity was the performance of the lion-tamer, and
when it did come it exceeded his expectations.

The master of the ring, attired in what resembled the uniform of an
officer of the navy, stepped into the middle of the arena, and with the
affectation of good breeding characteristic of the class, said, "Ladies
and gentlemen: I have the honor to announce that John Brinton, the most
extraordinary and celebrated tamer of lions in the world, will appear
before you in his remarkable performance, during which every one is
requested to keep his seat. Your attention is especially directed to the
third part of it, as one of the marvels of the nineteenth century.

"To-morrow there will be a matinée at one o'clock, and in the evening
the performance at the usual hour."

The speaker bowed and retired. The band struck up "See, the Conquering
Hero Comes," as the Brinton in question came forward with that dash
which belongs to lion-tamers everywhere. He was an athletic man between
forty and fifty, of a stern countenance, and of a self-possession that
was evident as soon as he appeared. He was arrayed in flesh-colored
tights, with embroidered sky-blue velvet around the loins. He bore in
one hand a black rod, five or six feet long, and in the other a whip.
His hair was short, and he was cleanly shaved. Men who put their heads
between lions' jaws generally are, for the titillation of a straggling
hair might produce a cough that would prove tragical. He was quick and
decided in all his movements, as the lion-tamer should be, in order to
leave the beast no time to work itself up to a decision.

The cage which he entered contained two lions. One was large, grumbling,
and fierce, who had passed a part of his life in the wilds of Africa;
the other, and smaller of the two, was an emasculated beast, born behind
the bars, and was as tractable as the animal usually is that has never
known freedom. The performance consisted of three parts. The first was
of the kind common to menageries. The tamer entered by the little door
in a corner, with the celerity which all tamers employ, and stood for a
moment in the statuesque immobility to which they are also given, in
coming before the public. Having done this, he started forward with the
black rod in his left hand, approached the animals, driving them to the
end of the cage, the end of the rod nearly touching their faces. Here
they stood under protest, growling. Then he raised his whip, struck the
smaller beast, making it run from one end of the cage to the other, and
leap over his shoulder in a way familiar to people who have visited a
menagerie. He threw it down, put his foot on its prostrate body, and
folded his arms in the character of victor. He lay down on it, pulled
open its jaws, and inserted his head therein. Then he jumped up and
dismissed it, with a cut of the whip, to one corner. During this time
the larger lion had been an indifferent and surly spectator. The tamer
approached, touching him with the rod, when he jumped forward with a
growl, half crouching. Quickly the tamer caught hold of his upper jaw
and tore it open, as great, rebellious cog-wheel growls issued from the
mighty throat. Then he spurned him with his foot, bowed to the audience,
went to the door, let himself out like a flash, the two animals making a
bound against it as he disappeared.

"A, B, C," said Rounders. "Nothing new about that."

During the interim venders went about holding up photographic portraits
of the tamer, lustily shouting his professional and private virtues.
Their voices were, however, soon drowned in the clash of the brass band,
which played a prelude to what was coming. At the conclusion of this a
lone and last voice cried out, "Ice-cold lemonade," but it was promptly
suppressed by those near the crier, as Brinton again appeared.

The second part was a short drama enacted with the larger animal, whose
name was Brutus, the smaller one being driven into an adjoining cage. In
the drama Brutus was the faithful friend of his master, the tamer, who
is attacked by his enemies--a dozen supernumeraries in rusty spangles,
who simultaneously thrust their spears through the bars from the outside
of one end of the cage; when the spears are thus thrust through the
bars, the master calls on his faithful servant Brutus to save his
master's life, and rid him of his enemies, giving the command in the
words:

"To the rescue, Brutus! Down with the miscreants!"

This was the "situation." Brutus advances at the word of command, and
with a few blows from his great paws breaks the brittle spears which the
somewhat _flasque_ enemies hold from without. At this the tamer strikes
an attitude, and shouts in a melodramatic voice:

"Saved! And by this noble animal!"

These words are accompanied with the action of putting an arm
affectionately around the neck of Brutus. This is the dénouement.

He bows and retires as before, this time amid increased applause.

"Not bad," said the critical Rounders, "but nothing extra."

As Brinton disappeared the voices of the venders arose again, to be
drowned as before by the blare of the wind instruments. Silence was
restored for his next appearance. It was the third part which Rounders
desired especially to see, and a surprise was reserved for him. In it
the tamer entered the cage with a great piece of raw meat in each hand,
Brutus being still alone, standing in the middle of the cage, eagerly
looking out for his master. Brinton threw one of the pieces down in the
middle of the floor, and the beast pounced on it as only a wild beast
can, holding it between his paws as he gluttonously devoured it--not
with a lateral movement of the jaws, but cat-like--amid half stifled,
threatening growls, with menacing eyes turned from time to time toward
the tamer. What the tamer then did was the most extraordinary
performance which Rounders had ever seen, and sent thrills of admiration
down his spinal column.

Brinton calmly approached the ferocious animal feeding, and took away
from it the half finished piece of meat, and as he did so the beast
growled, but submitted! After which he waved the half consumed beef in
the air and bowed, amid great applause, in which Rounders heartily
joined. Then the tamer said:

"Brutus, you have behaved so well I shall reward you with another
piece."

Which he did, the beast seizing it and gorging himself as before. At
this point the master of the ring stepped forth again as the tamer
disappeared, and said:

"Ladies and gentlemen, when you recollect how difficult it is to take a
bone away from even a pet dog, it will give you some idea of the
marvellous performance you have just witnessed. It will be repeated
to-morrow during the day and evening."

"This is a real show," said Rounders, wound up to enthusiasm. "But how
does he do it?" This was the question which at once presented itself,
and thereafter gave him no peace. With this perplexing inquiry was
mingled a deep and abiding admiration. He was brought to a determination
to which he had been moving for two or three years. In a word, he
decided then and there to enter the vocation. He sought the man who had
sent the tingling, shivering sensation down his vertebræ, and explained
that he wanted to go with him on any terms and in any capacity.

Brinton had taken off his professional gear, and was undistinguishable
from the sombre mass of his fellow citizens. He was out on the open
space near the great tent, looking abstractedly at a man blowing with
distended cheeks into a lung-testing machine. Rounders stood before him
with the respect due to a man who snatches meat away from a ferocious
lion.

After going through his work with the beasts, Brinton was usually tired
and somewhat indifferent to the ordinary affairs of life. Other things
seemed pale after the emotions of the cage. When Rounders explained to
him what he wanted, the tamer said:

"You've got it."

"Got what?"

"The lion fever. You are lion struck. I've seen a good many like you.
Its an uphill business. Not one keeper in fifty gets the handling of the
brutes, and still the only way of going about it is to be a keeper.
Besides handling them, you must have a _specialty_--a trick, you know.
You've got to get up one yourself or worm it out of somebody else. As
for the lion man telling anybody--that is something I haven't yet met
with. You may take his life, but he won't give up his trick; it's his
pride, his pleasure, and his bread and butter."

"I want to be a keeper all the same," returned Rounders.

"Come on then," said Brinton; "for we want a keeper, as we left one at
the last town. He was a young man who had been reading in natural
history about the noble nature of the lion, and he put his hand in
between the bars to pat Brutus on the head. The surgeon examined him,
and said his arm was fractured in several places--it was a regular chaw.
We left him in the hospital. I tell you this as a warning not to go
fooling round the beasts--that is, if you're coming."

The fate of the young man of a too trusting faith in the noble nature of
the lion did not turn Rounders from his determination, and the next
morning he was a part of the establishment.

At first the tongue of the tamer was pretty closely tied touching
matters of his profession, but in due time he expanded into talk when he
saw the genuine enthusiasm of the keeper for all that related to the
subject, yet naturally practised strict reserve in everything concerning
his particular work. In a word, professional secrets remained entombed.

He thought men were born to his vocation, and there was no resisting it.
He had followed shows and hung around lion cages when he was a boy.
Toward manhood the business had exercised such a fascination that he at
last obtained employment with a tamer, whom he followed until he was
killed by his beasts. This sanguinary spectacle deterred him for the
time from the idea of entering a cage, but he continued his work.

There were two kinds of lions in the menageries--those born and raised
in the cages and those caught as whelps wild in Asia and Africa. A few
full grown were caught in pits. The first time he entered a cage was in
a small show in a provincial town. The two lions whom he then
encountered were old and sick, and bore the scars of twenty years'
whipping on their bald hides; besides, they were born and brought up
behind the bars. They growled from force of habit, but there was not
much danger in them. The posters of course announced the two brutes as
two of the most ferocious kings of the forest.

From these he passed to cage-bred lions in their prime, thence to the
wild animals, of which Brutus was one. Until the tamer was able to work
with these last, he was not considered as belonging to the rank of real
tamers. The sensation he experienced the first time he entered the cage
of wild animals was difficult to describe; it was an appreciation of
imminent danger coupled with courage. When he issued from the cage his
tights and spangled cloth felt as if they had just come out of the wash
tub. He was steeled up to the point of bravery before the brutes, but
ten minutes afterward a child could have knocked him over.

The principal secret of managing the brutes was not to be afraid of
them. When the man showed fear he was lost. The mastery was not acquired
so much through violence of treatment as an absolute sense of security
in their presence. Audacity and self-possession were necessary every
minute, every second; a moment's loss of equilibrium might prove fatal.

The buttery mode of treatment about which bookmen wrote had no existence
in fact among showmen. No man managed his beasts with kindness. When his
Brutus licked his face in his performance it looked affectionate, but it
was not; he did it because he was afraid; and when the animal went
through this osculatory business he was obliged to keep his eye on him
with all the concentration of his will, for there was something in the
beast's eyes which showed that he would sooner use his teeth than his
tongue.

There was an impression that a lion once tamed is tamed for good, as a
horse is broken to harness. This was an error; the lion had to be tamed
every day anew in order to keep him in subjection.

Rounders asked him if he meant to say that all lions were vicious. To
which he answered negatively. There were good lions and bad lions, just
as there were good and bad men. The bad beasts, however, were more
numerous than the others, for it was their nature to kill to provide for
their hunger. The book talk about their generosity was not trustworthy;
the instinct of the beast was to kill when it was hungry, but when its
stomach was full it was less dangerous. He had seen the beast in its
wild state, having hunted him in Africa. He had captured Brutus there
when the animal was two years old; he was then ten, but always retained
something of his wild nature. He was secured in a pit with his mother,
the mother being shot.

In another menagerie with which he had been connected his principal
performance was "the happy family," in which he brought together in the
same cage two lions, several wolves, a couple of bears, a sheep, a small
elephant with a monkey on his back. The crowning feature of this was the
introduction of the sheep's head into the lion's mouth, which he held
open by the upper lip with a strong grip. The sovereignty of the lions
was acknowledged by the other animals, who looked at them with fear,
getting as far away from them as the cage would permit. He had to pull
each one into the cage by force. He compelled a bear to stand with his
nose in close proximity to that of a lion; he called this the kiss of
friendship; the bear had to be kicked and pushed into position, looking
at the lion with terror; the lion did not deign to look at the bear, but
kept his eye fixed on his master, whom of course he obeyed under
protest. When the sheep was brought forward, and its head was put
between the lion's jaws, it was almost in a swooning condition, and
excited general pity. He had to get a new sheep every month, the daily
fear causing them soon to decline unto death.

The foregoing, in substance, was a portion of the talk with which
Brinton gratified himself as well as his listener, the appreciative
Rounders.

The trick of pulling away the meat from under the jaws of Brutus was
technically known under the canvas as the "meat-jerk." It continued to
remain uppermost in the mind of the new keeper.

The nomadic life had pleasures for Rounders, aside from the fascination
of the "meat-jerk." He drove a gayly colored wagon in the caravan, as it
moved through the country. At night, like the Arabs, they folded their
tents and stole away, and at dawn they were on the march. Perched on his
seat, Rounders's eyes dwelt on the landscape with its purple tints of
the morning, and his nostrils sniffed the sweet odors of Nature while
she was still in déshabille. Silently, like a variegated serpent, the
caravan crept around the hills and through the valleys. The musicians,
clad in gold and scarlet, rode through the country in their magnificent
chariot, and gave out no sound, their breath being reserved for the
towns and villages. The vestal silence remained unbroken by the
stridulous clarinet and the blatant trombones.

Every man has a weakness, and Brinton had his. He was in tender
thraldom. He loved the woman that jumped through the hoops and balloons
on a padded horse. Whenever her eyes turned on him they sent a thrill
through him more exciting than that produced by Brutus. He generally
stood near the ring-board when she appeared in public, and envied the
ringmaster the agreeable duty of assisting her to mount. Admiringly he
watched her shapely legs going through the hoops and over the garters,
as her eyes sparkled and her face flushed with the excitement, but there
was no indication of his love being returned.

When Rounders discovered this tenderness in the heart of the tamer, he
thought of Samson and Delilah, and wondered if something of the kind
could not be done with natural comeliness instead of a pair of scissors.
Guided by instinct, Rounders, who was a shrewd fellow, as has already
been said, made his court to Mlle. La Sauteuse, known in private life as
Sally Stubbs. There were conventional barriers between a keeper and a
rider, but Rounders by tact and good looks got over them, and whispered
sweet nonsense in the porches of Miss Stubbs's willing ear.

One evening, after the performance, as the moon shone athwart the great
tent, and the brass band was hushed, Sally Stubbs stood against a
background of canvas, bathed in the sheen from on high. Quiet reigned in
the tents of the elephantine woman and the calf with six legs. The
lung-tester had folded up his machine and departed. The sound of
"ice-cold lemonade" had died in the general stillness. Mlle. La Sauteuse
leaned over lovingly to the new keeper, and asked in a low, sympathetic
voice,

"What can I do for you, Jim Rounders?"

"Find out the 'meat-jerk,'" was the swift response.

"Alas," said the fair Stubbs, "when you've been as long in the tent as
I've been, you'll know that that is impossible. You might as well ask me
for a slice of the moon that is now lookin' down on this here peaceful
scene atween you and me."

"You've heard the Sunday school story about Samson and Delilah?" pursued
Rounders.

"What's that got to do with John Brinton's secret?"

"What's been done can be done again. Delilah wormed it out of Samson:
why can't Sally Stubbs worm it out of Brinton?"

"Cut off his hair, as the Bible woman did?"

"That's too thin," said Rounders rashly, without fear of theological
dogma. "That's allygory. They call it hair-cuttin', and when they call
it that, its hairsplittin'. Take my word for it, Sally Stubbs, that when
she got the secret out of that hefty, long-haired man, she did it with
her pretty ways and good looks."

Still, Miss Stubbs affirmed that such a project as Rounders entertained
was impossible; and it was true. In his weakest, or most sentimental
hours, Brinton knew how to withstand even the blandishments of the
charming Stubbs when she approached professional topics. Under her smile
he opened up like a morning-glory kissed by Aurora; but when she tried
to penetrate into the mystery of his great lion act, he closed up like
the same flower when it encounters the sun. He had a well-ordered mind
divided into comp

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