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The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 05, No. 31, May, 1860

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Title: The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 05, No. 31, May, 1860

Author: Various


        
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THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS

VOL. V, MAY, 1860, NO. XXXI






INSTINCT.


"Instinct is a great matter," quoth Falstaff, when called upon to find
out a device, a "starting-hole," to hide himself from the open and
apparent shame of having run away from the fight and hacked his sword
like a handsaw with his own dagger. Like a valiant lion, he would not
turn upon the true prince, but ran away upon instinct. Although the
peculiar circumstances of the occasion upon which the subject was
presented to Falstaff's mind were not very favorable to a calm
consideration of it, he was undoubtedly correct in saying that instinct
is a great matter. "If, then, the tree may be known by the fruit," says
Falstaff, "as the fruit by the tree, then, peremptorily I speak it,
there is virtue in that Falstaff"; and it is proper that his authority
should be quoted, even upon a question of metaphysical science.

That psychological endowment of animals which we denominate instinct
has in every age been a matter full of wonder; and men of thought have
found few more interesting subjects of inquiry. But it is confessed
that little has been satisfactorily made out concerning the nature and
limitations of instinct. In former times the habits and mental
characteristics of those orders of animated being which are inferior to
man were observed with but a careless eye; and it was late before the
phenomena of animal life received a careful and reverent examination.
It is vain to inquire what instinct is, before there has been an
accurate observation of its manifestations. It is only from its outward
manifestations that we can know anything of that marvellous inward
nature which is given to animals. We cannot know anything of the
essential constitution of mind, but can know only its properties. This
is all we know even of matter. "If material existence," says Sir
William Hamilton, "could exhibit ten thousand phenomena, and if we
possessed ten thousand senses to apprehend these ten thousand phenomena
of material existence, of existence absolutely and in itself we should
be then as ignorant as we are at present." But this limitation of human
knowledge has not always been kept in view. Men have been solicitous to
penetrate into the higher mysteries of absolute and essential
existence. But in thus reaching out after the unattainable, we have
often passed by the only knowledge which it was possible for us to
gain. Much vague speculation concerning instinct has arisen from the
attempt to resolve the problem of its ultimate nature; and perhaps much
more might have been made out with certainty about it, if no greater
task had been attempted than to classify the phenomena which it
exhibits and determine the nature of its manifestations. In regard to
instinct, as well as everything else, we must be content with finding
out what it seems to us to be, rather than what it is. Even with this
limitation, the inquiry will prove sufficiently difficult. The
properties of instinct are a little more inscrutable than those of the
human mind, inasmuch as we have our own consciousness to assist us in
this case, while we are left to infer the peculiarities of instinct
from its outward manifestations only. And moreover, the inquiry
involves an understanding of the workings of the human mind; for it is
only when viewed in contrast with the rational endowments of man that
the character of instinct is best known. All other questions connected
with the subject are subordinate to this one of the apparent difference
between instinct and reason.

Many definitions have been given of instinctive actions. These differ
widely in their extent, and are for the most part quite inadequate.
Some writers have ranged under this term all those customary habits and
actions which are common to all the individuals of a species. According
to this definition, almost every action of animated life is
instinctive. But the general idea of an instinctive action is much more
restricted; it is one that is performed without instruction and prior
to experience,--and not for the immediate gratification of the agent,
but only as the means for the attainment of some ulterior end. To apply
the term instinct to the regular and involuntary movements of the
bodily organs, such as the beating of the heart and the action of the
organs of respiration, is manifestly an extension of the ordinary
acceptation of the term. Organic actions of a similar character are
also performed by plants, and are purely mechanical. "In the lowest and
simplest class of excited movements," says Müller, "the nervous system
would not appear to be concerned. They result from stimuli directly
applied to the muscles, which immediately excite their contractility;
and they are evidently of the same character with the motions of
plants." Thus, the heart is excited to pulsation by the direct contact
of the blood with the muscle. The hand of a sleeping child closes upon
any object which gently touches the palm. And it is in this way,
doubtless, that the Sea Anemone entraps its prey, or anything else that
may come in contact with its tentacles. But so far are these movements
from indicating of themselves the action of any instinctive principle,
that they are no proof of animality; for a precisely analogous power is
possessed by the sensitive plant known as the Fly-Trap of Venus
(_Dionoea muscipula_): "any insect touching the sensitive hairs on the
surface of its leaf instantly causes the leaf to shut up and enclose
the insect, as in a trap; nor is this all; a mucilaginous secretion
acts like a gastric juice on the captive, digests it, and renders it
assimilable by the plant, which thus feeds on the victim, as the
Actinea feeds on the Annelid or Crustacean it may entrap." In the
animal organization a large class of reflex actions are excited, not by
a direct influence, but indirectly by the agency of the nerves and
spinal cord. Such actions are essentially independent of the brain; for
they occur in animals which have no brain, and in those whose brain has
been removed. However marvellous these functions of organic life may
be, there is nothing in them at all resembling that agency properly
called instinct, which may be said to take the place in the inferior
tribes of reason in man. To refer these operations to the same source
as the wonderful instinct that guides the bird in its long migratory
flight, or in the construction of its nest, would be to make the bird a
curiously constructed machine which is operated by impressions from
without upon its sentient nerves.

Those actions have sometimes been called instinctive which arise from
the appetites and passions; and they have been referred to instinct,
doubtless, because they have one characteristic of instinct,--that they
are not acquired by experience or instruction. "But they differ," says
Professor Bowen, "at least in one important respect from those
instincts of the lower animals which are usually contrasted with human
reason. The objects towards which they are directed are prized for
their own sake; they are sought as _ends_; while instinct teaches
brutes to do many things which are needed only as means for the
attainment of some ulterior purpose." When the butterfly extracts the
nectar from the flowers which she loves most, she meets a want of her
physical nature which demands satisfaction at the moment; but when, in
opposition to her appetite, she proceeds to the flowerless shrub to
deposit her eggs upon the leaves best suited to support her
unthought-of progeny, she is not influenced by any desire for the
immediate gratification of her senses, but is led to the act by some
dim impulse, in order that an ultimate object may be provided for to
which she has no reference at the time. We are surprised to find it
declared, in the very interesting "Psychological Inquiries" of Sir B.C.
Brodie, that the desire for food is the simplest form of an instinct,
and that such an instinct goes far towards explaining others which are
more complicated. It is true that the appetites and passions of animals
have an ultimate object, but they are impelled to action by a desire
for immediate gratification only; but when we speak of an instinct, we
mean something more than a mere want or desire,--we have chiefly in
view the end beyond the blind instrumentality by which it is reached.

When we watch the movements of a young bee, as it first goes forth from
its waxen cradle, we are forced to recognize an influence at work which
is unlike reason, and which is neither appetite nor any mechanical
principle of organic life. Rising upon the comb, and holding steadily
with its tiny feet, with admirable adroitness the young bee smooths its
wings for its first flight, and rubs its body with its fore legs and
antennae; then walking along the comb to the mouth of the hive, it
mounts into the air, flies forth into the fields, alights upon the
proper flowers, extracts their juices, collects their pollen, and,
kneading it into little balls, deposits them in the sacks upon its
feet; and then returning to its hive, it delivers up the honey and the
wax and the bread which it has gathered and elaborated. In the hive it
works the wax with its paws and feelers into an hexagonal cell with a
rhomboidal bottom, the three plates of which form such angles with each
other as require the least wax and space in the construction of the
cell. All these complex operations the bee performs as adroitly, on the
first morning of its life, as the most experienced workman in the hive.
The tyro gatherer sought the flowery fields upon untried wings, and
returned to its home from this first expedition with unerring flight by
the most direct course through the trackless air.

This is one instance of that great class of actions which are allowed
on all hands to be strictly instinctive. In the fact, that the occult
faculties which urge the bee to make honey and construct geometrical
cells are in complete development when it first emerges from its cell,
we recognize one of the most striking characteristics of instinct,--its
existence prior to all experience or instruction. The insect tribes
furnish us with many instances in which the young being never sees its
parents, and therefore all possibility of its profiting from their
instructions or of its imitating their actions is cut off. The solitary
wasp, for example, is accustomed to construct a tunnelled nest in which
she deposits her eggs and then brings a number of living caterpillars
and places them in a hole which she has made above each egg; being very
careful to furnish just caterpillars enough to maintain the young worm
from the time of its exclusion from the egg till it can provide for
itself, and to place them so as to be readily accessible the moment
food is required. But what is most curious of all is the fact that the
wasp does not deposit the caterpillars unhurt, for thus they would
disturb or perhaps destroy the young; nor does she sting them to death,
for thus they would soon be in no state of proper preservation; but, as
if understanding these contingencies, she inflicts a disabling wound.
Yet the wasp does not feed upon caterpillars herself, nor has she ever
seen a wasp provide them for her future offspring. She has never seen a
worm such as will spring from her egg, nor can she know that her egg
will produce a worm; and besides, she herself will be dead long before
the unknown worm can be in existence. Therefore she works blindly;
without knowing that her work is to subserve any useful purpose, she
works to a purpose both definite and important; and her acts are
uniform with those of all solitary wasps that have lived before her or
that will live after her; so that we are compelled to refer these
untaught actions to some constant impulse connected with the special
organization of the wasp,--an innate tact, uniform throughout the
species, of which we, not possessing anything of the kind, can form
only a poor conception, but which we call instinct.

There have been some philosophers, however, who have exercised their
ingenuity in tracing so-called instinctive actions to the operation of
experience. The celebrated Doctor Erasmus Darwin gave, as an
illustration of this view, his opinion that the young of animals know
how to swallow from their experience of swallowing _in utero_. Without
going into any refutation of this position, we would only remark, in
passing, that the act of swallowing is not an instinctive action at
all, but a purely mechanical one. Would not Doctor Darwin have rejoiced
greatly, if he could have brought to the support of his theory the
observation of our own great naturalist, Agassiz, who, knowing the
savage snap of one of the large, full-grown Testudinata, is said to
have asserted, that, under the microscope, he has seen the juvenile
turtle snapping precociously _in embryo_?

But not only is instinct prior to all experience, it is even superior
to it, and often leads animals to disregard it,--the spontaneous
impulse which Nature has given them being their best guide. The
carrier-pigeon or the bird of passage, taken a long distance from home
by a circuitous route, trusting to this "pilot-sense," flies back in a
straight course; and the hound takes the shortest way home through
fields where he has never previously set foot.

The existence of instinct prior to all experience or instruction, and
its perfection in the beginning, render cultivation and improvement not
only unnecessary, but impossible. As it is with the individual, so it
is with the race. One generation of the irrational tribes does not
improve upon the preceding or educate its successor. The web which you
watched the spider weaving in your open window last summer, carefully
measuring off each radius of her wheel and each circular mesh by one of
her legs, was just such a web as the spider wove of old when she was
pronounced to be "little upon the earth, yet exceeding wise."

This incapacity for education is what so widely separates instinct from
the rational powers of man. Man gathers knowledge and transmits it from
generation to generation. He is not born with a ready skill, but with a
capacity for it. His mind is formed destitute of all connate knowledge,
that it may acquire the knowledge of all things. "Man's imperfection at
his nativity is his perfection; while the perfection of brutes at their
nativity is their imperfection." No rational being has ever arrived at
such perfection that he cannot still improve; he can travel on from one
attainment to another in a perpetual progress of improvement. He is,
moreover, free to choose his own path of action; while the being of
instinct is governed by a power which is not subject to his will, and
which confines him to a narrow path which he cannot leave. But
instinct, within its narrow limits, in many cases quite transcends
reason in its achievements.

  "Man's attainments in his own concerns,
  Matched with the expertness of the brutes in theirs,
  Are ofttimes vanquished and thrown far behind."

Perhaps man has never made a structure as perfect in all its
adaptations as the honeycomb. Yet when Virgil spoke of the belief that
bees have a portion of the mind divine, nothing was known of the
wonderful mathematical properties of this beautiful fabric; and the
demonstration of them which has been made within the present century is
beyond the comprehension of far the larger part of mankind. If the bee
comprehended the problem which it has been working out for these many
ages before man was able to solve it, would its intellectual powers be
inferior to his in degree, if they were the same in kind? The
water-spider weaves for herself a cocoon, makes it impervious to water,
and fastens it by loose threads to the leaves of plants growing at the
bottom of a still pool. She carries down air in a bag made for this
purpose, till the water is expelled from the cell through the opening
below. The spider lived quite dry in her little air-chamber beneath the
water ages before the diving-bell was invented; but that she understood
anything of the doctrines of space and gravity, no one would venture to
assert.

It has been the belief of some philosophers, and poets as well, that
man has taken the hint for some of the arts he now practises from the
brute creation. Democritus represents him as having derived the arts of
weaving and sewing from the spider, and the art of building of tempered
clay from the swallow; and we also read in Pliny's "Natural History,"
that the nest of the swallow suggested to Toxius, the son of Coelus,
the invention of mortar. According to Lucretius, men learned music from
the song of birds, and Pope describes them as learning from the mole to
plough, from the nautilus to sail, and from bees and ants to form a
political community. Perhaps we were behind the beaver in felling
timber, in leading dams across rivers, and in building cabin
villages,--behind the wasp in making paper, and behind the squirrel and
spider in crossing streams upon rafts. So, if man had needed any
example of war and violence and wrong, he had only to go to the
ant-hill and see the red ants invade the camps of the black and bear
off their little negro prisoners into slavery.

Whatever truth there may be in these ideas, it is at least conceivable
that man may have profited from the example of these animals. He has
copied from patterns set by Nature in tree and leaf and flower and
plant; he has formed the Gothic arch and column from the trunks and
interlacing boughs of the lofty avenue, the Corinthian capital from the
acanthus foliage embracing a basket, and classic urns and vases from
flowers. But no one could describe one species of the brute world as
having derived a similar lesson from another, and much less from trees
and plants. No species of animals has learnt anything new even from
man, except within the narrow sphere of domestication.

It is only in particulars that instinct appears superior to reason in
the works it achieves. When an animal is taken, ever so little, out of
the ordinary circumstances in which its instincts act, it is apt to
behave very foolishly. If a woodpecker's egg is hatched by a bird which
builds an open nest upon the branches of a tree, when the young bird is
grown large enough to shuffle about in the nest, induced by its
instinct to suppose that its nest is in a hole walled round on all
sides by the tree, with a long, narrow entrance down from above, it
does not see that it has been inducted into the open nest of another
bird, and is sure to tumble out. The bee and the ant, in a few
particulars, show wonderful sagacity; but remove them from the narrow
compass of their instincts, and all their wisdom is at an end. That
animals are so wise in a few things and so wanting in wisdom in all
others shows that they are endowed with a mental principle essentially
of a different nature from that of the human race. "They do many things
even better than ourselves," says Descartes; "but this does not prove
them to be endowed with reason, for this would prove them to have more
reason than we have, and that they should excel us in all other things
also"; for reason can act not only in one direction, but in all.

But it will be said that instinct is not invariable,--that it often
displays a capacity of accommodating itself, like reason, to
circumstances, and is therefore a principle the same in kind with
it,--or else that the animal has something of the rational faculty
superadded to the instinctive. But does the animal make these
variations in its conduct from a true perception of their meaning and
purpose?

It is very natural for us to ascribe to reason those actions of other
animals which would be ascribable to reason, if performed by man. "If,"
says Keller, (an old German writer,) "the fly be enabled to choose the
place which suits her best for the deposition of her eggs, (as, for
instance, in my sugar-basin, in which I placed a quantity of decaying
wheat,) she takes a correct survey of every part and selects that in
which she believes her ova will be the best preserved and her young
ones well cared for." The fly, in this instance, apparently exercises
an intelligent choice; but does any one doubt that the selection she
makes is determined wholly by a blind, uncalculating instinct? The
beaver selects a site for his dam at a place where the depth, width,
and rapidity of the stream are most fit. There is a tree upon the bank,
and food and materials for his work in the vicinity. If a man should
attempt to build a beaver's dam, he would abstractly consider all these
elements of fitness. The outward manifestations of the quality of
abstraction are equally observable in either case. But we must not
hastily conclude, because the beaver in one instance acts in a manner
apparently reasonable, that he has any reason of his own; for, when we
come to study the habits of this animal, we find that he displays all
the characteristics of the instinctive principle. If animals are
endowed with instincts which apparently act so much like reason in the
ordinary course of their operations, we should not at once conclude
that there is any need of endowing them with a modicum of reason to
account for their deviations from this course, which do not outwardly
resemble the acts of reason any more strongly. And besides, it is said,
that, if we refer the variations to an intelligent principle, we must
refer the ordinary conduct to the same principle. To use an old
illustration,--if a bird is reasonable and intelligent, when, on
perceiving the swollen waters of the stream approach her half-finished
nest, she builds higher up the bank, she was intelligent while making
her first nest, and was always intelligent; for how otherwise, it is
asked, could she know when to lay down instinct and take up reason?

Instinct aims at certain definite ends; but these ends cannot always be
reached by the same means, especially when places and circumstances are
not the same. Accommodation is necessary, or it could not always
produce the effects for which it is intended. Would the instinct of the
spider be complete, if, after it has guided her to spin a web so neat
and trim and regular, it did not also lead her to repair her broken
snare, when the cords have been sundered by the struggles of some
powerful captive? But this pliancy of the spider's instinct is no more
remarkable than the contingent operation of the instincts of many
species of animals. "It is remarkable," says Kirby, "that many of the
insects which are occasionally observed to emigrate are not usually
social animals, but seem to congregate, like swallows, merely for the
purpose of emigration." When certain rare emergencies occur, which
render it necessary for the insects to migrate, a contingent instinct
develops itself, and renders an unsocial species gregarious.

It is probable that most of our domesticated species, exhibiting as
they do in that condition attainments foreign to their natural habits
and faculties in a wild state, were endowed with provisional instincts
with a view to their association with man. But generally the docility
of animals does not extend to attainments which are radically different
from their habits and faculties in a wild state. Casual acquirements,
which have no relation to their exigencies in their natural condition,
never become hereditary, and are not, therefore, instinctive. A young
pointer-dog, which has never been in the fields before, will not only
point at a covey of partridges, but will remain motionless, like a
well-trained dog. The fact that the sagacity of the pointer is
hereditary shows that it is the development of an instinctive
propensity; for simple knowledge is not transmitted by blood from one
generation to another. We have heard of a pig that pointed game, and of
another that was learned in letters; but we ascertain in every such
instance that their foreign acquirements do not reappear in their
progeny, but end with the pupils of the time being. The pig's
peculiarity of pointing did not arise from the development of a
provisional instinct, because it does not become hereditary; but the
same act in the pointer-dog is instinctive,--for, when once brought out
by associating with man, it has remained with the breed, being a part
of the animal's nature, which existed in embryo till it was developed
by a companionship with man, for whose use this faculty was alone
intended.

Although the animals which especially display these exceptional or
contingent instincts are those which are fitted for the use and comfort
of man and may be domesticated, it is doubtless true that many other
species are in some degree provided with them, and that they thus have
a plasticity in their nature which enables them to exercise, under
particular circumstances, unlooked-for attention, foresight, and
caution. And besides, it is only in analogy with the laws of the
physical world that instinct should admit of a slightly diversified
application.

It is to be noticed in this connection that many animals are gifted
with a wonderful sensibility of the senses,--the action of which is
sometimes mistaken not only for the action of instinct, but for that of
reason also. The acuteness of the sense of smell in the dog, which
enables him to trace the steps of his master for miles through crowded
streets by the infinitesimal odor which his footsteps left upon the
pavement, is quite beyond our conception. Equally incomprehensible to
us are the keenness of sight and wide range of vision of the eagle,
which enable him to discover the rabbit nipping the clover amid the
thick grass at a distance at which a like object would be to us
altogether imperceptible. The chameleon is enabled to seize the little
insects upon which it feeds by darting forth its wonderfully
constructed tongue with such rapidity and with such delicacy of
perception that "wonder-loving sages" have told us that it feeds upon
the air.

It has been the belief of some observers that some animals have senses
by which they are enabled to take cognizance of things which are not
revealed directly to our senses. It is easy enough to conceive of
beings endowed with a more perfect perception of the external world,
both in its condition and the number of objects it presents, than we
have, by means of other organs of outward perception. Voltaire, in one
of his philosophical romances, represents an inhabitant of one of the
planets of the Dog-Star as inquiring of the Secretary of the Academy of
Sciences in the planet of Saturn, at which he had recently arrived in a
journey through the heavens, how many senses the men of his globe had;
and when the Academician answered, that they had seventy-two, and were
every day complaining of the smallness of the number, he of the
Dog-Star replied, that in his globe they had very near one thousand
senses, and yet with all these they felt continually a sort of listless
inquietude and vague desire which told them how very imperfect they
were. But we shall not travel so far as this for our illustrations. We
have all seen in the fields and about our houses birds and insects
which seem to take cognizance of the electric state of the atmosphere;
and we have learnt to feel quite sure, when, early in the morning of a
summer's day, we see fresh piles of sand around the holes of the ants,
that a storm is approaching, although the sky may as yet be cloudless
and the air perfectly serene. In like manner birds perceive the
approach of rain, and are all busy oiling and smoothing their feathers
in preparation for it; and then, before the clouds break away, they
come out from their retreats and joyfully hail the return of fair
weather. So, by some analogous sense, the birds of passage are informed
of the approach of winter and the return of spring.

It is doubtless true that in some animals the senses are immediately
connected with instincts which assist and extend their operation.
Metaphysicians and physiologists are agreed that the perception of
distance is an acquired knowledge. The sense of sight by itself
principally makes us conversant with extension only. The painting upon
the retina of the eye presents all external things with flat surfaces
and at the same distance. Before we can have any correct ideas of
distance, we must be able to compare the result of the sense of sight
with the result of the sense of feeling. By experience we in time come
to judge something of distance by the size of the image which an object
makes upon the retina, but more by our acquired knowledge of the form
and color of external things. It is true that the eyes of many animals
are constructed like those of man; but they do not learn to judge of
distance by the same slow process. It is known from experiment that
some animals have a perfect conception of distance at the moment of
their birth; and the young of the greater part of animals possess some
instinctive perception of this kind. "A flycatcher, for example, just
come out of its shell, has been seen to peck at an insect with an aim
as perfect as if it had been all its life engaged in learning the art."
And so when the hen takes her chickens out into the field for the first
time to feed, they seem to perceive very distinctly the relative
distance of all objects about them, and will run by the straightest
course when she calls them to pick up the little grains which she
points out to them. Without this instinctive power of determining the
relative distance and figure of objects, the young of most animals
would perish before their sense of sight could be perfected, as ours
is, by experience.

We have now noticed the chief characteristics of instinct: its
existence prior to all experience or instruction; its incapacity of
improvement, except within the narrow sphere of domestication; its
limitation to a few objects, and the certainty of its action within
these limits; the distinctness and permanence of its character for each
species; and its constant hereditary nature. In regard to the
uniformity of instinct throughout each species, it may be further
remarked, that this seems to be very constantly preserved in the lowest
divisions of the animal kingdom. Among the Articulates, also, instinct
appears almost unvarying; and it is in this department among the insect
tribes that the most striking manifestations of instinct are to be met
with. When we arrive among the higher orders of the Vertebrates, we
find in some species that each individual is capable of some
modification of its actions, according to the particular circumstances
in which it finds itself placed. But throughout the long series of
animals, from the polype to man, there is instinctive action more or
less in amount in every species, with, perhaps, the exception of man
alone. The variety of that endowment, which is adapted to definite
objects, means, and results, in each particular one of the five hundred
thousand species estimated to be now living, may well call forth our
admiration and astonishment at the magnitude and extent of the
prospective contrivance of the Creator. How various the relations of
all these animals to each other and to the inanimate world about them!
and yet how admirable the adjustments of that immaterial principle
which regulates their lives, so as to secure the well-being of each and
the symmetry of the general plan!

There has been much diversity of opinion as to the existence of
instincts in the human species,--some making the whole mind of man
nothing but a bundle of instincts, and others wholly denying him any
endowment of this nature, while others still have given him a complex
mental nature, and have, moreover, declared that intellect and instinct
in him are so interwoven that it is impossible to tell where the one
begins and the other ends. But we believe, with the author of "Ancient
Metaphysics," that in Nature, however intimately things are blended
together and run into each other like different shades of the same
color, the species of things are absolutely distinct, and that there
are certain fixed boundaries which separate them, however difficult it
may be for us to find them out. In regard to intelligence and instinct,
the two principles seem to us to be not more distinctly and widely
separated in their nature than in the provinces of their operation.

Sir Henry Holland, who believes that intelligence and instinct are
blended in man, admits that instincts, properly so called, form the
_minimum_ in relation to reason, and are difficult of definition from
their connection with his higher mental functions, but that, wherever
we can truly distinguish them, they are the same in principle and
manner of operation as those of other animals. He makes one
distinction, however, between the instincts of man and those of lower
animals,--that in the former they have more of individual character,
are far less numerous and definite in relation to the physical
conditions of life, and more various and extensive in regard to his
moral nature. But, on the other hand, Sir B.C. Brodie seems to be of
opinion that the majority of instincts belonging to man resemble those
of the inferior animals, inasmuch as they relate to the preservation of
the individual and the continuation of the species; and that when man
first began to exist, and for some generations afterwards, the range of
his instincts was much more extensive than it is at the present time.
When authorities so eminent as these differ so widely upon the
question, to what human instincts relate, we see at least that it is
very difficult to define and distinguish these instincts, and we may be
led to doubt their existence at all. Of that marvellous endowment which
guides the bee to fabricate its cells according to laws of the most
rigid mathematical exactness, and guides the swallow in its long flight
to its winter home, we agree with Professor Bowen, that there is no
trace whatever in human nature. The actions of man which have been
loosely described as instinctive belong for the most part to those
classes of actions which we have already shown to be in no proper sense
of the word instinctive, that is, those concerned in the appetites and
in the functions of organic life. There are also numerous automatic and
habitual actions which are liable to be mistaken for instincts. Some
have included in the category of instincts those intuitive perceptions
and primary beliefs which are a part of our constitution, and are the
foundation of all our knowledge. But these propensities of thought and
feeling are of a higher nature than mere instincts; they are immutable
laws of the human mind, which time and physical changes cannot reach:
they do not seem to depend upon the physical organization, but to be
inherent in the soul itself. If these are instincts, then, why are not
all the ways in which the mind exerts itself instincts also, and reason
itself an instinct?

There is hardly any human action, feeling, or belief, which has not
been ranged under the term instinct. Hunger and thirst have been called
instincts; so have the faculty of speech, the use of the right hand in
preference to the left, the love of society, the desire to possess
property, the desire to avoid danger and prolong life, and the belief
in supernatural agencies, upon which is engrafted the religious
sentiment. We cannot, in this paper, attempt to analyze these and many
other similar examples which have been given as illustrations of
instinct in treatises of high repute, and show that they do not at all
come within that class of actions which we contrast with reason. In
regard to those actions of early infancy which have often been adduced
as illustrations of instinct, the physiologists of the present day are
agreed that they are as mechanical as the act of breathing. To place
these upon the same level with the complex and wonderful operations of
the bee, the ant, and the beaver, is to admit that the instincts of the
latter are merely reflex actions following impressions on the nerves of
sense.

On the other hand, whether the animals inferior to man ever exercise
any conscious process of reasoning is a question which has often been
discussed, and upon which there is no general agreement. Instances of
the remarkable sagacity of some domesticated animals are often adduced
as proofs of reasoning on their part. Some of these wonderful feats may
be traced to the unconscious faculty of imitation, which even in man
often appears as a blind propensity, although he exercises an active
and rational imitation as well. Sometimes the mere association of
ideas, or the perception by animals that one thing is accompanied by
another or that one event follows another, is mistaken for that higher
principle which in man judges, reflects, and understands causes and
effects. When the dog sees his master take down his gun, his
blandishments show that he anticipates a renewal of the pleasures of
the chase. He does not reflect upon past pleasures; but, seeing the gun
in his master's hand, a confused idea of the feelings that were
associated with the gun in times past is called up. So the ox and the
horse learn to associate certain movements with the voice and gesture
of man. And so a fish, about the most stupid of all animals, comes to a
certain spot at a certain signal to be fed. These combinations are
quite elementary. This is quite another thing from that reciprocal
action of ideas on each other by which man perceives the relations of
things, understands the laws of cause and effect, and not only forms
judgments of the past, but draws conclusions which are laws for the
future. We find in the brute no power of attending to and arranging its
thoughts,--no power of calling up the past at will and reflecting upon
it. The animal has the faculty of memory, and, when this is awakened,
the object remembered may be accompanied by a train or attendance of
accessory notions which have been connected with the object in the
animal's past experience. But it never seems to be able to exercise the
purely voluntary act of recollection. It is not capable of comparing
one thing with another, so far as we can judge. If the animal could
exercise any true act of comparison, there would be no limit to the
exercise of it, and the animal would be an intelligent being; for the
result of a simple act of comparison is judgment, and reasoning is only
a double act of comparison. We have the authority of Sir William
Hamilton for saying that the highest function of mind is nothing higher
than comparison. Hence comes thought,--hence, the power of discovering
truth,--and hence, the mind's highest dignity, in being able to ascend
unassisted to the knowledge of a God. Those who hold that the minds of
the inferior animals are essentially of the same nature with that of
the human race, and differ only in degree, should reflect that the
distinguishing attribute of the human mind does not admit of degrees.
The faculty of comparison, in all its various applications, must be
either wholly denied or else wholly attributed. Hence, Pope is not
philosophical, when he applies the epithet "half-reasoning" to the
elephant. "As reasoning," says Coleridge, "consists wholly in a man's
power of seeing whether any two ideas which happen to be in his mind
are or are not in contradiction with each other, it follows of
necessity, not only that all men have reason, but that every individual
has it in the same degree." We gather also from the same acute writer
that in the simple determination, "black is not white," all the powers
are implied that distinguish man from other animals. If, then, the
brute reasoned at all, he would be a rational being, and would improve
and gain knowledge by experience; and, moreover, he would be a moral
agent, accountable for his conduct. "Would not the brute," asks an able
writer in the "Zoölogical Journal," "take a survey of his lower powers,
and would he not, as man does, either rightly use or pervert them, at
his pleasure?"

It has been suggested by some one, that, by the law of merciful
adaptation, which extends throughout the universe, thought would not be
imprisoned and pent up forever in an intelligence wanting the power of
expression. But it is also to be noticed that the want of an articulate
language or a system of general signs puts it out of the power of
animals to perform a single act of reasoning. The use of language to
communicate wants and feelings is not peculiar to "word-dividing men,"
though enjoyed by them in a much higher degree than by other animals.
Doubtless every species of social animals has some kind of language,
however imperfect it may be. "We never watch the busy workers of the
ant-hill," says Acheta Domestics, (the author of "Episodes of
Insect-Life,") "stopping as they encounter and laying their heads
together, without being pretty certain that they are saying to each
other something quite as significant as 'Fine day.'" And when the
morning wakes the choral song of the birds, they seem to be telling
each other of their happiness. But though animals have a language
appropriate to the expression of their sensations and emotions, they
have no words, "those shadows of the soul, those living sounds." Words
are symbols of thoughts, and may be considered as a revelation of the
human mind. It is this use of language as an instrument of thought, as
a system of general signs, which, according to Bishop Whately,
distinguishes the language of man from that of the brute; and the same
eminent authority declares that without such a system of general signs
the reasoning process could not be conducted.

It is true, that we often see in the inferior animals manifestations of
deductions of intellect similar to those of the human mind,--only that
they are not made by the animals themselves, but for them and above
their conscious perception. "When a bee," says Dr. Reid, "makes its
combs so geometrically, the geometry is not in the bee, but in that
great Geometrician who made the bee, and made all things in number,
weight, and measure." Since the animal is not conscious of the
intelligence and design which are manifested in its instincts, which it
obeys and works out, the conscious life of the individual must be
wholly a life within the senses. The senses alone can give the animal
only an empirical knowledge of the world of its observation. The senses
may register and report facts, but they can never arrive at an
understanding of necessary truths; the source of this kind of knowledge
is the rational mind, which has an active disposition to draw out these
infallible laws and eternal truths from its own bosom. The main
tendency of the rational mind is not towards mere phenomena, but their
scientific explanation. It seeks to trace effects, as presented to us
by the senses, back to the causes which produced them; or contemplating
things wholly metaphysical, it seeks to follow out the laws which it
has itself discovered, till they have gone through a thousand probable
contingencies and lost themselves in numberless results. It is on
account of this capacity and tendency of the human mind to look through
fact to law, through individuals to classes, through effects to causes,
through phenomena to general principles, that the late Dr. Burnap was
led to declare, in a very interesting course of lectures which he
delivered before the Lowell Institute a few years since, that he
considered the first characteristic difference between the highest
species of animals and the lowest race of man to be a capacity of
science. But is not the whole edifice of human science built upon the
simple faculty of comparison?

This is the ultimate analysis of all the highest manifestations of the
human mind, whether of judgment, or reason, or intellect, or common
sense, or the power of generalization, or the capacity of science. We
have already quoted Hamilton to this effect, and we, moreover, have his
authority for saying that the faculty of discovering truth, by a
comparison of the notions we have obtained by observation and
experience, is the attribute by which man is distinguished as a
creature higher than the animals. We might also cite Leibnitz to the
effect that men differ from animals in being capable of the formation
of necessary judgments, and hence capable of demonstrative sciences.

But notwithstanding it seems so apparent that what is customarily
called reason is the distinguishing endowment which makes man the
"paragon of animals," we very often meet with attempts to set up some
other distinction. We cannot here go into an examination of these
various theories, or even allude to them specially. We will, however,
briefly refer to a view which was recently advanced in one of our
leading periodicals, inasmuch as it makes prominent a distinction which
we wish to notice, although it seems to us to be only subordinate to
the distinguishing attribute of the human mind which we have already
pointed out. It is said that self-consciousness is what makes the great
difference between man and other animals; that the latter do not
separate themselves consciously from the world in which they exist; and
that, though they have emotions, impulses, pains, and pleasures, every
change of feeling in them takes at once the form of an outward change
either in place or position. It is not intended, however, to be said
that they have no conscious perception of external things. We cannot
possibly conceive of an animal without this condition of consciousness.
A consciousness of an outward world is an essential quality of the
animal soul; this distinguishes the very lowest form of animal life
from the vegetable world; and hence it cannot possibly be, as has been
suggested by some, that there are any animate beings which have no
endowments superior to those which belong to plants. The plant is not
conscious of an outward world, when it sends out its roots to obtain
the nourishment which is fitting for itself; but the polype, which is
fixed with hundreds of its kind on the same coral-stock, and is able
only to move its mouth and tentacles, is aware of the presence of the
little craw-fish upon which it feeds, and throws out its lasso-cells
and catches it. The world of which the polype has any perception is not
a very large one. The outer world of a bird is vastly greater; and man
knows a world without, which is immeasurably large beyond that of which
any other animal is conscious, because both his physical organs and his
mental faculties bring him into far the most diversified and intimate
relations with all created things. He sees in every flower of the
garden and every beast of the field, in the air and in the sea, in the
earth beneath his feet and in the starry heavens above him, countless
meanings which are hidden to all the living world besides. To him there
is a world which has existed and a world that will exist. "Man," says
Protagoras, "is the measure of the universe." But he has a greater
dignity in being able to apprehend the world of thought within. "Whilst
I study to find how I am a microcosm or little world," says Sir Thomas
Browne, "I find myself something more than the great." Man can make
himself an object to himself and gain the deepest insight into the
workings of his own mind. This internal perception seems never to be
developed in other animals. We have already observed that they have no
thought of their own. The intelligence and design which they often
manifest in their actions are not the workings of their own minds. The
intelligence and design belong to Him who impressed the thought upon
the animal's mind and unceasingly sustains it in action. They
themselves are not conscious of any thought, but only of "certain dim
imperious influences" which urge them on. They are conscious of
feelings and desires and impulses. We could not conceive of the
existence of these affections in animals without their having an
immediate knowledge of them. Even "the function of voluntary motion,"
says Hamilton, "which is a function of the animal soul in the
Peripatetic doctrine, ought not, as is generally done, to be excluded
from the phenomena of consciousness and mind." The conscious life of
the irrational tribes seems, then, to be a life almost wholly within
the senses. They have nothing of that higher conscious personality
which belongs to man and is an attribute of a free intellect.

A general statement of the points made out in the foregoing inquiry
will more clearly show our conception of the nature and limitations of
instinct. First, we limited the word instinct so as to exclude all
those automatic and mechanical actions concerned in the simple
functions of organic life,--as also to exclude the operations of the
passions and appetites, since these seek no other end than their own
gratification. Then it was shown that instinct exists prior to all
experience or memory; that it comes to an instant or speedy perfection,
and is not capable of any improvement or cultivation; that its objects
are precise and limited; that within its proper sphere it often appears
as the highest wisdom, but beyond this is only foolishness; that it
uses complex and laborious means to provide for the future, without any
prescience of it; that it performs important and rational operations
which the animal neither intends nor knows anything about; that it is
permanent for each species, and is transmitted as an hereditary gift of
Nature; and that the few variations in its action result from the
development of provisional faculties, or from blind imitation. We were
led to conclude that instinct is not a free and conscious possession of
the animal itself. We found some points of resemblance between
intelligence in man and instinct in other animals,--but at the same
time points of dissimilarity, such as to make the two principles appear
radically unlike.

This brief summary presents nearly all that we can satisfactorily make
out respecting instinct; and at the same time it shows how much is
still wanting to a complete solution of all the questions which it
involves. And then there are higher mysteries connected with the
subject, which we do not attempt to penetrate,--mysteries in regard to
the creation and the maintenance of instinctive action: whether it be
the result of particular external conditions acting on the organization
of animals, or whether, as Sir Isaac Newton thought, the Deity himself
is virtually the active and present moving principle in them;--and
mysteries, too, about the future of the brute world: whether, as
Southey wrote,

        "There is another world
For all that live and move,--a better world."

If we ever find a path which seems about to lead us up to these
mysteries, it speedily closes against us, and leaves us without any
rational hope of attaining their solution.




MY OWN STORY.


"Oh, tell her, brief is life, but love is long."

"What have I got that you would like to have? Your letters are tied up
and directed to you. Mother will give them to you, when she finds them
in my desk. I could execute my last will myself, if it were not for
giving her additional pain. I will leave everything for her to do
except this: take these letters, and when I am dead, give them to
Frank. There is not a reproach in them, and they are full of wit; but
he won't laugh, when he reads them again. Choose now, what will you
have of mine?"

"Well," I said, "give me the gold pen-holder that Redmond sent you
after he went away."

Laura rose up in her bed, and seized me by my shoulder, and shook me,
crying between her teeth, "You love him! you love him!" Then she fell
back on her pillow. "Oh, if he were here now! He went, I say, to marry
the woman he was engaged to before he saw you. He was nearly mad,
though, when he went. The night mother gave them their last party, when
you wore your black lace dress, and had pink roses in your hair,
somehow I hardly knew you that night. I was in the little parlor,
looking at the flowers on the mantelpiece, when Redmond came into the
room, and, rushing up to me, bent down and whispered, 'Did you see her
go? I shall see her no more; she is walking on the beach with Maurice.'
He sighed so loud that I felt embarrassed; for I was afraid that Harry
Lothrop, who was laughing and talking in a corner with two or three
men, would hear him; but he was not aware that they were there. I did
not know what to do, unless I ridiculed him. 'Follow them,' I said.
'Step on her flounces, and Maurice will have a chance to humiliate you
with some of his cutting, exquisite politeness.' He never answered a
word, and I would not look at him, but presently I understood that
there were tears falling. Oh, you need not look towards me with such
longing; he does not cry for you now. They seemed to bring him to his
senses. He stamped his foot; but the carpet was thick; it only made a
thud. Then he buttoned his coat, giving himself a violent twist as he
did it, and looked at me with such a haughty composure, that, if I had
been you, I should have trembled in my shoes. He walked across the room
toward the group of men.--'Ah, Harry,' he said, 'where is Maurice?'
'Don't you know?' they all cried out; 'he has gone as Miss Denham's
escort?' 'By Jove!' said Harry Lothrop,--'Miss Denham was as handsome
as Cleopatra, to-night. Little Maurice is now singing to her. Did he
take his guitar under his arm? It was here; for I saw a green bag near
his hat, when we came in to-night.' Just then we heard the twang of a
guitar under the window, and Redmond, in spite of himself, could not
help a grimace.--Is it not a droll world?" said Laura, after a pause;
"things come about so contrariwise."

She laughed such a shrill laugh, that I shuddered to hear it, and I
fell a-crying.  "But," she continued, "I am going, I trust, where a key
will be given me for this cipher."

Tears came into her eyes, and an expression of gentleness filled her
face.

"It is strange," she said, "when I know that I must die, that I should
be so moved by earthly passions and so interested in earthly
speculations. My heart supplicates God for peace and patience, and at
the same moment my thoughts float away in dreams of the past. I shall
soon be wiser; I am convinced of that. The doctrine of compensation
extends beyond this world; if it be not so, why should I die at twenty,
with all this mysterious suffering of soul? You must not wonder over
me, when I am gone, and ask yourself, 'Why did she live?' Believe that
I shall know why I lived, and let it suffice you and encourage you to
go on bravely. Live and make your powers felt. Your nature is affluent,
and you may yet learn how to be happy."

She sighed softly, and turned her face to the wall, and moved her
fingers as sick people do. She waited for me to cease weeping: my tears
rained over my face so that I could neither see nor speak.

After I had become calmer, she moved toward me again and took my hand:
her own trembled.

"It is for the last time, Margaret. My good, skilful father gives me no
medicine now. My sisters have come home; they sit about the house like
mourners, with idle hands, and do not speak with each other. It is
terrible, but it will soon be over."

She pulled at my hand for me to rise. I staggered up, and met her eyes.
Mine were dry now.

"Do not come here again. It will be enough for my family to look at my
coffin. I feel better to think you will be spared the pain."

I nodded.

"Good-bye!"

A sob broke in her throat.

"Margaret,"--she spoke like a little child,--"I am going to heaven."

I kissed her, but I was blind and dumb. I lifted her half out of the
bed. She clasped her frail arms round me, and hid her face in my bosom.

"Oh, I love you!" she said.

Her heart gave such a violent plunge, that I felt it, and laid her back
quickly. She waved her hand to me with a determined smile. I reached
the door, still looking at her, crossed the dark threshold, and passed
out of the house. The bold sunshine smote my face, and the insolent
wind played about me. The whole earth was as brilliant and joyous as if
it had never been furrowed by graves.

Laura lived some days after my interview with her. She sent me no
message, and I did not go to see her. From the garret-windows of our
house, which was half a mile distant from Laura's, I could see the
windows of the room where she was lying. Three tall poplar-trees
intervened in the landscape. I thought they stood motionless so that
they might not intercept my view while I watched the house of death.
One morning I saw that the blinds had been thrown back and the windows
opened. I knew then that Laura was dead.

The day after the funeral I gave Frank his letters, his miniature, and
the locket which held a ring of his hair.

"Is there a fire?" he asked, when I gave them to him; "I want to burn
these things."

I went to another room with him.

"I'll leave everything here to-day; and may I never see this cursed
place again! Did she die, do you know, because I held her promise that
she would be my wife?"

He threw the papers into the grate, and crowded them down with his
boot, and watched them till the last blackened flake disappeared. He
then took from his neck a hair chain, and threw that into the fire
also.

"It is all done now," he said.

He shook my hand with a firm grasp and left me.

A month later Laura's mother sent me a package containing two bundles
of letters. It startled me to see that the direction was dated before
she was taken ill:--"To be given to Margaret in case of my death.
June 5th, 1848." They were my letters, and those which she had
received from Harry Lothrop. On this envelop was written, "Put these
into the black box he gave you." The gold pen-holder came into my hands
also. _Departure_ was engraved on the handle, and Laura's initials were
cut in an emerald in its top. The black box was an ebony, gold-plated
toy, which Harry Lothrop had given me at the same time Redmond gave
Laura the pen-holder. It was when they went away, after a whole
summer's visit in our little town, the year before. I locked the
letters in the black box, and,

  "Whether from reason or from impulse only,"

I know not, but I was prompted to write a line to Harry Lothrop.  "Do
not," I said, "write Laura any more letters. Those you have already
written to her are in my keeping, for she is dead. Was it not a
pleasant summer we passed together? The second autumn is already at
hand: time flies the same, whether we are dull or gay. For all this
period what remains except the poor harvest of a few letters?"

I received in answer an incoherent and agitated letter. What was the
matter with Laura? he asked. He had not heard from her for months. Had
any rupture occurred between her and her friend Frank? Did I suppose
she was ever unhappy? He was shocked at the news, and said he must come
and learn the particulars of the event. He thanked me for my note, and
begged me to believe how sincere was his friendship for my poor friend.

"Redmond," he continued, "is, for the present, attached to the engineer
corps to which I belong, and he has offered to take charge of my
business while I am a day or two absent. He is in my room at this
moment, holding your note in his hand, and appears painfully
disturbed."

It was now a little past the time of year when Redmond and Harry
Lothrop had left us,--early autumn. After their departure, Laura and I
had been sentimental enough to talk over the events of their visit.
Recalling these associations, we created an illusion of pleasure which
of course could not last. Harry Lothrop wrote to Laura, but the
correspondence declined and died. As time passed on, we talked less and
less of our visitors, and finally ceased to speak of them. Neither of
us knew or suspected the other of any deep or lasting feeling toward
the two friends. Laura knew Redmond better than I did; at least, she
saw him oftener; in fact, she knew both in a different way. They had
visited her alone; while I had met them almost entirely in society. I
never found so much time to spare as she seemed to have; for everybody
liked her, and everybody sought her. As often as we had talked over our
acquaintance, she was wary of speaking of Redmond. Her last
conversation with me revealed her thoughts, and awakened feelings which
I thought I had buffeted down. The tone of Harry Lothrop's note
perplexed me, and I found myself drifting back into an old state of
mind I had reason to dread.

As I said, the autumn had come round. Its quiet days, its sombre
nights, filled my soul with melancholy. The lonesome moan of the sea
and the waiting stillness of the woods were just the same a year ago;
but Laura was dead, and Nature grieved me. Yet none of us are in one
mood long, and at this very time there were intervals when I found
something delicious in life, either in myself or the atmosphere.

  "Moreover, something is or seems
  That touches me with mystic gleams."

A golden morning, a starry night, the azure round of the sky, the
undulating horizon of sea, the blue haze which rose and fell over the
distant hills, the freshness of youth, the power of beauty,--all gave
me deep voluptuous dreams.

I can afford to confess that I possessed beauty; for half my faults and
miseries arose from the fact of my being beautiful. I was not vain, but
as conscious of my beauty as I was of that of a flower, and sometimes
it intoxicated me. For, in spite of the comforting novels of the Jane
Eyre school, it is hardly possible to set an undue value upon beauty;
it defies ennui.

As I expected, Harry Lothrop came to see me. The sad remembrance of
Laura's death prevented any ceremony between us; we met as old
acquaintances, of course, although we had never conversed together half
an hour without interruption. I began with the theme of Laura's illness
and death, and the relation which she had held toward me. All at once I
discovered, without evidence, that he was indifferent to what I was
saying; but I talked on mechanically, and like a phantasm the truth
came to my mind. The real man was there,--not the one I had carelessly
looked at and known through Laura.

I became silent.

He twisted his fingers in the fringe of my scarf, which had fallen off,
and I watched them.

"Why," I abruptly asked, "have I not known you before?"

He let go the fringe, and folded his hands, and in a dreamy voice
replied,--

"Redmond admires you."

"What a pity!" I said. "And you,--you admire me, or yourself, just now;
which?"

He flushed slightly, but continued with a bland voice, which irritated
and interested me.

"All that time I was so near you, and you scarcely saw me; what a
chance I had to study you! Your friend was intelligent and sympathetic,
so we struck a league of friendship: I could dare so much with her,
because I knew that she was engaged to marry Mr. Ballard. I own that I
have been troubled about her since I went away. How odd it is that I am
here alone with you in this room! how many times I have wished it! I
liked you best here; and while absent, the remembrance of it has been
inseparable from the remembrance of you,--a picture within a picture. I
know all that the room contains,--the white vases, and the wire
baskets, with pots of Egyptian lilies and damask roses, the books bound
in green and gold, the engravings of nymphs and fauns, the crimson bars
in the carpet, the flowers on the cushions, and, best of all, the
arched window and its low seat. But I had promised myself never to see
you: it was all I could do for Laura. She is dead, and I am here."

I rose and walked to the window, and looked out on the misty sea, and
felt strangely.

"Another lover," I thought,--"and Redmond's friend, and Laura's. But it
all belongs to the comedy we play."

He came to where I stood.

"I know you so well," he said,--"your pride, your self-control, even
your foibles: but they attract one, too. You did not escape heart-whole
from Redmond's influence. He is not married yet, but he will be; he is
a chivalrous fellow. It was a desperate matter between you two,--a
hand-to-hand struggle. It is over with you both, I believe: you are
something alike. Now may I offer you my friendship? If I love you, let
me say so. Do not resist me. I appeal to the spirit of coquetry which
tempted you before you saw me to-night. You are dressed to please me."

I was thinking what I should say, when he skilfully turned the
conversation into an ordinary channel. He shook off his dreamy manner,
and talked with his old vivacity. I was charmed a little; an
association added to the charm, I fancy. It was late at night when he
took his leave. He had arranged it all; for a man brought his carriage
to the door and drove him to the next town, where he had procured it to
come over from the railway.

When I was shut in my room for the night, rage took possession of me. I
tore off my dress, twisted my hair with vehemence, and hurried to bed
and tried to go to sleep, but could not, of course. As when we press
our eyelids together for meditation or sleep, violet rings and changing
rays of light flash and fade before the darkened eyeballs, so in the
dark unrest of my mind the past flashed up, and this is what I saw:--

The county ball, where Laura and I first met Redmond, Harry Lothrop,
and Maurice. We were struggling through the crowd of girls at the
dressing-room door, to rejoin Frank, who was waiting for us. As we
passed out, satisfied with the mutual inspection of our dresses of
white silk, which were trimmed with bunches of rose-geranium, we saw a
group of strangers close by us, buttoning their gloves, looking at
their boots, and comparing looks. Laura pushed her fan against my arm;
we looked at each other, and made signs behind Frank, and were caught
in the act, not only by him, but by a tall gentleman in the group which
she had signalled me to notice.

The shadow of a smile was travelling over his face as I caught his eye,
but he turned away so suddenly that I had no opportunity for
embarrassment. An usher gave us a place near the band, at the head of
the hall.

"Do not be reckless, Laura," I said,--"at least till the music gives
you an excuse."

"You are obliged to me, you know," she answered, "for directing your
attention to such attractive prey. Being in bonds myself, I can only
use my eyes for you: don't be ungrateful."

The band struck up a crashing polka, and she and Frank whirled away,
with a hundred others. I found a seat and amused myself by contrasting
the imperturbable countenances of the musicians with those of the
dancers. The perfumes the women wore floated by me. These odors, the
rhythmic motion of the dancers, and the hard, energetic music
exhilarated me. The music ended, and the crowd began to buzz. The loud,
inarticulate speech of a brilliant crowd is like good wine. As my
acquaintances gathered about me, I began to feel its electricity, and
grew blithe and vivacious. Presently I saw one of the ushers speaking
to Frank, who went down the hall with him.

"Oh, my prophetic soul!" said Laura, "they are coming."

Frank came back with the three, and introduced them. Redmond asked me
for the first quadrille, and Harry Lothrop engaged Laura. Frank said to
me behind his handkerchief,--"It's _en règle_; I know where they came
from; their fathers are brave, and their mothers are virtuous."

The quadrille had not commenced, so I talked with several persons near;
but I felt a constraint, for I knew I was closely observed by the
stranger, who was entirely quiet. Curiosity made me impatient for the
dance to begin; and when we took our places, I was cool enough to
examine him. Tall, slender, and swarthy, with a delicate moustache over
a pair of thin scarlet lips, penetrating eyes, and a tranquil air. My
antipodes in looks, for I was short and fair; my hair was straight and
black like his, but my eyes were blue, and my mouth wide and full.

"What an unnaturally pleasant thing a ball-room is!" he said,--"before
the dust rises and the lights flare, I mean. But nobody ever leaves
early; as the freshness vanishes, the extravagance deepens. Did you
ever notice how much faster the musicians play as it grows late? When
we open the windows, the fresh breath of the night increases the
delirium within. I have seen the quietest women toss their faded
bouquets out of the windows without a thought of making a comparison
between the flowers and themselves."

"My poor geraniums!" I said,--"what eloquence!"

He laughed, and answered,--

"My friend Maurice yonder would have said it twice as well."

We were in the promenade then, and stopped where the said Maurice was
fanning himself against the wall.

"May I venture to ask you for a waltz, Miss Denham? it is the next
dance on the card," said Maurice;--"but of course you are engaged."

I gave him my card, and he began to mark it, when Redmond took it, and
placed his own initials against the dance after supper, and the last
one on the list. He left me then, and I saw him a moment after talking
with Laura.

We passed a gay night. When Laura and I equipped for our ten miles'
ride, it was four in the morning. Redmond helped Frank to pack us in
the carriage, and we rewarded him with a knot of faded leaves.

"This late event," said Laura, with a ministerial air, after we had
started, "was a providential one. You, my dear Frank, were at liberty
to pursue your favorite pastime of whist, in some remote apartment,
without being conscience-torn respecting me. I have danced very well
without you, thanks to the strangers. And you, Margaret, have had an
unusual opportunity of displaying your latent forces. Three such
different men! But let us drive fast. I am in want of the cup of tea
which mother will have waiting for me."

We arrived first at my door. As I was going up the steps, Laura broke
the silence; for neither of us had spoken since her remarks.

"By the way, they are coming here to stay awhile. They are anxious for
some deep-sea fishing. They'll have it, I think."

I heard Frank's laugh of delight at Laura's wit, as the carriage drove
off.

It was our last ball that season.

It was late in the spring; and when Redmond came with his two friends
and settled at the hotel in our town, it was early summer. When I saw
them again, they came with Laura and Frank to pay me a visit. Laura was
already acquainted with them, and asked me if I did not perceive her
superiority in the fact.

"Let us arrange," said Harry Lothrop, "some systematic plan of
amusement by sea and land. I have a pair of horses, Maurice owns a
guitar, and Redmond's boat will be here in a few days. Jones, our
landlord, has two horses that are tolerable under the saddle. Let us
ride, sail, and be serenaded. The Lake House, Jones again, is eight
miles distant. This is Monday; shall we go there on horse-back
Wednesday?"

Laura looked mournfully at Frank, who replied to her look,--

"You must go; I cannot; I shall go back to business to-morrow."

I glanced at Redmond; he was contemplating a portrait of myself at the
age of fourteen.

"Shall we go?" Laura asked him.

"Nothing, thank you," he answered.

We all laughed, and Harry Lothrop said,--

"Redmond, my boy, how fond you are of pictures!"

Redmond, with an unmoved face, said,--

"Don't be absurd about my absent-mindedness. What were you saying?"

And he turned to me.

"Do you like our plan," I asked, "of going to the Lake House? There is
a deep pond, a fine wood, a bridge,--perch, pickerel,--a one-story inn
with a veranda,--ham and eggs, stewed quince, elderberry wine,--and a
romantic road to ride over."

"I like it."

Frank opened a discussion on fishing; Laura and I withdrew, and went to
the window-seat.

"I am light-hearted," I said.

"It is my duty to be melancholy," she replied; "but I shall not mope
after Frank has gone."

"'After them the deluge,'" said I. "How long will they stay?"

"Till they are bored, I fancy."

"Oh, they are going; we must leave our recess."

Frank and she remained; the others bid us good-night.

"I shall not come again till Christmas," he said. "These college-chaps
will amuse you and make the time pass; they are young,--quite suitable
companions for you girls. _Vive la bagatelle!_"

He sighed, and, drawing Laura's arm in his, rose to go. She groaned
loudly, and he nipped her ears.

"Good-bye, Margaret; let Laura take care of you. There is a deal of
wisdom in her."

We shook hands, Laura moaning all the while, and they went home.

Frank and Laura had been engaged three years. He was about thirty, and
was still too poor to marry.

Wednesday proved pleasant. We had an early dinner, and our cavalcade
started from Laura's. I rode my small bay horse Folly, a gift from my
absentee brother. His coat was sleeker than satin; his ears moved
perpetually, and his wide nostrils were always in a quiver. He was not
entirely safe, for now and then he jumped unexpectedly; but I had
ridden him a year without accident, and felt enough acquainted with him
not to be afraid.

Redmond eyed him.

"You are a bold rider," he said.

"No," I answered,--"a careful one. Look at the bit, and my whip, too. I
cut his hind legs when he jumps. Observe that I do not wear a long
skirt. I can slip off the saddle, if need be, without danger."

"That's all very well; but his eyes are vicious; he will serve you a
trick some day."

"When he does, I'll sell him for a cart-horse."

Laura and Redmond rode Jones's horses. Harry Lothrop was mounted on his
horse Black, a superb, thick-maned creature, with a cluster of white
stars on one of his shoulders. Maurice rode a wall-eyed pony. Our
friends Dickenson and Jack Parker drove two young ladies in a
carriage,--all the saddle-horses our town could boast of being in use.
We were in high spirits, and rode fast. I was occupied in watching
Folly, who had not been out for several days. At last, tired of tugging
at his mouth, I gave him rein, and he flew along. I tucked the edge of
my skirt under the saddle-flap, slanted forward, and held the bridle
with both hands close to his head. A long sandy reach of road lay
before me. I enjoyed Folly's fierce trotting; but, as I expected, the
good horse Black was on my track, while the rest of the party were far
behind. He soon overtook me. Folly snorted when he heard Black's step.
We pulled up, and the two horses began to sidle and prance, and throw
up their heads so that we could not indulge in a bit of conversation.

"Brute!" said Harry Lothrop,--"if I were sure of getting on again, I
would dismount and thrash you awfully."

"Remember Pickwick," I said; "don't do it."

I had hardly spoken, when the strap of his cap broke, and it fell from
his head to the ground. I laughed, and so did he.

"I can hold your horse while you dismount for it."

I stopped Folly, and he forced Black near enough for me to seize the
rein and twist it round my hand; when I had done so, Folly turned his
head, and was tempted to take Black's mane in his teeth; Black felt it,
reared, and came down with his nose in my lap. I could not loose my
hands, which confused me, but I saw Harry Lothrop making a great leap.
Both horses were running now, and he was lying across the saddle,
trying to free my hand. It was over in an instant. He got his seat, and
the horses were checked.

"Good God!" he said, "your fingers are crushed."

He pulled off my glove, and turned pale when he saw my purple hand.

"It is nothing," I said.

But I was miserably fatigued, and prayed that the Lake House might come
in sight. We were near the wood, which extended to it, and I was
wondering if we should ever reach it, when he said,--

"You must dismount, and rest under the first tree. We will wait there
for the rest of the party to come up."

I did so. Numerous were the inquiries, when they reached us. Laura,
when she heard the story, declared she now believed in Ellen Pickering.
Redmond gave me a searching look, and asked me if the one-story inn had
good beds.

"I can take a nap, if necessary," I answered, "in one of Mrs. Sampson's
rush-bottomed chairs on the veranda. The croak of the frogs in the pond
and the buzz of the bluebottles shall be my lullaby."

"No matter how, if you will rest," he said, and assisted me to remount.

We rode quietly together the rest of the way. After arriving, we girls
went by ourselves into one of Mrs. Sampson's sloping chambers, where
there was a low bedstead, and a thick feather-bed covered with a
patchwork-quilt of the "Job's Trouble" pattern, a small, dim
looking-glass surmounted by a bunch of "sparrow-grass," and an
unpainted floor ornamented with home-made rugs which were embroidered
with pink flower-pots containing worsted rose-bushes, the stalks,
leaves, and flowers all in bright yellow. We hung up our riding-skirts
on ancient wooden pegs, for we had worn others underneath them suitable
for walking, and then tilted the wooden chairs at a comfortable angle
against the wall, put our feet on the rounds, and felt at peace with
all mankind.

"Alas!" I said, "it is too early for currant-pies."

"I saw," said one of the girls, "Mrs. Sampson poking the oven, and a
smell of pies was in the air."

"Let us go into the kitchen," exclaimed Laura.

The proposal was agreeable; so we went, and found Mrs. Sampson making
plum-cake.

"The pies are green-gooseberry-pies," whispered Laura,--"very good,
too."

"Miss Denham," shrieked Mrs. Sampson, "you haven't done growing
yet.--How's your mother and your grandmother?--Have you had a revival
in your church?--I heard of the young men down to Jones's,--our
minister's wife knows their fathers,--first-rate men, she says.--I
thought you would be here with them.--'Sampson,' I said this morning, as
soon as I dressed, 'do pick some gooseberries. I'll have before sundown
twenty pies in this house.' There they are,--six gooseberry, six
custard, and, though it's late for them, six mince, and two awful great
pigeon pies. It's poor trash, I expect; I'm afraid you can't eat it;
but it is as good as anybody's, I suppose."

We told her we should devour it all, but must first catch some fish;
and we joined the gentlemen on the veranda. A boat was ready for us.
Laura, however, refused to go in it. It was too small; it was wet; she
wanted to walk on the bridge; she could watch us from that; she wanted
some flowers, too. Like many who are not afraid of the ocean, she held
ponds and lakes in abhorrence, and fear kept her from going with us.
Harry Lothrop offered to stay with her, and take lines to fish from the
bridge. She assented, and, after we pushed off, they strolled away.

The lake was as smooth and white as silver beneath the afternoon sun
and a windless sky; it was bordered with a mound of green bushes,
beyond which stretched deep pine woods. There was no shade, and we soon
grew weary. Jack Parker caught all the fish, which flopped about our
feet. A little way down, where the lake narrowed, we saw Laura and
Harry Lothrop hanging over the bridge.

"They must be interested in conversation," I thought; "he has not
lifted his line out of the water once."

Redmond, too, looked over that way often, and at last said,--

"We will row up to the bridge, and walk back to the house, if you,
Maurice, will take the boat to the little pier again."

"Oh, yes," said Maurice.

We came to the bridge, and Laura reached out her hand to me.

"Why, dear!" she exclaimed, "you have burnt your face. Why did you,"
turning to Redmond, "paddle about so long in the hot sun?"

Her words were light enough, but the tone of her voice was savage.
Redmond looked surprised; he waved his hand deprecatingly, but said
nothing. We went up toward the house, but Laura lingered behind, and
did not come in till we were ready to go to supper.

It was past sundown when we rose from the ruins of Mrs. Sampson's pies.
We voted not to start for home till the evening was advanced, so that
we might enjoy the gloom of the pine wood. We sat on the veranda and
heard the sounds of approaching night. The atmosphere was like powdered
gold. Swallows fluttered in the air, delaying to drop into their nests,
and chirped their evening song. We heard the plunge of the little
turtles in the lake, and the noisy crows as they flew home over the
distant tree-tops. They grew dark, and the sky deepened slowly into a
soft gray. A gentle wind arose, and wafted us the sighs of the pines
and their resinous odors. I was happy, but Laura was unaccountably
silent.

"What is it, Laura?" I asked, in a whisper.

"Nothing, Margaret,--only it seems to me that we mortals are always
riding or fishing, eating or drinking, and that we never get to living.
To tell you the truth, the pies were too sour. Come, we must go," she
said aloud.

Redmond himself brought Folly from the stable.

"We will ride home together," he said. "My calm nag will suit yours
better than Black. Why does your hand tremble?"

He saw my shaking hands, as I took the rein; the fact was, my wrists
were nearly broken.

"Nothing shall happen to-night, I assure you," he continued, while he
tightened Folly's girth.

He contrived to be busy till all the party had disappeared down a turn
of the road. As he was mounting his horse, Mrs. Sampson, who was on the
steps, whispered to me,--

"He's a beautiful young man, now!"

He heard her; he had the ear of a wild animal; he took off his hat to
Mrs. Sampson, and we rode slowly away.

As soon as we were in the wood, Redmond tied the bridles of the horses
together with his handkerchief. It was so dark that my sight could not
separate him from his horse. They moved beside me, a vague, black
shape. The horses' feet fell without noise in the cool, moist sand. If
our companions were near us, we could not see them, and we did not hear
them. Horses generally keep an even pace, when travelling at
night,--subdued by the darkness, perhaps,--and Folly went along without
swaying an inch. I dropped the rein on his neck, and took hold of the
pommel. My hand fell on Redmond's. Before I could take it away, he had
clasped it, and touched it with his lips. The movement was so sudden
that I half lost my balance, but the horses stepped evenly together. He
threw his arm round me, and recoiled from me as if he had received a
blow.

"Take up your rein," he said, with a strange voice,--"quick!--we must
ride fast out of this."

I made no reply, for I was trying to untie the handkerchief. The knot
was too firm.

"No, no," he said, when he perceived what I was doing, "let it be so."

"Untie it, Sir!"

"I will not."

I put my face down between the horses' necks and bit it apart, and
thrust it into my bosom.

"Now," I said, "shall we ride fast?"

He shook his rein, and we rode fiercely,--past our party, who shouted
at us,--through the wood,--over the brow of the great hill, from whose
top we saw the dark, motionless sea,--through the long street,--and
through my father's gateway into the stable-yard, where I leaped from
my horse, and, bridle in hand, said, "Good night!" in a loud voice.

Redmond swung his hat and galloped off.

Early next morning, Laura sent me a note:--

"DEAR MARGARET,--I have an ague, and mean to have it till Sunday night.
The pines did it. Did you bring home any needles? On Monday, mother
will give one of her whist-parties. I shall add a dozen or two of our
set; you will come.

"P.S. What do you think of Mr. Harry Lothrop? Good young man, eh?"

I was glad that Laura had shut herself up for a few days; I dreaded to
see her just now. I suffered from an inexplicable feeling of pride and
disappointment, and did not care to have her discover it. Laura, like
myself, sometimes chose to protect herself against neighborly
invasions. We never kept our doors locked in the country; the sending
in of a card was an unknown process there. Our acquaintances walked in
upon us whenever the whim took them, and it now and then happened to be
an inconvenience to us who loved an occasional fit of solitude. I
determined to keep in-doors for a few days also. Whenever I was in an
unquiet mood, I took to industry; so that day I set about arranging my
drawers, making over my ribbons, and turning my room upside down. I
rehung all my pictures, and moved my bottles and boxes. Then I mended
my stockings, and marked my clothes, which was not a necessary piece of
work, as I never left home. I next attacked the parlor,--washed all the
vases, changed the places of the furniture, and distressed my mother
very much. When evening came, I brushed my hair a good deal, and looked
at my hands, and went to bed early. I could not read then, though I
often took books from the shelves, and I would not think.

Sunday came round. The church-bells made me lonesome. I looked out of
the window many times that day, and, fixing on the sash one of my
father's ship-glasses, swept the sea, and peered at the islands on the
other side of the bay, gazing through their openings, beyond which I
could see the great dim ocean. Mother came home from church, and said
young Maurice was there, and inquired about me. He hoped I did not take
cold; his friend Redmond had been hoarse ever since our ride, and had
passed most of the time in his own room, drumming on the window-pane
and whistling dirges. Mother dropped her acute eyes on me, while she
was telling me this; but I yawned all expression from my face.

As Monday night drew near, my numbness of feeling began to pass off;
thought came into my brain by plunges. Now I desired; now I hoped. I
dressed myself in black silk, and wore a cape of black Chantilly lace.
I made my hair as glossy as possible, drew it down on my face, and put
round my head a band composed of minute sticks of coral. When all was
done, I took the candle and held it above my head and surveyed myself
in the glass. I was very pale. The pupils of my eyes were dilated, as
if I had received some impression that would not pass away. My lips had
the redness of youth; their color was deepened by my paleness.

"How handsome I am!" I thought, as I set down the candle.

When I entered Laura's parlor, she came toward me and said,--

"Artful creature! you knew well, this warm night, that every girl of us
would wear a light dress; so you wore a black one. How well you
understand such matters! You are very clever; your real sensibility
adds effect to your cleverness. I see how it is. Come into this corner.
Have you got a fan? Good gracious! black, with gold spangles;--where
_do_ you buy your things? I can tell you now," she continued, "my
conversation on the bridge the other day."

She hesitated, and asked me if I liked her new muslin. She did look
well in it; it was a white fabric, with red rose-buds scattered over
it. Her delicate face was shadowed by light brown curls. She was
attractive, and I told her so, and she began again:--

"Harry Lothrop said, as he was impaling the half of a worm,--

"'Redmond is a handsome fellow, is he not?'

"'He is too awfully thin,' I answered, 'but his eyes are good.'

"He gave me a crafty side-look, like that of a parrot, when he means to
bite your finger.

"'Your friend, too,' he added, 'is really one of the most beautiful
girls I ever saw,--a coquette with a heart.'

"'Let down your line into the water,' I said.

"He laughed a little laugh. By-the-by, there is an insidious tenacity
about Mr. Harry Lothrop which irritates me; but I like him, for I think
he understands women. I feel at ease with him, when he is not throwing
out his tenacious feelers. Then he said,--

"'Redmond is engaged to his cousin. The girl's mother had the charge of
him through his boyhood. He is ardently attached to her,--the mother, I
mean. She is most anxious to call Redmond her son.'

"'Didn't you have a bite?' I said.

"'Well, I think the bait is off the hook,' he answered; and then we
were silent and pondered the water.

"There are some people I must speak to,"--and Laura moved away without
looking at me.

I opened my fan, but felt chilly. A bustle near me caused me to raise
my eyes; Redmond was speaking to a lady. He was in black, too, and very
pale. He turned toward me and our eyes met. His expression agitated me
so that I unconsciously rose to my feet and warned him off with my fan;
but he seemed rooted to the spot. Laura took care of us both; she came
and stood between us. I saw her look at him so sweetly and so
mournfully, that he understood her in a moment. He shook his head and
walked abruptly into another room. Laura went again from me without
giving me a look. Maurice came up and I made room for him beside me. We
talked of the riding-party, and then of our first meeting at the ball.
He told me that Redmond's boat had arrived, and what a famous boat it
was, and "what jolly sprees we fellows had, cruising about with her." I
asked him about his guitar, and when we might hear him play. He grew
more chatty and began to tell me about his sister, when Redmond and
Harry Lothrop came over to us, which ended his chat.

The party was like all parties,--dull at first, and brighter as it grew
late. The old ladies played whist in one room, and the younger part of
the company were in another. Champagne was not a prevalent drink in our
village, but it happened that we had some that night.

"It may be a sinful beverage," said an old lady near me, "but it is
good."

Redmond opened a bottle for me, we clinked glasses, and drank to an
indefinite, silent wish.

"One more," he asked, "and let us change glasses."

Presently a cloud of delicate warmth spread over my brain, and gave me
courage to seek and meet his glance. There must have been an expression
of irresolution in my face, for he looked at me inquiringly, and then
his own face grew very sad. I felt awkward from my intuition of his
opinion of my mood, when he relieved me by saying something about
Shelley,--a copy of whose poems lay on a table near. From Shelley he
went to his boat, and said he hoped to have some pleasant excursions
with Laura and myself. He "would go at once and talk with Laura's
mother about them." I watched him through the door, while he spoke to
her. She was in a low chair, and he leaned his face on one hand close
to hers. I saw that his natural expression was one of tranquillity and
courage. He was not more than twenty-two, but the firmness of the lines
about his mouth belied his youth.

"He has a wonderful face," I thought, "and just as wonderful a will."

I felt my own will rise as I looked at him,--a will that should make me
mistress of myself, powerful enough to contend with, and resist, or
turn to advantage any controlling fate which might come near me.

"Do you feel like singing?" Harry Lothrop inquired. "Do you know
Byron's song, 'One struggle more and I am free'?"

"Oh, yes!" I replied,--"it is set to music which suits my voice. I will
sing it."

Laura had been playing polkas with great spirit. Since the Champagne,
the old ladies had closed their games of whist for talking, and, as it
was nearly time to go, the company was gay. There was laughing and
talking when I began, but silence soon after, for the wine made my
voice husky and effective. I sang as if deeply moved.

"Lord!" I heard Maurice say to Laura, as I rose from the piano, "what a
girl! she's really tragic."

I caught Harry Lothrop's eye, as I passed through the door to go
up-stairs; it was burning; I felt as if a hot coal had dropped on me.
Maurice ran into the hall and sprang upon the stair-railing to ask me
if he might be my escort home. That night he serenaded me. He was a
good-hearted, cheerful creature; conceited, as small men are apt to
be,--conceit answering for size with them,--but pleasantly so, and I
learned to like him as much as Redmond did.

The summer days were passing. We had all sorts of parties,--parties in
houses and out-of-doors; we rode and sailed and walked. Laura walked
and talked much with Harry Lothrop. We did not often see each other
alone, but, when we met, were more serious and affectionate with each
other. We did not speak, except in a general way, of Redmond and Harry
Lothrop. I did not avoid Redmond, nor did I seek him. We had many a
serious conversation in public, as well as many a gay one; but I had
never met him alone since the night we rode through the pines.

He went away for a fortnight. On the day of his return he came to see
me. He looked so glad, when I entered the room, that I could not help
feeling a wild thrill. I went up to him, but said nothing. He held out
both his hands. I retreated. An angry feeling rushed into my heart.

"No," I said, "Whose hand did you hold last?"

He turned deadly pale.

"That of the woman I am going to marry."

I smiled to hide the trembling of my lips, and offered my hand to him;
_but he waved it away_, and fell back on his chair, hurriedly drawing
his handkerchief across his face. I saw that he was very faint, and
stood against the door, waiting for him to recover.

"More than I have played the woman and the fool before you."

"Yes."

"I thought so. You seem experienced."

"I am."

"Forgive me," he said, gently; "being only a man, I think you can. Good
God!" he exclaimed, "what an infernal self-possession you show!"

"Redmond, is it not time to end this? The summer has been a long
one,--has it not?--long enough for me to have learned what it is to
live. Our positions are reversed since we have become acquainted. I am
for the first time forgetting self, and you for the first time remember
self. Redmond, you are a noble man. You have a steadfast soul. Do not
be shaken. I am not like you; I am not simple or single-hearted. But I
imitate you. Now come, I beg you will go."

"Certainly, I will. I have little to say."

August had nearly gone when Maurice told me they were about to leave.
Laura said we must prepare for retrospection and the fall sewing.

"Well," I said, "the future looks gloomy, and I must have some new
dresses."

Maurice came to see me one morning in a state of excitement to say we
were all going to Bird Island to spend the day, dine at the
light-house, and sail home by moonlight. Fifteen of the party were
going down by the sloop Sapphire, and Redmond had begged him to ask if
Laura and I would go in his boat.

"Do go," said Maurice; "it will be our last excursion together; next
week we are off. I am broken-hearted about it. I shall never be so
happy again. I have actually whimpered once or twice. You should hear
Redmond whistle nowadays. Harry pulls his moustache and laughs his oily
laughs, but he is sorry to go, and kicks his clothes about awfully. By
the way, he is going down in the sloop because Miss Fairfax is
going,--he says,--that tall young lady with crinkled hair;--he hates
her, and hopes to see her sick. May I come for you in the morning, by
ten o'clock? Redmond will be waiting on the wharf."

"Tell Redmond," I answered, "that I will go; and will you ask Harry
Lothrop not to engage himself for all the reels to Miss Fairfax?"

He promised to fulfil my message, and went off in high spirits. I
wondered, as I saw him going down the walk, why it was that I felt so
much more natural and friendly with him than with either of his
friends. I often talked confidentially to him; he knew how I loved my
mother, and how I admired my father, and I told him all about my
brother's business. He also knew what I liked best to eat and to wear.
In return, he confided his family secrets to me. I knew his tastes and
wishes. There was no common ground where I met Redmond and Harry
Lothrop. There were too many topics between Redmond and myself to be
avoided, for us to venture upon private or familiar conversation. Harry
Lothrop was an accomplished, fastidious man of the world, I dreaded
boring him, and so I said little. He was several years older than
Redmond, and possessed more knowledge of men, women, and books. Redmond
had no acquirements, he knew enough by nature, and I never saw a person
with more fascination of manner and voice.

The evening before the sailing-party, I had a melancholy fit. I was
restless, and after dark I put a shawl over my head and went out to
walk. I went up a lonesome road, beyond our house. On one side I heard
the water washing against the shore with regularity, as if it were
breathing. On the other side were meadows, where there were cows
crunching the grass. A mile farther was a low wood of oaks, through
which ran a path. I determined to walk through that. The darkness and a
sharp breeze which blew against me from limitless space made me feel as
if I were the only human creature the elements could find to contend
with, I turned down the little path into the deeper darkness of the
wood, sat down on a heap of dead leaves, and began to cry.

"Mine is a miserable pride," was my thought,--"that of arming myself
with beauty and talent and going through the world conquering! Girls
are ignorant, till they are disappointed. The only knowledge men
proffer us is the knowledge of the heart; it becomes us to profit by
it. Redmond will marry that girl. He must, and shall. I will empty the
dust and ashes of my heart as soon as the fire goes down: that is, I
think so; but I know that I do not know myself. I have two
natures,--one that acts, and one that is acted upon,--and I cannot
always separate the one from the other."

Something darkened the opening into the path. Two persons passed in
slowly. I perceived the odor of violets, and felt that one of them must
be Laura. Waiting till they passed beyond me, I rose and went home.

The next morning was cloudy, and the sea was rough with a high wind;
but we were old sailors, and decided to go on our excursion. The sloop
and Redmond's boat left the wharf at the same time. We expected to be
several hours beating down to Bird Island, for the wind was ahead.
Laura and I, muffled in cloaks, were placed on the thwarts and
neglected; for Redmond and Maurice were busy with the boat. Laura was
silent, and looked ill. Redmond sat at the helm, and kept the boat up
to the wind, which drove the hissing spray over us. The sloop hugged
the shore, and did not feel the blast as we did. I slid along my seat
to be near Redmond. He saw me coming, and put out his hand and drew me
towards him, looking so kindly at me that I was melted. Trying to get
at my handkerchief, which was in my dress-pocket, my cloak flew open,
the wind caught it, and, as I rose to draw it closer, I nearly fell
overboard. Redmond gave a spring to catch me, and the boat lost her
headway. The sail flapped with a loud bang. Maurice swore, and we
chopped about in the short sea.

"It is your destiny to have a scene, wherever you are," said Laura. "If
I did not feel desperate, I should be frightened. But these green,
crawling waves are so opaque, if we fall in, we shall not see ourselves
drown."

"Courage! the boat is under way," Maurice cried out; "we are nearly
there."

And rounding a little point, we saw the light-house at last. The sloop
anchored a quarter of a mile from the shore, the water being shoal, and
Redmond took off her party by instalments.

"What the deuse was the matter with you at one time?" asked Jack
Parker. "We saw you were having a sort of convulsion. Our cap'n said
you were bold chaps to be trifling with such a top-heavy boat."

"Miss Denham," said Redmond, "thought she could steer the boat as well
as I could, and so the boat lost headway."

Harry Lothrop gave Redmond one of his soft smiles, and a vexed look
passed over Redmond's face when he saw it.

We had to scramble over a low range of rocks to get to the shore.
Redmond anchored his boat by one of them. Bird Island was a famous
place for parties. It was a mile in extent. Not a creature was on it
except the light-house keeper, his wife, and daughter. The gulls made
their nests in its rocky borders; their shrill cries, the incessant
dashing of the waves on the ledges, and the creaking of the lantern in
the stone tower were all the sounds the family heard, except when they
were invaded by some noisy party like ours. They were glad to see us.
The light-house keeper went into the world only when it was necessary
to buy stores, or when his wife and daughter wanted to pay a visit to
the mainland.

The house was of stone, one story high, with thick walls. The small,
deep-set windows and the low ceilings gave the rooms the air of a
prison; but there was also an air of security about them: for, in
looking from the narrow windows, one felt that the house was a
steadfast ship in the circle of the turbulent sea, whose waves from
every point seemed advancing towards it. A pale, coarse grass grew in
the sand of the island. It was too feeble to resist the acrid breath of
the ocean, so it shuddered perpetually, and bent landward, as if
invoking the protection of its stepmother, the solid earth.

"It is perfect," said Redmond to me; "I have been looking for this spot
all my life; I am ready to swear that I will never leave it."

We were sitting in a window, facing each other. He looked out toward
the west, and presently was lost in thought. He folded his arms tightly
across his breast, and his eyes were a hundred miles away. The sound of
a fiddle in the long alley which led from the house to the tower broke
his reverie.

"We shall be uproarious before we leave," I said; "we always are, when
we come here."

The fun had already set in. Some of the girls had pinned up their
dresses, and borrowed aprons from the light-house keeper's wife, and
with scorched faces were helping her to make chowder and fry
fish. Others were arranging the table, assisted by the young men, who
put the dishes in the wrong places. Others were singing in the best
room. One or two had brought novels along, and were reading them in
corners. It was all merry and pleasant, but I felt quiet. Redmond
entered into the spirit of the scene. I had never seen him so gay. He
chatted with all the girls, interfering or helping, as the case might
be. Maurice brought his guitar, and had a group about him at the foot
of the tower-stairs. He sung loud, but his voice seemed to
fluctuate;--now it rang through the tower, now it was half overpowered
by the roar of the sea. His poetical temperament led him to choose
songs in harmony with the place, not to suit the company,--melancholy
words set to wild, fitful chords, which rose and died away according to
the skill of the player. I had gone near him, for his singing had
attracted me.

"You are inspired," I said.

He nodded.

"You never sung so before."

"I feel old to-day," he answered, and he swept his hands across all the
strings; "my ditties are done."

After dinner Laura asked me to go out with her. We slipped away unseen,
and went to the beach, and seated ourselves on a great rock whose outer
side was lapped by the water. The sun had broken through the clouds,
but shone luridly, giving the sea a leaden tint. The wind was going
down. We had not been there long, when Redmond joined us. He asked us
to go round the island in his boat. Laura declined, and said she would
sit on the rock while we went, if I chose to go. I did choose to go,
and he brought the boat to the rock. He hoisted the sail half up the
mast, and we sailed close to the shore. It rose gradually along the
east side of the island, and terminated in a bold ledge which curved
into the sea. We ran inside the curve, where the water was nearly
smooth. Redmond lowered the sail and the boat drifted toward the ledge
slowly. A tongue of land, covered with pale sedge, was on the left
side. Above the ledge, at the right, we could see the tower of the
light-house. Redmond tied down the helm, and, throwing himself beside
me, leaned his head on his hand, and looked at me a long time without
speaking. I listened to the water, which plashed faintly against the
bows. He covered his face with his hands. I looked out seaward over the
tongue of land; my heart quaked, like the grass which grew upon it. At
last he rose, and I saw that he was crying,--the tears rained fast.

"My soul is dying," he said, in a stifled voice; "I am not more than
mortal,--I cannot endure it."

I pointed toward the open sea, which loomed so vague in the distance.

"The future is like that,--is it not? Courage! we must drift through
it; we shall find something."

He stamped his foot on the deck.

"Women always talk so; but men are different. If there is a veil before
us, we must tear it away,--not sit muffled in its folds, and speculate
on what is behind it. Rise."

I obeyed him. He held me firmly. We were face to face.

"Look at me."

I did. His eyes were blazing.

"Do you love me?"

"No."

He placed me on the bench, hoisted the sail, untied the helm, and we
were soon ploughing round to the spot where we had left Laura; but she
was gone. On the rock where she was, perched a solitary gull, which
flew away with a scream as we approached.

That day was the last that I saw Redmond alone. He was at the party at
Laura's house which took place the night before they left. We did not
bid each other adieu.

After the three friends had gone, they sent us gifts of remembrance.
Redmond's keepsake was a white fan with forget-me-nots painted on it.
To Laura he sent the pen-holder, which was now mine.

We missed them, and should have felt their loss, had no deep feeling
been involved; for they gave an impetus to our dull country life, and
the whole summer had been one of excitement and pleasure. We settled by
degrees into our old habits. At Christmas, Frank came. He looked
worried and older. He had heard something of Laura's intimacy with
Harry Lothrop, and was troubled about it, I know: but I believe Laura
was silent on the matter. She was quiet and affectionate toward him
during his visit, and he went back consoled.

The winter passed. Spring came and went, and we were deep into the
summer when Laura was taken ill. She had had a little cough, which no
one except her mother noticed. Her spirits fell, and she failed fast.
When I saw her last, she had been ill some weeks, and had never felt
strong enough to talk as much as she did in that interview. She nerved
herself to make the effort, and as she bade me farewell, bade farewell
to life also. And now it was all over with her!

       *       *       *       *       *

I fell asleep at length, and woke late. It seemed as if a year had
dropped out of the procession of Time. My heart was still beating with
the emotion which stirred it when Redmond and I were together last.
Recollection had stung me to the quick. A terrible longing urged me to
go and find him. The feeling I had when we were in the boat, face to
face, thrilled my fibres again. I saw his gleaming eyes; I could have
rushed through the air to meet him. But, alas! exaltation of feeling
lasts only a moment; it drops us where it finds us. If it were not so,
how easy to be a hero! The dull reaction of the present, like a slow
avalanche, crushed and ground me into nothingness.

"Something must happen at last," I thought, "to amuse me, and make time
endurable."

What can a woman do, when she knows that an epoch of feeling is rounded
off, finished, dead? Go back to her story-books, her dress-making, her
worsted-work? Shall she attempt to rise to mediocrity on the piano or
in drawing, distribute tracts, become secretary of a Dorcas society? or
shall she turn her mind to the matter of cultivating another lover at
once? Few of us women have courage enough to shoulder out the corpses
of what men leave in our hearts. We keep them there, and conceal the
ruins in which they lie. We grow cunning and artful in our tricks, the
longer we practise them. But how we palpitate and shrink and shudder,
when we are alone in the dark!

After Redmond departed, I had locked up my feelings and thrown the key
away. The death of Laura, and the awakening of my recollections, caused
by the appearance of Harry Lothrop, wrenched the door open. Hitherto I
had acted with the bravery of a girl; I must now behave with the
resolution of a woman. I looked into my heart closely. No skeleton was
there, but the image of a living man,--_Redmond_.

"I love him," I confessed. "To be his wife and the mother of his
children is the only lot I ever care to choose. He is noble, handsome,
and loyal. But I cannot belong to him, nor can he ever be mine.

  "'Of love that never found his earthly close
  What sequel?'

"What did he do with the remembrance of me? He scattered it, perhaps,
with the ashes of the first cigar he smoked after he went from
me,--made a mound of it, maybe, in honor of Duty. I am as ignorant of
him as if he no longer existed; so this image must be torn away. I will
not burn the lamp of life before it, but will build up the niche where
it stands into a solid wall."

The ideal happiness of love is so sweet and powerful, that, for a
while, adverse influences only exalt the imagination. When Laura told
me of Redmond's engagement, it did but change my dream of what might be
into what might have been. It was a mirage which continued while he was
present and faded with his departure. Then my heart was locked in the
depths of will, till circumstance brought it a power of revenge. I
think now, if we had spoken freely and truly to each other, I should
have suffered less when I saw his friend. We feel better when the
funeral of our dearest friend is over and we have returned to the
house. There is to be no more preparation, no waiting; the windows may
be opened, and the doors set wide; the very dreariness and desolation
force our attention towards the living.

"Something will come," I thought; and I determined not to have any more
reveries. "Mr. Harry Lothrop is a pleasant riddle; I shall see him
soon, or he will write."

It occurred to me then that I had some letters of his already in my
possession,--those he had written to Laura. I found the ebony box, and,
taking from it the sealed package, unfolded the letters one by one,
reading them according to their dates. There was a note among them for
me, from Laura.

"When you read these letters, Margaret," it said, "you will see that I
must have studied the writer of them in vain. You know now that he made
me unhappy; not that I was in love with him much, but he stirred depths
of feeling which I had no knowledge of, and which between Frank, my
betrothed husband, and myself had no existence. But '_le roi s'amuse._'
Perhaps a strong passion will master this man; but I shall never know.
Will you?"

I laid the letters back in their place, and felt no very strong desire
to learn anything more of the writer. I did not know then how little
trouble it would be,--my share of making the acquaintance.

It was not many weeks before Mr. Lothrop came again, and rather
ostentatiously, so that everybody knew of his visit to me. But he saw
none of the friends he had made during his stay the year before. I
happened to see him coming, and went to the door to meet him. Almost
his first words were,--

"Maurice is dead. He went to Florida,--took the fever,--which killed
him, of course. He died only a week after--after Laura. Poor fellow!
did he interest you much? I believe he was in love with you, too; but
musical people are never desperate, except when they play a false
note."

"Yes," I answered; "I was fond of him. His conceit did not trouble me,
and he never fatigued me; he had nothing to conceal. He was a
commonplace man; one liked him, when with him,--and when away, one had
no thought about him."

"I alone am left you," said my visitor, putting his hat on a chair, and
slowly pulling off his gloves, finger by finger.

He had slender, white hands, like a woman's, and they were always in
motion. After he had thrown his gloves into his hat, he put his finger
against his cheek, leaned his elbow on the arm of his chair, crossed
his legs, and looked at me with a cunning self-possession. I glanced at
his feet; they were small and well-booted. I looked into his face; it
was not a handsome one; but he had magnetic eyes, of a lightish blue,
and a clever, loose mouth. It is impossible to describe him,--just as
impossible as it is for a man who was born a boor to attain the bearing
of a gentleman; any attempt at it would prove a bungling matter, when
compared with the original. He felt my scrutiny, and knew, too, that I
had never looked at him till then.

"Do you sing nowadays?" he asked, tapping with his fingers the keys of
the piano behind him.

"Psalms."

"They suit you admirably; but I perceive you attend to your dress
still. How effective those velvet bands are! You look older than you
did two years ago."

"Two years are enough to age a woman."

"Yes, if she is miserable. Can you be unhappy?" he asked, rising, and
taking a seat beside me.

There was a tone of sympathy in his voice which made me shudder, I knew
not why. It was neither aversion nor liking; but I dreaded to be thrown
into any tumult of feeling. I realized afterward more fully that it is
next to impossible for a passionate woman to receive the sincere
addresses of a manly man without feeling some fluctuation of soul.
Ignorant spectators call her a coquette for this. Happily, there are
teachers among our own sex, women of cold temperaments, able to
vindicate themselves from the imputation. They spare themselves great
waste of heart and some generous emotion,--also remorse and
self-accusations regarding the want of propriety, and the other
ingredients which go to make up a white-muslin heroine.

Harry Lothrop saw that my cheek was burning, and made a movement toward
me. I tossed my head back, and moved down the sofa; he did not follow
me, but smiled and mused in his old way.

And so it went on,--not once, but many times. He wrote me quiet,
persuasive, eloquent letters. By degrees I learned his own history and
that of his family, his prospects and his intentions. He was rich. I
knew well what position I should have, if I were his wife. My beauty
would be splendidly set. I was well enough off, but not rich enough to
harmonize all things according to my taste. I was proud, and he was
refined; if we were married, what better promise of delicacy could be
given than that of pride in a woman, refinement in a man? He brought me
flowers or books, when he came. The flowers were not delicate and
inodorous, but magnificent and deep-scented; and the material of the
books was stalwart and vigorous. I read his favorite authors with him.
He was the first person who ever made any appeal to my intellect. In
short, he was educating me for a purpose.

Once he offered me a diamond cross. I refused it, and he never asked me
to accept any gift again. His visits were not frequent, and they were
short. However great the distance he accomplished to reach me, he staid
only an evening, and then returned. He came and went at night. In time
I grew to look upon our connection as an established thing. He made me
understand that he loved me, and that he only waited for me to return
it; but he did not say so.

I lived an idle life, inhaling the perfume of the flowers he gave me,
devouring old literature, the taste for which he had created, and
reading and answering his letters. To be sure, other duties were
fulfilled, I was an affectionate child to my parents, and a proper
acquaintance for my friends. I never lost any sleep now, nor was I
troubled with dreams. I lived in the outward; all my restless activity,
that constant questioning of the heavens and the earth, had ceased
entirely. Five years had passed since I first saw Redmond. I was now
twenty-four. The Fates grew tired of the monotony of my life, I
suppose, for about this time it changed.

My oldest brother, a bachelor, lived in New York. He asked me to spend
the winter with him; he lived in a quiet hotel, had a suite of rooms,
and could make me comfortable, he said. He had just asked somebody to
marry him, and that somebody wished to make my acquaintance. I was glad
to go. My heart gave a bound at the prospect of change; I was still
young enough to dream of the impossible, when any chance offered itself
to my imagination; so I accepted my brother's invitation with some
elation.

I had been in New York a month. One day I was out with my future
sister, on a shopping raid; with our hands full of little paper
parcels, we stopped to look into Goupil's window. There was always a
rim of crowd there, so I paid no attention to the jostles we received.
We were looking at an engraving of Ary Scheffer's Françoise de Rimini.
"Not the worst hell," muttered a voice behind me, which I knew. I
started, and pulled Leonora's arm; she turned round, and the fringe of
her cloak-sleeve caught a button on the overcoat of one of the
gentlemen standing together. It was Redmond; the other was his
"ancient," Harry Lothrop. Leonora was arrested; I stood still, of
course. Redmond had not seen my face, for I turned it from him; and his
head was bent down to the task of disengaging his button.

  "'Each only as God wills
  Can work; God's puppets, best and worst,
  Are we; there is no last nor first,'"

I thought, and turned my head. He instinctively took off his hat, and
then planted it back on his head firmly, and looked over to Harry
Lothrop, to whom I gave my hand. He knew me before I saw him, I am
convinced; but his dramatic sense kept him silent,--perhaps a deeper
feeling. There was an expression of pain in his face, which impelled me
to take his arm.

"Let us move on, Leonora," I said; "these are some summer friends of
mine," and I introduced them to her.

My chief feeling was embarrassment, which was shared by all the party;
for Leonora felt that there was something unusual in the meeting. The
door of the hotel seemed to come round at last, and as we were going
in, Harry Lothrop asked me if he might see me the next morning.

"Do come," I answered aloud.

We all bowed, and they disappeared.

"What an elegant Indian your tall friend is!" said Leonora.

"Yes,--of the Camanche tribe."

"But he would look better hanging from his horse's mane than he does in
a long coat."

"He is spoiled by civilization and white parents. But, Leonora, stay
and dine with me, in my own room. John will not come home till it is
time for the opera. You know we are going. You must make me splendid;
you can torture me into style, I know."

She consented, provided I would send a note to her mother, explaining
that it was my invitation, and not her old John's, as she irreverently
called him. I did so, and she was delighted to stay.

"This is fast," she said; "can't we have Champagne and black coffee?"

She fell to rummaging John's closets, and brought out a dusty,
Chinese-looking affair, which she put on for a dressing-gown. She found
some Chinese straw shoes, and tucked her little feet into them, and
then braided her hair in a long tail, and declared she was ready for
dinner. Her gayety was refreshing, and I did not wonder at John's
admiration. My spirits rose, too, and I astonished Leonora at the table
with my chat; she had never seen me except when quiet. I fell into one
of those unselfish, unasking moods which are the glory of youth: I felt
that the pure heaven of love was in the depths of my being; my soul
shone like a star in its atmosphere; my heart throbbed, and I cried
softly to it,--"Live! live! he is here!" I still chatted with Leonora
and made her laugh, and the child for the first time thoroughly liked
me. We were finishing our dessert, when we heard John's knock. We
allowed him to come in for a moment, and gave him some almonds, which,
he leisurely cracked and ate.

"Somehow, Margaret," he said, "you remind me of those women who enjoy
the Indian festival of the funeral pile. I have seen the thing done;
you have something of the sort in your mind; be sure to immolate
yourself handsomely. Women are the deuse."

"Finish your almonds, John," I said, "and go away; we must dress."

He put his hand on my arm, and whispered,--

"Smother that light in your eyes, my girl; it is dangerous. And you
have lived under your mother's eye all your life! You see what I have
done,"--indicating Leonora with his eyebrows,--"taken a baby on my
hands."

"John, John!" I inwardly ejaculated, "you are an idiot."

"She shall never suffer what you suffer; she shall have the benefit of
the experience which other women have given me."

"Very likely," I answered; "I know we often serve you as pioneers
merely."

He gave a sad nod, and I closed the door upon him.

"Put these pins into my hair, Leonora, and tell me, how do you like my
new dress?"

"Paris!" she cried.

It was a dove-colored silk with a black velvet stripe through it. I
showed her a shawl which John had given me,--a pale-yellow gauzy fabric
with a gold-thread border,--and told her to make me up. She produced
quite a marvellous effect; for this baby understood the art of dress to
perfection. She made my hair into a loose mass, rolling it away from my
face; yet it was firmly fastened. Then she shook out the shawl, and
wrapped me in it, so that my head seemed to be emerging from a
pale-tinted cloud. John said I looked outlandish, but Leonora thought
otherwise. She begged him for some Indian perfume, and he found an
aromatic powder, which she sprinkled inside my gloves and over my shawl.

We found the opera-house crowded. Our seats were near the stage. John
sat behind us, so that he might slip out into the lobby occasionally;
for the opera was a bore to him. The second act was over; John had left
his seat; I was opening and shutting my fan mechanically, half lost in
thought, when Leonora, who had been looking at the house with her
lorgnette, turned and said,--

"Is not that your friend of this morning, on the other side, in the
second row, leaning against the third pillar? There is a
queenish-looking old lady with him. He hasn't spoken to her for a long
time, and she continually looks up at him."

I took her glass, and discovered Redmond. He looked back at me through
another; I made a slight motion with my handkerchief; he dropped his
glass into the lap of the lady next him and darted out, and in a moment
he was behind me in John's seat.

"Who is with you?" he asked.

"Brother," I answered.

"You intoxicate me with some strange perfume; don't fan it this way."

I quietly passed the fan to Leonora, who now looked back and spoke to
him. He talked with her a moment, and then she discreetly resumed her
lorgnette.

"What happened for two years after I left B.? The last year I know
something of."

"Breakfast, dinner, and tea; the ebb and flow of the tide; and the days
of the week."

"Nothing more?" And his voice came nearer.

"A few trifles."

"They are under lock and key, I suppose?"

"We do not carry relics about with us."

"There is the conductor; I must go. Turn your face toward me more."

I obeyed him, and our eyes met. His searching gaze made me shiver.

"I have been married," he said, and his eyes were unflinching, "and my
wife is dead."

All the lights went down, I thought; I struck out my arm to find
Leonora, who caught it and pressed it down.

"I must get out," I said; and I walked up the alley to the door without
stumbling.

I knew that I was fainting or dying; as I had never fainted, I did not
know which. Redmond carried me through the cloak-room and put me on a
sofa.

"I never can speak to him again," I thought, and then I lost sight of
them all.

A terribly sharp pain through my heart roused me, and I was in a
violent chill. They had thrown water over my face; my hair was matted,
and the water was dripping from it on my naked shoulders. The gloves
had been ripped from my hands, and Leonora was wringing my
handkerchief.

"The heat made you faint, dear," she said.

John was walking up and down the room with a phlegmatic countenance,
but he was fuming.

"My new dress is ruined, John," I said.

"Hang the dress! How do you feel now?"

"It is drowned; and I feel better; shall we go home?"

He went out to order the carriage, and Leonora whispered to me that she
had forgotten Redmond's name.

"No matter," I answered. I could not have spoken it then.

When John came, Leonora beckoned to Redmond to introduce himself. John
shook hands with him, gave him an intent look, and told us the carriage
was ready. Redmond followed us, and took leave of us at the
carriage-door.

Leonora begged me to stay at her house; I refused, for I wished to be
alone. John deposited her with her mother, and we drove home. He gave
me one of his infallible medicines, and told me not to get up in the
morning. But when morning came, I remembered Harry Lothrop was coming,
and made myself ready for him. As human nature is not quite perfect, I
felt unhappy about him, and rather fond of him, and thought he
possessed some admirable qualities. I never could read the old poets
any more without a pang, unless he were with me, directing my eye along
their pages with his long white finger! I never should smell tuberoses
again without feeling faint, unless they were his gift!

By the time he came I was in a state of romantic regret, and in that
state many a woman has answered, "Yes!" He asked me abruptly if I
thought it would be folly in him to ask me to marry him. The question
turned the tide.

"No," I answered,--"not folly; for I have thought many times in the
last two years, that I should marry you, if you said I must. But now I
believe that it is not best. You have pursued me patiently; your
self-love made the conquest of me a necessary pleasure. That was well
enough for me; for you made me feel all the while, that, if I loved
you, you were worth possessing. And you are. I like you. But my feeling
for you did not prevent my fainting away at the opera-house last night,
when Redmond told me that his wife was dead."

"So," he said, "the long-smothered fire has broken out again! Chance
does not befriend me. He saw you last night, and yielded. He said
yesterday he should not tell you. He asked me about you after we left
you, and wished to know if I had seen you much for the last year. I
offered him your last letter to read,--am I not generous?--but he
refused it.

"'When I see her,' he asked, 'am I at liberty to say what I choose?'

"On that I could have said, 'No.' Redmond and I have not seen each
other since the period of my first visit to you. He has been nursing
his wife in the mean time, taking journeys with her, and trying all
sorts of cures; and now he seems tied to his aunt and mother-in-law. He
was merely passing through the city with her, and this morning they
have gone again.--Well," after a pause, "there is no need of words
between us. I have in my possession a part of you. Beautiful women are
like flowers which open their leaves wide enough for their perfume to
attract wandering bees; the perfume is wasted, though the honey may be
hid."

"Alas, what a lesson this man is giving me!" I thought.

"Farewell, then," he said. He bit his lips, and his clenched hands
trembled; but he mastered his emotion. "You must think of me."

"And see you, too," I answered. "Everything comes round again, if we
live long enough. Dramatic unities are never preserved in life; if they
were, how poetical would all these things be! But Time whirls us round,
showing us our many-sided feelings as carelessly as a child rattles the
bits of glass in his kaleidoscope."

"So be it!" he replied. "Adieu!"

That afternoon I staid at home, and put John's room in order, and
cleaned the dust from his Indian idols, and was extremely busy till he
came in. Then I kissed his whiskers, and told him all my sins, and
cried once or twice during my confession. He petted me a good deal, and
made me eat twice as much dinner as I wanted; he said it was good for
me, and I obeyed him, for I felt uncommonly meek that day.

Soon after, Redmond sent me a long letter. He said he had been, from a
boy, under an obligation to his aunt, the mother of his wife. It was a
common story, and he would not trouble me with it. He was married soon
after Harry Lothrop's first visit to me, at the time they had received
the news of Laura's death. How much he had thought of Laura afterward,
while he was watching the fading away of his pale blossom! His aunt had
been ill since the death of her daughter, restless, and discontented
with every change. He hoped she was now settled among some old friends
with whom she might find consolation. In conclusion, he wrote,--"My
aunt noticed our hasty exit from the opera-house that night, when I was
brute enough to nearly kill you. I told her that I loved you. She now
feels, after a struggle, that she must let me go. 'Old women have no
rights,' she said to me yesterday. Margaret, may I come, and never leave
you again?"

My answer may be guessed, for one day he arrived. It was the dusk of a
cheery winter day, the time when home wears so bright a look to those
who seek it. It was an hour before dinner, and I was waiting for John
to come in. The amber evening sky gleamed before the windows, and the
fire made a red core of light in the room. John's sandal-wood boxes
gave out strange odors in the heat, and the pattern of the Persian rug
was just visible. A servant came to the door with a card. I held it to
the grate, and the fire lit up his name.

"Show him up-stairs," I said.

I stood in the doorway, and heard his step on every stair. When he
came, I took him by the hand, and drew him into the room. He was
speechless.

"Oh, Redmond, I love you! How long you were away!"

He kneeled by me, and put my arms round his neck, and we kissed each
other with the first, best kiss of passion.

John came in, and I reached out my hand to him and said, "This is my
husband."

"That's comfortable," he answered. "Won't you stay to dinner?"

"Oh, yes," replied Redmond; "this is my hotel."

"I see," said John.

But after dinner they had a long talk together. John sent me to my
room, and I was glad to go. I walked up and down, crying, I must say,
most of the time, asking forgiveness of myself for my faults, and
remembering Laura and Maurice,--and then thinking Redmond was mine,
with a contraction of the heart which threatened to stifle me.

John took us up to Leonora's that evening; he said he wanted to see if
Puss would be tantalized with the sight of such a beautiful romantic
couple just from fairy-land, who were now prepared "to live in peace."

We were married the next day in a church in a by-street. John was the
only witness, and flourished a large silk handkerchief, so that it had
the effect of a triumphal banner. Redmond put the ring on the wrong
finger,--a mistake which the minister kindly rectified. All I had new
for the occasion was a pair of gloves.

One morning after my marriage, when Redmond and John were smoking
together, I was turning over some boxes, for I was packing to go home
on a visit to our mother. I called Redmond to leave his pipe and come
to me.

"You have not seen any of my property. Look, here it is:--

"One bitten handkerchief.

"A fan never used.

"A gold pen-holder.

"A draggled shawl."

"Margaret," he said, taking my chin in his hand and bringing his eyes
close to mine, "I am wild with happiness."

"Your pipe has gone out," we heard John say.

       *       *       *       *       *

THE PLAYMATE.


  The pines were dark on Ramoth hill,
    Their song was soft and low;
  The blossoms in the sweet May wind
    Were falling like the snow.

  The blossoms drifted at our feet,
    The orchard birds sang clear;
  The sweetest and the saddest day
    It seemed of all the year.

  For, more to me than birds or flowers,
    My playmate left her home,
  And took with her the laughing spring,
    The music and the bloom.

  She kissed the lips of kith and kin,
    She laid her hand in mine:
  What more could ask the bashful boy
    Who fed her father's kine?

  She left us in the bloom of May:
    The constant years told o'er
  Their seasons with as sweet May morns.
    But she came back no more.

  I walk, with noiseless feet, the round
    Of uneventful years;
  Still o'er and o'er I sow the spring
    And reap the autumn ears.

  She lives where all the golden year
    Her summer roses blow;
  The dusky children of the sun
    Before her come and go.

  There haply with her jewelled hands
    She smooths her silken gown,--
  No more the homespun lap wherein
    I shook the walnuts down.

  The wild grapes wait us by the brook,
    The brown nuts on the hill,
  And still the May-day flowers make sweet
    The woods of Follymill.

  The lilies blossom in the pond,
    The bird builds in the tree,
  The dark pines sing on Ramoth hill
    The slow song of the sea.

  I wonder if she thinks of them,
    And how the old time seems,--
  If ever the pines of Ramoth wood
    Are sounding in her dreams.

  I see her face, I hear her voice:
    Does she remember mine?
  And what to her is now the boy
    Who fed her father's kine?

  What cares she that the orioles build
    For other eyes than ours,--
  That other hands with nuts are filled,
    And other laps with flowers?

  O playmate in the golden time!
    Our mossy seat is green,
  Its fringing violets blossom yet,
    The old trees o'er it lean.

  The winds so sweet with birch and fern
    A sweeter memory blow;
  And there in spring the veeries sing
    The song of long ago.

  And still the pines of Ramoth wood
    Are moaning like the sea,--
  The moaning of the sea of change
    Between myself and thee!




THE MAROONS OF SURINAM.


When that eccentric individual, Captain John Gabriel Stedman, resigned
his commission in the English navy, took the oath of abjuration, and
was appointed ensign in the Scots brigade employed for two centuries by
Holland, he little knew that "their High Mightinesses the States of the
United Provinces" would send him out, within a year, to the forests of
Guiana, to subdue rebel negroes. He never imagined that the year 1773
would behold him beneath the rainy season in a tropical country, wading
through marshes and splashing through lakes, exploring with his feet
for submerged paths, commanding impracticable troops and commanded by
an insufferable colonel, feeding on gree-gree worms and fed upon by
mosquitoes, howled at by jaguars, hissed at by serpents, and shot at by
those exceedingly unattainable gentlemen, "still longed for, never seen,"
the Maroons of Surinam.

Yet, as our young ensign sailed up the Surinam river, the world of
tropic beauty came upon him with enchantment. Dark, moist verdure was
close around him, rippling waters below; the tall trees of the jungle
and the low mangroves beneath were all hung with long vines and lianas,
a maze of cordage, like a fleet at anchor; odd monkeys travelled
ceaselessly up and down these airy paths, in armies, bearing their
young, like knapsacks, on their backs; macaws and humming-birds, winged
jewels, flew from tree to tree. As they neared Paramaribo, the river
became a smooth canal among luxuriant plantations, the air was perfumed
music, redolent of orange-blossoms and echoing with the songs of birds
and the sweet plash of oars; gay barges came forth to meet them; "while
groups of naked boys and girls were promiscuously playing and
flouncing, like so many tritons and mermaids, in the water." And when
the troops disembarked,--five hundred fine young men, the oldest not
thirty, all arrayed in new uniforms and bearing orange-flowers in their
caps, a bridal wreath for beautiful Guiana,--it is no wonder that the
Creole ladies were in ecstasy, and the boyish recruits little foresaw
the day, when, reduced to a few dozens, barefooted and ragged as
filibusters, their last survivors would gladly reëmbark from a country
beside which even Holland looked dry and even Scotland comfortable.

For over all that earthly paradise there brooded not alone its terrible
malaria, its days of fever and its nights of deadly chill, but the
worse shadows of oppression and of sin, which neither day nor night
could banish. The first object which met Stedman's eye, as he stepped
on shore, was the figure of a young girl stripped to receive two
hundred lashes, and chained to a hundred-pound-weight. And the few
first days gave a glimpse into a state of society worthy of this
exhibition,--men without mercy, women without modesty, the black man a
slave to the white man's passions, and the white man a slave to his
own. The present West Indian society in its worst forms is probably a
mere dilution of the utter profligacy of those days. Greek or Roman
decline produced nothing more debilitating or destructive than the
ordinary life of a Surinam planter, and his one virtue of hospitality
only led to more unbridled excesses and completed the work of vice. No
wonder that Stedman himself, who, with all his peculiarities, was
essentially simple and manly, soon became disgusted, and made haste to
get into the woods and cultivate the society of the Maroons.

The rebels against whom this expedition was sent were not the original
Maroons of Surinam, but a later generation. The originals had long
since established their independence, and their leaders were
flourishing their honorary silver-mounted canes in the streets of
Paramaribo. Fugitive negroes had begun to establish themselves in the
woods from the time when the colony was finally ceded by the English to
the Dutch, in 1674. The first open outbreak occurred in 1726, when the
plantations on the Seramica river revolted; it was found impossible to
subdue them, and the government very imprudently resolved to make an
example of eleven captives, and thus terrify the rest of the rebels.
They were tortured to death, eight of the eleven being women; this
drove the others to madness, and plantation after plantation was
visited with fire and sword. After a long conflict, their chief, Adoe,
was induced to make a treaty, in 1749. The rebels promised to keep the
peace, and in turn were promised freedom, money, tools, clothes, and,
finally, arms and ammunition.

But no permanent peace was ever made upon a barrel of gunpowder as a
basis, and of course an explosion followed this one. The colonists
naturally evaded the last item of the bargain, and the rebels,
receiving the gifts and remarking the omission of the part of Hamlet,
asked contemptuously if the Europeans expected negroes to subsist on
combs and looking-glasses? New hostilities at once began; a new body of
slaves on the Ouca river revolted; the colonial government was changed
in consequence, and fresh troops shipped from Holland; and after four
different embassies had been sent into the woods, the rebels began to
listen to reason. The black generals, Captain Araby and Captain Boston,
agreed upon a truce for a year, during which the colonial government
might decide for peace or war, the Maroons declaring themselves
indifferent. Finally the government chose peace, delivered ammunition,
and made a treaty, in 1761; the white and black plenipotentiaries
exchanged English oaths and then negro oaths, each tasting a drop of
the other's blood during the latter ceremony, amid a volley of
remarkable incantations from the black _gadoman_ or priest. After some
final skirmishes, in which the rebels almost always triumphed, the
treaty was at length accepted by all the various villages of Maroons.
Had they known that at this very time five thousand slaves in Berbice
were just rising against their masters and were looking to them for
assistance, the result might have been different; but this fact had not
reached them, nor had the rumors of insurrection in Brazil, among negro
and Indian slaves. They consented, therefore, to the peace. "They write
from Surinam," says the "Annual Register" for January 23, 1761, "that
the Dutch governor, finding himself unable to subdue the rebel negroes
of that country by force, hath wisely followed the example of Governor
Trelawney at Jamaica, and concluded an amicable treaty with them; in
consequence of which, all the negroes of the woods are acknowledged to
be free, and all that is past is buried in oblivion." So ended a war of
thirty-six years, and in Stedman's day the original three thousand Ouca
and Seramica Maroons had multiplied (almost incredibly) to fifteen
thousand.

But for the slaves not sharing in this revolt it was not so
easy to "bury the whole past in oblivion." The Maroons had told
some very plain truths to the white ambassadors, and had frankly
advised them, if they wished for peace, to mend their own
manners and treat their slaves humanely. But the planters learned
nothing by experience,--and indeed, the terrible narrations of Stedman
were confirmed by those of Alexander, so lately as 1831. Of course,
therefore, in a colony comprising eighty thousand blacks to four
thousand whites, other revolts were stimulated by the success of this
one. They reached their highest point in 1772, when an insurrection on
the Cottica river, led by a negro named Baron, almost gave the
finishing blow to the colony; the only adequate protection being found
in a body of slaves liberated expressly for that purpose,--a dangerous
and humiliating precedent. "We have been obliged to set three or four
hundred of our stoutest negroes free to defend us," says an honest
letter from Surinam in the "Annual Register" for September 5, 1772.
Fortunately for the safety of the planters, Baron presumed too much
upon his numbers, and injudiciously built a camp too near the
sea-coast, in a marshy fastness, from which he was finally ejected by
twelve hundred Dutch troops, though the chief work was done, Stedman
thinks, by the "black rangers" or liberated slaves. Checked by this
defeat, he again drew back into the forests, resuming his guerrilla
warfare against the plantations. Nothing could dislodge him;
bloodhounds were proposed, but the moisture of the country made them
useless; and thus matters stood when Stedman came sailing, amid
orange-blossoms and music, up the winding Surinam.

Our young officer went into the woods in the condition of Falstaff,
"heinously unprovided." Coming from the unbounded luxury of the
plantations, he found himself entering "the most horrid and
impenetrable forests, where no kind of refreshment was to be had,"--he
being provisioned only with salt pork and peas. After a wail of sorrow
for this inhuman neglect, he bursts into a gush of gratitude for the
private generosity which relieved his wants at the last moment by the
following list of supplies:--"24 bottles best claret, 12 ditto Madeira,
12 ditto porter, 12 ditto cider, 12 ditto rum, 2 large loaves white
sugar, 2 gallons brandy, 6 bottles muscadel, 2 gallons lemon-juice, 2
gallons ground coffee, 2 large Westphalia hams, 2 salted bullocks'
tongues, 1 bottle Durham mustard, 6 dozen spermaceti candles." The hams
and tongues seem, indeed, rather a poor halfpennyworth to this
intolerable deal of sack; but this instance of Surinam privation in
those days may open some glimpse at the colonial standards of comfort.
"From this specimen," moralizes our hero, "the reader will easily
perceive, that, if some of the inhabitants of Surinam show themselves
the disgrace of the creation by their cruelties and brutality, others,
by their social feelings, approve themselves an ornament to the human
species. With this instance of virtue and generosity I therefore
conclude this chapter."

But the troops soon had to undergo worse troubles than those of the
_commisariat_. The rainy season had just set in. "As for the negroes,"
said Mr. Klynhaus, the last planter with whom they parted, "you may
depend on never seeing a soul of them, unless they attack you off
guard; but the climate, the climate, will murder you all." Bringing
with them constitutions already impaired by the fevers and dissipation
of Paramaribo, the poor boys began to perish long before they began to
fight. Wading in water all day, hanging their hammocks over water at
night, it seemed a moist existence, even compared with the climate of
England and the soil of Holland. It was "Invent a shovel and be a
magistrate," even more than Andrew Marvell found it in the United
Provinces. In fact, Raynal evidently thinks that nothing but Dutch
experience in hydraulics could ever have cultivated Surinam.

The two gun-boats which held one division of the expedition were merely
old sugar-barges, roofed over with boards, and looking like coffins.
They were pleasantly named the "Charon" and the "Cerberus," but Stedman
thought that the "Sudden Death" and the "Wilful Murder" would have been
titles more appropriate. The chief duty of the troops consisted in
lying at anchor at the intersections of wooded streams, waiting for
rebels who never came. It was dismal work, and the raw recruits were
full of the same imaginary terrors which have haunted other heroes less
severely tested: the monkeys never rattled the cocoa-nuts against the
trees, but they all heard the axes of Maroon wood-choppers; and when a
sentinel declared, one night, that he had seen a negro go down the
river in a canoe, with his pipe lighted, the whole force was called to
arms--against a firefly. In fact, the insect race brought by far the
most substantial dangers. The rebels eluded the military, but the
chigres, locusts, scorpions, and bush-spiders were ever ready to come
half-way to meet them; likewise serpents and alligators proffered them
the freedom of the forests and exhibited a hospitality almost
excessive. Snakes twenty feet long hung their seductive length from the
trees; jaguars volunteered their society through almost impenetrable
marshes; vampire bats perched by night with lulling endearments upon
their toes. When Stedman describes himself as killing thirty-eight
mosquitoes at one stroke, we must perhaps pardon something to the
spirit of martyrdom. But when we add to these the other woes of his
catalogue,--prickly-heat, ring-worm, putrid-fever, "the growling of
Colonel Fougeaud, dry, sandy savannas, unfordable marshes, burning hot
days, cold and damp nights, heavy rains, and short allowance,"--we can
hardly wonder that three captains died in a month, and that in two
months his detachment of forty-two was reduced to a miserable seven.

Yet, through all this, Stedman himself kept his health. His theory of
the matter almost recalls the time-honored prescription of "A light
heart and a thin pair of breeches," for he attributes his good
condition to his keeping up his spirits and kicking off his shoes.
Daily bathing in the river had also something to do with it,--and,
indeed, hydropathy (this may not be generally known) was first learned
of the West India Maroons, who did their "packing" in wet clay,--and it
was carried by Dr. Wright to England. But his extraordinary personal
qualities must have contributed most to his preservation. Never did a
"meagre, starved, black, burnt, and ragged tatterdemalion," as he calls
himself, carry about him such a fund of sentiment, philosophy, poetry,
and art. He had a great faculty for sketching, as the engravings in his
volumes, with all their odd peculiarities, show; his deepest woes he
coined always into couplets, and fortified himself against hopeless
despair with Ovid and Valerius Flaccus, Pope's "Homer" and Thomson's
"Seasons." Above all reigned his passion for natural history, a ready
balm for every ill. Here he was never wanting to the occasion, and, to
do justice to Dutch Guiana, the occasion never was wanting to him. Were
his men sickening, the peccaries were always healthy without, and the
cockroaches within the camp; just escaping from a she-jaguar, he
satisfies himself, ere he flees, that the print of her claws on the
sand is precisely the size of a pewter dinner-plate; bitten by a
scorpion, he makes sure of his scientific description in case he should
expire of the bite; is the water undrinkable, there is at least some
rational interest in the number of legs possessed by the centipedes
which preoccupy it. This is the highest triumph of man over his
accidents, when he thus turns his pains to gains, and becomes an
entomologist in the tropics.

Meanwhile the rebels kept their own course in the forests, and
occasionally descended upon plantations beside the very river on whose
upper waters the useless troops were sickening and dying. Stedman
himself made several campaigns, with long intervals of illness, before
he came any nearer to the enemy than to burn a deserted village or
destroy a rice-field. Sometimes they left the Charon and the Cerberus
moored by grape-vines to the pine-trees, and made expeditions into the
woods single file. Our ensign, true to himself, gives the minutest
schedule of the order of march, and the oddest little diagram of
manikins with cocked hats, and blacker manikins bearing burdens. First,
negroes with bill-hooks to clear the way; then the van-guard; then the
main body, interspersed with negroes bearing boxes of ball-cartridges;
then the rear-guard, with many more negroes, bearing camp-equipage,
provisions, and new rum, surnamed "kill-devil," and appropriately
followed by a sort of palanquin for the disabled. Thus arrayed, they
marched valorously forth into the woods, to some given point; then they
turned, marched back to the boats, then rowed back to camp, and
straightaway went into the hospital. Immediately upon this, the coast
being clear. Baron and his rebels marched out again and proceeded to
business.

In the course of years, these Maroons had acquired their own peculiar
tactics. They built stockaded fortresses on marshy islands, accessible
by fords which they alone could traverse. These they defended further
by sharp wooden pins, or crows'-feet, concealed beneath the surface of
the miry ground,--and, latterly, by the more substantial protection of
cannon, which they dragged into the woods, and learned to use. Their
bush-fighting was unique. Having always more men than weapons, they
arranged their warriors in threes,--one to use the musket, another to
take his place, if wounded or slain, and a third to drag away the body.
They had Indian stealthiness and swiftness, with more than Indian
discipline; discharged their fire with some approach to regularity, in
three successive lines, the signals being given by the captain's horn.
They were full of ingenuity: marked their movements for each other by
scattered leaves and blazed trees; ran zigzag, to dodge bullets; gave
wooden guns to their unarmed men, to frighten the plantation negroes on
their guerrilla expeditions; and borrowed the red caps of the black
rangers whom they slew, to bewilder the aim of the others. One of
them, finding himself close to the muzzle of a ranger's gun, threw up
his hand hastily. "What!" he exclaimed, "will you fire on one of your
own party?" "God forbid!" cried the ranger, dropping his piece, and was
instantly shot through the body by the Maroon, who the next instant had
disappeared in the woods.

These rebels were no saints: their worship was obi-worship; the women
had not far outgrown the plantation standard of chastity, and the men
drank "kill-devil" like their betters. Stedman was struck with the
difference between the meaning of the word "good" in rebellious circles
and in reputable. "It must, however, be observed that what we Europeans
call a good character was by the Africans looked upon as detestable,
especially by those born in the woods, whose only crime consisted in
avenging the wrongs done to their forefathers." But if martial virtues
be virtues, such were theirs. Not a rebel ever turned traitor or
informer, ever flinched in battle or under torture, ever violated a
treaty or even a private promise. But it was their power of endurance
which was especially astounding; Stedman is never weary of paying
tribute to this, or of illustrating it in sickening detail; indeed, the
records of the world show nothing to surpass it; "the lifted axe, the
agonizing wheel" proved powerless to subdue it; with every limb lopped,
every bone broken, the victims yet defied their tormentors, laughed,
sang, and died triumphant.

Of course, they repaid these atrocities in kind. If they had not, it
would have demonstrated the absurd paradox, that slavery educates
higher virtues than freedom. It bewilders all the relations of human
responsibility, if we expect the insurrectionary slave to commit no
outrages; if slavery have not depraved him, it has done him little
harm. If it be the normal tendency of bondage to produce saints like
Uncle Tom, let us all offer ourselves at auction immediately. It is
Cassy and Dred who are the normal protest of human nature against
systems which degrade it. Accordingly, these poor, ignorant Maroons,
who had seen their brothers and sisters flogged, burned, mutilated,
hanged on iron hooks, broken on the wheel, and had been all the while
solemnly assured that this was paternal government, could only repay
the paternalism in the same fashion, when they had the power. Stedman
saw a negro chained to a red-hot distillery-furnace; he saw disobedient
slaves, in repeated instances, punished by the amputation of a leg, and
sent to boat-service for the rest of their lives; and of course the
rebels borrowed these suggestions. They could bear to watch their
captives expire under the lash, for they had previously watched their
parents. If the government rangers received twenty-five florins for
every rebel right-hand which they brought in, of course they risked
their own right-hands in the pursuit. The difference was, that the one
brutality was that of a mighty state, and the other was only the
retaliation of the victims. And after all, Stedman never ventures to
assert that the imitation equalled the original, or that the Maroons
had inflicted nearly so much as they had suffered.

The leaders of the rebels, especially, were men who had each his own
story of wrongs to tell. Baron, the most formidable, had been the slave
of a Swedish gentleman, who had taught him to read and write, taken him
to Europe, promised to manumit him on his return,--and then, breaking
his word, sold him to a Jew. Baron refused to work for his new master,
was publicly flogged under the gallows, fled to the woods next day, and
became the terror of the colony. Joli Coeur, his first captain, was
avenging the cruel wrongs of his mother. Bonny, another leader, was
born in the woods, his mother having taken refuge there just
previously, to escape from his father, who was also his master. Cojo,
another, had defended his master against the insurgents until he was
obliged by ill usage to take refuge among them; and he still bore upon
his wrist, when Stedman saw him, a silver band, with the inscription,--
"True to the Europeans." In dealing with wrongs like these, Mr. Carlyle
would have found the despised negroes quite as ready as himself to take
the total-abstinence pledge against rose-water.

In his first two months' campaign, Stedman never saw the trace of a
Maroon; in the second, he once came upon their trail; in the third, one
captive was brought in, two surrendered themselves voluntarily, and a
large party was found to have crossed a river within a mile of the
camp, ferrying themselves on palm-trunks, according to their fashion.
Deep swamps and scorching sands,--toiling through briers all day, and
sleeping at night in hammocks suspended over stagnant water, with
weapons supported on sticks crossed beneath,--all this was endured for
two years and a half, before Stedman personally came in sight of the
enemy.

On August 20th, 1775, the troops found themselves at last in the midst
of the rebel settlements. These villages and forts bore a variety of
expressive names, such as "Hide me, O thou surrounding verdure," "I
shall be taken," "The woods lament for me," "Disturb me, if you dare,"
"Take a tasting, if you like it," "Come, try me, if you be men," "God
knows me and none else," "I shall moulder before I shall be taken."
Some were only plantation-grounds with a few huts, and were easily laid
waste; but all were protected more or less by their mere situations.
Quagmires surrounded them, covered by a thin crust of verdure,
sometimes broken through by one man's weight, when the victim sank
hopelessly into the black and bottomless depths below. In other
directions there was a solid bottom, but inconveniently covered by
three or four feet of water, through which the troops waded
breast-deep, holding their muskets high in the air, unable to reload
them when once discharged, and liable to be picked off by rebel scouts,
who ingeniously posted themselves in the tops of palm-trees.

Through this delectable region Colonel Fougeaud and his followers
slowly advanced, drawing near the fatal shore where Captain Meyland's
detachment had just been defeated, and where their mangled remains
still polluted the beach. Passing this point of danger without attack,
they suddenly met a small party of rebels, each bearing on his back a
beautifully-woven hamper of snow-white rice: these loads they threw
down, and disappeared. Next appeared an armed body from the same
direction, who fired upon them once and swiftly retreated; and in a few
moments the soldiers came upon a large field of standing rice, beyond
which lay, like an amphitheatre, the rebel village. But between the
village and the field had been piled successive defences of logs and
branches, behind which simple redoubts the Maroons lay concealed. A
fight ensued, lasting forty minutes, during which nearly every soldier
and ranger was wounded, but, to their great amazement, not one was
killed. This was an enigma to them until after the skirmish, when the
surgeon found that most of them had been struck, not by bullets, but by
various substitutes, such as pebbles, coat-buttons, and bits of silver
coin, which had penetrated only skin-deep. "We also observed that
several of the poor rebel negroes, who had been shot, had only the
shards of Spa-water cans, instead of flints, which could seldom do
execution; and it was certainly owing to these circumstances that we
came off so well."

The rebels at length retreated, first setting fire to their village; a
hundred or more lightly built houses, some of them two stories high,
were soon in flames; and as this conflagration occupied the only neck
of land between two impassable morasses, the troops were unable to
follow, and the Maroons had left nothing but rice-fields to be
pillaged. That night the military force was encamped in the woods;
their ammunition was almost gone; so they were ordered to lie flat on
the ground, even in case of attack; they could not so much as build a
fire. Before midnight an attack was made on them, partly with bullets
and partly with words; the Maroons were all around them in the forest,
but their object was a puzzle: they spent most of the night in bandying
compliments with the black rangers, whom they alternately denounced,
ridiculed, and challenged to single combat. At last Fougeaud and
Stedman joined in the conversation, and endeavored to make this
midnight volley of talk the occasion for a treaty. This was received
with inextinguishable laughter, which echoed through the woods like a
concert of screech-owls, ending in a _charivari_ of horns and
hallooing. The Colonel, persisting, offered them "life, liberty,
victuals, drink, and all they wanted"; in return, they ridiculed him
unmercifully: he was a half-starved Frenchman, who had run away from
his own country, and would soon run away from theirs; they profoundly
pitied him and his soldiers; they would scorn to spend powder on such
scarecrows; they would rather feed and clothe them, as being poor white
slaves, hired to be shot at and starved for four-pence a day. But as
for the planters, overseers, and rangers, they should die, every one of
them, and Bonny should be governor of the colony. "After this, they
tinkled their bill-hooks, fired a volley, and gave three cheers; which
being answered by the rangers, the clamor ended, and the rebels
dispersed with the rising sun."

Very aimless nonsense it certainly appeared. But the next day put a new
aspect on it; for it was found, that, under cover of all this noise,
the Maroons had been busily occupied all night, men, women, and
children, in preparing and filling great hampers of the finest rice,
yams, and cassava, from the adjacent provision-grounds, to be used for
subsistence during their escape, leaving only chaff and refuse for the
hungry soldiers. "This was certainly such a masterly trait of
generalship in a savage people, whom we affected to despise, as would
have done honor to any European commander."

From this time the Maroons fulfilled their threats. Shooting down
without mercy every black ranger who came within their reach,--one of
these rangers being, in Stedman's estimate, worth six white
soldiers,--they left Colonel Fougeaud and his regulars to die of
starvation and fatigue. The enraged Colonel, "finding himself thus
foiled by a naked negro, swore he would pursue Bonny to the world's
end." But he never got any nearer than to Bonny's kitchen-gardens. He
put the troops on half-allowance, sent back for provisions and
ammunition,--and within ten days changed his mind, and retreated to the
settlements in despair. Soon after, this very body of rebels, under
Bonny's leadership, plundered two plantations in the vicinity, and
nearly captured a powder-magazine, which was, however, successfully
defended by some armed slaves.

For a year longer these expeditions continued. The troops never gained
a victory, and they lost twenty men for every rebel killed; but they
gradually checked the plunder of plantations, destroyed villages and
planting-grounds, and drove the rebels, for the time at least, into the
deeper recesses of the woods or into the adjacent province of Cayenne.
They had the slight satisfaction of burning Bonny's own house, a
two-story wooden hut, built in the fashion of our frontier
guard-houses. They often took single prisoners,--some child, born and
bred in the woods, and frightened equally by the first sight of a white
man and of a cow,--or some warrior, who, on being threatened with
torture, stretched forth both hands in disdain, and said, with Indian
eloquence,--"These hands have made tigers tremble." As for Stedman, he
still went bare-footed, still quarrelled with his colonel, still
sketched the scenery and described the reptiles, still reared gree-gree
worms for his private kitchen, still quoted good poetry and wrote
execrable, still pitied all the sufferers around him, black, white, and
red, until finally he and his comrades were ordered back to Holland in
1776.

Among all that wasted regiment of weary and broken-down men, there was
probably no one but Stedman who looked backward with longing as they
sailed down the lovely Surinam. True, he bore all his precious
collections with him,--parrots and butterflies, drawings on the backs
of old letters, and journals kept on bones and cartridges. But he had
left behind him a dearer treasure; for there runs through all his
eccentric narrative a single thread of pure romance, in his love for
his beautiful quadroon wife and his only son.

Within a month after his arrival in the colony, our susceptible ensign
first saw Joanna, a slave-girl of fifteen, at the house of an intimate
friend. Her extreme beauty and modesty first fascinated him, and then
her piteous narrative,--for she was the daughter of a planter, who had
just gone mad and died in despair from the discovery that he could not
legally emancipate his own children from slavery. Soon after, Stedman
was dangerously ill, was neglected and alone; fruits and cordials were
anonymously sent to him, which proved at last to have come from Joanna,
and she came herself, ere long, and nursed him, grateful for the
visible sympathy he had shown to her. This completed the conquest; the
passionate young Englishman, once recovered, loaded her with presents,
which she refused,--talked of purchasing her and educating her in
Europe, which she also declined, as burdening him too greatly,--and
finally, amid the ridicule of all good society in Paramaribo,
surmounted all legal obstacles and was united to the beautiful girl in
honorable marriage. He provided a cottage for her, where he spent his
furloughs, in perfect happiness, for four years.

The simple idyl of their loves was unbroken by any stain or
disappointment, and yet always shadowed with the deepest anxiety for
the future. Though treated with the utmost indulgence, she was legally
a slave, and so was the boy of whom she became the mother. Cojo, her
uncle, was a captain among the rebels against whom her husband fought.
And up to the time when Stedman was ordered back to Holland, he was
unable to purchase her freedom, nor could he, until the very last
moment, procure the emancipation of his boy. His perfect delight at
this last triumph, when obtained, elicited some satire from his white
friends. "While the well-thinking few highly applauded my sensibility,
many not only blamed, but publicly derided me for my paternal
affection, which was called a weakness, a whim." "Nearly forty
beautiful boys and girls were left to perpetual slavery by their
parents of my acquaintance, and many of them without being so much as
once inquired after at all."

But Stedman was a true-hearted fellow, if his sentiment did sometimes
run to rodomontade; he left his Joanna only in the hope that a year or
two in Europe would repair his ruined fortunes, and he could return to
treat himself to the purchase of his own wedded wife. He describes,
with unaffected pathos, their parting scene,--though, indeed, there
were several successive partings,--and closes the description in a
manner worthy of that remarkable combination of enthusiasms which
characterized him. "My melancholy having surpassed all description, I
at last determined to weather one or two painful years in her absence;
and in the afternoon went to dissipate my mind at a Mr. Roux' cabinet
of Indian curiosities; where as my eye chanced to fall on a
rattlesnake, I will, before I leave the colony, describe this dangerous
reptile."

It was impossible to write the history of the Maroons of Surinam except
through the biography of our Ensign, (at last promoted Captain,)
because nearly all we know of them is through his quaint and
picturesque narrative, with its profuse illustrations by his own hand.
It is not fair, therefore, to end without chronicling his safe arrival
in Holland, on June 3d, 1777. It is a remarkable fact, that, after his
life in the woods, even the Dutch looked slovenly to his eyes. "The
inhabitants, who crowded about us, appeared but a disgusting assemblage
of ill-formed and ill-dressed rabble,--so much had my prejudices been
changed by living among Indians and blacks: their eyes seemed to
resemble those of a pig; their complexions were like the color of foul
linen; they seemed to have no teeth, and to be covered over with rags
and dirt. This prejudice, however, was not against these people only,
but against all Europeans in general, when compared to the sparkling
eyes, ivory teeth, shining skin, and remarkable cleanliness of those I
had left behind me." Yet, in spite of these superior attractions, he
never recrossed the Atlantic; for his Joanna died soon after, and his
promising son, being sent to the father, was educated in England,
became a midshipman in the navy, and was lost at sea. With his elegy,
in which the last depths of bathos are sadly sounded by a mourning
parent,--who is induced to print them only by "the effect they had on
the sympathetic and ingenious Mrs. Cowley,"--the "Narrative of a Five
Years' Expedition" closes.

The war, which had cost the government forty thousand pounds a year,
was ended, and left both parties essentially as when it began. The
Maroons gradually returned to their old abodes, and, being unmolested
themselves, left others unmolested thenceforward. Originally three
thousand,--in Stedman's time, fifteen thousand,--they were estimated at
seventy thousand by Captain Alexander, who saw Guiana in 1831,--and a
recent American scientific expedition, having visited them in their
homes, reported them as still enjoying their wild freedom, and
multiplying, while the Indians on the same soil decay. The beautiful
forests of Surinam still make the morning gorgeous with their beauty,
and the night deadly with their chill; the stately palm still rears, a
hundred feet in air, its straight gray shaft and its head of verdure;
the mora builds its solid, buttressed trunk, a pedestal for the eagle;
the pine of the tropics holds out its myriad hands with water-cups for
the rain and dews, where all the birds and the monkeys may drink their
fill; the trees are garlanded with epiphytes and convolvuli, and
anchored to the earth by a thousand vines. High among their branches,
the red and yellow mockingbirds still build their hanging nests,
uncouth storks and tree-porcupines cling above, and the spotted deer
and the tapir drink from the sluggish stream below. The night is still
made noisy with a thousand cries of bird and beast; and the stillness
of the sultry noon is broken by the slow tolling of the _campañero_, or
bell-bird, far in the deep, dark woods, like the chime of some lost
convent. And as Nature is unchanged there, so apparently is man; the
Maroons still retain their savage freedom, still shoot their wild game
and trap their fish, still raise their rice and cassava, yams and
plantains,--still make cups from the gourd-tree and hammocks from the
silk-grass plant, wine from the palm-tree's sap, brooms from its
leaves, fishing-lines from its fibres, and salt from its ashes. Their
life does not yield, indeed, the very highest results of spiritual
culture; its mental and moral results may not come up to the level of
civilization, but they rise far above the level of slavery. In the
changes of time, the Maroons may yet elevate themselves into the one,
but they will never relapse into the other.




CIRCUMSTANCE.


She had remained, during all that day, with a sick neighbor,--those
eastern wilds of Maine in that epoch frequently making neighbors and
miles synonymous,--and so busy had she been with care and sympathy that
she did not at first observe the approaching night. But finally the
level rays, reddening the snow, threw their gleam upon the wall, and,
hastily donning cloak and hood, she bade her friends farewell and
sallied forth on her return. Home lay some three miles distant, across
a copse, a meadow, and a piece of woods,--the woods being a fringe on
the skirts of the great forests that stretch far away into the North.
That home was one of a dozen log-houses lying a few furlongs apart from
each other, with their half-cleared demesnes separating them at the
rear from a wilderness untrodden save by stealthy native or deadly
panther tribes.

She was in a nowise exalted frame of spirit,--on the contrary, rather
depressed by the pain she had witnessed and the fatigue she had
endured; but in certain temperaments such a condition throws open the
mental pores, so to speak, and renders one receptive of every
influence. Through the little copse she walked slowly, with her cloak
folded about her, lingering to imbibe the sense of shelter, the sunset
filtered in purple through the mist of woven spray and twig, the
companionship of growth not sufficiently dense to band against her the
sweet home-feeling of a young and tender wintry wood. It was therefore
just on the edge of the evening that she emerged from the place and
began to cross the meadow-land. At one hand lay the forest to which her
path wound; at the other the evening star hung over a tide of failing
orange that slowly slipped down the earth's broad side to sadden other
hemispheres with sweet regret. Walking rapidly now, and with her eyes
wide-open, she distinctly saw in the air before her what was not there
a moment ago, a winding-sheet,--cold, white, and ghastly, waved by the
likeness of four wan hands,--that rose with a long inflation and fell
in rigid folds, while a voice, shaping itself from the hollowness
above, spectral and melancholy, sighed,--"The Lord have mercy on the
people! The Lord have mercy on the people!" Three times the sheet with
its corpse-covering outline waved beneath the pale hands, and the
voice, awful in its solemn and mysterious depth, sighed, "The Lord have
mercy on the people!" Then all was gone, the place was clear again, the
gray sky was obstructed by no deathly blot; she looked about her, shook
her shoulders decidedly, and, pulling on her hood, went forward once
more.

She might have been a little frightened by such an apparition, if she
had led a life of less reality than frontier settlers are apt to lead;
but dealing with hard fact does not engender a flimsy habit of mind,
and this woman was too sincere and earnest in her character, and too
happy in her situation, to be thrown by antagonism merely upon
superstitious fancies and chimeras of the second-sight. She did not
even believe herself subject to an hallucination, but smiled simply, a
little vexed that her thought could have framed such a glamour from the
day's occurrences, and not sorry to lift the bough of the warder of the
woods and enter and disappear in their sombre path. If she had been
imaginative, she would have hesitated at her first step into a region
whose dangers were not visionary; but I suppose that the thought of a
little child at home would conquer that propensity in the most
habituated. So, biting a bit of spicy birch, she went along. Now and
then she came to a gap where the trees had been partially felled, and
here she found that the lingering twilight was explained by that
peculiar and perhaps electric film which sometimes sheathes the sky in
diffused light for very many hours before a brilliant aurora. Suddenly,
a swift shadow, like the fabulous flying-dragon, writhed through the
air before her, and she felt herself instantly seized and borne aloft.
It was that wild beast--the most savage and serpentine and subtle and
fearless of our latitudes--known by hunters as the Indian Devil, and he
held her in his clutches on the broad floor of a swinging fir-bough.
His long sharp claws were caught in her clothing, he worried them
sagaciously a little, then, finding that ineffectual to free them, he
commenced licking her bare white arm with his rasping tongue and
pouring over her the wide streams of his hot, fetid breath. So quick
had this flashing action been that the woman had had no time for alarm;
moreover, she was not of the screaming kind; but now, as she felt him
endeavoring to disentangle his claws, and the horrid sense of her fate
smote her, and she saw instinctively the fierce plunge of those
weapons, the long strips of living flesh torn from her bones, the
agony, the quivering disgust, itself a worse agony,--while by her side,
and holding her in his great lithe embrace, the monster crouched, his
white tusks whetting and gnashing, his eyes glaring through all the
darkness like balls of red fire,--a shriek, that rang in every forest
hollow, that startled every winter-housed thing, that stirred and woke
the least needle of the tasselled pines, tore through her lips. A
moment afterward, the beast left the arm, once white, now crimson, and
looked up alertly.

She did not think at this instant to call upon God. She called upon her
husband. It seemed to her that she had but one friend in the world;
that was he; and again the cry, loud, clear, prolonged, echoed through
the woods. It was not the shriek that disturbed the creature at his
relish; he was not born in the woods to be scared of an owl, you know;
what then? It mast have been the echo, most musical, most resonant,
repeated and yet repeated, dying with long sighs of sweet sound,
vibrated from rock to river and back again from depth to depth of cave
and cliff. Her thought flew after it; she knew, that, even if her
husband heard it, he yet could not reach her in time; she saw that
while the beast listened he would not gnaw,--and this she _felt_
directly, when the rough, sharp, and multiplied stings of his tongue
retouched her arm. Again her lips opened by instinct, but the sound
that issued thence came by reason. She had heard that music charmed
wild beasts,--just this point between life and death intensified every
faculty,--and when she opened her lips the third time, it was not for
shrieking, but for singing.

A little thread of melody stole out, a rill of tremulous motion; it was
the cradle-song with which she rocked her baby;--how could she sing
that? And then she remembered the baby sleeping rosily on the long
settee before the fire,--the father cleaning his gun, with one foot on
the green wooden rundle,--the merry light from the chimney dancing out
and through the room, on the rafters of the ceiling with their tassels
of onions and herbs, on the log walls painted with lichens and
festooned with apples, on the king's-arm slung across the shelf with
the old pirate's-cutlass, on the snow-pile of the bed, and on the great
brass clock,--dancing, too, and lingering on the baby, with his fringed
gentian eyes, his chubby fists clenched on the pillow, and his fine
breezy hair fanning with the motion of his father's foot. All this
struck her in one, and made a sob of her breath, and she ceased.

Immediately the long red tongue was thrust forth again. Before it
touched, a song sprang to her lips, a wild sea-song, such as some
sailor might be singing far out on trackless blue water that night, the
shrouds whistling with frost and the sheets glued in ice,--a song with
the wind in its burden and the spray in its chorus. The monster raised
his head and flared the fiery eyeballs upon her, then fretted the
imprisoned claws a moment and was quiet; only the breath like the vapor
from some hell-pit still swathed her. Her voice, at first faint and
fearful, gradually lost its quaver, grew under her control and subject
to her modulation; it rose on long swells, it fell in subtile cadences,
now and then its tones pealed out like bells from distant belfries on
fresh sonorous mornings. She sung the song through, and, wondering lest
his name of Indian Devil were not his true name, and if he would not
detect her, she repeated it. Once or twice now, indeed, the beast
stirred uneasily, turned, and made the bough sway at his movement. As
she ended, he snapped his jaws together, and tore away the fettered
member, curling it under him with a snarl,--when she burst into the
gayest reel that ever answered a fiddle-bow. How many a time she had
heard her husband play it on the homely fiddle made by himself from
birch and cherry-wood! how many a time she had seen it danced on the
floor of their one room, to the patter of wooden clogs and the rustle
of homespun petticoat! how many a time she had danced it herself!--and
did she not remember once, as they joined clasps for right-hands-round,
how it had lent its gay, bright measure to her life? And here she was
singing it alone, in the forest, at midnight, to a wild beast! As she
sent her voice trilling up and down its quick oscillations between joy
and pain, the creature who grasped her uncurled his paw and scratched
the bark from the bough; she must vary the spell; and her voice spun
leaping along the projecting points of tune of a hornpipe. Still
singing, she felt herself twisted about with a low growl and a lifting
of the red lip from the glittering teeth; she broke the hornpipe's
thread, and commenced unravelling a lighter, livelier thing, an Irish
jig. Up and down and round about her voice flew, the beast threw back
his head so that the diabolical face fronted hers, and the torrent of
his breath prepared her for his feast as the anaconda slimes his prey.
Franticly she darted from tune to tune; his restless movements followed
her. She tired herself with dancing and vivid national airs, growing
feverish and singing spasmodically as she felt her horrid tomb yawning
wider. Touching in this manner all the slogan and keen clan cries, the
beast moved again, but only to lay the disengaged paw across her with
heavy satisfaction. She did not dare to pause; through the clear cold
air, the frosty starlight, she sang. If there were yet any tremor in
the tone, it was not fear,--she had learned the secret of sound at
last; nor could it be chill,--far too high a fervor throbbed her
pulses; it was nothing but the thought of the log-house and of what
might be passing within it. She fancied the baby stirring in his sleep
and moving his pretty lips,--her husband rising and opening the door,
looking out after her, and wondering at her absence. She fancied the
light pouring through the chink and then shut in again with all the
safety and comfort and joy, her husband taking down the fiddle and
playing lightly with his head inclined, playing while she sang, while
she sang for her life to an Indian Devil. Then she knew he was fumbling
for and finding some shining fragment and scoring it down the yellowing
hair, and unconsciously her voice forsook the wild war-tunes and
drifted into the half-gay, half-melancholy Rosin the Bow.

Suddenly she woke pierced with a pang, and the daggered tooth
penetrating her flesh;--dreaming of safety, she had ceased singing and
lost it. The beast had regained the use of all his limbs, and now,
standing and raising his back, bristling and foaming, with sounds that
would have been like hisses but for their deep and fearful sonority, he
withdrew step by step toward the trunk of the tree, still with his
flaming balls upon her. She was all at once free, on one end of the
bough, twenty feet from the ground. She did not measure the distance,
but rose to drop herself down, careless of any death, so that it were
not this. Instantly, as if he scanned her thoughts, the creature
bounded forward with a yell and caught her again in his dreadful hold.
It might be that he was not greatly famished; for, as she suddenly
flung up her voice again, he settled himself composedly on the bough,
still clasping her with invincible pressure to his rough, ravenous
breast, and listening in a fascination to the sad, strange U-la-lu that
now moaned forth in loud, hollow tones above him. He half closed his
eyes, and sleepily reopened and shut them again.

What rending pains were close at hand! Death! and what a death! worse
than any other that is to be named! Water, be it cold or warm, that
which buoys up blue ice-fields, or which bathes tropical coasts with
currents of balmy bliss, is yet a gentle conqueror, kisses as it kills,
and draws you down gently through darkening fathoms to its heart. Death
at the sword is the festival of trumpet and bugle and banner, with
glory ringing out around you and distant hearts thrilling through
yours. No gnawing disease can bring such hideous end as this; for that
is a fiend bred of your own flesh, and this--is it a fiend, this living
lump of appetites? What dread comes with the thought of perishing in
flames! but fire, let it leap and hiss never so hotly, is something too
remote, too alien, to inspire us with such loathly horror as a wild
beast; if it have a life, that life is too utterly beyond our
comprehension. Fire is not half ourselves; as it devours, arouses
neither hatred nor disgust; is not to be known by the strength of our
lower natures let loose; does not drip our blood into our faces from
foaming chaps, nor mouth nor snarl above us with vitality. Let us be
ended by fire, and we are ashes, for the winds to bear, the leaves to
cover; let us be ended by wild beasts, and the base, cursed thing howls
with us forever through the forest. All this she felt as she charmed
him, and what force it lent to her song God knows. If her voice should
fail! If the damp and cold should give her any fatal hoarseness! If all
the silent powers of the forest did not conspire to help her! The dark,
hollow night rose indifferently over her; the wide, cold air breathed
rudely past her, lifted her wet hair and blew it down again; the great
boughs swung with a ponderous strength, now and then clashed their iron
lengths together and shook off a sparkle of icy spears or some
long-lain weight of snow from their heavy shadows. The green depths
were utterly cold and silent and stern. These beautiful haunts that all
the summer were hers and rejoiced to share with her their bounty, these
heavens that had yielded their largess, these stems that had thrust
their blossoms into her hands, all these friends of three moons ago
forgot her now and knew her no longer.

Feeling her desolation, wild, melancholy, forsaken songs rose thereon
from that frightful aerie,--weeping, wailing tunes, that sob among the
people from age to age, and overflow with otherwise unexpressed
sadness,--all rude, mournful ballads,--old tearful strains, that
Shakspeare heard the vagrants sing, and that rise and fall like the
wind and tide,--sailor-songs, to be heard only in lone mid-watches
beneath the moon and stars,--ghastly rhyming romances, such as that
famous one of the "Lady Margaret," when

"She slipped on her gown of green
   A piece below the knee,--
And 'twas all a long, cold winter's night
   A dead corse followed she."

Still the beast lay with closed eyes, yet never relaxing his grasp.
Once a half-whine of enjoyment escaped him,--he fawned his fearful head
upon her; once he scored her cheek with his tongue: savage caresses
that hurt like wounds. How weary she was! and yet how terribly awake!
How fuller and fuller of dismay grew the knowledge that she was only
prolonging her anguish and playing with death! How appalling the
thought that with her voice ceased her existence! Yet she could not
sing forever; her throat was dry and hard; her very breath was a pain;
her mouth was hotter than any desert-worn pilgrim's;--if she could but
drop upon her burning tongue one atom of the ice that glittered about
her!--but both of her arms were pinioned in the giant's vice. She
remembered the winding-sheet, and for the first time in her life
shivered with spiritual fear. Was it hers? She asked herself, as she
sang, what sins she had committed, what life she had led, to find her
punishment so soon and in these pangs,--and then she sought eagerly for
some reason why her husband was not up and abroad to find her. He
failed her,--her one sole hope in life; and without being aware of it,
her voice forsook the songs of suffering and sorrow for old Covenanting
hymns,--hymns with which her mother had lulled her, which the
class-leader pitched in the chimney-corners,--grand and sweet Methodist
hymns, brimming with melody and with all fantastic involutions of tune
to suit that ecstatic worship,--hymns full of the beauty of holiness,
steadfast, relying, sanctified by the salvation they had lent to those
in worse extremity than hers,--for they had found themselves in the
grasp of hell, while she was but in the jaws of death. Out of this
strange music, peculiar to one character of faith, and than which there
is none more beautiful in its degree nor owning a more potent sway of
sound, her voice soared into the glorified chants of churches. What to
her was death by cold or famine or wild beasts? "Though He slay me, yet
will I trust in Him," she sang. High and clear through the frore fair
night, the level moonbeams splintering in the wood, the scarce glints
of stars in the shadowy roof of branches, these sacred anthems
rose,--rose as a hope from despair, as some snowy spray of flower-bells
from blackest mould. Was she not in God's hands? Did not the world
swing at His will? If this were in His great plan of providence, was it
not best, and should she not accept it?

"He is the Lord our God; His judgments are in all the earth."

Oh, sublime faith of our fathers, where utter self-sacrifice alone was
true love, the fragrance of whose unrequired subjection was pleasant as
that of golden censers swung in purple-vapored chancels!

Never ceasing in the rhythm of her thoughts, articulated in music as
they thronged, the memory of her first communion flashed over her.
Again she was in that distant place on that sweet spring morning. Again
the congregation rustled out, and the few remained, and she trembled to
find herself among them.

How well she remembered the devout, quiet faces; too accustomed to the
sacred feast to glow with their inner joy! how well the snowy linen at
the altar, the silver vessels slowly and silently shifting! and as the
cup approached and passed, how the sense of delicious perfume stole in
and heightened the transport of her prayer, and she had seemed, looking
up through the windows where the sky soared blue in constant freshness,
to feel all heaven's balms dripping from the portals, and to scent the
lilies of eternal peace! Perhaps another would not have felt so much
ecstasy as satisfaction on that occasion; but it is a true, if a later
disciple, who has said, "The Lord bestoweth his blessings there, where
he findeth the vessels empty."--"And does it need the walls of a church
to renew my communion?" she asked. "Does not every moment stand a
temple four-square to God? And in that morning, with its buoyant
sunlight, was I any dearer to the Heart of the World than now?" "My
beloved is mine, and I am his," she sang over and over again, with all
varied inflection and profuse tune. How gently all the winter-wrapt
things bent toward her then! into what relation with her had they
grown! how this common dependence was the spell of their intimacy! how
at one with Nature had she become! how all the night and the silence
and the forest seemed to hold its breath, and to send its soul up to
God in her singing! It was no longer despondency, that singing. It was
neither prayer nor petition. She had left imploring, "How long wilt
thou forget me, O Lord?" "Lighten mine eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of
death!" "For in death there is no remembrance of thee";--with countless
other such fragments of supplication. She cried rather, "Yea, though I
walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil:
for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me";--and
lingered, and repeated, and sang again, "I shall be satisfied, when I
awake, with thy likeness."

Then she thought of the Great Deliverance, when he drew her up out of
many waters, and the flashing old psalm pealed forth triumphantly:--

"The Lord descended from above,
  and bow'd the heavens hie;
And underneath his feet he cast
  the darknesse of the skie.
On cherubs and on cherubins
  full royally he road:
And on the wings of all the winds
  came flying all abroad."

She forgot how recently, and with what a strange pity for her own
shapeless form that was to be, she had quaintly sung,--

"Oh, lovely appearance of death!
  What sight upon earth is so fair?
Not all the gay pageants that breathe
  Can with a dead body compare!"

She remembered instead,--"In thy presence is fulness of joy; at thy
right hand there are pleasures forevermore"; and, "God will redeem my
soul from the power of the grave: for he shall receive me"; "He will
swallow up death in victory." Not once now did she say, "Lord, how long
wilt thou look on? rescue my soul from their destructions, my darling
from the lions"--for she knew that "the young lions roar after their
prey and seek their meat from God." "O Lord, thou preservest man and
beast!" she said.

She had no comfort or consolation in this season, such as sustained the
Christian martyrs in the amphitheatre. She was not dying for her faith;
there were no palms in heaven for her to wave; but how many a time had
she declared,--"I had rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God,
than to dwell in the tents of wickedness!" And as the broad rays here
and there broke through the dense covert of shade and lay in rivers of
lustre on crystal sheathing and frozen fretting of trunk and limb and
on the great spaces of refraction, they builded up visibly that house,
the shining city on the hill, and singing, "Beautiful for situation,
the joy of the whole earth, is Mount Zion, on the sides of the North,
the city of the Great King," her vision climbed to that higher picture
where the angel shows the dazzling thing, the holy Jerusalem descending
out of heaven from God, with its splendid battlements and gates of
pearls, and its foundations, the eleventh a jacinth, the twelfth an
amethyst,--with its great white throne, and the rainbow round about it,
in sight like unto an emerald:--"And there shall be no night
there,--for the Lord God giveth them light," she sang.

What whisper of dawn now rustled through the wilderness? How the night
was passing! And still the beast crouched upon the bough, changing only
the posture of his head, that again he might command her with those
charmed eyes;--half their fire was gone; she could almost have released
herself from his custody; yet, had she stirred, no one knows what
malevolent instinct might have dominated anew. But of that she did not
dream; long ago stripped of any expectation, she was experiencing in
her divine rapture how mystically true it is that "he that dwelleth in
the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the
Almighty."

Slow clarion cries now wound from the distance as the cocks caught the
intelligence of day and reechoed it faintly from farm to farm,--sleepy
sentinels of night, sounding the foe's invasion, and translating that
dim intuition to ringing notes of warning. Still she chanted on. A
remote crash of brushwood told of some other beast on his depredations,
or some night-belated traveller groping his way through the narrow
path. Still she chanted on. The far, faint echoes of the chanticleers
died into distance,--the crashing of the branches grew nearer. No wild
beast that, but a man's step,--a man's form in the moonlight, stalwart
and strong,--on one arm slept a little child, in the other hand he held
his gun. Still she chanted on.

Perhaps, when her husband last looked forth, he was half ashamed to
find what a fear he felt for her. He knew she would never leave the
child so long but for some direst need,--and yet he may have laughed at
himself, as he lifted and wrapped it with awkward care, and, loading
his gun and strapping on his horn, opened the door again and closed it
behind him, going out and plunging into the darkness and dangers of the
forest. He was more singularly alarmed than he would have been willing
to acknowledge; as he had sat with his bow hovering over the strings,
he had half believed to hear her voice mingling gayly with the
instrument, till he paused and listened if she were not about to lift
the latch and enter. As he drew nearer the heart of the forest, that
intimation of melody seemed to grow more actual, to take body and
breath, to come and go on long swells and ebbs of the night-breeze, to
increase with tune and words, till a strange, shrill singing grew ever
clearer, and, as he stepped into an open space of moonbeams, far up in
the branches, rocked by the wind, and singing, "How beautiful upon the
mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that
publisheth peace," he saw his wife,--his wife,--but, great God in
heaven! how? Some mad exclamation escaped him, but without diverting
her. The child knew the singing voice, though never heard before in
that unearthly key, and turned toward it through the veiling dreams.
With a celerity almost instantaneous, it lay, in the twinkling of an
eye, on the ground at the father's feet, while his gun was raised to
his shoulder and levelled at the monster covering his wife with shaggy
form and flaming gaze,--his wife so ghastly white, so rigid, so stained
with blood, her eyes so fixedly bent above, and her lips, that had
indurated into the chiselled pallor of marble, parted only with that
flood of solemn song.

I do not know if it were the mother-instinct that for a moment lowered
her eyes,--those eyes, so lately riveted on heaven, now suddenly seeing
all life-long bliss possible. A thrill of joy pierced and shivered
through her like a weapon, her voice trembled in its course, her glance
lost its steady strength, fever-flushes chased each other over her
face, yet she never once ceased chanting. She was quite aware, that, if
her husband shot now, the ball must pierce her body before reaching any
vital part of the beast,--and yet better that death, by his hand, than
the other. But this her husband also knew, and he remained motionless,
just covering the creature with the sight. He dared not fire, lest some
wound not mortal should break the spell exercised by her voice, and the
beast, enraged with pain, should rend her in atoms; moreover, the light
was too uncertain for his aim. So he waited. Now and then he examined
his gun to see if the damp were injuring its charge, now and then he
wiped the great drops from his forehead. Again the cocks crowed with
the passing hour,--the last time they were heard on that night.
Cheerful home sound then, how full of safety and all comfort and rest
it seemed! what sweet morning incidents of sparkling fire and sunshine,
of gay household bustle, shining dresser, and cooing baby, of steaming
cattle in the yard, and brimming milk-pails at the door! what pleasant
voices! what laughter! what security! and here----

Now, as she sang on in the slow, endless, infinite moments, the fervent
vision of God's peace was gone. Just as the grave had lost its sting,
she was snatched back again into the arms of earthly hope. In vain she
tried to sing, "There remaineth a rest for the people of God,"--her
eyes trembled on her husband's, and she could think only of him, and of
the child, and of happiness that yet might be, but with what a dreadful
gulf of doubt between! She shuddered now in the suspense; all calm
forsook her; she was tortured with dissolving heats or frozen with icy
blasts; her face contracted, growing small and pinched; her voice was
hoarse and sharp,--every tone cut like a knife,--the notes became heavy
to lift,--withheld by some hostile pressure,--impossible. One gasp, a
convulsive effort, and there was silence,--she had lost her voice.

The beast made a sluggish movement,--stretched and fawned like one
awaking,--then, as if he would have yet more of the enchantment,
stirred her slightly with his muzzle. As he did so, a sidelong hint of
the man standing below with the raised gun smote him; he sprung round
furiously, and, seizing his prey, was about to leap into some unknown
airy den of the topmost branches now waving to the slow dawn. The late
moon had rounded through the sky so that her gleam at last fell full
upon the bough with fairy frosting; the wintry morning light did not
yet penetrate the gloom. The woman, suspended in mid-air an instant,
cast only one agonized glance beneath,--but across and through it, ere
the lids could fall, shot a withering sheet of flame,--a rifle-crack,
half heard, was lost in the terrible yell of desperation that bounded
after it and filled her ears with savage echoes, and in the wide arc of
some eternal descent she was falling;--but the beast fell under her. I
think that the moment following must have been too sacred for us, and
perhaps the three have no special interest again till they issue from
the shadows of the wilderness upon the white hills that skirt their
home. The father carries the child hushed again into slumber; the
mother follows with no such feeble 

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