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The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 04, No. 26, December, 1859

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Title: The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 04, No. 26, December, 1859

Author: Various


        
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Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY, VOLUME 04, NO. 26, DECEMBER, 1859 ***




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Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders












THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS

VOL. IV, DECEMBER, 1859, NO. XXVI







THE EXPERIENCE OF SAMUEL ABSALOM, FILIBUSTER.


In the winter of 1856, the outlook of the present writer, known
somewhere as Samuel Absalom, became exceedingly troubled, and indeed
scarcely respectable. As gold-digger in California, Fortune had looked
upon him unkindly, and he was grown to be one of the indifferent,
ragged children of the earth. Those who came behind him might read as
they ran, stamped on canvas once white, "Stockton Mills. Self-Rising
Flour!"--the well-known label in California, at that day, of greatest
embarrassment.

One morning, after sleeping out the night in the streets of Oroville,
he got up, and read these words, or some like them, in the village
newspaper:--"The heavy frost which fell last night brings with it at
least one source of congratulation for our citizens. Soon the crowd of
vagrant street-sleepers, which infests our town, will be forced to go
forth and work for warmer quarters. It has throughout this summer been
the ever-present nuisance and eyesore of our otherwise beautiful and
romantic moonlit nights." "Listen to this scoundrel!" said he; "how he
can insult an unfortunate man! Makes his own living braying, lying, and
flinging dirt, and spits upon us sad devils who fail to do it in an
honest manner! Ah, the times are changing in California! Once, no one
knew but this battered hat I sit under might partially cover the head
of a nobleman or man of honor; but men begin to show their quality by
the outside, as they do elsewhere in the world, and are judged and
spoken to accordingly. I will shake California dust from my feet, and
be gone!"

In this mood, I thought of General Walker, down there in Nicaragua,
striving to regenerate the God-forsaken Spanish Americans. "I will go
down and assist General Walker," said I. So next morning found me on my
way to San Francisco, with a roll of blankets on my shoulder and some
small pieces of money in my pocket. Arrived in the city, I sought out
General Walker's agent, one Crittenden by name, a respectable,
honest-looking man, and obtained from him the promise of two hundred
and fifty acres of Nicaraguan land and twenty-five dollars per month
for service in the army of General Walker, and also a steerage-ticket
of free passage to the port of San Juan del Norte by one of the
steamers of the Nicaragua Transit Line. Of my voyage down I do not
intend to speak; several unpublished sensations might have been picked
up in that steerage crowd of bog Irish, low Dutch, New Yorkers, and
California savages of every tribe, returning home in red flannel shirts
and boots of cowhide large; but my business is not with them, and I say
only that after a brief and prosperous voyage we anchored early one
morning in the harbor of San Juan del Sur, at that time part of the
dominions of General Walker.

Whilst the great crowd of home-bound passengers, with infinite din and
shouting, are bustling down the gangways toward the shore, our little
party of twenty or thirty Central American regenerators assemble on the
ship's bow, and answer to our names as read out by a small,
mild-featured man, whom at a glance I should have thought no
filibuster. It seems he was our captain _pro tem._, and bore
recommendations from the agent at San Francisco to a commission in the
Nicaraguan service. He had made the voyage on the cabin side of the
ship, and I saw him now for the first time. His looks betokened no
fire-eating soul; but your brave man has not necessarily a truculent
countenance; and I was, indeed, thankful for the prospect of fighting
under an honest man and no cut-throat outwardly.

We followed this our chief down the vessel's side to the shore,
catching a glimpse of Fate as we passed over the old hulk in our
course. It was one of Walker's soldiers in the last stage of fever. His
skin was as yellow and glazed as parchment, and seemed drawn over a
mere fleshless skeleton. Poor man! he lay there watching the noisy
passengers descend from the ship. "His eyes are with his heart, and
that is far away," carried back by the bustling scene to another
shore,--the goal of that passing crowd,--never more to gladden _his_
dim eye. The unrelenting grasp of death was on him; and even now,
perhaps, the waves are rolling his bleaching bones to and fro on that
distant beach. I say that this dismal omen damped the spirit of us all.
But nothing in this world can long dishearten the brave; we soon grow
lighter, and, marching along in the crowd, blackguard effectively the
witty or witless dogs that crack jokes at us and forebode hard fate
ahead of us.

When we came into the town of San Juan, we found there a general and
colonel of the filibuster army, and reported ourselves forthwith as a
party of recruits just arrived and at their service. The general was
altogether absorbed hobnobbing with the old friends whom he had
discovered in the passenger crowd, and would not listen to us; but the
colonel pointed out an empty building, and told us to drop our luggage
there, and amuse ourselves until we heard further from him. This town
of San Juan del Sur is entirely the creation of the Nicaragua Transit
Company, and is the Pacific terminus of the Isthmus portage-road. It
consisted of half a dozen board hotels, and a litter of native
grass-thatched huts, and lay at the foot of a high, woody spur, which
curves out into the sea and forms the southern rim of a beautiful
little harbor, completed by another less elevated point jutting out on
the north. The country inland is entirely shut out by a dense forest,
into which the Transit road plunges and is immediately lost. Whilst I
was walking about this sequestered place, now all alive with the
California passengers, a party of Walker's cavalry came riding in from
the interior, and at once drew all eyes upon them. They were mounted on
horses or mules of every color, shape, and size,--themselves
yellow-faced, ragged, and dirty; nevertheless, their deadly garniture,
rifles, revolvers, and bowie-knives, and their fierce and shaggy looks,
kept them from being laughed at. They dismounted and tied their beasts
in front of one of the hotels, and then dispersed about the town in
search of whatever was refreshing.

From these men we learned that General Walker's prospects were never so
fair as now. His enemies, they said, worn out and ready to despair, had
drawn off to Granada, where they now lay irresolute and quarrelling
amongst themselves. General Walker held the Transit route from ocean to
ocean, and a single filibuster might walk all through the country
without danger. This news was not satisfactory to all of us. A small,
bright-eyed youth, from the California theatre, who had been noted on
the voyage down for his loud talking, declared that for his part he had
come to Nicaragua to fight, and, now that there was no more fighting to
be done, he would pass through and take ship for the United States. The
filibusters smiled at each other grimly, and told him, if that was the
difficulty, he had better not go, for Walker intended driving the enemy
out of Granada shortly, and he would there find all that he wanted. And
well it was that they satisfied him to stay; for on that day this youth
went without his dinner because he had no cent in his pocket to buy it,
and ship-captains refuse to assist all such as lie under that unhappy
cloud. Oh, thou light-bodied son of Thespis! Where art thou now? I saw
thee last, with heavy musket on thy shoulder, marching wearily to the
assault of San Jorge. Did the vultures tear thee there? Or art thou
still somewhere amongst men, blowing the great deeds wrought by thy
feathery arm that day? I hope thou wast not left on that dismal shore!

Late in the afternoon, when the Californians had departed for Virgin
Bay, where they were to embark on Lake Nicaragua, our party of recruits
took the road for the same place, on our way to Rivas, the
head-quarters of the filibuster army. A short distance from the
Pacific, we began the ascent of the Cordillera chain, not very
formidable here, but broken into spurs and irregular ridges, with deep
umbrageous hollows, and little streams of clear water winding noisily
among them. Coming down from this rugged high ground, we entered a wide
plain, stretching away to Lake Nicaragua, out of whose waters we saw
the blue cones of Ometepec and Madeira lifting their heads up above
all, and capped with clouds. Before we had crossed the twelve miles
between ocean and lake, and entered Virgin Bay, it was dark, and the
Californians were already hurrying aboard a little steamer, which
puffed and whistled at the wharf. In half an hour afterwards they were
steaming across the lake for the entrance or head of the Rio San Juan.

It was here that we ate our first meal at the expense of General
Walker, or, rather, at the expense of an innkeeper of Virgin Bay; for
he, our entertainer, looked upon us as little better than sorners,
declaring he had already fed filibusters to the value of six thousand
dollars, without other return than General Walker's promise to pay,
which he professed to esteem but slightly or not at all. These
hotel-keepers of Virgin Bay and San Juan, who came in the wake of the
Transit Company, and made their money by the California passengers,
seemed to be a good deal worried by General Walker. Their business was
no longer profitable, and their families lived in a state of continual
alarm between the combatants; yet they were not allowed the alternative
of flight; for it was General Walker's policy, wise or unwise, when he
had got a man into Nicaragua who was useful to him, to keep him there;
and the last Transit Company, being entirely in his interest, carried
no emigrant out of the Isthmus unfurnished with a passport from
President Walker himself.

That night we slept in an empty building, and were aroused next
morning at daybreak, and ordered to continue our march to Rivas, which
was said to lie nine miles to the north of us. We set forward,
grumbling sorely for lack of breakfast, and stiff from our
twelve-miles' march of the evening before. Our path led us sometimes
under the deep shades of a tangled forest, sometimes along the open
lake-beach, on which the waves rolled with almost the swell of an ocean
surf. A few miles short of Rivas we emerged from the ragged forest, and
entered a beautiful, cultivated country, through which we passed along
green lanes fringed with broad-leaved plantains, bending oranges,
tufted palms, and all tropical fruit-trees,--a very Nicaraguan paradise
to the sore-footed wayfarer. At last this enchanting approach brought
us to the outskirts of Rivas, and we entered a narrow, mud-walled
street, and never halted until we came out upon the central and only
_plaza_ of the miserable town. Our incumbered march, without breakfast,
after a long, inactive sea-voyage, had wearied us sadly; and we threw
our luggage upon, the ground, lay down upon it, and ruminated on a
scene of little comfort to the faint-hearted, if there were any such in
our little crowd of world-battered and battering strong men, topers,
and vagabonds.

The square we had entered was perhaps one hundred yards or more in
width, much overgrown with grass, and surrounded by buildings of mean
and gloomy aspect. Six narrow and sordid streets debouched into
it,--two coming with parallel courses from the west, two from the east,
and one entering at each eastern angle from the north and south. It was
at the opening of the last of these that we rested, and received our
first impressions of the wretched _plaza_,--since hung for us with a
thousand dirty reminiscences.

It displayed none of those architectural embellishments and attempts at
magnificence which usually centre about the _plazas_ of the
Spanish-American capitals,--not even a carved door-facing or trifling
ornament of any description. The entire side on our right, between the
two eastern streets, was occupied by the cracked and roofless walls of
an ancient church or convent, which had long been a neglected ruin. The
fallen stones and mortar had raised a sloping embankment high up its
venerable sides; and the small trees, here and there shooting above the
luxuriant grass and running vines which, covered this climbing pile of
rubbish, waved their branches over the top of the mouldering walls. The
interior of the crumbling structure was a wilderness of rank grass and
weeds, the elysium of reptiles, iguanas, centipedes, and ten thousand
poisonous insects. On our left, opposite the falling church, was
another ruin; but its vulgar features owned none of the green and mossy
dignity of age, which gave a melancholy beauty to the former. It was a
glaring pile of naked dust and rubbish, and its shot crumbled walls and
riddled doors told the tale of its destruction. The entire front on
that side of the _plaza_ was in ruins, with the exception of one stout
building on the corner diagonally opposed to us. The northern side was
inclosed by a long, low building, with its elevated doors partly hidden
by the far-projecting, red-tiled roof; and in front of it six or eight
grim pieces of cannon, mounted upon wheels, gaped their black mouths
toward us. Our own side of the square was occupied by a building
exactly like the one opposite. The low-reaching roof was supported by
wooden posts, and the long porch or corridor between the posts and the
wall was paved with large earthen tiles. The doors, elevated several
feet above this pavement to baffle the heat of a tropical sun, were
darkened by the overhanging roof; and this, together with the effect of
the small wooden-grated windows and the absence of furniture, gave the
rooms a gloomy and comfortless aspect. All these buildings, with the
exception of the ruined convent, which was of stone, were built of
_adobes_, or large sun-dried blocks of mud; and their walls, doors, and
staring red roofs were everywhere bruised or perforated with shot.

Such was the _plaza_ and middle spot of Rivas, a town of some two or
three thousand inhabitants, where General Walker stood at bay many
weary days against the combined Costa Ricans, Guatemalans, and
Chamorristas, and was netted at last. But these observations of the
squalid _plaza_ were of another date. At present our eyes and thoughts
fasten upon the crowd of melancholy, fever-eaten filibusters, who walk
with heavy pace up and down the corridors, and along the paths which
cross the grass-grown plaza. There was a morbid, yellowish glaze,
almost universal, on their faces, and an unnatural listlessness and
utter lack of animation in all their movements and conversation, which
contrasted painfully with the boisterous hilarity and rugged
healthiness of our late Californian fellow-travellers. Their appearance
was most forlorn and despicable in a military view,--no soldier's
uniform or spirit amongst them, only the poor man's uniform of rags and
dirt, and the spirit of careless, disease-worn, doomed men.
Nevertheless, all bore about them some emblem of their trade; some, for
the most part with difficulty, carried muskets or rifles; some, the
better-dressed and healthier looking, wore swords,--a weapon, as I
afterwards found, distinctive of commissioned officers; some had with
them only their pistols or cartridge-boxes, which, belted around the
middle, served a double purpose in keeping up their ragged breeches.
Then almost all of them, as they moved about or lay in the shade of the
corridors, sucked or gnawed some fruit of the country,--the only thing
which they seemed to do with energy or due sensation.

Whilst I sat looking about at these miserable people, I was accosted by
an individual whom I had known in California. He professed to be glad
to see me; told me Nicaragua was the finest of countries; "but," said
he, with some latent humor of too ghastly a hue, "I'm sorry you didn't
come down with us three months ago, as you thought of doing; we've all
been promoted. The officers and two-thirds of the men have died, and
nearly all the rest of us are promoted. I myself am captain. You made a
great mistake, you see."

"My friend," said I, "you needn't try to frighten me. I've lived in a
tropical climate before, and it is the healthiest part of the world for
men of my temperament."

"Then you'll be promoted," said he. "A healthy man is sure of his
reward in this service. Do you see that fellow crossing the plaza with
the old shoes in his hand?"

"Yes," said I,--"poor man!"

"He has got them off of some dead man's feet out at the hospital. They
die out there night and day. All these men you see here will die in six
months."

After running through this humorous vein, he told me what adventures he
had seen since joining the filibuster army; which, however, I have no
intention to recount;--honor enough, if I may relate veridically, and
with passable phrase, my own tamer befallings.

Long after we had grown sufficiently hungry, one came from General
Walker, and led us to a house in the outer parts of the town, where, he
informed us, we had been allotted to quarter for the present. The same
person further instructed us to send to the commissary, and we should
obtain wherewith to satisfy our hunger. We did so gladly; and having
drawn a supply of beef, tortillas, and plantains, were comparatively
content for the rest of the day.

After several days of idle loitering about the camp, our party was
separated and ranked in divers old companies of the army. Myself and
some few others obtained seats amongst the horsemen, and had reason to
think ourselves happy; for the mounted part of the service was so much
more esteemed, that lieutenants of the foot companies had been known to
drop their rank voluntarily and take grade as private soldiers in the
saddle.

But first it was necessary to achieve our horses before we could mount;
and to that end we were permitted, and indeed commanded, by General
Walker, President of Nicaragua, to search the surrounding _haciendas_
and stables, until we were satisfactorily provided. Accordingly we set
out one morning on this errand, furnished, all of us, with rifles and
store of ammunition, against the possibility of collision with such
countryfolk as might desire over-ardently to keep their horses by them.
It will not be profitable to follow our search over that magnificent
country, diversified with groves of cocoa and plantain trees, patches
of sugar-cane and maize, with here and there a picturesque grange
embowered amidst orange and palm trees. Suffice it to say, that all the
animals in the vicinity of Rivas, fit for warlike purposes, had been
removed, and toward evening we found ourselves out amongst the hills to
the west, beyond the circle of cultivation, and as yet with no horses
in tow. From the summit of a high, grass-crowned hill we swept all the
surrounding country;--toward the east spread a vast sea of verdure,
rolled into gentle hollows and ridges, broken by the red roofs of
Rivas, San Jorge, and Obraja; and beyond all, the lake stretching into
misty remoteness, with its islands, and the ever-notable volcanoes,
Madeira and Ometepec, rising abruptly out of it. It was a glorious
scene, worthy of reverie. But we must scan it as Milton's Devil--to
compare us with one far above us--did the hardly fairer garden of
Paradise,--with thoughts of prey in our hearts. Nor were we
disappointed, any more than that other greater one; for on top of an
open ridge, a short distance west of us, we saw a solitary horse,
tethered, and feeding composedly, as if he had nothing to fear out here
amongst the hills. Part of us keep our eyes upon him, lest his tricky
owner should get the alarm and remove him; whilst others plunge into
the coppice which fills the intervening hollow, and soon reappear on
the ridge beyond.

Whilst we stood about the horse, communing doubtfully, not knowing
where to find another, an old man approached us, and, with rueful look
and gesture, besought us not to deprive him of the sole support of his
life.

"Beyond that hill," said he, "the Padre has many better horses. _El
Padre está un rico hombre. Yo estoy muy pobre, Señores_."

Set it down to the credit of filibusters, that we gladly surrendered
this old man his horse, and betook ourselves to the rear of the hill
which he pointed out to us; and there, after some search, we found, in
close covert of tangled and almost impenetrable bushes, a small
_corral_ of mules and horses, which the Padre had begrudged the service
of General Walker. For my own share in the spoils of this Trojan
adventure, I chose a well-legged mule, young, lively, and well enough
looking generally; and thenceforward I was entitled to call myself
"Mounted Ranger," according to General Walker's rather high-sounding
classification.

Let no one reflect upon the writer because he assisted in robbing this
churchman of his horses. For him there was no choice; and if he is
chargeable with moral depravity, it must be elsewhere,--forsooth, in
joining with one who made war unprovided with a military chest
sufficient to cover expenses. However, this is no matter, one way or
the other. The private character of the relator, Samuel Absalom, is not
before the reader; nor is it to be expected that he will care to turn
his eye upon it for a moment.

The ranger company in which we had been ranked was stationed below, on
the Transit road; but as it would return to head-quarters as soon as
the California immigrants, now due, had crossed over to the Pacific, we
were ordered to await it there. We spent the interim foraging for our
animals or loitering about the camp. It may be that some short
exposition of filibuster spirit and circumstances, as we saw them at
this leisure time, will have interest for one or two. A few weeks
before our arrival, the prospect of the Americans in Nicaragua was
black enough, and, indeed, despaired of by most. General Henningsen,
with the greater part of the force, was cooped up and half starved in
Granada, by three or four thousand Costa Ricans and Chamorristas;
General Walker, with the remainder, lay lower down on the Isthmus,
watched by a second division of the enemy, and too weak to give him any
assistance. General Henningsen's men, reduced to a mere handful by
starvation and the bullets of the enemy, could hold out but a day or
two longer; and then the entire force of the allies would unite and
beat up General Walker, and end the squalid game. The Central Americans
were certain of their prey. But just at this juncture several hundred
healthy Americans landed on the Transit road, and, placing them on one
of the lake steamers, together with his old force, General Walker took
them up to Granada, sent them ashore in bungos under a heavy fire, told
them to do or die, and then paddled out into the lake with the steamer.
It was a good stroke. The men, without other hope, fought their way
over three successive barricades to General Henningsen, brought him
out, setting fire to the city, reembarked on the steamer, and finally
landed again at the fort of San Jorge, two miles east of Rivas. After
that, General Walker gathered all his force at Rivas, and the enemy
drew off to Granada, with some thirty or forty miles between.

When we reached Nicaragua, in the latter part of December, 1856, the
entire force of the filibusters was still in Rivas, with the exception
of a small party stationed on the Rio San Juan, beyond the lake, and
communicating with the Isthmus force only by means of two small
steamers, "La Vírgen" and "San Cárlos," which plied across the lake
between the head of the river and Virgin Bay, on the California
passenger-line. The allies had remained inactive at Granada, and were
said to be broken into factions, and daily deserting and returning home
in large bodies. The isthmus of Rivas was free ground to the
filibusters, and a score of rangers might forage with little danger
from the Costa Rican line almost to Granada. Their force outside of the
hospital, as we saw it at head-quarters, numbered probably from eight
hundred to one thousand men,--one-third mere skeletons, scarcely able
to go through drill on the _plaza_,--fit only to bury,--and the great
majority of the remainder turning yellow, shaken daily by chills and
fever, and soon to be as worthless as the others. They were all
foreigners,--Americans, Germans, Irish, French, and English,--with the
exception of one small company of natives, captained by a half-breed
Mexican. It was said, however, that many of the poorer natives were
willing to fight against the Chamorristas,--the aristocratic Nicaraguan
faction originally opposed to Patricio Rivas and the Liberals, now in
arms against General Walker,--but that they made miserable soldiers
outside of a barricade, and General Walker had no arms to throw away
upon them. For sustenance, the filibusters had the fruits around Rivas,
and a small ration of tortillas and beef, furnished them daily by
Walker's commissary. The beef, as we heard, was supplied by Señor
Pineda, General Walker's most powerful and faithful friend amongst the
natives; and the tortillas were bought from the native women in the
neighborhood of Rivas. It was the quality of the food--assisted largely
by exposure, irregular fasts, and _aguardiente_--which made Nicaragua
so fatal to the filibusters. The isthmus between the lake and the
Pacific, swept nine months of the year by cool eastern breezes, is not
unhealthy. But the ration of beef and tortillas (simple maize cakes
without salt) was too scanty and intermittent; and in the absence of
proper food, the men were driven to fill their stomachs with the
unwholesome fruits which everywhere surrounded their quarters, and but
few were able to stand it many months.

As to the spirit which seemed to animate these men, it was certainly
most discouraging. They had lost all thought--supposing them to have
ever had such thought--of regenerating Central America; and most of
them wished no better thing than to fill their bellies, or to escape
from Nicaragua. Many of them were sunk into a physical and mental
lethargy, thinking of nothing and caring for nothing, and were gone,
not a few, even into lunacy. Some cursed General Walker for enticing
them there under false pretences. There were men with families who
professed to have come there to settle and cultivate the soil, having
been persuaded that the war was ended and the country prepared for
peaceful immigration. Some had paid their own passage, purposing merely
to reconnoïtre, and remain or not, as it pleased them; but when they
landed in Nicaragua, General Walker placed muskets in their unwilling
hands, and there he had kept them, fighting, not for himself or his
promises, but for life. It disgusted others that the service was not
only almost certain death and thankless, but was altogether
unprofitable. It was General Walker's practice, and had been always, to
discharge his soldiers' wages with scrip of no cash value whatever, or
so little that many neglected to draw it when due them. And this was
concealed at their enlistment. Indeed, the hatred towards General
Walker and the service seemed almost universal amongst the privates,
and they would have revolted and thrown away their arms at any moment,
had there been hope of escape in that. But they were held together by
common danger in a treacherous or hostile country, separated by broad
oceans and impassable forests from a land of safe refuge. There was,
besides, distrust of each other; and fear, though no love, of General
Walker. He was said to have the iron will and reckless courage of the
true man of destiny. At one time, so they told us, a large body of
fresh, able-bodied men, just arrived in Nicaragua, refused to join the
filibusters on account of some disappointment about the amount of
promised wages. General Walker led out his crowd of yellow men, whom
the newcomers might have knocked down with the wind of their fists, and
so overawed them by this display of resolution that they forthwith
swallowed their complaints and joined his ranks with as good a grace as
they might. I myself, in these first days, saw a little incident which
impressed me that the man was no trifler. I was in his quarters one
day, when an officer came in and made a report to him about some matter
of his duty.

"Captain," said General Walker, looking serenely over the man's head,
"if this is the way you are going to do business, Nicaragua has no
further need for you. We want nothing of this sort done here, Sir."

The fierce, big-whiskered officer said nothing, but looked cowed; and,
indeed, not without excuse; for though there was a nasal whine in the
tone of the little General, and no great fire in his unmeaning eye,
there was yet a quiet self-reliance about him extremely imposing, and
which, as I thought, reached back of any temporary sufflation as tyrant
of Rivas, and was based upon perennial character. Nor is it contrary,
so far as I know, to the laws of psychology, for a man to be endued
with all the self-reliance of Bonaparte, with, at the same time, an
unusually short gift of the great man's marvellous insight, military or
other.

Such an all-pervading demoralized spirit amongst the men as this I have
slightly marked was sure to be contagious; and I am persuaded that
there were few of us who came down there with enthusiasm or admiration
for General Walker, but lost most of it during our first days' mixture
in Rivas.

At the end of some six or eight days, our company came up from the
Transit road, without the California passengers having as yet made
their appearance. General Walker was expecting by this steamer, so long
due on the Atlantic side, a large body of recruits with cannon, bombs,
and other military stores, whose arrival would put him in condition to
attack the enemy at Granada. He began to grow uneasy; and at length
sent an armed row-boat across the lake to the head of the Rio San Juan
to get intelligence. The little party which held that river were
thought to be in no danger behind the walls of San Carlos and Castillo,
and still further protected by the impenetrable forests which stretched
backward from either bank; but now it began to be whispered that
General Walker had committed a fatal blunder in not using the surest
means to keep his only communication with the Atlantic open.

In the mean while our company of rangers was ordered back to the
Transit road, to remain until the passengers crossed. We rode down by a
trail that lay nearer the Pacific than the one by which we had first
approached Rivas.

We found the same desolate, vine-netted forest; but on this route it
was broken at several points by grassy savannas, dotted thinly with
calabash-trees, and browsed by a few wild mules and cattle. In one of
these openings, several miles from the Transit road, we passed a
red-tiled building, the only one of any sort on the trail beyond the
ring-fenced cultivation of Rivas. It was known as the Jocote
Ranch-house, and became afterwards the scene of a bloody defeat for the
filibusters.

Our ride terminated at a large open shed, standing on the Transit road,
two miles east of San Juan, which had been erected by the Transit
Company, and was used by them as shelter for their carriages. Here,
together with a second company of mounted rangers, we were to quarter
until the arrival of the California passengers; and then it was to be
our duty to guard those feeble travellers through the dominions of
President Walker to the Pacific. Our own company numbered some thirty
heads,--men and officers,--and being but lately come to Nicaragua, were
yet tolerably healthy and lively,--although shaken at times by chills
and melancholy, and nearly all turning perceptibly yellow. At all times
of the day, when not in the presence of food or drink, some of them
were bewailing the hour they came to Nicaragua, and sighing sadly to
escape; and had Samuel Absalom come there from any light motive of
vanity, he had surely repented with them: as it was, he had seen a
worse day; the life, too, was not without charms for some men, and his
heart stayed within him through all. The other company was even smaller
than ours, older soldiers, and in much worse health,--many of them
having a chill daily, others wasted with perpetual diarrhoea.

Our routine of duty at this camp was, to ride each day into the forest
and hunt our ration of beef, to water our horses, and to stand an
hour's guard occasionally at night; the remainder of consciousness we
spent broiling and eating cow's flesh, sucking sugar-cane, and waging
horrid warfare against a host of ravenous ticks and crawling creatures
of basest name.

One day, after we had so passed it off for a week or more, a report
reached us from Virgin Bay, that one of the Transit steamers had been
seen to pass up the lake toward Granada, without stopping to land the
passengers. A little after came an order from the colonel of the
rangers directing our party to ride with all haste to Virgin Bay, and
garrison it against the enemy. We mounted immediately and rode over the
Transit as fast as such beasts as we had could carry us. On the way we
met some of the American residents of Virgin Bay, with carpet-bags in
their hands, hurrying across to find comfort near the emigrant steamer,
which still awaited her passengers in the harbor of San Juan. They were
a good deal frightened, and said an attack was expected on Virgin Bay
at any hour.

When we came into the town, it was dark, and, having no time to lose in
getting out the pickets, our horses were left tied under saddle in the
street, and we took station, four at a post, out on the several
approaches to the town. It seemed that nothing was known with certainty
of the enemy; but it was doubted by no one, since the steamer had
passed in sight of her wharf without making or answering signals, that
the enemy were in possession of her; and it seemed probable that they
would land somewhere that night, and attack before General Walker had
time to prepare for them. Our force to oppose them, should they attempt
to land at Virgin Bay, the only convenient place with a pier on the
whole lake, was scarcely thirty in all,--a detachment from both
companies having been sent a few days before to Rivas; and of this
force, the privates, to a man nearly, were wanted to furnish out the
picket-guards,--leaving a reserve body in the citadel of some
half-dozen officers armed mostly with revolvers.

All that night we listened anxiously to the ceaseless din of the lake
breaking upon the shore; but it brought no enemy, and at morning we
were released from guard and sent out to forage. At our shed-camp of
the previous week the animals were turned out to feed in an inclosure,
and we were spared the troublesome duty of foraging. But at Virgin Bay
we were forced to go at it again under disadvantages; for the town had
no surrounding circle of cultivation like that of Rivas,--having been
but recently redeemed from the forest by the Transit Company,--and our
only resource was a few distant _ranchos_ scattered up and down the
lake shore. Beside this, we had the daily duty, as before, of searching
the open savannas in the forest for beef,--the commissary department
furnishing us no part of a ration but bread,--and other irregular
expeditions, which kept us in the saddle the greater part of the day.

Almost a week had passed in this manner, with no appearance or news of
the enemy, and we had grown heartily tired of riding and watching to no
purpose, when one day the steamer hove in sight towards the north; and
steaming down she went to land, almost directly opposite Virgin Bay,
against the island of Ometepec. Day after day she lay there immovable,
with her white side gleaming dimly across the water, and far out of the
reach of us wistful filibusters;--for although there was a small brig
of General Walker's floating beside the pier which ran out into the
lake, yet it was out of repair; and, in any state, the wind blew too
strongly and constantly from the northeast for a sail vessel to make
the island, which lay almost in its teeth. Nevertheless, carpenters
were set at work on it, and row-boats, borrowed of the vessels in San
Juan harbor, were hauled over the Transit road; and it was said that
the old brig was to be filled with soldiers and worked across to the
island by aid of the row-boats. The thing seemed far from impossible.
The space between the island and Virgin Bay was not above ten or twelve
miles, and for part of the distance, under lee of the great volcano,
the wind was lull. Could the brig be worked round the wind and brought
into this calm water, the towing thenceforward was easy; and all this
done in the space of one night, the surprise and recapture of the
steamer were certain. In the mean while a detachment of foot marched
down daily from Rivas, and, without giving us any relief, marched as
regularly back again. Our hard-worked garrison, almost worn down by
watching and riding, and, at sight of these men, hoping always to be
relieved, snarled bitterly at such apparently useless expenditure of
leg-muscle,--an article, truly, of which those lean, saffron-colored
trampers had but too scanty supply for ordinary need.

One night, after the detachment of foot had gone, and there was no
force but the rangers in the town, a large light, supposed to be under
the boilers of the steamer, was seen on the water approaching from the
north, and it was thought that the enemy were coming at last to attack
us. However, when the light came almost opposite, it made toward the
island and soon after disappeared. Next morning, looking across to the
island, we saw a dark-colored steamer lying beside the white one; and
we knew that the enemy were in possession of both the Transit steamers,
and held the lake wholly at command. It was the same day, I think, that
one of the boats was seen to be getting up steam, and shortly afterward
she paddled out from the island, and came directly toward Virgin Bay.
Things were quickly put in posture for a fight. The neutral residents,
who had returned from San Juan, again set out over the Transit road.
The squad of infantry which had just come in from Rivas was placed at
the extreme end of the wooden pier that ran some one hundred and fifty
yards into the lake. They were armed with rifled muskets and Minié
ball, and hoped to kill at eight hundred or a thousand yards. The
rangers, with arms of shorter range, waited on the shore. As the
steamer approached, she was seen to be covered with a crowd of
dark-skinned soldiers. She came steadily up within quarter of a mile of
the shore, and then, suddenly turning broadside to, opened with a
single cannon. The ball struck the water some little distance from the
end of the pier,--after an interval implying awkward handling, another
roar,--and then one or two nervous soldiers on the pier, not liking to
await the ball in that place, break for the shore; but they are
promptly knocked down by the others, and make no further progress. The
steamer continues her fire out there leisurely, and the officer on the
pier, being satisfied at last that she will come no closer, gives her a
volley of musketry. In a moment the decks are cleared with a scamper,
and no man is anywhere visible; whilst, at the same time, the steamer
hastily puts about, and never stops until she reaches the island.

This ill-supported bravado was as much as we saw of the enemy at Virgin
Bay; for next day we were recalled to headquarters, and gladly left
that post to the care of the infantry. When we came to Rivas, we found
many rumors about the enemy, but it was certain only that a bungo with
natives from the island had been captured, as it came to shore, by a
party of rangers, and it was these prisoners' report that the enemy
were gathering provisions on the island, and awaiting reinforcements,
on whose arrival they would land and attack us upon the isthmus.

I may as well state here the explanation, as we afterwards learned it,
of this most unexpected reappearance of the enemy,--which came upon
General Walker like a thunderclap, whilst he dreamed they had left him
for good and all. It seems that the Vanderbilt Company, whom Walker had
made enemies by ousting them from the Transit route, sent an agent (one
Spencer) to the disheartened Costa Ricans, who showed them that they
might easily strangle the filibuster force by seizing the ill-guarded
Rio San Juan. Led by Spencer, they secretly cut a road through the
forest on the Costa Rican side, found the forts scarcely watched by a
few spiritless sick men, and overwhelmed and scattered them without
difficulty. At the same time they surprised and seized all the Transit
steamers on the river and lake, so that thenceforward communication
with the Atlantic was closed to General Walker, and a large body of New
Orleans recruits under Lockridge, who had just arrived at the mouth of
the river, found themselves headed off, and began a long and skilless
fight to recover the steamers and make the junction with the isthmus
force. So, after all, Walker owes his defeat, not to the natives of
Central America, but to his own countrymen; and, had it not been for
the malice or revenge of Vanderbilt, he might have reigned in Nicaragua
at this day,--unless he had blundered himself out of it unassisted, as
many who lived with him thought he could hardly fail to do, were time
but granted him.--After capture of the lake steamers, the Costa Ricans,
impressing their American crews into service, took them up to Granada
to embark the old force of Costa Ricans and Chamorristas still
remaining there. They were on this errand when the steamer San Carlos
was first seen to pass Virgin Bay. But what other reinforcement they
expected, whilst they lay so long against the island after their return
from Granada, I do not know,--unless it was the Guatemalans, who we
knew soon afterward had joined them in large force.

The next day after we had returned to Rivas, our company, now united
again, had orders to ride to San Juan, on the Pacific, and convoy back
some cart-loads of lead. As we were bringing our charge on the return,
we were overtaken in the forest by an order to hasten to Virgin Bay, to
the assistance of the infantry about to be attacked by the enemy.
Leaving three or four of the company to follow the carts, we started
immediately at hard gallop for Virgin Bay. When we arrived there, we
found that the enemy, after a trifling cannonade of the town from one
of the steamers, had put back to the island again, leaving no greater
damage than a shot-hole in one of the row-boats,--which still lay at
Virgin Bay awaiting the bungling delay (better worthy of greasers than
earnest filibusters) about the brig. This demonstration against Virgin
Bay was probably a ruse to divide the filibuster force; for, next day,
as I recollect it, the Alcalde of Obraja, a native partisan of General
Walker, hurried into Rivas with the news that fifteen hundred of the
enemy had landed from the lake, ten or twelve miles above.

The Alcalde brought with him to Rivas his family and valuables, and
proved himself one of the few natives of the better class who, during
my sojourn, took active part with the Americans. It was said, that,
when Patricio Rivas was President, and Walker General-in-chief of his
army, many men of wealth and station amongst the Liberals--as Rivas's
democratic party, opposed to the Chamorristas or aristocratic party,
were called--encouraged and thought well of their American assistants.
But after the Chamorristas were worsted,--mainly by strength of
Walker's Californians,--and General Walker had broken with Rivas, and
set up for President of Nicaragua himself, almost all the natives of
any name or property had deserted him. However, many of them remained
on their _haciendas_, and took no part in the struggle on either side.
Those in the vicinity of Rivas feigned sympathy with us, but were
probably inimical at heart. Indeed, intelligence of some act of
disaffection was continually coming to General Walker; and thereupon he
would oust the offender, confiscate his estate to the government, and,
perhaps, grant it to some one of his officers, or pawn it to foreign
sympathizers for military stores. The neighborhood of Rivas was dotted
with ranch-houses, distenanted by these means,--rank grass growing in
the court-yards, the cactus-hedges gapped, and the crops swept away by
the foragers. Perhaps, had these men been let alone, jealousy toward
foreigners would not, of itself, have made them enemies; but General
Walker was obliged to provide arms and provisions for his soldiers,
and, having no other resource, he must come down heavily on the
Nicaraguans, so far as he could reach them. That this was a ground of
great disgust and odium toward us, throughout the country, our company
of rangers, which did some foraging and mule-gathering, had good reason
to know. I remember, on one occasion, a small party of us, armed only
with revolvers, were retreating out of a large _hacienda_, heavily
incumbered with horse-provender, when we saw the landlord and his
peons, with _machetes_ in their hands, coming to meet us. As we trotted
up toward them, the angry man stood at the roadside, lariat in hand,
frowning, and in the attitude to arrest our foremost horseman;--but the
filibuster drew his revolver, concealed hitherto by his burden, and
cocked it,--and the poor man, seeing that he was unequal, was fain to
vent his wrath in boiling words. This man, who doubtless became an
enemy, might have been soothed, had General Walker taken the pains to
furnish foraging-papers to the rangers. He professed himself a true
friend of Walker's, holding all he possessed at his service; but it was
out of his power, he said, to contain himself, whilst a troop of
_Americanos_ were leaping his fences and ravaging his fields, without
token of authority, or word of apology on any part. However, after all,
General Walker may have acted for the wisest in this matter. The writer
of this narrative was an unenlightened private in the filibuster army,
and, of course, though open-eyed to some extent, saw all things of
policy through a glass dimly. It may be that General Walker, who had
opportunities for thorough acquaintance with Spanish-American
character, held it weakness to place any trust or value upon their
friendship, and therefore took no care to conciliate it. This has a
look of wisdom, and would explain many apparently stupid and gratuitous
negligences. But what shall I think when he seemed as little
solicitous, and certainly was at no greater pains, to attach his own
men? Instead of treating us like fellow-soldiers and adventurers in
danger, upon whom he was wholly dependent, until his power was
established, he bore himself like an Eastern tyrant,--reserved and
haughty,--scarcely saluting when he met us,--mixing not at all, but
keeping himself dose in his quarters,--some said through fear, lest
some of his own men should shoot him, of which indeed there was great
danger to such a man. But his treatment of the wounded was his worst
policy. There was, it is true, a hospital at Rivas; but he never, or
rarely, visited it; and it was so badly kept, that every good captain
who had friends in the ranks chose the great inconvenience of nursing
his wounded at his own quarters, rather than send them into that
wretched hole whence few ever came out. It is true, the wounded seldom
got well in that climate, and Walker's best general said that the
government liked to have the enemy kill the men, rather than wound
them; yet, had they been wiser, they would have taken care of them
merely for the sake of the spirit of the rest.--But I have wandered
from my narrative.

Toward the evening of the same day that the faithful _alcalde_ brought
his report, I walked down to the _plaza_, to see what stir the news had
created among the skeleton foot-soldiers. There was no stir at all,
outwardly. They sat in their doors and talked listlessly, without
laughter or excitement, as they were always wont before. A hearty laugh
or a loud voice in conversation always sounded unnaturally in the
streets of Rivas; and, indeed, few amongst the foot found spirit for
such things,--unless new recruits, or under the stimulus of
_aguardiente_. As often as I have left the quarters of the more healthy
and animated rangers in the outskirts, and walked down into the
populous part of the camp, I have been reminded of one of those
enchanted cities of the "Arabian Nights," where the silent inhabitants,
though grouped about, seemingly engaged in their ordinary occupations,
are in reality soulless, and no better than dead men or frozen fish.

I took my seat in the porch of the guard-house,--that stout building
which I have mentioned as the only one surviving the ruin on the west
side of the _plaza_,--and watched the foot go through their evening
drill. Classed as musketeers, riflemen, and artillery-men, they were
trained to a part of the United States army-practice, each morning and
evening, on the _plaza_. The rangers were taught no drill of any kind;
and when I observed how some of the despicable officers pricked those
feeble creatures with their swords to make them look sharp and step
lively, I was glad enough to go without instruction in the military
science. The men, on the present occasion, were clothed in black felt
hats, blue cotton trousers, brogans, and blue flannel shirts, with the
letter of their company and the number of the regiment sewed upon the
breast in characters of white cloth. They had received this uniform, I
think, by the steamer on which I came down, and it was become somewhat
greasy and louse-seamed by this time; nevertheless, their appearance
was much more soldierlike and respectable than when I first saw them.
After the exercise was ended, the men gathered around a small brass
band, of half a dozen Germans, which began to play in front of General
Walker's quarters. The little General himself sat in his door, and
looked out with impassible countenance upon the crowd in the street. It
was an excellent conglomerate to study, for any one who could have the
head and feeling there. What General Walker made of it, not even his
staff-officers, who sat beside him, could tell,--if it were true, as
was said, that he had no confidant, even amongst them.

Toward dusk, as I was returning to quarters, I saw a detachment of some
one hundred riflemen marching out on the Obraja road, to the slow tap
of a kettle-drum, and dragging a small piece of artillery with them.
This, with the exception of some rangers, who had been sent forward to
scout, was the sole force yet dispatched to meet the enemy,--who were
now said to be advanced to Obraja, a hamlet nine miles northwest of
Rivas.

[To be continued.]




THE MINISTER'S WOOING.[1]

[Concluded]


CHAPTER XXXV.

OLD LOVE AND NEW DUTY.

The sun was just setting, and the whole air and sea seemed flooded with
rosy rays. Even the crags and rocks of the sea-shore took purple and
lilac hues, and savins and junipers, had a painter been required to
represent them, would have been found not without a suffusion of the
same tints. And through the tremulous rosy sea of the upper air, the
silver full-moon looked out like some calm superior presence which
waits only for the flush of a temporary excitement to die away, to make
its tranquillizing influence felt.

Mary, as she walked homeward with this dreamy light around her, moved
with a slower step than when borne along by the vigorous arm and
determined motion of her young friend.

It is said that a musical sound uttered with decision by one instrument
always makes the corresponding chord of another vibrate; and Mary felt,
as she left her positive, but warm-hearted friend, a plaintive
vibration of something in her own self, in which she was conscious her
calm friendship for her future husband had no part. She fell into one
of those reveries which she thought she had forever forbidden to
herself, and there rose before her mind the picture of a
marriage-ceremony,--but the eyes of the bridegroom were dark, and his
curls were clustering in raven ringlets, and her hand throbbed in his
as it had never throbbed in any other.

It was just as she was coming out of a little grove of cedars, where
the high land overlooks the sea, and the dream which came to her
overcame her with a vague and yearning sense of pain. Suddenly she
heard footsteps behind her, and some one said, "Mary!" It was spoken in
a choked voice, as one speaks in the crisis of a great emotion; and she
turned and saw those very eyes, that very hair, yes, and the cold
little hand throbbed with that very throb in that strong, living, manly
hand; and, whether in the body or out of the body God knoweth, she felt
herself borne in those arms, and words that spoke themselves in her
inner heart, words profaned by being repeated, were on her ear.

"Oh! is this a dream? is this a dream? James! are we in heaven? Oh, I
have lived through such an agony! I have been so worn out! Oh, I
thought you never would come!" And then the eyes closed, and heaven and
earth faded away together in a trance of blissful rest.

But it was no dream; for an hour later you might have seen a manly form
sitting in that selfsame place, bearing in his arms a pale figure which
he cherished as tenderly as a mother her babe. And they were talking
together,--talking in low tones; and in all this wide universe neither
of them knew or felt anything but the great joy of being thus side by
side.

They spoke of love mightier than death, which many waters cannot
quench. They spoke of yearnings, each for the other,--of longing
prayers,--of hopes deferred,--and then of this great joy,--for _one_
had hardly yet returned to the visible world.

Scarce wakened from deadly faintness, she had not come back fully to
the realm of life,--only to that of love,--to love which death cannot
quench. And therefore it was, that, without knowing that she spoke, she
had said all, and compressed the history of those three years into one
hour.

But at last, thoughtful of her health, provident of her weakness, he
rose up and passed his arm around her to convey her home. And as he did
so, he spoke one word that broke the whole charm.

"You will allow me, Mary, the right of a future husband, to watch over
your life and health."

Then came back the visible world,--recollection, consciousness, and
the great battle of duty,--and Mary drew away a little, and said,--

"Oh, James, you are too late! that can never be!"

He drew back from her.

"Mary, are you married?"

"Before God, I am," she said, "My word is pledged. I cannot retract it.
I have suffered a good man to place his whole faith upon it,--a man who
loves me with his whole soul."

"But, Mary, you do not love _him_. _That_ is impossible!" said James,
holding her off from him, and looking at her with an agonized
eagerness. "After what you have just said, it is not possible."

"Oh, James! I am sure I don't know what I have said,--it was all so
sudden, and I didn't know what I was saying,--but things that I must
never say again. The day is fixed for next week. It is all the same as
if you had found me his wife."

"Not quite," said James, his voice cutting the air with a decided
manly ring. "I have some words to say to that yet."

"Oh, James, will you be selfish? will you tempt me to do a mean,
dishonorable thing? to be false to my word deliberately given?"

"But," said James, eagerly, "you know, Mary, you _never_ would have
given it, if you had known that I was living."

"That is true, James; but I _did_ give it. I have suffered him to build
all his hopes of life upon it. I _beg_ you not to tempt me,--help me to
do right!"

"But, Mary, did you not get my letter?"

"Your letter?"

"Yes,--that long letter that I wrote you."

"I never got any letter, James."

"Strange!" he said. "No wonder it seems sudden to you!"

"Have you seen your mother?" said Mary, who was conscious this moment
only of a dizzy instinct to turn the conversation from where she felt
too weak to bear it.

"No; do you suppose I should see anybody before you?"

"Oh, then, you must go to her!" said Mary. "Oh, James, you don't know
how she has suffered!"

They were drawing near to the cottage-gate.

"Do, pray!" said Mary. "Go, hurry to your mother! Don't be too sudden,
either, for she's very weak; she is almost worn out with sorrow. Go, my
dear brother! _Dear_ you always will be to me."

James helped her into the house, and they parted. All the house was yet
still. The open kitchen-door let in a sober square of moonlight on the
floor. The very stir of the leaves on the trees could be heard. Mary
went into her little room, and threw herself upon the bed, weak, weary,
yet happy,--for deep and high above all other feelings was the great
relief that he was living still. After a little while she heard the
rattling of the wagon, and then the quick patter of Miss Prissy's
feet, and her mother's considerate tones, and the Doctor's grave
voice,--and quite unexpectedly to herself, she was shocked to find
herself turning with an inward shudder from the idea of meeting him.
"How very wicked!" she thought,--"how ungrateful!"--and she prayed that
God would give her strength to check the first rising of such feelings.

Then there was her mother, so ignorant and innocent, busy putting away
baskets of things that she had bought in provision for the
wedding-ceremony.

Mary almost felt as if she had a guilty secret. But when she reflected
upon the last two hours, she felt no wish to take them back again. Two
little hours of joy and rest they had been,--so pure, so perfect! she
thought God must have given them to her as a keepsake to remind her of
His love, and to strengthen her in the way of duty.

Some will, perhaps, think it an unnatural thing that Mary should have
regarded her pledge to the Doctor as of so absolute and binding force;
but they must remember the rigidity of her education. Self-denial and
self-sacrifice had been the daily bread of her life. Every prayer,
hymn, and sermon, from her childhood, had warned her to distrust her
inclinations and regard her feelings as traitors. In particular had she
been brought up to regard the sacredness of a promise with a
superstitious tenacity; and in this case the promise involved so deeply
the happiness of a friend whom she had loved and revered all her life,
that she never thought of any way of escape from it. She had been
taught that there was no feeling so strong but that it might be
immediately repressed at the call of duty; and if the thought arose to
her of this great love to another, she immediately answered it by
saying, "How would it have been, if I had been married? As I could have
overcome then, so I can now."

Mrs. Scudder came into her room with a candle in her hand, and Mary,
accustomed to read the expression of her mother's countenance, saw at a
glance a visible discomposure there. She held the light so that it
shone upon Mary's face.

"Are you asleep?" she said.

"No, mother."

"Are you unwell?"

"No, mother,--only a little tired."

Mrs. Scudder set down the candle, and shut the door, and, after a
moment's hesitation, said,--

"My daughter, I have some news to tell you, which I want you to prepare
your mind for. Keep yourself quite quiet"

"Oh, mother!" said Mary, stretching out her hands towards her, "I know
it. James has come home."

"How did you hear?" said her mother, with astonishment.

"I have seen him, mother."

Mrs. Scudder's countenance fell.

"Where?"

"I went to walk home with Cerinthy Twitchel, and, as I was coming back,
he came up behind me, just at Savin Rock."

Mrs. Scudder sat down on the bed and took her daughter's hand.

"I trust, my dear child," she said. She stopped.

"I think I know what you are going to say, mother. It is a great joy,
and a great relief; but of course I shall be true to my engagement with
the Doctor."

Mrs. Scudder's face brightened.

"That is my own daughter! I might have known that you would do so. You
would not, certainly, so cruelly disappoint a noble man who has set his
whole faith upon you."

"No, mother, I shall not disappoint him. I told James that I should be
true to my word."

"He will probably see the justice of it," said Mrs. Scudder, in that
easy tone with which elderly people are apt to dispose of the feelings
of young persons. "Perhaps it may be something of a trial, at first."

Mary looked at her mother with incredulous blue eyes. The idea that
feelings which made her hold her breath when she thought of them could
be so summarily disposed of! She turned her face wearily to the wall,
with a deep sigh, and said,--

"After all, mother, it is mercy enough and comfort enough to think that
he is living. Poor Cousin Ellen, too,--what a relief to her! It is like
life from the dead. Oh, I shall be happy enough; no fear of that!"

"And you know," said Mrs. Scudder, "that there has never existed any
engagement of any kind between you and James. He had no right to found
any expectations on anything you ever told him."

"That is true also, mother," said Mary, "I had never thought of such a
thing as marriage, in relation to James."

"Of course," pursued Mrs. Scudder, "he will always be to you as a near
friend."

Mary assented.

"There is but a week now, before your wedding," continued Mrs. Scudder;
"and I think Cousin James, if he is reasonable, will see the propriety
of your mind being kept as quiet as possible. I heard the news this
afternoon in town," pursued Mrs. Scudder, "from Captain Staunton, and,
by a curious coincidence, I received from him this letter from James,
which came from New York by post. The brig that brought it must have
been delayed out of the harbor."

"Oh, please, mother, give it to me!" said Mary, rising up with
animation; "he mentioned having sent me one."

"Perhaps you had better wait till morning," said Mrs. Scudder; "you are
tired and excited."

"Oh, mother, I think I shall be more composed when I know all that is
in it," said Mary, still stretching out her hand.

"Well, my daughter, you are the best judge," said Mrs. Scudder; and she
set down the candle on the table, and left Mary alone.

It was a very thick letter of many pages, dated in Canton, and ran as
follows:--


CHAPTER XXXVI.

JACOB'S VOW.

"My Dearest Mary:--

"I have lived through many wonderful scenes since I saw you last. My
life has been so adventurous, that I scarcely know myself when I think
of it. But it is not of _that_ I am going now to write. I have written
all that to mother, and she will show it to you. But since I parted
from you, there has been another history going on within me; and that
is what I wish to make you understand, if I can.

"It seems to me that I have been a changed man from that afternoon when
I came to your window, where we parted. I have never forgot how you
looked then, nor what you said. Nothing in my life ever had such an
effect upon me. I thought that I loved you before; but I went away
feeling that love was something so deep and high and sacred, that I was
not worthy to name it to you. I cannot think of the man in the world
who is worthy of what you said you felt for me.

"From _that_ hour there was a new purpose in my soul,--a purpose which
has led me upward ever since. I thought to myself in this way: 'There
is some secret source from whence this inner life springs,'--and I knew
that it was connected with the Bible which you gave me; and so I
thought I would read it carefully and deliberately, to see what I could
make of it.

"I began with the beginning. It impressed me with a sense of something
quaint and strange,--something rather fragmentary; and yet there were
spots all along that went right to the heart of a man who had to deal
with life and things as I did. Now I must say that the Doctor's
preaching, as I told you, never impressed me much in any way. I could
not make out any connection between it and the men I had to manage and
the things I had to do in my daily life. But there were things in the
Bible that struck me otherwise. There was _one_ passage in particular,
and that was where Jacob started off from all his friends to go and
seek his fortune in a strange country, and laid down to sleep all alone
in the field, with only a stone for his pillow. It seemed to me exactly
the image of what every young man is like, when he leaves his home and
goes out to shift for himself in this hard world. I tell you, Mary,
that one man alone on the great ocean of life feels himself a very weak
thing. We are held up by each other more than we know till we go off by
ourselves into this great experiment. Well, there he was as lonesome as
_I_ upon the deck of my ship. And so lying with the stone under his
head, he saw a ladder in his sleep between him and heaven, and angels
going up and down. That was a sight which came to the very point of his
necessities. He saw that there was a way between him and God, and that
there were those above who did care for him, and who could come to him
to help him.

"Well, so the next morning he got up, and set up the stone to mark the
place; and it says Jacob vowed a vow, saying, 'If God will be with me,
and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat
and raiment to put on, so that I come again to my father's house in
peace, _then_ shall the Lord be my God.' Now _there_ was something that
looked to me like a tangible foundation to begin upon.

"If I understand Dr. H., I believe he would have called that all
selfishness. At first sight it does look a little so; but then I
thought of it in this way: 'Here he was all alone. God was entirely
invisible to him; and how could he feel certain that He really existed,
unless he could come into some kind of connection with Him? the point
that he wanted to be sure of, more than merely to know that there was a
God who made the world;--he wanted to know whether He cared anything
about men, and would do anything to help them. And so, in fact, it was
saying, "If there is a God who interests Himself at all in me, and will
be my Friend and Protector, I will obey Him, so far as I can find out
His will."'

"I thought to myself, 'This is the great experiment, and I will try
it.' I made in my heart exactly the same resolution, and just quietly
resolved to assume for a while as a fact that there _was_ such a God,
and, whenever I came to a place where I could not help myself, just to
ask His help honestly in so many words, and see what would come of it.

"Well, as I went on reading through the Old Testament, I was more and
more convinced that all the men of those times had tried this
experiment, and found that it would bear them; and in fact, I did begin
to find, in my own experience, a great many things happening so
remarkably that I could not but think that _Somebody_ did attend even
to my prayers,--I began to feel a trembling faith that _Somebody_ was
guiding me, and that the events of my life were not happening by
accident, but working themselves out by His will.

"Well, as I went on in this way, there were other and higher thoughts
kept rising in my mind. I wanted to be better than I was. I had a sense
of a life much nobler and purer than anything I had ever lived, that I
wanted to come up to. But in the world of men, as I found it, such
feelings are always laughed down as romantic, and impracticable, and
impossible. But about this time I began to read the New Testament, and
then the idea came to me, that the same Power that helped me in the
lower sphere of life would help me carry out those higher aspirations.
Perhaps the Gospels would not have interested me so much, if I had
begun with them first; but my Old Testament life seemed to have
schooled me, and brought me to a place where I wanted something higher;
and I began to notice that my prayers now were more that I might be
noble, and patient, and self-denying, and constant in my duty, than
for any other kind of help. And then I understood what met me in the
very first of Matthew: 'Thou shall call his name Jesus, for he shall
save his people from their sins.'

"I began now to live a new life,--a life in which I felt myself coming
into sympathy with you; for, Mary, when I began to read the Gospels, I
took knowledge of you, that you had been with Jesus.

"The crisis of my life was that dreadful night of the shipwreck. It was
as dreadful as the Day of Judgment. No words of mine can describe to
you what I felt when I knew that our rudder was gone, and saw those
hopeless rocks before us. What I felt for our poor men! But, in the
midst of it all, the words came into my mind, 'And Jesus was in the
hinder part of the ship asleep on a pillow,' and at once I felt He was
there; and when the ship struck I was only conscious of an intense
going out of my soul to Him, like Peter's when he threw himself from
the ship to meet Him in the waters.

"I will not recapitulate what I have already written,--the wonderful
manner in which I was saved, and in which friends and help and
prosperity and worldly success came to me again, after life had seemed
all lost; but now I am ready to return to my country, and I feel as
Jacob did when he said, 'With my staff I passed over this Jordan, and
now I am become two bands.'

"I do not need any arguments now to convince me that the Bible is from
above. There is a great deal in it that I cannot understand, a great
deal that seems to me inexplicable; but all I can say is, that I have
tried its directions, and find that in my case they do work,--that it
is a book that I can live by; and that is enough for me.

"And now, Mary, I am coming home again, quite another man from what I
went out,--with a whole new world of thought and feeling in my heart,
and a new purpose, by which, please God, I mean to shape my life. All
this, under God, I owe to you; and if you will let me devote my whole
life to you, it will be a small return for what you have done for me.

"You know I left you wholly free. Others must have seen your loveliness
and felt your worth; and you may have learnt to love some better man
than me. But I know not what hope tells me that this will not be; and I
shall find true what the Bible says of love, that 'many waters cannot
quench it, nor floods drown.' In any case, I shall be always, from my
very heart, yours, and yours only.

"JAMES MARVYN."

Mary rose, after reading this letter, rapt into a divine state of
exaltation,--the pure joy, in contemplating an infinite good to
another, in which the question of self was utterly forgotten.

He was, then, what she had always hoped and prayed he would be, and she
pressed the thought triumphantly to her heart. He was that true and
victorious man, that Christian able to subdue life, and to show, in a
perfect and healthy manly nature, a reflection of the image of the
superhuman excellence. Her prayers that night were aspirations and
praises, and she felt how possible it might be so to appropriate the
good and the joy and the nobleness of others as to have in them an
eternal and satisfying treasure. And with this came the dearer thought,
that she, in her weakness and solitude, had been permitted to put her
hand to the beginning of a work so noble. The consciousness of good
done to an immortal spirit is wealth that neither life nor death can
take away.

And so, having prayed, she lay down to that sleep which God giveth to
his beloved.


CHAPTER XXXVII.

THE QUESTION OF DUTY.

It is a hard condition, of our existence here, that every exaltation
must have its depression. God will not let us have heaven here below,
but only such glimpses and faint showings as parents sometimes give to
children, when they show them beforehand the jewelry and pictures and
stores of rare and curious treasures which they hold for the possession
of their riper years. So it very often happens that the man who has
gone to bed an angel, feeling as if all sin were forever vanquished,
and he himself immutably grounded in love, may wake the next morning
with a sick-headache, and, if he be not careful, may scold about his
breakfast like a miserable sinner.

We will not say that our dear little Mary rose in this condition next
morning,--for, although she had the headache, she had one of those
natures in which, somehow or other, the combative element seems to be
left out, so that no one ever knew her to speak a fretful word. But
still, as we have observed, she had the headache and the
depression,--and there came the slow, creeping sense of waking up,
through all her heart and soul, of a thousand, thousand things that
could be said only to one person, and that person one that it would be
temptation and danger to say them to.

She came out of her room to her morning work with a face resolved and
calm, but expressive of languor, with slight signs of some inward
struggle.

Madame de Frontignac, who had already heard the intelligence, threw two
or three of her bright glances upon her at breakfast, and at once
divined how the matter stood. She was of a nature so delicately
sensitive to the most refined shades of honor, that she apprehended at
once that there must be a conflict,--though, judging by her own
impulsive nature, she made no doubt that all would at once go down
before the mighty force of reawakened love.

After breakfast she would insist upon following Mary about through all
her avocations. She possessed herself of a towel, and would wipe the
cups and saucers, while Mary washed. She clinked the glasses, and
rattled the cups and spoons, and stepped about as briskly as if she had
two or three breezes to carry her train, and chattered half English and
half French, for the sake of bringing into Mary's cheek the shy, slow
dimples that she liked to watch. But still Mrs. Scudder was around,
with an air as provident and forbidding as that of a sitting hen who
watches her nest; nor was it till after all things had been cleared
away in the house, and Mary had gone up into her little attic to spin,
that the long-sought opportunity came of diving to the bottom of this
mystery.

"_Enfin, Marie, nous voici!_ Are you not going to tell me anything,
when I have turned my heart out to you like a bag? _Chère enfant!_ how
happy you must be!" she said, embracing her.

"Yes, I am very happy," said Mary, with calm gravity.

"_Very happy!_" said Madame de Frontignac, mimicking her manner. "Is
that the way you American girls show it, when you are very happy? Come,
come, _ma belle_! tell little Virginie something. Thou hast seen this
hero, this wandering Ulysses. He has come back at last; the tapestry
will not be quite as long as Penelope's? Speak to me of him. Has he
beautiful black eyes, and hair that curls like a grape-vine? Tell me,
_ma belle_!"

"I only saw him a little while," said Mary, "and I felt a great deal
more than I saw. He could not have been any clearer to me than he
always has been in my mind."

"But I think," said Madame de Frontignac, seating Mary, as was her
wont, and sitting down at her feet, "I think you are a little _triste_
about this. Very likely you pity the good priest. It is sad for him;
but a good priest has the Church for his bride, you know."

"You do not think," said Mary, speaking seriously, "that I shall break
my promise given before God to this good man?"

"_Mon Dieu, mon enfant!_ you do not mean to marry the priest, after
all? _Quelle idée!_"

"But I _promised_ him," said Mary.

Madame de Frontignac threw up her hands, with an expression of
vexation.

"What a pity, my little one, you are not in the True Church! Any good
priest could dispense you from that."

"I do not believe," said Mary, "in any earthly power that can dispense
us from solemn obligations which we have assumed before God, and on
which we have suffered others to build the most precious hopes. If
James had won the affections of some girl, thinking as I do, I should
not think it right for him to leave her and come to me. The Bible says,
that the just man is 'he that sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth
not.'"

"_C'est le sublime de devoir!_" said Madame de Frontignac, who, with
the airy frailty of her race, never lost her appreciation of the fine
points of anything that went on under her eyes. But, nevertheless, she
was inwardly resolved, that, picturesque as this "sublime of duty" was,
it must not be allowed to pass beyond the limits of a fine art, and so
she recommenced.

"_Mais c'est absurde_. This beautiful young man, with his black eyes,
and his curls,--a real hero,--a Theseus, Mary,--just come home from
killing a Minotaur,--and loves you with his whole heart,--and this
dreadful promise! Why, haven't you any sort of people in your Church
that can unbind you from promises? I should think the good priest
himself would do it!"

"Perhaps he would," said Mary, "if I should ask him; but that would be
equivalent to a breach of it. Of course, no man would marry a woman
that asked to be dispensed."

"You are an angel of delicacy, my child; _c'est admirable!_ but, after
all, Mary, this is not well. Listen now to me. You are a very sweet
saint, and very strong in goodness. I think you must have a very strong
angel that takes care of you. But think, _chère enfant,_--think what it
is to marry one man while you love another!"

"But I love the Doctor," said Mary, evasively.

"_Love!_" said Madame de Frontignac. "Oh, Marie! you may love him well,
but you and I both know that there is something deeper than that. What
will you _do_ with this young man? Must he move away from this place,
and not be with his poor mother any more? Or can you see him, and hear
him, and be with him, after your marriage, and not feel that you love
him more than your husband?"

"I should hope that God would help me to feel right," said Mary.

"I am very much afraid He will not, _ma chère._ I asked Him a great
many times to help _me,_ when I found how wrong it all was; but He did
not. You remember what you told me the other day,--that, if I would do
right, I must not _see_ that man any more. You will have to ask him to
go away from this place; you can never see him; for this love will
never die till you die;--that you may be sure of. Is it wise? is it
right, dear little one? _Must_ he leave his home forever for you? or
must you struggle always, and grow whiter and whiter, and fall away
into heaven, like the moon this morning, and nobody know what is the
matter? People will say you have the liver-complaint, or the
consumption, or something. Nobody ever knows what we women die of."

Poor Mary's conscience was fairly posed. This appeal struck upon her
sense of right as having its grounds. She felt inexpressibly confused
and distressed.

"Oh, I wish somebody would tell me exactly what is right!" she said.

"Well, _I_ will," said Madame de Frontignac. "Go down to the dear
priest, and tell him the whole truth. My dear child, do you think, if
he should ever find it out after your marriage, he would think you used
him right?"

"And yet _mother_ does not think so; mother does not wish me to tell
him."

"_Pauvrette, toujours les mères!_ Yes, it is always the mothers that
stand in the way of the lovers. Why cannot she marry the priest
herself?" she said between her teeth, and then looked up, startled and
guilty, to see if Mary had heard her.

"I _cannot,_" said Mary,--"I cannot go against my conscience, and my
mother, and my best friend."

At this moment, the conference was cut short by Mrs. Scudder's
provident footsteps on the garret-stairs. A vague suspicion of
something French had haunted her during her dairy-work, and she
resolved to come and put a stop to the interview, by telling Mary that
Miss Prissy wanted her to come and be measured for the skirt of her
dress.

Mrs. Scudder, by the use of that sixth sense peculiar to mothers, had
divined that there had been some agitating conference, and, had she
been questioned about it, her guesses as to what it might have been
would probably have given no bad _résumé_ of the real state of the
case. She was inwardly resolved that there should be no more such for
the present, and kept Mary employed about various matters relating to
the dresses, so scrupulously that there was no opportunity for anything
more of the sort that day.

In the evening James Marvyn came down, and was welcomed with the
greatest demonstrations of joy by all but Mary, who sat distant and
embarrassed, after the first salutations had passed.

The Doctor was innocently paternal; but we fear that on the part of the
young man there was small reciprocation of the sentiments he expressed.

Miss Prissy, indeed, had had her heart somewhat touched, as good little
women's hearts are apt to be by a true love-story, and had hinted
something of her feelings to Mrs. Scudder, in a manner which brought
such a severe rejoinder as quite humbled and abashed her, so that she
coweringly took refuge under her former declaration, that, "to be sure,
there couldn't be any man in the world better _worthy_ of Mary than the
Doctor," while still at her heart she was possessed with that
troublesome preference for unworthy people which stands in the way of
so many excellent things. But she went on vigorously sewing upon the
wedding-dress, and pursing up her small mouth into the most perfect and
guarded expression of non-committal; though she said afterwards, "it
went to her heart to see how that poor young man did look, sitting
there just as noble and as handsome as a picture. She didn't see, for
_her_ part, how anybody's heart _could_ stand it; though, to be sure,
as Miss Scudder said, the poor Doctor ought to be thought about, dear
blessed man! What a pity it was things _would_ turn out so! Not that it
was a pity that Jim came home,--that was a great providence,--but a
pity they hadn't known about it sooner. Well, for her part, she didn't
pretend to say; the path of duty did have a great many hard places in
it."

As for James, during his interview at the cottage, he waited and tried
in vain for one moment's private conversation. Mrs. Scudder was
immovable in her motherly kindness, sitting there, smiling and chatting
with him, but never stirring from her place by Mary.

Madame de Frontignac was out of all patience, and determined, in her
small way, to do something to discompose the fixed state of things. So,
retreating to her room, she contrived, in very desperation, to upset
and break a water-pitcher, shrieking violently in French and English at
the deluge which came upon the sanded floor and the little piece of
carpet by the bedside.

What housekeeper's instincts are proof against the crash of breaking
china?

Mrs. Scudder fled from her seat, followed by Miss Prissy.

"Ah! then and there was hurrying to and fro," while Mary sat quiet as a
statue, bending over her sewing, and James, knowing that it must be now
or never, was, like a flash, in the empty chair by her side, with his
black moustache very near to the bent brown head.

"Mary," he said, "you _must_ let me see you once more. All is not said,
is it? Just hear me,--hear me once alone!"

"Oh, James, I am too weak!--I dare not!--I am afraid of myself!"

"You think," he said, "that you _must_ take this course, because it is
right. But _is_ it right? Is it right to marry one man, when you love
another better? I don't put this to your inclination, Mary,--I know it
would be of no use,--I put it to your conscience."

"Oh, I was never so perplexed before!" said Mary. "I don't know what I
_do_ think. I must have time to reflect. And you,--oh, James!--you
_must_ let me do right! There will never be any happiness for me, if I
do wrong,--nor for you, either."

All this while the sounds of running and hurrying in Madame de
Frontignac's room had been unintermitted; and Miss Prissy, not without
some glimmerings of perception, was holding tight on to Mrs. Scudder's
gown, detailing to her a most capital receipt for mending broken china,
the history of which she traced regularly through all the families in
which she had ever worked, varying the details with small items of
family history, and little incidents as to the births, marriages, and
deaths of different people for whom it had been employed, with all the
particulars of how, where, and when, so that James's time for
conversation was by this means indefinitely extended.

"Now," he said to Mary, "let me propose one thing. Let _me_ go to the
Doctor, and tell him the truth."

"James, it does not seem to me that I can. A friend who has been so
considerate, so kind, so self-sacrificing and disinterested, and whom I
have allowed to go on with this implicit faith in me so long. Should
you, James, think of _yourself_ only?"

"I do nor, I trust, think of myself only," said James; "I hope that I
am calm enough, and have a heart to think for others. But, I ask you,
is it doing right to _him_ to let him marry you in ignorance of the
state of your feelings? Is it a kindness to a good and noble man to
give yourself to him only seemingly, when the best and noblest part of
your affections is gone wholly beyond your control? I am quite sure of
_that_, Mary. I know you do love him very well,--that you would make a
most true, affectionate, constant wife to him; but what I know you feel
for me is something wholly out of your power to give to him,--is it
not, now?"

"I think it is," said Mary, looking gravely and deeply thoughtful "But
then, James, I ask myself, 'What if this had happened a week hence?' My
feelings would have been just the same, because they are feelings over
which I have no more control than over my existence. I can only control
the expression of them. But in _that_ case you would not have asked me
to break my marriage-vow; and why now shall I break a solemn vow
deliberately made before God? If what I can give him will content him,
and he never knows that which would give him pain, what wrong is done
him?"

"I should think the deepest possible wrong done me," said James, "if,
when I thought I had married a wife with a whole heart, I found that
the greater part of it had been before that given to another. If you
tell him, or if I tell him, or your mother,--who is the proper person,
and he chooses to hold you to your promise, then, Mary, I have no more
to say. I shall sail in a few weeks again, and carry your image forever
in my heart;--nobody can take that away; that dear shadow will be the
only wife I shall ever know."

At this moment Miss Prissy came rattling along towards the door,
talking--we suspect designedly--on quite a high key. Mary hastily
said,--

"Wait, James,--let me think,--tomorrow is the Sabbath-day. Monday I
will send you word, or see you."

And when Miss Prissy returned into the best room, James was sitting at
one window and Mary at another,--he making remarks, in a style of most
admirable commonplace, on a copy of Milton's "Paradise Lost," which he
had picked up in the confusion of the moment, and which, at the time
Mrs. Katy Scudder entered, he was declaring to be a most excellent
book,--a really, truly, valuable work.

Mrs. Scudder looked keenly from one to the other, and saw that Mary's
cheek was glowing like the deepest heart of a pink shell, while, in all
other respects, she was as cold and calm. On the whole, she felt
satisfied that no mischief had been done.

We hope our readers will do Mrs. Scudder justice. It is true that she
yet wore on her third finger the marriage-ring of a sailor lover, and
his memory was yet fresh in her heart; but even mothers who have
married for love themselves somehow so blend a daughter's existence
with their own as to conceive that she must marry their love, and not
her own. Besides this, Mrs. Scudder was an Old Testament woman, brought
up with that scrupulous exactitude of fidelity in relation to promises
which would naturally come from familiarity with a book in which
covenant-keeping is represented as one of the highest attributes of
Deity, and covenant-breaking as one of the vilest sins of humanity. To
break the word that had gone forth out of one's mouth was to lose
self-respect, and all claim to the respect of others, and to sin
against eternal rectitude.

As we have said before, it is almost impossible to make our
light-minded times comprehend the earnestness with which those people
lived. It was, in the beginning, no vulgar nor mercenary ambition that
made her seek the Doctor as a husband for her daughter. He was poor,
and she had had offers from richer men. He was often unpopular; but he
of all the world was the man she most revered, the man she believed in
with the most implicit faith, the man who embodied her highest ideas of
the good; and therefore it was that she was willing to resign her child
to him.

As to James, she had felt truly sympathetic with his mother, and with
Mary, in the dreadful hour when they supposed him lost; and had it not
been for the great perplexity occasioned by his return, she would have
received him, as a relative, with open arms. But now she felt it her
duty to be on the defensive,--an attitude not the most favorable for
cherishing pleasing associations in regard to another. She had read the
letter giving an account of his spiritual experience with very sincere
pleasure, as a good woman should, but not without an internal
perception how very much it endangered her favorite plans. When Mary,
however, had calmly reiterated her determination, she felt sure of her;
for had she ever known her to say a thing she did not do?

The uneasiness she felt at present, was not the doubt of her daughter's
steadiness, but the fear that she might have been unsuitably harassed
or annoyed.


CHAPTER XXXVIII.

THE TRANSFIGURED.

The next morning rose calm and fair. It was the Sabbath-day,--the last
Sabbath in Mary's maiden life, if her promises and plans were
fulfilled.

Mary dressed herself in white,--her hands trembling with unusual
agitation, her sensitive nature divided between two opposing
consciences and two opposing affections. Her devoted filial love toward
the Doctor made her feel the keenest sensitiveness at the thought of
giving him pain. At the same time, the questions which James had
proposed to her had raised serious doubts in her mind whether it was
altogether right to suffer him blindly to enter into this union. So,
after she was all prepared, she bolted the door of her chamber, and,
opening her Bible, read, "If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of
God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not, and it shall
be given him"; and then, kneeling down by the bedside, she asked that
God would give her some immediate light in her present perplexity. So
praying, her mind grew calm and steady, and she rose up at the sound of
the bell which marked that it was time to set forward for church.

Everybody noticed, as she came into church that morning, how beautiful
Mary Scudder looked. It was no longer the beauty of the carved statue,
the pale alabaster shrine, the sainted virgin, but a warm, bright,
living light, that spoke of some summer breath breathing within her
soul.

When she took her place in the singers' seat, she knew, without turning
her head, that he was in his old place, not far from her side; and
those whose eyes followed her to the gallery marvelled at her face
there,--

        "her pure and eloquent blood
    Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought
    That you might almost say her body thought";

for a thousand delicate nerves were becoming vital once more,--the holy
mystery of womanhood had wrought within her.

When they rose to sing, the tune must needs be one which they had often
sung together, out of the same book, at the singing-school,--one of
those wild, pleading tunes, dear to the heart of New England,--born, if
we may credit the report, in the rocky hollows of its mountains, and
whose notes have a kind of grand and mournful triumph in their warbling
wail, and in which different parts of the harmony, set contrary to all
the canons of musical Pharisaism, had still a singular and romantic
effect, which a true musical genius would not have failed to recognize.
The four parts, tenor, treble, bass, and counter, as they were then
called, rose and swelled and wildly mingled, with the fitful
strangeness of Aeolian harp, or of winds in mountain-hollows, or the
vague moanings of the sea on lone, forsaken shores. And Mary, while her
voice rose over the waves of the treble, and trembled with a pathetic
richness, felt, to her inmost heart, the deep accord of that other
voice which rose to meet hers, so wildly melancholy, as if the soul in
that manly breast had come to meet her soul in the disembodied, shadowy
verity of eternity. The grand old tune, called by our fathers "China,"
never, with its dirge-like melody, drew two souls more out of
themselves, and entwined them more nearly with each other.

The last verse of the hymn spoke of the resurrection of the saints with
Christ:

  "Then let the last dread trumpet sound
     And bid the dead arise;
   Awake, ye nations under ground!
     Ye saints, ascend the skies!"

And as Mary sang, she felt sublimely upborne with the idea that life is
but a moment and love is immortal, and seemed, in a shadowy trance, to
feel herself and him past this mortal fane, far over on the shores of
that other life, ascending with Christ, all-glorified, all tears wiped
away, and with full permission to love and to be loved forever. And as
she sang, the Doctor looked upward, and marvelled at the light in her
eyes and the rich bloom on her cheek,--for where she stood, a sunbeam,
streaming aslant through the dusty panes of the window, touched her
head with a kind of glory,--and the thought he then received
outbreathed itself in the yet more fervent adoration of his prayer.


CHAPTER XXXIX.

THE ICE BROKEN.

Our fathers believed in special answers to prayer. They were not
stumbled by the objection about the inflexibility of the laws of
Nature; because they had the idea, that, when the Creator of the world
promised to answer human prayers, He probably understood the laws of
Nature as well as they did. At any rate, the laws of Nature were His
affair, and not theirs. They were men, very apt, as the Duke of
Wellington said, to "look to their marching-orders,"--which, being
found to read, "Be careful for nothing, but in everything by prayer and
supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto
God," they did it. "They looked unto Him and were lightened, and their
faces were not ashamed." One reads, in the Memoirs of Dr. Hopkins, of
Newport Gardner, one of his African catechumens, a negro of singular
genius and ability, who, being desirous of his freedom, that he might
be a missionary to Africa, and having long worked without being able to
raise the amount required, was counselled by Dr. Hopkins that it might
be a shorter way to seek his freedom from the Lord, by a day of solemn
fasting and prayer. The historical fact is, that, on the evening of a
day so consecrated, his master returned from church, called Newport to
him, and presented him with his freedom. Is it not possible that He who
made the world may have established laws for prayer as invariable as
those for the sowing of seed and raising of grain? Is it not as
legitimate a subject of inquiry, when petitions are not answered, which
of these laws has been neglected?

But be that as it may, certain it is, that Candace, who on this morning
in church sat where she could see Mary and James in the singers' seat,
had certain thoughts planted in her mind which bore fruit afterwards in
a solemn and select consultation held with Miss Prissy at the end of
the horse-shed by the meeting-house, during the intermission between
the morning and afternoon services.

Candace sat on a fragment of granite boulder which lay there, her black
face relieved against a clump of yellow mulleins, then in majestic
altitude. On her lap was spread a checked pocket-handkerchief,
containing rich slices of cheese, and a store of her favorite brown
doughnuts.

"Now, Miss Prissy," she said, "dar's _reason_ in all tings, an' a good
deal _more_ in some tings dan dar is in oders. Dar's a good deal more
reason in two young, handsome folks comin' togeder dan dar is in"----

Candace finished the sentence by an emphatic flourish of her doughnut.

"Now, as long as eberybody thought Jim Marvyn was dead, dar wa'n't
nothin' else in de world _to_ be done _but_ marry de Doctor. But, good
lan! I hearn him a-talkin' to Miss Marvyn las' night; it kinder' mos'
broke my heart. Why, dem two poor creeturs, dey's jest as onhappy's dey
can be! An' she's got too much feelin' for de Doctor to say a word; an'
_I_ say _he oughter be told on't!_ dat's what _I_ say," said Candace,
giving a decisive bite to her doughnut.

"I say so, too," said Miss Prissy. "Why, I never had such bad feelings
in my life as I did yesterday, when that young man came down to our
house. He was just as pale as a cloth. I tried to say a word to Miss
Scudder, but she snapped me up so! She's an awful decided woman when
her mind's made up. I was telling Cerinthy Ann Twitchel,--she came
round me this noon,--that it didn't exactly seem to me right that
things should go on as they are going. And says I, 'Cerinthy Ann, I
don't know anything what to do.' And says she, 'If I was you, I know
what _I'd_ do,--I'd tell the Doctor,' says she. 'Nobody ever takes
offence at anything _you_ do, Miss Prissy.' To be sure," added Miss
Prissy, "I have talked to people about a good many things that it's
rather strange I should; 'cause I a'n't one, somehow, that can let
things go that seem to want doing. I always told folks that I should
spoil a novel before it got half-way through the first volume, by
blurting out some of those things that they let go trailing on so, till
everybody gets so mixed up they don't know what they're doing."

"Well, now, honey," said Candace, authoritatively, "ef you's got any
notions o' dat kind, I tink it mus' come from de good Lord, an' I
'dvise you to be 'tendin' to't, right away. You jes' go 'long an' tell
de Doctor yourself all you know, an' den le's see what'll come on't. I
tell you, I b'liebe it'll be one o' de bes' day's works you eber did in
your life!"

"Well," said Miss Prissy, "I guess tonight, before I go to bed, I'll
make a dive at him. When a thing's once out, it's out, and can't be got
in again, even if people don't like it; and that's a mercy, anyhow. It
really makes me feel 'most wicked to think of it, for he is the most
blessedest man!"

"Dat's what he _is_" said Candace. "But de blessedest man in de world
oughter know de truth; dat's what _I_ tink!"

"Yes,--true enough!" said Miss Prissy. "I'll tell him, anyway."

Miss Prissy was as good as her word; for that evening, when the Doctor
had retired to his study, she took her life in her hand, and, walking
swiftly as a cat, tapped rather timidly at the study-door, which the
Doctor opening said, benignantly,--

"Ah, Miss Prissy!"

"If you please, Sir," said Miss Prissy, "I'd like a little
conversation."

The Doctor was well enough used to such requests from the female
members of his church, which, generally, were the prelude to some
disclosures of internal difficulties or spiritual experiences. He
therefore graciously motioned her to a chair.

"I thought I must come in," she began, busily twirling a bit of her
Sunday gown. "I thought--that is--I felt it my duty--I thought--
perhaps--I ought to tell you--that perhaps you ought to know."

The Doctor looked civilly concerned. He did not know but Miss Prissy's
wits were taking leave of her. He replied, however, with his usual
honest stateliness,--

"I trust, dear Madam, that you will feel perfect freedom to open to me
any exercises of mind that you may have."

"It isn't about myself," said Miss Prissy. "If you please, it's about
you and Mary!"

The Doctor now looked awake in right earnest, and very much astonished
besides; and he looked eagerly at Miss Prissy, to have her go on.

"I don't know how you would view such a matter," said Miss Prissy; "but
the fact is, that James Marvyn and Mary always did love each other,
ever since they were children."

Still the Doctor was unawakened to the real meaning of the words, and
he answered, simply,--

"I should be far from wishing to interfere with so very natural and
universal a sentiment, which, I make no doubt, is all quite as it
should be."

"No,--but," said Miss Prissy, "you don't understand what I mean. I mean
that James Marvyn wanted to marry Mary, and that she was--well--she
wasn't engaged to him, but"----

"Madam!" said the Doctor, in a voice that frightened Miss Prissy out of
her chair, while a blaze like sheet-lightning shot from his eyes, and
his face flushed crimson.

"Mercy on us! Doctor, I hope you'll excuse me; but there the fact
is,--I've said it out,--the fact is, they wa'n't engaged; but that Mary
loved him ever since he was a boy, as she never will and never can love
any man again in this world, is what I'm just as sure of as that I'm
standing here; and I've felt you ought to know it: 'cause I'm quite
sure, that, if he'd been alive, she'd never given the promise she
has,--the promise that she means to keep, if her heart breaks, and his
too. They wouldn't anybody tell you, and I thought I must tell you;
'cause I thought you'd know what was right to do about it."

During all this latter speech the Doctor was standing with his back to
Miss Prissy, and his face to the window, just as he did some time
before, when Mrs. Scudder came to tell him of Mary's consent. He made a
gesture backward, without speaking, that she should leave the
apartment; and Miss Prissy left, with a guilty kind of feeling, as if
she had been striking a knife into her pastor, and, rushing
distractedly across the entry into Mary's little bedroom, she bolted
the door, threw herself on the bed, and began to cry.

"Well, I've done it!" she said to herself. "He's a very strong, hearty
man," she soliloquized, "so I hope it won't put him in a
consumption;--men do go into a consumption about such things sometimes.
I remember Abner Seaforth did; but then he was always narrow-chested,
and had the liver-complaint, or something. I don't know what Miss
Scudder will say;--but I've done it. Poor man! such a good man, too! I
declare, I feel just like Herod taking off John the Baptist's head.
Well, well! it's done, and can't be helped."

Just at this moment Miss Prissy heard a gentle tap at the door, and
started, as if it had been a ghost,--not being able to rid herself of
the impression, that, somehow, she had committed a great crime, for
which retribution was knocking at the door.

It was Mary, who said, in her sweetest and most natural tones, "Miss
Prissy, the Doctor would like to see you."

Mary was much astonished at the frightened, discomposed manner with
which Miss Prissy received this announcement, and said,--

"I'm afraid I've waked you up out of sleep, I don't think there's the
least hurry."

Miss Prissy didn't, either; but she reflected afterwards that she might
as well get through with it at once; and therefore, smoothing her
tumbled cap-border, she went to the Doctor's study. This time he was
quite composed, and received her with a mournful gravity, and requested
her to be seated.

"I beg, Madam," he said, "you will excuse the abruptness of my manner
in our late interview. I was so little prepared for the communication
you had to make, that I was, perhaps, unsuitably discomposed. Will you
allow me to ask whether you were requested by any of the parties to
communicate to me what you did?"

"No, Sir," said Miss Prissy.

"Have any of the parties ever communicated with you on the subject at
all?" said the Doctor.

"No, Sir," said Miss Prissy.

"That is all," said the Doctor. "I will not detain you. I am very much
obliged to you, Madam."

He rose, and opened the door for her to pass out, and Miss Prissy,
overawed by the stately gravity of his manner, went out in silence.


CHAPTER XL.

THE SACRIFICE.

When Miss Prissy left the room, the Doctor sat down by the table and
covered his face with his hands. He had a large, passionate, determined
nature; and he had just come to one of those cruel crises in life in
which it is apt to seem to us that the whole force of our being, all
that we can hope, wish, feel, enjoy, has been suffered to gather itself
into one great wave, only to break upon some cold rock of inevitable
fate, and go back, moaning, into emptiness.

In such hours men and women have cursed God and life, and thrown
violently down and trampled under their feet what yet was left of
life's blessings, in the fierce bitterness of despair. "This, or
nothing!" the soul shrieks, in her frenzy. At just such points as
these, men have plunged into intemperance and wild excess,--they have
gone to be shot down in battle,--they have broken life, and thrown it
away, like an empty goblet, and gone, like wailing ghosts, out into the
dread unknown.

The possibility of all this lay in that heart which had just received
that stunning blow. Exercised and disciplined as he had been, by years
of sacrifice, by constant, unsleeping self-vigilance, there was rising
there, in that great heart, an ocean-tempest of passion, and for a
while his cries unto God seemed as empty and as vague as the screams of
birds tossed and buffeted in the clouds of mighty tempests.

The will that he thought wholly subdued seemed to rise under him as a
rebellious giant. A few hours before, he thought himself established in
an invincible submission to God's will that nothing could shake. Now he
looked into himself as into a seething vortex of rebellion, and against
all the passionate cries of his lower nature could, in the language of
an old saint, cling to God only by the naked force of his will. That
will rested unmelted amid the boiling sea of passion, waiting its hour
of renewed sway. He walked the room for hours, and then sat down to his
Bible, and roused once or twice to find his head leaning on its pages,
and his mind far gone in thoughts from which he woke with a bitter
throb. Then he determined to set himself to some definite work, and,
taking his Concordance, began busily tracing out and numbering all the
proof-texts for one of the chapters of his theological system! till, at
last, he worked himself down to such calmness that he could pray; and
then he schooled and reasoned with himself, in a style not unlike, in
its spirit, to that in which a great modern author has addressed
suffering humanity:--

"What is it that thou art fretting and self-tormenting about? Is it
because thou art not happy? Who told thee that thou wast to be happy?
Is there any ordinance of the universe that thou shouldst be happy? Art
thou nothing but a vulture screaming for prey? Canst thou not do
without happiness? Yea, thou canst do without happiness, and, instead
thereof, find blessedness."

The Doctor came, lastly, to the conclusion, that blessedness, which was
all the portion his Master had on earth, might do for him also; and
therefore he kissed and blessed that silver dove of happiness, which he
saw was weary of sailing in his clumsy old ark, and let it go out of
his hand without a tear.

He slept little that night; but when he came to breakfast, all noticed
an unusual gentleness and benignity of manner, and Mary, she knew not
why, saw tears rising in his eyes when he looked at her.

After breakfast he requested Mrs. Scudder to step with him into his
study, and Miss Prissy shook in her little shoes as she saw the matron
entering. The door was shut for a long time, and two voices could be
heard in earnest conversation.

Meanwhile James Marvyn entered the cottage, prompt to remind Mary of
her promise that she would talk with him again this morning.

They had talked with each other but a few moments, by the
sweetbrier-shaded window in the best room, when Mrs. Scudder appeared
at the door of the apartment, with traces of tears upon her cheeks.

"Good morning, James," she said. "The Doctor wishes to see you and Mary
a moment, together."

Both looked sufficiently astonished, knowing, from Mrs. Scudder's
looks, that something was impending. They followed her, scarcely
feeling the ground they trod on.

The Doctor was sitting at his table, with his favorite large-print
Bible open before him. He rose to receive them, with a manner at once
gentle and grave.

There was a pause of some minutes, during which he sat with his head
leaning upon his hand.

"You all know," he said, turning toward Mary, who sat very near him,
"the near and dear relation in which I have been expected to stand
towards this friend. I should not have been worthy of that relation, if
I had not felt in my heart the true love of a husband, as set forth in
the New Testament,--who should love his wife even as Christ loved the
Church and gave himself for it; and in case any peril or danger
threatened this dear soul, and I could not give myself for her, I had
never been worthy the honor she has done me. For, I take it, whenever
there is a cross or burden to be borne by one or the other, that the
man, who is made in the image of God as to strength and endurance,
should take it upon himself, and not lay it upon her that is weaker;
for he is therefore strong, not that he may tyrannize over the weak,
but bear their burdens for them, even as Christ for his Church.

"I have just discovered," he added, looking kindly upon Mary, "that
there is a great cross and burden which must come, either on this dear
child or on myself, through no fault of either of us, but through God's
good providence; and therefore let me bear it.

"Mary, my dear child," he said, "I will be to thee as a father, but I
will not force thy heart."

At this moment, Mary, by a sudden, impulsive movement, threw her arms
around his neck and kissed him, and lay sobbing on his shoulder.

"No! no!" she said,--"I will marry you, as I said!"

"Not, if I will not," he replied, with a benign smile. "Come here,
young man," he said, with some authority, to James. "I give thee this
maiden to wife." And he lifted her from his shoulder, and placed her
gently in the arms of the young man, who, overawed and overcome,
pressed her silently to his heart.

"There, children, it is over," he said. "God bless you!"

"Take her away," he added; "she will be more composed soon."

Before James left, he grasped the Doctor's hand in his, and said,--

"Sir, this tells on my heart more than any sermon you ever preached. I
shall never forget it. God bless you, Sir!"

The Doctor saw them slowly quit the apartment, and, following them,
closed the door; and thus ended THE MINISTER'S WOOING.


CHAPTER XLI.

THE WEDDING.

Of the events which followed this scene we are happy to give our
readers more minute and graphic details than we ourselves could
furnish, by transcribing for their edification an autograph letter of
Miss Prissy's, still preserved in a black oaken cabinet of our
great-grandmother's; and with which we take no further liberties than
the correction of a somewhat peculiar orthography. It is written to
that sister "Lizabeth," in Boston, of whom she made such frequent
mention, and whom, it appears, it was her custom to keep well-informed
in all the gossip of her immediate sphere.

"My DEAR SISTER:--

"You wonder, I s'pose, why I haven't written you; but the fact is, I've
been run just off my feet, and worked till the flesh aches so it seems
as if it would drop off my bones, with this wedding of Mary Scudder's.
And, after all, you'll be astonished to hear that she ha'n't married
the Doctor, but that Jim Marvyn that I told you about. You see, he came
home a week before the wedding was to be, and Mary, she was so
conscientious she thought 'twa'n't right to break off with the Doctor,
and so she was for going right on with it; and Mrs. Scudder, she was
for going on more yet; and the poor young man, he couldn't get a word
in edgeways, and there wouldn't anybody tell the Doctor a word about
it, and there 'twas drifting along, and both on 'em feeling dreadful,
and so I thought to myself, 'I'll just take my life in my hand, like
Queen Esther, and go in and tell the Doctor all about it.' And so I
did. I'm scared to death always when I think of it. But that dear
blessed man, he took it like a saint. He just gave her up as serene and
calm as a psalm-book, and called Jim in and told him to take her.

"Jim was fairly overcrowed,--it really made him feel small,--and he
says he'll agree that there is more in the Doctor's religion than most
men's: which shows how important it is for professing Christians to
bear testimony in their works,--as I was telling Cerinthy Ann Twitchel:
and she said there wa'n't anything made her want to be a Christian so
much, if that was what religion would do for people.

"Well, you see, when this came out, it wanted just three days of the
wedding, which was to be Thursday, and that wedding-dress I told you
about, that had lilies-of-the-valley on a white ground, was pretty much
made, except puffing the gauze round the neck, which I do with white
satin piping-cord, and it looks beautiful too; and so Mrs. Scudder and
I, we were thinking 'twould do just as well, when in come Jim Marvyn,
bringing the sweetest thing you ever saw, that he had got in China, and
I think I never did see anything lovelier. It was a white silk, as
thick as a board, and so stiff that it would stand alone, and overshot
with little fine dots of silver, so that it shone, when you moved it,
just like frostwork; and when I saw it, I just clapped my hands, and
jumped up from the floor, and says I, 'If I have to sit up all night,
that dress shall be made, and made well, too.' For, you know, I thought
I could get Miss Olladine Hocum to run the breadths and do such parts,
so that I could devote myself to the fine work. And that French woman I
told you about, she said she'd help, and she's a master hand for
touching things up. There seems to be work provided for all kinds of
people, and French people seem to have a gift in all sorts of dressy
things, and 'tisn't a bad gift either.

"Well, as I was saying, we agreed that this was to be cut open with a
train, and a petticoat of just the palest, sweetest, loveliest blue
that ever you saw, and gauze puffings down the edgings each side,
fastened in, every once in a while, with lilies-of-the-valley; and
'twas cut square in the neck, with puffings and flowers to match, and
then tight sleeves, with full ruffles of that old Mechlin lace that you
remember Mrs. Katy Scudder showed you once in that great camphor-wood
trunk.

"Well, you see, come to get all things together that were to be done,
we concluded to put off the wedding till Tuesday; and Madame de
Frontignac, she would dress the best room for it herself, and she spent
nobody knows what time in going round and getting evergreens and making
wreaths, and putting up green boughs over the pictures, so that the
room looked just like the Episcopal church at Christmas. In fact, Mrs.
Scudder said, if it had been Christmas, she shouldn't have felt it
right, but, as it was, she didn't think anybody would think it any
harm.

"Well, Tuesday night, I and Madame de Frontignac, we dressed Mary
ourselves, and, I tell you, the dress fitted as if it was grown on her;
and Madame de Frontignac, she dressed her hair; and she had on a wreath
of lilies-of-the-valley, and a gauze veil that came almost down to her
feet, and came all around her like a cloud, and you could see her white
shining dress through it every time she moved, and she looked just as
white as a snow-berry; but there were two little pink spots that came
coming and going in her cheeks, that kind of lightened up when she
smiled, and then faded down again. And the French lady put a string of
real pearls round her neck, with a cross of pearls, which went down and
lay hid in her bosom.

"She was mighty calm-like while she was being dressed; but just as I
was putting in the last pin, she heard the rumbling of a coach
down-stairs, for Jim Marvyn had got a real elegant carriage to carry
her over to his father's in, and so she knew he was come. And pretty
soon Mrs. Marvyn came in the room, and when she saw Mary, her brown
eyes kind of danced, and she lifted up both hands, to see how beautiful
she looked. And Jim Marvyn, he was standing at the door, and they told
him it wasn't proper that he should see till the time come; but he
begged so hard that he might just have one peep, that I let him come
in, and he looked at her as if she was something he wouldn't dare to
touch; and he said to me softly, says he, 'I'm 'most afraid she has got
wings somewhere that will fly away from me, or that I shall wake up and
find it is a dream.'

"Well, Cerinthy Ann Twitchel was the bridesmaid, and she came next with
that young man she is engaged to. It is all out now, that she is
engaged, and she don't deny it. And Cerinthy, she looked handsomer than
I ever saw her, in a white brocade, with rosebuds on it, which I guess
she got in reference to the future, for they say she is going to be
married next month.

"Well, we all filled up the room pretty well, till Mrs. Scudder came in
to tell us that the company were all together; and then they took hold
of arms, and they had a little time practising how they must stand, and
Cerinthy Ann's beau would always get her on the wrong side, 'cause he's
rather bashful, and don't know very well what he's about; and Cerinthy
Ann declared she was afraid that she should laugh out in prayer-time,
'cause she always did laugh when she knew she mus'n't. But finally Mrs.
Scudder told us we must go in, and looked so reproving at Cerinthy that
she had to hold her mouth with her pocket-handkerchief.

"Well, the old Doctor was standing there in the very silk gown that the
ladies gave him to be married in himself,--poor, dear man!--and he
smiled kind of peaceful on 'em when they came in, and walked up to a
kind of bower of evergreens and flowers that Madame de Frontignac had
fixed for them to stand in. Mary grew rather white, as if she was going
to faint; but Jim Marvyn stood up just as firm, and looked as proud and
handsome as a prince, and he kind of looked down at her,--'cause, you
know, he is a great deal taller,--kind of wondering, as if he wanted to
know if it was really so. Well, when they got all placed, they let the
doors stand open, and Cato and Candace came and stood in the door. And
Candace had on her great splendid Mogadore turban, and a crimson and
yellow shawl, that she seemed to take comfort in wearing, although it
was pretty hot.

"Well, so when they were all fixed, the Doctor, he begun his
prayer,--and as 'most all of us knew what a great sacrifice he had
made, I don't believe there was a dry eye in the room; and when he had
done, there was a great time,--people blowing their noses and wiping
their eyes, as if it had been a funeral. Then Cerinthy Ann, she pulled
off Mary's glove pretty quick; but that poor beau of hers, he made such
work of James's that he had to pull it off himself, after all, and
Cerinthy Ann, she liked to have laughed out loud. And so when the
Doctor told them to join hands, Jim took hold of Mary's hand as if he
didn't mean to let go very soon, and so they were married.

"I was the first one that kissed the bride after Mrs. Scudder;--I got
that promise out of Mary when I was making the dress. And Jim Marvyn,
he insisted upon kissing me,--''Cause,' says he, 'Miss Prissy, you are
as young and handsome as any of 'em'; and I told him he was a saucy
fellow, and I'd box his ears, if I could reach them.

"That French lady looked lovely, dressed in pale pink silk, with long
pink wreaths of flowers in her hair; and she came up and kissed Mary,
and said something to her in French.

"And after a while old Candace came up, and Mary kissed her; and then
Candace put her arms round Jim's neck, and gave him a real hearty
smack, so that everybody laughed.

"And then the cake and the wine was passed round, and everybody had
good times till we heard the nine-o'clock-bell ring. And then the coach
come up to the door, and Mrs. Scudder, she wrapped Mary up, kissing
her, and crying over her, while Mrs. Marvyn stood stretching her arms
out of the coach after her; and then Cato and Candace went after in the
wagon behind, and so they all went off together; and that was the end
of the wedding; and ever since then we ha'n't any of us done much but
rest, for we were pretty much beat out. So no more at present from your
affectionate sister,

"PRISSY.

"P.S.--I forgot to tell you that Jim Marvyn has come home quite rich.
He fell in with a man in China who was at the head of one of their
great merchant-houses, whom he nursed through a long fever, and took
care of his business, and so, when he got well, nothing would do but he
must have him for a partner; and now he is going to live in this
country and attend to the business of the firm here. They say he is
going to build a house as grand as the Vernons'. And we hope he has
experienced religion; and he means to join our church, which is a
providence, for he is twice as rich and generous as that old Simeon
Brown that snapped me up so about my wages. I never believed in him,
for all his talk. I was down to Mrs. Scudder's when the Doctor examined
Jim about his evidences. At first the Doctor seemed a little anxious,
'cause he didn't talk in the regular way; for you know Jim always did
have his own way of talking, and never could say things in other
people's words; and sometimes he makes folks laugh, when he himself
don't know what they laugh at, because he hits the nail on the head in
some strange way they aren't expecting. If I was to have died, I
couldn't help laughing at some things he said; and yet I don't think I
ever felt more solemnized. He sat up there in a sort of grand,
straightforward, noble way, and told all the way the Lord had been
leading of him, and all the exercises of his mind, and all about the
dreadful shipwreck, and how he was saved, and the loving-kindness of
the Lord, till the Doctor's spectacles got all blinded with tears, and
he couldn't see the notes he made to examine him by; and we all cried,
Mrs. Scudder, and Mary, and I; and as to Mrs. Marvyn, she just sat with
her--hands clasped, looking into her son's eyes, like a picture of the
Virgin Mary. And when Jim got through, there wa'n't nothing to be heard
for some minutes; and the Doctor; he wiped his eyes, and wiped his
glasses, and looked over his papers, but he couldn't bring out a word,
and at last says he, "Let us pray,"--for that was all there was to be
said; for I think sometimes things so kind of fills folks up that there
a'n't nothing to be done but pray, which, the Lord be praised, we are
privileged to do always. Between you and I, Martha, I never could
understand all the distinctions our dear, blessed Doctor sets up; but
when he publishes his system, if I work my fingers to the bone, I mean
to buy one and study it out, because he is such a blessed man; though,
after all's said, I have come back to my old place, and trust to the
loving-kindness of the Lord, who takes care of the sparrow on the
house-top, and all small, lone creatures like me; though I can't say
I'm lone either, because nobody need say that, so long as there's folks
to be done for. So if I _don't_ understand the Doctor's theology, or
don't get eyes to read it, on account of the fine stitching on his
shirt-ruffles I've been trying to do, still I hope I may be accepted on
account of the Lord's great goodness; for if we can't trust that, it's
all over with us all."


CHAPTER XLII.

LAST WORDS.

We know it is fashionable to drop the curtain over a newly married
pair, they recede from the altar; but we cannot but hope our readers
may by this time have enough of interest in our little history to wish
for a few words on the lot of the personages whose acquaintance they
have thereby made.

The conjectures of Miss Prissy in regard to the grand house which James
was to build for his bride were as speedily as possible realized. On a
beautiful elevation, a little out of the town of Newport, rose a fair
and stately mansion, whose windows overlooked the harbor, and whose
wide, cool rooms were adorned by thy constant presence of the sweet
face and form which has been the guiding star of our story. The fair
poetic maiden, the seeress, the saint, has passed into that appointed
shrine for woman, more holy than cloister, more saintly and pure than
church or altar,--_a Christian home_. Priestess, wife, and mother,
there she ministers daily in holy works of household peace, and by
faith and prayer and love redeems from grossness and earthliness the
common toils and wants of life.

The gentle guiding force that led James Marvyn from the maxims and
habits and ways of this world to the higher conception of an heroic and
Christ-like manhood was still ever present with him, gently touching
the springs of life, brooding peacefully with dovelike wings over his
soul, and he grew up under it noble in purpose and strong in spirit. He
was one of the most energetic and fearless supporters of the Doctor in
his life-long warfare against an inhumanity which was intrenched in all
the mercantile interests of the day, and which at last fell before the
force of conscience and moral appeal.

Candace in time transferred her allegiance to the growing family of her
young master and mistress, and predominated proudly in gorgeous raiment
with her butterfly turban over a rising race of young Marvyns. All the
care not needed by them was bestowed upon the somewhat querulous old
age of Cato, whose never-failing cough furnished occupation for all her
spare hours and thought.

As for our friend the Doctor, we trust our readers will appreciate the
magnanimity with which he proved a real and disinterested love, in a
point where so many men experience only the graspings of a selfish one.
A mind so severely trained as his had been brings to a great crisis,
involving severe self-denial, an amount of reserved moral force quite
inexplicable to those less habituated to self-control. He was like a
warrior whose sleep even was in armor, always ready to be roused to the
conflict.

In regard to his feelings for Mary, he made the sacrifice of himself to
her happiness so wholly and thoroughly that there was not a moment of
weak hesitation,--no going back over the past,--no vain regret.
Generous and brave souls find a support in such actions, because the
very exertion raises them to a higher and purer plane of existence.

His diary records the event only in these very calm and temperate
words:--"It was a trial to me,--_a very great_ trial; but as she did
not deceive me, I shall never lose my friendship for her."

The Doctor was always a welcome inmate in the house of Mary and James,
as a friend revered and dear. Nor did he want in time a hearthstone of
his own, where a bright and loving face made him daily welcome; for we
find that he married at last a woman of a fair countenance, and that
sons and daughters grew up around him.

In time, also, his theological system was published. In that day, it
was customary to dedicate new or important works to the patronage of
some distinguished or powerful individual. The Doctor had no earthly
patron. Four or five simple lines are found in the commencement of his
work, in which, in a spirit reverential and affectionate, he dedicates
it to our Lord Jesus Christ, praying Him to accept the good, and to
overrule the errors to His glory.

Quite unexpectedly to himself, the work proved a success, not only in
public acceptance and esteem, but even in a temporal view, bringing to
him at last a modest competence, which he accepted with surprise and
gratitude. To the last of a very long life, he was the same steady,
undiscouraged worker, the same calm witness against popular sins and
proclaimer of unpopular truths, ever saying and doing what he saw to be
eternally right, without the slightest consultation with worldly
expediency or earthly gain; nor did his words cease to work in New
England till the evils he opposed were finally done away.

Colonel Burr leaves the scene of our story to pursue those brilliant
and unscrupulous political intrigues so well known to the historian of
those times, and whose results were so disastrous to himself. His duel
with the ill-fated Hamilton, the awful retribution of public opinion
that followed, and the slow downward course of a doomed life are all on
record. Chased from society, pointed at everywhere by the finger of
hatred, so accursed in common esteem that even the publican who lodged
him for a night refused to accept his money when he knew his name,
heart-stricken in his domestic relations, his only daughter taken by
pirates and dying amid untold horrors,--one seems to see in a doom so
much above that of other men the power of an avenging Nemesis for sins
beyond those of ordinary humanity.

But we who have learned of Christ may humbly hope that these crushing
miseries in this life came not because he was a sinner above
others,--not in wrath alone,--but that the prayers of the sweet saint
who gave him to God even before his birth brought to him those friendly
adversities, that thus might be slain in his soul the evil demon of
pride, which had been the opposing force to all that was noble within
him. Nothing is more affecting than the account of the last hours of
this man, whom a woman took in and cherished in his poverty and
weakness with that same heroic enthusiasm with which it was his lot to
inspire so many women. This humble keeper of lodgings was told, that,
if she retained Aaron Burr, all her other lodgers would leave. "Let
them do it, then," she said; "but he shall remain." In the same
uncomplaining and inscrutable silence in which he had borne the
reverses and miseries of his life did this singular being pass through
the shades of the dark valley. The New Testament was always under his
pillow, and when alone he was often found reading it attentively; but
of the result of that communion with Higher Powers he said nothing.
Patient, gentle, and grateful, he was, as to all his inner history,
entirely silent and impenetrable. He died with the request, which has a
touching significance, that he might be buried at the feet of those
parents whose lives had finished so differently from his own.

  "No farther seek his errors to disclose,
  Or draw his frailties from their dread abode."

Shortly after Mary's marriage, Madame de Frontignac sailed with her
husband for home, where they lived in a very retired way on a large
estate in the South of France. An intimate correspondence was kept up
between her and Mary for many years, from which we shall give our
readers a few extracts. Her first letter is dated shortly after her
return to France.

"At last, my sweet Marie, you behold us in peace after our wanderings.
I wish you could see our lovely nest in the hills which overlook the
Mediterranean, whose blue waters remind me of Newport harbor and our
old days there. Ah, my sweet saint, blessed was the day I first learned
to know you! for it was you, more than anything else, that kept me back
from sin and misery. I call you my Sibyl, dearest, because the Sibyl
was a prophetess of divine things out of the Church; and so are you.
The Abbé says, that all true, devout persons of all persuasions belong
to the True Catholic Apostolic Church, and will in the end be
enlightened to know it. What do you think of that, _ma belle?_ I fancy
I see you look at me with your grave, innocent eyes, just as you used
to; but you say nothing.

"I am far happier, _ma Marie_, than I ever thought I could be. I took
your advice, and told my husband all I had felt and suffered. It was a
very hard thing to do; but I felt how true it was, as you said, that
there could be no real friendship without perfect truth at bottom; so I
told him all, and he was very good and noble and helpful to me; and
since then he has been so gentle and patient and thoughtful, that no
mother could be kinder; and I should be a very bad woman, if I did not
love him truly and dearly,--as I do.

"I must confess that there is still a weak, bleeding place in my heart
that aches yet, but I try to bear it bravely; and when I am tempted to
think myself very miserable, I remember how patiently you used to go
about your house-work and spinning, in those sad days when you thought
your heart was drowned in the sea; and I try to do like you. I have
many duties to my servants and tenants, and mean to be a good
_châtelaine_; and I find, when I nurse the sick and comfort the poor,
that my sorrows are lighter. For, after all, Marie, I have lost nothing
that ever was mine,--only my foolish heart has grown to something that
it should not, and bleeds at being torn away. Nobody but Christ and His
dear Mother can tell what this sorrow is; but they know, and that is
enough."

The next letter is dated some three years after.

"You see me now, my Marie, a proud and happy woman. I was truly
envious, when you wrote me of the birth of your little son; but now the
dear good God has sent a sweet little angel to me, to comfort my
sorrows and lie close to my heart; and since he came, all pain is gone.
Ah, if you could see him! he has black eyes, and lashes like silk, and
such little hands!--even his finger-nails are all perfect, like little
gems; and when he puts his little hand on my bosom, I tremble with joy.
Since he came, I pray always, and the good God seems very near to me.
Now I realize, as I never did before, the sublime thought that God
revealed Himself in the infant Jesus; and I bow before the manger of
Bethlehem where the Holy Babe was laid. What comfort, what adorable
condescension for us mothers in that scene!--My husband is so moved, he
can scarce stay an hour from the cradle. He seems to look at me with a
sort of awe, because I know how to care for this precious treasure that
he adores without daring to touch. We are going to call him Henri,
which is my husband's name and that of his ancestors for many
generations back. I vow for him an eternal friendship with the son of
my little Marie; and I shall try and train him up to be a brave man and
a true Christian. Ah, Marie, this gives me something to live for! My
heart is full,--a whole new life opens before me!"

Somewhat later, another letter announces the birth of a daughter,--and
later still, the birth of another son; but we shall add only one more,
written some years after, on hearing of the great reverses of popular
feeling towards Burr, subsequently to his duel with the ill-fated
Hamilton.

"_Ma chère Marie_,--Your letter has filled me with grief. My noble
Henri, who already begins to talk of himself as my protector, (these
boys feel their manhood so soon, _ma Marie_!) saw by my face, when I
read your letter, that something pained me, and he would not rest till
I told him something about it. Ah, Marie, how thankful I then felt that
I had nothing to blush for before my son! how thankful for those dear
children whose little hands had healed all the morbid places of my
heart, so that I could think of all the past without a pang! I told
Henri that the letter brought bad news of an old friend, but that it
pained me to speak of it; and you would have thought, by the grave and
tender way he talked to his mamma, that the boy was an experienced man
of forty, to say the least.

"But, Marie, how unjust is the world! how unjust both in praise and
blame! Poor Burr was the petted child of Society; yesterday she doted
on him, flattered him, smiled on his faults, and let him do what he
would without reproof; to-day she flouts and scorns and scoffs him, and
refuses to see the least good in him. I know that man, Marie,--and I
know, that, sinful as he may be before Infinite Purity, he is not so
much more sinful than all the other men of his time. Have I not been in
America? I know Jefferson; I knew poor Hamilton,--peace be with the
dead! Neither of them had a life that could bear the sort of trial to
which Burr's is subjected. When every secret fault, failing, and sin is
dragged out, and held up without mercy, what man can stand?

"But I know what irritates the world is that proud, disdainful calm
which will give neither sigh nor tear. It was not that he killed poor
Hamilton, but that he never seemed to care! Ah, there is that evil
demon of his life,--that cold, stoical pride, which haunts him like a
fate! But I know he _does_ feel; I know he is not as hard at heart as
he tries to be; I have seen too many real acts of pity to the
unfortunate, of tenderness to the weak, of real love to his friends, to
believe that. Great have been his sins against our sex, and God forbid
that the mothers of children should speak lightly of them I but is not
so susceptible a temperament, and so singular a power to charm as he
possessed, to be taken into account in estimating his temptations?
Because he is a sinning man, it does not follow that he is a demon. If
any should have cause to think bitterly of him, I should. He trifled
inexcusably with my deepest feelings; he caused me years of conflict
and anguish, such as he little knows; I was almost shipwrecked; yet I
will still say to the last that what I loved in him was a better
self,--something really noble and good, however concealed and perverted
by pride, ambition, and self-will. Though all the world reject him, I
still have faith in this better nature, and prayers that he may be led
right at last. There is at least one heart that will always intercede
with God for him."

It is well known, that, for many years after Burr's death, the odium
that covered his name was so great that no monument was erected, lest
it should become a mark for popular violence. Subsequently, however, in
a mysterious manner, a plain granite slab marked his grave; by whom
erected has never been known. It was placed in the night by some
friendly, unknown hand. A laborer in the vicinity, who first discovered
it, found lying near the spot a small _porte-monnaie_, which had
perhaps been used in paying for the workmanship. It contained no papers
that could throw any light on the subject, except the fragment of the
address of a letter on which was written "Henri de Frontignac."




THE NORTHERN LIGHTS AND THE STARS.


The stars are watching at their posts
  And raining silence from the sky,
And, guarded by the heavenly hosts,
  Earth closes her day-wearied eye.

A reign of holy quietness
  Replaces the tumultuous light,
And Nature's weary tribes confess
  The calm beatitude of Night:

When from the Arctic pit up-steams
  The Boreal fire's portentous glare,
And, bursting into arrowy streams,
  Hurls horrid splendors on the air.

The embattled meteors scale the arch,
  And toss their lurid banners wide;
Heaven reels with their tempestuous march,
  And quivers in the flashing tide.

Against the everlasting stars,
  Against the old empyreal Right,
They vainly wage their anarch wars,
  In vain they urge their fatuous light.

The skies may flash and meteors glare,
  And Hell invade the spheral school;
But Law and Love are sovereign there,
  And Sirius and Orion rule.

The stars are watching at their posts,
  Again the Silences prevail;
The meteor crew, like guilty ghosts,
  Have slunk to the infernal jail.

The truths of God forever shine,
  Though Error glare and Falsehood rage;
The cause of Order is divine,
  And Wisdom rules from age to age.

Faith, Hope, and Love, your time abide!
  Let Hades marshal all his hosts,
The heavenly forces with you side,
  The stars are watching at their posts.




THOMAS PAINE IN ENGLAND AND IN FRANCE.


Paine landed at Havre in May, A.D. 1787, _aet. suae_ 50, with many
titles to social success. He brought with him a literary fame which
ranks higher in France than elsewhere; and his works were in the
fashionable line of the day. He had been an energetic actor in the
American Revolution,--a subject of unbounded enthusiasm with Frenchmen,
who look upon it, to this day, as an achievement of their own. And he
could boast of a scientific _spécialité_, without which no intelligent
gentleman was complete in the last third of the eighteenth century.
Philosopher, American, republican, friend of humanity, _savant_,--he
could show every claim to notice. Besides all this, and better than
all, he brought letters from Franklin, the charming old man, whose
fondness for "that dear nation" which he could not leave without regret
was returned a thousand fold by its admiring affection. De Rayneval did
not exaggerate when he wrote to him,--"You will carry with you the
affection of all France"; and De Chastellux told the simple truth in
the graceful compliment he sent to the old sage after his return
home,--"When you were here, we had no need to praise the Americans; we
had only to say, 'Look! here is their representative.'" Let us devoutly
pray that our ambassadors may not be made use of for the same purpose
now!

For these reasons, Paine's reception in Paris was cordial; visits and
invitations poured in upon him; he dined with Malesherbes; M. Le Roy
took him to Buffon's, where he saw some interesting experiments on
inflammable air; the Abbé Morellet exerted himself to get the model of
his bridge, which had been stopped at the custom-house, safely to
Paris. Through their influence it was submitted to a committee of the
Académie des Sciences; their report was, in substance, that the iron
bridge of M. Paine was _ingénieusement imaginé_,--that it merited an
attempt to execute it, and furnished a new example of the application
of a metal which had not yet been sufficiently used on a large scale.

Two other gentlemen from America, who were interested in science and in
mechanics, were in Paris at that time. Rumsey was there with his model
of a steamboat; and Thomas Jefferson, whose curiosity extended to all
things visible or audible, was busily collecting ground-plans and
elevations, and preparing to add at least two ugly buildings to a State
"over which," as he himself wrote, "the Genius of Architecture had
showered his malediction."

Unfortunately for inventors, the times were not favorable for the
construction of boats or of bridges. A taste had sprung up in France
for constitution-making, one of the most difficult and expensive of
public works. A translation of the American State Constitutions
attracted more attention in Paris than Paine's iron-work; for these
also, the French thought, were _ingénieusement imaginées_, and worthy
of an attempt to execute them abroad. The American Revolution, with its
brilliant termination of wisdom, liberty, and peace, seemed to promise
similar good results to the efforts of reformers elsewhere. Treatises
on moral science and on the nature and end of civil government were
eagerly read, "_Humanité, mot nouveau_," as Cousin says, became the
watch-word of the Parisians. It was the fashion among all classes, high
as well as low, to talk of human rights, to exalt the virtue of the
people, hitherto supposed to have none, and to execrate "bloody
tyrants," "silly despots," the members of the kingly profession, which
fell into such sad disfavor towards the end of the last century. Ségur,
after his return from America, heard the whole court applaud these
lines at the theatre:--

  "Je suis fils de Brutus, et je porte en mon coeur
  La liberté gravée et les rois en horreur."

None suspected whither the road would lead which they were pursuing
with so much gayety and enlightenment. Philosophers, nobles, and
parliaments all clamored for reform--in others; and for the public
good, provided their own goods did not suffer. The King meant reform;
he, at least, was in earnest. But how to get it? He had sought
assistance from the middle classes; had tried Turgot, the political
economist, and Necker, the banker, as ministers; but both broke down
under the opposition of the nobility. Then Calonne volunteered, witty
and reckless, and convoked the notables, or not-ables, as Lafayette
called them in one of his American letters, borrowing a bad pun from
Thomas Paine. Calonne could do nothing with the notables, who
obstinately refused to submit to taxation. Brienne, Archbishop of
Toulouse, took his place. This was in April, 1787, a month before
Paine's arrival in France. The notables suddenly became manageable
under the new minister, and voted all the necessary taxes; but now the
parliaments grew restive, refused to register the edicts, declaring
that they had not the legal right to consent to taxes, that the
States-General alone had authority to impose new ones. Brienne,
indignant at this perverseness,--for hitherto they had claimed the sole
right of registering taxes,--forced them to register the stamp-tax and
the land-tax, and exiled them to Troyes. This took place on the 15th of
August. The same day the two brothers of the King went to register the
edicts in the Cour des Comptes and the _Cour des Aides_. Monsieur was
received with acclamations; but D'Artois, who belonged to the unpopular
Calonne party, was hissed and jostled by the crowd. Alarmed, he ordered
his guard to close about him. "I was standing in one of the apartments
through which he had to pass," says Paine, "and could not avoid
reflecting how wretched is the condition of a disrespected man."

Evidently no bridges to be built here at present. It would be better to
try in England, Paine thought, and in September crossed to London. Sir
Joseph Banks, a great scientific authority, thought well of his model,
and recommended the construction of one on a larger scale. The
different parts of the new bridge were cast in a Yorkshire foundry
belonging to Thomas Walker, a Whig friend of the inventor, brought by
sea to London, and erected in an open field at Faddington, where the
structure was inspected by great numbers of people. After standing
there a year, it was taken down, and the materials used in building a
bridge over the river Wear at Sunderland, of two hundred and thirty-six
feet span, with a rise of thirty-four feet. This bridge is still in
use.[1]

[Footnote 1: Stephenson says, in rather bad English, (we quote from the
_Quarterly_),--"If we are to consider Paine as its author, his daring
in engineering certainly does full justice to the fervor of his
political career; for, successful as the result has undoubtedly proved,
want of experience and consequent ignorance of the risk could alone
have induced so bold an experiment; and we are rather led to wonder at
than to admire a structure which, as regards its proportions and the
small quantity of material employed in its construction, will probably
remain unrivalled,"--thus resembling the spider's web, which furnished;
the original suggestion. In 1801, when Paine had exhausted his theory
of human rights in France, he offered his plan to Chaptal, the Minister
of the Interior, who proposed to build an iron bridge over the Seine.
Two years later, after his return to America, he addressed a memorial
to Congress on the same subject, offering the nation the invention as a
free gift, and his own services to superintend the structure; but
neither Chaptal nor Congress thought fit to accept his offer.]

Paine had forgotten his bridge long before it was taken down. His soul
was engrossed by the contemplation of the wonderful event which was
daily developing itself in France. Bankruptcy had brought on the
crisis. In August, 1788, the interest was not paid on the national
debt, and Brienne resigned. The States-General met in May of the next
year; in June they declared themselves a national assembly, and
commenced work upon a constitution under the direction of Sièyes, who
well merited the epithet, "indefatigable constitution-grinder," applied
to Paine by Cobbett. Not long after, the attempted _coup d'état_ of
Louis XVI. failed, the Bastille was demolished, and the political
Saturnalia of the French people began.

It is evident, that, in the beginning, Paine did not aspire to be the
political Prometheus of England. He rather looked to the Whig party and
to Mr. Burke as the leaders in such a movement. As for himself, a
veteran reformer from another hemisphere, he was willing to serve as a
volunteer in the campaign against the oppressors of mankind. He had
adopted for his motto, "Where liberty is not, there is my country,"--a
negative variation of Franklin's saying, which suited his tempestuous
character. As he flitted to and fro across the Channel, observing with
sharp, eager eyes the progress of "principles" in France, gradually
there arose in his mind the thought that poor, old, worn-out England
might be regenerated by these new methods. "The French are doubling
their strength," he wrote, "by allying, if it may be so expressed, (for
it is difficult to express a new idea by old terms,) the majesty of the
sovereign with the majesty of the nation."

Paris swarmed with enthusiastic "friends of humanity," English, Scotch,
and Irish. Among them Paine naturally took a foremost position, being
an authority in revolutionary matters, and a man who had principles on
the subject of government. In spite of his contempt of titles, he wrote
himself, "Secretary for Foreign Affairs to the Congress of the United
States," slightly improving upon the office he had actually held, to
suit the sound to European capacity,--showing that in this, likewise,
he possessed a genuine American element of character. Lafayette thought
much of him, used his pen freely, and listened to his advice. The
Marquis, warm-hearted, honest, but endowed with little judgment and a
womanish vanity, was trying to make himself the Washington of a French
federative republic, and felt happy in having secured the experienced
services of Mr. Paine. He wrote to his great master,--"'Common Sense'
is writing a book for you, and there you will see a part of my
adventures. Liberty is springing up around us in the other parts of
Europe, and I am encouraging it by all the means in my power." Paine
was in Paris when the Bastille was taken. Lafayette placed the key in
his hands, to be transmitted to Washington. Paine wrote to the
President, "That the principles of America opened the Bastille is not
to be doubted, and therefore the key comes to the right place."
Washington, returning his thanks to Paine for the key, added,--"It will
give you pleasure to learn that the new government answers its purposes
as well as could have been reasonably expected." Yes! and still answers
reasonable purposes to this day. In the mean while dozens of French
constitutions, "perfections of human wisdom," have been invented, set
up, and crushed to atoms.

It was a time of revival in politics. Holland was indulging in hope,
Germany was anxious, and steady old England began to lend an ear to the
new doctrines from the other side of the Channel. The tendency of the
human mind to believe in a golden future, until knowledge of the world
and reflection teach us that these bright visions always shrink into
the ordinary dimensions of the present as they approach it, misled
enthusiastic Englishmen, many of them of a high order of intelligence.
There was something grand in the idea, that the prejudices and the
abuses of twenty centuries had been buried forever in the ruins of the
old French monarchy. This was not enough. All governments and all
prejudices of society were to be thrown into the melting-pot; out of
the fusion was to arise the new era, the millennium. All other evil
things would cease to exist, as well as monopolies, titles, places, and
pensions. Sickness, even death, perhaps, might be evaded by the skill
of a new science. Who could tell? Franklin had suggested this, half in
jest, years before; Condorcet believed and asserted it now. Ignorance
and misery, at all events, should come to an end. When kings and a
wicked self-seeking aristocracy should be swept away, the divine sense
of right, which God had implanted in the people, would rule; there
could be no wars; armies and fleets would become useless; taxes would
amount to nothing. All the nations would form one grand republic, with
a universal convention sitting at the world's centre, to watch over the
rights of man! Liberty, virtue, happiness, seemed ready to descend upon
the earth.

  "Jam nova progenies caelo demittitur alto,
  Ac toto surget gens aurea mundo."

As each week brought the news of some stupendous change, a kind of
madness seized upon the minds of men. Fanatics were jubilant.
"Revolutions," they said, "can do no wrong; all are for the best."
Englishmen, hitherto sane, forgot their nationality, and became violent
Frenchmen. So strongly did the current set in this direction, that the
massacres of September, the execution of the King, the despotism of the
Directory and the Consulship could not turn it, until Napoleon united
all France under him and all England against him. As late as 1793, such
men as James Watt, Jr., and the poet Wordsworth were in Paris, on
intimate terms with Robespierre and his Committee.

Before 1789, there was no particular discontent in England. Some talk
there had been of reform in the representation, and the usual
complaints of the burden of taxation. The Dissenters had been trying to
get the Corporation and Test Acts repealed, without much success. But
nothing beyond occasional meetings and petitions to Parliament would
have occurred, had it not been for the explosion in France, then, as
since, the political powder-magazine of Europe. The Whig party had seen
with pleasure the beginning of the French reforms. Paine, who had
partaken of Mr. Burke's hospitality at Beaconsfield, wrote to him
freely from Paris, assuring him that everything was going on right;
that little inconveniences, the necessary consequences of pulling down
and building up, might arise; but that these were much less than ought
to be expected; and that a national convention in England would be the
best plan of regenerating the nation. Christie, a foolish Scotchman,
and Baron Clootz (soon to become Anacharsis) also wrote to Burke in the
same vein. Their communications affected his mind in a way they little
expected. Mr. Burke had lost all faith in any good result from the
blind, headlong rush of the Revolution, and was appalled at the
toleration, or rather, sympathy, shown in England, for the riots,
outrages, and murders of the Parisian rabble. He began writing the
"Reflections," as a warning to his countrymen. He was led to enlarge
the work by some remarks made by Fox and Sheridan in the House of
Commons; and more particularly by some passages in a sermon preached at
the Old Jewry by Dr. Price. Eleven years before, this scientific
divine, by a resolution of the American Congress, had been invited to
consider himself an American citizen, and to furnish the rebellious
Colonists with his assistance in regulating their finances. He had
disregarded this flattering summons. Full of zeal for "humanity," he
eagerly accepted the request of the Revolution Society to deliver their
anniversary sermon. In this discourse, the Doctor, the fervor of whose
sentiments had increased with age, maintained the right of the nation
"to cashier the king," choose a new ruler, and frame a government for
itself. The sermon and the congratulatory addresses it provoked were
published by the society and industriously circulated.

Mr. Burke's well-known "Reflections" appeared in October, 1790. The
book was hailed with delight by the conservatives of England. Thirteen
thousand copies were sold and disseminated. It was a sowing of the
dragon's teeth. Every copy brought out some radical, armed with speech
or pamphlet. Among a vulgar and forgotten crowd of declaimers, the
harebrained Lord Stanhope, Mary Wolstonecraft, who afterward wrote a
"Vindication of the Rights of Women," and the violent Catharine
Macaulay came forward to enter the ring against the great Mr. Burke.
Dr. Priestley, Unitarian divine, discoverer of oxygen gas,
correspondent of Dr. Franklin, afterward mobbed in Birmingham, and
self-exiled to Pennsylvania, fiercely backed Dr. Price, and maintained
that the French Revolution would result "in the enlargement of liberty,
the melioration of society, and the increase of virtue and happiness."
The "Vindiciae Gallicae" brought into notice Mr. Mackintosh, an
opponent whom Burke did not consider beneath him. But the champion was
Thomas Paine. At the White Bear, Piccadilly, Paine's favorite lounge,
where Romney, who painted a good portrait of him, Lord Edward
Fitzgerald, Colonel Oswald, Horne Tooke, and others of that set of
clever, impracticable reformers used to meet, there had been talk of
the blow Mr. Burke was preparing to strike, and Paine had promised his
friends to ward it off and to return it. He set himself to work in the
Red-Lion Tavern, at Islington, and in three months, Part the First of
the "Rights of Man" was ready for the press. Here a delay occurred. The
printer who had undertaken the job came to a stop before certain
treasonable passages, and declined proceeding farther. This caused the
loss of a month. At last, Jordan, of Fleet Street, brought it out on
the 13th of March, 1791. No publication in Great Britain, not Junius
nor Wilkes's No. 45, had produced such an effect. All England was
divided into those who, like Cruger of Bristol, said "Ditto to Mr.
Burke," and those who swore by Thomas Paine. "It is a false, wicked,
and seditious libel," shouted loyal gentlemen. "It abounds in
unanswerable truths, and principles of the purest morality and
benevolence; it has no object in view but the happiness of mankind,"
answered the reformers. "He is the scavenger of rebellion and
infidelity."--"Say, rather, 'the Apostle of Freedom, whose heart is a
perpetual bleeding fountain of philanthropy.'" The friends of the
government carried Paine in effigy, with a pair of stays under his
arms, and burned the figure in the streets. The friends of humanity
added a new verse to the national hymn, and sung,--

  "God save great Thomas Paine,
  His Rights of Man proclaim
  From pole to pole!"

This pamphlet, which excited Englishmen of seventy years ago to such a
pitch of angry and scornful contention, may be read safely now. Time
has taken the sting from it. It is written in that popular style which
was Paine's extraordinary gift. He practised the maxim of
Aristotle,--although probably he had never heard of it,--"Think like
the wise, and speak like the common people." Fox said of the "Rights of
Man," "It seems as clear and as simple as the first rule in
arithmetic." Therein lay its strength. Paine knew exactly what he
wanted to say, and exactly how to say it. His positions may be
wrong,--no doubt frequently are wrong,--but so clearly, keenly, and
above all so boldly stated, and backed by such shrewd arguments and
such apposite illustrations, that it is difficult not to yield to his
common-sense view of the question he is discussing. His plain and
perspicuous style is often elegant. He may sometimes be coarse and
rude, but it is in the thought rather than in the expression. It is
true, that, in the heat of conflict, he is apt to lose his temper and
break out into the bitter violence of his French associates; but even
the scientific and reverend Priestley "called names,"--apostate,
renegade, scoundrel. This rough energy added to his popularity with the
middle and the lower classes, and made him doubly distasteful to his
opponents. Paine, who thought all revolutions alike, and all good,
could not understand why Burke, who had upheld the Americans, should
exert his whole strength against the French, unless he were "a traitor
to human nature." Burke did Paine equal injustice. He thought him
unworthy of any refutation but the pillory. In public, he never
mentioned his name. But his opinion, and, perhaps, a little soreness of
feeling, may be seen in this extract from a letter to Sir William
Smith:--

"He [Paine] is utterly incapable of comprehending his subject. He has
not even a moderate portion of learning of any kind. He has learned the
instrumental part of literature, without having ever made a previous
preparation of study for the use of it. Paine has nothing more than
what a man, whose audacity makes him careless of logical consequences
and his total want of honor makes indifferent to political
consequences, can very easily write."

The radicals thought otherwise. They drank Mr. Burke's health with
"thanks to him for the discussion he had provoked." And the student of
history, who may read Paine's opening sketch of the French Revolution,
written to refute Burke's narrative of the same events, will not deny
Paine's complete success. He will even meet with sentences that Burke
might have composed. For instance: Paine ridicules, as Quixotic, the
fine passage in the "Reflections on the Decay of Chivalry"; and adds,
"Mr. Burke's mind is above the homely sorrows of the vulgar. He can
only feel for a king or for a queen. The countless victims of tyranny
have no place in his sympathies. He is not affected by the reality of
distress touching upon his heart, but by the showy resemblance of it.
He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird."

The French constitution,--"a fabric of government which time could not
destroy and the latest posterity would admire." This was the boast of
the National Assembly, echoed by the English clubs. Even Mr. Fox, as
late as April, 1791, misled by his own magniloquence, spoke of it as
"the most stupendous and glorious edifice of liberty which had been
erected on the foundation of human integrity in any time or country."
Paine heartily concurred with him. Such a constitution as this, he
said, is needed in England. There is no hope of it from Parliament.
Indeed, Parliament, if it desired reforms, could not make them; it has
not the legal right. A national convention, fresh from the people, is
indispensable. Then, _reculant pour mieux sauter_, Paine goes back to
the origin of man,--a journey often undertaken by the political
philosophers of that day. He describes his natural rights,--defines
society as a compact,--declares that no generation has a right to bind
its successors, (a doctrine which Mr. Jefferson, and some foolish
people after him, thought a self-evident truth,)--hence, no family has
a right to take possession of a throne. An hereditary rule is as great
an absurdity as an hereditary professorship of mathematics,--a place
supposed by Dr. Franklin to exist in some German university. Paine grew
bolder as he advanced: "If monarchy is a useless thing, why is it kept
up anywhere? and if a necessary thing, how can it be dispensed with?"
This is a pretty good specimen of one of Paine's dialectical methods.
Here is another: The French constitution says, that the right of war
and of peace is in the nation. "Where else should it reside, but in
those who are to pay the expense? In England, the right is said to
reside in a metaphor shown at the Tower for sixpence or a shilling."
Dropping the crown, he turned upon the aristocracy and the Church, and
tore them. He begged Lafayette's pardon for addressing him as Marquis.
Titles are but nicknames. Nobility and no ability are synonymous. "In
all the vocabulary of Adam, you will find no such thing as a duke or a
count." The French had established universal liberty of conscience,
which gave rise to the following Painean statement: "With respect to
what are called denominations of religion,--if every one is left to
judge of his own religion, there is no such thing as a religion which
is wrong; but if they are to judge of each other's religion, there is
no such thing as a religion that is right;--and therefore all the world
is right or all the world is wrong." The next is better: "Religion is
man bringing to his Maker the fruits of his heart; and though these
fruits may differ from each other, like the fruits of the earth, the
grateful tribute of every one is accepted."

To encounter an antagonist like Burke, and to come off with credit,
might stimulate moderate vanity into public self-exposure; but in Paine
vanity was the besetting weakness. It was now swollen by success and
flattery into magnificent proportions. Franklin says, that, "when we
forbear to praise ourselves, we make a sacrifice to the pride or to the
envy of others." Paine did not hesitate to mortify both these failings
in his fellow-men. He praises himself with the simplicity of an Homeric
hero before a fight. He introduces himself, without a misgiving, almost
in the words of Pius Aeneas,--

  "Sum Thomas Paine,
  Faunâ, super aethera notus."

"With all the inconveniences of early life against me, I am proud to
say, that, with a perseverance undismayed by difficulties, a
disinterestedness that compels respect, I have not only contributed to
raise a new empire in the world, founded on a new system of government,
but I have arrived at an eminence in political literature, the most
difficult of all lines to succeed and excel in, which aristocracy, with
all its aids, has not been able to reach or to rival." "I possess," he
wrote in the Second Part of the "Rights of Man," "more of what is
called consequence in the world than any one of Mr. Burke's catalogue
of aristocrats." Paine sincerely believed himself to be an adept who
had found in the rights of man the _materia prima_ of politics, by
which error and suffering might be transmuted into happiness and truth.
A second Columbus, but greater than the Genoese! Christopher had
discovered a new world, it is true, but Thomas had discovered the means
of making a new world out of the old. About this time, Dumont, the
Benthamite, travelled with him from Paris to London. Dumont was
irritated with "his incredible _amour-propre_ and his presumptuous
self-conceit." "He was mad with vanity." "The man was a caricature of
the vainest of Frenchmen. He believed that his book on the 'Rights of
Man' might supply the place of all the books that had ever been
written. If it was in his power, he would destroy all the libraries in
the world without hesitation, in order to root out the errors of which
they were the deposit, and so recommence by the 'Rights of Man' a new
chain of ideas and principles." Thus Paine and his wild friends had
reached the point of folly in the reformer's scale, and, like so many
of their class since, made the fatal mistake of supposing that the old
world knew nothing.

When Dumont fell in with Paine, he was returning from a flying visit to
Paris, invigorated by the bracing air of French freedom. He had seen
Pope Pius burned in effigy in the Palais Royal, and the poor King
brought back a prisoner from Varennes,--a cheerful spectacle to the
friend of humanity. He was on his way to be present at a dinner given
in London on the 14th of July, to commemorate the taking of the
Bastille; but the managers of the festivity thought it prudent that he
should not attend. He wrote, soon after, the address read by Horne
Tooke to the meeting of the 20th of August, at the Thatched House
tavern. So enlightened were the doctrines set forth in this paper, that
the innkeeper declined receiving Mr. Tooke and his friends on any
subsequent occasion. On the 4th of November, he assisted at the
customary celebration of the Fifth by the Revolution Society, and gave,
for his toast, "The Revolution of the World."

Meanwhile, Paine had reloaded his piece, and was now ready for another
shot at kings, lords, and commons. A thousand guineas were offered for
the copyright and refused. He declined to treat as a merchantable
commodity principles of such importance to mankind. His plan was, to
publish Part the Second on the day of the opening of Parliament; but
Chapman, the printer, became frightened, like his predecessor, at a
treasonable paragraph, and refused to go on.

A fortnight passed before work was resumed, and the essay did not
appear until the 16th of February, 1792. It combined, according to the
author, "principles and practice." Part the First was now fully
expounded, and enlarged by a scheme for diminishing the taxes and
improving the condition of the poor, by making weekly allowances to
young children, aged people, travelling workmen, and disbanded
soldiers. This project of Paine, stated with the mathematical accuracy
which was a characteristic of his mind, sprang from the same source as
the thousand Utopianisms which form the ludicrous side of the terrible
French Revolution.

Part the First was dedicated to Washington; Part the Second bore the
name of Lafayette. It is evident, from the second dedication, that
Paine had kept pace with the railway speed of the Revolution, and had
far outstripped the Marquis, who was not born to lead, or even to
understand the period he attempted to direct. The foremost men of 1792
had no time to wait;--"Mankind are always ripe enough to understand
their true interest," said Paine; adding words which seemed to quiet
Englishmen of fearful significance:--

"I do not believe that monarchy and aristocracy will continue seven
years longer in any of the enlightened countries of Europe."--"When
France shall be surrounded with revolutions, she will be in peace and
safety."--"From what we can learn, all Europe may form but one great
republic, and man be free of the whole."--"It is only a certain service
that any man can perform in the state, and the service of any
individual in the routine of office can never exceed the value of ten
thousand pounds a year."--"I presume that no man in his sober senses
will compare the character of any of the kings of Europe with that of
George Washington. Yet in France and in England the expenses of the
Civil List only for the support of one man are eight times greater than
the whole expense of the Federal government of America."--"The time is
not very distant when England will laugh at itself for sending to
Holland, Hanover, Zell, or Brunswick, for men, at the expense of a
million a year, who understand neither her laws, her language, or her
interest, and whose capacities would scarcely have fitted them for the
office of a parish constable. If government could be trusted to such
hands, it must be some easy and simple thing indeed, and materials fit
for all the purposes may be found in every town and village in
England."

Here is treasonable matter enough, surely; and no wonder that Mr.
Chapman judged it prudent to stop his press.

Paine sent fifty copies to Washington; and wrote to him that sixteen
thousand had been printed in England, and four editions in
Ireland,--the second of ten thousand copies. Thirty thousand copies
were distributed by the clubs, at their own expense, among the poor.
Six months after the appearance of the Second Part, Paine sent the
Society for Constitutional Information a thousand pounds, which he had
received from the sale of the book. He then gave up the copyright to
the public. The circulation of this tract was prodigious. The original
edition had been printed in the same form as Burke's "Reflections," in
order that the antidote might be bound up with the bane. The high price
preventing many from purchasing, Paine got out a cheap edition which
was retailed at sixpence all over England and Scotland. It is said that
at least one hundred thousand copies were sold, besides the large
number distributed gratuitously. An edition was published in the United
States. It was translated into French by Dr. Lanthenas, a member of the
National Convention, and into German by C. F. Krämer. Upon English
readers of a certain class it retained a hold for many years. In 1820,
Carlile, the bookseller, said, that in the preceding three years he had
sold five thousand copies of the "Rights of Man." Perhaps Cobbett's
resurrection of the bones of the prophet brought the book into fashion
again at that time. It may yet be read in England; but in this country,
where a citizen feels that his rights are anything he may choose to
claim, it is certainly a superfluous publication, and seldom met with.

In England, in 1792, Burke and Paine revived the royalist and
republican parties, which had lain dormant since 1688. A new body of
men, the manufacturing, entered the political field on the republican
side. The contest was embittered not only by the anger of antagonism,
but by the feeling of class. A radical of Paine's school was considered
by good society as a pestilent blackguard, unworthy of a gentleman's
notice,--much as an Abolitionist is looked down upon nowadays by the
American "Chivalry." But the strife was confined to meetings,
resolutions, and pamphlets. Few riots took place; none of much
importance. The gentlemen of England have never wanted the courage or
the strength to take care of themselves.

The political clubs were the principal centres of agitation. There were
two particularly active on the liberal side: the Revolution Society,
originally founded to commemorate the Revolution of 1688, and the
Society for Constitutional Information, established for the purpose of
bringing about a reform in the representation. But the revolutionary
changes in France had quickened their ideas, and had given them a taste
for stronger and more rapid measures. They now openly "resolved" that
England was "a prey to an arbitrary King, a senile Peerage, a corrupt
House of Commons, and a rapacious and intolerant Clergy." A third club,
the Corresponding Society, was younger and more violent, with branches
and affiliations all over England on the Jacobins' plan, and in active
correspondence with that famous institution. The middle and lower
classes in manufacturing towns, precursors of the Chartists of 1846,
belonged to this society. Their avowed objects were annual parliaments
and universal suffrage; but many members were in favor of a national
convention and a republic. The tone of all three societies became
French; they used a jargon borrowed from the other side of the Channel.
They sent deputations to the National Convention, expressing their wish
to adopt the republican form in England, and their hope of success. The
Corresponding Society even sent addresses of congratulation after the
massacres of September. Joel Barlow, the American, a man of the Paine
genus, without his talent or honesty of purpose, went as Commissioner
of the Society for Constitutional Information to the Convention,--
carrying with him an address which reads like a translation from the
French, and a thousand pair of shoes, with the promise of a thousand
pair a week for six weeks to come.

On the other side there were, of course, numerous Tory associations,
counter clubs, as violent as their republican antagonists, whose loyal
addresses to the throne were duly published in the Gazette.

The probability of a revolution now became a subject of general
discussion. Government, at last convinced that England, in the words of
Mr. Burke, "abounded in factious men, who would readily plunge the
country into blood and confusion for the sake of establishing the
fanciful Systems they were enamored of," determined to act with vigor.
A royal proclamation was issued against seditious writings. Paine
received notice that he would be prosecuted in the King's Bench. He
came immediately to London, and found that Jordan, his publisher, had
already been served with a summons, but, having no stomach for a
contest with the authorities, had compromised the affair with the
Solicitor of the Treasury by agreeing to appear and plead guilty. Such
pusillanimity was beneath the mark of Paine's enthusiasm. He wrote to
McDonald, the Attorney-General, that he, Paine, had no desire to avoid
any prosecution which the authorship of one of the most useful books
ever offered to mankind might bring upon him; and that he should do the
defence full justice, as well for the sake of the nation as for that of
his own reputation. He wound up a long letter by the very ungenerous
insinuation, that Mr. Burke, not being able to answer the "Rights of
Man," had advised legal proceedings.

The societies, checked for a moment by the blow struck at them, soon
renewed their exertions. The sale of the "Rights of Man" became more
extended than ever. Paine said that the proclamation served hint for an
advertisement. The Manchester and Sheffield branches of the
Constitutional Society voted unanimously addresses of thanks to him for
his essay, "a work of the highest importance to every nation under
heaven." The newspapers were full of speeches, votes, resolutions, on
the same subject. Every mail was laden with congratulations to the
Jacobins on the coming time,--

  "When France shall reign, and laws be all
    repealed."

To the Radicals, the Genius of Liberty seemed to be hovering over
England; and Thomas Paine was the harbinger to prepare his way.

Differences of opinion, when frequently expressed in hard words,
commonly lead to hard blows; and the conservative classes of England
were not men to hold their hands when they thought the proper time had
come to strike. But the party which looked up to Paine as its apostle
was not as numerous as it appeared to be from the noise it made. There
is never a sufficiently large number of reckless zealots in England to
do much mischief,--one of the greatest proofs of the inherent good
sense of that people. Dr. Gall's saying, "_Tout ce qui est ultrà est
bête_," is worth his whole phrenological system. Measures and doctrines
had now been pushed so far that a numerous and influential body of
liberals called a halt,--the prelude of a union with the government
forces.

Luckily for Paine, his French admirers stepped in at this critical
moment to save him. Mons. Audibert, a municipal officer from Calais,
came to announce to him that he was elected to the National Convention
for that department. He immediately proceeded to Dover with his French
friend. In Dover, the collector of the customs searched their pockets
as well as their portmanteaus, in spite of many angry protestations.
Finally their papers were returned to them, and they were allowed to
embark. Paine was just in time; an order to detain him arrived about
twenty minutes after his embarkation.

The trial came on before Lord Kenyon. Erskine appeared for the absent
defendant. The Attorney-General used, as his brief, a foolish letter he
had received from Paine at Calais, read it to the jury, made a few
remarks, and rested his case. The jury found Paine guilty without
leaving their seats. Sentence of outlawry was passed upon him. Safe in
France, he treated the matter as a capital joke. Some years later he
found that it had a disagreeable meaning in it.

The prophet had been translated to another sphere of revolutionary
unrest. His influence gradually died away. He dwindled into a mere
name. "But the fact remains," to use his own words, "and will hereafter
be placed in the history of extraordinary things, that a pamphlet
should be produced by an individual, unconnected with any sect or
party, and almost a stranger in the land, that should completely
frighten a whole government, and that in the midst of its triumphant
security."

Paine might have published his "principles" his life long without
troubling many subjects of King George, had it not been for their
combination with "practice" in France,--whither let us now follow him.

When he landed at Calais, the guard turned out and presented arms; a
grand salute was fired; the officer in command embraced him and
presented him with the national cockade; a good-looking _citoyenne_
asked leave to pin it on his hat, expressing the hope of her
compatriots that he would continue his exertions in favor of liberty.
Enthusiastic acclamations followed,--a grand chorus of _Vive Thomas
Paine!_ The crowd escorted him to Dessein's hotel,[1] in the Rue de
l'Égalité, formerly Rue du Roi, and shouted under his windows. At the
proper time he was conducted to the Town Hall. The municipality were
assembled to bestow the _accolade fraternelle_ upon their
representative. M. le Maire made a speech, which Audibert, who still
had Paine in charge, translated. Paine laid his hand on his heart,
bowed, and assured the municipality that his life should be devoted to
their service. In the evening, the club held a meeting in the Salle des
Minimes. The hall was jammed. Paine was seated beside the President,
under a bust of Mirabeau, surmounted by the flags of France, England,
and the United States. More addresses, compliments, protestations, and
frantic cries of _Vive Thomas Paine!_ The _séance_ was adjourned to the
church, to give those who could not obtain admission into the Club Hall
an opportunity to look at their famous representative. The next evening
Paine went to the theatre. The state-box had been prepared for him. The
house rose and _vivaed_ as he entered.

[Footnote 1: See Sterne's _Sentimental Journey_.]

When Calais had shouted itself hoarse, Paine travelled towards Paris.
The towns he traversed on the road thither received him with similar
honors. From the capital he addressed a letter of thanks to his
fellow-citizens. Although he sat for Calais in the Convention, he had
been chosen by three other departments. Priestley was a candidate for
Paris, but was beaten by Marat, a doctor of another description. He
was, however, duly elected in the department L'Orne, but never took his
seat. Paine and Baron Clootz were the only foreigners in the
Convention. Another stranger, of political celebrity out of doors,
styled himself American as well as Paine,--_Fournier l'Américain_, a
mulatto from the West Indies, whose complexion was not considered
"incompatible with freedom" in France,--a violent and blood-thirsty
fellow, who shot at Lafayette on the _dix-sept Juillet_, narrowly
missing him,--led an attacking party against the Tuileries on the _dix
Août_, and escaped the guillotine to be transported by Bonaparte.

In Paris, Paine was already a personage well known to all the leading
men,--a great republican luminary, "foreign benefactor of the species,"
who had commenced the revolution in America, was making one in England,
and was willing to help make one in France. His English works,
translated by Lanthenas, a friend of Robespierre and co-editor with
Brissot of the "Patriote Français," had earned for him the dignity of
_citoyen Français_,--an honor which he shared with Mackintosh, Dr.
Price, the Priestleys, father and son, and David Williams. He had
furnished Lafayette with a good deal of his revolutionary rhetoric, had
contributed to the Monthly Review of the Girondists and the "Chronique
de Paris," and had written a series of articles in defence of
representative government, which Condorcet had translated for him.
Paine was a man of one idea in politics; a federal republic, on the
American plan, was the only system of government he believed in, and
the only one he wished to see established in France. Lafayette belonged
to this school. So did Condorcet, Pétion, Buzot, and others of less
note. Under Paine's direction they formed a republican club, which met
at Condorcet's house. This federal theory cost them dear. In 1793, it
was treason against the _une et indivisible_, and was punished
accordingly.

After the flight to Varennes, Paine openly declared that the King was
"a political superfluity." This was true enough. The people had lost
all respect for the man and for the office. None so base as to call him
King. He was only the _pouvoir exécutif_, or more commonly still,
_Monsieur Veto_. Achille Duchâtelet, a young officer who had served in
America, called upon Dumont to get him to translate a proclamation
drawn up by Paine, urging the people to seize the opportunity and
establish a republic. It was intended to be a "Common Sense" for
France. Dumont refusing to have anything to do with it, some other
translator was found. It appeared on the walls of the capital with
Duchâtelet's name affixed. The placard was torn down by order of the
Assembly and attracted little attention. The French were not quite
ready for the republic, although gradually approaching it. They seemed
to take a pleasure in playing awhile with royalty before exterminating
it.

The Abbé Sièyes was a warm monarchist. He wrote in the "Moniteur," that
he could prove, "on every hypothesis," that men were more free in a
monarchy than in a republic. Paine gave notice in Brissot's paper, that
he would demolish the Abbé utterly in fifty pages, and show the world
that a constitutional monarchy was a nullity,--concluding with the
usual flourish about "weeping for the miseries of humanity," "hell of
despotism," etc., etc., the fashionable doxology of patriotic authors
in that day. Sièyes announced his readiness to meet the great Paine in
conflict. This passage of pens was interrupted by the publication of
Part Second of the "Rights of Man." Before Paine returned to Paris, the
mob had settled the question for the time, so far as the French nation
were concerned.

Paine had also taken a leading part in some of the politico-theatrical
entertainments then so frequent in the streets of Paris. At the
festival of the Federation, in July, 1790, when Clootz led a
"deputation" of the _genre humain_, consisting of an English editor and
some colored persons in fancy dresses, Paine and Paul Jones headed the
American branch of humanity and carried the stars and stripes. Not long
after, Fame appears again marshalling a deputation of English and
Americans, who waited upon the Jacobin Club to fraternize. Suitable
preparations had been made by the club for this solemn occasion. The
three national flags, united, were placed in the hall over the busts of
Dr. Franklin and Dr. Price. Robespierre himself received the generous
strangers; but most of the talking seems to have been done by a fervid
_citoyenne_, who took _la parole_ and kept it. "Let a cry of joy rush
through all Europe and fly to America," said she. "But hark!
Philadelphia and all its countries repeat, like us, _Vive la Liberté!_"
To see a man of Paine's clear sense and simple tastes pleased by such
flummery as this shows us how difficult it is not to be affected by the
spirit of the generation we live with. How could he have supposed that
the new heaven upon earth of his dreams would ever be constructed out
of such pinchbeck materials?

It was now the year 1. of the Republic. The _dix Août_ was over, the
King a prisoner in the Temple. Lafayette, in his attempt to imitate his
"master," Washington, had succeeded no better than the magician's
apprentice, who knew how to raise the demon, but not how to manage him
when he appeared. He had gone down before the revolution, and was now
_le traître Lafayette_, a refugee in Austria. Dumouriez commanded on
the north-eastern frontier in his place. France was still shuddering at
the recollection of the prison-massacres of the _Septembriseurs_, and
society, to use the phrase of a modern French revolutionist, was _en
procès de liquidation_.

Paine got on very well, at first. The Convention was impressed with the
necessity of looking up first principles, and Paine was emphatically
the man of principles. A universal republic was the hope of the
majority, with a convention sitting at the centre of the civilized
world, watching untiringly over the rights of man and the peace of the
human race. Meantime, they elected a committee to make a new
constitution for France. Paine was, of course, selected. His colleagues
were Sièyes, Condorcet, Gensonné, Vergniaud, Pétion, Brissot, Barère,
and Danton. Of these nine, Paine and Sièyes alone survived the Reign of
Terror. When, in due time, this constitution was ready to be submitted
to the Convention, no one could be found to listen to the reading of
the report. The revolution had outstripped the committee. Their labors
proved as useless as the Treatise on Education composed by Mr. Shandy
for the use of his son Tristram;--when it was finished, the child had
outgrown every chapter.

Thenceforward, we catch only occasional glimpses of Paine. In the days
of his glory, he lived in the fashionable Rue de Richelieu, holding
levees twice a week, to receive a public eager to gaze upon so great a
man. His name appears at the _fête civique_ held by English and Irish
republicans at White's Hotel. There he sat beside Santerre, the famous
brewer, and proposed, as a sentiment, "The approaching National
Convention of Great Britain and Ireland." At this dinner, Lord Edward
Fitzgerald, then an officer in the British service, gave, "May the 'Ça
ira,' the 'Carmagnole,' and the 'Marseillaise' be the music of every
army, and soldier and citizen join in the chorus,"--a toast which cost
him his commission, perhaps his life. We read, too, that Paine was
struck in a _café_ by some loyal, hot-headed English captain, who took
that means of showing his dislike for the author of the "Rights of
Man." The police sternly seized the foolish son of Albion. A blow
inflicted upon the sacred person of a member of the Convention was
clearly sacrilege, punishable, perhaps, with death. But Paine
interfered, procured passports, and sent the penitent soldier safely
out of the country.

Speaking no French, for he never succeeded in learning the language,
Paine's part in the public sittings of the Convention must have been
generally limited to eloquent silence or expressive dumbshow. But when
the trial of the King came on, he took a bold and dangerous share in
the proceedings, which destroyed what little popularity the ruin of his
federal schemes had left him, and came near costing him his head. He
was already so great a laggard behind the revolutionary march, that he
did not suspect the determination of the Mountain to put the King to
death. Louis was guilty, no doubt, Paine thought,--but not of any great
crime. Banishment for life, or until the new government be
consolidated,--say to the United States, where he will have the
inestimable privilege of seeing the working of free institutions;--once
thoroughly convinced of his royal errors, morally, as well as
physically uncrowned, he might safely be allowed to return to France as
plain Citizen Capet: that should be his sentence. But the extreme left
of the Convention and the constituent rabble of the galleries wanted to
break with the past, and to throw a king's head into the arena as wager
of battle to the despots of Europe. The discovery of the iron safe in
the palace offered, it was thought, sufficient show of evidence for the
prosecution; if not, they were ready to dispense with any. The case was
prejudged; the trial, a cruel and an empty form. There were two
righteous men in that political Gomorrah,--Tronchet and the venerable
Malesherbes. They offered their services to defend the unfortunate
victim. Who can read Malesherbes's noble letter to the President of the
Convention, without thinking the better of French nature forever after?

A fierce preliminary discussion arose the Convention on the
constitutional question of the King's inviolability. Paine had no
patience with the privileges of kingship and voted against
inviolability. He requested that a speech he had prepared on the
subject might be read to the House at once, as he wished to send off a
copy to London for the English papers. This wretched composition was
manifestly written for England. Paine had George III. in his mind,
rather than Louis XVI. Here is a specimen of the style of
it,--interesting, as showing the temper of the time, as well as of
Member Thomas Paine:--"Louis, as an individual, is an object beneath
the notice of the Republic. But he ought to be tried, because a
conspiracy has been formed against the liberty of all nations by the
crowned ruffians of Europe. Louis XVI. is believed to be the partner of
that horde, and is the only man of them you have in your power. It is
indispensable to discover who the gang is composed of, and this may be
done by his trial. It may also bring to light the detestable conduct of
Mr. Guelph, Elector of Hanover, and be doing justice to England to make
them aware of it. It is the interest of France to be surrounded by
republics, and that revolutions be universal. If Louis XVI. can serve
to prove, by the flagitiousness of government in general, the necessity
of revolutions, France ought not to let slip so precious an
opportunity. Seeing no longer in Louis XVI. but a weakminded and
narrow-spirited individual, ill-bred, like all his colleagues, given,
as it is said, to frequent excesses of drunkenness, and whom the
National Assembly raised again imprudently to a throne which was not
made for him,--if we show him hereafter some pity, it shall not be the
result of the burlesque idea of a pretended inviolability."

A secretary read this speech from the tribune,--Paine standing near
him, silent, furnishing perhaps an occasional gesture to mark the
emphasis. The Convention applauded warmly, and ordered it to be printed
and circulated in the departments.

When the King was found guilty, and it came to the final vote, whether
he should be imprisoned, banished, or beheaded, the Girondins, who had
spoken warmly against the death-penalty, voted for it, overawed by the
stormy abuse of the galleries. Paine, coarse and insolent, but not
cowardly or cruel, did not hesitate to vote for banishment. He
requested the member from the Pas de Calais to read from the tribune
his appeal in favor of the King. Drunau attempted to do it, but was
hooted down. Paine persisted,--presented his speech again the next day.
Marat objected to its reception, because Paine was a Quaker, and
opposed to capital punishment on principle; but the Convention at last
consented to the reading. After alluding to the all-important
assistance furnished by Louis XVI. to the insurgent American Colonies,
Paine, as a citizen of both countries, proposed sending him to the
United States. "To kill Louis," wrote Paine, "is not only inhuman, but
a folly. It will increase the number of your enemies. France has but
one ally,--the United States of America,--and the execution of the King
would spread an universal affliction in that country. If I could speak
your language like a Frenchman, I would descend a suppliant to your
bar, and in the name of all my brothers in America present to you a
petition and prayer to suspend the execution of Louis." The Mountain
and the galleries roared with rage. Thuriot exclaimed,--"That is not
the true language of Thomas Paine."

"I denounce the translator," shrieked venomous Marat; "these are not
the opinions of Thomas Paine; it is a wicked and unfaithful
translation."

Coulon affirmed, solemnly, that he had seen the original in Paine's
hands, and that it was exact. The reader was finally allowed to resume.
"You mean to send an ambassador to the United States. Let him announce
to the Americans that the National Convention of France, from pure
friendship to America, has consented to respite the sentence of Louis.
Ah, Citizens, do not give the despot of England the pleasure of seeing
sent to the scaffold the man who helped my beloved brethren of America
to free themselves from his chains!"

Soon after the execution of the King, Paris fell into the hands of the
lowest classes. Their leaders ruled with terrible energy. Chabot's
_dictum,--"Il n'y a pas de crimes en révolution_," and Stablekeeper
Drouet's exclamation,--"_Soyons brigands pour le bonheur du peuple_,"
contain the political principles which guided them. Marat thundered
away in his paper against Brissotins, Girondins, federalism, and
moderantism. The minority members, thus unpleasantly noticed, went
armed; many of them dared not sleep at home. Soon came the arrest of
the _suspects_. The 31st of May, _cette insurrection toute morale_, as
Robespierre called it, followed next. The Convention was stormed by the
mob and purged of Brissotins and Girondins. The _Comité de Salut
Public_ decreed forced loans and the _levée en masse_. Foreigners were
expelled from the Convention and imprisoned throughout France. Mayor
Bailly, Mme. Roland, Manuel, and their friends, passed under the axe.
The same fate befell the Girondins, a party of phrase-makers who have
enjoyed a posthumous sentimental reputation, but who, when living, had
not the energy and active courage to back their fine speeches. The
_reductio ad horribile_ of all the fine arguments in favor of popular
infallibility and virtue had come; neither was the _reductio ad
absurdum_ wanting. The old names of the days and months and years were
changed. The statues of the Virgin were torn from the little niches in
street-walls, and the busts of Marat and Lepelletier set up in their
stead. The would-be God, _soi-disant Dieu_, was banished from France.
Clootz and Chaumette, who called themselves Anacharsis and Anaxagoras,
celebrated the worship of the Goddess of Reason. Bonfires of feudality;
Goddesses of Liberty in plaster; trees of liberty planted in every
square; altars _de la patrie_; huge rag-dolls representing Anarchy and
Discord; Cleobis and Biton dragging their revered parents through the
streets; _bonnets rouges, banderolles, ça iras, carmagnoles,
fraternisations, accolades_; the properties, as well as the text of the
plays, borrowed from Ancient Greece or Rome. What a bewildering
retrospect! A period well summed up by Emerson:--"To-day, pasteboard
and filigree; to-morrow, madness and murder." _Tigre-singe_, Voltaire's
epigrammatic definition, describes his countrymen of the Reign of
Terror in two words.

Neglected by all parties, and disgusted with all, Paine moved to a
remote quarter of Paris, and took rooms in a house which had once
belonged to Mme. de Pompadour. Brissot, Thomas Christie, Mary
Wolstonecraft, and Joel Barlow were his principal associates. Two
Englishmen, "friends of humanity," and an ex-officer of the
_garde-du-corps_ lodged in the same building. The neighborhood was not
without its considerable persons. Sanson, most celebrated of headsmen,
had his domicile ii the same section. He called upon Paine,
complimented him in good English upon his "Rights of Man," which he had
read, and offered his services in a polite manner.

When the Reign of Terror was fully established, the little party seldom
left their walls, and amused themselves as best they could with
conversation and games. The news of the confusion and alarm of Paris
reached them in their retreat, as if they were miles away in some quiet
country residence. Every evening the landlord went into the city and
brought back with him the horrible story of the day. "As to myself,"
Paine wrote to Lady Smith, "I used to find some relief by walking in
the garden and cursing with hearty good-will the authors of that
terrible system that had turned the character of the revolution I had
been proud to defend."

After some weeks, the two Englishmen contrived to escape to
Switzerland, leaving their enthusiasm for humanity behind them. Two
days later, a file of armed men came to arrest them. Before the month
was out, the landlord was carried off in the night. Last of all came
the turn of Paine. He was arrested in December, by order of
Robespierre, "for the interest of America, as well as of France, as a
dangerous enemy of

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