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The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 94, August, 1865

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Title: The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 94, August, 1865

Author: Various


        
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Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY, VOLUME 16, NO. 94, AUGUST, 1865 ***




Produced by Joshua Hutchinson, Josephine Paolucci and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net.
(This file was produced from images generously made
available by Cornell University Digital Collections.)








THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

_A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics._

VOL. XVI.--AUGUST, 1865.--NO. XCIV.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1865, by TICKNOR AND
FIELDS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of
Massachusetts.




AMONG THE HONEY-MAKERS.


The luxury of all summer's sweet sensation is to be found when one lies
at length in the warm, fragrant grass, soaked with sunshine, aware of
regions of blossoming clover and of a high heaven filled with the hum of
innumerous bees.

It is that happy hum--which seems to the closed eyes as if the silent
sunbeams themselves had found a voice and were brimming the bending blue
with music as they went about their busy chemistry--that gives the chief
charm to the moment; for it tunes the mind to its own key, the murmuring
expression of all pleasant things, the chord of sunshine and perfume and
flowers.

And it is, indeed, the sound of a process scarcely less subtile than the
sunbeams' own, of that alchemy by which the limpid drop of sweet
insipidity at the root of any petal is transformed to the pungent flavor
and viscid drip of honey. A beautiful woman, weary of her frivolities,
once half in jest envied the fate of Io, dwelling all day in the sun,
all night in the starshine and dew, and fed on pasturage of violets; but
there is the morning beam, the evening ray, the breeze, the dew, the
spirit of the violet and of the cowslip, all gathered like a
distillation and sealed into the combs, and this is the tune to which it
is harvested. Beyond doubt there is no such eminent sound of gladness in
all the world. The cricket seems to speak of more spiritual things than
those of this sphere. As to bird-song, poets differ.

    "O nightingale, what doth she ail,
      And is she sad or jolly?
    Sure ne'er on earth was sound of mirth
      So like to melancholy,"

exclaims one in compromise with all the others. Every echo is full of a
lonesome sadness. The musical baying of a distant dog by night
accentuates the depth and darkness and stillness; the crowing of cocks
from farm to farm, in their cordon of sentinelship against the invasion
of the dawn, tells the hearer how all too well the world is getting on
without him; the lowing of kine through the clear noon air comes robbed
of roughness, in its deep, mellow sonority, like the oboe and bassoon,
full of a penetrating pathos. Let Nature but interpose a sheet of water
or a bit of wood, and the merriest joy-bells that ever rang are infused
with that melancholy which is the overplus of rapture. But there is no
distance to lend that enchantment to the buzzing of a bee: it is close
about us, a universal sibilation; the air is made of it; it sings of
work, that joy and privilege,--of a home, of plenty, of a world whose
color and odor make one giddy with good cheer; it may have many varying
elements, but its constant is content.

    "When the south wind, in May days,
    With a net of shining haze,
    Silvers the horizon wall,
    And, with softness touching all,
    Tints the human countenance
    With a color of romance,
    And, infusing subtile heats,
    Turns the sod to violets,
    Thou, in sunny solitudes,
    Rover of the underwoods,
    The green silence dost displace
    With thy mellow breezy bass."

And although this burly rover is not our little bee of the hive, but his
saucy, sonsy country-cousin, the song of the one is scarcely sweeter
than that of the other, while they blend into rarest unison. And well
may both be sweet, it is such a pleasant thing to live; there is the
hive to furnish, there is the dear nest underground; they forget
yesterday's rain, to-morrow's frost is but a dim phantasm,--the sun is
so warm to-day on their little brown backs, and here is such store of
honey. It is true, the humble-bee is much the most dazzling,--he has the
prestige of size, moreover; but the other may find some favor in his new
bronze and gold armor and his coarse velvet mantle,--there are few
creatures that can afford to labor in half such array as that, but when
the work is so nice one's dress must correspond: it would never do to
rumple round among the rose-leaves, black as a beetle, and expect not
only to be heaped with delicates, but to be intrusted with love-tokens.
One cannot be so splendid as the moths and sphinxes, who have nothing to
do all summer but to lay eggs among the petals that their offspring may
devour them; no, there is work to be done. But though one toils, one has
a dignity to maintain; one remembers it readily when he has been made
the insignia of royalty, when kings have worn his effigy, when popes
have put him in their coats-of-arms; one cannot forget that he has
himself been called the Winged Pontiff of the Flowers. See him now, as
he hovers over the clover, not the red kind,--for him each floret of
that is deep as those shafts of the hashish-eater's dream, where the
broken tubes of the honeysuckle being planted in the sand, their mouths
level with the floor of the desert, they became wells, and the Arab
women dropped their buckets therein and drew them up dripping with
honey,--it is the small white clover on which he alights, whose sweets
are within reach of his little proboscis; or, lost in that great
blue-bell, he swings it with his motion and his melody; or he burrows
deep in the heart of a rose, never rolling there, as it has erroneously
been said, but, collecting the pollen with his pincers, swims over the
flower while brushing it into the baskets of his hinder legs, and then
lights again for a fresh fare, till, laden and regaled, he loudly issues
forth, dusty with treasure; and _les rois fainéans_, the Merovingian
kings, who powdered their heads and their beards with gold, were no
finer fellows than he. But a few months' wear and tear will suffice to
tarnish him; by-and-by the little body will be battered and rusty, the
wings will be ragged and worn; one day as he goes home heavily burdened,
if no sailing blue-winged swallow have skimmed him up long ago, the
flagging flight will fail, a breeze will be too much for him, a
rain-drop will dash him down, he will fall, and some garden-toad, the
focal length of whose vision is exactly the distance to which he can
dart his tongue, will see a tired bee blundering across his sky, and
will make a morsel of him, honey-bag, pollen, and all. Yet that is in
the future, far outside the focal length of any bee's vision, that
fortunate vision which finds creation so fair and himself the centre of
it, each rose made for him to rifle, and welcome everywhere. "The docile
flower inclines and lends itself to the unquiet movements of the insect.
The sanctuary that she had shut from the winds, from the sight, she
opens to her dear bee, who, all impregnated with her sweetness, goes
carrying off her messages. The delicious precautions that Nature has
taken to veil her mysteries from the profane do not for a single moment
arrest this venturesome explorer, who makes himself one of the
household, and is never afraid of being the third. This flower, for
instance, is protected by two petals which join each other in a dome
above; it is thus that the flag-flower shelters her delicate little
lovers from the rain. Another, such as the pea, coifs itself in a kind
of casque, whose visor must be raised. The bee establishes himself at
the bottom of these retreats fit for fairies, laid with softest carpets,
under fantastical pavilions, with walls of topaz and ceilings of
sapphire. But poor comparisons borrowed from dead stones! These things
live and they feel, they desire and they await. And if the joyous
conqueror of their little hidden kingdom, if the imperious violator of
their innocent barriers, mingles and confounds everything there, they
give him thanks, heap him with their perfumes, and load him with their
honey," says M. Michelet, in a brochure upon the insect, which, however
uncertain its statements, would be perfectly charming in tone and spirit
but for the inevitable sentimentalisms.

It is a brave companionship to which our tiny adventurer comes,
likewise,--a world of opening blossoms, a crowd of shining intimates.
There is the Chrysopa, a bright-green thing, with filmy transparent
wings wrought like the rarest point-lace, and with eyes redder than
rubies are; there is the Rose-Chafer, the little Cetonia of the white
rose, with an emerald shield upon its back, and carrying underneath a
breastplate of carbuncle; there are the butterflies,--the silver-washed
Fritillaries of June,--the Painted Lady, found in every clime, and
sometimes out at sea,--the Admiral of the White, peerless in his lofty
flight,--the Vanessa Atalanta of August,--the Purple Emperor of the
Woods,--the Peacock-tailed butterfly of the autumn; and there are the
beautiful, savage dragon-flies, with their gauzy wings of silvery green
and blue,--all flying flakes of living splendor, which seem to be only
flowers endowed with wings. And in truth the analogies between flowers
and insects are noticeable enough, between the egg and the seed, the
chrysalis and the bud, the wide-spread wings and the expanded corolla;
there is a vital principle enjoyed by both, individuals of both have the
power of emitting light, there are ephemera of both; as certain buds
always bloom at fixed hours, so certain moths break their coverings to
the minute; as there are flowers that part their petals only at dark, so
there are insects that fly only by night; there are plants that are
miniature barometers, there are insects equally sensitive to every
variation of the atmosphere; for fragrance there is the musk-beetle, the
tiger-beetle, which affords a scent like that of the attar-of-roses; and
whereas some blossoms have fetid odors, there is the little golden-eyed,
lace-winged fly to offset them. It is easy to detect the rudimentary
flower in the folded bud, thus the lovely little aerial butterfly with
its ocellated wings may be found all ready for flight wrapped in the
caterpillar that feeds on the wild strawberry,--the one has the freedom
of heaven, the other seems bound by the spells of some beautiful
enchantment; these Libellulæ are sporting in the air, these sweet-peas
are just about to depart; there are locusts which appear to be walking
leaves, and finally there is the bee-orchis, which deceives even the
bees themselves.

It must fairly seem to this busy, bustling fellow, culling nectar and
ambrosia, that all outside is shadow, that the earth is made for him and
his kind, and that, let him cull never so tirelessly, he cannot hive
half its honey,--so that there will always be a drop or two left over
for his little poor relations, the violet-carpenter, the
roseleaf-cutter, and the poppy-bee. They have need of it, that drop or
two, to sweeten all the anxieties of their solitary lives the span of a
summer long, vagabonds at best, and not always allowed what
domesticities they have in peace. The pitiful fortunes of a mason-bee,
as told in "A Tour round my Garden," are liable to befall one as
another.

"Look at her," says the author, "returning home with her provisions; her
hind feet are loaded with a yellow dust, which she has taken from the
stamens of flowers: she goes into the hole; when she comes out again,
there will be no pollen on her feet; with honey which she has brought,
she will make a savory paste of it at the bottom of her nest. This is,
perhaps, her tenth journey to-day, and she shows no inclination to rest.

"All these cares are for one egg which she has laid,--for a single egg
which she will never see hatched; besides, that which will issue from
that egg will not be a fly like herself, but a worm, which will not be
metamorphosed into a fly for some time afterwards. She has, however,
hidden it in that hole, and knows precisely how much nourishment it will
require before it arrives at the state which ushers in its
transformation into a fly. This nourishment she goes to seek, and she
seasons and prepares it. There, she is gone again!

"But what is this other brilliant little fly which is walking up the
house-wall? Her breast is green, and her abdomen is of a purple red; but
these two colors are so brilliant that I am really at a loss to find
words splendid enough to express them, but the names of an emerald and a
ruby joined together.

"That pretty fly--that living jewel--is the 'Chrysis.' I scarcely dare
breathe, for fear of making it fly away. I should like to take it in my
hands, that I might have sufficient time to examine it more closely.
This likewise is the mother of a family; she also has an egg to lay,
from which will issue a fly like herself, but which she will never see.
She also knows how much nourishment her offspring will require; but,
more richly clothed than the bee, she does not, like her, know how to
gather the pollen from flowers or to make a paste of it with honey.

"She has but one resource, and that resource she is determined to
employ; she will recoil neither from roguery nor theft to secure the
subsistence of her offspring; she has recognized the solitary bee, and
she is going to lay her egg in her nest. It will hatch sooner than that
of the true proprietor; then the intruder will eat the provisions so
painfully collected for the legitimate child, who, when it is hatched in
its turn, will have nothing to do but to die of hunger.

"There she is at the edge of the hole,--she hesitates,--she
decides,--she enters.

"This insect interests me, she is so beautiful. The other likewise
interests me, she is so industrious. But here she comes back through the
air: one would think her a warrior covered with chased armor and a
golden cuirass; she buzzes as she comes along. The Chrysis has heard the
buzzing, which is for her the terrible sound of a war-trumpet. She
wishes to fly; she comes out; but the other, justly irritated, pounces
upon the daring intruder, beating it with her head. She bruises and
tears the brilliant gauze of her wings, and beats her down to the dust,
where she falls stupefied and inanimate.

"The bee then enters into her nest, and deposits and prepares her
provisions; but still agitated with her combat and her victory, she sets
out again through the air. I follow her with my eyes for a long time,
and at last she disappears.

"The poor Chrysis is not, however, dead: she gets up again, shakes
herself, flutters, and attempts to fly; but her lacerated wings will no
longer support her. What can she do to escape the fury of her enemy? It
is not her business to fly away; her business is to deposit her egg in
the bee's nest, and to secure future provision for her offspring,--but
the bee came back too soon. She ascends, climbing painfully: at times
her strength seems to fail her; she is forced to stop, but at last she
arrives,--she enters,--she is in! This time the interest is for her.
Then she was only beautiful, now she is very unfortunate. I am aware
that a long plea might be made for the other. I should not like to be
appointed judge between them. Ah! she is out again,--she flies away!
But, oh, how happy she is to have succeeded! Now I begin to feel for the
bee. The poor bee continues to bring provisions for its young, which,
nevertheless, will die of hunger."

Nor is the Chrysis her only tormentor, it may be remarked; there are
some frivolous little vagabonds of her own kind that never think of
building for themselves, but always appropriate the homes of others in
this style, and they are known as cuckoo-bees.

It is no wonder that the happy bee of the community, escaping all such
trial, makes blithe murmur to itself over its luscious labor. Perhaps
all artisans would sing as cheerfully, were their task as sweet; it can
be no such severe duty to fill one's basket with the bountiful store at
hand, when one has just banqueted on the very dew of the morning. There
are a few secondary products of Nature on which words cannot be wasted.
It is pleasant to recall the poetical charms of wine, its tints, its
aromas, and its sparkles; yet, with all that fire and fragrance, it
seems but poor, thin stuff, when poured out beside the heavy flow of
honey with sunbeams dissolved in every plash. The Hungarian huntsman may
praise his ropy Cotnar, fine ladies sip cordial Rosolio and Levantine
sirups, the fancy warm over African Constantia; but every peasant has
honey in his garden, and they buy it of him to enrich their best
Muscats. The great globes of the grape on which the wind and weather
have breathed a bloom, pulped with rain, and sweetened with sun, the
dew-drops slipping down among them as they stir beneath the weight of
some bird that springs from the stem into the sky,--these lend their
beauty and innocence as a kind of chrism to cover the profanities of
wine, which, before it can be used at all, undergoes a kind of
decomposition; but the wild wine of the bramble-rose has no need of its
youth in apology for its age. It is stainless honey still; the sweet
earth-juices stole up the tiny ducts of the flower to secrete it;
showers and odors, warmth and balm, distilled together into the nectary
to give it wealth and savor; it yet preserves the essence of long summer
days, of serene nights, of wandering winds, of mingled blossoms; it is
the link between vegetable and animal productions; it has undergone the
processes of a higher organization than that of the plant; it is, in
fact, the bee himself, and not all the art of all the laboratories can
reproduce it. Into all these other secondary products some stain of
humanity enters; but little sinless sprites of greenwood and glen alone
share the occult science of this with the blossoms. As light and heat
are the generative forces of the world, honey seems to be their first
result; it is lapped, indeed, in flowers, but it looks like candied
sunshine. From the beginning, it has been regarded as a sacred
substance; some have supposed it the earliest element of vegetation. The
ancients made offering of it to the souls of the departed; they
preserved their dead in its incorruptible medium; they sacrificed it to
the gods. "With honey out of the rock should I have satisfied thee,"
said the Psalmist, as if earth had nothing more to give. Nor has it to
our bee. Let him fill his honey-vesicle, he will regurgitate the deposit
into a cell that he closes with a thin waxen pellicle, or into another
already partially occupied by the farina of flowers, which he knows to
be perishable, and therefore secludes from the air in the same fashion
that the Romans used to seal their flasks of Falernian,--with a few
drops of honey at the mouth. Give him a grain of pollen, a taste of
stagnant water, a drop of honey, and kings could not enrich him. The
honey is his food, in the stagnant water he finds salts requisite as
remedies; but what the bee wants with the grain of pollen is still a
doubtful matter among apiarists. He makes of it a confection for the
brood, it is also an ingredient of the royal jelly, he eats it himself,
and he elaborates it in scales of wax upon his body, say those who
follow Huber; on the other hand, the brood receive no confection or food
whatever, there is no such thing as royal jelly, the insect will die
sooner than partake of pollen, and there is no wax elaborated in scales
upon the body of any bee, say those who oppose Huber. But if the brood
are not fed, one may ask, why does the wild bee, the tapestry, or the
carder bee, take such pains, before closing the nest where her egg is
hidden, to store there the little drop of honey? and what is it that
occasions the greater consumption of honey during the brooding period
than during any other portion of the year? It is really a pity, when
Huber has given us so many interesting relations, that people must needs
go prying into their truth. How is it possible that Nature could improve
upon them? Kirby, indeed, accepts them all, and hands them down to us;
subsequent encyclopedists have profited by his example; and Michelet,
who between a true story and a picturesque one never hesitates a
moment,--who tells us that the down on the butterfly's wing is a
collection of exquisitely minute balloons, and that the silkworm files
its way out of the cocoon with its eyes,--leading us to think, that, if
his great history partake of the nature of his lesser works, it must be
an assemblage of splendid errors,--M. Michelet out-Hubers Huber himself.
Contrary to these, Mr. Huish, a British author, declares that a rod
ought to be pickled for the man who dared impose such sheer inventions
upon the credulity of a weak-minded public; and although he does not say
it in so many words, he has evidently pictured to himself the
consternation with which Huber's wife and servant must have looked at
one another when he announced to them his intention of publishing a book
of the fairy stories with which they had amused him, and suffered him to
amuse his friend Bonnet. Huber has novelty, romance, and interest, upon
his side; Huish has certainly a little logic. The latter's book upon the
subject is, nevertheless, as quarrelsome an affair as ever was
published; he seems to be as choleric and adust of temperament as the
bees themselves; he contradicts every one who has dared to speak upon
the matter, and, while insisting that they could by no possibility have
seen what they pretend to have done, asserts opposing facts, which he
could no more have seen than they.

There is a close classification in Huber's system, the results of which
give us several ranks among bees,--those of the queen, the drone, the
jelly-maker, the artists in wax, the nurse, the harvester, and a certain
little useless black bee. Adversely to this, Mr. Huish, who would carry
bee-craft back to a pre-Réaumurite period, reverts to the original
observations, and declares there are but three sorts of bee in the
hive,--queen, drone, and worker,--which obviously simplifies matters;
while as for the little black bee, he regards it as existing nowhere but
in the head of its discoverer, so that, if the worthy person had not the
traditional maggot in his brain, he might at least be said to have a bee
in his bonnet. The sociable caterpillars, we are told, work as each one
pleases. John Hunter said that bees did, too; and here Mr. Huish is of
the same opinion,--this or that worker scours the fields or fashions the
cell according to the fancy that may overcome him. Him? That is exactly
the question. Mademoiselle Jurine, following the anatomical researches
of her father, promulgated the discovery that the common bee was a
decided female, with its organs undeveloped. To counterbalance her
statements, M. Epignes published a treatise in which he proved
satisfactorily to himself that the common bee is a decided male. Mr.
Huish insists that the common bee is a decided neuter. Discarding M.
Epignes with a fillip, Mr. Huish stoutly argues, against Mademoiselle
Jurine's theory, that the possession of organs destined to no use is an
incident out of the course of Nature,--to which, even were the statement
quite true, it might be added that the creation of a community of a
thousand males and one female is equally out of the course of Nature.
Mr. Huish insists, that, if these bees were all females, yet forbidden
the functions of their sex, it would be an anomaly; he forgets that the
existence of a neuter is already an anomaly. Allowing that Mr. Huish is
here in the wrong, as seems probable, it involves a slight trouble of
its own; for there would then seem to be need of but two kinds of eggs
in the hive, whereas it is well established that three kinds are
laid,--that of the male, the female, and the worker, or imperfect
female. Huber, however, in such dilemma, adopting the previous hints of
Schirach, at once seized upon Mademoiselle Jurine's discovery, and
assured us, not only that from the egg of a worker a queen could at any
time be produced, but enlightened us as to the manner of conducting the
experiment. The queen is dead? It is lamentable, but nothing so easy as
to make another. There is only to tear down some dozen cells, to set the
youngest embryo afloat in royal jelly, and a queen appears, who, if not
in the legitimate line, is capable of performing perfectly all the
office of a sovereign. There is a moment of intense despair, great riot,
and agitation; work is suspended; the temperature of the hive mounts
many degrees. All at once the old art is remembered,--the administration
of that delicious medicament, of so astonishingly affluent nature that
it can make a queen out of a commoner, the enlargement of the narrow
cradle to that ampler space which forbids the atrophy of a single fibre
of the body. The preparations are made; and, with tranquillity restored,
the people await the event. One day there comes a singular piping
sound,--it is the cry of the royal babe,--the hive is filled with
rejoicing,--there is no longer any interregnum of the purple,--the queen
is born! Perhaps the queen-makers have been too much in earnest, and at
nearly the same moment the inmates of two royal cells issue together.
Then is the time to try one's mettle,--no shrinking, no bias, nothing
but pure patriotism. Let a ring be formed, and she who proves herself
victor is worthy of homage. Is one of the two a coward? The impartial
circle bring her back to the encounter, bite her, tease her, tumble her,
worry her, tell her plainly that life is possible to her on no terms but
those of conquest. At length the matter decides itself; the brilliant
and victorious Amazon bends her long, slender body, and with her royal
poniard pierces the abject pretender through and through. Then these
satisfied subjects surround her, load her with endearments, cleanse her,
brush her, lick her, offer her honey on the end of their proboscides,
and, if there are yet remaining other royal apartments whose tenants
give notice of timely appearance, they conduct her on an Elizabethan
progress, in which, filled with instinctive dismay, she pauses at every
cell, and stabs her young rivals to death with her sting. As the story
runs, there are still other conditions to be fulfilled by the aspiring
princess,--she must give her people the assurance of a populous empire.
Should she fail in this, they have recourse to their old manoeuvres,
becoming manifestly insubordinate and unruly. If, however, they at any
time wax unbearable in their insolence, the young monarch has it in her
power, by assuming a singular attitude, standing erect at a little
distance, her wings crossed upon her back and slightly fluttering, while
she utters a shrill, slender sound, to strike them dumb, so that they
hang their heads for shame.

All this pretty story the later apiarists deem a tissue of fiction and
fallacy. If, when a hive is deprived of its queen, there happen to be a
royal egg remaining in it, they say, it will shortly produce a queen,
as, if it had been a common egg, it would have produced a common bee.
They insist that the organism of the creature to be produced is inherent
in the egg, and do not believe it in the power of a bee to alter a law
of Nature; they deny the statements of Schirach, Huber, Dunbar, Rennie,
and others to this effect,--scout the idea of the existence of such a
thing as royal jelly at all, with the supposed aristocracy of its
compounders,--share with Huber the amazement he says he felt, when, in a
time of disturbance, he distinctly heard a queen address her bees in
the French language, saying, "_Je suis ici, je suis ici_"--entirely
repudiate the royal duels, which the editor of the "Naturalist's
Library" himself, an advocate as he is of the Huberian principles,
confesses he has never, in all his experience, been able to
witness,--and go to the extreme of declaring, that, far from being the
truculent and jealous tyrant described, the queen is the most timid of
all creatures, flying, at the first intimation of danger, into the
depths of the hive, and never using her sting under any circumstances
through the whole course of her life, while, should you get one in your
hand, you may offer her indignities with impunity; she knows her value
to her people, and that, should she sting and be unable to withdraw her
barbed weapon, the effort would disembowel her, and prove her own death
and the ruin of her kingdom. The royal larvæ, Huber tells us, in
spinning their cocoons, leave the lower rings of the body unprotected by
the gossamer envelope, that thus,--and it is certainly considerate on
their part,--the head being too well shielded by the hard nature of its
substances, and the cocoon endangering the safety of her sting by its
entangling flimsy threads, their queenly assailant may destroy them
without detriment to herself, by stinging that portion left exposed. On
the contrary, we are informed by his refuters, that, even were the body
destitute of this covering, which is not the case, it would present a
horny, scaly surface, from which there would be infinitely greater
difficulty in extracting the sting than from the silken meshes of any
cocoon,--and that, as no sting could pierce the waxen wall of the cell,
and as the royal cell is vertical, and the nymph lies with its head
towards the orifice of it, unless the queen, with her sting of the
eighth of an inch in length, had the power of darting it through the
orifice to the distance of three fourths of an inch, the act would be
otherwise an impossibility,--and that, to finish the affair, these
infant princesses are destroyed by the bees themselves, who, finding
them unnecessary for further swarming, tear them from their cells, and
despatch them, not by dart or venom, but, when they are in a
sufficiently advanced stage, by an attack of the teeth at the root of
the wings, in the same way that they despatch the drone, disabling and
dragging them out of the hive, after they have become supernumeraries,
where they drop to the ground, and, powerless to fly and escape, perish
with cold, or become the prey of bird, mouse, and reptile. It is
possible that none of the various tribes of all the tiny arm-bearing
people make use of the _coup de grâce_ in their power, except as a last
resort. Still, when the bees find it necessary, they use it with Spartan
cunning. Bruin can testify to that in his sensitive muzzle; and thus,
when he takes a fancy to their conserve of blossoms, he carries off the
hive in his hug, and plunges it into the nearest brook or pool till the
bees are drowned, and all their riches made his undisturbed possession.
The bee that is not irascible betrays a dismal home and a miserable
mother; he has nothing worth fighting for. But far from him be malice;
unmolested, he does not molest. For one who has lived in an old mansion,
with bats' nests under the eaves and wasps' nests everywhere, waking in
autumn mornings to count the customary inhabitants of the latter
clustered on the cornices by threescores, while observing that they
always made themselves sufficiently at home, not only to claim a place
at table, but to walk across the cloth and help themselves, pausing
sometimes midway to flirt out the purple enamel of a wing for
admiration, and never giving offence to one of the house,--for one who
has seen this fierce and fell fury so prettily and quietly behaved, it
is pardonable to claim an equal amount of moderation for the sweeter and
purer nature of the little honey-maker, who has learned his gentler
manners of the flowers themselves. There are occasions, moreover, when
the bees positively forget they have a sting at all, as when, in
swarming, they are so entirely absorbed that they may be lifted in
handfuls. M. Lombard states the circumstance of a child's being cured of
her fear of the sting by an experience of this season. "A swarm having
left a hive, I observed the queen alight by herself, at a little
distance from the apiary. I immediately called my little friend, that I
might show her this important personage. She was anxious to have a
nearer view of Her Majesty; and therefore, having first caused her to
draw on her gloves, I gave the queen into her hand. Scarcely had I done
so, when we were surrounded by all the bees of the swarm. In this
emergency, I encouraged the trembling girl to be steady, and to fear
nothing, remaining myself close by her, and covering her head and
shoulders with a thin handkerchief. I then made her stretch out the hand
that held the queen, and the bees instantly alighted on it, and hung
from her fingers as from the branch of a tree. The little girl,
experiencing no injury, was delighted above measure at the novel sight,
and so entirely freed from all fear that she bade me uncover her face.
The spectators were charmed at the interesting spectacle. I at length
brought a hive, and, shaking the swarm from the child's hand, it was
lodged in safety without inflicting a single sting."

But however greatly opinions may vary in this branch of natural history
on one or another topic, the principal dispute is concerning the
relations that may subsist between the queen and the drones. Huber had a
complicated arrangement in reference to this, which his admirers
accepted enthusiastically, while Latreille and other apiarists reject it
as a cluster of prurient fancies. The opinion of Huish upon the subject,
which would seem to have more probability to support it than others
have, is that the queen commences to lay immediately on being
established, and that the eggs being in their separate cells, it is the
office of the drone to make them fruitful, after the custom of certain
fish and of frogs.

"When the population of the hive has been so increased by the opening of
the brood-cells that accommodation has become insufficient, and the heat
so unendurable that every wing droops wet and flaccid with perspiration,
as grand an emigration as those of the early Northern tribes is ordered,
scouts are sent out to select the future place of abode, and in some
propitious moment of perfect sunshine, honey-pouches full and nothing to
delay, the great exodus takes place with a noise as if the whole hive
were attacked by vertigo; and Homer himself could find nothing to which
to compare his multitudinous Greeks thronging from their ships fitter
than these nations of close-swarming bees. That the young queen should
lead the departing swarm seems the natural occurrence, being desirous of
fulfilling her own destiny and of hastening from a hive hostile to all
but one mistress whom they already know and love. Huber, however, will
have it that it is the old queen, who, outraged and indignant at her
treatment when a rival is allowed to live, sounds the alarm and sallies
forth with her adherents. In support of this Mr. Duncan mentions having
deprived an old queen of one of her antennæ, and noticing her thereafter
at the head of a swarm, although Huber previously makes it known that
any bee deprived of one of its antennæ is rendered useless. And in
opposition to it may be given the circumstance quoted by Mr. Huish, in
which the German apiarian Scopoli asserts, that, having clipped the
wings of a queen, he found her still in his hive after an interval of
many months, during which two excellent swarms had been thrown, and
rather plumes himself on the triumphant fact, as if by any possibility
she could have gotten away. A hive will throw off from one to four
swarms in a season, but the last two are generally worthless, and should
be deprived of their queens and returned to the parent stock. We have an
old adage to this purpose,--

    A swarm in May
    Is worth a load of hay,
    A swarm in June
    Is worth a silver spoon,
    But the swarm of July
    Isn't worth a fly,"--

and any one may verify it who chooses to investigate the condition of
such swarms at the conclusion of the harvest, when it will be seen that
those which founded their colony at so late an hour have not collected
sufficient honey even for their winter provision, and must be fed in
order to be saved till spring.

They have dainty appetites, these little people. They will work away
with their forceps at a bit of sweetmeat, but they can absorb only
liquids through their proboscides. Being in a state of civilization,
their food must be administered in a civilized way: it must be boiled
for them. They fancy stimulants; and sugar dissolved in ale, old brown
October, or, better still, made into a rich sirup with Port wine, they
find very delectable. Those authors who regard pollen as a part of their
subsistence deem that it is because they require nitrogenized
substances; and in order to prove that it is used as food, they remark
that the bees continue to harvest it so long as a single flower blows,
and that entirely after the formation of the cells has ceased. This,
however, may be owing simply to the instinct which prompted them in the
first place to bring it home, as instinct is generally in all creatures
stronger than reason and overloaded; and that it cannot be any portion
of the food of bees seems evident from the fact that whole hives are
known to have perished by hunger while still abundantly supplied with
bee-bread, as the pollen is often called. It is more probable that
pollen is really the chief constituent of wax, although Huber submits
that honey has that honor; but that this wax is produced in the manner
that Huber states is extremely doubtful. It is his opinion that the
wax-workers, having first gorged themselves with honey, suspend
themselves in festoons from the flowers, where they remain for
twenty-four hours,--which in a chilly spring night would break many a
link of the chain,--after which, one detaches herself from the festoon,
enters the hive, and takes up her situation, with her forceps detaches a
scale of wax from her side where it has recently exuded, works it with
her tongue, and fashions it to the required consistency, succeeded in
turn by others, artisan and apprentice. But as honey is the normal and
established food of bees, it would follow that these scales must be in a
state of perpetual exudation, and thus before long the hive would become
filled with them, unless bees have a control of their bodily secretions
enjoyed by no other order of beings. Anatomical dissection has found
pollen only in the second stomach of the bee, of which the mouth is the
sole and single opening; it is therefore presumed, that, being taken in
a crude condition, and having undergone its due elaboration there, it is
disgorged again and becomes the wax of the cells. This was the opinion
of Réaumur; and for additional proof, it is stated, that, though the
workers are seen to collect large quantities of farina during the season
in which the cells are being made, no particle of crude farina is
meanwhile to be found in a single cell, the whole of it being used in
their composition. All this, however, will long remain in uncertainty;
for, till some one is born with eyes of his own, ready to devote his
lifelong labor to such observations, and perhaps in the end be stung to
death for his pains,--since there are rebellions even in heaven, we
learn,--there will be general willingness to accept the most piquant
little statements regarding this most peculiar little people.

Wax itself is a substance that has no similitude to any other known. It
is now thought, that, as there are three orders of bee, so there are
three substances merely in the hive,--honey, farina, and wax. Pliny
enumerates three others,--commosis, pissoceros, and propolis. Of these
many moderns still retain the last, calling it a resinous matter
collected from alders and willows, and used for the more secure
foundation of the comb. But upon subjecting a lump of propolis to the
boiling process by which wax is purified, it turns out simple wax of
nearly its former weight; and it is accordingly presumed to be only wax
in a much more crude stage of elaboration. Dr. Bevan, in experimenting
with his hives, says that he melted wax and spread it upon a certain
place, and, while fluid, attached a slight guide-comb to it, which the
bees immediately adopted, suspending their whole comb thereby; from
which it is evident, that, wax being strong enough itself for a
foundation, propolis is unnecessary, and Nature is not apt to afford
superfluities in her economy of construction.

The beautiful geometry of the cells is, after all, the marvel of the
whole. Koenig demonstrated, that, in the problem of space and material,
the bee had at once arrived at the solution which he himself reached
only after infinitesimal calculations; and it furnishes fresh proof of
the great mathematical relations of the universe, when even instinct is
found to take on the accuracy and method of crystals. This honey-comb,
by the way, is a favorite figure in Nature. If one examines
microscopically the beautiful and brilliant petal of a gladiolus, it
will offer this cellular structure in loose and irregular outlines; but
under the same lens, the eye of a dragon-fly, which displays by daylight
a jewel-like transparency, will be seen a strict crowd of glittering
hexagons, with every alveole so closely arranged and so symmetrically
shaped as to afford instant testimony to the superiority of the animal
organization. It is by no means the habit of all bees, however, to
dispose their affairs with such precision, though many other methods may
have an equal grace. Don Felix d'Azara tells us of South American bees
which deposit their honey in small waxen cups, and are known as
Angelitos, because never using the sting; while the little black
stingless bee of Guadaloupe, which inhabits the clefts of hollow rocks
by the seaside, stores its honey in cells the size of a pigeon's egg,
each sacklet being filled only so far as it will hold without tearing
from its fellow, and a pretty piece of color being effected by the amber
honey in its receptacles of dark violet-colored wax which never
blanches, as the whole hangs together like a great cluster of grapes.
This is a species of bee not greatly differing from that which makes the
honey of Estabentum, that Clavigero says is taken every two months and
is the finest in the world. The Mexicans are reported to attend with
care to the culture of these bees, not so much for their rich honey as
for the wax, of which large quantities are used in their common church
ceremonials.

There are many singular incidents related by Huber, which, if they are
not true, one may exclaim, "The more's the pity." When he notes, that,
in a time of disorder in the hive, he beheld the queen ascend a royal
cell and seat herself upon it as if it were a throne, and, having
sympathized for a season, suddenly assume the awful attitude and strike
her disloyal people motionless, it interests us like some recital of the
haps and heroics of Boadicea and her Britons. It is remembered that in
the early days of what are known as spiritual manifestations, while one
wit thought our furniture made of Dodonean oak, another regarded the
manifestations as a wise provision, in aid of the customary May ramble
of city families from their respective domiciles. It is from a similarly
provident point of view, with the current price of coal, that we should
look at Huber's statement concerning the heat of a hive, when he tells
us that twenty hives will warm an apartment comfortably, and
twenty-five, occasionally well shaken, will furnish the proper
temperature for a conservatory,--which throws Count Rumford's feat of
boiling water without the aid of fire far into the shade. But when Huber
proceeds to say that the queen is followed on her rounds by a royal
guard, who wait on her with obsequious reverence, although it seems to
be a pretty custom enough, the actual custom may be found a far prettier
one: for the queen attends to her affairs, as others are assured, quite
unaccompanied; only as workers at all times cover the comb, when she
passes from group to group, each bee for a moment leaves labor, bestows
a caress upon its mother, offers her honey, refreshes her, sees her
pass to the next group, which hastens to do the same, while the first
returns to the business of the moment. The elder Huber taxes the
credulity, however, hardly more than his son does, in presenting a
drawing of humble-bees hindering a toppling comb from falling by taking
acrobatic postures, standing on their heads and supporting it with their
hind legs till relieved, converting themselves, in fact, into a kind of
flying-buttresses. Indeed, the trouble with all these things is, that
naturalists persist in endowing the little creatures with human
passions; and having once given the rein to imagination, it runs away
with them. Now and then they find themselves in a quagmire; but
sometimes the result is simply amusing, as in old Butler's most graphic
and entertaining description of the pillage of a weak hive by its rich
and powerful neighbor, in the "Feminine Monarchie." Yet these stories
have been told ever since the Flood. Aristotle assures us, that, when a
bee has a headwind to encounter, he ballasts himself with a little
pebble between his feet; and the Abbé della Rocca, who made observations
on the bees of the Grecian Archipelago, had the pleasure of witnessing
the circumstance in person,--which would cause one to conjecture that
the Greek bees, ever since they made honey on Plato's lip, have had
habits peculiar to themselves, were it not that the little solitary
mason-bee comes to the rescue,--the mason-bee, that, loaded with gravel
and material for her nest, both Aristotle and the Abbé della Rocca
undoubtedly saw. It is Virgil, however, on whom, in practical matters,
apiarists have not yet improved, who has told the most amazing stories
about bees, certifying that the body of their people may be bred from
decay, and particularizing the blossom on which the king of the bees is
born; but Virgil lived, it is to be recollected, nearly two thousand
years ago, and two hundred have not yet passed since Redi, sometimes
called the father of experimental entomology, first brought discredit on
the doctrine of spontaneous generation: having tried the recipe for the
manufacture of snakes, by his friend the learned Kircher, he could never
witness, he says, "the generation of those blessed snakelets made to
hand." M. Michelet, having a kind word for everybody, has a graceful
apology also for the errors of Virgil, avowing that this was not Horace,
the elegant favorite of Rome, nor the light and indiscreet Ovid, but
Virgil, the child of the soil, the noble and candid figure of the old
Italian peasant, the religious interpreter of Nature; and though he may
have been mistaken as to names, what he said he saw; he was simply
deceived, as subsequently Réaumur was for a moment, by the rat-tailed
larvæ or sewer-flies, which, having escaped from their cradle of
corruption, now shining and adorned, are thereupon brevetted to the rank
of noble Virgilian-bees.

Certain superstitions seem to have prevailed in all countries ever since
bees were first domesticated. In England they must not be bought, though
they may be bartered; but there can be no haggling. In this country they
are not even to be bartered. As their homeward flight is supposed to be
westerly, it is necessary to obtain them from a place due east of their
future residence; and their first swarm is to be hived and returned to
the original owner, the bees relying on your good faith and working one
summer on credit, so to say: they are not slaves, to be exchanged for
silver. At this and all subsequent swarmings, it is requisite that they
should be stunned by a confused clatter of bells, pans, pebbles, and
cries, although it was long ago explained by Butler that this noise came
into custom merely in signal of the ownership of a vagrant swarm. When a
death occurs in the household, the hives are to be told of it and
dressed in crape, in Switzerland turned topsy-turvy, as without such
treatment the bees do not consider themselves used as a part of the
family, and will fly away.

Among all the anecdotes given, perhaps the best instance in relation to
the intelligence of the bee is that narrative of its stratagems in
warfare with the famous Death's-Head Moth. Mr. Huish, to be sure,
leaning upon Buffon, laughs at it, believes it on a par with Jack's
Beanstalk, and is grimly satisfied that no bees ever erected
fortifications of any kind other than as against the effluvium of
murdered mouse or snail when they wall up its source in a tomb of wax;
but it is impossible to look at the benevolent, bland face in any
picture of Huber, with its sweetness of expression, and its innocent,
wide, wandering eyes, and not wish to believe every word he says. M.
Michelet tells the story so pleasantly that it would be difficult to
quote it, especially as it is well to be credulous in good company.

"About the time of the American Revolution, a little before that of the
French, there appeared and multiplied a thing unknown to our Europe, a
being of frightful shape, a large and powerful moth, marked plainly
enough in yellowish gray, with an ugly death's head. This sinister
creature, that had never before been seen, alarmed the rural regions,
and appeared to be an augury of the greatest misfortunes. In reality,
those who were terrified by it had brought it upon themselves. It had
entered the country as a caterpillar upon its natal plant, the American
potato, the fashionable vegetable of the time, extolled by Parmentier,
protected by Louis XVI., and spreading everywhere. The _savans_
christened this stranger by a name not too reassuring,--the Sphinx
Atropos.

"This animal was terrible indeed,--but only to honey. Of that it was
gluttonous, and capable of everything in order to obtain it. A hive of
thirty thousand bees did not appall it. In the depth of midnight, the
voracious monster, profiting by that hour when the outskirts of the city
are weakly guarded, with a little dull lugubrious noise, muffled as if
by the smooth down which covered him, invaded the hive, sought the
combs, gorged himself, pillaged, spoiled, overthrew the stores and the
brood. In vain might the attacked party awaken, assemble, and riot;
stings could not pierce the covering,--the species of soft, elastic
mattress with which he was everywhere garnished, like the Mexicans of
the time of Cortés in their cotton armor that no Spanish weapon could
penetrate.

"Huber took counsel with himself for some means of protecting his bees
from this daring robber. Should he make gratings? should he make doors?
and how? That was his doubt. The best imagined closure possible had the
inconvenience of hindering the great movement of exit and entrance
always going on at the sill of the hive. Their impatience rendered these
barriers, in which they would entangle themselves and break their wings,
intolerable to the bees.

"One morning, the faithful servant who aided him in all his experiments
informed him that the bees had already solved the problem for
themselves. They had in various hives conceived and carried out divers
systems of defence and fortification. Here they had constructed a waxen
wall, with narrow windows, through which the huge enemy could not pass;
and there, by a more ingenious invention, without stirring anything,
they had placed at their gates intersecting arcades or little
partitions, one behind another, but alternating, so that opposite the
empty spaces between those of the first row stood the partitions of the
second row. Thus were contrived numerous openings for the impatient
crowd of bees, who could go out and come in as usual, and without any
other obstacle than the slight one of going a little zigzag; but limits,
absolute obstructions, for the great, clumsy enemy, who could not enter
with his unfolded wings, nor even insinuate himself without bruises
between the narrow corridors.

"This was the _coup d'état_ of the lower orders, the revolution of
insects, executed by the bees, not only against those that robbed them,
but against those that denied their intelligence. The theorists who
refuse that to them, the Malebranches and the Buffons, must consider
themselves conquered. We go back to the reserve of the great students
of Nature, the Swammerdams, the Réaumurs, who, far from contesting the
genius of insects, give us numberless facts to prove that it is
flexible, that it can increase with dangers and with obstacles, that it
can quit routine, and in certain circumstances make unexpected
progress."

Intelligence among the inferior animals seems always more or less an
affair of acute senses; the bee certainly ought to manifest much of it,
for his senses are extraordinary. Not to speak of that singular sixth
sense of the antennæ, by whose power alone he fashions his cell and
seems to make and receive communication, nor of his wonderful eyesight,
to which a double kind of eye contributes, one portion of it being for
distance and another for vertical objects or for closer work,--although
there are naturalists who consider these stemmata as a possible organ of
hearing,--he has a sense of smell which must surpass that of any other
creature on the wing: it is perhaps to this lively faculty that he owes
his marvellous cleanliness. Féburier states that at one time the bees,
attracted by the lemon-trees and flowers of Cuba, emigrated thither in a
body from the mainland of Florida, a distance of twenty-five
leagues,--the fact, however, being that their owners emigrated and took
them with them. But they have been positively known to track heath a
distance of four miles, and that across water, through an atmosphere in
which the faint scent of the heath must have mingled with all the
powerful salt odor of the sea. Strong little wings they must be, too, to
travel these distances, and yet perform all the other labor allotted
them; for every day, while some with their burdens are entering the
black hive, and some are darting out again into the glaring sunlight
full of business and on new errands, others may always be distinguished
stationed by the door and fanning their bits of wings backward and
forward in ventilation of the hive. Although disputatious to the last,
Mr. Huish insists that this motion is nothing but the expression of
intense satisfaction and joy. Either way, it would seem as if an
answering rest must be required in order to repair such wear and tear;
and on this point an old Spanish writer sets it down that bees sleep
during every night and on all fast-days in addition, and a corroborating
investigator remarks that he has seen them withdraw into the empty
cells, and, composing themselves, their heads towards the bottom, enjoy
the deepest slumber, the body gently heaving with the breath, and every
little limb relaxed,--to which another person replies, that this is an
outrageous statement, for it is a decided fact that sleep is as much a
stranger to the eye of a bee as it is to the eye of a herring. Yet in
the German countries much of the labor of flight is after all spared
them, their owners collecting them into caravans, conducting them
gypsy-wise, encamping here and encamping there, through whatever
districts linger latest in bloom. They build bee-barges, too, in France,
capacious enough for a hundred hives, and drift them down the rivers, so
that the bees shall follow the summer as it flits southward. And in
Lower Egypt, where the blossoming continues much longer than in the
upper regions, Niebuhr saw an assemblage of four thousand hives upon the
Nile; anchoring at places of plentiest pasturage: the bees thus float
from one end of the land to the other before they return and enrich
their proprietors with the honey they have harvested from the
orange-flowers and jasmines of the Said and all the wealthy banks of the
mighty river. The hunter in America takes advantage of this clear sight
and of this strength of wing when, he lines a bee to its nest, by
alluring one to a bait of honey within a circle of wet white paint,
watching the subsequent flight, letting off another, similarly secured,
at right angles to that, and looking for the nest at the intersection of
the two white lines. Nor is the hunter their only depredator. At the
Cape of Good Hope there lives a bird known as the Honey-Guide, that
enters into alliance with man, sounds its shrill note, and, fluttering
from spray to spray, leads the way to the sweet resort: it would be
sacrilege, if the Hottentot did not leave a portion of the honey to the
informer. There, too, is the rattel, a little beast that at sunset
shelters its eyes with a paw, for clearer view, spots a bee, and follows
it: often these two make fellowship together, the one for the honey, the
bird for the brood. But these are not the terrors of a temperate clime;
the hives can despatch a field-mouse unassisted; the master who cannot
rid them of the wax-moth they will desert without regrets; sounding the
slogan for aid, no two bees will hesitate to grapple with the bold
butchering wasp that invades them; the humble-bee, making her
underground nest, the poppy-bee, fitting her splendid scarlet tapestry,
however many each may have, recks of few enemies beyond the rain and
storm. What should any one of them all remember about the tomtit that
comes and taps outside and snaps each resident up as it appears
inquiring at the gate? of the little feathered monster that tears bees
to pieces, making shreds of heads and wings for his mere amusement? To
them a briefer memory makes brief life blessed. The happy murmurer of
our morning knows of little but peace and security, he does not even
dream that _savans_ infuriate themselves about him, he buzzes from
flower to flower, daringly puts aside the curtain of sacred shrines and
makes himself luxurious hermitage in the snowy depths of the lilies,
lets the south wind swing him a moment on the golden cradle of kingcups,
pursues his pleasures in the purple recesses of the hyacinth, or,
gliding into a labyrinth of petals, between the silken linings of
perfumed chambers, the tinted sunlight softly sifting through, revels
with the gracious nymphs that wait there, that hail him, caress him, and
give him their confidence all under the rose; he goes his way, and his
music spurns the trail of melancholy that never fails to follow the most
delicious warble that ever trilled from throat of bobolink or throstle.
As you lie and listen, in the golden tenor of the hive-bee's hum seems
diffused the wide whisper of continuous gladness; and giving the
innermost note of summer and of noon, the booming bass of the humble-bee
blazons abroad all poetry and beauty and sumptuous delight.

    "Hot midsummer's petted crone,
    Sweet to me thy drowsy tone,
    Tells of countless sunny hours,
    Long days and solid banks of flowers,
    Of gulfs of sweetness without bound
    In Indian wilderness found,
    Of Syrian peace, immortal leisure,
    Firmest cheer, and bird-like pleasure."




COUNTESS LAURA.


    It was a dreary day in Padua.
    The Countess Laura, for a single year
    Fernando's wife, upon her bridal bed,
    Like an uprooted lily on the snow,
    The withered outcast of a festival,
    Lay dead. She died of some uncertain ill,
    That struck her almost on her wedding-day,
    And clung to her, and dragged her slowly down,
    Thinning her cheeks and pinching her full lips,
    Till, in her chance, it seemed that with a year
    Full half a century was overpast.
    In vain had Paracelsus taxed his art,
    And feigned a knowledge of her malady;
    In vain had all the doctors, far and near,
    Gathered around the mystery of her bed,
    Draining her veins, her husband's treasury,
    And physic's jargon, in a fruitless quest
    For causes equal to the dread result.
    The Countess only smiled, when they were gone,
    Hugged her fair body with her little hands,
    And turned upon her pillows wearily,
    As if she fain would sleep, no common sleep,
    But the long, breathless slumber of the grave.
    She hinted nothing. Feeble as she was,
    The rack could not have wrung her secret out
    The Bishop, when he shrived her, coming forth,
    Cried, in a voice of heavenly ecstasy,
    "O blessed soul! with nothing to confess,
    Save virtues and good deeds, which she mistakes--
    So humble is she--for our human sins!"
    Praying for death, she tossed upon her bed,
    Day after day,--as might a shipwrecked bark
    That rocks upon one billow, and can make
    No onward motion towards her port of hope.
    At length, one morn, when those around her said,
    "Surely the Countess mends, so fresh a light
    Beams from her eyes and beautifies her face,"--
    One morn in spring, when every flower of earth
    Was opening to the sun, and breathing up
    Its votive incense, her impatient soul
    Opened itself, and so exhaled to heaven.
    When the Count heard it, he reeled back a pace;
    Then turned with anger on the messenger;
    Then craved his pardon, and wept out his heart
    Before the menial: tears, ah, me! such tears
    As Love sheds only, and Love only once.
    Then he bethought him, "Shall this wonder die
    And leave behind no shadow? not a trace
    Of all the glory that environed her,
    That mellow nimbus circling round my star?"
    So, with his sorrow glooming in his face,
    He paced along his gallery of Art,
    And strode amongst the painters, where they stood,
    With Carlo, the Venetian, at their head,
    Studying the Masters by the dawning light
    Of his transcendent genius. Through the groups
    Of gayly vestured artists moved the Count,--
    As some lone cloud of thick and leaden hue,
    Packed with the secret of a coming storm,
    Moves through the gold and crimson evening mists,
    Deadening their splendor. In a moment, still
    Was Carlo's voice, and still the prattling crowd;
    And a great shadow overran them all,
    As their white faces and their anxious eyes
    Pursued Fernando in his moody walk.
    He paused, as one who balances a doubt,
    Weighing two courses, then burst out with this:
    "Ye all have seen the tidings in my face;
    Or has the dial ceased to register
    The workings of my heart? Then hear the bell,
    That almost cracks the frame in utterance:
    The Countess--she is dead!"--"Dead!" Carlo groaned.
    And if a bolt from middle heaven had struck
    His splendid features full upon the brow,
    He could not have appeared more scathed and blanched.
    "Dead!--dead!" He staggered to his easel-frame,
    And clung around it, buffeting the air
    With one wild arm, as though a drowning man
    Hung to a spar and fought against the waves.--
    The Count resumed: "I came not here to grieve,
    Nor see my sorrow in another's eyes.
    Who'll paint the Countess, as she lies to-night
    In state within the chapel? Shall it be
    That earth must lose her wholly? that no hint
    Of her gold tresses, beaming eyes, and lips
    That talked in silence, and the eager soul
    That ever seemed outbreaking through her clay,
    And scattering glory round it,--shall all these
    Be dull corruption's heritage, and we,
    Poor beggars, have no legacy to show
    The love she bore us? That were shame to love,
    And shame to you, my masters." Carlo stalked
    Forth from his easel, stiffly as a thing
    Moved by mechanic impulse. His thin lips,
    And sharpened nostrils, and wan, sunken cheeks,
    And the cold glimmer in his dusky eyes,
    Made him a ghastly sight. The throng drew back,
    As if they let a spectre through. Then he,
    Fronting the Count, and speaking in a voice
    Sounding remote and hollow, made reply:
    "Count, I shall paint the Countess. 'Tis my fate,--
    Not pleasure,--no, nor duty." But the Count,
    Astray in woe, but understood assent,
    Not the strange words that bore it; and he flung
    His arm round Carlo, drew him to his breast,
    And kissed his forehead. At which Carlo shrank:
    Perhaps 'twas at the honor. Then the Count,
    A little reddening at his public state,--
    Unseemly to his near and recent loss,--
    Withdrew in haste between the downcast eyes
    That did him reverence as he rustled by.

    Night fell on Padua. In the chapel lay
    The Countess Laura at the altar's foot.
    Her coronet glittered on her pallid brows;
    A crimson pall, weighed down with golden work,
    Sown thick with pearls, and heaped with early flowers,
    Draped her still body almost to the chin;
    And over all a thousand candles flamed
    Against the winking jewels, or streamed down
    The marble aisle, and flashed along the guard
    Of men-at-arms that slowly wove their turns,
    Backward and forward, through the distant gloom.
    When Carlo entered, his unsteady feet
    Scarce bore him to the altar, and his head
    Drooped down so low that all his shining curls
    Poured on his breast, and veiled his countenance.
    Upon his easel a half-finished work,
    The secret labor of his studio,
    Said from the canvas, so that none might err,
    "I am the Countess Laura." Carlo kneeled,
    And gazed upon the picture,--as if thus,
    Through those clear eyes, he saw the way to heaven.
    Then he arose; and as a swimmer comes
    Forth from the waves, he shook his locks aside,
    Emerging from his dream, and standing firm
    Upon a purpose with his sovereign will.
    He took his palette, murmuring, "Not yet!"
    Confidingly and softly to the corpse;
    And as the veriest drudge who plies his art
    Against his fancy, he addressed himself
    With stolid resolution to his task.
    Turning his vision on his memory,
    And shutting out the present, till the dead,
    The gilded pall, the lights, the pacing guard,
    And all the meaning of that solemn scene
    Became as nothing, and creative Art
    Resolved the whole to chaos, and reformed
    The elements according to her law,--
    So Carlo wrought, as though his eye and hand
    Were Heaven's unconscious instruments, and worked
    The settled purpose of Omnipotence.
    And it was wondrous how the red, the white,
    The ochre, and the umber, and the blue,
    From mottled blotches, hazy and opaque,
    Grew into rounded forms and sensuous lines;
    How just beneath the lucid skin the blood
    Glimmered with warmth, the scarlet lips apart
    Bloomed with the moisture of the dews of life;
    How the light glittered through and underneath
    The golden tresses, and the deep, soft eyes
    Became intelligent with conscious thought,
    And somewhat troubled underneath the arch
    Of eyebrows but a little too intense
    For perfect beauty; how the pose and poise
    Of the lithe figure on its tiny foot
    Suggested life just ceased from motion; so
    That any one might cry, in marvelling joy,
    "That creature lives,--has senses, mind, a soul
    To win God's love or dare hell's subtleties!"
    The artist paused. The ratifying "Good"
    Trembled upon his lips. He saw no touch
    To give or soften. "It is done," he cried,--
    "My task, my duty! Nothing now on earth
    Can taunt me with a work left unfulfilled!"
    The lofty flame which bore him up so long
    Died in the ashes of humanity;
    And the mere man rocked to and fro again
    Upon the centre of his wavering heart.
    He put aside his palette, as if thus
    He stepped from sacred vestments, and assumed
    A mortal function in the common world.
    "Now for my rights!" he muttered, and approached
    The noble body. "O lily of the world!
    So withered, yet so lovely! what wast thou
    To those who came thus near thee--for I stood
    Without the pale of thy half-royal rank--
    When thou wast budding, and the streams of life
    Made eager struggles to maintain thy bloom,
    And gladdened heaven dropped down in gracious dews
    On its transplanted darling? Hear me now!
    I say this but in justice, not in pride,
    Not to insult thy high nobility,
    But that the poise of things in God's own sight
    May be adjusted, and hereafter I
    May urge a claim that all the powers of heaven
    Shall sanction, and with clarions blow abroad.
    Laura, you loved me! Look not so severe,
    With your cold brows, and deadly, close-drawn lips!
    You proved it, Countess, when you died for it,--
    Let it consume you in the wearing strife
    It fought with duty in your ravaged heart.
    I knew it ever since that summer-day
    I painted Lila, the pale beggar's child,
    At rest beside the fountain; when I felt--
    Oh, heaven!--the warmth and moisture of your breath
    Blow through my hair, as with your eager soul--
    Forgetting soul and body go as one--
    You leaned across my easel till our cheeks--
    Ah, me! 'twas not your purpose--touched, and clung!
    Well, grant 'twas genius; and is genius nought?
    I ween it wears as proud a diadem--
    Here, in this very world--as that you wear.
    A king has held my palette, a grand-duke
    Has picked my brush up, and a pope has begged
    The favor of my presence in his Rome.
    I did not go; I put my fortune by.
    I need not ask you why: you knew too well.
    It was but natural, it was no way strange,
    That I should love you. Everything that saw,
    Or had its other senses, loved you, sweet!
    And I amongst them. Martyr, holy saint,--
    I see the halo curving round your head,--
    I loved you once; but now I worship you,
    For the great deed that held my love aloof,
    And killed you in the action! I absolve
    Your soul from any taint. For from the day
    Of that encounter by the fountain-side
    Until this moment, never turned on me
    Those tender eyes, unless they did a wrong
    To Nature by the cold, defiant glare
    With which they chilled me. Never heard I word
    Of softness spoken by those gentle lips;
    Never received a bounty from that hand
    Which gave to all the world. I know the cause.
    You did your duty,--not for honor's sake,
    Nor to save sin or suffering or remorse,
    Or all the ghosts that haunt a woman's shame,
    But for the sake of that pure, loyal love
    Your husband bore you. Queen, by grace of God,
    I bow before the lustre of your throne!
    I kiss the edges of your garment-hem,
    And hold myself ennobled! Answer me,--
    If I had wronged you, you would answer me
    Out of the dusty porches of the tomb,--
    Is this a dream, a falsehood? or have I
    Spoken the very truth?"--"The very truth!"
    A voice replied; and at his side he saw
    A form, half shadow and half substance, stand,
    Or, rather, rest; for on the solid earth
    It had no footing, more than some dense mist
    That wavers o'er the surface of the ground
    It scarcely touches. With a reverent look,
    The shadow's waste and wretched face was bent
    Above the picture,--as if greater awe
    Subdued its awful being, and appalled,
    With memories of terrible delight
    And fearful wonder, its devouring gaze.
    "You make what God makes,--beauty," said the shape.
    "And might not this, this second Eve, console
    The emptiest heart? Will not this thing outlast
    The fairest creature fashioned in the flesh?
    Before that figure Time, and Death himself,
    Stand baffled and disarmed. What would you ask
    More than God's power, from nothing to create?"
    The artist gazed upon the boding form,
    And answered: "Goblin, if you had a heart,
    That were an idle question. What to me
    Is my creative power, bereft of love?
    Or what to God would be that selfsame power,
    If so bereaved?"--"And yet the love thus mourned
    You calmly forfeited. For had you said
    To living Laura--in her burning ears--
    One half that you professed to Laura dead,
    She would have been your own. These contraries
    Sort not with my intelligence. But say,
    Were Laura living, would the same stale play
    Of raging passion, tearing out its heart
    Upon the rock of duty, be performed?"
    "The same, O phantom, while the heart I bear
    Trembled, but turned not its magnetic faith
    From God's fixed centre." "If I wake for you
    This Laura,--give her all the bloom and glow
    Of that midsummer day you hold so dear,--
    The smile, the motion, the impulsive heart,
    The love of genius,--yea, the very love,
    The mortal, hungry, passionate, hot love,
    She bore you, flesh to flesh,--would you receive
    That gift, in all its glory, at my hands?"
    A cruel smile arched the tempter's scornful lips,
    And glittered in the caverns of his eyes,
    Mocking the answer. Carlo paled and shook;
    A woful spasm went shuddering through his frame,
    Curdling his blood, and twisting his fair face
    With nameless torture. But he cried aloud,
    Out of the clouds of anguish, from the smoke
    Of very martyrdom, "O God, she is thine!
    Do with her at thy pleasure!" Something grand,
    And radiant as a sunbeam, touched the head
    He bent in awful sorrow. "Mortal, see"----
    "Dare not! As Christ was sinless, I abjure
    These vile abominations! Shall she bear
    Life's burden twice, and life's temptations twice,
    While God is justice?" "Who has made you judge
    Of what you call God's good, and what you think
    God's evil? One to Him, the Source of both,
    The God of good and of permitted ill.
    Have you no dream of days that might have been,
    Had you and Laura filled another fate?
    Some cottage on the sloping Apennines,
    Roses and lilies, and the rest all love?
    I tell you that this tranquil dream may be
    Filled to repletion. Speak, and in the shade
    Of my dark pinions I shall bear you hence,
    And land you where the mountain goat himself
    Struggles for footing." He outspread his wings,
    And all the chapel darkened, as if hell
    Had swallowed up the tapers; and the air
    Grew thick, and, like a current sensible,
    Flowed round the person, with a wash and dash,
    As of the waters of a nether sea.
    Slowly and calmly through the dense obscure,
    Dove-like and gentle, rose the artist's voice:
    "I dare not bring her spirit to that shame!
    Know my full meaning,--I that neither fear
    Your mystic person nor your dreadful power.
    Nor shall I now invoke God's potent name
    For my deliverance from your toils. I stand
    Upon the founded structure of His law,
    Established from the first, and thence defy
    Your arts, reposing all my trust in that!"
    The darkness eddied off; and Carlo saw
    The figure gathering, as from outer space,
    Brightness on brightness; and his former shape
    Fell from him, like the ashes that fall off,
    And show a core of mellow fire within.
    Adown his wings there poured a lambent flood,
    That seemed as molten gold, which plashing fell
    Upon the floor, enringing him with flame;
    And o'er the tresses of his beaming head
    Arose a stream of many-colored light,
    Like that which crowns the morning. Carlo stood
    Steadfast, for all the splendor, reaching up
    The outstretched palms of his untainted soul
    Towards heaven for strength. A moment thus; then asked,
    With reverential wonder quivering through
    His sinking voice, "Who, spirit, and what art thou?"
    "I am that blessing which men fly from,--Death."
    "Then take my hand, if so God orders it;
    For Laura waits me." "But bethink thee, man,
    What the world loses in the loss of thee!
    What wondrous Art will suffer with eclipse!
    What unwon glories are in store for thee!
    What fame, outreaching time and temporal shocks,
    Would shine upon the letters of thy name
    Graven in marble, or the brazen height
    Of columns wise with memories of thee!"
    "Take me! If I outlived the Patriarchs,
    I could but paint those features o'er and o'er;
    Lo! that is done." A pitying smile o'erran
    The seraph's features, as he looked to heaven,
    With deep inquiry in his tender eyes.
    The mandate came. He touched with downy wing
    The sufferer lightly on his aching heart;
    And gently, as the sky-lark settles down
    Upon the clustered treasures of her nest,
    So Carlo softly slid along the prop
    Of his tall easel, nestling at the foot
    As if he slumbered; and the morning broke
    In silver whiteness over Padua.




STRATEGY AT THE FIRESIDE.


I.

Was it the fault of poor Barbara Dinwiddie, that, when Sumter fell, and
the gallant Anderson saw with anguish the old flag pulled down, she was
the most desperate little Rebel in all Dixie? By no means! At school, at
home, at church, she had been taught that Slavery was the divinest of
all divine institutions; that all those outside barbarians, known as
Yankees, who questioned its justice, its policy, its eternal fitness,
were worse than infidels; that those favored individuals whose felicity
it had been to be born and bred under the patriarchal benignity were the
master race of this continent; and that one Southern man could, with
perfect ease to himself, and without any risk whatever of any unpleasant
consequences, whip and put _hors de combat_ any five of the "homeless
and traditionless race" that could be brought against him.

Had not Mr. Jefferson Davis so styled them? and had he not said that he
would rather herd with hyenas than with Yankees? Had not Mr. Yancey
declared that all the Yankees were cowards? Had not Mr. Walker,
Secretary of State of the new Confederacy, predicted that the "stars and
bars" would wave over Faneuil Hall in a twelvemonth? Had not the
Richmond papers assured the high-born sons of the South, who of course
included the whole white population, that it was an utter impossibility
for the chivalry to exist under the same government with the mean,
intolerable mudsills of the North? The wonder was, that the aforesaid
chivalry could live under the same sun, breathe the same atmosphere,
with such miscreants.

Was it, then, surprising that poor little Barbara, receiving in her
narrow sphere no other political influences than these, should find
herself at the age of seventeen the most eager of feminine sympathizers
with Secession? She burned to emulate Mrs. Greenhow, Belle Boyd, and
other enterprising Amazons who early in the war distinguished themselves
as spies or carriers for the Rebels. She almost blamed herself as
recreant, because she read with a shudder the account of that Southern
damsel who bade her lover bring back, as the most precious gift he could
lay at her feet, a Yankee scalp. She tried to persuade herself that
those little mementos, carved from Yankee bones, which were so
fashionable at one time among the _élite_ of the "Secesh" aristocracy,
would not shock her own sensitive heart.

Barbara's mother had done much to encourage these sentiments in her
daughter. A match between Barbara and Colonel Pegram of South Carolina
was one of that mother's pet projects. Mrs. Dinwiddie was of "one of the
first families of Virginia"; in which she was not singular. She had been
brought up to regard the Old Dominion as the lawful dictatress of the
legislation of the American continent; as sovereign, not only over her
own borders, but over the Congress and especially the Treasury of the
United States. The tobacco-lands of her father having given out through
that sagacious system of culture which Slavery applies, and
negro-raising for the supply of the slave-market farther south being in
a temporary condition of paralysis, the lady had so far descended from
her pedestal of ancestral pride as to encourage the addresses of Mr.
Daniel Dinwiddie, a Baltimore merchant, and himself "of excellent
family," though he had tarnished his hereditary honors by condescending
to engage in trade. Two children were the fruits of the alliance which
ensued,--our Barbara, and Mr. Culpepper Dinwiddie, who became eventually
a major in the Rebel army.

What a _dies iræ_ it was for poor Mrs. Dinwiddie, that day that "Beast
Butler" rode at a slow walk through the streets of Baltimore, smoking
his cigar, and swaying to and fro carelessly on his horse! The poor
lady was ready to cuff Mr. Dinwiddie's ears, because that worthy citizen
sat down to his mutton and claret that day at dinner as coolly as if
nothing had happened. Barbara wept, and sang "My Maryland" and the
"Bonnie Blue Flag" till she made herself hoarse. She then glanced at a
photograph of Colonel Pegram, and thought how well he looked the
conquering hero.

Sunday came. It was a blessed satisfaction that at the Church of St.
Fortunatus all the communicants were friends of the Rebellion. The
Reverend Bogus de Bogus was himself an extremist in his advocacy of
Slavery and the Slave Confederacy. But what was the consternation of the
whole assembly, at hearing him, on that eventful Sabbath, pray for the
President and other authorities of the United States! Had he been
tampered with by the Beast? What was the world coming to? How
intolerable that the solar system should move on as regularly and
indifferently as if nothing had happened!

The fomenters of Rebellion in the Monument City continued hopeful,
notwithstanding the defection of the Reverend Bogus de Bogus. Mrs.
Dinwiddie almost worried Dinwiddie's life out, teasing him for money
with which to buy quinine and percussion-caps to smuggle into Rebeldom.
Barbara worked till her taper little forefinger looked like a
nutmeg-grater, making shirts and drawers for the "gallant Palmetto
Tenth," in which certain sprigs of aristocracy from Baltimore had
enlisted. The regiment was commanded by that splendid fellow, Charlie
Pegram.

What was Barbara's despair, on learning that all the products of her
labors had been intercepted by the "Beast," and were safely stored at
"these headquarters"! Mrs. Dinwiddie went into hysterics at the news,
but was suddenly restored, on hearing Dinwiddie enter, and inquire in
the most cold-blooded manner, "Why isn't dinner ready?" Falling upon
that monster in human shape, she crushed him so far into silence by her
indignation, that he was glad to make a meal of a few crackers and a
glass of ale, and then retire for his afternoon cigar to the repose of
his counting-room.

The war (the civil, not the domestic, we mean) went on. Battle succeeded
battle, and skirmish skirmish, with alternating successes, when at last
came the Emancipation Proclamation, not in the earthquake, nor in the
whirlwind, but in the still small voice. "Well, what of it? 'Tis a mere
paper bomb!" said Belshazzar at Richmond, looking out on Libby and Belle
Isle. Mrs. Dinwiddie read the "Richmond Enquirer," and thought, for the
thousandth time, how intolerable life would be, if ever again Yankees
were to be suffered to live within a thousand miles of a genuine
descendant of the Cavaliers. "Spaniels must be whipped into
subservience," said Mr. Jefferson Davis, alluding to the abhorred race
north of Mason and Dixon's line.

"Yes, they must be whipped!" echoed Mrs. Dinwiddie; and soon afterwards
came news of the capture of New Orleans, of Vicksburg, of Port Hudson,
and at last of Atlanta. "These horrid Yankees!" she shrieked. "Why don't
we do something, Dinwiddie? If one Southerner can whip five Yankees,
why, in the name of common sense, don't we do something? Speak, you
stupid, provoking man!"

"Yes, yes, what was it you asked?" meekly interrogated Dinwiddie, who
was calculating how much he had made in the recent rise of United States
five-twenties.

"What was it? Oh, go to your tobacco-casks, your coupons, and your
cotton, you soulless, huckstering old man! You can look on and see
Abolitionism getting rampant in this once proud city, and not lift a
voice or a finger to save us from ruin! You can see Maryland drifting
into the horrible abyss of Yankeeism and Anti-slavery, and keep on doing
business and minding the paltry affairs of your counting-room, as if all
that gives grace and dignity to this wretched State were not on the
verge of destruction! If you'd had the spirit of a hare, you'd have
been a brigadier-general in the Confederate army by this time."

Dinwiddie was not a man of words. He had a wholesome horror of
strong-minded women; and to that class he discovered, too late for his
peace, that his wife belonged. So he simply replied, slightly
stuttering, as was his wont, except when excited,--

"If I had joined the army, Madam, I should have--have--ve"----

"I should have what?"

"I should have been deprived of your--ahem--agreeable society; and then
you might have been a wid--wid--widow."

"I should have been proud. Sir, to have been your widow under such
circumstances."

"Thank you, Mrs. Dinwiddie; but being a mod--mod--modest man myself, I'd
rather not make my wife proud."

"There's no danger of your ever doing that, Sir," quoth Madam; "but I
thank Heaven we're not wholly disgraced. We have one representative of
our family in the Confederate army. My son Culpepper may live to make
amends for his sire's degeneracy."

Dinwiddie was beginning to get roused.

"My degeneracy, Madam? Confound it, Madam, where would you and yours
have been, if I hadn't saved you all from pau--pau--pauperism, Madam?"

It was rare that Dinwiddie made so long a speech, and the lady was
astounded.

"Sir," said she, "do you know it is a Culpepper of whom you speak?"

"Devilish well I know it," said the excited Daniel; "and what you all
had but your pride I never could find out; and what were you proud of?
Of a dozen or two old family nig--nig--niggers, that were only a bill of
expense to that pompous old cove, your father."

Mrs. Dinwiddie began to grow livid with exasperation. Her husband had
touched her on a tender point.

"Go on, Sir," said she; "I see your drift. I have suspected for some
time that you were going to play the renegade; to desert your order; to
prove false to the South; to cooperate with miscreant Yankees in
overturning our sacred institutions."

"Confound your sacred institutions, Madam! Slavery is played out."

"Played out, you monstrous blasphemer? An institution for which
Scripture vouches; an institution which the Reverend Dr. Palmer says
comes right down to us from heaven! Played out? Monster! I thank the
Lord my two children have not been corrupted by these detestable Yankee
notions that are upsetting all our old landmarks in this once noble city
of Baltimore."

"Noble? Ah, yes,--noble, I suppose, when it allowed its ruffians to
shoot down a band of Northern soldiers who were marching to the support
of Government!"

"You yourself said at the time, Mr. Dinwiddie, that it served them
right."

Dinwiddie winced, for this was a blow square on his forehead between his
two eyes. He paused, and then, without knowing it, translated the words
of a Latin moralist, and replied,--

"Times change, and we change with them."

"You will find, Sir, that a Culpepper doesn't change," said Madam; and,
with a gesture of queenly scorn, she swept with expansive crinoline out
of the room.

"So the ice is broken at last," muttered Dinwiddie. "I wouldn't have
believed I could have faced her so well. After all, I'm not sure that
the military is not my true sphere."

His soliloquy was interrupted by the ring of muskets on the sidewalk in
front, of his house, and he jumped with a nervous horror. Looking from
the window, he saw a file of soldiers, and an officer in the United
States uniform, with one arm in a sling, and the hand of the other
holding a drawn sword. He was a pale, but handsome youth, and looked up
as if to read the name on the door. Then, followed by a sergeant, he
ascended the steps and rang the bell.

"What the Deuse is all this for. I wonder?" exclaimed Dinwiddie; and in
his curiosity he opened the outside door, anticipating the negro
footman, Nero, who exchanged a glance of intelligence with the military
man.

"I am Captain Penrose, Sir," said the officer; "this is Sergeant
MacFuse; you, I believe, bear the name on the door-plate before us."

Dinwiddie bowed an affirmative.

"I have orders, Sir," resumed the officer, "to search your house; and I
will thank you to give me the opportunity with as little delay as
possible, and without communicating with any member of your family."

"But, Captain, does anybody doubt my loyalty?"

"No one, Sir, that I am aware of," replied the Captain, with a suavity
that reassured and captivated Dinwiddie. "We haven't the slightest
doubt, Sir, of your thoroughly loyal and honorable conduct and
intentions; but, Sir, there is, nevertheless, a Rebel mail in your house
at this moment. I'll thank you to conduct us quietly to the little
bathing-room communicating with your wife's apartment on the second
story."

Dinwiddie saw through it all. He said not a word, but led the way up
stairs.

"We shall have to pass through Madam's room to get at the place," he
remarked; "for the door is locked on the inside."

"Yes, but the key is out, and I have a duplicate," replied the officer.
"We will enter by the door that opens on this passage-way. I will just
give a gentle knock, to learn whether any one is in the bathing-room."

He knocked, and there was no reply.

"I think we may venture in," he said.

He unlocked the door, and they entered,--Captain Penrose, Sergeant
MacFuse, Dinwiddie, and Nero. The Captain pointed to a chest of drawers
let into the wall, and said,--

"Now, Sir, if you will open that lowest drawer, I think you will find
what I am in search of."

Dinwiddie opened the drawer, and a strong smell of tobacco, in which
some furs were packed, made him sneeze; but the Captain proved to be
correct in his surmise. Nero displayed his ivory in a broad grin, and
Dinwiddie lifted a small, but well-stuffed leather mail-bag.

At that moment the door leading into Mrs. Dinwiddie's apartment opened,
and that lady, followed by Barbara, made her appearance. Nero's grin was
at once transformed into a look of intense solemnity, and the whites of
his eyes were lifted in sympathetic amazement.

Madam's first effort was to snatch the mail-bag from her husband; but he
handed it to Sergeant MacFuse, who, receiving it, shouldered his musket
with military formality.

"But this is an outrage, Sir!" exclaimed Mrs. Dinwiddie, finding words
at length for her rage.

"Madam," said Captain Penrose, "a carriage ought to be by this time at
the door. Have the goodness, you and your daughter, to make the
necessary preparations and accompany me and Sergeant MacFuse to the
office of the Provost Marshal."

"I shall do no such thing!" said Madam, with set teeth, trembling with
exasperation.

"You will relieve me, I am sure, Madam," said the Captain, "of anything
so painful as the exercise of force."

"Force!" cried Madam; "yes, that would be all in the line of you mean
and dastardly Yankees, to use force to unprotected women!"

"Oh, mother!" said Barbara, shocked, in spite of her Secession
sympathies, at the maternal rudeness, and somewhat touched withal by the
pale face and the slung arm of the handsome young officer; "I am sure
the gentleman has"--

"Gentleman! Ha, ha, ha! You call him a gentleman, do you?" gasped Mrs.
Dinwiddie, as, quite beside herself with passion, she sank into a chair.

"Yes, mother," said Barbara, her heart moved by a thrill as natural as
that which stirs the leaves of the embryo bud in May; "yes, mother, I
call him a gentleman; and I hope you will do nothing to prevent his
calling you a lady."

Captain Penrose looked with a sudden interest on the maiden. Strange
that he hadn't noticed it before, but truly she was very, very pretty!
Light, not too light, hair; blue eyes; a charming figure; a face radiant
with sentiment and with intelligence; verily, in all Baltimore, so
justly famed for beautiful women, he had not seen her peer! Barbara
dropped her eyes. Decidedly the young officer's admiration was too
emphatically expressed in his glance.

Mrs. Dinwiddie began to grow hysterical.

"Madam," said Captain Penrose, "I fear your strength will not be equal
to the task it is my painful duty to put you to; and I will venture to
break through my instructions so far as to say, that, if you will give
me your promise--you and your daughter--to remain at home till you
receive permission through me to quit the house, I will waive all
further action at present."

"There, mother," quoth Barbara, "what could be more reasonable,--more
gentlemanly? Say you consent to his terms."

Mrs. Dinwiddie motioned a negative with her handkerchief, and stamped
her feet, as if no power on earth should extort from her the slightest
concession.

"There, Sir, she consents, she consents, you see," said Barbara.

"Um--um--um!" shrieked Mrs. Dinwiddie, shaking her head, and stamping
her feet with renewed vigor.

"I see," said Captain Penrose; "and I need not ask if you, Miss
Dinwiddie, also consent."

"I do, Sir; and I thank you for your consideration," said Barbara.

"I don't--don't--don't!" stormed the elderly lady, quivering in every
limb, like a blown ribbon.

It was strange that Captain Penrose did not hear the exclamation, loud
and emphatic as it was; but he simply bowed and quitted the room,
followed by Dinwiddie, Nero, and Sergeant MacFuse.

No sooner had the military men quitted the house than the dinner-bell
rang. Madam refused to make her appearance. Barbara came down and
presided. Boys in the street were crying the news of Sherman's capture
of Savannah.

"Good for Sherman!" said Dinwiddie. "I'm devilish glad of it."

Little Barbara looked up with consternation. She loved her father, but
never before had she heard from his lips a decided expression of
sympathy with the loyal cause. True, for the last six months he had said
little on either side; but, from the absence of any controversy between
him and her mother, Barbara imagined that their political sentiments
were harmonious.

She made no reply to her father's remark, but kept up in that little
brain of hers an amount of thinking that took away all her appetite for
the dessert. Mrs. Dinwiddie entered before the table was cleared. Then
there was a ring of the door-bell. It was the postman. Nero brought in a
letter. Dinwiddie looked at the address.

"'T is a letter for Anjy," said he. "The handwriting looks like
Culpepper's."

Anjy, or Angelina, was an old black cook, one of the few surviving
representatives of the vanished glories of the old Culpepper estate. She
had taken a lively interest in the course of Maryland towards freedom;
and when at length that noble Commonwealth stripped off the last fetter
from her limbs, and trampled it under her feet, Anjy was loudest among
the colored people with her Hallelujahs. She was no longer a slave,
thank the Lord! There was a future of justice, of self-respect, of
freedom now dawning upon her abused race.

As Anjy could not read, Barbara had been duly authorized to open all her
letters. She did so on this occasion, read, turned pale, and
exclaimed,--

"Horrible! Oh, the villain!"

"What's the matter?" asked her father.

The letter was from his son, Culpepper, to the old family servant, and
was in these words:--

     "DEAR ANJY,--I have very unpleasant news to tell you. Your
     son Tony has been shot by his master, Colonel Pegram, for
     refusing to fight against the Yankees, and trying to run
     away. Tony was much to blame. He had been a good boy till
     some confounded Abolitionists put it into his head that the
     Yankee scum were fighting the battles of the black man;
     when, as you well know, Anjy, the true friends of the black
     man are those who mean to keep him in that state of slavery
     for which the Lord plainly intended him. But Tony got this
     foolish notion of the Abolitionists into his head, and one
     day frankly told the Colonel that he wouldn't fire a gun at
     the Yankees to save his own life; whereupon the Colonel very
     properly had him whipped, and pretty badly, too. The next
     day Tony was caught trying to make his escape into the
     Yankee lines. He was brought before the Colonel, who told
     him, that, for your sake, Anjy, he would forgive him, if he
     would swear on the Bible not to do so again. Tony refused to
     swear this, began to rave about his rights, and finally
     declared that he was free, first under God's law, next under
     the laws of the United States, and finally under the laws of
     Maryland. There were other negroes, slaves of officers, near
     by, listening to all this wicked stuff, and Pegram felt the
     importance of making an example; so he drew his revolver and
     shot Tony through the heart. How could he help it, Anjy? You
     mustn't blame the Colonel. We all felt he couldn't have done
     otherwise, I saw Tony the minute after he was shot. He died
     easy. I emptied his pockets. There was nothing in them but a
     photograph of you, Anjy, a printed proclamation by the
     wretched Yankee tyrant, Abe Lincoln, and a handkerchief
     printed as an American flag. I'm very sorry at this affair;
     but you must seek comfort in religion, and pray that your
     poor deluded boy may be forgiven for his unfaithfulness and
     bad conduct. Affectionately,

                                  "CULPEPPER."

This letter was read aloud,--not by Barbara, nor by her father, but by
Mrs. Dinwiddie, who exclaimed, as she finished it,--

"Here's the result of your Yankee teachings, Mr. Dinwiddie! There wasn't
a better boy than Tony in all Maryland, till the Abolitionists got hold
of him. Pegram served him just right,--just as I would have done."

Dinwiddie rose, pale, trembling, and all his features convulsed. Barbara
covered her face with her hands and groaned. Never before had she seen
such an expression on her father's face. Turning to his wife, he said in
a husky voice, which with a great effort he seemed to make audible,--

"Pegram was a murderer; and you, Madam, if you commend his act, have in
you the stuff out of which murderers are made. Now hear me,--you and
Miss Barbara here. Here I repudiate Slavery, and every man, woman, or
child who helps by word or deed to uphold such deviltry as that you have
just read of. Long enough, Madam, I've allowed my conscience to be
juggled, fooled, and blinded by your imperious will and absurd family
pride. 'T is ended. This day I subscribe ten thousand dollars to the
relief of the Georgia freedmen, made free by Sherman. Utter one syllable
against it, and, so help me God, I'll make it twenty thousand. Further:
if either you or your daughter shall dare, after this warning, to lift a
needle in behalf of this Rebellion,--if I hear of either one of you
lending yourself to the smuggling of Rebel mails, or giving aid of any
kind to Rebel emissaries,--that moment I give you up to the regular
authorities and disown you forever. You know that I am a man of few
threats; but you also know that what I say I mean."

Dinwiddie waited a full minute for some reply to this unparalleled
outburst, and then left the room with an air of dignity which neither
Barbara nor her mother had ever witnessed before.

The mother first broke silence. She began with an hysterical laugh, and
then said,--

"If he thinks to involve me in his cowardly treason to the South, he'll
find himself mistaken. Don't look so pale and frightened, you foolish
girl! Go and put on your things for the Bee."

The Bee was a society of fashionable ladies, of pronounced disloyalty,
who met once a week to make up garments for Rebel officers.

"I shall go to the Bee no more, mother," said Barbara; "besides, I have
given my promise to keep the house till I have permission to quit it."

"And do you venture to set your father's orders above mine, you
presuming girl? Are you, too, going to desert the Southern cause?"

Barbara's reply was interrupted by the entrance of old Anjy. The scene
which had just transpired had been faithfully transferred to the memory
of the listening and observant Nero, who had communicated it all to the
party chiefly interested.

Mrs. Dinwiddie quailed a little as she met Anjy's glance; but Barbara
rose and threw her arms about the faithful old creature's neck, and,
bursting into tears, exclaimed,--

"Oh, Anjy! 't was the act of a devil! I hate him for it!"

"Mind what you say, Barbara!" said Mrs. Dinwiddie.

Barbara withdrew her arms, and, folding them, looked her mother straight
in the face and said,--

"My father did not speak too harshly of it. 'T was a foul and cowardly
murder."

"Oh!" cried Mrs. Dinwiddie, again threatening a relapse into hysterics.

"My dear, dear Anjy," said Barbara, her tears flowing afresh, "come up
to my room, and I will read you your letter."

With a face tearless and inflexible, Anjy allowed herself to be led out
of the dining-hall, and up stairs into Barbara's apartment. The two
stayed there a couple of hours, heedless of every summons for them to
come forth.


II.

At seventeen the process of conversion is apt to be rapid. Barbara lay
awake nearly all that night, thinking, praying, and weeping. With her
sudden detestation of Pegram mingled the personal consideration that he
knew that Tony was the son of her own favorite Anjy,--the friend of her
childhood.

"If he had had one spark of true regard for me," thought Barbara, "not
to save the whole Southern Confederacy would he have shot the son of
Anjy. Pegram is a brutal ruffian, and Slavery has made him that."

Anjy helped on the work of conversion by her anguish and her solemn
adjurations. The old woman had picked up arguments, both moral and
economical, enough to have posed even Mr. Alexander H. Stephens himself,
the philosophical apostle of that new dispensation whose deity was born
of the cotton-gin and sired by the devil Avarice.

Barbara rose and breakfasted late that morning. At eleven o'clock she
took her music-lesson. Let us leave her for a few minutes, and fly to
another part of the city, where, in one of the rooms of the
Provost-Marshal's office, the Rebel mail was being examined. Captain
Penrose entered, and Detective Wilkins handed him a letter he had just
opened. It was addressed to Colonel Pegram, and was signed by Mrs.
Daniel Dinwiddie. We will take the liberty of quoting a portion of it.

     "I know, my dear Charlie, that you have been obliged to draw
     largely on your financial resources in aid of the great
     cause of Southern independence, and I am not surprised that
     you should find yourself so severely pushed for money. I
     sent you five hundred dollars in greenbacks in my last, the
     savings of Barbara and myself. I hope to send you as much
     more by the next mail. I regret to say that for the last six
     months my husband has utterly refused to allow me one cent
     for what he calls disloyal purposes. I consequently have to
     practise some finesse in getting what I do. The money he
     gives us for dresses and for charity is all saved up for
     you; and then I manage to make our grocer's and butcher's
     bills appear twice as large as they really are, and thus add
     to our savings. It is mortifying to have to resort to these
     shifts; but when I reflect on what it is all for, I feel
     abundantly justified. Mr. Dinwiddie's income the last two
     years has been enormous. He is taxed for upwards of a
     million. A good part of this, my dear Charlie, shall be
     yours as soon as you change the title of friend for the
     nearer one of son-in-law. You complain that Barbara wouldn't
     engage herself the last time you met. Her refusal was merely
     an act of maiden coyness, and only meant, 'I want to be won,
     but not too easily.' She sees no young men, and I watch her
     closely; for I am resolved that your interests shall be as
     well looked after as if you were on the spot."

As Captain Penrose finished reading the letter, Mr. Dinwiddie walked in,
and it was handed to him for perusal. That worthy merchant glanced
through it rapidly, and a grim smile overspread his features. "We shall
see, Madam," he said, folding up the letter, and handing it to Detective
Wilkins for filing. Then, turning to the Captain, he remarked,--

"You are from Maine, I believe, Captain Penrose?"

"Yes, Mr. Dinwiddie,--from the very extremity of Yankeedom."

"Well, Captain, I have this morning seen a friend of your father's, who
bade me say to you he is in the city for a day or two, and hopes to see
you before he leaves."

"To whom do you refer?"

"To Mr. Calvin Carver, of Montreal."

"Oh, yes; I've often heard my father speak of him as one of the best men
in the world."

"A man, Captain Penrose, of whom you may truly say, 'His word is as good
as his bond.' I never knew him to overstate a fact, and that is saying a
great deal of an active business man. I have not seen him before to-day
since my marriage."

"I shall take an early opportunity of calling on him, Mr. Dinwiddie."

"He told me, Captain, of your gallant conduct the other day at
Nashville, during Hood's attack. He said I ought to give Stanton no
peace till he has you promoted to a colonelcy."

"All in good time, Mr. Dinwiddie. There are hundreds of brave fellows
who have a prior claim. And now, Sir, permit me to say, that I have
consulted with the Provost-Marshal, and my official duty requires me to
call on your wife and daughter, and notify them that they are at liberty
to go where they please."

The Captain might have added, had he thought it discreet, that the
police authorities had concluded they should learn more of the secrets
of the Rebel plotters by allowing Madam to go at large than by keeping
her shut up.

Dinwiddie stood nervously playing with his watch-key. An idea had
occurred to him,--a glorious, a ravishing idea,--an idea which, if
concreted successfully into action, would revenge him triumphantly on
his wife for the tricks revealed in the letter he had just read.

"Captain," said he, "if you are going to my house, have you any
objection to take a letter for my daughter?"

"I shall be pleased to do so," returned the Captain; but he would have
put more warmth into his reply, had it not been for certain chilly
misgivings in regard to the preoccupation of Barbara's heart.

Mr. Dinwiddie sat down at a table, and wrote these lines:--

     "BARBARA,--Captain Arthur Penrose, of Maine, visits you in
     pursuance of his yesterday's promise. If you have any regard
     for your poor, distracted father,--if you would save me from
     the deepest, the direst mortification,--exert all your
     powers to conciliate Captain Penrose, and to detain him
     till I return home and relieve you. I will explain all to
     you hereafter. My peace of mind depends largely on your
     being able to do this. Urge him to call again. In haste,
     your father."

The Captain received this missive, bowed, and walked off in the
direction of Dinwiddie's house.

Nero came to the door.

"Is Mrs. Dinwiddie in?"

"No, Cap'n, but Miss Barbara is in," said the conspiring Nero, in a tone
of encouragement.

Madam, it should be remarked, was out making calls on a few leading
feminine sympathizers; but she did not notice, that, wherever she went,
a little man in black, with a postman's big pocket-book in his hands,
followed, as if busily employed in delivering letters.

Captain Penrose sent up his card, together with the missive he was
charged with. Nero returned the next minute, and ushered him into the
drawing-room, assuring him, with overflowing suavity, that Miss Barbara
would be down in a minute. It was with profound agitation that that
young lady read her father's note. What could be the matter?

She looked in the glass,--combed back her profuse flaxen hair so as to
expose her fair temples in the most approved fashion of the hour,--took
a little tea-rose from the silver vase on her bureau,--and then, with a
beating heart, stepped down the broad, low stairs into the drawing-room.

Captain Penrose was examining an exquisite painting of an iceberg, which
hung on the wall over the piano. He turned to Barbara, bowed gravely,
and said,--

"I merely came to say, Miss Dinwiddie, that there is no longer any
restraint upon your movements. You are at liberty to go where you
please. Your mother, I learn, has already anticipated the permission for
herself. You may say to her, that, in her case also, the prohibition is
removed. I will bid you a very good morning."

He bowed, and had almost reached the door before Barbara could recover
her composure sufficiently to say,--

"Sir,--Captain Penrose,--I beg you not to leave me so abruptly. Pray be
seated."

The Captain, arch-hypocrite that he was, looked at the clock as if he
were closely pushed for time, and replied,--

"My official duties, Miss Dinwiddie, are so pressing--so"----

"But I've something particular to say to you," said Barbara, grown
desperate.

"Indeed! Then I'm at your service."

Barbara pointed to an arm-chair; but the Captain wheeled it up to her,
and at the same time pushed along an ottoman for himself. As soon as the
lady was seated, he, too, sat.

There was a pause, and rather a long one.

"Now, Miss Dinwiddie, I shall be happy to hear your communication."

"Ahem! I noticed, Sir, as I came in, that you were looking at yonder
painting."

"Yes; is it not most admirable? 'T is by a Boston artist, I see,--by
Curtis."

"Indeed! 'T is a picture my father bought only last week. 'T was
recommended to him by Mr. Carver; for father does not pretend to be a
connoisseur. You think it good?"

"Good? 'T is exquisite! Look at the atmosphere over that water. You
might feel a cool exhalation from it on a hot day. The misty freshness
rolling off, and lit up by the cheery sunlight, is Nature itself. It
carries me away--far away--once more to the coast of Labrador, where I
spent a summer month in my youth. But, Miss Dinwiddie, how happens it
that you condescend, in times like these, to patronize a Yankee artist?
When Colonel Pegram comes, you must take down that picture and hide it."

Barbara started and blushed.

"What do you know, Sir, of Colonel Pegram?"

"Nothing, except that he is a fortunate man, unless Rumor belies him."

"If you refer, Sir, to that foolish report in regard to myself which was
current last winter, I beg to assure you there is no truth in it."

"Not _now_, perhaps."

"_Never_ shall it be true!" exclaimed Barbara, starting up and pacing
the floor.

"Excuse me," said the Captain, also rising,--"excuse me, if I have been
impertinent on so slight an acquaintance."

He had his hat in his hand, and walked towards the door.

"Deuse take the fellow! can't he stay patiently here five minutes?"
thought Barbara. She dropped the rose she had been holding. The Captain
picked it up and offered it.

"Keep it, Sir, if you think it worth while," said Barbara,--driven to
this incipient impropriety by the vague apprehensions excited by her
father's letter.

"Thank you," replied the Captain, so taken by surprise that he forgot
his military laurels, and showed a faint heart by a blush.

Barbara esteemed it a very charming symptom; and as the Captain, with
his one unwounded arm, tried rather awkwardly to put the flower in the
buttonhole of his waistcoat, she stepped up with a "Let me aid you";
and, taking from her own dress a pin, fastened the rose nicely as near
as she could to the beating heart of the imperilled soldier. Alas! if
his thoughts had been put into words, he would have soliloquized, "Look
here, Captain, I'm afraid you are deporting yourself very much like a
simpleton. Pluck up a spirit, man!"

"There! I'm sure 't is very becoming," quoth Barbara, mischievously.

"You see how convenient it is to have two hands," returned the Captain.
"And your having two hands, Miss Dinwiddie, reminds me that your piano
stands open, showing its teeth, as if it, smiling, wanted to say, 'Come,
play on me.'"

"What a lucky idea!" thought Barbara. "Now I have him, and will hold
him. He shall get enough of it. When will pa come, I wonder?--Are you
fond of music, Captain Penrose?"

"Yes; I used to be a performer before I was disabled."

"But your voice is not disabled. You sing?"

"A little; but I'm out of practice."

"No matter. Come! Here's a martial piece, suitable for the times: 'To
Greece we give our shining blades.'"

It was one of the Captain's favorites; and as the two voices, resonant
and penetrating, rose on the chorus in perfect accord, the singers
thought they had never sung so well before, and each attributed it to
the excellent time of the other. Nero and another person listened at the
aperture of the folding-doors: Nero, who was musical, going through a
show of vehement applause, and throwing himself about in a manner that
would have made his fortune as an Ethiopian minstrel.

Other songs followed in rapid succession; and when the Captain sang
"Annie Lawrie," _con espressione_, accompanying himself on the piano
with one hand, Barbara exclaimed, with a frank burst of genuine
admiration,--

"Oh, but you sang that superbly!"

She had quite forgotten her anxiety about her father's return.

Then they talked of the popular composers; and from music their
conversation glanced on literature; and from literature the Captain
ventured on the dangerous ground of politics.

"Are you incorrigibly a Rebel?" he asked.

Barbara looked down. She feared that any confession of change in her
notions would seem too much like insincerity.

"Now I'm going to lecture you," he continued. "Are you not rejoiced that
Maryland is a Free State? that no longer on this soil a man has power to
rob a fellow-man of his labor, and to shoot him down, if he lifts a hand
in opposition to brutal oppression? Does not your generous heart tell
you that the system under which such injustice is organized is wrong,
unchristian, devilish? Are we not well rid of the curse?"

Barbara looked up, and responded in a hearty, emphatic _Yes_.

"But," she added, "my conversion is recent. And who do you suppose
converted me?"

"I cannot imagine."

Here a door was thrown open, and Mr. Dinwiddie entered. The perfidious
man had been listening. Captain Penrose glanced guiltily at the clock,
and saw, to his consternation, that two hours had somehow unaccountably
slipped away.

"I have been a loiterer, you see, Mr. Dinwiddie," he said; "but the
fault is your daughter's. I will now take my leave."

"We shall be happy to see you again," said Barbara, glancing assent to a
nod from her father.

"Yes, Captain Penrose," said Dinwiddie, "I hope you'll not drop our
acquaintance, notwithstanding the circumstances under which it was
made."

"I shall esteem any circumstances fortunate," replied the Captain, "that
have given me so agreeable a visit"; and, bowing, he left the room, and
Barbara rang the bell for Nero to open the outer door.

"Saved! saved!" cried Dinwiddie, sinking into a chair, and covering his
face with his handkerchief.

"Saved? How saved?" asked Barbara, alarmed.

"But no," exclaimed Dinwiddie, starting up with a very tragic
expression. "Perhaps it was but a transient pow--pow--power you exerted
over him. Barbara, should you meet again, put forth all your attractions
to--to--to bind him as with a sp--sp--spell to keep my fatal secret."

"What secret, father?"

"Hush--sh--sh!" said Dinwiddie, stepping on tiptoe to one door and then
to another, and then looking with a cautious air under the sofa. He
beckoned to his daughter. She drew near. Once more he looked anxiously
around the room, and then whispered, in a hoarse, low tone, in her ear,
these words, "You shall know all in due time."

Little Barbara drew a long breath, and resolved that it should not be
her fault, if the Captain was not captivated. At that moment there was a
ring at the door-bell; and Mrs. Dinwiddie came in from high conference
with a select conclave of fashionable ladies, who yet clung with
pathetic tenacity to the declining fortunes of Slavery and Secession.


III.

For a fortnight matters seemed to go on swimmingly. Dinwiddie had, as he
thought, so managed as to bring the young people repeatedly together
without his wife's having a suspicion of what was in the wind; and when
Captain Penrose called on him at his counting-room and asked whether he
might pay his addresses to Barbara, Dinwiddie whirled round on his
office-stool, jumped down, and gave the young soldier a cordial hug.

"Certainly, my dear boy! Win her. She likes you. I like you. Everybody
likes you. Go ahead."

"It is proper to inform you, Sir," said the Captain, "that my income is
only twelve hundred a year; but"--

"Pshaw! What do I care for your income? There! Go and settle it with
Barbara. You'll find her alone, I think. Mrs. Dinwiddie, for the last
week, has been as busy as--as--we'll not say who--in a gale of wind.
Remember, 'Fortune favors the brave.' I'm obliged to go to Philadelphia
this afternoon. Good bye."

In a transport of delight, the Captain darted from the office, took a
carriage, and drove to Dinwiddie's.

"Yes, Miss Barbara is in. Walk up, Captain."

"What could be more propitious? Poets are not always in the right. Isn't
my love true love, and doesn't it run smooth?"

Wait awhile, my Captain! Perhaps Shakspeare was not so much in error,
after all.

Barbara's eyes plainly spoke her pleasure at seeing him. Adjoining the
drawing-room was a little boudoir filled with sunshine and flowers.
Into that she led him. They sat down on one of those snug contrivances
for a _tête-à-tête_, formed like the capital letter S. A fragrance as of
spring was shed through the room from the open door of a conservatory,
and a canary-bird near by was tuning his voice for a song.

"Barbara, do you know it is a whole fortnight that we have known each
other?"

She looked up at him inquiringly, for this was the third time he had
called her by her first name. He continued,--

"Barbara, I had a pleasant interview with your father this morning, and
what do you suppose I said to him?"

"Said it was a fine day, most like," returned Barbara, intent on
spreading out the leaves of a half-blown rose.

"No, I said not a word about the weather. I asked him if he would have
any objection to me for a son-in-law."

"And what did he reply?" asked Barbara, after a pause, during which her
little heart beat wildly.

"He told me I could settle it all with you."

"Indeed!" said Barbara. "But I never had any genius for settlements. I
always hated business."

"But this is a matter of pleasure, not of business," urged the Captain;
and then coming round to her side, and falling on one knee, he took her
unreluctant little hand, put it to his lips, and said, "May I not have
it for my own?"

Before she could reply, approaching steps were heard, and a youth of
some nineteen years, wearing the coarse pea-jacket, red baize shirt, and
glazed hat of a sailor, made his appearance.

"Culpepper!" exclaimed Barbara, while the Captain resumed his seat,--"is
it you?"

"Yes," replied the youth. "Sister, I have a few words to say to this man
privately. Please leave the room."

Master Culpepper was one of those nondescripts in social zoölogy,
classed by some philosophers as "cubs," and by others as
"hobbledehoys,"--"not a man, nor a boy, but a hobbledehoy." At school he
had been set down as a hopeless blockhead, and Barbara had severely
tasked her patience, trying to insinuate into his brains the little
knowledge of the ordinary branches of education which he possessed.
Consequently, though she was two years his junior, she had been
accustomed to regard herself as several years his senior, and to talk to
him as to the inferior he really was in everything but brute strength.
The cub's strong points, morally considered, were his family pride and
his hatred of "Abolitionism": in these he bade fair to surpass even the
maternal proficiency.

"Captain Penrose," said Barbara, "this is my brother Culpepper. Now,
Cully, go and play in the stable, that's a good boy."

"Do you know, Miss Barbara, that you are addressing a Major in the
Confederate army," replied Cully, folding his arms with a great effort
at dignity. "You will accost me hereafter as Major Dinwiddie, if you
please."

"Well, Major, this gentleman and myself are engaged, so"----

"Engaged!" howled Cully, with flashing eyes and vociferous speech.
"Engaged! And you dare to confess it to me, your brother! Engaged! And
to an Abolitionist,--a low-born Yankee! I cancel the engagement."

Barbara was too much roused by the cub's insolence to care to correct
the misapprehension which he had blundered into so precipitately, and
which she was now disposed to make a verity.

"Do you mean to tell me," demanded the cub, "that you are engaged to be
married to this man?"

"Yes, if he'll have me," said Barbara, putting forth her hand, which
Penrose eagerly seized, exclaiming,--

"Will I _have_ you, Barbara? Yes, as the best treasure life can offer."

And the first kiss was exchanged.

"Look here," said Cully, "this business must stop where it is. I demand,
Sir, that you leave the house with me this instant."

And then, as an amused expression flitted over the Captain's face, the
cub asked angrily,--

"Why do you smile, Sir?"

"Sir," said the Captain, "your sister and I have cause for smiling; we
are happy."

The cub took from his side-pocket a revolver and cocked it. Penrose
stood up, and Barbara threw herself between him and her brother.

"Coward!" cried the cub, "to allow yourself to be shielded by a woman!"

The cub, under the influence of Pro-slavery precedents, had really got
it into his thick head, that he, under the circumstances, was the man of
chivalry and valor, and that because the unarmed Penrose would not
present a fair shot to his revolver, that gentleman was chargeable with
an excess of poltroonery of which only a Yankee could be guilty.

The cub's heroics were ignominiously cut short. Suddenly his two arms
were seized from behind, while his pistol was wrenched from his grasp.
Two armed policemen, followed by Mr. Dinwiddie and Nero, had entered the
room.

"Am I betrayed?" exclaimed the cub.

"Blockhead!" said his father, "Fort Warren shall henceforth be your
school, till we knock a little common-sense into that obstinate skull of
yours."

"Fort Warren!" cried Cully, gnashing his teeth. "But I'm here on a
furlough, disguised as a sailor, you perceive. I promised to be back to
my regiment by Friday. Fort Warren?"

"Never!" shrieked Mrs. Dinwiddie, entering the room from the
conservatory, where she had been hiding. "Kill me, but don't compel my
son to break his pledge to the Confederate authority."

"Bah!" said Dinwiddie. "Officers, take the booby away."

Nero almost sank into his boots with excess of enjoyment, but abruptly
put on a very agonized face, and showed the whites of his eyes, as Mrs.
Dinwiddie looked towards him.

Cully submitted, though with an ill grace, to what was plainly a case of
necessity; but he turned, before crossing the threshold, and said to
Penrose,--

"I take everybody to witness, Sir, that I prohibit your having anything
further to do with my sister. The consequences be on your own head, if
you disobey."

"And I, Captain Penrose," said Dinwiddie, "take everybody to witness,
that, if, after having paid the court that you have to my daughter, you
now refuse to take her as your wife, the consequences, Sir, must be on
your own head."

"Sir," said the Captain, "that is the most agreeable threat that I can
imagine. I have already committed myself to your daughter."

"Ah! disgraceful!" groaned Mrs. Dinwiddie.

"What do you say to that, Cully?" said the father, as, with no very
gentle thrust, he replaced the glazed hat on the youth's head.

Cully kept silent. The recollection of certain debts which could be paid
only from the paternal purse inspired a prudent reserve.

"Take him now," said Dinwiddie to the officers; "give him as much
gingerbread as he wants, and charge it to me."

Cully and the officers disappeared.

"And now," resumed Dinwiddie, "it is time for me to drive to the cars.
Mrs. Dinwiddie, this is Captain Penrose, your future son-in-law. Treat
him kindly in my absence. Farewell."

The lady bowed not ungraciously, as Dinwiddie departed. She had been
meditating, during the last minute, a new flank movement in favor of
Colonel Pegram. She determined to change her base of operations. Barbara
was amazed, but, in her inexperience, was wholly unsuspicious of
strategy.

"Captain Penrose, you'll stop and take tea with us?" said the wily lady
of the house.

"I shall be charmed to," replied the Captain.

"Mother, let me kiss you!" cried the innocent Barbara, delighted at what
seemed the vanishing of the only obstacle to the betrothal of herself
and the Yankee officer.

There was an ambush in preparation, of which these two did not dream.


IV.

Two days afterwards, Barbara and her mother were on their way to
Montreal.

This was the flank movement, and it was thus accomplished. The second
morning after her husband's departure, Mrs. Dinwiddie burst into
Barbara's apartment with the intelligence that she had just received a
telegraphic dispatch from Mr. Dinwiddie, bidding her start at once for
Montreal to procure certain funds in the hands of a certain party there,
which funds were immediately wanted. Barbara, to whom all business
matters were mysteries profound as the income-tax or the national debt,
received it all without a question. She did not stop to ask, "Why
doesn't father send one of his clerks?" or "Why can't he do it all by
letter?" She took it for granted that there was a great hurry about
something that required an instant journey to Montreal. So she wrote a
letter to Captain Penrose, (which Mrs. Dinwiddie took good care to
intercept,) and, before another hour had slipped by, mother and daughter
were at the Northern railway station.

The old lady had taken the precaution to send Nero on an errand out of
the city, and had hired a public hack to convey her to the cars. But as
she was attending to her trunk, an officious gentleman in black stepped
up to Barbara, and asked for what place she wished to have the baggage
checked. Before Mrs. Dinwiddie could interpose, Barbara had answered,
"Montreal." Thereupon the gentleman had simply remarked, "I don't think
they check baggage so far," and then had walked away in the direction of
the telegraph-office,--for what purpose the sequel must suggest. Mrs.
Dinwiddie thought nothing more of the matter. They passed through
Philadelphia and New York the next day uninterrupted.

At Rutland, Vt., a very civil sort of gentleman accosted them in the
car, and, on learning that they were on their way to Canada, asked if
they had passports. On Mrs. Dinwiddie's replying in the negative, he
informed her, that, by a recent order of the United States Government,
persons travelling to and from Canada were required to have passports;
and he advised her to stop at Rutland, and he would telegraph to New
York and procure them. After some hesitation, she consented to do this.
The third day of her detention, her volunteer informant came with the
necessary papers, and at the same time introduced Mr. Glide, an
obsequious little gentleman, who said he was going to Montreal, and
should be happy to render any service in his power to the ladies.

"Surely, Sir, I have seen you before," said Mrs. Dinwiddie. "Are you not
from Baltimore?"

"Yes, Madam; and I will tell you where we last met: 't was at the secret
gathering of ladies and gentlemen for purchasing a new outfit for Mrs.
Jefferson Davis."

"Hush!" said Mrs. Dinwiddie, slightly alarmed.

"Oh, there's no danger," returned Mr. Glide. "I'm discreet. Your
devotion to the Confederate cause, Madam, your noble efforts, your
sacrifices, have long been known to me; and I rejoice at having this
opportunity of expressing my thanks and my admiration. Is there anything
I can do for you?"

Mrs. Dinwiddie looked significantly at him, nodded her head by way of
warning, and glanced at her daughter.

"I see, Madam," murmured Mr. Glide, in a confidential tone.

"Barbara, go and pack my trunk," said she.

Barbara left the room.

"Now, Sir," resumed Mrs. Dinwiddie, "I will confide to you my troubles.
That young girl has recently engaged herself, against my wishes, to a
young man,--a captain in the Yankee army."

"Engaged herself to a Yankee? But, oh, Madam, what an affliction! what a
humiliation!"

"Yes, Sir, 't is all that."

"I agree with Mr. Davis, Madam, that the Yankees are the scum of the
world. Is there no way by which you can avert from your family the
threatened disgrace?"

"Well, Sir, I have formed a plan, and, if you will lend me your aid, I
think we may manage to put the infatuated girl for a time where she will
have an opportunity of recovering her senses."

"My dear Madam, I shall be delighted to serve you in any such good work.
To save youth and beauty from the polluting touch of a Yankee captain
might well call forth the warmest zeal, the most devoted daring, of any
native of the sunny South."

"Sir, your sentiments do you honor. This, then, is my scheme--Is there
any chance of our being overheard?"

"By none except the invisibles," said Glide; "and they probably exist
only in the imagination of Yankee fanatics."

"My plan," whispered the lady, "is to put my daughter in a convent until
the gentleman to whom I have promised her, Colonel Pegram of the
Confederate army, can have an opportunity of seeing her. Of course it
would not take him five minutes to drive out of her head all thought of
this Yankee lover."

"And has your daughter, Madam, no suspicion of this admirable scheme of
yours?"

"Not the slightest. She supposes we are going to Montreal on business of
her father's."

"Madam, you couldn't have been more fortunate in your confidence. It
happens that I am on most intimate terms with Father Basil, the
confessor of the nuns, and who, by the rules of the convent, must
interrogate your daughter before she can be admitted to its privileges."

"But," said Mrs. Dinwiddie, anxiously, "will Father Basil have the
proper sympathy with my maternal motives and my Southern sentiments?
Will he be disposed to strain his authority a little in order to put my
daughter in durance?"

"I think I may venture to promise," answered Glide, "that, such is my
influence with him, he will do in the matter whatever I may request."

"How fortunate!"

"And now, Madam, you must make preparations for your departure. The cars
start in ten minutes."

Before seven o'clock that evening the whole party were comfortably
disposed in one of the best of the Montreal hotels. The obliging Mr.
Glide went forth immediately to make inquiries in Mrs. Dinwiddie's
behalf.

After breakfast the next day he presented himself to her and asked,--

"You have said nothing as yet to your daughter?"

"Not a word," she replied.

"Then," said he, "our course will be to drive at once to Father Basil's
residence, and get him to broach the whole matter to Miss Barbara. He
has a very persuasive tongue, and I think she will at once yield to his
exhortations. Should she, however, be disposed to resist forcibly our
measures for her benefit, there will be the means at hand to carry them
out."

Barbara entered the room, wholly unsuspicious of the plots against her
liberty.

"The carriage will soon be at the door," said her mother. "Go and get
ready." And after a whispered hint from Mr. Glide, she added, "Put on
your pearl silk, Barbara. We shall have to call on certain persons of
distinction."

Barbara was soon ready. They all three entered the carriage, and after a
drive of about a mile, it stopped before a large and elegant house.

"Our father confessor lives in style," whispered Mrs. Dinwiddie.

"Yes," returned Glide; "one of his wealthy neophytes gives him a home
here. If you will wait in this little basement room, Madam, I will
conduct your daughter up to his library."

"Go with Mr. Glide, Barbara," said Mrs. Dinwiddie.

Supposing it was merely one of the mysterious forms of business, little
Barbara at once took the gentleman's proffered arm and ascended the
stairs with him.

Ten minutes,--twenty,--thirty,--Mrs. Dinwiddie waited, and nobody came.
She looked at the furniture, the carpets, the paintings, till she had
exhausted the curiosities of the apartment. Suddenly there was a sound
of music from above,--not sacred music,--it sounded very much like the
waltz from "Gustavus." What could it all mean?

At last Mr. Glide made his appearance.

"Now, Madam, 't is all arranged," said he. "I regret to say that we had
to use the most stringent measures for reducing your daughter to terms.
But she is so bound at last that she can have little hope of regaining
her freedom."

"Bound, Sir? Did you have to bind her?" asked Mrs. Dinwiddie, with a
throb of maternal solicitude.

"You shall see, Madam."

He threw open the door at the head of the landing, and they entered a
stately room, where some thirty or forty ladies and gentlemen seemed to
be assembled. Mrs. Dinwiddie drew away her arm and almost swooned with
amazement and consternation.

At the front end of the apartment, before a gorgeous mirror, stood
Barbara and Captain Penrose. A veil and a bunch of orange-blossoms had
been added to the young lady's coiffure. At her side stood a handsome
old gentleman, with bright, affectionate eyes, (very much like the
Captain's,) who seemed to regard her with a gratified look. On the side
of Penrose stood--horrors!--Mr. Dinwiddie himself, a smile of fiendish
exultation on his face; while a gentleman with a white cravat and a
narrow collar to his coat, evidently an Episcopal clergyman, went up and
shook hands with Barbara, and then mingled with the rest of the company.

A middle-aged gentleman, whom the guests accosted as Mr. Carver, drew
near to Dinwiddie, and said,--

"Now introduce me to your wife."

Dinwiddie took his arm, and, leading him to where the lady stood,
said,--

"Wife, this is my old friend Carver, of whom you have so often heard me
speak. Yonder stands your daughter, Mrs. Penrose, waiting for your
maternal kiss of congratulation."

Mrs. Dinwiddie debated with herself a moment whether to shriek, to fall
into hysterics, to explode in a philippic, or to rush from observation.
Her husband, seeing her hesitation, took her by the hand and led her
into an unoccupied room. A veil must be dropped upon the connubial
interview which then and there took place.

Suffice it to say, that, when she came forth leaning on the arm of Mr.
Dinwiddie, it was with the air of one who has made up her mind to make
the best of a case of necessity,--an air very much like that, I fancy,
with which the South will yet take the arm of its consort, the North.
She saw there was no longer any chance for another flank movement.

One vindictive glance she turned on the dapper Mr. Glide, as he stood
guzzling Champagne, and looking the picture of meek fidelity; and then
she courageously walked up, kissed her daughter, shook hands with the
Captain, curtsied condescendingly to old Mr. Penrose, and smothered her
astonishment as she best could, on being taken up to a lady of rare
elegance of person and demeanor, whom she had set down as the wife of
the Governor-General at least, but who, on presentation, she learned was
the mother of her new son-in-law.

"Ladies and gentlemen," said Mr. Carver,--and at his voice the buzz of
conversation was hushed,--"I believe we have none here who will not
readily comply with the request I have now to make. Since all's well
that ends well, I ask it as a favor, that no person of this company, who
may happen to be acquainted with the peculiar circumstances of this
marriage, will mention them outside of the circle here present. Will you
all say _ay_ to this proposition?"

Amid smiles there rose what sounded like a unanimous assent; but a close
observer might have remarked that the Perfidious Mr. Glide, instead of
moving his lips affirmatively, simply lifted his Champagne-glass, and in
the act raised his forefinger so as to cover the side of his nose. To
this individual, no doubt the boon companion of some rascally reporter,
we probably owe the circumstance that a garbled and incorrect account of
this affair appeared in the Baltimore and Washington papers. The present
writer has consequently felt it incumbent on him to place on record a
version which, whatever may be said of it, cannot be stigmatized as
exaggerated.




AROUND MULL.


PART II.

The island of Staffa being nearly a mile in length, we have already had
a distant external view of the huge grassy mound which constitutes its
surface, reared on a steep, craggy base, hear and there exhibiting
superb basaltic columns, and everywhere consisting of basaltic pillars
more or less broken, irregular, and contorted, and in some instances
forming the entrance to caves of great interest, though of less grandeur
and magnificence than the giant temple of Nature which is the principal
feature and pride of Staffa and the chief object of our visit. Ah, here
comes the Bailie, looking as innocent as possible of the pipe! Christie,
too, has crept up from the cabin, and, though professing inability to go
ashore, is relieved by the sudden cessation of the steamer's motion, and
is prepared to witness with cheerfulness the disembarkation of her more
fortunate fellow-passengers. It is the office of boatmen from the
neighboring island of Ulva, hardy and skilful men, accustomed to these
boisterous seas, to row passengers ashore, and in case of calm weather,
such as we are blest with, to conduct their boats within the noble
archway and up the grand broad aisle of Fingal's Cave: for the floor of
this glorious cathedral is the rolling sea, whose green waves surge with
a grand swell and fall to the very extremity of the cave, echoing
through its vaults with a resonance which gave it its early Gaëlic name
of Uaimh Bhinn, the Musical Cave. How and when these boatmen approached
unseen and surrounded our steamer as she lies here in the sun, I cannot
imagine; so perfect are all the arrangements for our convenience, that
they have probably been lying in wait for our approach, and had only to
dash our form among the black rocks of the shore; but in view of the
power of Nature in this locality, the wonderful architecture, of which
we witness as yet the mere _débris_, and the noble palace of the sea
which our imagination is already shadowing forth, it is not difficult to
believe that these hardy mariners spring up from the depths at the
voyager's bidding, and that they are neither more bidding, and that they
are neither more nor less than ocean genii, the servants of some ocean
king, appointed to wait on and convoy his guests. The Dexterity of these
men and the strength of their boats inspire perfect confidence, however;
for the latter are fast filling and putting off for the shore. The
landing-place mist be near at hand, though as yet out of sight; for
"See!" I exclaim to the Bailie, "one or two of the boats have landed
their parties and are already returning! Everybody is disappearing from
the steamer; had we not better make haste and secure a passage?"

But the Bailie, who is something of a philosopher, has confidence that
there is time and accommodation enough for us all; so he and I proceed
very leisurely to the step-ladder, and, as everybody else is in a hurry,
we fall to the very last boat that leaves the steamer. A few unforeseen
claimants and stragglers present themselves just as we are putting off,
and, as often happens at the last chance to go ashore, our boat is
somewhat overloaded, and I find myself separated from my companion, who
is standing upright in the bows, while I am seated in the stern among
the elderly Scotch folk, who seem so familiar with all the detail of the
place and proceedings I am led to believer them faithful worshipper of
Nature who come periodically to pay their vows in the national minster,
as members of some parish church go up reverently to the cathedral
convocations. An eager, excitable gude-wife next to me is especially
anxious and officious, and seems disposed to question the efficiency and
prudence of our Ulva boatmen.

"The boat is too full!" she cries, with the emphasis of certainty. "Tell
them to put back; she is too full!" and the murmur of alarm echoes in
our vicinity. "Don't be afraid, my dear," she adds, in a sort of
stage-aside to me, who, though I have observed that the boat's edge is
almost on a level with the water, have never dreamed of danger until she
put it into my head, "Not a bit of danger," she continues, patting me
encouragingly on the shoulder, while in the same breath she reiterates
to those in authority her startling warning and her assurance that we
shall presently sink by our own weight.

But the Bailie, standing in the bow, still maintains his philosophy, and
the smile on his face reassures me. And now, with only just that sense
of insecurity which adds to the awe of the occasion, I perceive that we
are rounding a cliff, and that the entrance to Fingal's Cave is dawning
on our view.

The magnificent proportions and perfect symmetry of the archway which
forms the entrance to the cave will be seen to better advantage somewhat
later, when the steamer, on leaving the island, sweeps directly past the
vestibule purposely to afford their passengers this opportunity; but one
is never more impressed with the hugeness and stability of this gigantic
structure than when measuring it by gradual approach, and looking up
into its lofty Gothic vault as we glide under the enormous archway and
out of the dazzling sunshine into the twilight of the deep interior.
Those whose imaginations are aided by statistics may form a more real
conception of this great natural structure by reflecting that the
archway at the entrance is forty-two feet in width, and its height
nearly seventy above the level of the sea, and that these vast
proportions are preserved to the farther extremity of the cave, as
distance of some two hundred and thirty feet. The imposing effect of the
portico is still further enhanced by the massive entablature of thirty
feet additional which it supports, and by the noble cluster of pillars
grouped on each side of the entrance-way. These lofty pillars, or
complication of basaltic columns, are in a general sense perpendicular,
their departure from the stern lines and angles of human architecture
serving only to proclaim them the workmanship of that Architect who
alone is independent of artistic rules, and giving new force to what
Goethe tells us is understood by genius, namely, "that Art is called Art
because it is _not_ Nature." Here with the poet of Nature, we may offer

    "Thanks for the lessons of this spot,--fit school
    For the presumptuous thoughts that would assign
    Mechanic laws to agency divine,
    And, measuring heaven by earth, would overrule
    Infinite Power."

And here, if anywhere, is the place to learn how vainly Art may seek to
rival Nature. "How splendid," exclaims a learned prelate, "do the
porticos of the ancients appear in our eyes from the ostentatious
magnificence of the descriptions we have received of them! And with what
admiration are we seized, on seeing the colonnades of our modern
edifices! But when we behold the Cave of Fingal, formed by Nature in the
Isle of Staffa, it is no longer possible to make a comparison; and we
are forced to acknowledge that this piece of Nature's architecture far
surpasses that of the Louvre, that of St. Peter's at Rome, all that
remains of Palmyra and Pæstum, and all that the genius, taste, and
luxury of the Greeks were ever capable of inventing."

So much for a comparison of this ocean cathedral with buildings of human
construction; and no less decisive is the verdict of the French author,
M. de St. Fond, in contrasting Staffa with other natural edifices. "I
have," he says, "seen many ancient volcanoes, and I have given
descriptions of several basaltic causeways and delightful caverns in the
midst of lavas; but I have never found anything which comes near to
this, or can bear any comparison with it, for the admirable regularity
of its columns, the height of the arch, the situation, the form, the
elegance of this production of Nature or its resemblance to the
masterpieces of Art, though Art has had no share in its construction. It
is therefore not at all surprising that tradition should have made it
the abode of a hero."

These are but general descriptions of this _chef d'oeuvre._ Shall I
attempt in my own words, or those of any other, to give even a feeble
impression of the grandeur which overarches and surrounds us as our boat
glides into the interior? Let Wilson speak; I dare not. Listen to his
words while I vouch for their truth.

"How often have we since recalled to mind the regularity, magnitude, and
loftiness of those columns, the fine o'er-hanging cliff of small
prismatic basalt to which they give support, worn by the murmuring waves
of many thousand years into the semblance of some stupendous Gothic
arch,

    'Where, through the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault,'

the wild waters ever urge their way; and the receding sides of that
great temple, running inwards in solemn perspective, yet ever and anon,
as ocean heaves and falls, rendered visible in its far sanctuary by the
broad and flashing light reflected by the foaming surges sweeping
onwards from below! Then the broken and irregular gallery which
overhangs that subterranean flood, and from which, looking upwards and
around, we behold the rich and varied hues of red, green, and gold,
which give such splendid relief to the deep and sombre colored
columns,--the clear bright tints which sparkle beneath our feet, from
the wavering, yet translucent sea,--the whole accompanied by the wild,
yet mellow and sonorous moan of each successive billow which rises up
the sides or rolls over the finely formed crowns of the lowlier and
disjointed pillars: these are a few of the features of this exquisite
and most singular scene, which cannot fail to astonish the beholder."

Up this irregular gallery, which extends to the farther extremity of the
cave, most of our steamer's party have already gone, having successively
deserted the boats to take advantage of this natural pathway, whereby,
stepping carefully along the wet slippery floor, and clinging for
security to a rope attached to iron bolts riveted in the solid stone of
the wall, they can penetrate to the innermost depths of the cavern.
Through the dim religious light of the place we can discern their
figures, diminished in the distant perspective, as in long procession
they grope their way, the joyous laughter of the younger votaries
mingling with the little shrieks of alarm or warning with which the more
cautious or timid emphasize every misstep or uncertain footing,--the
entire human murmur, fortunately for us, softened by distance, or
returned to our ears only in the mellowed form of an echo, so that we
are spared in some degree that mockery of mirth and discord, otherwise
so inevitable, and always so uncongenial to the spirit of the
place,--that tumult of voices, exclamations, and shouts so familiar to
the tourist, and which drew from Wordsworth, on occasion of his visit to
the spot, the half-bitter reflection,--

    "We saw, but surely, in the motley crowd,
    Not one of us has felt the far-famed-sight:
    How _could_ we feel it, each the other's blight,
    Hurried and hurrying, volatile and loud?"

Thus the Bailie's philosophy has not proved in fault. There is an
advantage in being the last comers, if it is merely that our
fellow-tourists have taken themselves out of our way. Only the harsh
vituperations of our boatmen make dissonance with Nature, as, their long
poles driven hard now against one side and now the other of the cave,
they strive to keep the boat in middle position, and save a collision
with the rocks. And even this discord is soon overborne. "Sing!" cried
the gude-wife at my elbow, as we passed under the great archway, and her
plastic soul, alive as readily to the spirit of praise as to that of
fear, caught the inspiration of the place; "all of you, sing!"

There was an earnestness, a fervor, in this woman, which made her every
word and thought contagious; and as either she, or some neighbor of hers
who shared her emotion and purpose, struck the key-note, voice after
voice joined in, until there swelled up from our little boat the almost
universal song,--no common trivial melody,--not even a national
air,--such would have been sacrilege,--but a grand old song of praise,
one of those literal versions of the Psalmist familiar to the ear and
lip of every kirk-loving Scot. And so, as the singing chorus went
sailing up that broad aisle, heart and voice united in a spontaneous
liturgy, an act of devout adoration, which seemed the only fit response
to the spirit that whispered to our souls, "Praise ye the Lord!"

The psalm ended, our boat with most of its passengers retraces its
course and is rowed back to the steamer,--the Bailie and I, however,
having first disembarked and clambered up to the rough gallery, with a
view of imitating the parties who are pursuing their explorations on
foot. This gallery, or causeway, which runs along the eastern side of
the cave, is about two feet in width, and consists of the bases of
broken pillars, whose dark purple hexagons, cemented together by
crystallizations or a white calcareous deposit, form a rough mosaic
flooring. The inequality of its surface, and the fact that the stones
are worn smooth and slippery by the action of the sea, render it a very
precarious pathway; and as soon as we have proceeded far enough to
gratify our curiosity and obtain satisfactory points of view, we are
content to abandon the enterprise of penetrating to the remotest depths,
preferring to reserve our time for a ramble over the exterior surface of
the island.

Emerging from the cavern and skirting its eastern side, we still find
ourselves stepping from hexagon to hexagon over a massive bed of refuse
material, and gazing upward at the columnar wall on our left which
upholds the table-land of the island. No traveller, however ignorant or
inappreciative of science, can fail to realize the immense interest
which these evidences of some great natural convulsion must possess for
the geologist; and a knowledge of the recent geological discoveries in
this and other of the Western Islands is not needed to impress us with
the conviction that treasures of truth are beneath and around us
everywhere, waiting to be revealed. But we have not the key, nor can we
pause to pick the lock.

Passing on, then, in our ignorance, but not without an awe of things
unknown, we recognize as within the scope of our comprehension two
broken pillars so lodged as to constitute the seat and back of a rude
chair, which has received the name of Fingal's Chair, and beyond this
the Clamshell Cave, so called from the curved form of the mass of
basaltic pillars at its entrance; and at length we attain a point where,
by scaling a rough staircase constructed for the convenience of
tourists, we gain the grassy summit of the island. So perpendicular is
the cliff at every point, that, these green slopes once reached, the
previous singularity of formation and wildness of scenery at once give
place to the pastoral. Rocks, columns, caves, and cliffs are all hid
from our view; we have gained Nature's upper story, and around us is a
perfect calm. Not even the steamer which brought us hither is visible,
so effectually do the bold precipices conceal every near thing in their
shadow. The great cavern through which ocean surges with a ceaseless
swell lies far beneath us, and no echo of its roar reaches this spot. A
few sheep are nibbling the short grass; the golden star-flowers and the
pink heather plumes at our feet are the lineal descendants, for aught we
can conceive, of star-flowers and heather plumes that flourished here a
thousand years ago,--so undisturbed a possession has Nature had In this
realm of hers for ages. No change, improvement, growth, has added to or
taken from Staffa. Storm-washed in winter, flower-crowned in summer, its
history is forever the same. Sitting here among the heather tufts, and
looking off on the limitless blue sea and the neighboring islands, it is
not hard to dream one's self away into by-gone centuries, to imagine
Bruce and his faithful islesmen sailing past as they go forth to rouse
the clans, or, diving deeper into legendary days, to picture Fingal
himself and his warlike allies bending their white sails towards the
ocean-palace that still claims him as its traditionary king.

"O Ossian, Carril, and Ullin! you know of heroes that are no more. Give
us the song of other years. Raise, ye bards of other times, raise high
the praise of heroes; that my son! may settle on their fame."

"Soon shall my voice be heard no more, and my footsteps cease to be
seen," was the prophetic cry of the "first of a thousand heroes," as he
learned from "Ullin, the bard of song" that his young son Ryno was "with
the awful forms of his fathers." But "the bards will tell of Fingal's
name, the stones will talk of me," was the consolatory thought of him,
who, grown old in fame, had a foreshadowing of the glory which would
hang round his memory, when he exclaimed, "But before I go hence, one
beam of fame shall rise, I will remain renowned; the departure of my
soul shall be a stream of light."

And who among ancient heroes could better deserve to have his memory
embalmed than he whom an honorable foe thus eulogized?--"Blest be thy
soul, thou king of shells! In peace thou art the gale of spring; in war,
the mountain storm." And what touching interest to us of later times
hangs round this legendary champion of the right, when we listen to his
mingled strain of triumph, lament, and justification!--"When will Fingal
cease to fight? I was born in the midst of battles, and my steps must
move in blood to the tomb, But my hand did not injure the weak, my steel
did not touch the feeble in arms. I behold thy tempests, O Morven! which
will overturn my halls, when my children are dead in battle, and none
remains to dwell in Selma. Then will the feeble come, but they will not
know my tomb. My renown is only in song, My deeds shall be as a dream to
future times!"

Yes, a dream,--and we are the dreamers. The songs of the bards are
ringing in our ears, and though no stone marks the tomb of Fingal, the
stones talk of him; the great basaltic columns are his memorial pillars,
and the sea yet sounds his dirge as its wailing echo sweeps mournfully
through Fingal's Cave.

But hark! The bell of the Pioneer is rousing us with the cry, "Wake up,
ye dreamers! Come back from the clouds, ye visionaries!" The time for
Staffa is up, and the steamer, like a cackling hen who is eager to call
her brood together, commences a system of coaxing, warning, and threat,
which soon results in the converging of her passengers from every
quarter of the island. Most of them are by this time rambling over its
upper surface, and all make for the rough stairway where the comparative
difficulties of the "ascensus" and "descensus" are in complete
contradiction to classical authority: the former having been
accomplished with ease, while the latter proves a terrific experience.
There is truly something maternal about the Pioneer; for here, as at
every other point of difficulty on our excursion, faithful guides are
stationed and strong hands outstretched for our assistance. Still it is
with a plunge,--half a nightmare and half a miracle,--that we, who are
among the earliest to make the experiment, arrive safely at the bottom,
and, stepping on board a boat, regain the steamer, where we sit at our
leisure and laugh at the absurd figure made by later comers as they
scramble down the cliff: Sir Thomas even forgetting his dignity in the
difficulties of the operation, and the interjectional phrases of her
Ladyship, as she now and then comes to a hopeless stand-still, tickling
our ears at the distance where we sit watching them.

Our entire party fairly on board, the Pioneer, now panting to be off,
sets her wheels in motion and starts on her further course, not,
however, without first skirting the base of the island and affording us,
as I have already intimated, one last view of Fingal's Cave, and that
the finest. It is an impressive circumstance, that at this moment the
attention of the tourist on the steamer's deck is divided between
Nature's great cathedral and man's early efforts in the same
direction,--that immediately opposite the pillared vestibule of the
Staffa minster the Abbey tower of the Blessed Isle looms boldly on our
view, the mimic architecture of man paying silent homage to the spot,

    "Where, as to shame the temples decked
    By skill of earthly architect,
    A minster to her Maker's praise!
    Not for a meaner use ascend
    Her columns, or her arches bend;
    Nor of a theme less solemn tells
    That mighty surge that ebbs and swells,
    And still, between each awful pause,
    From the high vault an answer draws,
    In varied tone, prolonged and high,
    That mocks the organ's melody.
    Nor doth its entrance front in vain
    To old Iona's holy fane,
    That Nature's voice might seem to say,
    'Well hast thou clone, frail child of clay!
    Thy humble powers that stately shrine
    Tasked high and hard,--but witness mine!'"

And so, with a great lesson behind us and before, we sail away on that
summer sea and bid farewell to Staffa. The timid seal whom we have
disturbed creeps back to her cell, the wild-fowl returns to its nest,
the sea-swell rolls in and out in waves unbroken by our keel, and the
warm sun holds all in his soft embrace. The winter winds will roar
through the cavern erelong, the ocean lash pillar and ceiling with its
foam, tempests will beat and rage against its giant columns, the stormy
petrel will flap its wings in the archway, and the piercing cry of the
sea-gull keep time to the diapason of the deep; but the massive
structure whose corner-stone is hid beneath the waters, and which leans
upon the Rock of Ages, will still defy the tempest and loom in lonely
grandeur, alike in summer's smile and winter's frown the dwelling-place
of the Almighty. Iona's walls, reared centuries ago, and dedicated to
Him by human tribute, have crumbled or are fast crumbling to decay; but
this mighty temple, whose foundations no man laid, has gazed calmly
through all these ages at man's feeble work, and will gaze unchanged
until He who holds the sea in the hollow of His hand shall uproot its
columns.


III.

Now on to Iona, a distance of seven or eight miles, a formidable voyage,
perhaps, for early pilgrims to this sacred shrine, to us barely
affording time for dinner, a meal of which I have no remembrance of
partaking on this eventful day,--though my recollections would doubtless
have been more poignant, if I had failed to do so,--and of which I can
at least certify that it was sumptuous and well-served, since the
luxurious habits of life enjoyed on these floating hotels of the
Hutchesons are proverbial, and the flavor of good cheer still clings to
my palate, especially that of the daily "salmon so fresh as still to
retain its creamy curd."

The approach to Iona, Icolmkill, or Colmeskill, as it is variously
termed, has in it nothing imposing, if we except the ancient Abbey,
already descried at a distance, and the neighboring ruins, the simple
fact of whose presence in this lonely isle is suggestive of all that has
given interest and sanctity to this cradle of Christianity in Britain.
On landing at the rude pier, formed of masses of gneiss and granite
boulders, we find ourselves opposite the modern village, a row of some
forty cottages, running parallel with the shore, and, as is the case in
nearly all Scotch villages, including both an established and a free
church. We have scarcely set foot on the beach before we have a
verification of Wordsworth's experience:--

    "How sad a welcome! To each voyager
    Some ragged child holds up for sale a store
    Of wave-worn pebbles, pleading on the shore
    Where once came monk and nun with gentle stir,
    Blessings to give, news ask, or suit prefer."

But I have no heart to find fault with this small fry of the modern
fishing-town, whose trade in pressed sea-weeds, shells, and stones is
now so extensive that near the ruins they have established rival
counters, and are a most clamorous set of persecutors; for I still have
pleasure in looking on the really precious and suggestive mementos of
the place which they thrust upon me, a willing victim.

A little to the rear of the village, though still nearly on a level with
the beach, are the ruins, to which we are guided by Archibald Macdonald,
chief boatman, and authorized to act as our cicerone. In setting forth
on our explorations, we must premise that little now remains to mark the
age of the Culdees and the simple life of St. Columba and those
companions of his apostolic zeal who first settled in Iona, and thence,
going forth in pilgrim fashion and with the endurance of pilgrim
hardships, diffused Christianity through Britain. A huge mound, or
cairn, yet marks the place where the missionaries first landed; and
there are still, in a remote part of the island, vestiges of the rude
dwelling-place or cell in which the Culdees first made their abode and
set up the cross as a luminary for the yet uncivilized nations. With the
exception of these rude vestiges, the tradition of their virtues and the
results of their self-sacrificing labors are their only memorial. But
the standard which they planted followers of later ages have continued
to maintain; and the monastic buildings, now more or less ruinous, and
marking successive eras of Church history, are all of great antiquity,
many being of a date so remote that the records of them are merely
traditional. But wherever the pilgrim turns his eye or sets his foot,
voices whisper to him that this is holy ground. The very silence and
mystery which inwrap the place have a tendency to exalt the soul; and
although doubts may arise in regard to some of the traditions, and
incredulity may condemn others as simply mythical, faith so often
becomes sight, and the essence of faith is so triumphant everywhere, as
to make us feel, with the great moralist, that "that man is little to be
envied whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon,
or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona."

Our first visit is to the Nunnery, of which the chapel only remains
standing. The style of its architecture is Norman, and it probably dates
no farther back than the beginning of the thirteenth century. The tomb
of the Princess Anna, the last prioress, is still preserved, though much
defaced by the rude feet of soulless tourists. Her figure is sculptured
in bas-relief on the stone, and the mirror and comb which are introduced
as symbolic of the female sex suggest that instinct of decoration
inherent in woman, and which, if superfluous anywhere, certainly would
be so in a nunnery at Iona. There is a sad interest in the remains of
this sanctuary, the only refuge for innocence and gentleness in a
barbarous age, when many a votary was doubtless driven hither by motives
similar to those which actuated the fair maid of Lorn, of whom Sir
Walter Scott tells us,--

    "The maid has given her maiden heart
      To Ronald of the Isles;
    And, fearful lest her brother's word
    Bestow her on that English lord,
      She seeks Iona's piles;
    And wisely deems it best to dwell
    A vot'ress in the holy cell,
    Until these feuds, so fierce and fell,
      The abbot reconciles."

"The cemetery of the nunnery," as we learn on the authority of Dr.
Johnson, and at the date of his visit, "was, till very lately, regarded
with such reverence that only women were buried in it." And how the
burly speech and rugged bluntness characteristic of the old philosopher
are softened and atoned for, to my thinking, when he adds, "These relics
of veneration always produce some mournful pleasure. I could have
forgiven a great injury more easily than the violation of this imaginary
sanctity."

Next to its renown as an ancient seat of piety and learning, it is as a
burial-place that Iona is chiefly known and venerated. Though it is
difficult now to identify the tombs of kings, or to distinguish them
from those of the humbler individuals who have found a last
resting-place in Reilig Orain, the burial-place of St. Oran, it is
unquestionably true that the sanctity of the island gave it a preference
over any other spot as a place of sepulture, especially for royalty,--a
preference, doubtless, partly due to the belief in an ancient Gaëlic
prophecy, which foretold that before the end of the world "the sea at
one tide shall cover Ireland and the green-headed Islay, but Columba's
Isle shall swim above the flood."

Forty Scottish kings are said to have been interred in Iona, among whom
we have Shakspeare's authority for including King Duncan.

    "_Rosse._ Where is Duncan's body?

    "_Macd._ Carried to Colmeskill,
    The sacred storehouse of his predecessors,
    And guardian of their bones."

Among the monuments of Christianity in Iona, none are more conspicuous
and eloquent than the numerous crosses, of which the original number is
said to have been three hundred and sixty. Most of them have been
ruthlessly carried away or demolished. For myself, much as I deplore the
Vandalism which has mutilated nearly all these sacred memorials, I can
well dispense with the other three hundred and fifty-nine crosses for
the sake of the vivid recollection, I may almost say consciousness, I
have of one, that of St. Martin, which stands upright and in good
preservation just at the entrance of the cathedral inclosure, and
produces a solemn effect upon the mind of every reverential beholder. It
consists of a solid column of mica schist, fourteen feet in height,
fixed in a massive pedestal of red granite, and is of substantial rather
than graceful proportions. It is carved in high relief, and on one side
is sculptured with emblematic devices, of which the Virgin and Child,
surrounded by cherubs, occupy the central place. But its most
characteristic feature is its antiquity, enhanced to the eye by the gray
lichens and the rust of time, with which it is so incrusted that it
presents a hoary and venerable aspect, and seems the embodiment of that
ancient faith to which the whole island is consecrated. Here saints and
abbots of distant ages have knelt and wept and prayed, and caught the
inspiration for their labor of love, and here still, if we listen to the
voices in our hearts, we may hear the Spirit's whisper, and he who runs
may read the everliving sermon written on the old gray stone.

We have now gained the Cathedral, by far the best preserved and most
imposing of the ruined edifices of Iona,--a building which exhibits
various styles of architecture, and which is probably of more recent
construction than the other monastic or ecclesiastical monuments. It is
cruciform, and the square tower at the intersection, about seventy feet
in height, remains entire. The building is unroofed: for here, as in the
case of every other ancient structure on the island, every particle of
wood-work has been carried away, that material being too precious in
Iona to escape being converted to utilitarian purposes. The dimensions
of the cathedral or abbey church are spacious, and it boasted, even in
recent centuries, a noble altar and many other decorations, of which it
has been despoiled,--partly, no doubt, by the inhabitants of the island;
but tourists and pilgrims to the place are in no slight degree
responsible for these depredations, since, in their eagerness for
mementos, they have mercilessly robbed and mutilated it, and it is
prophesied, that, in spite of every possible precaution, many of the
interesting memorials of antiquity in Iona will soon be unrecognizable
or will have ceased to exist.

The tomb of Abbot Mackinnon, who died in 1500, though greatly defaced,
still exhibits a sculptured figure of its occupant, thought to do much
credit to the art of that period; and the largest monument in the
island, that of Macleod of Macleod, is still preserved. It is in this
church that the celebrated "Black Stones" of Iona were kept, on which
the old Highland chieftains were accustomed to take oaths of contract or
allegiance, and for which they entertained so sincere a reverence that
oaths thus ratified were never broken. Dr. Johnson observes,--"In those
days of violence and rapine, it was of great importance to impress upon
savage minds the sanctity of an oath, by some particular and
extraordinary circumstances. They would not have recourse to the black
stones upon small or common occasions; and when they had established
their faith by this tremendous sanction, inconstancy and treachery were
no longer feared."

Though neither the ancient structures nor the modern village of Iona are
situated much above the sea-level, and are so near to the shore as to
constitute the foreground of the picture, as seen from the usual
landing-place, the island is not without its highlands, which rise to a
considerable elevation immediately behind the village, some bold cliffs
even obtruding themselves upon our return pathway to the steamer: for I
can recall the picturesque effect produced upon the landscape by the
figure of one of the Baronet's daughters, seated at her ease upon the
summit of a huge, precipitous rock, her sketch-book in her lap, and her
pencil busily delineating the prospect in our direction. I scarcely
think, however, that, like the travelling photographer, she dreamed of
including her fellow-tourists in her sketch-book of reminiscences, any
more than I then anticipated the day when I should be tempted to
illustrate mine by her own and her sister's portraits.

I believe some rare ferns are to be found in Iona; it includes in its
vegetable kingdom one hawthorn, and a species of dwarf-oak is said to
occur there sparingly; but I cannot remember seeing even the most
inferior specimen of a tree upon the island. Bareness, desolation, is
its one characteristic,--a feature from which the meanness and poverty
of the row of village huts by no means detracts. As, once more
re-embarked on our steamer, we take a final view of Iona, the external
impression is meagre and poor indeed. So much the warmer and more
animated, then, is the glow of enthusiasm and gratitude with which we
dwell on the piety and self-sacrifice of those saints of old with whose
memory the Blessed Isle is still fragrant. Nor are the piety and zeal of
God's saints perpetuated chiefly by ecclesiastical monuments, or
embalmed in human hearts alone; for,

          "when, subjected to a common doom
    Of mutability, those far-famed piles
    Shall disappear from both the sister Isles,
    Iona's saints, forgetting not past days,
    Garlands shall wear of amaranthine bloom,
    While heaven's vast sea of voices chants their praise."

Is it the weariness of body entailed on us by our pilgrimages among the
wonders of Staffa and the ruins of Iona,--is it the mind overtasked by
the effort to grasp and comprehend so much of interest and novelty,--or
is it the soul tuned to deeper thoughts and holier sympathies than are
wont to engage it, which steeps us for the remainder of our voyage in
the luxury of repose? A mingling of all, I suspect. And happily the
sentiment seems universal. Christie, who, warned by her painful
experience of the steamer's oscillations, as she swung like a pendulum
on the sea-swell off Staffa, has been only too glad to accompany us on
shore at Iona, is not only relieved of her sea-sickness, but insured for
the rest of the trip. Somehow she, the Bailie, and I find ourselves
among that large proportion of our company who have gradually migrated
to the forward part of the boat, where, forgetful of the
conventionalities which have hitherto restrained us, we are grouped on
the fore-deck in whatever listless or indolent attitude the prevailing
mood may suggest. The August afternoon is drawing to a close, and the
sun is declining. Our share in the day's labor--though it be but
laborious pleasure--is done; the remainder of the task devolves on the
Pioneer, and, while she ploughs the waves, we have but to rest,
meditate, and congratulate ourselves and one another. There is a hum of
merry voices from the knot of gay young Scots, whose spirits are toned
down, not damped, by the experiences of the day. Our English girls, with
their young brother, are prettily grouped on the deck-floor, the latter
stretched at the feet of the youngest girl, and exchanging with her
those sweet confidences which always exist between a chivalrous boy and
the sister nearest his own age. Their confiding parents have remained
aft, as have a majority of the elders of the company; but, though youth,
freedom, and high natural spirits preponderate at our end of the boat,
peace seems to be brooding over us with dove-like wings.

We are still skirting the bold, precipitous shores of Mull, the central
loadstone which has kept us all day to our course, and now and then our
attention is especially engrossed by the view of her rugged cliffs,
terrible in winter's storms, and her natural arches of basalt, through
which the sea washes at high-water, and which betray in every feature a
family likeness to great Staffa. But for the most part our hearts and
thoughts now are with the past, and gratitude and thanksgiving are
welling up within us for a day on which sunshine, fair breezes, and a
prosperous voyage have combined with Nature's most glorious revelations
and humanity's holiest relics in opening up to us pleasures and
privileges beyond compare. Or, if a thought of the future mingles with
our meditations, it is the rapturous thought that these gifts of
Providence once ours are ours for a life-time.

At length, a softening of the majestic landscape, a contraction from the
sea's wide expanse into comparatively still waters, and, bidding
farewell to Mull, we have entered the Sound of Kerrera, and the great
island is hid from us by its less imposing sister, Kerrera Island, the
same that land-locks the Bay of Oban. We have but to make our way
through the picturesque channel, whose scenery is already familiar to
our eyes, and now Dunolly, the moss-crowned warder of the bay, greets us
once more, her friendly face, as we sweep into our little harbor,
seeming to hail us with a "Welcome Home!"

Home to the Caledonian, where a "towsy tea," as my Scotch friends would
term it, awaits the tired and hungry travellers: a motley, substantial
meal: fowls of the daintiest,--fresh herring, never eaten in such
perfection as on the Hebridean coast,--honey-comb of the tint of burnt
umber,--fragrant, ambrosial honey, the very juice of the heather, the
crystallized sun and dew in which these unshadowed hills bask and bathe
without let or hindrance.

Then a stroll round the bay and along the white sea-wall, now glistening
in the moonlight, and then to bed, to dream perhaps of Ossian's heroes,
of storm-swept castles, of old monkish rites, and of the ocean
cathedral's eternal chant,--dreams which, however varied and strange,
can lull the spirit into no softer illusions, can rouse it to no wilder
ecstasies than the reality of our experience in our twelve hours' sail
round Mull.




JOHN BRIGHT AND THE ENGLISH RADICALS.


In the June number of this magazine a review of the career of Richard
Cobden presented the lifelong activity and loftiness of purpose which
distinguished that great man, whom we have so recently been called to
mourn. It is our purpose to record something of his friend and ally, Mr.
Bright, whose devotion to America has led him for once to raise his
voice in vindication of war, as the only method of preserving liberty.

John Bright was born at Greenbank, near the thrifty town of Rochdale, on
the 16th of November, 1811. His father was Mr. Jacob Bright, a gentleman
who, by his own exertions, had risen from humble means to wealth, in the
vocation of a cotton manufacturer. John was the second of eleven
children, the oldest of whom died in infancy. The family were devoted
members of the Society of Friends, and the subject of this sketch still
adheres to the hereditary faith. John's health, during childhood, caused
much solicitude to his parents. His constitution was apparently feeble,
and it was found that study injured his already delicate system. At the
age of fifteen he was taken from school, and placed in his father's
counting-room. Mr. Jacob Bright was a shrewd, yet highly honorable man,
entirely engrossed in the superintendence of his business, and an adept
in the conduct of his manufactory. It was his ambition that his sons
should follow in his footsteps, and should become, like himself,
influential members of the commercial community. He doubtless
underrated, as the class to which he belonged are apt to do in England,
the value of a university education; and as soon as the boys reached the
suitable age, they were set to work in the mills. Had John Bright
received the culture which a residence at Oxford or Cambridge would have
afforded him, he would doubtless have occupied a place in the first rank
of that group of accomplished statesmen who now grace either House of
Parliament, and whose elegant erudition is as conspicuous as their
enlightened statecraft. As it was, we find him spending his youth at the
desk, learning how to buy and sell, and how to rule the miniature
commonwealth which an English manufactory presents. In the discharge of
these duties he proved himself skilful, prompt, and energetic.

As he grew to manhood, however, a new interest and a new ambition awoke
within him. He had always been more of a thinker than the other members
of his family. When scarcely twenty, he had addressed the people of
Rochdale in favor of the great Reform of 1832, and with the effect of
giving him at that early age a local popularity. He had seemingly thrown
his vigorous mind into the study of the complex elements of the
Constitution, with especial reference to those parts which affected
commerce and manufactures. From such studies he had become the confirmed
disciple of those doctrines which, with a narrower view to
self-interest, the commercial class almost universally adopted. When the
passage of the Reform Bill had quieted for a while the agitation on that
score, Mr. Bright, his interest being now thoroughly awakened to the
excitements of a public career, turned his attention to the Temperance
question, then much mooted in the larger towns. The idea of total
abstinence was at that time new to Englishmen, and Mr. Bright was one of
the earliest champions of that principle, which has since attracted so
many powerful orators, and which has reclaimed so many from the
debasement of the cup. In the year 1835, Mr. Bright, with a view to
extending his experience, and in order to observe the systems of other
nations, made the tour of the Continent, extending his travels to Athens
and Palestine. On his return, he was invited to lecture before the local
Institute at Rochdale, and he delivered a series of lectures, taking as
his subjects the observations he had made abroad. These he followed by
another series on questions more nearly connected with the practical
interests of his auditors,--putting before them with admirable
perspicuity the ideas he had formed on the commercial policy of England.
About this time contentions arose respecting the Church Rates, and Mr.
Bright took active ground for their abolition.

The sufferings of the manufacturing class now revived that agitation
against the Corn-Laws which had once before engaged the earnest
attention of the country. Mr. Bright had the patent evidence all around
him of the misery which the inequitable adjustment of the tariff had
created. The class over whom he had supervision were materially affected
by this injustice. With that promptness which is one of his conspicuous
qualities, he devoted himself to the study of the science which would
open to him the causes, consequences, and remedies of the evils which a
legalized monopoly had brought into existence. He found that the landed
proprietors, whose influence in Parliament had long continued paramount
through the protection of the Tory party, had secured laws which enabled
them to enjoy the monopoly of the corn trade, to the practical exclusion
of foreign competition. Prices were thus increased to such an extent, as
to put it beyond the power of factory hands, with the wages which their
employers could afford to pay them, to buy bread.

The distress of the operatives from this cause was already great, and
was constantly becoming more serious and more alarming. The lower
classes of England have never been patient under unusual pressure. They
are prone to take redress by violent resistance to law. Thus the
agricultural ascendency threatened to drive the rival element to
desperation. The Tories, led by Wellington, already obnoxious from their
long opposition to Reform, steadily maintained the existing laws, and
continued to be the devoted partisans of the landed interest. The
aristocratic Whigs, who were in power under Viscount Melbourne, and who
were reaping the fruit of a reform carried by the cooperation of
popular leaders, were reluctant to do more than make slight
modifications,--modifications which still left the evil great and
dangerous. At this juncture, a new force sprang up, which from small
beginnings finally effected a total revolution in the economical policy
of the Government. This was the Anti-Corn-Law League. It was instituted
by a number of liberal noblemen and gentlemen in Parliament, who had the
sense to perceive, and the wisdom to provide for, the gloomy crisis
which seemed to be impending. Charles Pelham Villiers, a son of the Earl
of Clarendon, and one of the ablest of the younger generation of
statesmen, was the most prominent leader. The object of the association
was to organize a crusade against agricultural tyranny, and to effect
the abrogation of the odious laws by which farmers grew rich by starving
manufacturers. As usual with all organizations for reform, the League at
first met with clamorous denunciation from all quarters, was sneered at
in Parliament, and laughed at by the great proprietors. But it grew
rapidly. Every day people awakened more and more to the increasing
necessity. The champions of the League, spreading among the rural
communities, eloquently and convincingly pointed out the great evils
which they sought to eradicate. They were untiring in their exertions,
and their success was beyond their best hopes.

The great advantage to be gained by keeping their cause in constant
agitation before the public made the Leaguers desirous to employ active
and eloquent orators. John Bright, in his twenty-seventh year, began to
speak in advocacy of commercial reform in his own neighborhood. The
League heard of him, called him to their assistance, and he became one
of their authorized speakers. This was a triumph not a little flattering
to a young merchant whose training had been in a manufactory, and to
whom the field of forensic eloquence was entirely new. He was thoroughly
convinced, both from observation and from a naturally quick reason, that
the principles of which he was now to be a public advocate were just and
practical. His whole soul was in the effort to alleviate suffering, and
to find a balance between interests which had been, but were not of
necessity, conflicting. With that hearty zeal which has ever since
marked his public career, he entered the political arena, turned over to
his partners the affairs of the firm, and devoted himself to the study
and exposition of the new commercial theories. Through the influence of
the League, he obtained opportunities to speak in many considerable
places; and he every-day increased his reputation as a vigorous reasoner
and a pleasing speaker. He went boldly into the agricultural districts,
where the hard-headed old Tories who believed in Wellington formed his
audiences, and put to them unwelcome truths which they found it hard to
swallow. On one occasion he appeared before a large assemblage at
Drury-Lane Theatre, when the effect of his eloquence was such that his
name became immediately known throughout the kingdom. Copies of the
speech were distributed by order of the League, and Bright found himself
in demand from all quarters. Working in concert with Villiers, Morpeth,
and the other leaders, he assisted in instituting branches of the League
in the principal cities. Besides his unquestioned ability as an orator,
he had one advantage which most of his co-workers did not possess,--he
was emphatically a man of the people. He came out from the busy
community in which he was born and reared, to labor for the people.
Those who might distrust a Villiers or a Howard,--who might suspect that
an agitation set on foot by noblemen was designed for selfish ends,--who
might be indifferent to those whom they had been accustomed to regard as
political schemers,--would trust and follow one who threw aside his
commercial vocation and came forward to sustain that commercial interest
in which he himself was concerned. He could gain the ear and reason of
many who would not listen to one whose profession was political
agitation. Thus his influence became considerable; his origin reassuring
his hearers, his eloquence charming them, and his honesty and
earnestness commanding their sympathy and approval.

The rapid spread of Free-Trade principles, resulting from the organized
efforts of the League, and from the demonstration, which actual
occurrences confirmed, that the farming monopoly could not continue,
gave the leaders of the League much importance in Parliament. The Whigs,
nay, even the more moderate Tories, began to profess conversion to
Free-Trade doctrines. When Parliament was dissolved in 1841, both
parties went to the country on the issue of Free-Trade or Protection.
Sir Robert Peel, who afterward became the patriotic instrument by which
the Corn-Laws fell, represented those who adhered to Protection and the
agricultural interest. Lord Melbourne came forward as the advocate of
those principles which the League had been the first to avow, and which
as Premier he had not been anxious to put in practice. Notwithstanding
the Reform of 1832, the landed nobility still retained a large control
in the composition of the House of Commons. Peel had organized the
Conservatives with great tact, and the ministry of Melbourne was
suffering from the weakness of internal dissension. The result of the
election was, that Peel's candidates were so generally successful that
he gained a clear working majority in the House, and he consequently
became Prime-Minister.

It was soon after the Conservatives thus attained office that John
Bright came forward as a candidate for Parliament in the northern city
of Durham. The Free-Traders were wise enough to seek the assistance of
the best men their ranks could furnish. Bright, it was universally
thought, would be a valuable auxiliary, coming as he did from the
mercantile class, and possessing a clear mind and ready tongue. Durham
was conservative by tradition. In 1843 the city rejected Bright; but in
1844, so rapid was the growth of Liberalism, that the same constituency
returned him to the House of Commons by a handsome majority.

Meanwhile Sir Robert Peel, elected and supported by Protectionists, was
gradually turning his steps toward the more liberal policy which his
opponents had advocated. Soon after assuming office, he had proposed a
modification of the tariff. The Duke of Buckingham, representing the
extreme wing of the Protectionists, resigned in alarm. The Premier did
not falter, but approached still nearer the Free-Trade standard. Lord
Stanley, a stronger man than Buckingham, retired from the council-board.
When John Bright entered Parliament, Peel was rapidly coming to the
abolition of the Corn-Laws. Bright at once mingled in the debates, which
now daily absorbed the attention of the House, on the one question
before the country. The little band of Leaguers stood in the front rank
of the opposition. They were pressing Sir Robert, by steady and
oft-repeated appeals, to make the final concession. To the voices of
Villiers, Morpeth, Russell, Gibson, were added the sonorous tones of the
merchant-orator, and he maintained the debate with the best, whether of
friends or foes. He reasoned with such clearness, he brought the evils
of the corn monopoly so vividly before the minds of his auditors, he
pressed the necessity and justice of its abrogation with such power of
argument, that from that day he took rank as one of the first speakers
and logicians in the lower House.

Sir Robert soon threw aside all party and selfish considerations, and
did fearlessly what his judgment convinced him was urgently demanded by
the interests of the country. He proposed the repeal of the Corn-Laws.
He thus exhibited a rare spirit for an English statesman,--a spirit of
self-sacrifice for the public good. His old associates assailed him with
bitter, powerful eloquence. The Whigs, whose thunder he had stolen,
looked with the coldness of partisan selfishness upon his conversion to
their views. But in spite of every discouragement, he carried that
magnanimous measure through both Houses by his influence as First Lord
of the Treasury. Hardly ever during the present century has Parliament
been more electrified by stirring and splendid contests of forensic
genius than during these debates on the repeal. And in these debates
John Bright proved a worthy competitor to Disraeli, whose caustic
oratory was justly feared,--and to Stanley, whose excellence in
rejoinder made him to be regarded as the equal of Fox in extempore
debate.

The fall of Sir Robert Peel, who could not retain power whilst Tories
and Whigs were alike arrayed against him, was followed by the elevation
of Lord John Russell and his Whig friends to the ministry. Several of
the leaders of the League accepted office; but John Bright received no
overtures from the new Premier. No thought of personal ambition, indeed,
seems to have entered into his views. Possessing that independence and
fearlessness which men of his origin are apt to exhibit, and deeply
interested in the new field in which he found himself, his sole desire
seems to have been to arrive at a knowledge of what would most benefit
his country. In this search, he rejected all party creeds. He declined
to put himself under a pledge to abide by the will of a caucus. He
considered himself bound by no precedent which was unjust, committed to
no policy which did not have a present reason. He was ready to act with
the party that sustained, in each individual case, the measure which he
considered right; nor would he hesitate to vote with those with whom he
usually found himself at variance, if they brought forward measures
which his judgment approved.

At the time Lord Russell came into power, Mr. Bright was regarded as
opposed to the Established Church and to the House of Lords, as
favorable to a system of general suffrage, and as decidedly
anti-monarchical in political theory. With opinions so radical the
aristocratic Whigs were the last to have any sympathy. They were much
less likely to encourage that class of politicians than their old
antagonists, the Tories. The reason is evident. Radicalism, by startling
the masses by the novelty of its doctrines, and thus driving a large
majority to seek certain safety under the protection of the Tories, had
kept the Whigs out of Whitehall for half a century. John Wilkes and
Horne Tooke secured Pitt in his power. Francis Burdett and his
confederates faithfully served Liverpool. If Lord Russell should
recognize the later Radicals by calling one of their leaders to his
counsels, he might well fear a defection far outweighing the
acquisition. Thus Mr. Bright, an active participant in the contest for
Free Trade, which had just resulted in a complete victory, cheerfully
continued to be simply an independent commoner, representing the
constituency of Durham,--free to judge, and to speak his honest
thought,--at liberty to advocate reforms more thorough than ministers
dared to propose,--ready to represent the feelings and wants of that
great multitude of Englishmen to whom the timeworn restrictions of the
franchise prohibited a voice in the Government,--anxious to keep ideas
in agitation which needed stout hearts and steady heads to maintain them
in existence.

In 1847, the ministers having caused his defeat as member for Durham, he
became the successful contestant for the seat for Manchester. This
metropolis of manufacture was then the centre, as it is now, of extreme
liberal notions. The fame of Mr. Bright, who had gone forth into public
life from its immediate neighborhood, was grateful to a district which
sorely needed such an advocate. He continued to represent Manchester
through the Parliament which sustained and finally ousted Lord John
Russell. In 1852, when the Premier, joining issue with Lord Derby,
(formerly Lord Stanley,) went to the country, Mr. Bright again stood for
Manchester, and was gratified by receiving a majority of eleven hundred.
It was the just reward of labors incessant and courageous, to keep the
interests of the constituency always before the legislature, and to
bring about that system of equality to which they were thoroughly
devoted. Mr. Bright continued to represent Manchester until 1857. During
the session of that year, the late Mr. Cobden, the earnest co-worker
with Mr. Bright, brought forward a motion condemnatory of the Chinese
War, then transpiring under the conduct of Lord Palmerston's Government.
The House divided against the minister. The Radicals and Conservatives
were in a majority. Palmerston dissolved Parliament, and appealed to the
nation. Bright once more went before his constituents, on the issue of
war or peace with China. His notions respecting the iniquity of war in
general, which resulted from his Quaker education, and his opinion that
this attack on the Celestial Empire was especially unjustifiable, were
not welcome to the electors of Manchester. His opponent, like himself a
radical Whig, but an advocate of the war, was returned by five thousand
votes. In 1859 Palmerston being again forced to the expedient of a new
election, Mr. Bright was invited to stand as a candidate for the
constituency of Birmingham, by whom he was returned to Parliament, where
he has since continued to represent them. Here he has been very active
in the advocacy of his own peculiar doctrines, some of which have within
a few years gained much in public estimation. Independent of all
parties, he votes usually with the ministry, but sometimes follows Mr.
Disraeli and Lord Stanley below the bar on a division of the House.

This record of eighteen years in the House of Commons is certainly a
remarkable one. While constantly opposing both of the great parties, Mr.
Bright has won the respect of all. His ability as a logician and as an
effective speaker, and his evident honesty and earnestness of purpose,
are conceded by every one. The courage and persistency with which he has
upheld unpopular doctrines compel the admiration of those who recoil
from the changes which he seeks to effect. It is not too much to say
that his character has greatly enhanced the influence of those for whom
he acts, and of whom he is the unquestioned leader. The Radicals were a
mere handful when Bright entered Parliament. They are now beginning to
be feared. Several of the largest and most prosperous cities regularly
send Radical members to Westminster. Some of the profoundest thinkers in
England are inclined to admit that the time is approaching when Radical
ideas shall become practical. Many of them already declare these ideas
to be abstractly just. The English are getting _accustomed_ to Radical
doctrines. In due time they will be ready to pass a fair judgment upon
them.

The progressive party in a nation too often possesses leaders who, being
low-born, are coarse and lawless, or who seek to foster discontent by an
artful demagoguism. A good cause is often discountenanced and rendered
futile by reason of the ignorance or wickedness of those who have been
prominent in its advocacy. John Wilkes and Thomas Paine scandalized the
cause of progress in their time by the profligacy of their lives and the
badness of their motives. So did Robespierre and Danton by the cruel
ambition which actuated them. The character of such men naturally
frightened people of honest intentions from their leadership; while the
extremities to which they carried their views deterred men of practical
sense from upholding them. The reformers of the present generation,
however, exhibit traits which command respect. They pursue a course
which, if not altogether moderate or suited to the times, is evidently
grounded upon deductions of thoughtful reason.

If we were to compress the description of Mr. Bright's character into a
few words, we should say he was honest, earnest, fearless, eloquent. He
is honest; for he casts aside the objects of personal ambition in a life
devotion to an unpopular cause. He is earnest; for he is constant to his
faith, untiring in the effort to instil it into the community. He is
fearless,--morally fearless; for he permits no obstacle, no obloquy, no
powerful antagonism, to check him in the expression of unwelcome
thoughts. He is eloquent; inasmuch as he stands up amid the silence of
the most critical and restless legislature in the world, and compels
members to listen, without interruption, to ideas which in the opinion
of the vast majority are hateful and destructive. His character, as it
has been displayed by a consistent public record, bears the stamp of
truth and ingenuousness. He is candid, almost to a fault. He has no
subtle statecraft; he recognizes no code of expediency. He is impatient
of that spirit which actuates statesmen as a class to sacrifice
something of good for the practical attainment even of a worthy end,--a
spirit which, for our own part, we cannot wholly disapprove. While as a
business man his integrity is perfectly unimpeachable, as a legislator
his opponents have only to fear his strong and indignant eloquence: they
are safe from any thrust which is not open and manly. He was not
destined to become a great statesman: he is too rash, too little
tolerant of antagonistic opinion, too much inclined to absolute
conclusions, too open by nature in giving expression to his thoughts. In
the demolishing process which properly precedes, in a long-established
polity, the constructing process, he has every quality which would fit
him to be a leader. His Quaker blood is of little avail in mak

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