In the Three
Zones

By F. J. Stimson (J. S. of Dale)

Dr. Materialismus. His Hypothesis
Worked Out

An Alabama Courtship. Its Simplicities
and its Complexities

Los Caraqueños. Being the Life History
of Don Sebastian Marques del Torre and
of Dolores, his wife, Condesa de Luna

Charles Scribner’s Sons
New York, 1893

Copyright, 1893, by
Charles Scribner’s Sons
TROW DIRECTORY
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY
NEW YORK

WORKS OF FICTION

BY

F. J. STIMSON
(J. S. of Dale)

DR. MATERIALISMUS
HIS HYPOTHESIS WORKED OUT

I should like some time to tell how Tetherby came to his end; he, too, was a victim of materialism, as his father had been before him; but when he died, he left this story, addressed among his papers to me; and I am sure he meant that all the world (or such part of it as cares to think) should know it. He had told it, or partly told it, to us before; in fragments, in suggestions, in those midnight talks that earnest young men still have in college, or had, in 1870.

Tetherby came from that strange, cold, Maine coast, washed in its fjords and beaches by a clear, cold sea, which brings it fogs of winter but never haze of summer; where men eat little, think much, drink only water, and yet live intense lives; where the village people, in their long winters away from the world, in an age of revivals had their waves of atheism, and would transform, in those days, their pine meeting-houses into Shakspere clubs, and logically make a cult of infidelity; now, with railways, I suppose all that has ceased; they read Shakspere as little as the scriptures, and the Sunday newspaper replaces both. Such a story—such an imagination—as Tetherby’s, could not happen now—perhaps. But they take life earnestly in that remote, ardent province; they think coldly; and, when you least expect it, there comes in their lives, so hard and sharp and practical, a burst of passion.

He came to Newbridge to study law, and soon developed a strange faculty for debate. The first peculiarity was his name—which first appeared and was always spelled, C. S. J. J. Tetherby in the catalogue, despite the practice, which was to spell one’s name in full. Of course, speculation was rife as to the meaning of this portentous array of initials; and soon, after his way of talk was known, arose a popular belief that they stood for nothing less than Charles Stuart Jean Jacques. Nothing less would justify the intense leaning of his mind, radical as it was, for all that was mystical, ideal, old. But afterwards we learned that he had been so named by his curious father, Colonel Sir John Jones, after a supposed loyalist ancestor, who had flourished in the time of the Revolution, and had gone to Maine to get away from it; Tetherby’s father being evidently under the impression that the two titles formed a component part of the ancestor’s identity.

Rousseau Tetherby, as he continued to be called, was a tall, thin, broad-shouldered fellow, of great muscular strength and yet with feeble health, given to hallucinations and morbid imaginations which he would recount to you in that deep monotone of twang that seemed only fit to sell a horse in. The boys made fun of Tetherby; he bore it with a splendid smile and a twinkle in his ice-blue eye, until one day it went too far, and then he tackled the last offender and chucked him off the boat-house float into the river. He would have rowed upon the university crew, but that his digestion gave out; strong as he was in mind and body, nothing, that went for the nutrition and fostering of life, was well with him. Such men as he are repellent to the sane, and are willed by the world to die alone.

Some one on that night, I remember, had said something derogatory about Goethe’s theory of colors. A dry subject, an abstruse subject, a useless subject—as one might think—but it roused Tetherby to sudden fury. He made a vehement defence of the great poet-philosopher against the dry, barren mathematics of the Newtonian science.

“Do you cipherers think all that is reducible to numbers? to so many beats per second, like your own dry hearts? Sound may be nothing but a quicker rattle—is it but a rattle, the music in your souls? If light is but the impact of more rapid molecules, does MAN bring nothing else, when he worships the glory of the dawn? You say, tones are a few thousand beats per second, and colors a few billion beats per second—what becomes of all the numbers left between? If colored lights count all these billions, up from red to violet, and white light is the sum of all the colors, what can be its number but infinity? But is a white light GOD? Or would you cipherers make of God a cipher? Smoke looks yellow against the sky, and blue against the forest—but how can its number change? You, who make all to a number, as governments do to convicts in a prison! I tell you, this rage for machinery will bear Dead Sea fruit. You confound man’s highest emotions with the tickling of the gray matter in his brain; that way lies death and suicide of the soul——”

We stared; we thought he had gone crazy.

“Goethe and Dante still know more about this universe than any cipherer,” he said, more calmly. And then he told us this story; we fancied it a nightmare, or a morbid dream; but earnestly he told it, and slowly, surely, he won our hearts at least to some believing in the terror of the tale.

When he was through, we parted, with few words, thinking poor Tetherby mad. But when he died it was found among his papers, addressed to me. Materialism had conquered him, but not subdued him; “say not the struggle naught availed him” though he left but this one tract behind. It is only as a sermon that it needs preserving, though the story of poor Althea Hardy was, I believe, in all essentials true.

I was born and lived, until I came to this university, in a small town in Maine. My father was a graduate of B—— College, and had never wholly dissolved his connection with that place; probably because he was there are not unfavorably know to more acquaintances, and better people, than he elsewhere found. The town is one of those gentle-mannered, ferocious-minded, white wooden villages, common to Maine; with two churches, a brick town-hall, a stucco lyceum, a narrow railway station, and a spacious burying-ground. It is divided into two classes of society: one which institutes church-sociables, church-dances, church-sleighing parties; which twice a week, and critically, listens to a long and ultra-Protestant, almost mundane, essay-sermon; and which comes to town with, and takes social position from, pastoral letters of introduction, that are dated in other places and exhibited like marriage certificates. I have known the husbands at times get their business employments on the strength of such encyclicals (but the ventures of these were not rarely attended with financial disaster, as passports only hinder honest travellers); the other class falling rather into Shakespeare clubs, intensely free-thinking, but calling Sabbath Sunday, and pretending to the slightly higher social position of the two. This is Maine, as I knew it; it may have changed since. Both classes were in general Prohibitionists, but the latter had wine to drink at home.

In this town were many girls with pretty faces; there, under that cold, concise sky of the North, they grew up; their intellects preternaturally acute, their nervous systems strung to breaking pitch, their physical growth so backward that at twenty their figures would be flat. We were intimate with them in a mental fellowship. Not that we boys of twenty did not have our preferences, but they were preferences of mere companionship; so that the magnanimous confidence of English America was justified; and anyone of us could be alone with her he preferred from morn to midnight, if he chose, and no one be the wiser or the worse. But there was one exceptional girl in B——, Althea Hardy. Her father was a rich ship-builder; and his father, a sea-captain, had married her grandmother in Catania, island of Sicily. With Althea Hardy, I think, I was in love.

In the winter of my second year at college there came to town a certain Dr. Materialismus—a German professor, scientist, socialist—ostensibly seeking employment as a German instructor at the college; practising hypnotism, magnetism, mesmerism, and mysticism; giving lectures on Hegel, believing in Hartmann, and in the indestructibility of matter and the destructibility of the soul; and his soul was a damned one, and he cared not for the loss of it.

Not that I knew this, then; I also was fascinated by him, I suppose. There was something so bold about his intellectuality, that excited my admiration. Althea and I used to dispute about it; she said she did not like the man. In my enthusiasm, I raved to her of him; and then, I suppose, I talked to him of her more than I should have done. Mind you, I had no thought of marriage then; nor, of course, of love. Althea was my most intimate friend—as a boy might have been. Sex differences were fused in the clear flame of the intellect. And B—— College itself was a co-educational institution.

The first time they met was at a coasting party; on a night of glittering cold, when the sky was dusty azure and the stars burned like blue fires. I had a double-runner, with Althea; and I asked the professor to come with us, as he was unused to the sport, and I feared lest he should be laughed at. I, of course, sat in front and steered the sled; then came Althea; then he; and it was his duty to steady her, his hands upon her waist.

We went down three times with no word spoken. The girls upon the other sleds would cry with exultation as they sped down the long hill; but Althea was silent. On the long walk up—it was nearly a mile—the professor and I talked; but I remember only one thing he said. Pointing to a singularly red star, he told us that two worlds were burning there, with people in them; they had lately rushed together, and, from planets, had become one burning sun. I asked him how he knew; it was all chemistry, he said. Althea said, how terrible it was to think of such a day of judgment on that quiet night; and he laughed a little, in his silent way, and said she was rather too late with her pity, for it had all happened some eighty years ago. “I don’t see that you cry for Marie Antoinette,” he said; “but that red ray you see left the star in 1789.”

We left Althea at her home, and the professor asked me down to his. He lived in a strange place; the upper floor of a warehouse, upon a business street, low down in the town, above the Kennebec. He told me that he had hired it for the power; and I remembered to have noticed there a sign “To Let—One Floor, with Power.” And sure enough, below the loud rush of the river, and the crushing noise made by the cakes of ice that passed over the falls, was a pulsing tremor in the house, more striking than a noise; and in the loft of his strange apartment rushed an endless band of leather, swift and silent. “It’s furnished by the river,” he said, “and not by steam. I thought it might be useful for some physical experiments.”

The upper floor, which the doctor had rented, consisted mainly of a long loft for manufacturing, and a square room beyond it, formerly the counting-room. We had passed through the loft first (through which ran the spinning leather band), and I had noticed a forest of glass rods along the wall, but massed together like the pipes of an organ, and opposite them a row of steel bars like levers. “A mere physical experiment,” said the doctor, as we sank into couches covered with white fur, in his inner apartment. Strangely disguised, the room in the old factory loft, hung with silk and furs, glittering with glass and gilding; there was no mirror, however, but, in front of me, one large picture. It represented a fainting anchorite, wan and yellow beneath his single sheepskin cloak, his eyes closing, the crucifix he was bearing just fallen in the desert sand; supporting him, the arms of a beautiful woman, roseate with perfect health, with laughing, red lips, and bold eyes resting on his wearied lids. I never had seen such a room; it realized what I had fancied of those sensuous, evil Trianons of the older and corrupt world. And yet I looked upon this picture; and as I looked, some tremor in the air, some evil influence in that place, dissolved all my intellect in wild desire.

“You admire the picture?” said Materialismus. “I painted it; she was my model.” I am conscious to-day that I looked at him with a jealous envy, like some hungry beast. I had never seen such a woman. He laughed silently, and going to the wall touched what I supposed to be a bell. Suddenly my feelings changed.

“Your Althea Hardy,” went on the doctor, “who is she?”

“She is not my Althea Hardy,” I replied, with an indignation that I then supposed unreasoning. “She is the daughter of a retired sea-captain, and I see her because she alone can rank me in the class. Our minds are sympathetic. And Miss Hardy has a noble soul.”

“She has a fair body,” answered he; “of that much we are sure.”

I cast a fierce look upon the man; my eye followed his to that picture on the wall; and some false shame kept me foolishly silent. I should have spoken then.... But many such fair carrion must strew the path of so lordly a vulture as this doctor was; unlucky if they thought (as he knew better) that aught of soul they bore entangled in their flesh.

“You do not strain a morbid consciousness about a chemical reaction,” said he. “Two atoms rush together to make a world, or burn one, as we saw last night; it may be pleasure or it may be pain; conscious organs choose the former.”

My distaste for the man was such that I hurried away, and went to sleep with a strange sadness, in the mood in which, as I suppose, believers pray; but that I was none. Dr. Materialismus had had a plum-colored velvet smoking-jacket on, with a red fez (he was a sort of beau), and I dreamed of it all night, and of the rushing leather band, and of the grinding of the ice in the river. Something made me keep my visit secret from Althea; an evil something, as I think it now.

The following day we had a lecture on light. It was one in a course in physics, or natural philosophy, as it was called in B—— College; just as they called Scotch psychology “Mental Philosophy,” with capital letters; it was an archaic little place, and it was the first course that the German doctor had prevailed upon the college government to assign to him. The students sat at desks, ranged around the lecture platform, the floor of the hall being a concentric inclined plane; and Althea Hardy’s desk was next to mine. Materialismus began with a brief sketch of the theory of sound; how it consisted in vibrations of the air, the coarsest medium of space, but could not dwell in ether; and how slow beats—blows of a hammer, for instance—had no more complex intellectual effect, but were mere consecutive noises; how the human organism ceased to detect these consecutive noises at about eight per second, until they reappeared at sixteen per second, the lowest tone which can be heard; and how, at something like thirty-two thousand per second these vibrations ceased to be heard, and were supposed unintelligible to humanity, being neither sound nor light—despite their rapid movement, dark and silent. But was all this energy wasted to mankind? Adverting one moment to the molecular, or rather mathematical, theory—first propounded by Democritus, re-established by Leibnitz, and never since denied—that the universe, both of mind and matter, body and soul, was made merely by innumerable, infinitesimal points of motion, endlessly gyrating among themselves—mere points, devoid of materiality, devoid also of soul, but each a centre of a certain force, which scientists entitle gravitation, philosophers deem will, and poets name love—he went on to Light. Light is a subtler emotion (he remarked here that he used the word emotion advisedly, as all emotions alike were, in substance, the subjective result of merely material motion). Light is a subtler emotion, dwelling in ether, but still nothing but a regular continuity of motion or molecular impact; to speak more plainly, successive beats or vibrations reappear intelligible to humanity as light, at something like 483,000,000,000 beats per second in the red ray. More exactly still, they appear first as heat; then as red, orange, yellow, all the colors of the spectrum, until they disappear again, through the violet ray, at something like 727,000,000,000 beats per second in the so-called chemical rays. “After that,” he closed, “they are supposed unknown. The higher vibrations are supposed unintelligible to man, just as he fancies there is no more subtle medium than his (already hypothetical) ether. It is possible,” said Materialismus, speaking in italics and looking at Althea, “that these higher, almost infinitely rapid vibrations may be what are called the higher emotions or passions—like religion, love and hate—dwelling in a still more subtle, but yet material, medium, that poets and churches have picturesquely termed heart, conscience, soul.” As he said this I too looked at Althea. I saw her bosom heaving; her lips were parted, and a faint rose was in her face. How womanly she was growing!

From that time I felt a certain fierceness against this German doctor. He had a way of patronizing me, of treating me as a man might treat some promising school-boy, while his manner to Althea was that of an equal—or a man of the world’s to a favored lady. It was customary for the professors in B—— College to give little entertainments to their classes once in the winter; these usually took the form of tea-parties; but when it came to the doctor’s turn, he gave a sleighing party to the neighboring city of A——, where we had an elaborate banquet at the principal hotel, with champagne to drink; and returned driving down the frozen river, the ice of which Dr. Mismus (for so we called him for short) had had tested for the occasion. The probable expense of this entertainment was discussed in the little town for many weeks after, and was by some estimated as high as two hundred dollars. The professor had hired, besides the large boat-sleigh, many single sleighs, in one of which he had returned, leading the way, and driving with Althea Hardy. It was then I determined to speak to her about her growing intimacy with this man.

I had to wait many weeks for an opportunity. Our winter sports at B—— used to end with a grand evening skating party on the Kennebec. Bonfires were built on the river, the safe mile or two above the falls was roped in with lines of Chinese lanterns, and a supper of hot oysters and coffee was provided at the big central fire. It was the fixed law of the place that the companion invited by any boy was to remain indisputably his for the evening. No second man would ever venture to join himself to a couple who were skating together on that night. I had asked Althea many weeks ahead to skate with me, and she had consented. The Doctor Materialismus knew this.

I, too, saw him nearly every day. He seemed to be fond of my company; of playing chess with me, or discussing metaphysics. Sometimes Althea was present at these arguments, in which I always took the idealistic side. But the little college had only armed me with Bain and Locke and Mill; and it may be imagined what a poor defence I could make with these against the German doctor, with his volumes of metaphysical realism and his knowledge of what Spinoza, Kant, Schopenhauer, and other defenders of us from the flesh could say on my side. Nevertheless, I sometimes appeared to have my victories. Althea was judge; and one day I well remember, when we were discussing the localization of emotion or of volition in the brain:

“Prove to me, if you may, even that every thought and hope and feeling of mankind is accompanied always by the same change in the same part of the cerebral tissue!” cried I. “Yet that physical change is not the soul-passion, but the effect of it upon the body; the mere trace in the brain of its passage, like the furrow of a ship upon the sea.” And I looked at Althea, who smiled upon me.

“But if,” said the doctor, “by the physical movement I produce the psychical passion? by the change of the brain-atoms cause the act of will? by a mere bit of glass-and-iron mechanism set first in motion, I make the prayer, or thought, or love, follow, in plain succession, to the machine’s movement, on every soul that comes within its sphere—will you then say that the metaphor of ship and wake is a good one, when it is the wake that precedes the ship?”

“No,” said I, smiling.

“Then come to my house to-night,” said the doctor; “unless,” he added with a sneer, “you are afraid to take such risks before your skating party.” And then I saw Althea’s lips grow bloodless, and my heart swelled within me.

“I will come,” I muttered, without a smile.

“When?” said the professor.

“Now.”

Althea suddenly ran between us. “You will not hurt him?” she said, appealingly to him. “Remember, oh, remember what he has before him!” And here Althea burst into a passion of weeping, and I looked in wild bewilderment from her to him.

“I vill go,” said the doctor to me. “I vill leafe you to gonsole her.” He spoke in his stronger German accent, and as he went out he beckoned me to the door. His sneer was now a leer, and he said:

“I vould kiss her there, if I vere you.”

I slammed the door in his face, and when I turned back to Althea her passion of tears had not ceased, and her beautiful bright hair lay in masses over the poor, shabby desk. I did kiss her, on her soft face where the tears were. I did not dare to kiss her lips, though I think I could have done it before I had known this doctor. She checked her tears at once.

“Now I must go to the doctor’s,” I said. “Don’t be afraid; he can do me or my soul no harm; and remember to-morrow night.” I saw Althea’s lips blanch again at this; but she looked at me with dry eyes, and I left her.

The winter evening was already dark, and as I went down the streets toward the river I heard the crushing of the ice over the falls. The old street where the doctor lived was quite deserted. Trade had been there in the old days, but now was nothing. Yet in the silence, coming along, I heard the whirr of steam, or, at least, the clanking of machinery and whirling wheels.

I toiled up the crazy staircase. The doctor was already in his room—in the same purple velvet he had worn before. On his study table was a smoking supper.

“I hope,” he said, “you have not supped on the way?”

“I have not,” I said. Our supper at our college table consisted of tea and cold meat and pie. The doctor’s was of oysters, sweetbreads, and wine. After it he gave me an imported cigar, and I sat in his reclining-chair and listened to him. I remember that this chair reminded me, as I sat there, of a dentist’s chair; and I good-naturedly wondered what operations he might perform on me—I helpless, passive with his tobacco and his wine.

“Now I am ready,” said he. And he opened the door that led from his study into the old warehouse-room, and I saw him touch one of the steel levers opposite the rows of glass rods. “You see,” he said, “my mechanism is a simple one. With all these rods of different lengths, and the almost infinite speed of revolution that I am able to gif them with the power that comes from the river applied through a chain of belted wheels, is a rosined leather tongue, like that of a music-box or the bow of a violin, touching each one; and so I get any number of beats per second that I will.” (He always said will, this man, and never wish.)

“Now, listen,” he whispered; and I saw him bend down another lever in the laboratory, and there came a grand bass note—a tone I have heard since only in 32-foot organ pipes. “Now, you see, it is Sound.” And he placed his hand, as he spoke, upon a small crank or governor; and, as he turned it slowly, note by note the sound grew higher. In the other room I could see one immense wheel, revolving in an endless leather band, with the power that was furnished by the Kennebec, and as each sound rose clear, I saw the wheel turn faster.

Note by note the tones increased in pitch, clear and elemental. I listened, recumbent. There was a marvellous fascination in the strong production of those simple tones.

“You see I hafe no overtones,” I heard the doctor say. “All is simple, because it is mechanism. It is the exact reproduction of the requisite mathematical number. I hafe many hundreds of rods of glass, and then the leather band can go so fast as I will, and the tongue acts upon them like the bow upon the violin.”

I listened, I was still at peace; all this I could understand, though the notes came strangely clear. Undoubtedly, to get a definite finite number of beats per second was a mere question of mathematics. Empirically, we have always done it, with tuning-forks, organ-pipes, bells.

He was in the middle of the scale already; faster whirled that distant wheel, and the intense tone struck C in alt. I felt a yearning for some harmony; that terrible, simple, single tone was so elemental, so savage; it racked my nerves and strained them to unison, like the rosined bow drawn close against the violin-string itself. It grew intensely shrill; fearfully, piercingly shrill; shrill to the rending-point of the tympanum; and then came silence.

I looked. In the dusk of the adjoining warehouse the huge wheel was whirling more rapidly than ever.

The German professor gazed into my eyes, his own were bright with triumph, on his lips a curl of cynicism. “Now,” he said, “you will have what you call emotions. But, first, I must bind you close.”

I shrugged my shoulders amiably, smiling with what at the time I thought contempt, while he deftly took a soft white rope and bound me many times to his chair. But the rope was very strong, and I now saw that the frame-work of the chair was of iron. And even while he bound me, I started as if from a sleep, and became conscious of the dull whirring caused by the powerful machinery that abode within the house, and suddenly a great rage came over me.

I, fool, and this man! I swelled and strained at the soft white ropes that bound me, but in vain.... By God, I could have killed him then and there!... And he looked at me and grinned, twisting his face to fit his crooked soul. I strained at the ropes, and I think one of them slipped a bit, for his face blanched; and then I saw him go into the other room and press the last lever back a little, and it seemed to me the wheel revolved more slowly.

Then, in a moment, all was peace again, and it was as if I heard a low, sweet sound, only that there was no sound, but something like what you might dream the music of the spheres to be. He came to my chair again and unbound me.

My momentary passion had vanished. “Light your cigar,” he said, “it has gone out.” I did so. I had a strange, restful feeling, as of being at one with the world, a sense of peace, between the peace of death and that of sleep.

“This,” he said, “is the pulse of the world; and it is Sleep. You remember, in the Nibelung-saga, when Erda, the Earth spirit, is invoked, unwillingly she appears, and then she says, Lass mich schlafen—let me sleep on—to Wotan, king of the gods? Some of the old myths are true enough, though not the Christian ones, most always.... This pulse of the earth seems to you dead silence, yet the beats are pulsing thousands a second faster than the highest sound.... For emotions are subtler things than sound, as you sentimental ones would say; you poets that talk of ‘heart’ and ‘soul.’ We men of science say it this way: That those bodily organs that answer to your myth of a soul are but more widely framed, more nicely textured, so as to respond to the impact of a greater number of movements in the second.”

While he was speaking he had gone into the other room, and was bending the lever down once more; I flew at his throat. But even before I reached him my motive changed; seizing a Spanish knife that was on the table, I sought to plunge it in my breast. But, with a quick stroke of the elbow, as if he had been prepared for the attempt, he dashed the knife from my hand to the floor, and I sank in despair back into his arm-chair.

“Yes-s,” said he, with a sort of hiss of content like a long-drawn sigh of relief. “Yes-s-s—I haf put my mechanik quickly through the Murder-motif without binding you again, after I had put it back to sleep.”

“What do you mean?” I said, languidly. How could I ever hope to win Althea away from this man’s wiles?

“When man’s consciousness awakes from the sleep of the world, its first motive is Murder,” said he; “you remember the Hebrew myth of Cain?” and he laughed silently. “Its next is Suicide; its third, Despair. This time I have put my mechanik quickly through the Murder movement, so your wish to kill me was just now but momentary.”

There was an evil gleam in his eye as he said this.

“I leafe a dagger on the table, because if I left a pistol the subject would fire it, and that makes noise. Then at the motion of Suicide you tried to kill yourself: the suicide is one grade higher than the murderer. And now, you are in Despair.”

He bent the lever further down and touched a small glass rod.

“And now, I will gife to you—I alone—all the emotions of which humanity is capable.”

How much time followed, I know not; nor whether it was not all a dream, only that a dream can hardly be more vivid—as this was—than my life itself. First, a nightmare came of evil passions; after murder and suicide and despair came revenge, envy, hatred, greed of money, greed of power, lust. I say “came,” for each one came on me with all the force the worst of men can feel. Had I been free, in some other place, I should inexorably have committed the crimes these evil passions breed, and there was always some pretext of a cause. Now it was revenge on Materialismus himself for his winning of Althea Hardy; now it was envy of his powers, or greed of his possessions; and then my roving eye fell on that strange picture of his I mentioned before; the face of the woman now seemed to be Althea’s. In a glance all the poetry, all the sympathy of my mind or soul that I thought bound me to her had vanished, and in their place I only knew desire. The doctor’s leer seemed to read my thoughts; he let the lever stay long at this speed, and then he put it back again to that strange rhythm of Sleep.

“So—I must rest you a little between times,” he said. “Is my fine poet convinced?”

But I was silent, and he turned another wheel.

“All these are only evil passions,” said I, “there may well be something physical in them.”

“Poh—I can gife you just so well the others,” he sneered. “I tell you why I do not gife you all at once——”

“You can produce lust,” I answered, “but not love.”

“Poh—it takes but a little greater speed. What you call love is but the multiple of lust and cosmic love, that is, gravitation.”

I stared at the man.

“It is quite as I say. About two hundred thousand vibrations make in man’s cerebrum what you call lust; about four billion per second, that is gravitation, make what the philosophers call will, the poets, cosmic love; this comes just after light, white light, which is the sum of all the lights. And their multiple again, of love and light, makes many sextillions, and that is love of God, what the priests name religion.”... I think I grew faint, for he said, “You must hafe some refreshments, or you cannot bear it.”

He broke some raw eggs in a glass, in some sherry, and placed it by my side, and I saw him bend the lever much farther.

“Perhaps,” I spoke out, then, “you can create the emotion, or the mental existence—whatever you call it—of God himself.” I spoke with scorn, for my mind was clearer than ever.

“I can—almost,” he muttered. “Just now I have turned the rhythm to the thought millions, which lie above what you call evil passions, between them and what you call the good ones. It is all a mere question of degree. In the eye of science all are the same; morally, one is alike so good as the other. Only motion—that is life; and slower, slower, that is nearer death; and life is good, and death is evil.”

“But I can have these thoughts without your machinery,” said I.

“Yes,” said he, “and I can cause them with it; that proves they are mechanical. Now, the rhythm is on the intellectual-process movement; hence you argue.”

Millions of thoughts, fancies, inspirations, flashed through my brain as he left me to busy himself with other levers. How long this time lasted I again knew not; but it seemed that I passed through all the experience of human life. Then suddenly my thinking ceased, and I became conscious only of a bad odor by my side. This was followed in a moment by an intense scarlet light.

“Just so,” he said, as if he had noted my expression; “it is the eggs in your glass, they altered when we passed through the chemical rays; they will now be rotten.” And he took the glass and threw it out the window. “It was altered as we passed through the spectrum by no other process than the brain thinks.”

He had darkened the room, but the light changed from red through orange, yellow, green, blue, violet; then, after a moment’s darkness, it began again, more glorious than before. White, white it was now, most glorious; it flooded the old warehouse, and the shadows rolled from the dark places in my soul. And close on the light followed Hope again; hope of life, of myself, of the world, of Althea.

“Hope—it is the first of the motions you call virtuous,” came his sibilant voice, but I heeded him not. For even as he spoke my soul was lifted unto Faith, and I knew that this man lied.

“I can do but one thing more,” said he, “and that is—Love.”

“I thought,” said I, “you could make communion with the Deity.”

“And so I could,” he cried, angrily, “so I could; but I must first give my glass rod an infinite rotation; the number of vibrations in a second must be a number which is a multiple of all other numbers, however great; for that even my great fly-wheel must have an infinite speed. Ah, your ‘loft with power’ does not give me that.... But it would be only an idea if I could do that too, nothing but a rhythmic motion in your brain.”...

Then my faith rose well above this idle chatter. But I kept silence; for again my soul had passed out of the ken of this German doctor. Althea I saw; Althea in the dark room before me; Althea, and I had communion with her soul. Then I knew indeed that I did love her.

The ecstasy of that moment knew no time; it may have been a minute or an hour, as we mortals measure it; it was but an eternity of bliss to me.... Then followed again faith and hope, and then I awoke and saw the room all radiant with the calm of that white light—the light that Dante saw so near to God.

But it changed again to violet, like the glacier’s cave, blue like the heavens, yellow like the day; then faded through the scarlet into night.

Again I was in a sea of thoughts and phantasies; the inspiration of a Shakespeare, the fancy of a Mozart or a Titian, the study of a Newton, all in turn were mine. And then my evil dreams began. Through lust to greed of power, then to avarice, hatred, envy, and revenge, my soul was driven like a leaf before the autumn wind.

Then I rose and flew at his throat once more. “Thou liest!” I cried. “Heed not the rabble’s cry—God lies NOT in a rotting egg!”

I remember no more.

When I regained consciousness it was a winter twilight, and the room was cold. I was alone in the doctor’s study and the machinery in the house was stilled.... I went to the eastern window and saw that the twilight was not the twilight of the dawn. I I must have slept all day.... As I turned back I saw a folded paper on the table, and read, in the doctor’s hand:

“In six hours you have passed through all the thoughts, all the wills, and all the passions known to devils, men, or angels. You must now sleep deeply or you die. I have put the lever on the rhythm of the world, which is Sleep.

“In twelve hours I shall stop it, and you will wake.

“Then you had better go home and seek your finite sleep, or I have known men lose their mind.”

I staggered out into the street, and sought my room. My head was still dizzy, my brain felt tired, and my soul was sere. I felt like an old man; and yet my heart was still half-drunk with sleep, and enamoured with it, entranced with that profound slumber of the world to which all consciousness comes as a sorrow.

The night was intensely cold; the stars were like blue fires; a heavy ox-sledge went by me, creaking in the snow. It was a fine night for the river. I suddenly remembered that it must be the night for the skating party, and my engagement with Althea. And with her there came a memory of that love that I had felt for her, sublimated, as it had been, beyond all earthly love.

I hurried back to my room; and as I lit the lamp I saw a note addressed to me, in her handwriting, lying on my study table. I opened it; all it contained was in two phrases:

“Good-by; forgive me.

“Althea.”

I knew not what to think; but my heart worked quicker than my brain. It led me to Althea’s house; the old lady with whom she lived told me that she had already started for the skating party. Already? I did not dare to ask with whom. It was a breach of custom that augured darkly, her not waiting for me, her escort.

On my way to the river I took the street by the house of Materialismus. They were not there. The old warehouse was dark in all its windows. I went in; the crazy wooden building was trembling with the Power; but all was dark and silent but the slow beating of the Power on the Murder pulse.

I snatched up the Spanish dagger where it still lay on the table, and rushed out of that devil’s workshop and along the silent street to the river. Far up the stream I could already make out a rosy glow, the fires and lanterns of the skating party. I had no skates, but ran out upon the river in a straight line, just skirting the brink of the falls where the full flood maned itself and arched downward, steady, to its dissolution in the mist. I came to the place of pleasure, marked out by gay lines of paper lanterns; the people spoke to me, and some laughed, as I threaded my way through them; but I heeded not; they swerving and darting about me, like so many butterflies, I keeping to my line. By the time I had traversed the illuminated enclosure I had seen all who were in it. Althea was not among them.

I reached the farthest lantern, and looked out. The white river stretched broad away under the black sky, faintly mirroring large, solemn stars. It took a moment for my eyes, dazzled by the tawdry light, to get used to the quiet starlight; but then I fancied that I saw two figures, skating side by side, far up the river. They were well over to the eastern shore, skating up stream; a mile or more above them the road to A—— crossed the river, in a long covered bridge.

I knew that they were making for that road, where the doctor doubtless had a sleigh in waiting. By crossing diagonally, I could, perhaps, cut them off.

“Lend me your skates,” I said to a friend who had come up and stood looking at me curiously. Before he well understood, I had torn them off his feet and fitted them to my own; and I remember that to save time I cut his ankle-strap off with the Spanish knife. A moment more and I was speeding up the silent river, with no light but the stars, and no guide but the two figures that were slowly creeping up in the shadow of the shore. I laughed aloud; I knew this German beau was no match for me in speed or strength. I did not throw the knife away, for I meant more silent and more certain punishment than a naked blow could give. The Murder motive still was in my brain.

I do not know when they first knew that I was coming. But I soon saw them hurrying, as if from fear; at least her strokes were feeble, and he seemed to be urging, or dragging her on. By the side of the river, hitched to the last post of the bridge, I could see a single horse and sleigh.

But I shouted with delight, for I was already almost even with them, and could easily dash across to the shore while they were landing. I kept to my straight line; I was now below the last pier of the bridge; and then I heard a laugh from him, answering my shout. Between me and the bank was a long open channel of rippling dark water, leading up and down, many miles, from beneath the last section of the bridge.

They had reached the shore, and he was dragging her, half reluctant, up the bank. In a minute, and he would have reached his horse.

I put the knife between my teeth and plunged in. In a few strokes of swimming I was across; but the ice was shelving on the other side, and brittle; and the strong stream had a tendency to drag me under. I got my elbows on the edge of ice, and it broke. Again I got my arms upon the shelving ice; it broke again. I heard a wild cry from Althea—I cursed him—and I knew no more.

When I next knew life, it was spring; and I saw the lilac buds leafing by my window in the garden. I had been saved by the others—some of them had followed me up the river—unconscious, they told me, the dagger still clinched in my hand.

Althea I have never seen again. First I heard that she had married him; but then, after some years, came a rumor that she had not married him. Her father lost his fortune in a vain search for her, and died. After many years, she returned, alone. She lives, her beauty faded, in the old place.

AN ALABAMA COURTSHIP
ITS SIMPLICITIES AND ITS COMPLEXITIES

1.

I must first tell you how I came to be ever a commercial traveller. My father was a Higginbotham—one of the Higginbothams of Salem—but my mother, Marie Lawrence, was a far-off cousin of the wife of old Thomas Lawrence, the great tobacconist of New York. Horatio Higginbotham was both an author and an artist, but he neither wrote nor painted down to the popular taste; and as he was also a gentleman, and had lived like one, he left very little money. Not that he took it with him when he died, but he had spent it on the way. It costs considerable to get through this world, if you travel first-class and pay as you go. And, at least, my father left no debts.

He left my dear mother, however, and his assets were represented by me, an expensive Junior at Newbridge. And as none of the family counting-rooms and cotton-mills seemed to open the door for me—so degenerate a scion of a money-making race as to have already an artist behind him—I was glad to enter the wide portal of Cousin Lawrence’s tobacco manufactory.

Here, as in most successful trades, you were, all but the very heir-presumptive, put through a regular mill. First, a year or two in the factory, just to get used to the sneezing; and then you took to the road; and after a few years of this had thoroughly taught you the retail trade, you were promoted to be a gentleman and hob-nob with the planters in Cuba, and ride over their landed estates.

I got through the factory well enough; but the road, as you may fancy, was a trial in prospect. When my time came (being then, as you will see, something of a snob) I was careful to choose the wildest circuit, most remote from Boston and from Boston ways. The extreme West—Denver, Kansas City, Omaha—was out of the question; even the South—New Orleans, Charleston, Florida particularly—was unsafe. Indiana was barbarous enough, but went with Ohio and Michigan; and I finally chose what was called the Tennessee Circuit, which included all the country west of the Alleghanies, from the Ohio River to the Gulf States. Louisville belonged to my Cincinnati colleague, but the rest of Kentucky and Tennessee, from the Cumberland and Great Smoky Mountains to the hills of Alabama and the plains of Memphis, were mine.

And by no means uninteresting I found it. I travelled, you must know, in snuff; and the Southern mountains, with the headwaters of the Western rivers, Cumberland, Alabama, Tennessee, are the country of the snuff-taker in America.

The civilization, the picturesqueness of our country lies always between the mountains and the seaboard. Trace the Appalachian summits from their first uprearing at Tracadiegash or Gaspé, to that last laurel-hill near Tupelo in Mississippi—on the left of you lies history, character, local identity; on the right that great common place, that vast central prairie, lying stolidly spread out between the Rockies and the Blue Ridge, producing food. Heaven keep us above that central plain, one would say, and from the men and moods and motives that it breeds—but that out of it, in the very unidentified middle of it, the Lord upreared a Lincoln.

However, my beat lay so well to the south of it, lurked so far up in the mountain alleyways and southern river-cañons, that I found much to study and more to see. The railway did little more than take me to the field of labor; the saddle or the wagon or the country stage must do the rest. My first trip was to the east of my dominions; my headquarters were at Knoxville, and from there I rode through some thousand miles of mountain and of cove; and different enough and remote enough it was from all that I had known before, and from all that might know me or look askance upon a travelling-merchant selling snuff by sample. But this was but a breather, as it were; and on my second journey I was ordered to replace my predecessor, Jerry Sullivan, at his headquarters in Chattanooga, and take entire charge of that country. Already I had contracted a prejudice for the slow and unconventional modes of travelling; and after I had seen Jerry Sullivan, a genial Irishman, and had formal delivery of his office, and he had gone back with evident delight to his beloved New York, and I had sat there alone a day or two, I thought that I would open out the business westward. And looking at the map, it occurred to me that the Tennessee River was the natural avenue to my domains in that direction. Luckily, I made the acquaintance of a young land-prospector, with romantic instincts like my own; and the second evening after this idea came to me he and I were seated in a wooden dug-out canoe, my parcels of samples and his instruments in the waist of the boat, drifting swiftly down the brown stream at sunset, under the lofty shadow of the Lookout Mountain.

The stream was shallow, and its waters so opaque that six inches looked like six fathoms, and it happened not rarely that we ran upon a sand-bar in full mid-stream; but a hard shove at the pole would send us off, usually sideways, careening in the swirl. When we were not aground our time was rapid—some six or seven miles an hour, with the current, and the pole, and paddle. The mountains came close around us, and the shores contracted; and pretty soon the railway took a plunge into a tunnel and disappeared. No house nor light was in sight when the moon came out. For some twenty miles or more we swung down the swift stream silently, in a country that seemed quite unsettled. And as the night made it still harder to make out the deeper places, it is not surprising that after one long, gradual grate upon a mid-channel sand-bank, we settled in a bed that all our efforts were insufficient to dislodge us from. And Arthur Coe, my companion, by way of making the best night of it possible, and the moon and the mild May weather falling in, drew out a banjo from his traps in the bow and made melodies not unpleasant to a man who lay silent in the stern, looking at the stars and smoking his pipe.

A fine range of trees lined the opposite shore and, beyond, the forest rolled up in mountain-shoulders to the sky; but not a sign of human life was visible. So that we both started when, at the end of some negro melody, the refrain was taken up by a lusty chorus, and rang far out over the murmuring Tennessee. And in a few moments a large gum canoe filled with joyous darkies came to us from the farther shore; and finding our trouble, nothing would do but they must pull us ashore and we spend the night with “Massa.” Which we did, and a kind and queer old pair of gentry we found them, him and his wife, living alone with a dozen of old freed slaves, some dozen miles from anywhere. The old, wide, one-story plantation house stood in a clearing facing the river (which used to be much more of a river, with many steamers and cotton-craft, “befo’ de wo’”); and we had quite a concert before we went to bed, with all the cigars and other accompaniment that we needed. There were no young people in the house, only old massa and missus and the old slaves; and we heard some story of death in battle from the latter, as we all sang a hymn together before we went to bed, and took one final glass of whiskey; and even the negroes were allowed a taste of something, for wetting their whistles they had blown so well.

Thus it was, almost every night; and the long days were spent in drifting down the river; and even Coe was in no hurry to get to the place where he was to survey his railway or prospect his town; and either the people were so lonely, or their good will was so great, that they gave orders for snuff in a way that was surprising. Only one thing struck us—the absence of young people; not only of young men, but of girls. Coe said he thought the people were too old to have any children; but what had become of the children they should have had twenty years ago? “War-time,” said Coe, as if that explained it.

So we got down into Georgia, and then into Northern Alabama; and the river wound so that we were two weeks on the way. Coe was to prospect near a town called Florence, or Tuscumbia; places that then we never had heard of.

That day, at dawn, we ran on Muscle Shoals. Fresh from a night under the wild-grape vines, blossoming fragrantly, with a sweetness troubling to the spirit, acrid, whereunder we had slept like one drugged with wine—we had got into our canoe at sunrise or before, and pushed out into the stream. It lay broad and still and shimmering—so broad that we ought to have noticed its two or three miles of surface could scarce cover but three or four inches of depth. But our eyelids were heavy with the wild grape—as if its breath had been some soul phantasm of what was to be its fruit—and so we paddled dreamily to the midstream and ran aground.

“I say!” said Coe. But there was nothing to be said, and there we hung, two miles from either shore, and the sun rose full up stream, and gilded us.

In all that inland lake was but a hand’s-depth of water, flowing swift and softly over sand and shells. We took to our poles; hard choosing it would be which way lay deepest; and, one at either end, “Now then!” from Coe; and we moved, or didn’t move, or for the most part spun around upon the grinding shells, and Coe fell out of the boat and splashed shallowly upon his back upon the sand.

So all that day we labored; and the sun grew hot, so that Coe at noon sought wading for the shore to some shelter in the wild grapes; but that, half a stone’s-throw from the white clay bank ran swiftly some two fathoms deep of river Tennessee. So he came back and swore, and I laughed; and we set at it again. Meantime the slow, deep-laden scows, each with an appetizing tent for shade, spun downward close under that vine-shaded bank and jeered at us.

Late in the afternoon, raw-handed from the poles and raw in visage from a straight-down sun, we got away. Still breathless, burning, we too swung down the smooth stream, narrower, though still a half-mile wide; here it ran in curves by bold cliff-points castellated into white, vine-garlanded turrets of the strangely worn and carven limestone. No Rhine could be so beautiful; for here all was unprofaned, silent, houseless, lined by neither road nor rail.

The sun was nearly setting, and Coe’s soul turned to beauty, and again he began to marvel at the want of womankind. No country was visible behind the river-banks; and he stood up and studied carefully the shore through his field-glass.

“I think this is the spot,” he said.

“Tuscumbia?” said I. But Coe was rapt in study of the river-bank.

“Do you see her?” said I, louder.

Suddenly Coe turned to me in some excitement. “Paddle hard—I think it’s the place.” And seizing his bow paddle he drove it into the stream so deep that had I not steadied the craft she had rolled over. Englishmen can never get used to inanimate objects; deft is not their word.

So we rounded, always approaching the shore, a bold promontory; in four successive terraces three hundred feet of ranged limestone towers rose loftily, adorned with moss, and vines, and myrtle-ivy, their bases veiled in a grand row of gum-trees lining the shore. No Rheinstein ever was finer, and as we turned one point, a beautiful rich-foliaged ravine came down to meet us, widening at the river to a little park of green and wild flowers, walled on both sides by the castled cliffs; in the centre the most unsullied spring I have ever seen. And all about, no sign of man; no house, or smoke, or road, or track, or trail.

“This is it,” said Coe again, as the canoe grated softly on the dazzling sand, and he prepared to leap ashore.

“What,” said I, “Tuscumbia?” For there is a legend of this place; and of Tuscumbia, the great chieftain, and the Indian maiden, and their trysting by the silent spring.

“No,” said he; “Sheffield. That gorge is the only easy grade to the river for many miles. Through it we shall put our railroad, and this flat will do for terminal facilities—eh!” and he leaped clumsily; for the loud report of a shot-gun broke the air and the charge whisked almost about our ears, and flashed a hundred yards behind us in the Tennessee.

With one accord we ran up the ravine. There was no path, and the heavy vines and briers twined about our legs, and the tree-trunks of the Middle Ages still lay greenly, but when we sought to clamber over them, collapsed and let us to their punky middles.

Suddenly, as we rounded a bend between two gloomy ravages of rock, there stood before us a young girl, in the green light—her hair as black as I had ever seen, with such a face of white and rose! I stared at her helplessly; Coe, I think, cowered behind me. She looked at us inquiringly a moment; and then, as we neither spoke, turned up the side of the ravine, with her fowling-piece, and vanished by some way unknown to us. I would have followed her, I think, but Coe held me back by the coat-tails.

“Don’t,” said he. “She’s quite welcome to a shot, I am sure.”

2.

Nevertheless, after this one moment of chivalrous impulse, Coe set up his levelling-machine and began taking the gradients of the ravine up which this girl had gone. I have never known an Englishman upon whose heart you could make any impression until his stomach was provided for. Meantime I wandered on, admiring the red hibiscus blossom and liana vine that veiled the gorge in tropical luxuriance up to the myrtles of the limestone. Finally I emerged upon the plateau above the river, and found myself in a glorious, green, flowing prairie, many miles broad and apparently as long as the brown Tennessee that lay hid behind me. In the midst of it one iron-furnace was already in blast.

The inn (the International Hotel) at Tuscumbia was very noisy. I was struck by this when I went to my room to dress for supper; I had only been able to get one room for myself and Coe; there were two beds in it, but only one wash-stand. Through the walls, which were very thin, I could hear at least four distinct feminine voices on the one side, and several upon the other. There were also some across the hall that seemed to be engaged in the same conversation; and that the speakers were young ladies I had fleeting but satisfactory evidence when I opened my door to set out my water-jug for a further supply.

“Look here, young man,” said the landlord to me, when I again endeavored to get another room for Coe. “How many rooms do you reckon this yer house’ll hold, with fifty-seven guests all wantin’ em?”

“Fifty-seven!” said I. The International Hotel was a small two-story wooden house with a portico. “How many can the hotel accommodate?”

“Thirty in winter,” said the landlord. “In summer sixty to seventy.”

I stared at the man until he explained.

“You see, in the winter, they’s most from the North. I hev accommodated seventy-four,” added he, meditatively; “but they wuz all Southerners, an’ that wuz befo’ the wo’. They took a good bar’l of whiskey a day, they did—an’ consid’able Bo’bon,” and he ended with a sigh.

“Your present visitors seem chiefly young ladies,” I hazarded.

“Hevn’t you heard?” and mine host looked at me as if to reassure himself as to my social position. “They is society folks from Knoxville—down here givin’ a play—‘The Pirates of Penzance,’” and he handed me a newspaper wherein he pointed to a double-leaded announcement setting forth that the well-known Amateur Shakespeare Comedy Club of Knoxville, consisting of ladies and gentlemen of the upper social circles of that city, would appear in this well-known opera, the article closing with a tribute to the personal charms of Miss Birdie McClung, the principal member of the company.

“They hev come down in a Pullman cyar, all to themselves, quite special,” said the innkeeper.

“Are any of them married, Colonel Kipperson?” said I, timidly.

The colonel looked at me with scorn; and just then a peal of rippling laughter, melodious as the waves of the Tennessee upon Muscle Shoals, rang through the thin partition, accompanied by the crash of some falling missile, I think, a hair-brush.

“Does that look as if they wuz married?” said he, and turned upon his heel, as one who gave me up at last. “Supper’s at six,” he added, relenting, at the door.

Coe turned up at supper, but we saw nothing of the fair actresses; and the evening we passed socially with the leading spirits of the hotel: Judge Hankinson, Colonel Wilkinson, General McBride, Tim Healy, the railroad contractor, and two or three black bottles. Colonel Wilkinson and General McBride had been trying a case before Judge Hankinson, and both were disposed to criticise the latter’s rulings, but amiably, as became gentlemen over a whiskey-bottle in the evening. At midnight, just as the judge was ordering a fourth bottle, the door opened, and in walked a very beautiful young woman with black hair and eyes. “Good-evening, Miss Juliet,” said the others, as we rose and bowed.

Miss Juliet walked up to the judge, who with difficulty got up, and followed her out of the room. “Good-night, jedge,” and in the pause that followed, General McBride remarked pathetically that “the jedge wasn’t what he used to wuz.”

“No,” said the colonel, with a sigh, “I’ve seen the time when he wouldn’t leave a third bottle of his own.”

“What relation is Miss Juliet to Judge Wilkinson?” asked Coe.

The general and the colonel started; and Tim Healy looked apprehensively at the door.

“Young man,” said the general, “I wouldn’t ask that question, if I wuz you.”

“The jedge ken still shoot,” added the colonel.

All was forgiven when I had explained that Mr. Coe was an Englishman; and we went to bed. About two in the morning the adjoining rooms became suddenly populous with soft voices. Coe started to his elbow in his cot and called to me. “It’s only the Amateur Shakespeare Comedy Club of Knoxville, returning from the play,” said I; and I dropped asleep and dreamed confusedly of Tuscumbia, the Indian chieftain, feminine voices, and the rippling waters of the Tennessee.

In the morning I got into the train for Chattanooga, leaving Coe behind. On the platform I noticed two graceful girls, dressed in white muslin, wide straw hats with white satin ribbon and sashes, white lace mitts, and thick white veils; not so thick that I could not see that they were brunettes, with hair as black as only grows under Southern nights. The train was composed of two cars—the ordinary Southern local—differing from a Jersey accommodation only in that it had still more peanut shells and an added touch of emigrant-train and circus. At one end sat a tall gentleman in a stovepipe hat, who had removed his boots, and was taking his ease in blue woollen stockings. At the other was a poor, pretty woman, with large, sad eyes, petting her emaciated husband, who was dying of consumption. Just as the train started, he had a terrible fit of coughing; now he leans his head upon her shoulder, and she rests her cheek upon his forehead. Behind me, but across the aisle, are the two young ladies in white muslin.

So we jangle on through the hot Southern June morning; and pretty soon one of the girls in white comes over and takes the seat behind me. She has thrown off her veil, and I assure you a more beautiful face I never saw; it’s all very well to talk of a neck like a lily and cheeks like a rose, and eyes

“Whose depths unravel the coiled night

And see the stars at noon——”

but when you really see them you fall down and worship the aggregation whose inventoried details, in any novel, would excite weariness. Meantime, her sister had stretched herself out upon the other seat, pointing one dainty russet leather foot beneath the muslin, and disposed her handkerchief across her eyes.

How to speak to this fair beauty so close behind me I know not; I can almost feel her eyes in the back of my head; so near that I dare not look round; I fear she may be another daughter of Judge Wilkinson’s. And the train jangles on, and we are winding through green dense forests, up to the mountains. I wait half an hour for propriety, and then look around; I catch her deep eyes full, “bows on,” as it were, her lips parted as if almost to speak, and I—shrink back in confusion. I hear her give a little sound, whether a sigh or a murmur I am not sure; but pretty soon I hear her struggling with her window. This is my chance; and I rise and with the politest bow I know and “permit me,” I seek to help her; but the sash is old and grimed and the angle inconvenient. Finally I have to go around into her seat; and leaning over her I get a purchase and the window goes up with a bang and a cloud of dust that sets us both sneezing. “It is very hot,” I say, standing with my hand upon her seat, irresolute.

“Do you know, I thought you were never going to speak?” she says.

I sit down on the seat beside her.

“I hate being unsociable in a railway journey; but, of course, I couldn’t speak first. And now there’s so little time left,” she adds, regretfully.

“Where are you going—not to Chattanooga?”

“Only to Scott’s Plains. What’s your name?”

“Horatio Higginbotham,” I have to reply, fearing she will laugh, though the name is well known in Salem. She does not laugh at all, but smiles divinely.

“My name is Jeanie Bruce. And that’s my sister May. Come over, and I’ll introduce you.”

We walk across the car and Miss Jeanie says to Miss May (who, it appears, is not asleep), “May, I want to introduce to you my friend, Mr. Higginbotham. Mr. Higginbotham, Miss May Bruce.”

I bow to the more languid beauty, who does not rise, but smiles a twin sister of Miss Jeanie’s smile, showing her little white teeth and tapping her little foot in a way to make a man distracted which to look at.

“I thought you didn’t seem to be getting on very well,” says the recumbent May, “but now, I suppose, I can go to sleep,” and she pulls the lace handkerchief back over her eyes, and Jeanie leads me (it is the word) back to our seat on the other side of the car. “We are twin sisters; and some people can’t tell one from the other. Could you?” And she takes off her hat, pushes the soft black mass back from her brow, and looks at me, frankly, sweetly.

“I shouldn’t want to,” I say. I think I am getting on; but she looks at me as if puzzled, half displeased.

“May is engaged,” she answers, “and I am not. I have been, though.”

“Dear me,” I answer, heedlessly; “how old——”

“Seventeen. But I never had a gen’leman ask me such a question before.”

She is silent; I speechless. Yet I wish she would pronounce the t in “gentleman.” She does not bear malice long, but asks “where I come from?”

“Boston,” I say; “and I am twenty-three.”

She laughs merrily, in forgiveness, with a dear, lovable, quick sense of humor. Then she scans me curiously. “I never saw a gen’leman from Boston before.”

“There are some there,” I answer, humbly.

“Of course we see plenty of commercial travellers,” she says, and the conversation languishes. I look out the window, for suggestions, at the tall mountain timber and the bearded gray moss. It suggests nothing but partridges.

“But you have not yet told me whether you can tell us apart.”

Thus challenged, I bring my eyes to hers; there is something dazzling about them that always makes it hard to see her face, except when she is looking away; my eyes wander not from hers, until she does look away—out the window—and I suddenly see something familiar in the face.

“Is there much shooting about here?” I ask, abruptly, meaning game.

“Yes, there is a terrible deal. Why, my cousin, Kirk Bruce, was only eighteen when he shot and killed another gen’leman at school.”

“Dear me, I didn’t mean men,” I say. “I meant quail and partridges. And I thought I had seen you yesterday with a shot-gun down in that green bottom by the Tennessee. It might have been men, though; for your shot whistled about the ears of my friend, Mr. Coe.”

“I wondered you didn’t remember me when you got upon the train,” answers Jeanie. “Where is Mr. Coe?”

“He stayed behind at Sheffield,” I say. “Do you belong to the ‘Pirates of Penzance’?”

“Mercy, no—they’re city people from Knoxville—we’ve only spent two winters there getting our education in music.”

“Is Knoxville a musical city?”

“The advantages there are considered exceptional. We were at the Convent of Sacré-Cœur.”

“At the convent?” I ask.

“All our best schools are the convents, you know, for us girls. At Sacré-Cœur we have instruction from Signor Mancini. I have learned seventeen pieces, but May knows twenty-four and two duets.”

“Sonatas?” I say. “Concertos? Chopin? Beethoven?”

Miss Bruce shakes her head. “No,” she answers, with some pride. “Our music is all operatic. Of course, I can play ‘The Monastery Bells’ and ‘The Shepherd’s Dream;’ but now I’m learning ‘Il Trovatore.’ My sister can play a concert-piece upon ‘La Cenerentola.’”

“What else do you learn?”

“French—and dancing—and embroidery. But I suppose you are terribly learned,” and Miss Jeanie takes a wide and searching gaze of my poor countenance with her beautiful soft eyes.

“Not at all. I am a commercial traveller,” I say to justify my blushes. It was malicious of me; for she looks pained.

“Nearly all our young gen’lemen have got to go into business since the war. My cousin Bruce——”

(There was an inimitable condescension in her accent of the “our.”)

“The one who shot the other boy at school? Don’t you think you have too much of that kind of shooting?”

“As a gen’leman he had to do it—in self-defence. Of course, they were both very young gen’lemen. The other gen’leman had his revolver out first.”

“You ought not to carry revolvers so much.”

“There! that’s just what I’ve often said. But how can you help it?”

“I help it.”

“You don’t say you haven’t so much as a pistol with you?” And her gentle eyes are so full open that in looking into them I forget my answer.

“Well, anyhow, it wasn’t Cousin Kirk’s fault. He didn’t have any revolver, either, when he first went out of the house; but another scholar he ran up and made him take one. Mother didn’t ever want him to go to that school, anyhow; several of our family had got shot there before by this other boy’s family. This other boy, you see, liked a young lady Cousin Kirk was attentive to; and he sent word in to him one day to come out of the school-house to see him. And the other young gen’lemen in the school, they warned Cousin Kirk not to see him, as he wasn’t armed. He’d never ought to have gone out unarmed. But he went. And as soon as they met he shot Cousin Bruce in the right arm. And a friend that was with him gave Cousin Bruce his pistol; and he had to fire; and he killed him; and Cousin Bruce always says that man’s face haunts him yet. And the mother of the young man was almost crazy; and afterward she called at the school with a revolver, dressed in deep mourning. And when Cousin Bruce came into the parlor he didn’t know who she was; and she shot at him through the crape veil. But, of course, she didn’t hit him. And Cousin Bruce always says that man’s face haunts him yet.”

(I have endeavored to set down this conversation just as it happened. At the time I did not know at all what to make of Miss Jeanie Bruce. I had seen no girls like her in Salem, or even Boston. Her English was poor, her education deficient, her manners free. On all these points she was about on a par with the shop-girls in Lynn. But she was not at all like a Lynn shop-girl. Had I supposed it possible for there to be any ladies except according to the Salem and Boston standards, I should have set her down for a lady at the time.)

Here we arrived at Decatur, where I had the pleasure of taking the two Misses Bruce in to dinner, in a hotel built alongside of the railroad track, as the principal street of the town. In the long dining-room were six transverse tables, over everyone of which was a huge wooden fan like the blade of a paddle. The six fans were connected together, and at the back of the room a small bare-footed negro swung the entire outfit to and fro by means of a long pole like a boat-hook; and with a great swish! swish! disturbed in regular oscillations the clouds of flies. Miss Jeanie took off the lace mitts at the dinner-table, and upon one forefinger of her pretty white hand I noticed a ring—a single band of gold setting a small ruby.

When we got back into the cars and May had gone to sleep again, I reproached Jeanie with telling me she was not engaged. “I, too, was going to spend this winter at Knoxville, and I had hoped to see something of you.”

“I am not engaged,” said Miss Jeanie. “The ring was given me by a gen’leman, but I do not care for him at all. I only promised to wear it a few weeks, because he bothered so. I’ll tell you what,” she said, “to show I don’t care for him and remind you to be sure and call, I’ll give it to you.”

I was in some surprise, you may suppose. “But I can’t take a gentleman’s ring——”

“It’s my ring, I tell you,” said Miss Jeanie. “And if you don’t take it, I shan’t believe you’re coming to see me, and I won’t give you my address—there!”

What could I do? I took the ring.

When I got that night to Knoxville, I wrote at once to Jerry Sullivan. If they had spent two winters in Knoxville, he might have met them, or, at least, known something about them.

“Knoxville, June 30, 188—

“Dear Jerry: Tell me all you know about Miss Jeanie Bruce.

“Yours,

“H. Higginbotham.”

To which the answer came by telegram:

“H. Higginbotham, Knoxville:

“It would take too long.

“Sullivan.”

3.

I had deferred my call upon Miss Bruce until I should receive Sullivan’s answer to my letter; but when his telegram came I was in a quandary. It struck me as ambiguous. And what could be the extreme haste that made a telegram advisable? Or, perhaps, was the whole thing only one of Jerry Sullivan’s jokes?

Meantime I was wearing Miss Jeanie Bruce’s ring. Once it struck me that if I did not mean to call upon her, I ought to send it back. But I did mean to call upon her. There never was any question about that, from the first. I did not in the least approve of her, but I meant to call upon her, if only to tell her so. Her conversation had revealed a certain indifference to human life, but she had very soft and gentle eyes. Like the face of the boy whom Cousin Kirk had shot, they “haunted me yet.”

Coe noticed my ring. Oddly enough, though a foreigner, he had got into the ways of the people quicker than I had; and I saw him looking at it one day, though he said nothing. That is, nothing of the ring; he did ask me whether I had been to see Miss Bruce. So I went; they boarded in a small frame house that belonged to a Mrs. Judge Pennoyer. I suspect it was this female justice who came to the door; it was a Monday afternoon and the house was odorous with soup; but Miss Jeanie was “very much engaged.” The Friday following she was out, and Wednesday I met her walking on the principal street of Knoxville with a tall young man.

“Try Saturday,” said Coe that evening. “I want you to ask those girls for my trip up over the line.” During the summer, Coe had got some rusty rails spiked upon his right of way; and now wished to invite the youths and ladies of Tennessee to run over them in a trial trip.

That day I found Miss Jeanie alone in the parlor, almost as if awaiting me. “I began to think you had forgotten us,” said she, softly. Dear me, how soft her eyes were! I said that I had called there many times.

“You could scarcely expect me to let you in when another gen’leman was here!” said she. “Especially when——” I saw her look at the ring; but she checked herself. My afternoon calls in Salem had not so exclusively monopolized the lady’s attention, and I looked at her, puzzled. Just then the front door-bell rang; and I was confident I heard Mrs. Judge Pennoyer tell someone that Miss Jeanie “was very much engaged.”

My conversation languished. I think that Miss Bruce was disappointed. “Shall I play to you?” I saw her hesitate between “The Shepherd Boy” and a romance of Brinley Richards; and I hastened to reply, “I would rather talk.”— “But you don’t talk,” cried she. “But I look.”— “You can look while I play.”— “Not so well,” said I.— “I have a new piece—one they sent me from the convent, the Sacré-Cœur, you know, where I was for some years. It is called the ‘Tears of Love.’ The musical instruction of the convent was very good. Sister Ignatia had studied in Italy. I suppose it was better than outside—don’t you?”

I had never studied in a convent, and I don’t think I made much answer, for she went on. “Of course, you know, it is pleasanter in other ways. One has so much more liberty. Yet the most Kentucky ladies are all educated in convents. But I felt that I wished to see more of society. At the Sacré-Cœur they do not allow you to receive your gen’lemen friends except in the presence of the mother superior.”

There was a freshness, a simplicity of method in this young lady’s playing with the boys that quite took my breath away, and to relieve the situation I deemed it best to submit to the “Tears of Love.” Of this piece of music I remember little, save that the composer was continually bringing the left hand over the right to execute unnecessary arpeggios in the treble notes. Jeanie’s girlish figure was so round, and swayed so easily, that I thought this part of the music very pretty.

Then I bethought myself of the object of my visit; and I invited Miss Jeanie and Miss May, on Mr. Coe’s behalf, to make the railroad trip. A Salem instinct made me include Mrs. Judge Pennoyer; I then saw in Miss Bruce’s look that it had been unnecessary. Only when I got out the door did I remember that the ring had, after all, been my main object; to return it, I mean.

On the other side of the street, along by a low white-painted paling, lowered a heavy, hulking fellow in a rusty black frock-coat, a great deal of white shirt, and a black clerical tie. In this garb I recognized the Southern University man, and in the man I had a premonition I saw the redoubtable “Cousin Kirk.”

4.

Coe was chartered by the sovereign States of Florida and Alabama to construct his line “from that part of the Atlantic Ocean called the Gulf of Mexico, in the former State,” to a point “at or near” the Tennessee River in the latter. And so “a point at or near the Tennessee River” was the first object of our journey, and this proved as definite a designation as we could give it; though it had public parks and corner lots and a name—on paper. Its name in reality was “Cat Island,” the only native settlement being on a beautifully wooded island thus called, midstream in the river.

“Wouldn’t do to call it that, you know,” said Coe, in a burst of frankness. “Famous place for chills and fever; everybody born on Cat Island, white or black, turns clay-color! So we thought of Bagdad—from its resemblance to the Euphrates.”

Mrs. Judge Pennoyer had come; but so had a strange young man whose name I found was Raoul. He devoted himself to Miss May with a simplicity of purpose amazing to a Northern mind. Hardly anyone knew of the expedition at Knoxville, but when we arrived at Bagdad, that spacious plain was peopled in a way to delight the speculator. “Who are they?” I asked of Coe, puzzled at his evident anxiety where I expected pride. “Who are they, O Caliph of Bagdad?”

“Who are they? The Mesopotamians. Dash it,” he added, “they’ve come, with their wives and children, for the trip.”

So, indeed, they had. Tim Healy met us as we alighted on the platform of the old railroad station—there was, indeed, a platform, but nothing more—and grasping Coe and me warmly by the hand, said rapidly, in the latter’s ear, “had to invite a few of them, you know—prominent gen’lemen of the neighborhood—valuable political influence”—and then, aloud, “General McBride, gen’lemen. Mrs. McBride. Judge Hankinson I think you know. Mr. Coe, I want you fo’ to know Senator Langworthy; one of our most prominent citizens, gen’lemen, an’ I had the grea-at-est difficulty in persuading the senator fo’ to come along. I told him, Mr. Coe, we could show him something of a railroad already——” Coe expressed his acknowledgments.

“Sir, it was a pleasure to study the developments of my country. It does not need to be a citizen of Bagdad to appreciate the advantages of your location,” and the senator waved his hand in the direction of a rusty line of track I then first perceived winding across the prairie from the Tennessee. “Let me introduce to you Mrs. Langworthy.” A pale lady, with bonnet-strings untied and a baby at the breast, was indicated by the second gesture; she looked worn and world-weary, but I lived to learn she had an endurance of hardship Stanley might have envied, and a relish for fried cakes and bacon in the small hours of night that I am sure only an optimist could feel. “My partner, Mr. Hanks. My wife’s sister, Miss McClung.”

By this time we were ready to start. A brand-new locomotive decorated with flowers had backed down awkwardly from the new-laid track to the junction; and we entered what Coe with some pride informed me was the directors’ car. It contained one long saloon, two staterooms, a minute kitchen, and a glass gallery behind.

It was amazing how we all got into it; and when we had, I counted three babies, seven old women, and a dog, besides some twenty men. All had brought their luncheon-baskets, and the babies (except that appertaining unto Mrs. Senator Langworthy) were consoled with bottles. After a prodigious deal of whistling, we were off, and Bagdad resumed its quietude—at least, we thought so; but even then a distant shouting was heard, and Colonel Wilkinson, his wife, and two urchin boys were descried, hastening down the track from the direction of the Bagdad Hotel. Judge Hankinson pulled the bell-cord and then thrust his head out of a window and roared to the engineer. “Stop, driver, it’s Colonel Wilkinson. How are you, colonel?” he added to that gentleman, who had arrived, and was mopping himself with a red silk handkerchief, his wife and offspring still some laps behind. “Almost thought you’d be left.”

“Great heavens, I wish he was!” groaned Coe in my ear.

“Never mind, the judge hasn’t brought Miss Julia,” said Tim Healy; and this time we were really off.

I have neither time nor memory to describe that day; though it was very funny while it lasted, perhaps all the funnier that there was no one to share the humor of it. Everybody was great on the development of the country, and everybody made speeches. We stopped at least twenty times in the first fifteen miles to look at a seam of coal, or a field of iron, or a marble quarry (suitable for the Alhambra Palace or the new State Capitol, sir), or, at least, one of the most wonderful mineral springs of the world—only waiting the completion of Colonel Coe’s line of railroad to become another Saratoga. At all these places we got off the train, and went in a long, straggling, irregular file to inspect, Mrs. Senator Langworthy ruthlessly interrupting the repast of her youngest-born at such moments, and leaving him upon a car-seat in charge of the fireman. At the quarry or mineral spring the proprietor would take his turn in making a little stump speech, standing on the edge and gesticulating into the pool, while the rest of us stood grouped around the margin. Meantime Miss May Bruce and Raoul would go to walk in the woods; and we would hear the engine whistling wildly for us to return. It was a novel interruption to a flirtation, that railway-whistle; but everybody looked upon us amiably as we hurried down to the track; live and let live, and take your time for happiness; no schedule time, as at Salem.

By the hot noon we were above the river valley and winding up the folds of fir-forest that clothed the shaggy shoulders of the mountain. Engine No. 100 puffed and strained, and reeled up before us like a drunken man. We had had our dinner; the sexes began to separate, and even the Langworthy baby went to sleep. Raoul and May were riding on the engine. I left Miss Jeanie Bruce and joined the gentlemen, who were sitting cross-legged and contented in the smoking end of the car, from the glass-housed platform of which we looked already back upon the great central plain from the rising Appalachians.

“Oh, it’s a glorious country,” said “Colonel” Coe; and, I think, winked at me.

“Why, senator,” said the judge, “I have seen a corner-lot sold at Bagdad six times in one day, ’n a thousan’ dollars higher every time.”

“General,” said the senator, “do you know what the original purchase of the Bagdad Land and Investment Company aggregated—for the whole eighteen hundred acres?”

There was a silence. Everybody looked at me. It dawned upon me that I was the “general,” and I wondered why I ranked poor Coe.

“I’ve no idea,” I hastened to add; fearing the senator had followed Coe’s wink.

“Thirty thousand dollars,” answered General McBride, as if it were a game of “School-teacher.” “And they sold three hundred acres for——”

“Fifteen hundred thousand dollars,” resumed Judge Hankinson, with intense solemnity.

“Paper?” said Tim Healy.

“Cash, Captain Healy,” said the judge, fiercely, “cash.”

“I want to know!—Was that the lot you bought of Widow Enraghty, judge?”

A roar of laughter greeted Tim’s answer. People tipped back their chairs, slapping their thighs; the Langworthy baby woke up and cried, and even the judge screwed up his whiskey-softened old face in vain.

“Tell us about it, judge,” said Raoul, who had come back from the engine and was peering over our shoulders. “I’m a young lawyer, and I want to know these tricks.”

“Young man,” said the judge, “I’ll tell you, and let it be a warning to you when you’re married, to be honest and say so” (Raoul blushed violently). “The fact was, I had been acquainted with the widow Enraghty more than fifty years—her husband had got killed in the forties, an’ she was sixty-five if she was a day, and she owned that valuable corner lot opposite the new Court-house and by the building of the Board of Trade.” (“Not built yet,” whispered Coe to me.) “I’d been dickering with her for weeks; but I stood at four thousand, and she wanted five. Now I rode up that morning (it was a fine day; warm and spring-like, and I felt rather sanguine) and I said, ‘What’s your price, Mrs. Enraghty, to-day?’ ‘Six thousand,’ said she. This raise made me kind o’ nervous, an’ I got rash. ‘I’ll give you three thousand,’ said I, ‘cash.’ ‘Here’s your deed,’ says Widow Enraghty. And I declare she had it all ready. I looked at it carefully; it seemed all right, and I paid her the money. I kinder noticed there was a young fellow sittin’ in the room. Well, sir!”

“Well, judge?” The judge’s manner grew impressive.

“Next week that young fellow—Bill Pepper he was, an’ he was just twenty-one—he brought an ejectment against me. She had married him that morning. So Bill Pepper kep’ the land, and Mrs. Pepper kep’ the money.”

In the laughter that followed I became conscious of Raoul pinching my arm mysteriously. “I want a word with you in private,” said he. “Would you mind coming out upon the cow-catcher? It’s been railed off on purpose for observation,” he added, answering my look of amazement, “and it’s a first-rate place to see the cobweb trestle from. It’s something about the young ladies,” he added, seeing that I still hesitated, “and there’s really no other place.”

I looked through the car, but perceived the ladies were sitting in earnest conclave. On the front platform Mrs. Langworthy and the baby were taking the air. In the cab of the engine were the two girls. I suppose I made a gesture of assent, for Raoul nodded to the engineer, who slowed to a halt that almost threw the Langworthy’s domestic group into the bed of a brawling mountain stream some three hundred feet below.

“These gen’lemen want to ride on the pilot,” shouted the engineer in explanation; and we took our way to that exalted perch, where, sitting cross-legged and with hands nervously gripping the rail, I listened to Raoul’s story.

The Misses Bruce, he said, were wild not to go back that day with the railroad party, but to drive to the end of the location through the woods.

“Great Heavens!” said I, “but only Coe and I are going, with Captain Healy. There is nothing but tents——”

“The ladies are used to camping out.”

“But it will be so rough—there are two thousand niggers in camp!”

“The ladies are not afraid.”

I certainly was; for just then, with a preliminary corkscrew-like lurch, the engine began climbing the famous cobweb trestle; the earth suddenly vanished beneath us and we looked down through a lath-like tracery of wooden girders to the foaming stream, now four hundred feet below. I heard a cry behind, and looking timidly around, I saw the pale face of Jeanie at one engine-window and of May Bruce at the other.