THE MATCH GAME.

"I knelt down, and laid my mallet at her feet. 'Beautiful princess!' said I, 'behold your enemies, conquered, await your sentence.'"

(Page 349.)

MY WIFE AND I:

OR,

HARRY HENDERSON'S HISTORY.

BY

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE,

AUTHOR OF "UNCLE TOM'S CABIN," "PINK AND WHITE," ETC.

New-York:
J. B. FORD AND COMPANY.

1872.

Entered according to Act of Congress in the year 1871
BY J. W. FORD AND COMPANY,
in the office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

PREFACE.

During the passage of this story through The Christian Union, it has been repeatedly taken for granted by the public press that certain of the characters are designed as portraits of really existing individuals.

They are not. The supposition has its rise in an imperfect consideration of the principles of dramatic composition. The novel-writer does not profess to paint portraits of any individual men and women in his personal acquaintance. Certain characters are required for the purposes of his story. He conceives and creates them, and they become to him real living beings, acting and speaking in ways of their own. But on the other hand, he is guided in this creation by his knowledge and experience of men and women, and studies individual instances and incidents only to assure himself of the possibility and probability of the character he creates. If he succeeds in making the character real and natural, people often are led to identify it with some individual of their acquaintance. A slight incident, an anecdote, a paragraph in a paper, often furnishes the foundation of such a character; and the work of drawing it is like the process by which Professor Agassiz from one bone reconstructs the whole form of an unknown fish. But to apply to any single living person such delineation is a mistake, and might be a great wrong both to the author and to the person designated.

For instance, it being the author's purpose to show the embarrassment of the young champion of progressive principles, in meeting the excesses of modern reformers, it came in her way to paint the picture of the modern emancipated young woman of advanced ideas and free behavior. And this character has been mistaken for the portrait of an individual, drawn from actual observation. On the contrary, it was not the author's intention to draw an individual, but simply to show the type of a class. Facts as to conduct and behavior similar to those she has described are unhappily too familiar to residents of New York. But in this as in other cases the author has simply used isolated facts in the construction of a dramatic character suited to the design of the story. If the readers of to-day will turn back to Miss Edgeworth's Belinda, they will find that this style of manners, these assumptions and mode of asserting them, are no new things. In the character of Harriet Freke, Miss Edgeworth vividly portrays the manners and sentiments of the modern emancipated women of our times, who think themselves

"Ne'er so sure our passion to create,
As when they touch the brink of all we hate."

Certainly the author knows no original fully answering to the character of Mrs. Cerulean, though she has heard such an one described; and, doubtless, there are traits in her equally attributable to all fair enthusiasts who mistake the influence of their own personal charms and fascinations over the other sex, for real superiority of intellect.

There are happily several young women whose vigorous self-sustaining career, in opening paths of usefulness alike for themselves and others, are like that of Ida Van Arsdel; and the true experiences of a lovely New York girl first suggested the character of Eva; yet both of them are, in execution, strictly imaginary paintings, adapted to the story. In short, some real character, or, in many cases, some two or three, furnish the germs, but the germs only, out of which new characters are developed.

In close: The author wishes to dedicate this Story to the many dear, bright young girls whom she is so happy as to number among her choicest friends. No matter what the critics say of it, if they like it; and she hopes from them, at least, a favorable judgment.

H. B. S.

Twin-Mountain House, N.H.
October, 1871.

CONTENTS:

ILLUSTRATIONS:

CHAPTER I.

THE AUTHOR DEFINES HIS POSITION.

It appears to me that the world is returning to its second childhood, and running mad for Stories. Stories! Stories! Stories! everywhere; stories in every paper, in every crevice, crack and corner of the house. Stories fall from the pen faster than leaves of autumn, and of as many shades and colorings. Stories blow over here in whirlwinds from England. Stories are translated from the French, from the Danish, from the Swedish, from the German, from the Russian. There are serial stories for adults in the Atlantic, in the Overland, in the Galaxy, in Harper's, in Scribner's. There are serial stories for youthful pilgrims in Our Young Folks, the Little Corporal, "Oliver Optic," the Youth's Companion, and very soon we anticipate newspapers with serial stories for the nursery. We shall have those charmingly illustrated magazines, the Cradle, the Rocking Chair, the First Rattle, and the First Tooth, with successive chapters of "Goosy Goosy Gander," and "Hickory Dickory Dock," and "Old Mother Hubbard," extending through twelve, or twenty-four, or forty-eight numbers.

I have often questioned what Solomon would have said if he had lived in our day. The poor man, it appears, was somewhat blasé with the abundance of literature in his times, and remarked that much study was weariness to the flesh. Then, printing was not invented, and "books" were all copied by hand, in those very square Hebrew letters where each letter is about as careful a bit of work as a grave-stone. And yet, even with all these restrictions and circumscriptions, Solomon rather testily remarked, "Of making many books there is no end!" What would he have said had he looked over a modern publisher's catalogue?

It is understood now that no paper is complete without its serial story, and the spinning of these stories keeps thousands of wheels and spindles in motion. It is now understood that whoever wishes to gain the public ear, and to propound a new theory, must do it in a serial story. Hath any one in our day, as in St. Paul's, a psalm, a doctrine, a tongue, a revelation, an interpretation—forthwith he wraps it up in a serial story, and presents it to the public. We have prison discipline, free-trade, labor and capital, woman's rights, the temperance question, in serial stories. We have Romanism and Protestantism, High Church, and Low Church and no Church, contending with each other in serial stories, where each side converts the other, according to the faith of the narrator.

We see that this thing is to go on. Soon it will be necessary that every leading clergyman should embody in his theology a serial story, to be delivered from the pulpit Sunday after Sunday. We look forward to announcements in our city papers such as these: The Rev. Dr. Ignatius, of the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, will begin a serial romance, to be entitled "St. Sebastian and the Arrows," in which he will embody the duties, the trials, and the temptations of the young Christians of our day. The Rev. Dr. Boanerges, of Plymouth Rock Church, will begin a serial story, entitled "Calvin's Daughter," in which he will discuss the distinctive features of Protestant theology. The Rev. Dr. Cool Shadow will go on with his interesting romance of "Christianity a Dissolving View,"—designed to show how everything is, in many respects, like everything else, and all things lead somewhere, and everything will finally end somehow, and that therefore it is important that everybody should cultivate general sweetness, and have the very best time possible in this world.

By the time all these romances get to going, the system of teaching by parables, and opening one's mouth in dark sayings, will be fully elaborated. Pilgrim's Progress will be no where. The way to the celestial city will be as plain in everybody's mind as the way up Broadway—and so much more interesting! Finally all science and all art will be explained, conducted, and directed by serial stories, till the present life and the life to come shall form only one grand romance. This will be about the time of the Millennium.

Meanwhile, I have been furnishing a story for the Christian Union, and I chose the subject which is in everybody's mind and mouth, discussed on every platform, ringing from everybody's tongue, and coming home to every man's business and bosom, to wit:

My Wife and I.

I trust that Miss Anthony and Mrs. Stanton, and all the prophetesses of our day, will remark the humility and propriety of my title. It is not I and My Wife—oh no! It is My Wife and I. What am I, and what is my father's house, that I should go before my wife in anything?

"But why specially for the Christian Union?" says Mr. Chadband. Let us in a spirit of Love inquire.

Is it not evident why, O beloved? Is not that firm in human nature which stands under the title of My Wife and I, the oldest and most venerable form of Christian union on record? Where, I ask, will you find a better one?—a wiser, a stronger, a sweeter, a more universally popular and agreeable one?

To be sure, there have been times and seasons when this ancient and respectable firm has been attacked as a piece of old fogyism, and various substitutes for it proposed. It has been said that "My Wife and I" denoted a selfish, close corporation inconsistent with a general, all-sided diffusive, universal benevolence; that My Wife and I, in a millennial community, had no particular rights in each other more than any of the thousands of the brethren and sisters of the human race. They have said, too, that My Wife and I, instead of an indissoluble unity, were only temporary partners, engaged on time, with the liberty of giving three months' notice, and starting off to a new firm.

It is not thus that we understand the matter.

My Wife and I, as we understand it, is the sign and symbol of more than any earthly partnership or union—of something sacred as religion, indissoluble as the soul, endless as eternity—the symbol chosen by Almighty Love to represent his redeeming, eternal union with the soul of man.

A fountain of eternal youth gushes near the hearth of every household. Each man and woman that have loved truly, have had their romance in life—their poetry in existence.

So I, in giving my history, disclaim all other sources of interest. Look not for trap-doors, or haunted houses, or deadly conspiracies, or murders, or concealed crimes, in this history, for you will not find one. You shall have simply and only the old story—old as the first chapter of Genesis—of Adam stupid, desolate, and lonely without Eve, and how he sought and how he found her.

This much, on mature consideration I hold to be about the sum and substance of all the romances that have ever been written, and so long as there are new Adams and new Eves in each coming generation, it will not want for sympathetic listeners.

So I, Harry Henderson—a plain Yankee boy from the mountains of New Hampshire, and at present citizen of New York—commence my story.

My experiences have three stages.

First, My child-wife, or the experiences of childhood.

Second, My shadow-wife, or the dreamland of the future.

Third, my real wife, where I saw her, how I sought and found her.

In pursuing a story simply and mainly of love and marriage, I am reminded of the saying of a respectable serving man of European experiences, who speaking of his position in a noble family said it was not so much the wages that made it an object as "the things it enabled a gentleman to pick up." So in our modern days as we have been observing, it is not so much the story, as the things it gives the author a chance to say. The history of a young American man's progress toward matrimony, of course brings him among the most stirring and exciting topics of the day, where all that relates to the joint interests of man and woman has been thrown into the arena as an open question, and in relating our own experiences, we shall take occasion to keep up with the spirit of this discussing age in all these matters.

MY CHILD-WIFE.

"The big boys quizzed me, made hideous faces at me from behind their spelling-books, and great hulking Tom Halliday threw a spit-ball that lodged on the wall just over my head, by way of showing his contempt for me; but I looked at Susie, and took courage."

CHAPTER II.

MY CHILD-WIFE.

The Bible says it is not good for man to be alone. This is a truth that has been borne in on my mind, with peculiar force, from the earliest of my recollection. In fact when I was only seven years old I had selected my wife, and asked the paternal consent.

You see, I was an unusually lonesome little fellow, because I belonged to the number of those unlucky waifs who come into this mortal life under circumstances when nobody wants or expects them. My father was a poor country minister in the mountains of New Hampshire with a salary of six hundred dollars, with nine children. I was the tenth. I was not expected; my immediate predecessor was five years of age, and the gossips of the neighborhood had already presented congratulations to my mother on having "done up her work in the forenoon," and being ready to sit down to afternoon leisure.

Her well-worn baby clothes were all given away, the cradle was peaceably consigned to the garret, and my mother was now regarded as without excuse if she did not preside at the weekly prayer-meeting, the monthly Maternal Association, and the Missionary meeting, and perform besides regular pastoral visitations among the good wives of her parish.

No one, of course, ever thought of voting her any little extra salary on account of these public duties which absorbed so much time and attention from her perplexing domestic cares—rendered still more severe and onerous by my father's limited salary. My father's six hundred dollars, however, was considered by the farmers of the vicinity as being a princely income, which accounted satisfactorily for everything, and had he not been considered by them as "about the smartest man in the State," they could not have gone up to such a figure. My mother was one of those gentle, soft-spoken, quiet little women who, like oil, permeate every crack and joint of life with smoothness.

With a noiseless step, an almost shadowy movement, her hand and eye were every where. Her house was a miracle of neatness and order—her children of all ages and sizes under her perfect control, and the accumulations of labor of all descriptions which beset a great family where there are no servants, all melted away under her hands as if by enchantment.

She had a divine magic too, that mother of mine; if it be magic to commune daily with the supernatural. She had a little room all her own, where on a stand always lay open the great family Bible, and when work pressed hard and children were untoward, when sickness threatened, when the skeins of life were all crossways and tangled, she went quietly to that room, and kneeling over that Bible, took hold of a warm, healing, invisible hand, that made the crooked straight, and the rough places plain.

"Poor Mrs. Henderson—another boy!" said the gossips on the day that I was born. "What a shame! poor woman. Well, I wish her joy!"

But she took me to a warm bosom and bade God bless me! All that God sent to her was treasure. "Who knows," she said cheerily to my father, "this may be our brightest."

"God bless him," said my father, kissing me and my mother, and then he returned to an important treatise which was to reconcile the decrees of God with the free agency of man, and which the event of my entrance into this world had interrupted for some hours. The sermon was a perfect success I am told, and nobody that heard it ever had a moment's further trouble on that subject.

As to me, my outfit for this world was of the scantest-a few yellow flannel petticoats and a few slips run up from some of my older sisters cast off white gowns, were deemed sufficient.

The first child in a family is its poem—it is a sort of nativity play, and we bend before the young stranger, with gifts, "gold, frankincense and myrrh." But the tenth child in a poor family is prose, and gets simply what is due to comfort. There are no superfluities, no fripperies, no idealities about the tenth cradle.

As I grew up I found myself rather a solitary little fellow in a great house, full of the bustle and noise and conflicting claims of older brothers and sisters, who had got the floor in the stage of life before me, and who were too busy with their own wants, schemes and plans, to regard me.

I was all very well so long as I kept within the limits of babyhood. They said I was the handsomest baby ever pertaining to the family establishment, and as long as that quality and condition lasted I was made a pet of. My sisters curled my golden locks and made me wonderful little frocks, and took me about to show me. But when I grew bigger, and the golden locks were sheared off and replaced by straight light hair, and I was inducted into jacket and pantaloons, cut down by Miss Abia Ferkin from my next brother's last year's suit, outgrown—then I was turned upon the world to shift for myself. Babyhood was over, and manhood not begun—I was to run the gauntlet of boyhood.

My brothers and sisters were affectionate enough in their way, but had not the least sentiment, and as I said before they had each one their own concerns to look after. My eldest brother was in college, my next brother was fitting for college in a neighboring academy, and used to walk ten miles daily to his lessons and take his dinner with him. One of my older sisters was married, the two next were handsome lively girls, with a retinue of beaux, who of course took up a deal of their time and thoughts. The sister next before me was four years above me on the lists of life, and of course looked down on me as a little boy unworthy of her society. When her two or three chattering girl friends came to see her and they had their dolls and their baby houses to manage, I was always in the way. They laughed at my awkwardness, criticised my nose, my hair, and my ears to my face, with that feminine freedom by which the gentler sex joy to put down the stronger one when they have it at advantage. I used often to retire from their society swelling with impotent wrath, at their free comments. "I won't play with you," I would exclaim. "Nobody wants you," would be the rejoinder. "We've been wanting to be rid of you this good while."

But as I was a stout little fellow, my elders thought it advisable to devolve on me any such tasks and errands as interfered with their comfort. I was sent to the store when the wind howled and the frost bit, and my brothers and sisters preferred a warm corner. "He's only a boy, he can go, or he can do or he can wait," was always the award of my sisters.

My individual pursuits, and my own little stock of interests, were of course of no account. I was required to be in a perfectly free, disengaged state of mind, and ready to drop every thing at a moment's warning from any of my half dozen seniors. "Here Hal, run down cellar and get me a dozen apples," my brother would say, just as I had half built a block house. "Harry, run up stairs and get the book I left on the bed—Harry, run out to the barn and get the rake I left there—Here, Harry, carry this up garret—Harry, run out to the tool shop and get that"—were sounds constantly occurring—breaking up my private cherished little enterprises of building cob-houses, making mill dams and bridges, or loading carriages, or driving horses. Where is the mature Christian who could bear with patience the interruptions and crosses in his daily schemes, that beset a boy?

Then there were for me dire mortifications and bitter disappointments. If any company came and the family board was filled and the cake and preserves brought out, and gay conversation made my heart bound with special longings to be in at the fun, I heard them say, "No need to set a plate for Harry—he can just as well wait till after." I can recollect many a serious deprivation of mature life, that did not bring such bitterness of soul as that sentence of exclusion. Then when my sister's admirer, Sam Richards, was expected, and the best parlor fire lighted, and the hearth swept, how I longed to sit up and hear his funny stories, how I hid in dark corners, and lay off in shadowy places, hoping to escape notice and so avoid the activity of the domestic police. But no, "Mamma, mustn't Harry go to bed?" was the busy outcry of my sisters, desirous to have the deck cleared for action, and superfluous members finally disposed of.

Take it for all in all—I felt myself, though not wanting in the supply of any physical necessity, to be somehow, as I said, a very lonesome little fellow in the world. In all that busy, lively, gay, bustling household I had no mate.

"I think we must send Harry to school," said my mother, gently, to my father, when I had vented this complaint in her maternal bosom. "Poor little fellow, he is an odd one!—there isn't exactly any one in the house for him to mate with!"

So to school I was sent, with a clean checked apron, drawn up tight in my neck, and a dinner basket, and a brown towel on which I was to be instructed in the wholesome practice of sewing. I went, trembling and blushing, with many an apprehension of the big boys who had promised to thrash me when I came; but the very first day I was made blessed in the vision of my little child-wife, Susie Morril.

Such a pretty, neat little figure as she was! I saw her first standing in the school-room door. Her cheeks and neck were like wax; her eyes clear blue; and when she smiled, two little dimples flitted in and out on her cheeks, like those in a sunny brook. She was dressed in a pink gingham frock, with a clean white apron fitted trimly about her little round neck. She was her mother's only child, and always daintily dressed.

"Oh, Susie dear," said my mother, who had me by the hand, "I've brought a little boy here to school, and will be a mate for you."

How affably and graciously she received me—the little Eve—all smiles and obligingness and encouragement for the lumpish, awkward Adam. How she made me sit down on a seat by her, and put her little white arm cosily over my neck, as she laid the spelling-book on her knee, saying—"I read in Baker. Where do you read?"

Friend, it was Webster's Spelling-book that was their text-book, and many of you will remember where "Baker" is in that literary career. The column of words thus headed was a mile-stone on the path of infant progress. But my mother had been a diligent instructress at home, and I an apt scholar, and my breast swelled as I told little Susie that I had gone beyond Baker. I saw "respect mingling with surprise" in her great violet eyes; my soul was enlarged—my little frame dilated, as turning over to the picture of the "old man who found a rude boy on one of his trees stealing apples," I answered her that I had read there!

"Why-ee!" said the little maiden; "only think, girls—he reads in readings!"

I was set up and glorified in my own esteem; two or three girls looked at me with evident consideration.

"Don't you want to sit on our side?" said Susie, engagingly. "I'll ask Miss Bessie to let you, 'cause she said the big boys always plague the little ones." And so, as she was a smooth-tongued little favorite, she not only introduced me to the teacher, but got me comfortably niched, beside her dainty self on the hard, backless seat, where I sat swinging my heels, and looking for all the world like a rough little short-tailed robin, just pushed out of the nest, and surveying the world with round, anxious eyes. The big boys quizzed me, made hideous faces at me from behind their spelling-books, and great hulking Tom Halliday threw a spit ball that lodged on the wall just over my head, by way of showing his contempt for me; but I looked at Susie, and took courage. I thought I never saw anything so pretty as she was. I was never tired with following the mazes of her golden curls. I thought how dainty and nice and white her pink dress and white apron were; and she wore a pair of wonderful little red shoes; her tiny hands were so skillful and so busy! She turned the hem of my brown towel, and basted it for me so nicely, and then she took out some delicate ruffling that was her school work, and I admired her bright, fine needle and fine thread, and the waxen little finger crowned with a little brass thimble, as she sewed away with an industrious steadiness. To me the brass was gold, and her hands were pearl, and she was a little fairy princess!—yet every few moments she turned her great blue eyes on me, and smiled and nodded her little head knowingly, as much as to bid me be of good cheer, and I felt a thrill go right to my heart, that beat delightedly under the checked apron.

"Please, ma'am," said Susan, glibly, "mayn't Henry go out to play with the girls? The big boys are so rough."

And Miss Bessie smiled, and said I might; and I was a blessed little boy from that moment. In the first recess Susie instructed me in playing "Tag," and "Oats, peas, beans, and barley, O," and in "Threading the needle," and "Opening the gates as high as high as the sky, to let King George and his court pass by"—in all which she was a proficient, and where I needed a great deal of teaching and encouraging.

But when it came to more athletic feats, I could distinguish myself. I dared jump off from a higher fence than she could, and covered myself with glory by climbing to the top of a five-railed gate, and jumping boldly down; and moreover, when a cow appeared on the green before the school-house door, I marched up to her with a stick and ordered her off, with a manly stride and a determined voice, and chased her with the utmost vigor quite out of sight. These proceedings seemed to inspire Susie with a certain respect and confidence. I could read in "readings," jump off from high fences, and wasn't afraid of cows! These were manly accomplishments!

The school-house was a long distance from my father's, and I used to bring my dinner. Susie brought hers also, and many a delightful picnic have we had together. We made ourselves a house under a great button-ball tree, at whose foot the grass was short and green. Our house was neither more nor less than a square, marked out on the green turf by stones taken from the wall. I glorified myself in my own eyes and in Susie's, by being able to lift stones twice as heavy as she could, and a big flat one, which nearly broke my back, was deposited in the centre of the square, as our table. We used a clean pocket-handkerchief for a table-cloth; and Susie was wont to set out our meals with great order, making plates and dishes out of the button-ball leaves. Under her direction also, I fitted up our house with a pantry, and a small room where we used to play wash dishes, and set away what was left of our meals. The pantry was a stone cupboard, where we kept chestnuts and apples, and what remained of our cookies and gingerbread. Susie was fond of ornamentation, and stuck bouquets of golden rod and aster around in our best room, and there we received company, and had select society come to see us. Susie brought her doll to dwell in this establishment, and I made her a bedroom and a little bed of milkweed-silk to lie on. We put her to bed and tucked her up when we went into school—not without apprehension that those savages, the big boys, might visit our Eden with devastation. But the girls' recess came first, and we could venture to leave her there taking a nap till our play-time came; and when the girls went in Susie rolled her nursling in a napkin and took her safely into school, and laid her away in a corner of her desk, while the dreadful big boys were having their yelling war-whoop and carnival outside.

"How nice it is to have Harry gone all day to school," I heard one of my sisters saying to the other. "He used to be so in the way, meddling and getting into everything"—"And listening to everything one says," said the other, "Children have such horridly quick ears. Harry always listens to what we talk about."

"I think he is happier now, poor little fellow," said my mother. "He has somebody now to play with." This was the truth of the matter.

On Saturday afternoons, I used to beg of my mother to let me go and see Susie; and my sisters, nothing loth, used to brush my hair and put on me a stiff, clean, checked apron, and send me trotting off, the happiest of young lovers.

How bright and fair life seemed to me those Saturday afternoons, when the sun, through the picket-fences, made golden-green lines on the turf—and the trees waved and whispered, and I gathered handfuls of golden-rod and asters to ornament our house, under the button-wood tree!

Then we used to play in the barn together. We hunted for hens' eggs, and I dived under the barn to dark places where she dared not go; and climbed up to high places over the hay-mow, where she trembled to behold me—bringing stores of eggs, which she received in her clean white apron.

This daintiness of outfit excited my constant admiration. I wore stiff, heavy jackets and checked aprons, and was constantly, so my sisters said, wearing holes through my knees and elbows for them to patch; but little Susie always appeared to me fresh and fine and untumbled; she never dirtied her hands or soiled her dress. Like a true little woman, she seemed to have nerves through all her clothes that kept them in order. This nicety of person inspired me with a secret, wondering reverence. How could she always be so clean, so trim, and every way so pretty, I wondered? Her golden curls always seemed fresh from the brush, and even when she climbed and ran, and went with me into the barn-yard, or through the swamp and into all sorts of compromising places, she somehow picked her way out bright and unsoiled.

But though I admired her ceaselessly for this, she was no less in admiration of my daring strength and prowess. I felt myself a perfect Paladin in her defense. I remember that the chip-yard which we used to cross, on our way to the barn, was tyrannized over by a most loud-mouthed and arrogant old turkey-cock, that used to strut and swell and gobble and chitter greatly to her terror. She told me of different times when she had tried to cross the yard alone, how he had jumped upon her and flapped his wings, and thrown her down, to her great distress and horror. The first time he tried the game on me, I marched up to him, and by a dexterous pass, seized his red neck in my hand, and confining his wings down with my arm, walked him ingloriously out of the yard.

How triumphant Susie was, and how I swelled and exulted to her, telling her what I would do to protect her under every supposable variety of circumstances! Susie had confessed to me of being dreadfully afraid of "bears," and I took this occasion to tell her what I would do if a bear should actually attack her. I assured her that I would get father's gun and shoot him without mercy—and she listened and believed. I also dilated on what I would do if robbers should get into the house; I would, I informed her, immediately get up and pour shovelfuls of hot coal down their backs—and wouldn't they have to run? What comfort and security this view of matters gave us both! What bears and robbers were, we had no very precise idea, but it was a comfort to think how strong and adequate to meet them in any event I was.

Sometimes, of a Saturday afternoon, Susie was permitted to come and play with me. I always went after her, and solicited the favor humbly at the hands of her mother, who, after many washings and dressings and cautions as to her clothes, delivered her up to me, with the condition that she was to start for home when the sun was half an hour high. Susie was very conscientious in watching, but for my part I never agreed with her. I was always sure that the sun was an hour high, when she set her little face dutifully homeward. My sisters used to pet her greatly during these visits. They delighted to twine her curls over their fingers, and try the effects of different articles of costume on her fair complexion. They would ask her, laughing, would she be my little wife, to which she always answered with a grave affirmative.

MATRIMONIAL PROPOSITIONS.

"Early marriages?" said my mother, stopping her knitting looking at me, while a smile flashed over her thin cheeks: "what's the child thinking of?"

Yes, she was to be my wife; it was all settled between us. But when? I didn't see why we must wait till we grew up. She was lonesome when I was gone, and I was lonesome when she was gone. Why not marry her now, and take her home to live with me? I asked her and she said she was willing, but mamma never would spare her. I said I would get my mamma to ask her, and I knew she couldn't refuse, because my papa was the minister.

I turned the matter over and over in my mind, and thought sometime when I could find my mother alone, I would introduce the subject. So one evening, as I sat on my little stool at my mother's knees, I thought I would open the subject, and began:

"Mamma, why do people object to early marriages?"

"Early marriages?" said my mother, stopping her knitting, looking at me, while a smile flashed over her thin cheeks: "what's the child thinking of?"

"I mean, why can't Susie and I be married now? I want her here. I'm lonesome without her. Nobody wants to play with me in this house, and if she were here we should be together all the time."

My father woke up from his meditation on his next Sunday's sermon, and looked at my mother, smiling. A gentle laugh rippled her bosom.

"Why, dear," she said, "don't you know your father is a poor man, and has hard work to support his children now? He couldn't afford to keep another little girl."

I thought the matter over, sorrowfully. Here was the pecuniary difficulty, that puts off so many desiring lovers, meeting me on the very threshold of life.

"Mother," I said, after a period of mournful consideration, "I wouldn't eat but just half as much as I do now, and I'd try not to wear out my clothes, and make 'em last longer." My mother had very bright eyes, and there was a mingled flash of tears and laughter in them, as when the sun winks through rain drops. She lifted me gently into her lap and drew my head down on her bosom.

"Some day, when my little son grows to be a man, I hope God will give him a wife he loves dearly. 'Houses and lands are from the fathers; but a good wife is of the Lord,' the Bible says."

"That's true, dear," said my father, looking at her tenderly; "nobody knows that better than I do."

My mother rocked gently back and forward with me in the evening shadows, and talked with me and soothed me, and told me stories how one day I should grow to be a good man—a minister, like my father, she hoped—and have a dear little house of my own.

"And will Susie be in it?"

"Let's hope so," said my mother. "Who knows?"

"But, mother, ain't you sure? I want you to say it will be certainly."

"My little one, only our dear Father could tell us that," said my mother. "But now you must try and learn fast, and become a good strong man, so that you can take care of a little wife."

CHAPTER III.

OUR CHILD-EDEN.

My mother's talk aroused all the enthusiasm of my nature. Here was a motive, to be sure. I went to bed and dreamed of it. I thought over all possible ways of growing big and strong rapidly—I had heard the stories of Samson from the Bible. How did he grow so strong? He was probably once a little boy like me. "Did he go for the cows, I wonder," thought I—"and let down very big bars when his hands were little, and learn to ride the old horse bare-back, when his legs were very short?" All these things I was emulous to do; and I resolved to lift very heavy pails full of water, and very many of them, and to climb into the mow, and throw down great armfulls of hay, and in every possible way to grow big and strong.

I remember the next day after my talk with my mother was Saturday, and I had leave to go up and spend it with Susie.

There was a meadow just back of her mother's house, which we used to call the mowing lot. It was white with daisies, yellow with buttercups, with some moderate share of timothy and herds grass intermixed. But what was specially interesting to us was, that, down low at the roots of the grass, and here and there in moist, rich spots, grew wild strawberries, large and juicy, rising on nice high stalks, with three or four on a cluster. What joy there was in the possession of a whole sunny Saturday afternoon to be spent with Susie in this meadow! To me the amount of happiness in the survey was greatly in advance of what I now have in the view of a three weeks' summer excursion.

When, after multiplied cautions and directions, and careful adjustment of Susie's clothing, on the part of her mother, Susie was fairly delivered up to me; when we had turned our backs on the house and got beyond call, then our bliss was complete. How carefully and patronizingly I helped her up the loose, mossy, stone wall, all hedged with a wilderness of golden-rod, ferns, raspberry bushes, and asters! Down we went through this tangled thicket, into such a secure world of joy, where the daisied meadow received us to her motherly bosom, and we were sure nobody could see us.

We could sit down and look upward, and see daisies and grasses nodding and bobbing over our heads, hiding us as completely as two young grass birds; and it was such fun to think that nobody could find out where we were! Two bob-o-links, who had a nest somewhere in that lot, used to mount guard in an old apple tree, and sit on tall, bending twigs, and say, "Chack! chack! chack!" and flutter their black and white wings up and down, and burst out into most elaborate and complicated babbles of melody. These were our only associates and witnesses. We thought that they knew us, and were glad to see us there, and wouldn't tell anybody where we were for the world. There was an exquisite pleasure to us in this sense of utter isolation—of being hid with each other where nobody could find us.

We had worlds of nice secrets peculiar to ourselves. Nobody but ourselves knew where the "thick spots" were, where the ripe, scarlet strawberries grew; the big boys never suspected them, we said to one another, nor the big girls; it was our own secret, which we kept between our own little selves. How we searched, and picked, and chatted, and oh'd and ah'd to each other, as we found wonderful places, where the strawberries passed all belief!

But profoundest of all our wonderful secrets were our discoveries in the region of animal life. We found, in a tuft of grass overshadowed by wild roses, a grass bird's nest. In vain did the cunning mother creep yards from the cherished spot, and then suddenly fly up in the wrong place; we were not to be deceived. Our busy hands parted the lace curtains of fern, and, with whispers of astonishment, we counted the little speckled, bluegreen eggs. How round and fine and exquisite, past all gems polished by art, they seemed; and what a mystery was the little curious smooth-lined nest in which we found them! We talked to the birds encouragingly. "Dear little birds," we said, "don't be afraid; nobody but we shall know it;" and then we said to each other, "Tom Halliday never shall find this out, nor Jim Fellows." They would carry off the eggs and tear up the nest; and our hearts swelled with such a responsibility for the tender secret, that it was all we could do that week to avoid telling it to everybody we met. We informed all the children at school that we knew something that they didn't—something that we never should tell!—something so wonderful!—something that it would be wicked to tell of—for mother said so; for be it observed that, like good children, we had taken our respective mothers into confidence, and received the strictest and most conscientious charges as to our duty to keep the birds' secret.

In that enchanted meadow of ours grew tall, yellow lilies, glowing as the sunset, hanging down their bells, six or seven in number, from high, graceful stalks, like bell towers of fairy land. They were over our heads sometimes, as they rose from the grass and daisies, and we looked up into their golden hearts spotted with black, with a secret, wondering joy.

"Oh, don't pick them, they look too pretty," said Susie to me once when I stretched up my hand to gather one of these. "Let's leave them to be here when we come again! I like to see them wave."

And so we left the tallest of them; but I was not forbidden to gather handfuls of the less wonderful specimens that grew only one or two on a stalk. Our bouquets of flowers increased with our strawberries.

Through the middle of this meadow chattered a little brook, gurgling and tinkling over many-colored pebbles, and here and there collecting itself into a miniature waterfall, as it pitched over a broken bit of rock. For our height and size, the waterfalls of this little brook were equal to those of Trenton, or any of the medium cascades that draw the fashionable crowd of grown-up people; and what was the best of it was, it was our brook, and our waterfall. We found them, and we verily believed nobody else but ourselves knew of them.

By this waterfall, as I called it, which was certainly a foot and a half high, we sat and arranged our strawberries when our baskets were full, and I talked with Susie about what my mother had told me.

I can see her now, the little crumb of womanhood, as she sat, gaily laughing at me. "She didn't care a bit," she said. She had just as lief wait till I grew to be a man. Why, we could go to school together, and have Saturday afternoons together. "Don't you mind it, Hazzy Dazzy," she said, coming close up to me, and putting her little arms coaxingly round my neck; "we love each other, and it's ever so nice now."

I wonder what the reason is that it is one of the first movements of affectionate feeling to change the name of the loved one. Give a baby a name, ever so short and ever so musical, where is the mother that does not twist it into some other pet name between herself and her child. So Susie, when she was very loving, called me Hazzy, and sometimes would play on my name, and call me Hazzy Dazzy, and sometimes Dazzy, and we laughed at this because it was between us; and we amused ourselves with thinking how surprised people would be to hear her say Dazzy, and how they would wonder who she meant. In like manner, I used to call her Daisy when we were by ourselves, because she seemed to me so neat and trim and pure, and wore a little flat hat on Sundays just like a daisy.

"I'll tell you, Daisy," said I, "just what I'm going to do—I'm going to grow strong as Sampson did."

"Oh, but how can you?" she suggested, doubtfully.

"Oh, I'm going to run and jump and climb, and carry ever so much water for Mother, and I'm to ride on horseback and go to mill, and go all round on errands, and so I shall get to be a man fast, and when I get to be a man I'll build a house all on purpose for you and me—I'll build it all myself; it shall have a parlor and a dining-room and kitchen, and bed-room, and well-room, and chambers"—

"And nice closets to put things in," suggested the little woman.

"Certainly, ever so many—just where you want them, there I'll put them," said I, with surpassing liberality. "And then, when we live together, I'll take care of you—I'll keep off all the lions and bears and panthers. If a bear should come at you, Daisy, I should tear him right in two, just as Sampson did."

At this vivid picture, Daisy nestled close to my shoulder, and her eyes grew large and reflective. "We shouldn't leave poor Mother alone," said she.

"Oh, no; she shall come and live with us," said I, with an exalted generosity. "I will make her a nice chamber on purpose, and my mother shall come, too."

"But she can't leave your father, you know."

"Oh, father shall come, too—when he gets old and can't preach any more. I shall take care of them all."

And my little Daisy looked at me with eyes of approving credulity, and said I was a brave boy; and the bobolinks chittered and chattered applause as they sung and skirmished and whirled up over the meadow grasses; and by and by, when the sun fell low, and looked like a great golden ball, with our hands full of lilies, and our baskets full of strawberries, we climbed over the old wall, and toddled home.

After that, I remember many gay and joyous passages in that happiest summer of my life. How, when autumn came, we roved through the woods together, and gathered such stores of glossy brown chestnuts. What joy it was to us to scuff through the painted fallen leaves and send them flying like showers of jewels before us! How I reconnoitered and marked available chestnut trees, and how I gloried in being able to climb like a cat, and get astride high limbs and shake and beat them, and hear the glossy brown nuts fall with a rich, heavy thud below, while Susie was busily picking up at the foot of the tree. How she did flatter me with my success and prowess! Tom Halliday might be a bigger boy, but he could never go up a tree as I could; and as for that great clumsy Jim Fellows, she laughed to think what a figure he would make, going out on the end of the small limbs, which would be sure to break and send him bundling down. The picture which Susie drew of the awkwardness of the big boys often made us laugh till the tears rolled down our cheeks. To this day I observe it as a weakness of my sex that we all take it in extremely good part when the pretty girl of our heart laughs at other fellows in a snug, quiet way, just between one's dear self and herself alone. We encourage our own dear little cat to scratch and claw the sacred memories of Jim or Tom, and think that she does it in an extremely cunning and diverting way—it being understood between us that there is no malice in it—that "Jim and Tom are nice fellows enough, you know—only that somebody else is so superior to them," etc.

Susie and I considered ourselves as an extremely forehanded, well-to-do partnership, in the matter of gathering in our autumn stores. No pair of chipmonks in the neighborhood conducted business with more ability. We had a famous cellar that I dug and stoned, where we stored away our spoils. We had chestnuts and walnuts and butternuts, as we said, to last us all winter, and many an earnest consultation and many a busy hour did the gathering and arranging of these spoils cost us.

Then, oh, the golden times we had when father's barrels of new cider came home from the press! How I cut and gathered and selected bunches of choice straws, which I took to school and showed to Susie, surreptitiously, at intervals, during school exercises, that she might see what a provision of bliss I was making for Saturday afternoons. How Susie was sent to visit us on these occasions, in leather shoes and checked apron, so that we might go in the cellar; and how, mounted up on logs on either side of a barrel of cider, we plunged our straws through the foamy mass at the bung-hole, and drew out long draughts of sweet cider! I was sure to get myself dirty in my zeal, which she never did; and then she would laugh at me and patronize me, and wipe me up in a motherly sort of way. "How do you always get so dirty, Harry?" she would say, in a truly maternal tone of reproof. "How do you keep so clean?" I would say, in wonder; and she would laugh, and call me her dear, dirty boy. She would often laugh at me, the little elf, and make herself distractingly merry at my expense, but the moment she saw that the blood was getting too high in my cheeks, she would stroke me down with praises, as became a wise young daughter of Eve.

Besides all this, she had her little airs of moral superiority, and used occasionally to lecture me in the nicest manner. Being an only darling, she herself was brought up in the strictest ways in which little feet could go; and the nicety of her conscience was as unsullied as that of her dress. I was hot tempered and heady, and under stress of great provocation would come as near swearing as a minister's son could possibly do. When the big boys ravaged our house under the tree, or threw sticks at us, I used to stretch every permitted limit, and scream, "Darn you!" and "Confound you!" with a vigor and emphasis that made it almost equal to something a good deal stronger.

On such occasions Susie would listen pale and frightened, and, when reason came back to me, gravely lecture me, and bring me into the paths of virtue. She used to rehearse to me the teachings of her mother about all manner of good things.

I have her image now in my mind, looking so crisp and composed and neat in her sobriety, repeating, for my edification, the hymn which contained the good child's ideal in those days:

"Oh, that it were my chief delight

To do the things I ought,

Then let me try with all my might

To mind what I am taught.

Whene'er I'm told, I'll freely bring

Whatever I have got,

And never touch a pretty thing,

When mother tells me not.

If she permits me, I may tell

About my little toys,

But if she's busy or unwell,

I must not make a noise."

I can hear now the delicious lisp of my little saint, and see the gracious gravity of her manner. To my mind, she was unaccountably well established in the ways of virtue, and I listened to her little lectures with a secret reverence.

Susie was especially careful in the observation of Sunday, and as that is a point where children are apt to be particularly weak, she would exhort me to rigorous exactitude.

I kept it, first, by thinking that I should see her at church, and by growing very precise about my Sunday clothes, whereat my sisters winked at each other and laughed slyly. Then at church we sat in great square pews adjoining to each other. It was my pleasure to peep through the slats at Susie. She was wonderful to behold then, all in white, with a profusion of blue ribbons and her little flat hat over her curls—and a pair of dainty blue shoes peeping out from her dress.

She informed me that little girls never must think about their clothes in meeting, and so I supposed she was trying to be entirely absorbed from earthly vanities, unconscious of the fixed and earnest stare with which I followed every movement.

Human nature is but partially sanctified, however, in little saints as well as grown up ones, and I noticed that occasionally, probably by accident, the great blue eyes met mine, and a smile, almost amounting to a sinful giggle, was with difficulty choked down. She was, however, a most conscientious little puss and recovered herself in a moment, and looked gravely upward at the minister, not one word of whose sermon could she by any possibility understand, severely devoting herself to her religious duties, till exhausted nature gave way. The little lids would close over the eyes like blue pimpernel before a shower,—the head would drop and nod, till finally the mother would dispense the little Christian from further labors, by laying her head on her lap and drawing her feet up comfortably upon the seat, to sleep out to the end of the sermon.

When winter came on I beset my older brother to make me a sled. Sleds, such as every boy in Boston or New York now rejoices in, were blessings in our parts unknown; our sled was of rough, domestic manufacture.

My brother, laughing, asked if my sled was intended to draw Susie on, and on my earnest response in the affirmative he amused himself with painting it in colors, red and blue, most glorious to behold.

My soul was magnified within me when I first started with this stylish establishment to wait on Susie.

What young fellow does not exult in a smart team when he has a girl whom he wants to dazzle? Great was my joy and pride when I first stopped at Susie's and told her to hurry on her things, for I had come to draw her to school!

What a pretty picture she made in her little blue knit hood and mittens, her bright curls flying and cheeks glowing with the keen winter air! There was a long hill on the way to school, and seated on the sled behind her, I careered gloriously down with exultation in my breast, while a stream of laughter floated on the breeze behind us. That was a winter of much coasting down hill, of red cheeks and red noses, of cold toes, which we never minded, and of abundant jollity. Susie, under her mother's careful showing, knit me a pair of red mittens, warming to the heart and delightful to the eyes; and I piled up wood and carried water for Mother, and by vigorous economy earned money enough to buy Susie a great candy heart as big as my two hands, that had the picture of two doves tied together by a blue ribbon on one side, and on the other two very red hearts skewered together by an arrow.

No work of art ever gave greater and more unmingled delight. Susie gave it a prominent place in her baby-house,—and though it was undeniably sweet, as certain little nibbling trials on its edges had proved, yet the artistic sense was stronger than the palate, and the candy heart was kept to be looked at and rejoiced in.

Susie's mother was an intimate and confidential friend of my mother, and a most docile and confiding sheep of my father's flock. She regarded her minister's family, and all that belonged to it, as something set apart and sacred. My mother had imparted to her the little joke of my matrimonial wishes, and the two matrons had laughed over it together, and then sighed, and said, "Ah! well, stranger things have happened." Susie's mother told how she used to know her husband when he was a little boy, and what if it should be! and then they strayed on to the general truth that this was a world of uncertainty, and we never can tell what a day may bring forth.

Our little idyl, too, was rather encouraged by my brothers and sisters, who made a pet and plaything of Susie, and diverted themselves by the gravity and honesty with which we devoted ourselves to each other. Oh! dear ignorant days—sweet little child-Eden—why could it not last?

But it could not. It was fleeting as the bobolink's song, as the spotted yellow lilies, as the grass and daisies. My little Daisy was too dear to the angels to be spared to grow up in our coarse world.

The winter passed and spring came, and Susie and I rejoiced in the first bluebird, and found blue and white violets together, and went to school together, till the heats of summer came on. Then a sad epidemic began to linger around in our mountains, and to be heard of in neighboring villages, and my poor Daisy was scorched by its breath.

I remember well our last afternoon together in the meadow, where, the year before, we had gathered strawberries. We went down into it in high spirits; the strawberries were abundant, and we chatted and picked together gaily, till Daisy began to complain that her head ached and her throat was sore. I sat her down by the brook, and wet her curls with the water, and told her to rest there, and let me pick for her. But pretty soon she called me. She was crying with pain. "Oh! Hazzy, dear, I must go home," she said. "Take me to Mother." I hurried to help her, for she cried and moaned so that I was frightened. I began to cry, too, and we came up the steps of her mother's house sobbing together.

When her mother came out the little one suppressed her tears and distress for a moment, and turning, threw her arms around my neck and kissed me. "Don't cry any more, Hazzy," she said; "we'll see each other again."

Her mother took her up in her arms and carried her in, and I never saw my little baby-wife again on this earth! Not where the daisies and buttercups grew; nor where the golden lilies shook their bells, and the bobolinks trilled; not in the school-room, with its many child-voices; not in the old square pew in church—never, never more that trim little maiden form, those violet blue eyes, those golden curls of hair, were to be seen on earth!

My Daisy's last kisses, with the fever throbbing in her veins, very nearly took me with her. From that time I have only indistinct remembrances of going home crying, of turning with a strange loathing from my supper, of creeping up and getting into bed, shivering and burning, with a thumping and beating pain in my head.

The next morning the family doctor pronounced me a case of the epidemic (scarlet fever) which he said was all about among children in the neighborhood.

I have dim, hot, hazy recollections of burning, thirsty, head-achey days, when I longed for cold water, and could not get a drop, according to the good old rules of medical practice in those times. I dimly observed different people sitting up with me every night, and putting different medicines in my unresisting mouth; and day crept slowly after day, and I lay idly watching the rays of sunlight and flutter of leaves on the opposite wall.

One afternoon, I remember, as I lay thus listless, I heard the village bell strike slowly—six times. The sound wavered and trembled with long and solemn intervals of shivering vibration between. It was the numbering of my Daisy's little years on earth,—the announcement that she had gone to the land where time is no more measured by day and night, for there shall be no night there.

When I was well again I remember my mother told me that my little Daisy was in heaven, and I heard it with a dull, cold chill about my heart, and wondered that I could not cry.

I look back now into my little heart as it was then, and remember the paroxysms of silent pain I used to have at times, deep within, while yet I seemed to be like any other boy.

I heard my sisters one day discussing whether I cared much for Daisy's death.

"He don't seem to, much," said one.

"Oh, children are little animals, they forget what's out of sight," said another.

But I did not forget,—I could not bear to go to the meadow where we gathered strawberries,—to the chestnut trees where we had gathered nuts,—and oftentimes, suddenly, in work or play, that smothering sense of a past, forever gone, came over me like a physical sickness.

When children grow up among older people and are pushed and jostled, and set aside in the more engrossing interests of their elders, there is an almost incredible amount of timidity and dumbness of nature, with regard to the expression of inward feeling,—and yet, often at this time the instinctive sense of pleasure and pain is fearfully acute. But the child has imperfectly learned language. His stock of words, as yet, consists only in names and attributes of outward and physical objects, and he has no phraseology with which to embody a mere emotional experience.

What I felt when I thought of my little playfellow, was a dizzying, choking rush of bitter pain and anguish. Children can feel this acutely as men and women,—but even in mature life this experience has no gift of expression.

My mother alone, with the divining power of mothers, kept an eye on me. "Who knows," she said to my father, "but this death may be a heavenly call to him."

She sat down gently by my bed one night and talked with me of heaven, and the brightness and beauty there, and told me that little Susie was now a fair white angel.

I remember shaking with a tempest of sobs.

"But I want her here," I said. "I want to see her."

My mother went over all the explanations in the premises,—all that can ever be said in such cases, but I only sobbed the more.

"I can't see her! Oh mother, mother!"

That night I sobbed myself to sleep and dreamed a blessed dream.

It seemed to me that I was again in our meadow, and that it was fairer than ever before; the sun shone gaily, the sky was blue, and our great, golden lily stocks seemed mysteriously bright and fair, but I was wandering lonesome and solitary. Then suddenly my little Daisy came running to meet me in her pink dress and white apron, with her golden curls hanging down her neck. "Oh Daisy, Daisy!" said I running up to her. "Are you alive?—they told me that you were dead."

"No, Hazzy, dear, I am not dead,—never you believe that," she said, and I felt the clasp of her soft little arms round my neck. "Didn't I tell you we'd see each other again?"

"But they told me you were dead," I said in wonder—and I thought I held her off and looked at her,—she laughed gently at me as she often used to, but her lovely eyes had a mysterious power that seemed to thrill all through me.

"I am not dead, dear Hazzy," she said. "We never die were I am—I shall love you always," and with that my dream wavered and grew misty as when clear water breaks an image into a thousand glassy rings and fragments.

I thought I heard lovely music, and felt soft, clasping arms, and I awoke with a sense of being loved and pitied, and comforted.

I cannot describe the vivid, penetrating sense of reality which this dream left behind it. It seemed to warm my whole life, and to give back to my poor little heart something that had been rudely torn away from it. Perhaps there is no reader that has not had experiences of the wonderful power which a dream often exercises over the waking hours for weeks after—and it will not appear incredible that after that, instead of shunning the meadow where we used to play, it was my delight to wander there alone, to gather the strawberries—tend the birds' nests, and lie down on my back in the grass and look up into the blue sky through an overarching roof of daisies, with a strange sort of feeling of society, as if my little Daisy were with me.

And is it not perhaps so? Right along side of this troublous life, that is seen and temporal, may lie the green pastures and the still waters of the unseen and eternal, and they who know us better than we know them, can at any time step across that little rill that we call Death, to minister to our comfort.

For what are these child-angels made, that are sent down to this world to bring so much love and rapture, and go from us in such bitterness and mourning? If we believe in Almighty Love we must believe that they have a merciful and tender mission to our wayward souls. The love wherewith we love them is something the most utterly pure and unworldly of which human experience is capable, and we must hope that every one who goes from us to the world of light, goes holding an invisible chain of love by which to draw us there.

Sometimes I think I would never have had my little Daisy grow older on our earth. The little child dies in growing into womanhood, and often the woman is far less lovely than the little child. It seems to me that lovely and loving childhood, with its truthfulness, its frank sincerity, its pure, simple love, is so sweet and holy an estate that it would be a beautiful thing in heaven to have a band of heavenly children, guileless, gay and forever joyous—tender Spring blossoms of the Kingdom of Light. Was it of such whom he had left in his heavenly home our Saviour was thinking, when he took little children up in his arms and blessed them, and said, "Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven?"

CHAPTER IV.

MY SHADOW-WIFE.

My Shadow Wife! Is there then substance in shadow? Yea, there may be. A shadow—a spiritual presence—may go with us where mortal footsteps cannot go; walk by our side amid the roar of the city: talk with us amid the sharp clatter of voices; come to us through closed doors, as we sit alone over our evening fire; counsel, bless, inspire us; and though the figure cannot be clasped in mortal arms—though the face be veiled—yet this wife of the future may have a power to bless, to guide, to sustain and console. Such was the dream-wife of my youth.

Whence did she come? She rose like a white, pure mist from that little grave. She formed herself like a cloud-maiden from the rain and dew of those first tears.

When we look at the apparent recklessness with which great sorrows seem to be distributed among the children of the earth, there is no way to keep our faith in a Fatherly love, except to recognize how invariably the sorrows that spring from love are a means of enlarging and dignifying a human being. Nothing great or good comes without birth-pangs, and in just the proportion that natures grow more noble, their capacities of suffering increase.

The bitter, silent, irrepressible anguish of that childish bereavement was to me the awakening of a spiritual nature. The little creature who, had she lived, might have grown up perhaps into a common-place woman, became a fixed star in the heaven-land of the ideal, always drawing me to look upward. My memories of her were a spring of refined and tender feeling, through all my early life. I could not then write; but I remember that the overflow of my heart towards her memory required expression, and I taught myself a strange kind of manuscript, by copying the letters of the alphabet. I bought six cents' worth of paper and a tallow candle at the store, which I used to light surreptitiously when I had been put to bed nights, and, sitting up in my little night-gown, I busied myself with writing my remembrances of her. I could not, for the world, have asked my mother to let me have a candle in my bed-room after eight o'clock. I would have died sooner than to explain why I wanted it. My purchase of paper and candle was my first act of independent manliness. The money, I reflected, was mine, because I earned it myself, and the paper was mine, and the candle was mine, so that I was not using my father's property in an unwarrantable manner, and thus I gave myself up to my inspirations. I wrote my remembrances of her, as she stood among the daisies and the golden lilies. I wrote down her little words of wisdom and grave advice, in the queerest manuscript that ever puzzled a wise man of the East. If one imagines that all this was spelt phonetically, and not at all in the unspeakable and astonishing way in which the English language is conventionally spelt, one may truly imagine that it was something rather peculiar in the way of literature. But the heart-comfort, the utter abandonment of soul that went into it, is something that only those can imagine who have tried the like and found the relief of it. My little heart was like the Caspian sea, or some other sea which I read about, which had found a secret channel by which its waters could pass off under ground. When I had finished, every evening, I used to extinguish my candle, and put it and my manuscript inside of the straw bed on which I slept, which had a long pocket hole in the centre, secured by buttons, for the purpose of stirring the straw. Over this I slept in conscious security, every night; sometimes with blissful dreams of going to brighter meadows, when I saw my Daisy playing with whole troops of beautiful children, fair as water lilies on the shore of a blue lake. Thus, while I seemed to be like any other boy, thinking of nothing but my sled, and my bat and ball, and my mittens, I began to have a little withdrawing room of my own; another land in which I could walk and take a kind of delight that nothing visible gave me. But one day my oldest sister, in making the bed, with domestic thoroughness, disemboweled my whole store of manuscripts and the half consumed fragment of my candle.

There is no poetry in housewifery, and my sister at once took a housewifely view of the proceeding—

"Well, now! is there any end to the conjurations of boys?" she said. "He might have set the house on fire and burned us all alive, in our beds!"

Reader, this is quite possible, as I used to perform my literary labors sitting up in bed, with the candle standing on a narrow ledge on the side of the bedstead.

Forthwith the whole of my performance was lodged in my mother's hands—I was luckily at school.

"Now, girls," said my mother, "keep quiet about this; above all, don't say a word to the boy. I will speak to him."

Accordingly, that night after I had gone up to bed, my mother came into my room and, when she had seen me in bed, she sat down by me and told me the whole discovery. I hid my head under the bed clothes, and felt a sort of burning shame and mortification that was inexpressible; but she had a good store of that mother's wit and wisdom by which I was to be comforted. At last she succeeded in drawing both the bed clothes from my face and the veil from my heart, and I told her all my little story.

"Dear boy," she said, "you must learn to write, and you need not buy candles, you shall sit by me evenings and I will teach you; it was very nice of you to practice all alone; but it will be a great deal easier to let me teach you the writing letters."

Now I had begun the usual course of writing copies in school. In those days it was deemed necessary to commence by teaching what was called coarse hand; and I had filled many dreary pages with m's and n's of a gigantic size; but it never had yet occurred to me that the writing of these copies was to bear any sort of relation to the expression of thoughts and emotions within me that were clamoring for a vent, while my rude copies of printed letters did bear to my mind this adaptation. But now my mother made me sit by her evenings, with a slate and pencil, and, under her care, I made a cross-cut into the fields of practical handwriting, and was also saved the dangers of going off into a morbid habit of feeling, which might easily have arisen from my solitary reveries.

"Dear," she said to my father, "I told you this one was to be our brightest. He will make a writer yet," and she showed him my manuscript.

"You must look after him, Mother," said my father, as he always said, when there arose any exigency about the children, that required delicate handling.

My mother was one of that class of women whose power on earth seems to be only the greater for being a spiritual and invisible one. The control of such women over men is like that of the soul over the body. The body is visible, forceful, obtrusive, self-asserting. The soul invisible, sensitive, yet with a subtle and vital power which constantly gains control and holds every inch that it gains.

My father was naturally impetuous, though magnanimous, hasty tempered and imperious, though conscientious; my mother united the most exquisite sensibility with the deepest calm—calm resulting from habitual communion with the highest and purest source of all rest—the peace that passeth all understanding. Gradually, by this spiritual force, this quietude of soul, she became his leader and guide. He held her hand and looked up to her with a trustful implicitness that increased with every year.

"Where's your mother?" was always the fond inquiry when he entered the house, after having been off on one of his long preaching tours or clerical counsels. At all hours he would burst from his study with fragments of the sermon or letter he was writing, to read to her and receive her suggestions and criticisms. With her he discussed the plans of his discourses, and at her dictation changed, improved, altered and added; and under the brooding influence of her mind, new and finer traits of tenderness and spirituality pervaded his character and his teachings. In fact, my father once said to me, "She made me by her influence."

In these days, we sometimes hear women, who have reared large families on small means, spoken of as victims who had suffered unheard of oppressions. There is a growing materialism that refuses to believe that there can be happiness without the ease and facilities and luxuries of wealth.

But my father and mother, though living on a narrow income, were never really poor. The chief evil of poverty is the crushing of ideality out of life—the taking away its poetry and substituting hard prose;—and this with them was impossible. My father loved the work he did, as the artist loves his painting and the sculptor his chisel. A man needs less money when he is doing only what he loves to do—what, in fact, he must do,—pay or no pay. St. Paul said, "A necessity is laid upon me, yea, woe is me, if I preach not the gospel." Preaching the gospel was his irrepressible instinct, a necessity of his being. My mother, from her deep spiritual nature, was one soul with my father in his life-work. With the moral organization of a prophetess, she stood nearer to heaven than he, and looking in, told him what she saw, and he, holding her hand, felt the thrill of celestial electricity. With such women, life has no prose; their eyes see all things in the light of heaven, and flowers of paradise spring up in paths that to unanointed eyes, seem only paths of toil. I never felt, from anything I saw at home, from any word or action of my mother's, that we were poor, in the sense that poverty was an evil. I was reminded, to be sure, that we were poor in a sense that required constant carefulness, watchfulness over little things, energetic habits, and vigorous industry and self-helpfulness. But we were never poor in any sense that restricted hospitality or made it a burden. In those days, a minister's house was always the home for all the ministers and their families, whenever an exigency required of them to travel, and the spare room of our house never wanted guests of longer or shorter continuance. But the atmosphere of the house was such as always made guests welcome. Three or four times a year, the annual clerical gatherings of the church filled our house to overflowing and necessitated an abundant provision and great activity of preparation on the part of the women of our family. Yet I never heard an expression of impatience or a suggestion that made me suppose they felt themselves unduly burdened. My mother's cheerful face was a welcome and a benediction at all times, and guests found it good to be with her.

In the midst of our large family, of different ages, of vigorous growth, of great individuality and forcefulness of expression, my mother's was the administrative power. My father habitually referred everything to her, and leaned on her advice with a childlike dependence. She read the character of each, she mediated between opposing natures: she translated the dialect of different sorts of spirits, to each other. In a family of young children, there is a chance for every sort and variety of natures; and for natures whose modes of feeling are as foreign to each other, as those of the French and the English. It needs a common interpreter, who understands every dialect of the soul, thus to translate differences of individuality into a common language of love.

It has often seemed to me a fair question, on a review of the way my mother ruled in our family, whether the politics of the ideal state in a millennial community, should not be one equally pervaded by mother-influences.

The woman question of our day, as I understand it is this.—Shall MOTHERHOOD ever be felt in the public administration of the affairs of state? The state is nothing more nor less than a collection of families, and what would be good or bad for the individual family, would be good or bad for the state.

Such as our family would have been, ruled only by my father, without my mother, such the political state is, and has been; there have been in it "conscript fathers," but no "conscript mothers;" yet is not a mother's influence needed in acts that relate to the interests of collected families as much as in individual ones?

The state, at this very day, needs an influence like what I remember our mother's to have been, in our great, vigorous, growing family,—an influence quiet, calm, warming, purifying, uniting—it needs a womanly economy and thrift in husbanding and applying its material resources—it needs a divining power, by which different sections and different races can be interpreted to each other, and blended together in love—it needs an educating power, by which its immature children may be trained in virtue—it needs a loving and redeeming power, by which its erring and criminal children may be borne with, purified, and led back to virtue.

Yet, while I thus muse, I remember that such women as my mother are those to whom in an especial manner all noise and publicity and unrestful conflict are peculiarly distasteful. My mother had that delicacy of fibre that made any kind of public exercise of her powers an impossibility. It is not peculiarly a feminine characteristic, but belongs equally to many men of the finest natures. It is characteristic of the poets and philosophers of life. It is ascribed by the sacred writers to Jesus of Nazareth, in whom an aversion for publicity and a longing for stillness and retirement are specially indicated by many touching incidents. Jesus preferred to form around him a family of disciples and to act on the world through them, and it is remarkable that he left no writings directly addressed to the world by himself, but only by those whom he inspired.

Women of this brooding, quiet, deeply spiritual nature, while they cannot attend caucuses, or pull political wires or mingle in the strife of political life, are yet the most needed force to be for the good of the State. I am persuaded that it is not till this class of women feel as vital and personal responsibility for the good of the State, as they have hitherto felt for that of the family, that we shall gain the final elements of a perfect society. The laws of Rome, so said the graceful myth, were dictated to Numa Pompilius, by the nymph, Egeria. No mortal eye saw her. She was not in the forum, or the senate. She did not strive, nor cry, nor lift up her voice in the street, but she made the laws by which Rome ruled the world. Let us hope in a coming day that not Egeria, but Mary, the mother of Jesus, the great archetype of the Christian motherhood, shall be felt through all the laws and institutions of society. That Mary, who kept all things and pondered them in her heart—the silent poet, the prophetess, the one confidential friend of Jesus, sweet and retired as evening dew, yet strong to go forth with Christ against the cruel and vulgar mob, and to stand unfainting by the cross where He suffered!

From the time that my mother discovered my store of manuscripts, she came into new and more intimate relation with me. She took me from the district school, and kept me constantly with herself, teaching me in the intervals of domestic avocations.

I was what is called a mother's-boy, as she taught me to render her all sorts of household services, such as are usually performed by girls. My two older sisters, about this time, left us, to establish a seminary in the neighborhood, and the sister nearest my age went to study under their care, so that my mother said, playfully, she had no resource but to make a girl of me. This association with a womanly nature, and this discipline in womanly ways, I hold to have been an invaluable part of my early training. There is no earthly reason which requires a man, in order to be manly, to be unhandy and clumsy in regard to the minutiæ of domestic life; and there are quantities of occasions occurring in the life of every man, in which he will have occasion to be grateful to his mother, if, like mine, she trains him in woman's arts and the secrets of making domestic life agreeable.

But it is not merely in this respect that I felt the value of my early companionship with my mother. The power of such women over our sex is essentially the service rendered us in forming our ideal, and it was by my mother's influence that the ideal guardian, the "shadow wife," was formed, that guided me through my youth.

She wisely laid hold of the little idyl of my childhood, as something which gave her the key to my nature, and opened before me the hope in my manhood of such a friend as my little Daisy had been to my childhood. This wife of the future she often spoke of as a motive. I was to make myself worthy of her. For her sake I was to be strong, to be efficient, to be manly and true, and above all pure in thought and imagination and in word.

The cold mountain air and simple habits of New England country life are largely a preventive of open immorality; but there is another temptation which besets the boy, against which the womanly ideal is the best shield—the temptation to vulgarity and obscenity.

It was to my mother's care and teaching I owe it, that there always seemed to be a lady at my elbow, when stories were told such as a pure woman would blush to hear. It was owing to her, that a great deal of what I supposed to be classical literature both in Greek and Latin and in English was to me and is to me to this day simply repulsive and disgusting. I remember that one time when I was in my twelfth or thirteenth year, one of Satan's agents put into my hand one of those stories that are written with an express purpose of demoralizing the young—stories that are sent creeping like vipers and rattle-snakes stealthily and secretly among inexperienced and unguarded boys hiding in secret corners, gliding under their pillows and filling their veins with the fever poison of impurity. How many boys in the most critical period of life are forever ruined, in body and soul, by the silent secret gliding among them of these nests of impure serpents, unless they have a mother, wise, watchful, and never sleeping, with whom they are in habits of unreserved intimacy and communion!

I remember that when my mother took from me this book, it was with an expression of fear and horror which made a deep impression on me. Then she sat by me that night, when the shadows were deepening, and told me how the reading of such books, or the letting of such ideas into my mind would make me unworthy of the wife she hoped some day I would win. With a voice of solemn awe she spoke of the holy mystery of marriage as something so sacred, that all my life's happiness depended on keeping it pure, and surrounding it only with the holiest thoughts.

It was more the thrill of her sympathies, the noble poetry of her nature inspiring mine, than anything she said, that acted upon me and stimulated me to keep my mind and memory pure. In the closeness of my communion with her I seemed to see through her eyes and feel through her nerves, so that at last a passage in a book or a sentiment uttered always suggested the idea of what she would think of it.

In our days we have heard much said of the importance of training women to be wives. Is there not something to be said on the importance of training men to be husbands? Is the wide latitude of thought and reading and expression which has been accorded as a matter of course to the boy and the young man, the conventionally allowed familiarity with coarseness and indelicacy, a fair preparation to enable him to be the intimate companion of a pure woman? For how many ages has it been the doctrine that man and woman were to meet in marriage, the one crystal-pure, the other foul with the permitted garbage of all sorts of uncleansed literature and license?

If the man is to be the head of the woman, even as Christ is the head of the Church, should he not be her equal, at least, in purity?

My shadow-wife grew up by my side under my mother's creative touch. It was for her I studied, for her I should toil. The thought of providing for her took the sordid element out of economy and made it unselfish. She was to be to me adviser, friend, inspirer, charmer. She was to be my companion, not alone in one faculty, but through all the range of my being—there should be nothing wherein she and I could not by appreciative sympathy commune together. As I thought of her, she seemed higher than I. I must love up and not down, I said. She must stand on a height and I must climb to her—she must be a princess worthy of many toils and many labors. Gradually she became to me a controlling power.

The thought, of what she would think, closed for me many a book that I felt she and I could not read together—her fair image barred the way to many a door and avenue, which if a young man enters, he must leave his good angel behind,—for her sake I abjured intimacies that I felt she could not approve, and it was my ambition to keep the inner temple of my heart and thoughts so pure, that it might be a worthy resting place for her at last.

CHAPTER V.

I START FOR COLLEGE AND MY UNCLE JACOB ADVISES ME.

The time came at last when the sacred habit of intimacy with my mother was broken, and I was to leave her for college.

It was the more painful to her, as only a year before, my father had died, leaving her more than ever dependent on the society of her children.

My father died as he had lived, rejoicing in his work and feeling that if he had a hundred lives to live, he would devote them to the same object for which he had spent that one—the preaching of the Gospel. He left to my mother the homestead and a small farm, which was under the care of one of my brothers, so that the event of his death made no change in our family home center, and I was to go to college and fulfill the hope of his heart and the desire of my mother's life, in consecrating myself to the work of the Christian ministry.

My father and mother had always kept sacredly a little fund laid by for the education of their children; it was the result of many small savings and self-denials—but self-denials so cheerfully and hopefully encountered that they had almost changed their nature and become preferences. The family fund for this purpose had been used in turn by two of my older brothers, who, as soon as they gained an independent foothold in life, appropriated each his first earnings to replacing this sum for the use of the next.

It was not, however, a fund large enough to dispense with the need of a strict economy, and a supplemental self-helpfulness on our part.

The terms in some of our New England colleges are thoughtfully arranged so that the students can teach for three of the winter months, and the resources thus gained help out their college expenses. Thus at the same time they educate themselves and help to educate others, and they study with the maturity of mind and the appreciation of the value of what they are gaining, resulting from a habit of measuring themselves with the actual needs of life.

The time when the boy goes to college is the time when he feels manhood to begin. He is no longer a boy, but an unfledged, undeveloped man—a creature, half of the past and half of the future. Yet every one gives him a good word or a congratulatory shake of the hand on his entrance to this new plateau of life. It is a time when advice is plenty as blackberries in August, and often held quite as cheap—but nevertheless a young fellow may as well look at what his elders tell him at this time, and see what he can make of it.

As I was "our minister's son," all the village thought it had something to do with my going. "Hallo, Harry, so you've got into college! Think you'll be as smart a man as your dad?" said one. "Wa-al, so I hear you're going to college. Stick to it now. I could a made suthin ef I'd a had larnin at your age," said old Jerry Smith, who rung the meeting-house bell, sawed wood, and took care of miscellaneous gardens for sundry widows in the vicinity.

But the sayings that struck me as most to the purpose came from my Uncle Jacob.

Uncle Jacob was my mother's brother, and the doctor not only of our village, but of all the neighborhood for ten miles round. He was a man celebrated for medical knowledge through the State, and known by his articles in medical journals far beyond. He might have easily commanded a wider and more lucrative sphere of practice by going to any of the large towns and cities, but Uncle Jacob was a philosopher and preferred to live in a small quiet way in a place whose scenery suited him, and where he could act precisely as he felt disposed, and carry out all his little humors and pet ideas without rubbing against conventionalities.

He had a secret adoration for my mother, whom he regarded as the top and crown of all womanhood, and he also enjoyed the society of my father, using him as a sort of whetstone to sharpen his wits on. Uncle Jacob was a church member in good standing, but in the matter of belief he was somewhat like a high-mettled horse in a pasture,—he enjoyed once in a while having a free argumentative race with my father all round the theological lot. Away he would go in full career, dodging definitions, doubling and turning with elastic dexterity, and sometimes ended by leaping over all the fences, with most astounding assertions, after which he would calm down, and gradually suffer the theological saddle and bridle to be put on him and go on with edifying paces, apparently much refreshed by his metaphysical capers.

Uncle Jacob was reported to have a wonderful skill in the healing craft. He compounded certain pills which were stated to have most wonderful effects. He was accustomed to exact that, in order fully to develop their medical properties, they should be taken after a daily bath, and be followed immediately by a brisk walk of a specific duration in the open air. The steady use of these pills had been known to make wonderful changes in the cases of confirmed invalids, a fact which Uncle Jacob used to notice with a peculiar twinkle in the corner of his eye. It was sometimes whispered that the composition of them was neither more nor less than simple white sugar with a flavor of some harmless essence, but upon this subject my Uncle Jacob was impenetrable. He used to say, with the afore-mentioned waggish twinkle, that their preparation was his secret.

Uncle Jacob had always had a special favor for me, shown after his own odd and original manner. He would take me in his chaise with him when driving about his business, and keep my mind on a perpetual stretch with his odd questions and droll, suggestive remarks or stories. There was a shrewd keen quality to all that he said, that stimulated like a mental tonic, and none the less so for a stinging flavor of sarcasm and cynicism, that stirred up and provoked one's self-esteem. Yet as Uncle Jacob was companionable and loved a listener, I think he was none the less agreeable to me for this slight touch of his claws. One likes to find power of any kind—and he who shows that he can both scratch and bite effectively, if he holds his talons in sheath, comes in time to be regarded as a sort of benefactor for his forbearance: and so, though I got many a shrewd mental nip and gripe from my Uncle Jacob, I gave on the whole more heed to his opinion than that of anybody else that I knew.

From the time that I had been detected with my self-invented manuscript, up to the period of my going to college, the expression of my thoughts by writing had always been a passion with me, and from year to year my mind had been busy with its own creations, which it was a solace and amusement for me to record.

Of course there was ever so much crabbed manuscript, and no less confused, immature thought. I wrote poems, essays, stories, tragedies, and comedies. I demonstrated the immortality of the soul. I sustained the future immortality of the souls of animals. I wrote sonnets and odes, in whole or in part on almost everything that could be mentioned in creation.

My mother advised me to make Uncle Jacob my literary mentor, and the best of my productions were laid under his eye.

"Poor trash!" he was wont to say, with his usual kindly twinkle. "But there must be poor trash in the beginning. We must all eat our peck of dirt, and learn to write sense by writing nonsense." Then he would pick out here and there a line or expression which he assured me was "not bad." Now and then he condescended to tell me that for a boy of my age, so and so was actually hopeful, and that I should make something one of these days, which was to me more encouragement than much more decided praise from any other quarter.

UNCLE JACOB'S ADVICE.

"So you are going to college, boy! Well, away with you; there's no use advising you; you'll do as all the rest do. In one year you'll know more than your father, your mother, or I, or all your college officers—in fact, than the Lord himself."

We all notice that he who is reluctant to praise, whose commendation is scarce and hard-earned, is he for whose good word everybody is fighting; he comes at last to be the judge in the race. After all, the fact which Uncle Jacob could not disguise, that he had a certain good opinion of me, in spite of his sharp criticisms and scant praises, made him the one whose dicta on every subject were the most important to me.

I went to him in all the glow of satisfaction and the tremble of self-importance that a boy feels who is taking the first step into the land of manhood.

I have the image of him now, as he stood with his back to the fire, and the newspaper in his hand, giving me his last counsels. A little wiry, keen-looking man, with a blue, hawk-like eye, a hooked nose, a high forehead, shadowed with grizzled hair, and a cris-cross of deeply lined wrinkles in his face.

"So you are going to college, boy! Well, away with you; there's no use advising you; you'll do as all the rest do. In one year you'll know more than your father, your mother, or I, or all your college officers—in fact, than the Lord himself. You'll have doubts about the Bible, and think you could have made a better one. You'll think that if the Lord had consulted you he could have laid the foundations of the earth better, and arranged the course of nature to more purpose. In short, you'll be a god, knowing good and evil, and running all over creation measuring everybody and everything in your pint cup. There'll be no living with you. But you'll get over it,—it's only the febrile stage of knowledge. But if you have a good constitution, you'll come through with it."

I humbly suggested to him that I should try to keep clear of the febrile stage; that forewarned was forearmed.

"Oh, tut! tut! you must go through your fooleries. These are the regular diseases, the chicken-pox, measles, and mumps of young manhood; you'll have them all. We only pray that you may have them light, and not break your constitution for all your life through, by them. For instance, you'll fall in love with some baby-faced young thing, with pink cheeks and long eyelashes, and goodness only knows what abominations of sonnets you'll be guilty of. That isn't fatal, however. Only don't get engaged. Take it as the chicken-pox—keep your pores open, and don't get cold, and it'll pass off and leave you none the worse."

"And she!" said I, indignantly. "You talk as if it was no matter what became of her—"

"What, the baby? Oh, she'll outgrow it, too. The fact is, soberly and seriously, Harry, marriage is the thing that makes or mars a man; it's the gate through which he goes up or down, and you shouldn't pledge yourself to it till you come to your full senses. Look at your mother, boy; see what a woman may be; see what she was to your father, what she is to me, to you, to every one that knows her. Such a woman, to speak reverently, is a pearl of great price; a man might well sell all he had to buy her. But it isn't that kind of woman that flirts with college boys. You don't pick up such pearls every day."

Of course I declared that nothing was further from my thoughts than anything of that nature.

"The fact is, Harry, you can't afford fooleries," said my uncle. "You have your own way to make, and nothing to make it with but your own head and hands, and you must begin now to count the cost of everything. You have a healthy, sound body; see that you take care of it. God gives you a body but once. He don't take care of it for you, and whatever of it you lose, you lose for good. Many a chap goes into college fresh as you are, and comes out with weak eyes and crooked back, yellow complexion and dyspeptic stomach. He has only himself to thank for it. When you get to college they'll want you to smoke, and you'll want to, just for idleness and good fellowship. Now, before you begin, just calculate what it'll cost you. You can't get a good cigar under ten cents, and your smoker wants three a day, at the least. There go thirty cents a day, two dollars and ten cents a week, or a hundred and nine dollars and twenty cents a year. Take the next ten years at that rate, and you can invest over a thousand dollars in tobacco smoke. That thousand dollars, invested in a savings bank, would give a permanent income of sixty dollars a year,—a handy thing, as you'll find, just as you are beginning life. Now, I know you think all this is prosy; You are amazingly given to figures of rhetoric, but, after all, you've got to get on in a world where things go by the rules of arithmetic."

"Well, uncle," I said, a little nettled, "I pledge you my word that I won't smoke or drink. I never have done either, and I don't know why I should."

"Good for you! your hand on that, my boy. You don't need either tobacco or spirits any more than you need water in your shoes. There's no danger in doing without them, and great danger in doing with them; so let's look on that as settled.

"Now, as to the rest. You have a faculty for stringing words together, and a hankering after it, that may make or spoil you. Many a fellow comes to naught because he can string pretty phrases and turn a good line of poetry. He gets the notion that he's to be a poet, or orator, or genius of some sort, and neglects study. Now, Harry, remember that an empty bag can't stand upright; and that if you are ever to be a writer you must have something to say, and that you've got to dig for knowledge as for hidden treasure. A genius for hard work is the best kind of genius. Look at great writers, and see how many had it. What a student Milton was, and Goethe! Great fellows, those!—like trees that grow out in a pasture lot, with branches all round. Composition is the flowering out of a man's mind. When he has made growth, all studies and all learning, all that makes woody fibre, go into it. Now, study books; observe nature; practice. If you make a good firm mental growth, I hope to see some blossoms and fruits from it one of these days. So go your ways, and God bless you!"

The last words were said as Uncle Jacob slipped into my hand an envelope, containing a sum of money. "You'll need it," he said, "to furnish your room; and hark'e! if you get into any troubles that you don't want to burden your mother with, come to me."

There was warmth in the grip with which these last words were said, and a sort of misty moisture came over his keen blue eye,—little signs which meant as much from his shrewd and reticent nature as a caress or an expression of tenderness might from another.

My mother's last words, after hours of talk over the evening fire, were these: "I want you to be a good man. A great many have tried to be great men, and failed; but nobody ever sincerely tried to be a good man, and failed."

I suppose it is about the happiest era in a young fellow's life, when he goes to college for the first time.

The future is all a land of blue distant mists and shadows, radiant as an Italian landscape. The boundaries between the possible and the not possible are so charmingly vague! There is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow forever waiting for each new comer. Generations have not exhausted it!

De Balzac said, of writing his novels, that the dreaming out of them was altogether the best of it. "To imagine," he said, "is to smoke enchanted cigarettes; to bring out one's imaginations into words,—that is work!"

The same may be said of the romance of one's life. The dream-life is beautiful, but the rendering into reality quite another thing.

I believe every boy who has a good father and mother, goes to college meaning, in a general way, to be a good fellow. He will not disappoint them.—No! a thousand times, no! In the main, he will be a good boy,—not that he is going quite to walk according to the counsels of his elders. He is not going to fall over any precipices—not he—but he is going to walk warily and advisedly along the edge of them, and take a dispassionate survey of the prospect, and gather a few botanical specimens here and there. It might be dangerous for a less steady head than his; but he understands himself, and with regard to all things he says, "We shall see." The world is full of possibilities and open questions. Up sail, and away; let us test them!

As I scaled the mountains and descended the valleys on my way to college, I thought over all that my mother and Uncle Jacob had said to me, and had my own opinion of it.

Of course I was not the person to err in the ways he had suggested. I was not to be the dupe of a boy and girl flirtation. My standard of manhood was too exalted, I reflected, and I thought with complacency how little Uncle Jacob knew of me.

To be sure, it is a curious kind of a thought to a young man, that somewhere in this world, unknown to him, and as yet unknowing him, lives the woman that is to be his earthly fate,—to affect, for good or evil, his destiny.

We have all read the pretty story about the Princess of China and the young Prince of Tartary, whom a fairy and genius in a freak of caprice showed to each other in an enchanted sleep, and then whisked away again, leaving them to years of vain pursuit and wanderings. Such is the ideal image of somebody, who must exist somewhere, and is to be found sometime, and when found, is to be ours.

"Uncle Jacob is all right in the main," I said; "but if I should meet the true woman even in my college days, why that, indeed, would be quite another thing."

CHAPTER VI.

MY DREAM-WIFE

All things prospered with me in my college life. I had a sunny room commanding a fine prospect, and uncle Jacob's parting liberality enabled me to furnish it commodiously.

I bought the furniture of a departing senior at a reduced price, and felt quite the spirit of a householder in my possessions. I was well prepared on my studies and did not find my tasks difficult.

My stock of interior garnishment included several French lithographs, for the most part of female heads, looking up, with very dark bright eyes, or looking down, with very long dark eyelashes.

These heads of dream-women are, after all, not to be laughed at; they show the yearning for womanly influences and womanly society which follows the young man in his enforced monastic seclusion from all family life and family atmosphere. These little fanciful French lithographs, generally, are chosen for quite other than artistic reasons. If we search into it we shall find that one is selected because it is like sister "Nell," and another puts one in mind of "Bessie," and then again, there is another "like a girl I used to know." Now and then one of them has such a piquant, provoking air of individuality, that one is sure it must have been sketched from nature. Some teasing, coaxing, "don't-care-what-you-think" sort of a sprite, must have wreathed poppies and blue corn-flowers just so in her hair, and looked gay defiance at the artist who drew it. There was just such a saucy, spirited gipsy over my mantel piece, who seemed to defy me to find her if I searched the world over—with whom I held sometimes airy colloquies—not in the least was she like my dream-wife, but I liked her for all that, and thought I would "give something" to know what she would have to say to me, just for the curiosity of the thing.

The college was in a little village, and there was no particular amity between the townspeople and the students. I believe it is the understanding in such cases, that college students are to be regarded and treated as a tribe of Bedouin Arabs, whose hand is against every man, and they in their turn are not backward to make good the character. Public opinion shuts them up together—they are a state within a state—with a public sentiment, laws, manners, and modes of thinking of their own. It is a state, too, without women. When we think of this, and remember that all this experience is gone through in the most gaseous and yeasty period of human existence, we no longer wonder that there are college rows and scrapes, that all sort of grotesque capers become hereditary and traditional; that an apple-cart occasionally appears on top of one of the steeples, that cannon balls are rolled surreptitiously down the college stairs, and that tutors' doors are mysteriously found locked at recitation hours. One simply wonders that the roof is not blown off, and the windows out, by the combined excitability of so many fermenting natures.

There is a tendency now in society to open the college course equally to women—to continue through college life that interaction of the comparative influence of the sexes which is begun in the family.

To a certain extent this experiment has been always favorably tried in the New England rural Academies, where young men are fitted for college in the same classes and studies with women.

In these time-honored institutions, young women have kept step with young men in the daily pursuit of science, not only without disorder or unseemly scandal, but with manifestly more quietness and refinement of manner than obtains in institutions where female association ceases altogether. The presence of a couple of dozen of well-bred ladies in the lecture and recitation rooms of a college would probably be a preventive of many of the unseemly and clumsy jokes wherewith it has been customary to diversify the paths of science, to the affliction of the souls of professors.

But for us boys, there was no gospel of womanhood except what was to be got from the letters of mothers and sisters, and such imperfect and flitting acquaintance as we could pick up in the streets with the girls of the village. Now though there might be profit, could young men and women see each other daily under the responsibility of serious business, keeping step with one another in higher studies, yet it by no means follows that this kind of flitting glimpse-like acquaintance, formed merely in the exchange of a few outside superficialities, can have any particularly good effect. No element of true worthy friendship, of sober appreciation, or manly or womanly good sense, generally enters into these girl-and-boy flirtations, which are the only substitute for family association during the barren years of student life. The students were not often invited into families, and those who gained a character as ladies' men were not favorably looked upon by our elders. Now and then by rare and exceptional good luck a college student is made at home in some good family, where there is a nice kind mother and the wholesome atmosphere of human life; or, he forms the acquaintance of some woman, older and wiser than himself, who can talk with him on all the multitude of topics his college studies suggest. But such cases are only exceptions. In general there is no choice between flirtation and monastic isolation.

For my part, I posed myself on the exemplary platform, and remembering my uncle Jacob's advice, contemplated life with the grim rigidity of a philosopher. I was going to have no trifling, and surveyed the girls at church, on Sunday, with a distant and severe air—as gay creatures of an hour, who could hold no place in my serious meditations. Plato or Aristotle, in person, could not have contemplated life and society from a more serene height of composure. I was favorably known by my teachers, and held rank at the head of my class, and was stigmatized as a "dig," by frisky young gentlemen who enjoyed rolling cannon balls down stairs—taking the tongue out of the chapel bell—greasing the seats, and other thread-bare college jokes, which they had not genius enough to vary, so as to give them a spice of originality.

But one bright June Sunday—just one of those days that seem made to put all one's philosophy into confusion, when apple-blossoms were bursting their pink shells, and robins singing, and leaves twittering and talking to each other in undertones, there came to me a great revelation.

How innocently I brushed my hair and tied my neck tie, on that fateful morning, contemplating my growing moustache and whiskers hopefully in the small square of looking-glass which served for me these useful purposes of self-knowledge. I looked at my lineaments as those of a free young junior, without fear and without anxiety, without even an incipient inquiry what anybody else would think of them—least of all any woman—and marched forth obediently and took my wonted seat in that gallery of the village church which was assigned to the college students of Congregational descent; where, like so many sheep in a pen, we joined in the services of the common sheep-fold.

I suppose there is moral profit even in the decent self-denial of such weekly recurring religious exercises. To be forced to a certain period of silence, order, quiet, and to have therein a possibility and a suggestion of communion with a Higher Power, and an out-look into immortality, is something not to be undervalued in education, and justifies the stringency with which our New England colleges preserve and guard this part of their régime.

But it was to be confessed in our case, that the number who really seemed to have any spiritual participation or sympathy in the great purposes of the exercises, was not a majority. A general, dull decency of demeanor was the most frequent attainment, and such small recreations were in vogue as could be pursued without drawing the attention of the monitors. There was some telegraphy of eyes between the girls of the village and some of the more society-loving fellows, who had cultivated intimacies in that quarter; there were some novels, stealthily introduced and artfully concealed and read by the owner, while his head, resting on the seat before him, seemed bowed in devotion; and some artistic exercises in sketching caricatures on the part of others. For my own part, having been trained religiously, I gave strict outward and decorous attention; but the fact was that my mind generally sailed off on some cloud of fancy, and wandered through dream-land, so that not a word of anything present reached my ear. This habit of reverie and castle-building, repressed all the week by the severe necessity of definite tasks, came upon me Sundays as Bunyan describes the hot, sleepy atmosphere of the enchanted ground.

Our pastor was a good man, who wrote a kind of smooth, elegant, unexceptionable English; whose measured cadences and easy flow, were, to use the scripture language, as a "very lovely song of one that hath a pleasant voice, and can play sweetly upon an instrument." I heard him as one hears murmurs and voices through one's sleep, while my spirit went everywhere under the sun. I traveled in foreign lands, I saw pictures, cathedrals; I had thrilling adventures and hair-breadth escapes; formed strange and exciting acquaintances; in short, was the hero of a romance, whose scenes changed as airily and easily as the sunset clouds of evening. So really and so vividly did this supposititious life excite me that I have actually found myself with tears in my eyes through the pathos of these unsubstantial visions.

It was in one of the lulling pauses of such a romance, while I yet heard the voice of our good pastor proving that "selfishness was the essence of moral evil," that I lifted up my eyes, and became for the first time conscious of a new face, in the third pew of the broad aisle below me. It was a new one—one that certainly had never been there before, and was altogether just the face to enter into the most ethereal perceptions of my visionary life. I started with a sort of awakening thrill, such, perhaps, as Adam had when he woke from his sleep and saw his Eve. There, to be sure, was the face of my dream-wife, incarnate and visible! That face, so refined, so spiritual, so pure! a baptized, Christianized Greek face! A cross between Venus and the Virgin Mary! The outlines were purely, severely classical, such as I have since seen in the Psyche of the Naples gallery; but the large, tremulous, pathetic eyes redeemed them from statuesque coldness. They were eyes that thought, that looked deep into life, death, and eternity—so I said to myself as I gazed down on her, and held my breath with a kind of religious awe. The vision was all in white, as such visions must be, and the gauzy crape bonnet with its flowers upon her head, dissolved under my eyes into a sort of sacred aureole, such as surrounds the heads of saints. I saw her, and only her, through the remaining hour of church. I studied every movement. The radiant eyes were fixed upon the minister, and with an expression so sadly earnest that I blushed for my own wandering thoughts, and began to endeavor to turn my mind to the truths I was hearing told; but, after all, I thought more about her than the discourse. I saw her search the hymn-book for the hymn, and wished that I were down there to find it for her. I saw her standing up, and looking down at her hymns with the wonderful eyes veiled by long lashes, and singing—

"Call me away from earth and sense,

One sovereign word can draw me thence,

I would obey the voice divine,

And all inferior joys resign."

How miserably gross, and worldly, and unworthy I felt at that moment! How I longed for an ideal, superhuman spirituality,—something that should make me worthy to touch the hem of her garment!

When the blessing was pronounced, I hastened down and stood where I might see her as she passed out of church. I had not been alone in my discoveries: there had been dozens of others that saw the same star, and there were whisperings, and elbowings, and consultings, as a knot of juniors and seniors stationed themselves as I had done, to see her pass out.

As she passed by she raised her eyes slowly, and as it were by accident, and they fell like a ray of sunlight on one of our number,—Jim Fellows—who immediately bowed. A slight pink flush rose in her cheeks as she gracefully returned the salutation, and passed on. Jim was instantly the great man of the hour; he knew her, it seems.

"It's Miss Ellery, of Portland. Haven't you heard of her?" he said, with an air of importance. "She's the great beauty of Portland. They call her the 'little divinity.' Met her last summer, at Mount Desert," he added, with the comfortable air of a man in possession of the leading fact of the hour—the fact about which everybody else is inquiring.

I walked home behind her in a kind of trance, disdaining to join in what I thought the very flippant and unworthy comments of the boys. I saw the last wave of her white garments as she passed between the two evergreens in front of deacon Brown's square white house, which at that moment became to me a mysterious and glorified shrine; there the angel held her tabernacle.

At this moment I met Miss Dotha Brown, the deacon's eldest daughter, a rosy-cheeked, pleasant-faced girl, to whom I had been introduced the week before. Instantly she was clothed upon with a new interest in my eyes, and I saluted her with empressement; if not the rose, she at least was the clay that was imbibing the perfume of the rose; and I don't doubt that my delight at seeing her assumed the appearance of personal admiration. "What a charming Sunday," I said, with emphasis. "Perfectly charming," said Miss Brown, sympathetically.

"You have an interesting young friend staying with you, I observe," said I.

"Who, Miss Ellery? oh, yes. Oh! Mr. Henderson, she is the sweetest girl!" said Dotha, with effusion.

I didn't doubt it, and listened eagerly to her praises, and was grateful to Miss Brown for the warm invitation to "call" which followed. Miss Ellery was to make them a long visit, and she would be so happy to introduce me.

That evening Miss Ellery was a topic of excited discussion in our entry, and Jim Fellows plumed himself largely on his Mount Desert experiences, which he related in a way to produce the impression that he had been regarded with a favorable eye by the divinity.

I was in a state of silent indignation, at him, at all the rest of the boys, at everybody in general, being fully persuaded that they were utterly incapable of understanding or appreciating this wonderful creature.

"Hal, why don't you talk?" said one of them to me, when I had sat silent, pretending to read for a long time; "What do you think of her?"

"Oh, I'm no ladies' man, as you all know," I said, evasively, and actually pretended not to have remarked Miss Ellery except in a cursory manner.

Then followed a period of weeks and months, when that one image was never for a moment out of my thoughts. By a strange law of our being, a certain idea can accompany us everywhere, not stopping or interrupting the course of the thought, but going on in a sort of shadowy way with it, as an invisible presence.

The man or woman who cherishes an ideal is always liable to this accident, that the spiritual image often descends like a mantle, and invests some very ordinary person, who is, for the time being, transfigured,—"a woman clothed with the sun, and with the moon under her feet." It is not what there is in the person, but what there is in us, that gives this passage in life its critical power. It would seem as if there were in some men, and some women, preparation for a grand interior illumination and passion, like that hoard of mystical gums and spices which the phenix was fabled to prepare for its funeral pile; all the aspiration and poetry and romance, the upheaval toward an infinite and eternal good, a divine purity and rest, may be enkindled by the touch of a very ordinary and earthly hand, and, burning itself out, leave only cold ashes of experience.

Miss Ellery was a well-bred young lady, of decorous and proper demeanor, of careful religious education, of no particular strength either of mind or emotion, good tempered, and with an instinctive approbativeness that made her desirous to please every body, which created for her the reputation that Miss Brown expressed in calling her "a sweet girl." She was always most agreeable to those with whom she was thrown, and for the time being appeared to be, and was sincerely interested in them; but her mind was like a well-polished looking-glass, retaining not a trace of anything absent or distant.

She was gifted by nature with wonderful beauty, and beauty of that peculiar style that stirs the senses of the poetical and the ideal; her gentle approbativeness, and the graceful facility of her manner, were such as not at least to destroy the visions which her beauty created. In a quiet way she enjoyed being adored—made love to, but she never overstepped the bounds of strict propriety. She received me with graciousness, and I really think found something in my society which was agreeably stimulating to her. I was somewhat out of the common track of her adorers; my ardor and enthusiasm gave her a new emotion. I wrote poems to her, which she read with a graceful pensiveness and laid away among her trophies in her private writing-desk. I called her my star, my inspiration, my light, and she beamed down on me with a pensive purity. "Yes, she was delighted to have me read Tennyson to her," and many an hour when I should have been studying, I was lounging in the little front parlor of the Brown house, fancying myself Sir Galahad, and reading with emotion, how his "blade was strong, because his heart was pure;" and Miss Ellery murmured "How lovely!" and I was in paradise.

And then there came wonderful moonlight evenings—evenings when every leaf stirring had a penciled reproduction flickering in light and shade on the turf; and we walked together under arches of elm trees, and I talked and quoted poetry; and she listened and assented in the sweetest manner possible. All my hopes, my plans, my dreams, my speculations, my philosophies, came out to sun themselves under the magic of those lustrous eyes. Her replies and utterances were greatly in disproportion to mine; but I received them, and made much of them, as of old the priests of Delphi did with those of the inspired maiden. There must be deep meaning in it all, because she was a priestess; and I was not backward to supply it.

I have often endeavored to analyze the sources of the illusion cast over men by such characters as that of Miss Ellery. In their case the instinctive action of approbativeness assumes the semblance of human sympathy, and brings them for the time being into the life-sphere, and under the influence, of any person whom they wish to please, so that they with a temporary sincerity reflect back the ideas and feelings of others. There is just the same illusive sort of charm in this reflection of our own thoughts and emotions from another mind, as there is in the reflection of objects in a placid lake. There is no warmth and no reality to it; and yet, for the time being, it is often the most entrancing thing in the world, and gives back to you the glow of your own heart, the fervor of your imagination, and even every little flower of fancy, and twig of feeling, with a wonderful faithfulness of reproduction.

It is not real sympathy, because, like the image in the lake, it is only there when you are present; and when you are away, reflects with equal facility the next comer.

But men always have been, and to the end of time always will be, fascinated by such women, and will suppose this mere reflecting power of a highly polished surface to be the sympathetic response for which the heart longs.

So I had no doubt that Miss Ellery was a woman of all sorts of high literary tastes and moral heroisms, for there was nothing so high or so deep in the aspirations of poets or sages in my readings to her, that could not be reflected and glorified in those wonderful eyes.

Neither are such women hypocrites, as they are often called. What they give back to you is for the time being a sincere reflection, and if there is no depth to it, if it passes away with the passing hour, it is simply because their natures—smooth, shallow, and cold—have no deeper power of retention.

The fault lies in expecting more of a thing than there is in its nature—a fault we shall more or less all go on committing till the great curtain falls.

I wrote all about her to my mother; and received the usual cautionary maternal epistle, reminding me that I was yet far from that goal in life when I was warranted in asking any woman to be my wife; and suggesting that my taste might later with maturity; warning me against premature commitments—in short, saying all that good, anxious mothers usually say to young juniors in college in similar circumstances.

In reply, I told my mother that I had found a woman worthy the devotion of a life—a woman who would be inspiration and motive and reward. I extolled her purity and saintliness. I told my mother that she was forming and leading me to all that was holy and noble. In short I meant to win her though the seven labors of Hercules were to be performed seven times over to reach her.

Now the fact is, my mother might have saved herself her anxiety. Miss Ellery was perfectly willing to be my guiding star, my inspiration, my light, within reasonable limits, while making a visit in an otherwise rather dull town. She liked to be read to; she liked the consciousness of being incessantly admired, and would have made a very good image for some Church of the Perpetual Adoration; but after all, Miss Ellery was as incapable of forming an ineligible engagement of marriage with a poor college student, as the most sensible and collected of Walter Scott's heroines.

Looking back upon this part of my life, I can pity myself with as quiet and dispassionate a perception as if I were a third person. The illusion, for the time being, was so real, the feelings called up by it so honest and earnest and sacred; and supposing there had been a tangible reality to it—what might not such a woman have made of me, or of any man?

And suppose it pleased God to send forth an army of such women, as I thought her to be, among the lost children of men, women armed not only with the outward and visible sign of beauty, but with that inward and spiritual grace which beauty typifies, one might believe that the golden age would soon be back upon us.

Miss Ellery adroitly avoided all occasions of any critical commitment on my part or on her's. Women soon learn a vast amount of tact and diplomacy on that subject: but she gave me to understand that I was peculiarly congenial to her, and encouraged the outflow of all my romance with the gentlest atmosphere of indulgence. To be sure, I was not the only one whom she thus held with bonds of golden gossamer. She reigned a queen, and had a court at her feet, and the deacon's square, white, prosaic house bristled with the activity and vivacity of Miss Ellery's adorers.

Among them. Will Marshall was especially distinguished. Will was a senior, immensely rich, good-natured as the longest summer day is long, but so idle and utterly incapable of culture that only the liberality of the extra sum paid to a professor who held him in guardianship secured his stay in college classes. It has been my observation that money will secure a great variety of things in this lower world, and among others, will carry a very stupid fellow through college.

Will was a sort of favorite with us all. His good nature was without limit, and he scattered his money with a free hand, and so we generally spoke of him as "Poor Will;" a nice fellow, if he couldn't write a decent note, and blundered through all his recitations.

Will laid himself, so to speak, at Miss Ellery's feet. He was flush of bouquets and confectionery. He caused the village livery stable to import forthwith a turnout worthy to be a car of Venus herself.

I saw all this, but it never entered my head that Miss Ellery would cast a moment's thought other than those of the gentlest womanly compassion on poor Will Marshall.

The time of the summer vacation drew nigh, and with the close of the term closed the vision of my idyllic experiences with Miss Ellery. To the last, she was so gentle and easy to be entreated. Her lovely eyes cast on me such bright encouraging glances; and she accorded me a farewell moonlight ramble, wherein I walked not on earth, but in the seventh heaven of felicity. Of course there was nothing definite. I told her that I was a poor soldier of fortune, but might I only wear her name in my bosom, it would be a sacred talisman, and give strength to my arm, and she sighed, and looked lovely, and she did not say me nay.

I went home to my mother, and wearied that much-enduring woman, all through the vacation, with the hot and cold fits of my fever. Blessed souls! these mothers, who bear and watch and rear the restless creatures, who by and by come to them with the very heart gone out of them for love of another woman—some idle girl, perhaps, that never knew what it was either to love or care, and that plays with hearts as kittens do with pinballs!

I wrote to Miss Ellery letters long, overflowing, and got back little neatly-worded notes on scented paper, speaking in a general way of the charms of friendship.

But the first news that met me on my return to college broke my soap-bubble at one touch.

MY DREAM-WIFE.

"I told her that I was a poor soldier of fortune, but might I only wear her name in my bosom, it would be a sacred talisman, and give strength to my arm; and she sighed and looked lovely, and she did not say me nay."

"Hurrah! Hal—who do you guess is engaged?"

"I don't know."

"Guess."

"I couldn't guess."

"Why, Miss Ellery—engaged to Bill Marshall."

Alnaschar, in the Arabian tale, could not have been more astonished when his basket of glass-ware fell in glittering nothingness. I stood stupid with astonishment.

"She engaged to Will Marshall!—why, boys, he's a fool!"

"But you see he's rich. Oh, it's all arranged; they are to be married next month, and go to Europe for their wedding tour," said Jim Fellows.

And so my idol fell from its pedestal—and my first dream dissolved.

CHAPTER VII.

THE VALLEY OF HUMILIATION.

Miss Ellery was sufficiently mistress of herself, and of circumstances, to close our little pastoral in the most graceful and amiable manner possible.

I received a beautiful rose-scented note from her, saying that the very kind interest in her happiness which I always had expressed, and the extremely pleasant friendship which had arisen between us, made her desirous of informing me, &c., &c. Thereupon followed the announcement of her engagement, terminating with the assurance that whatever new ties she might form, or scenes she might visit, she should ever cherish a pleasant remembrance of the delightful hours spent beneath the elms of X., and indulge the kindest wishes for my future success and happiness.

I, of course, crushed the rose-scented missive in my hand, in the most approved tragical style, and felt that I had been deceived, betrayed and undone. I passed forthwith into that cynical state of young manhood, in which one learns for the first time what a mere unimportant drop his own most terribly earnest and excited feelings may be in the tumbling ocean of the existing world.

This is a valley of humiliation, which lies, in very many cases, just a day's walk beyond the palace, beautiful with all its fascinations.

The moral geographer, John Bunyan, to whom we are indebted for much wholesome information, tells us that while it is extremely difficult to descend gracefully into this valley, and pilgrims generally accomplish it at the expense of many a sore trip and stumble, yet when once they are fairly down, it presents many advantages of climate and soil not other where found.

The shivering to pieces of the first ideal, while it breaks ruthlessly and scatters much that is really and honestly good and worthy, breaks up no less a certain stock of unconscious self conceit, which young people are none the worse for having lessened.

The very assumption, so common in the early days of life, that we have feelings of a peculiar sacredness above the comprehension of the common herd, and for which only the selectest sympathy is possible, is one savoring a little too much of the unregenerate natural man, to be safely let alone to grow and thrive.

Natures, in particular, where ideality is largely in the ascendant, are apt to begin life with the scheme of building a high and thick stone wall of reticence around themselves, and enthroning therein an idol, whose rites and service are to be performed with a contemptuous indifference to all the rest of mankind.

When this idol is suddenly disenchanted by some stroke of inevitable reality, and we discern that the image which we had supposed to be the shrine of a divinity, is only a very earthly doll, stuffed with saw-dust, one's pinnacles and battlements—the whole temple in short, that we have prided ourselves on, comes tumbling down about us like the walls of Jericho, not without a certain sense of the ridiculous. Though, like other afflictions, this is not for the present joyous, still the space thus cleared in our mind may be so cultivated as afterwards to bring forth peaceable fruits of righteousness.

In my case, my idol was utterly defaced and destroyed in my eyes, because I could not conceal from myself that she was making a marriage wholly without the one element that above all others marriage requires.

Miss Ellery was perfectly well aware of the mental inferiority of poor Bill Marshall, and had listened unreprovingly to the half-contemptuous pity with which it was customary among us to speak of him. I remembered how patronizingly I had often talked of him to her, "Really not a bad fellow—only a little weak, you see;" and the pretty, graceful drollery in her eyes. I remembered things that these same eyes had looked at me, when he blundered and miscalled words in conversation, and a thousand sayings and intimations, each by itself indefinite as the boundary between two tints of the rainbow, by which she showed a superior sense of pleasure in my conversation and society.

And was all this acting and insincerity? I thought not. I was and am fully convinced that had I only been possessed of the wealth of Bill Marshall, Miss Ellery would infinitely have preferred me as a life companion; and it was no very serious amount of youthful vanity to imagine that I should have proved a more entertaining one. I can easily imagine that she made the decision with some gentle regret at first,—regret dried up like morning dew in the full sunlight of wedding diamonds, and capable of being put completely to sleep upon a couch of cashmere shawls.

With what indignant bitterness did I listen to all the details of the impending wedding from fluent Jim Fellows, who, being from Portland and well posted in all the gossip of the circle in which she moved, enlightened our entry with daily and weekly bulletins of the grandeur and splendors that were being, and to be.

"Boys, only think! Her wedding present from him is a set of diamonds valued at twenty-five thousand dollars. Bob Rivers saw them on exhibition at Tiffany's. Then she has three of the most splendid cashmere shawls that ever were imported into Maine. Captain Sautelle got them from an Indian Prince, and there's no saying what they would have cost at usual rates. I tell you Bill is going it in style, and they are going to be married with drums and trumpets, cymbals and dances; such a wedding as will make old Portland stare; and then off they are going to travel no end of time in Europe, and see all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them."

Now, I suppose none of us doubted that could Miss Ellery have attained the diamonds and the cashmeres and the fortune, with all its possibilities of luxury and self-indulgence, without the addition of the husband, nothing would have been wanting to complete her good fortune; but it is a condition in the way of a woman's making a fortune by marriage, as it was with Faust's compact with an unmentionable party, that it can only be ratified by the sacrifice of herself—herself, and for life! A sacrifice most awful and holy when made in pure love, and most fearful when made for any other consideration. The fact that Miss Ellery could make it was immediate and complete disenchantment to me.

Mine is not, I suppose, the only case where the ideal which has been formed under the brooding influence of a noble mother is shattered by the hand of a woman. Some woman, armed with the sacramental power of beauty, enkindles the highest manliness of the youth, and is, in his eyes, the incarnate form of purity and unworldly virtue, the high prize and incitement to valor, patience, constancy and courage, in the great life-battle.

But she sells herself before his eyes, for diamonds and laces, and trinkets and perfumes; for the liberty of walking on soft carpets and singing in gilded cages; and all the world laughs at his simplicity in supposing that, a fair chance given, any woman would ever do otherwise. Is not beauty woman's capital in trade, the price put into her hand to get whatever she needs; and are not the most beautiful, as a matter of course, destined prizes of the richest?

Miss Ellery's marriage was to me a great awakening, a coming out of a life of pure ideas and sentiment into one of external realities. Hitherto, I had lived only with people all whose measures and valuations had been those relating to the character—the intellect and the heart. Never in my father's house had I heard the gaining of money spoken of as success in life, except as far as money was needed to advance education, and education was a means for doing good. My father had his zeal, his earnestness, his exultations, but they all related to things to be done in his life-work; the saving of souls, the conversion of sinners, the gathering of churches, the repression of intemperance and immorality, the advancement of education. My elder brothers had successfully entered the ministry under his influence, and in counsels with them where to settle, I had never heard the question of salary or worldly support even discussed. The first, the only question I ever heard considered, was What work was needed to be done, and what fitness for the doing of it; taking for granted the record, that where the Kingdom of God and its righteousness were first sought, all things would be added.

Thus all my visions of future life had in them something of the innocent verdancy of the golden age, when noble men strove for the favor of fair women, by pureness, by knowledge, by heroism,—and the bravest won the crown from the hand of the most beautiful.

And suddenly to my awakened eyes the whole rushing cavalcade of fashionable life swept by, bearing my princess, amid waving feathers and flashing jewels and dazzling robes and merry laughs and jests, leaving me by the way-side dazed and covered with dust, to plod on alone.

Now first I felt the shame which comes over a young man, that he has not known the world as old wordlings know it.

In the discussions among the boys, relating to this marriage, I first learned the power of that temptation which comes upon every young man to look on wealth as the first object in a life race.

Woman is by order of nature the conservator of the ideal. Formed of finer clay, with nicer perceptions, and refined fiber, she is the appointed priestess to guard the poetry of life from sacrilege; but if she be bribed to betray the shrine, what hope for us? "If the salt have lost its savor, wherewith shall it be salted?"

My acquaintance with Miss Ellery had brought me out of my scholastic retirement, and made me an acquaintance of the whole bevy of the girls of X. Miss Ellery had been invited and fêted in all the families, and her special train of adorers had followed her, and thus I was "au courant" of all the existing girl-world of our little town. It was curious to remark what a silken flutter of wings, what an endless volubility of tongues there was, about this engagement and marriage, and how, on the whole, it was treated as the height of splendor and good fortune. My rosy-faced friend, Miss Dotha, was invited to the festival as bridesmaid, and returned thereafter "trailing clouds of glory" into the primitive circles of X; and my cynical bitterness of soul took a sort of perverse pleasure in the amplifications and discussions that I constantly heard in the tea-drinking circles of the town.

"Oh, girls, you've no idea about those diamonds," said Miss Dotha; "great big diamonds as large as peas, and just as clear as water! Bill Marshall made them send orders to Europe specially for the purpose; then she had a pearl set that his mother gave, and his sister gave an amethyst set for a breakfast suit! and you ought to have seen the presents! It was a perfect bazar! The Marshalls are an enormously rich family, and they all came down splendidly: old uncle Tom Marshall gave a solid silver dining set embossed with gold, and old Aunt Tabitha Marshall gave a real Sévres china tea-set, that was taken out of one of the royal palaces in France, at the time of the French Revolution. Captain Atkins was in France about the time they were sacking palaces, and doing all such things, and he brought away quite a number of things that found their way into some of these rich old Portland families. Her wedding veil was given by old Grandmamma Marshall, and was said to have been one that belonged to Queen Marie Antoinette, taken by some of those horrid women when they sacked the Tuilleries, and sold to Captain Atkins; at any rate, it was the most wonderful point lace, just like an old picture."

Fancy the drawing of breaths, the exclamations, the groans of delight, from a knot of pretty, well-dressed, nice country girls, at these wonderful glimpses into Paradise.

"After all," I said, "I think this custom of loading down a woman with finery just at her marriage hour, is giving it when she is least able to appreciate it. Why distract her with gew-gaws at the very moment when her heart must be so full of a new affection that she cares for nothing else? Miss Ellery is probably so lost in her love for Mr. Marshall, that she scarcely gives a thought to these things, and really forgets that she has them. It would be much more in point to give them to some girl that hasn't a lover."

I spoke with a simple, serious air, as if I had most perfect faith in my words, and a general gentle smile of amusement went round the circle, rippling into a laugh out-right, on the faces of some of the gayer girls. Miss Dotha said:

"Oh, come, now, Mr. Henderson, you are too severe."

"Severe!" said I; "I can't understand what you mean, Miss Dotha. You don't mean, of course, to intimate that Miss Ellery is not in love with the man she has married?"

"Oh, now!" said Miss Dotha, laughing, "you know perfectly, Mr. Henderson—we all know—it's pretty well understood, that this wasn't exactly what you call a love-match; in fact, I know," she added with the assurance of a confidant, "that she had great difficulty in making up her mind; but her family were very anxious for the match, and his family thought it would be such a good thing for him to marry and settle down, you know, so one way and another she concluded to take him."

"And, after all, Will Marshall is a good-natured creature," said Miss Smith.

"And going to Europe is such a temptation," said Miss Brown.

"And she must marry some time," said Miss Jones, "and one can't have every thing, you know. Will is certain to be kind to her, and let her have her own way."

"For my part," said pretty Miss Green, "I'm free to say that I don't blame any girl that has a chance to get such a fortune, for doing it as Miss Ellery has. I've always been poor, and pinched and plagued; never can go any where, or see anything, or dress as I want to; and if I had a chance, such as Miss Ellery had, I think I should be a fool not to take it."

"Well," said Miss Black, reflectively, "the only question is, couldn't Miss Ellery have waited and found a man who had more intellect, and more culture, whom she could respect and love, and who had money, too? She had such extraordinary beauty and such popular manners, I should have thought she might."

"Oh, well," said Miss Dotha, "she was getting on—she was three-and-twenty already—and nobody of just the right sort had turned up—'a bird in the hand'—you know. After all, I dare say she can love Will Marshall well enough."

Well enough! The cool philosophic tone of this phrase smote on my ear curiously.

"And pray, fair ladies, how much is 'well enough?'" said I.

"Well enough to keep the peace," said Miss Green, "and each let the other alone, to go their own ways and have no fighting."

Miss Green was a pretty, spicy little body, with a pair of provoking hazel eyes; who talked like an unprincipled little pirate, though she generally acted like a nice woman. In less than a year after, by the by, she married a home missionary, in Maine, and has been a devoted wife and mother in a little parish somewhere in the region of Skowhegan, ever since.

But I returned to my room gloriously misanthropic, and for some time my thoughts, like bees, were busy gathering bitter honey. I gave up visiting in the tea-drinking circles of X. I got myself a dark sombrero hat, which I slouched down over my eyes in bandit style when I walked the street and met with any of my former gentle acquaintances. I wrote my mother most sublime and awful letters on the inconceivable vanity and nothingness of human life. I read Plato and Æschylus, and Emerson's Essays, and began to think myself an old Philosopher risen from the dead. There was a melancholy gravity about all my college exercises, and I began to look down on young freshmen and sophomores with a serene compassion, as a sage who has passed through the vale of years and learned that all is vanity.

The valley of humiliation may have its charms—it is said that there are many flowers that grow there, and nowhere else, but for all that, a young fellow, so far as I know, generally walks through the first part of it in rather a surly and unamiable state.

To be sure, had I been wise, I should have been ready to return thanks on my knees for my disappointment. True, the doll was stuffed with saw-dust, but it was not my doll. I had not learned the cheat when it was forever too late to help myself, and was not condemned to spend life in vain attempts to make a warm, living friend of a cold marble statue. Many a man has succeeded in getting his first ideal, and been a miserable man always thereafter, and therefore.

I have lived to hear very tranquilly of Mrs. Will Marshall's soirées and parties, as she reigns in the aristocratic circles of New York; and to see her, still like a polished looking-glass, gracefully reflecting every one's whims and tastes and opinions with charming suavity, and forgetting them when their backs are turned; and to think that she is the right thing in the right place—a crowned Queen of Vanity Fair.

I have become, too, very tolerant and indulgent to the women who do as she did,—use their own charms as the coin wherewith to buy the riches and honors of the world.

The world has been busy for some centuries in shutting and locking every door through which a woman could step into wealth, except the door of marriage. All vigor and energy, such as men put forth to get this golden key of life, is condemned and scouted as unfeminine; and a woman belonging to the upper classes, who undertakes to get wealth by honest exertion and independent industry, loses caste, and is condemned by a thousand voices as an oddity and a deranged person. A woman gifted with beauty, who sells it to buy wealth, is far more leniently handled. That way of getting money is not called unwomanly; and so long as the whole force of the world goes that way, such marriages as Miss Ellery's and Bill Marshall's will be considered en régle.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE BLUE MISTS.

My college course was at last finished satisfactorily to my mother and friends. What joy there is to be got in college honors was mine. I studied faithfully and graduated with the valedictory.

Nevertheless I came back home again a sadder if not a wiser man than I went. In fact a tendency to fits of despondency and dejection had been growing upon me in these last two years of my college life.

With all the self-confidence and conceit that is usually attributed to young men, and of which they have their share undoubtedly, they still have their times of walking through troubled waters, and sinking in deep mire where there is no standing.

During my last year, the question "What are you good for?" had often borne down like a nightmare upon me. When I entered college all was distant, golden, indefinite, and I was sure that I was good for almost anything that could be named. Nothing that ever had been attained by man looked to me impossible. Riches, honor, fame, any thing that any other man unassisted had wrought out for himself with his own right arm, I could work out also.

But as I measured myself with real tasks, and as I rubbed and grated against other minds and whirled round and round in the various experiences of college life, I grew smaller and smaller in my own esteem, and oftener and oftener in my lonely hours it seemed as if some evil genius delighted to lord it over me and sitting at my bed-side or fire-side to say "What are you good for, to what purpose all the pains and money that have been thrown away on you? You'll never be anything; you'll only mortify your poor mother that has set her heart on you, and make your Uncle Jacob ashamed of you." Can any anguish equal the depths of those blues in which a man's whole self hangs in suspense before his own eyes, and he doubts whether he himself, with his entire outfit and apparatus, body, soul, and spirit, isn't to be, after all, a complete failure? Better, he thinks never to have been born, than to be born to no purpose. Then first he wrestles with the question, What is life for, and what am I to do or seek in it? It seems to be not without purpose, that the active life-work of the great representative Man of Men was ushered in by a forty days dreary wandering in the wilderness hungry, faint, and tempted of the Devil; for certainly, after education has pretty thoroughly waked up all there is in a man, and the time is at hand that he is to make the decision what to do with it, there often comes a wandering, darkened, unsettled, tempted passage in his life. In Christ's temptations we may see all that besets the young man.

The daily bread question, or how to get a living,—the ambitious heavings, or the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them, all to be got by some yielding to Satan,—the ostentatious impulse to come down on the world with a rush and a sensation,—these are mirrored in a young man's smaller life just as they were in that great life. The whole Heavens can be reflected in the little pool as in the broad ocean!

All these elements of unrest had been boiling in my mind during the last year. Who wants to be nothing in the great world? No young man at this time of his course. The wisdom of becoming nothing that he may possess all things is too high for this stage of immaturity.

I came into college as simple, and contented, and satisfied, as a huckleberry bush in a sweet-fern pasture. I felt rich enough for all I wanted to do, and my path of life lay before me defined with great simplicity.

But my intimacy with Miss Ellery, her marriage and all that pertained to it, had brought before my eyes the world of wealth and fashion, a world which a young collegian may try to despise, and about which he may write the most disparaging moral reflections, but which has, after all, its power to trouble his soul. The consciousness of being gloveless, and threadbare in toilet, comes over one in certain atmospheres, as the consciousness of nakedness to Adam and Eve. It is true that in the institution where I attended, as in many other rural colleges in New England, I was backed up by a majority of healthy-minded, hardy men, of real mark and worth, children of honest toil and self-respecting poverty, who were bravely working their way up through education to the prizes and attainments of life. Simple economies were therefore well understood and respected in the college.

Nevertheless there is something not altogether vulgar in the attractions which wealth enables one to throw around himself. I was a social favorite in college, and took a stand among my fellows as a writer and speaker, and so had a considerable share of that sincere sort of flattery which college boys lavish on each other. I was invited and made much of by some whose means were ample, whose apartments were luxuriously and tastefully furnished, but who were none the less good scholars and high-minded gentlemanly fellows.

In their vacations I had been invited to their houses, and had seen all the refinement, the repose, the ease and the quietude that comes from the possession of wealth in the hands of those who know how to use it. Wealth in such hands gives opportunities of the broadest culture, ability to live in the wisest manner, freedom to choose the healthiest surroundings both for mind and body, not restricted by considerations of expense; and how could I think it anything else than an object ardently to be sought?

It is true, my rich friends seemed equally to enjoy the vacations in my little, plain, mountain home. People generally are insensible to advantages they have always enjoyed, and have an appetite for something new; so the homely rusticity of our house, the perfect freedom from conventionalities, the wild, mountain scenery, the wholesome detail of farm life, the barn with its sweet stores of hay, and its nooks and corners and hiding places, the gathering in of our apples, and the making of cider, the corn-huskings and Thanksgiving frolics, seemed to have their interest and delights to them, and they often told me I was a lucky fellow to be born to such pleasant surroundings. But I thought within myself, It is easy to say this when you feel the control of thousands in your pocket, when if you are tired you can go to any land or country of the earth for change of scene.

In fact we see in history that the crusade of St. Francis in favor of Poverty was not begun by a poor man, but by a young nobleman who had known nothing hitherto but wealth and luxury. It is from the rich, if from any, that our grasping age must learn renunciation and simplicity. It is easier to renounce a good which one has tried and of which one knows all the attendant thorns and stings than to renounce one that has been only painted by the imagination, and whose want has been keenly felt. When I came to the College I came from the controlling power of home influences. At an early age I had felt the strength of that sphere of spirituality that encircled the lives of my parents, and, being very receptive and sympathetic, had reflected in my childish nature all their feelings.

I had renounced the world before I knew what the world was. I had joined my father's church and was looked upon as one destined in time to take up my father's work of the ministry.

Four years had passed and I came back to my mother, weakened and doubting, indisposed to take up the holy work to which in my early days I looked forward with enthusiasm, yet with all the sadness which comes from indecision as to one's life-object.

To be a minister is to embrace a life of poverty, of toil, of self-denial. To do this, not only with cheerfulness but with an enthusiasm which shall bear down all before it, which shall elevate it into the region of moral poetry and ideality, requires a fervid, unshaken faith. The man must feel the power of an endless life, be lifted above things material and temporal to things sublime and eternal.

Now it is one peculiarity of the professors of the Christian religion that they have not, at least of late years, arranged their system of education with any wise adaptation to having their young men come out of it Christians. In this they differ from many other religionists. The Brahmins educate their sons so that they shall infallibly become Brahmins; the Jews so that they shall infallibly be Jews; the Mohammedans so that they shall be Mohammedans; but the Christians educate their sons so that nearly half of them turn out unbelievers—professors of no religion at all.

There is a book which the Christian world unite in declaring to be an infallible revelation from Heaven. It has been the judgment of critics that the various writings in this volume excel other writings in point of mere literary merit as much as they do in purity and elevation of the moral sentiment. Yet it is remarkable that the critical study of these sacred writings in their original tongues is not in most of our Christian colleges considered as an essential part of the education of a Christian gentleman, while the heathen literature of Greece and Rome is treated as something indispensable, and to be gained at all hazards.

It is a fact that from the time that the boy begins to fit for college, his mind is so driven and pressed with the effort to acquire the classical literature, that there is no time to acquire the literature of the Bible, neither is it associated in his mind with the dignity and respect of a classical attainment. He must be familiar with Horace and Ovid, with Cicero and Plato, Æschylus and Homer in their original tongues, but the majestic poetry of the Old Testament, and its sages and seers and prophets, become with every advancing year more unintelligible to him. A thoroughly educated graduate of most of our colleges is unprepared to read intelligently many parts of Isaiah or Ezekiel or Paul's epistles. The scripture lessons of the church service often strike on his ear as a strange quaint babble of peculiar sounds, without rhyme or reason. Uncultured and uneducated in all that should enable him to understand them, he is only preserved by a sort of educational awe from regarding them as the jargon of barbarians.

Meanwhile, this literature of the Bible, strange, weird, sibylline, and full of unfulfilled needs and requirements of study, is being assailed in detail through all the courses of a boy's college life. The objections to it as a divine revelation relate to critical questions in languages of which he is ignorant, and yet they are everywhere; they are in the air he breathes, they permeate all literature, they enter into modern science, they disintegrate and wear away, bit by bit, his reverence and his confidence.

This work had been going on insensibly in my head during my college life, notwithstanding the loyalty of my heart. During those years I had learned to associate the Bible with the most sacred memories of home, with the dearest loves of home life. It was woven with remembrances of daily gatherings around the family altar, with scenes of deepest emotion when I had seen my father and mother fly to its shelter and rest upon its promises. There were passages that never recurred to me except with the sound of my father's vibrating voice, penetrating their words with a never dying power. The Bible was to me like a father and a mother, and the doubts, and queries, the respectful suggestions of incredulity, the mildly suggestive abatements of its authority, which met me, now here and now there, in all the course of my readings and studies, were as painful to me as reflections cast on my father's probity or my mother's honor.

I would not listen to them, I would not give them voice, I smothered them in the deepest recesses of my heart, while meantime the daily pressure that came on me in the studies and requirements of college life left me neither leisure nor inclination to pursue the researches that should clear them up.

To be sure, nothing is so important as the soul—nothing is of so much moment as religion, and the question "Is this God's book or is it not?" is the question of questions. It underlies all things, and he who is wise would drop all other things and undergo any toil and make any studies that should fit him to judge understandingly on this point. But I speak from experience when I say that the course of study in christian America is so arranged that a boy, from the grammar school upward till he graduates, is so fully pressed and overladen with all other studies that there is no probability that he will find the time or the inclination for such investigation.

In most cases he will do just what I did, throw himself upon the studies proposed to him, work enough to meet the demands of the hour, and put off the acquisition of that more important knowledge to an indefinite future, and sigh, and go backward in his faith.

But without faith or with a faith trembling and uncertain, how is a man to turn his back on the world that is before him—the world that he can see, hear, touch and taste—to work for the world that is unseen and eternal?

I will not repeat the flattering words that often fell on my ear and said to me, "You can make your way anywhere; you can be anything you please." And then there were voices that said in my heart, "I may have wealth, and with it means of power, of culture, of taste, of luxury. If I only set out for that, I may get it." And then, in contrast, came that life I had seen my father live, in its grand simplicity, in its enthusiastic sincerity, in its exulting sense of joy in what he was doing, down to the last mortal moment, and I wished, oh, how fervently! that I could believe as he did. But to be a minister merely from a sense of duty—to bear the burden of poverty with no perception of the unspeakable riches which Christ hath placed therein—who would not shrink from a life so grating and so cold? To choose the ministry as a pedestal for oratory and self-display and poetic religious sentiment, and thus to attain distinction and easy position, and the command of fashionable luxury, seemed to me a temptation to desecration still more terrible, and I dreaded the hour which should close my college life and make a decision inevitable.

It was with a sober and sad heart that I closed my college course and parted from class-mates—jolly fellows with whom had rolled away the four best years of my life—years that as one goes on afterwards in age look brighter and brighter in the distance. It was a lonesome and pokerish operation to dismantle the room that had long been my home, to bargain away my furniture, pack my books, and bid a final farewell to all the old quiddities and oddities that I had grown attached to in the quaint little village. The parting from Alma Mater is a second leaving of home—and this time for the great world. There is no staving off the battle of life now—the tents are struck, the camp-fires put out, and one must be on the march.

CHAPTER IX.

AN OUTLOOK INTO LIFE.

My coming back to my native town was an event of public notoriety. I had won laurels, and as I was the village property, my laurels were duly commented on and properly appreciated. Highland was one of those thrifty Yankee settlements where every house seems to speak the people so well-to-do, and so careful, and progressive in all the means of material comfort. There was not a house in it that was not in a sort of healthy, growing state, receiving, from time to time, some accession that showed that the Yankee aspiration was busy, stretching and enlarging. This had a new bay-window, and that had a new veranda; the other, new, tight, white picket fences all round the yard. Others rejoiced in a fresh coat of paint. But all were alive, and apparently self-repairing. There was to every house the thrifty wood-pile, seasoning for winter; the clean garden, with its wealth of fruit and its gay borders of flowers; and every new kind of flower, and every choice new fruit, found somewhere a patron who was trying a hand at it.

Highland was a place worth living in just for its scenery. It was at that precise point of the country where the hills are inspiriting, vivacious, reminding one of the Psalm,—"The little hills rejoice on every side!" Mountains are grand, but they also are dreary. For a near prospect they overpower too much, they shut out the sun, they have savage propensities, untamable by man, shown once in a while in land-slides and freshets; but these half-grown hills uplift one like waves of the sea. In summer they are wonderful in all possible shades of greenness; in autumn they are like a mystical rainbow—an ocean of waves, flamboyant with every wonderful device of color; and even when the leaves are gone, in November, and nothing left but the bristling steel-blue outlines of trees, there is a wonderful purple haze, a veil of dreamy softness, around them, that makes you think you never saw them so beautiful.

So I said to myself, as I came rambling over hill and dale back to the old homestead, and met my mother's bright face of welcome at the door. I was the hero of the hour at home, and everything had been prepared to make me welcome. My brother, who kept the homestead, had relinquished the prospect of a college life, and devoted himself to farming, but looked on me as the most favored of mortals in the attainments I had made. His young wife and growing family of children clustered around my mother and leaned on her experience; and as every one in the little village knew and loved her, there was a general felicitation and congratulation on the event of my return and my honors.

"See him in his father's pulpit afore long," said Deacon Manning, who called the first evening to pay his respects; "better try his hand at the weekly prayer meeting, and stir us up a bit."

"I think, Deacon," said I, "I shall have to be one of those that learn in silence, awhile longer. I may come to be taught, but I certainly cannot teach."

"Well, now, that's modest for a young fellow that's just been through college! They commonly are as feathery and highflying as a this year's rooster, and ready to crow whether their voice breaks or not," said the deacon. "'Learn in silence!' Well, that 'ere beats all for a young man!"

I thought to myself that the good deacon little knew the lack of faith that was covered by my humility.

Since my father's death, my mother had made her home with my Uncle Jacob, her health was delicate, and she preferred to enjoy the honors of a grandmother at a little distance. My Uncle Jacob had no children. Aunt Polly, his wife, was just the softest, sleekest, most domestic dove of a woman whose wings were ever covered with silver. I always think of her in some soft, pearly silk, with a filmy cap, and a half-handkerchief crossed over a gentle, motherly bosom, soft moving, soft speaking, but with a pair of bright, hazel eyes, keen as arrows to send their glances into every place in her dominions. Let anybody try sending in a false account to Aunt Polly, and they will see that the brightness of her eyes was not merely for ornament. Yet everything she put her hand to went so exactly, so easily, you would have said those eyes were made for nothing but reading, for which Aunt Polly had a great taste, and for which she found abundance of leisure.

My mother and she were enjoying together a long and quiet Saturday afternoon of life, reading to each other, and quietly and leisurely discussing all that they read,—not merely the last novel, as the fashion of women in towns and cities is apt to be, but all the solid works of philosophy and literature that marked the times. My uncle's house was like a bookseller's stall,—it was overrunning with books. The cases covered the walls; they crowded the corners and angles; and still every noteworthy book was ordered, to swell the stock.

My mother and aunt had read together Lecky, and Buckle, and Herbert Spencer, with the keen critical interest of fresh minds. Had it troubled their faith? Not in the least; no more than it would that of Mary on the morning after the resurrection! There is a certain moral altitude where faith becomes knowledge, and the bat-wings of doubt cannot fly so high. My mother was dwelling in that land of Beulah, where the sun always shineth, and the bells of the heavenly city are heard, and the shining ones walk. All was clear to her, all bright, all real, in "the beyond;" but that kind of evidence is above the realm of heavy-footed reason. The "joy unspeakable," the "peace that passeth understanding," are things that cannot be passed from hand to hand. Else I am quite sure my mother would have taken the crown of joy from her head and the peace from her bosom, and given them to me. But the "white stone with the new name" is Christ's gift to each for himself, and "no man knoweth it save he that receiveth it."

But these witnesses who stand gazing into heaven are not without their power on us who stand lower. It steadied my moral nerves, so to speak, that my mother had read and weighed the words that were making so much doubt and shaking; that she fully comprehended them, and that she smiled without fear.

She listened without distress, without anxiety, to all my doubts and falterings. "You must pass through this; you will be led; it will all come right," she said; "and then perhaps you will be the guide of others."

I had feared to tell her that I had abandoned the purpose of the ministry, but I found it easy.

"I would not have you embrace the ministry for anything but a true love," she said, "any more than I would that you should marry a wife for any other reason. If ever the time comes that you feel you must be that, it will be your call; but you can be God's minister otherwise than through the pulpit."

"Talk over your plans with your uncle," she said; "he is in your father's place now."

In fact, my uncle, having no children of his own, had set his heart on me, and was disposed to make me heir, not only to his very modest personal estate, but also to his harvest of ideas and opinions,—all that backwater of thoughts and ideas that accumulate on the mind of a man who thinks and reads a great deal in a lonely neighborhood. So he took me up as a companion in his daily rides over the country.

"Well, Harry, where next?" he said to me the day after my return, as we were driving together. "What are you about? Going to try the ministry?"

"I dare not; I am not fit. I know father wanted it, and prayed for it, and nothing would be such a joy to mother, but——"

My uncle gave a shrewd, sidelong glance on me.

"I suppose you are like a good many fellows; an education gives them a general shaking up, and all their beliefs break from their lashings and go rolling and tumbling about like spars and oil-casks in a storm on ship-board."

"I can't say that is true of all my beliefs; but yet a great many things that I tried to regard as certain are untied. I have too many doubts for a teacher."

"Who hasn't? I don't know anything in heaven or earth that forty unanswerable questions can't be asked about."

"You know," answered I, "Tennyson says,

'There lives more faith in honest doubt,

Believe me, than in half the creeds.'"

"H'm! that depends. Doubt is very well as a sort of constitutional crisis in the beginning of one's life; but if it runs on and gets to be chronic, it breaks a fellow up, and makes him morally spindling and sickly. Men that do anything in the world must be men of strong convictions; it won't do to go through life like a hen, craw-crawing and lifting up one foot, and not knowing where to set it down next."

"But," said I, "while I am passing through the constitutional crisis, as you call it, is the very time I must make up my mind to teach others on the most awful of all subjects. I cannot and dare not. I must be a learner for some years to come, and I must be a learner without any pledges, expressed or implied, to find the truth this way or that." "Well," said my uncle; "I'm not so greatly concerned about that—the Lord needs other ministers besides those in the pulpit. Why, man, the sermons on the evidences of Christianity that have come home to me most have been preached by lay preachers in poor houses and lonely churches, by ignorant men and women, and little children." "There's old Aunt Sarah there," he said, pointing with his whip to a brown house in the distance, "that woman is dying of a cancer, that slowly eats away her life in lingering agony, and all her dependence is the work of a sickly, consumptive daughter, and yet she is more than resigned to her lot, she is so cheerful, so thankful, so hopeful, there is such a blessed calm peace, and rest, and sweetness in that house, that I love to go there. The influence of that woman is felt all through the village—she preaches to some purpose."

"Because she knows what she believes," I said.

"It was the same with your father, Harry. Now my boy," he added, turning to me with the old controversial twinkle in his eye, and speaking in a confidential tone—"The fact is, I never agreed with your father doctrinally, there were weak spots in his system all along, and I always told him so. I could trip him and floor him in an argument, and have done it a hundred times," he said, giving a touch to his horse.

I thought to myself that it was well enough that my father wasn't there to hear that statement, otherwise there would have been an immediate tilting match, and the whole ground to be gone over.

"Yes," he said; "it wasn't mainly in your father's theology that his strength lay—it was the Christ in him—the great warm heart—his crystal purity and simplicity—his unworldly earnestness and honesty. He was a godly man and a manly man both, and he sowed seed all over this State that came up good men and good women. Yes, there are hundreds and hundreds in this State to-day that are good men and good women, mainly because he lived. That's what I call success in life, Harry, when a man carries himself so that he turns into seed-corn and makes a harvest of good people. You may upset a man's reasonings, and his theology may go to the dogs, but a brave Christian life you can't upset, it will tell. Now, Harry, are you going to try for that?"

"God helping me, I will," I said.

"You see, as to the theologies," he added, "I think it has been well said that the Christian world just now is like a ship that's tacking, it has lost the wind on one side and not quite got it on the other. The growth of society, the development of new physical laws, and this modern scientific rush of the human mind is going to modify the man-made theologies and creeds; some of them will drop away just as the blossom does when the fruit forms, but Christ's religion will be just the same as ever—his words will not pass away."

"But then," I said "there are a whole labyrinth of perplexing questions about this Bible. What is inspiration? What ground does it cover? How much of all these books is inspired? What is their history? How came we by them? What evidence have we that the record gives us Christ's words uncorrupted?"

"If you had been brought up in Justin Martyr's time or the days of the primitive Christians you would have been put to study all these things first and foremost in your education, but we modern Christians, teach young men everything else except what we profess to think the most important; and so you come out of college ignorant, just where knowledge is most vital."

"Well, that is past praying for now," said I.

"Yes; but even now there is a way out—just as going through a bog you plant your foot hard on what land there is, and then take your bearings—so you must do here. The way to get rid of doubts in religion, is to go to work with all our might and practice what we don't doubt, and that you can do whatever your calling or profession."

"I shall certainly try," said I.

"For example," said my uncle, "There's the Sermon on the Mount. Nobody has any doubt about that, there it lies—plain enough, and enough of it—not a bit of what's called theology in it. Not a word of information to settle the mooted questions men wrangle over, but with a direct answer to just the questions any thoughtful man must want to have answered when he looks at life. Is there a Father in the heavens? Will he help us if we ask? May the troubles of life be our discipline? Is there a better life beyond? And how are we to get that? There is Christ's philosophy of life in that sermon, and Christ's mode of dealing with actual existing society; and he who undertakes in good faith to square his heart and life by it will have his hands full. The world has been traveling eighteen hundred years and not come fully into the light of its meaning. There has never been a Christian state or a Christian nation, according to that. That document is in modern society just like a lump of soda in a tumbler of vinegar, it keeps up a constant commotion, and will do so till every particle of life is adjusted on its principles. The man who works out Christ's teachings into a palpable life-form, preaches Christianity, no matter what his trade or calling. He may be a coal heaver or he may be a merchant, or a lawyer, or an editor—he preaches all the same. Men always know it when they meet a bit of Christ's sermons walking out bodily in good deeds; they're not like worldly wisdom, and have a smack of something a good deal higher than common sense, but when people see it they say, "Yes—that's the true thing." Now one of our Presidents, General Harrison, found out on a certain day that through a flaw in the title deeds he was owner to half the city of Cincinnati. What does he do? Why, simply he says to himself, 'These people have paid their money in good faith, and I'll do by them as I'd be done by,' and he goes to a lawyer and has fresh deeds drawn out for the whole of 'em, and lived and died a poor, honest man. That action was a preaching of Christ's doctrine as I take it, and if you'll do as much whenever you get a chance, its no matter what calling you take for a pulpit. So now tell me what are you thinking of setting yourself about?"

"I intend to devote myself to literature," said I. "I always had a facility for writing, while I never felt the call or impulse toward public speaking; and I think the field of current literature opens a wide scope. I have had already some success in having articles accepted and well spoken of, and have now some promising offers. I have an opportunity to travel in Europe as correspondent of two papers, and I shall study to improve myself. In time I may become an editor, and then perhaps at last proprietor of a paper. So runs my scheme of life, and I hope I shall be true to myself and my religion in it. I shall certainly try to. Current literature—the literature of newspapers and magazines, is certainly a power."

"A very great power, Harry," said my uncle; "and getting to be in our day a tremendous power, a power far outgoing that of the pulpit, and that of books. This constant daily self-asserting literature of newspapers and periodicals is acting on us tremendously for good or for ill. It has access to us at all hours and gets itself heard as a preacher cannot, and gets itself read as scarcely any book does. It ought to be entered into as solemnly as the pulpit, for it is using a great power. Yet just now it is power without responsibility. It is in the hands of men who come under no pledge, pass no examination, give no vouchers, though they hold a power more than that of all other professions or books united. One cannot be a doctor, or a lawyer, or a minister, unless some body of his fellows looks into his fitness to serve society in these ways; but one may be turned loose to talk in every family twice a day, on every subject, sacred and profane, and say anything he chooses without even the safeguard of a personal responsibility. He shall speak from behind a screen and not be known. Now you know old Dante says that the souls in the other world were divided into three classes, those who were for God and those who were for the Devil, and those who were for neither, but for themselves. It seems to me that there's a vast many of these latter at work in our press—smart literary adventurers, who don't care a copper what they write up or what they write down, wholly indifferent which side of a question they sustain, so they do it smartly, and ready to sell their wit, their genius and their rhetoric to the highest bidder. Now, Harry, I'd rather see you a poor, threadbare, hard-worked, country minister than the smartest and brightest fellow that ever kept his talents on sale in Vanity Fair."

"Well," said I, "isn't it just here that your principle of living out a Gospel should come? Must there not be writers for the press who believe in the Sermon on the Mount, and who are pledged to get its principles into life-forms as fast as they can?"

"Yea, verily," said my uncle; "but do you mean to keep faithful to that? You have, say, a good knack at English; you can write stories, and poems, and essays; you have a turn for humor; and now comes the Devil to you and says, Show me up the weak points of those reformers; raise a laugh at those temperance men,—those religionists, who, like all us poor human trash, are running religion, and morals, and progress into the ground.' You can succeed; you can carry your world with you. You see, if Virtue came straight down from Heaven with her white wings and glistening robes, and always conducted herself just like an angel, our trial in life wouldn't be so great as it is. But she doesn't. Human virtue is more apt to appear like a bewildered, unprotected female, encumbered with all sorts of irregular bandboxes, dusty, disheveled, out of fashion, and elbowing her way with ungainly haste and ungraceful postures. You know there are stories of powerful fairies who have appeared in this way among men, to try their hearts; and those who protect them when they are feeble and dishonored, they reward when they are glorious. Now, your smart, flippant, second-rate wits never have the grace to honor Truth when she loses her way, and gets bewildered and dusty, and they drive a flourishing business in laughing down the world's poor efforts to grow better."

"I think," said I, "that we Americans have one brilliant example of a man who had keen humor, and used it on the Christian side. The animus of the "Biglow Papers" is the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount translated into the language of Yankee life, and defended with wit and drollery."

"You say truth, Harry, and it was no small thing to do it; for the Anti-Slavery cause then was just in that chaotic state in which every strange bird and beast, every shaggy, irregular, unkempt reformer, male and female, were flocking to it, and there was capital scope for caricature and ridicule; and all the fastidious, and conservative, and soft-handed, and even-stepping people were measureless in their contempt for this shocking rabble. Lowell stood between them and the world, and fought the battle with weapons that the world could understand. There was a Gospel truth in

'John P. Robinson, he,'

and it did what no sermon could; this is the more remarkable because he used for the purpose a harlequin faculty, that has so often been read out of meeting and excommunicated that the world had come to look at it as ex-officio of the Devil. Whittier and Longfellow made valiant music of the solemn sort, but Lowell evangelized wit."

"The fortunate man," said I, "to have used a great opportunity!"

"Harry, the only way to be a real man, is to have a cause you care for more than yourself. That made your father—that made your New England Fathers—that raises literature above some child's play, and makes it manly—but if you would do it you must count on one thing—that the devil will tempt you in the outset with the bread question as he did the Lord.

"Command that these stones be made bread;"

is the first onset—you'll want money, and money will be offered for what you ought not to write. There's the sensational novel, the blood and murder and adultery story, of which modern literature is full—you can produce it—do it perhaps as well as anybody—it will sell. Will you be barkeeper to the public, and when the public call for hot brandy sling give it to them, and help them make brutes of themselves? Will you help to vulgarize and demoralize literature if it will pay?"

"No;" said I, "not if I know myself."

"Then you've got to begin life with some motive higher than to make money, or get a living, and you'll have sometimes to choose between poisonous nonsense that brings pay, and honest truth that nobody wants."

"And I must tell the Devil that there is a higher life than the bread-life?" said I.

"Yes; get above that, to begin with. Remember the story of General Marion, who invited some British officers to dine with him and gave them nothing but roasted potatoes. They went away and said it was in vain to try to conquer a people when their officers would live on such fare rather than give up the cause. Do you know, Harry, what is my greatest hope for this State? It's this: Two or three years ago there was urgent need to carry this State in an election, and there was no end of hard money sent up to buy votes among our poor farmers: but they couldn't be bought. They had learned, 'Man shall not live by bread alone,' to some purpose. The State went all straight for liberty. What I ask of any man who wants to do a life-work is ability to be happy on a little."

"Well," said I, "I have been brought up to that. I have no expensive habits. I neither drink nor smoke. I am used to thinking definitely as to figures, and I am willing to work hard, and begin at the bottom of the ladder, but I mean to keep my conscience and my religion, and lend a helping hand to the good cause wherever I can."

"Well, now, my boy, there're only two aids that you need for this—one is God, and the other is a true, good woman. God you will have, but the woman—she must be found."

I felt the touch on a sore spot, and so answered, purposely misunderstanding his meaning. "Yes, I have not to go far for her—my mother."

"Oh yes, my boy—thank God for her; but Harry, you can't take her away from this place; her roots have spread here; they are matted and twined with the very soil; they run under every homestead and embrace every grave. She is so interwoven with this village that she could not take root elsewhere, beside that, Harry, look at the clock of life—count the years, sixty-five, sixty-six, sixty-seven, and the clock never stops! Her hair is all white now, and that snow will melt by and by, and she will be gone upward. God grant I may go first, Harry."

"And I, too," said I, fervently. "I could not live without her."

"You must find one like her, Harry. It is not good for man to be alone; we all need the motherly, and we must find it in a wife. Do you know what I think the prettiest story of courtship I ever read? Its the account of Jacob's marriage with Rebecca, away back in the simple old times. You remember the ending of it,—'And Isaac brought her into her mother Sarah's tent, and took Rebecca and she became his wife, and Isaac was comforted for his mother's death.' There's the philosophy of it," he added; "it's the mother living again in the wife. The motherly instinct is in the hearts of all true women, and sooner or later the true wife becomes a mother to her husband; she guides him, cares for him, teaches him, and catechises him all in the nicest way possible. Why I'm sure I never should know how to get along a day without Polly to teach me the requirings and forbiddens of the commandments; to lecture me for going out without my muffler, and see that I put on my flannels in the right time; to insist that I shall take something for my cough, and raise a rebellion to my going out when there's a north-easter. So much for the body, and as for the soul-life, I believe it is woman who holds faith in the world—it is woman behind the wall, casting oil on the fire that burns brighter and brighter, while the Devil pours on water; and you'll never get Christianity out of the earth while there's a woman in it. I'd rather have my wife's and your mother's opinion on the meaning of a text of Scripture than all the doctors of divinity, and their faith is an anchor that always holds. Some jackanapes or other I read once, said every woman wanted a master, and was as forlorn without a husband as a masterless dog. Its a great, deal truer that every man wants a mother; men are more forlorn than masterless dogs, a great deal, when no woman cares for them. Look at the homes single women make for themselves; how neat, how cosy, how bright with the oil of gladness, and then look at old bachelor dens! The fact is, women are born comfort-makers, and can get along by themselves a great deal better than we can."

"Well," said I, "I don't think I shall ever marry. Of course if I could find a woman like my mother, it would be another thing. But times are altered—the women of this day are all for flash and ambition, and money. There are no more such as you used to find in the old days."

"Oh, nonsense, Harry; don't come to me with that sort of talk. Bad sort for a young man—very. What I want to see in a young fellow is a resolution to have a good wife and a home of his own as quick as he can find it. The Roman Catholics weren't so far out of the way when they said marriage was a sacrament. It is the greatest sacrament of life, and that old church does yeoman service to humanity in the stand she takes for Christian marriage. I should call that the most prosperous state when all the young men and women were well mated and helping one another according to God's ordinances. You may be sure, Harry, that you can never be a whole man without a wife."

"Well," I said; "there's time enough for that by and by; if I'm predestinated I suppose it'll come along when I have my fortune made."

"Don't wait to be rich, Harry. Find a faithful, heroic friend that will strike hands with you, poor, and begin to build up your nest together,—that's the way your father and mother did, and who enjoyed more? That's the way your Aunt Polly and I did, and a good time we have had of it. There has always been the handful of meal in the barrel and the little oil in the cruse, and if the way we have always lived is poverty, all I have to say is, poverty is a pretty nice thing."

"But," said I, bitterly, "you talk of golden ages. There are no such women now as you found, the women now are mere effeminate dolls of fashion—all they want is ease and show, and luxury, and they care nothing who gives it—one man is as good as another if he is only rich."

"Tut, tut, boy! Don't you read your Bible? Away back in Solomon's time, it's written, 'Who can find a virtuous woman? Her price is above rubies.' Are rubies found without looking for them, and do diamonds lie about the street? Now, just attend to my words—brave men make noble women, and noble women make brave men. Be a true man first, and some day a true woman will be given you. Yes, a woman whose opinion of you will hold you up if all the world were against you, and whose 'Well done!' will be a better thing to come home to, than the senseless shouting of the world who scream for this thing to-day and that to-morrow."

By this time the horse had turned up the lane, and my mother stood smiling in the door. I marked the soft white hair that shone like a moonlight glory round her head, and prayed inwardly that the heavens would spare her yet a little longer.

CHAPTER X

COUSIN CAROLINE.

"You must go and see your cousin Caroline," said my mother, the first evening after I got home; "you've no idea how pretty she's grown."

"She's what I call a pattern girl," said my uncle Jacob, "a girl that can make the most of life."

"She is a model housekeeper and manager," said Aunt Polly.

Now if Aunt Polly called a girl a model house-keeper, it was the same for her that it would be for a man to receive a doctorate from a college; in fact it would be a good deal more, as Aunt Polly was one who always measured her words, and never said anything pro forma, or without having narrowly examined the premises.

Elderly people who live in happy matrimony are in a gentle way disposed to be match-makers. If they have sense, as my elders did, they do not show this disposition in any very pronounced way. They never advise a young man directly to try his fortune with "So and so," knowing that that would, in nine cases out of ten, be the direct way to defeat their purpose. So my mother's gentle suggestion, and my uncle Jacob's praise, and Aunt Polly's endorsement, were simply in the line of the most natural remarks.

Cousin Caroline was the daughter of Uncle Jacob's brother, the only daughter in the family. Her father was one of those men most useful and necessary in society, composed of virtues and properties wholly masculine. He was strong, energetic, shrewd, acridly conscientious, and with an intensity of self-will and love of domination. This rugged rock, all granite, had won a tender woman to nestle and flower in some crevice of his heart and she had clothed him with a garland of sons and one flower of a daughter. Within a year or two her death had left this daughter the mistress of her father's family. I remembered Caroline of old, as my school companion; the leading scholar, in every study, always good natured, steady, and clear-headed, ready to help me when I faltered in a translation, or the solution of an algebraic problem. In those days I never thought of her as pretty. There were the outlines and rudiments, which might bloom into beauty, but thin, pale, colorless, and deficient in roundness and grace.

I had seen very little of Caroline through my college life; we had exchanged occasionally a cousinly letter, but in my last vacation she was away upon a visit. I was not, therefore, prepared for the vision which bloomed out upon me from the singer's seat, when I looked up on Sunday and saw her, standing in a shaft of sunlight that lit up her whole form with a kind of glory. I rubbed my eyes with astonishment, as I saw there a very beautiful woman, and beautiful in quite an uncommon style, one which promised a more lasting continuance of personal attraction than is usual with our New England girls. I own, that a head and bust of the Venus de Milo type; a figure at once graceful, yet ample in its proportions; a rich, glowing bloom, speaking of health and vigor,—gave a new radiance to eyes that I had always admired, in days when I never had thought of even raising the question of Caroline's beauty. These charms were set off, too, by a native talent for dress,—that sort of instinctive gift that some women have of arranging their toilet so as exactly to suit their own peculiar style. There was nothing fussy, or furbelowed, or gaudy, as one often sees in the dress of a country beauty, but a grand and severe simplicity, which in her case was the very perfection of art.

My Uncle Ebenezer Simmons lived at a distance of nearly two miles from our house, but that evening, after tea, I announced to my mother that I was going to take a walk over to see cousin Caroline. I perceived that the movement was extremely popular and satisfactory in the eyes of all the domestic circle.

Whose thoughts do not travel in this direction, I wonder, in a small country neighborhood? Here comes Harry Henderson home from college, with his laurels on his brow, and here is the handsomest girl in the neighborhood, a pattern of all the virtues. What is there to be done, except that they should straightway fall in love with each other, and taking hold of hands walk up the Hill Difficulty together? I presume that no good gossip in our native village saw any other arrangement of our destiny as possible or probable.

I may just as well tell my readers first as last, that we did not fall in love with each other, though we were the very best friends possible, and I spent nearly half my time at my uncle's house, besetting her at all hours, and having the best possible time in her society; but our relations were as frankly and clearly those of brother and sister as if we had been children of one mother.

For a beautiful woman, Caroline had the least of what one may call legitimate coquetry, of any person I ever saw. There are some women, and women of a high class too, who seem to take a natural and innocent pleasure in the power which their sex enables them to exercise over men, and who instinctively do a thousand things to captivate and charm one of the opposite sex, even when they would greatly regret winning his whole heart. If well principled and instructed they try to keep themselves under control, but they still do a thousand ensnaring things, for no other reason, that I can see, than that it is their nature, and they cannot help it. If they have less principle this faculty becomes then available power, by which they can take possession of all that a man has, and use it to carry their own plans and purposes.

Of this power, whatever it may be, Caroline had nothing; nay, more, she despised it, and received the admiration and attentions which her beauty drew from the opposite sex, with a coldness, in some instances amounting to incivility.

With me she had been from the first so frankly, cheerfully and undisguisedly affectionate and kind, and with such a straightforward air of comradeship and a literal ignoring of everything sentimental, that the very ground of anything like love-making did not seem to exist between us. The last evening before I was to leave for my voyage to Europe, I spent with her, and she gave me a curiously-wrought traveling-case, in which there was a pocket for any imaginable thing that a bachelor might be supposed to want on his travels.

"I wish I could go with you," she said to me, with an energy quite out of her usual line.

"I am sure I wish you could," said I; and what with the natural softness of heart that a young man feels, when he is plunging off from the safe ground of home into the world and partly from the unwonted glow of feeling that came over Caroline's face, as she spoke, I felt quite a rush of emotion, and said, as I kissed her hand, "Why didn't we think of this before, Caroline?"

"Oh, nonsense, Henry; don't you be sentimental, of all things," she replied briskly, withdrawing her hand. "Of course, I didn't mean anything more than that I wished I was a young fellow like you, free to take my staff and bundle, and make my way in the great world. Why couldn't I be?"

"You," said I, "Caroline, you, with your beauty and your talents,—I think you might be satisfied with a woman's lot in life."

"A woman's lot! and what is that, pray? to sit with folded hands and see life drifting by—to be a mere nullity, and endure to have my good friends pat me on the back, and think I am a bright and shining light of contentment in woman's sphere?"

"But," said I, "you know, Caroline, that there is always a possibility in woman's destiny, especially a woman so beautiful as you are."

"You mean marriage. Well, perhaps if I could do as you can, go all over the world, examine and search for the one I want, and find him, the case would be somewhat equal; but my chances are only among those who propose to me. Now, I have read in the Arabian Nights of princesses so beautiful that men came in regiments, to seek the honor of their hand; but such things don't occur in our times in New England villages. My list for selection must be confined to such of the eligible men in this neighborhood as are in want of wives; men who want wives as they do cooking-stoves, and make up their minds that I may suit them. By the by, I have been informed already of one who has had me under consideration, and concluded not to take me. Silas Boardman, I understand, has made up his mind, and informed his sisters of the fact, that I am altogether too dressy in my taste for his limited means, and besides that I am too free and independent; so that door is closed to me, you'll observe. Silas won't have me!"

"The conceited puppy!" said I.

"Well, isn't that the common understanding among men—that all the marriageable girls in their neighborhood are on exhibition for their convenience? If the very first idea of marriage with any one of them were not so intensely disagreeable to me, I would almost be willing to let some of them ask me, just to hear what I could tell them. Now you know, Harry, I put you out of the case, because you are my cousin, and I no more think of you in that way than if you were my brother, but, frankly, I never yet saw the man that I could by any stretch of imagination conceive of my wanting, or being willing to marry; I know no man that it wouldn't be an untold honor to me to be doomed to marry. I would rather scrub floors on my knees for a living."

"But you do see happy marriages."

"Oh, yes, dear souls, of course I do, and am glad of it, and wonder and admire; yes, I see some happy marriages. There's Uncle Jacob and his wife, kind old souls, two dear old pigeons of the sanctuary!—how charmingly they get along! and your father and mother—they seemed one soul; it really was encouraging to see that people could live so."

"But you musn't be too ideal, Caroline; you musn't demand too much of a man."

"Demand? I don't demand anything of any man, I only want to be let alone. I don't want to wait for a husband to make me a position, I want to make one for myself; I don't want to take a husband's money, I want my own. You have individual ideas of life, you want to work them out; so have I: you are expected and encouraged to work them out independently, while I am forbidden. Now, what would you say if somebody told you to sit down quietly in the domestic circle and read to your mother, and keep the wood split and piled, and the hearth swept, and diffuse a sweet perfume of domestic goodness, like the violet amid its leaves, till by and by some woman should come and give you a fortune and position, and develop your affections,—how would you like that? Now the case with me is just here, I am, if you choose to say it, so ideal and peculiar in my views that there is no reasonable prospect that I shall ever marry, but I want a position, a house and home of my own, and a sphere of independent action, and everybody thinks this absurd and nobody helps me. As long as mother was alive, there was some consolation in feeling that I was everything to her. Poor soul! she had a hard life, and I was her greatest pride and comfort, but now she is gone, there is nothing I do for my father that a good, smart housekeeper could not be hired to do; but you see that would cost money, and the money that I thus save is invested without consulting me: it goes to buy more rocky land, when we have already more than we know what to do with. I sacrifice all my tastes, I stunt my growth mentally and intellectually to this daily tread-mill of house and dairy, and yet I have not a cent that I can call my own, I am a servant working for board and clothes, and because I am a daughter I am expected to do it cheerfully; my only escape from this position is to take a similar one in the family of some man to whom, in addition to the superintendence of his household, I shall owe the personal duties of a wife, and that way out you may know I shall never take. So you are sure to find me ten or twenty years hence a fixture in this neighborhood, spoken of familiarly as 'old Miss Caroline Simmons,' a cross-pious old maid, held up as a warning to contumacious young beauties how they neglect their first gracious offer. 'Caroline was a handsome gal in her time,' they'll say, 'but she was too perticklar, and now her day is over and she's left an old maid. She held her head too high and said "No" a little too often; ye see, gals better take their fust chances.'"

"After all, cousin," I said, "though we men are all unworthy sinners, yet sometimes you women do yield to much persuasion, and take some one out of pity."

"I can't do that; in fact I have tried to do it, and can't. This desperate dullness, and restraint, and utter paralysis of progress that lies like a nightmare on one, is a dreadful temptation; when a man offers you a fortune, which will give you ease, leisure, and power to follow all your tastes and a certain independent stand, such as unmarried women cannot take, it is a great temptation."

"But you resisted it!"

"Well, I was sorely tried; there were things I wanted desperately—a splendid house in Boston, pictures, carriages, servants,—oh, I did want them; I wanted the éclat, too, of a rich marriage, but I couldn't; the man was too good a man to be trifled with; if he would only have been a good uncle or grandpa I would have loved him dearly, and been ever so devoted, kept his house beautifully, waited on him like a dutiful daughter, read to him, sung to him, nursed him, been the best friend in the world to him, but his wife I could not be; the very idea of it made the worthy creature perfectly repulsive and hateful to me."

"Did you ever try to tell your father how you feel?"

"Of what earthly use? There are people in this world who don't understand each other's vernacular. Papa and I could no more discuss any question of the inner life together than if he spoke Chickasaw and I spoke French. Papa has a respect for my practical efficiency and business talent, and in a certain range of ideas we get on well together. He thinks I have made a great mistake, and that there is a crack in my head somewhere, but he says nothing; his idea is that I have let slip the only chance of my life, but still, as I am a great convenience at home, he is reconciled. I suppose all my friends mourn in secret places over me, and I should have been applauded and commended on all hands if I had done it; but, after all, wouldn't it be a great deal more honest, more womanly, more like a reasonable creature, for me to do just what you are doing, fit myself to make my own way, and make an independence for myself? Really it isn't honest to take a position where you know you can't give the main thing asked for, and keep out somebody perhaps who can. My friend has made himself happy with a woman who perfectly adores him, and ought to be much obliged to me that I didn't take him at his word; good, silly soul that he was."

"But, after all, the Prince may come—the fated knight—Caroline."

"And deliver the distressed damsel?" she said, laughing. "Well, when he comes I'll show him my 'swan's nest among the reeds.' Soberly, the fact is, cousin," she said, "you men don't know us women. In the first place they say that there are more of us born than there are of you: and that doesn't happen merely to give you a good number to choose from, and enable every widower to find a supernumerary; it is because it was meant that some women should lead a life different from the domestic one. The womanly nature can be of use otherwhere besides in marriage, in our world. To be sure, for the largest class of women there is nothing like marriage, and I suppose the usages of society are made for the majority, and exceptional people mustn't grumble if they don't find things comfortable; but I am persuaded that there is a work and a way for those who cannot marry."

"Well, there's Uncle Jacob has just been preaching to me that no man can be developed fully without a wife," said I.

"Uncle Jacob has matrimony on the brain! it's lucky he isn't a despotic Czar or, I believe, he'd marry all the men and women, wille nille. I grant that the rare, real marriage, that occurs one time in a hundred, is the true ideal state for man and woman, but it doesn't follow that all and everything that brings man and woman together in marriage is blessed, and I take my stand on St. Paul's doctrine that there are both men and women called to some higher state; now, it seems to me that the number of these increases with the advancement of society. Marriage requires so close an intimacy that there must be perfect agreement and sympathy; the lower down in the scale of being one is, the fewer distinctive points there are of difference or agreement. It is easier for John and Patrick, and Bridget and Katy, to find comfortable sympathy and agreement than it is for those far up in the scale of life where education has developed a thousand individual tastes and peculiarities. We read in history of the Rape of the Sabines, and how the women thus carried off at hap-hazard took so kindly to their husbands that they wouldn't be taken back again. Such things are only possible in the barbarous stages of society, when characters are very rudimentary and simple. If a similar experiment were made on women of the cultivated classes in our times I fancy some of the men would be killed; I know one would,"—she said with an energetic grasp of her little fist and a flash out of her eyes.

"But the ideal marriage is the thing to be sought," said I.

"For you, who are born with the right to seek, it is the thing to be sought," she said; "for me, who am born to wait till I am sought by exactly the right one, the chances are so infinitesimal that they ought not to be considered; I may have a fortune left me, and die a millionaire; there is no actual impossibility in that thing's happening—it is a thing that has happened to people who expected it as little as I do—but it would be the height of absurdity to base any calculation upon it and yet all the arrangements that are made about me and for me, are made on the presumption that I am to marry. I went to Uncle Jacob and tried to get him to take me through a course of medical study, to fit me for a professional life, and it was impossible to get him to take any serious view of it, or to believe what I said; he seemed really to think I was plotting to upset the Bible and the Constitution, in planning for an independent life."

"After all, Caroline, you must pardon me if I say that it does not seem possible that a woman like you will be allowed—that is you know—you will—well—find somebody—that is, you will be less exacting by and by."

"Exacting! why do you use that word, when I don't exact anything? I am not so very ideal in my tastes, I am only individual; I must have in myself a certain feeling towards this possible individual, and I don't find it. In one case certainly I asked myself why I didn't? The man was all he should be, I didn't object to him in the slightest degree as a man; but looked on respecting the marriage relation, he was simply intolerable. It must be that I have no vocation to marry, and yet I want what any live woman wants; I want something of my own; I want a life-work worth doing; I want a home of my own; I want money that I can use as I please, that I can give and withhold, and dispose of as absolutely mine, and not another's; and the world seems all arranged so as to hinder my getting it. If a man wants to get an education there are colleges with rich foundations, where endowments have been heaped up, and scholarships founded, to enable him to prepare for life at reasonable expense. There are no such for women, and their schools, such as they are, infinitely poorer than those given to men, involve double the expense. If you ask a professional man to teach you privately, he laughs at you, compliments you, and sends you away with the feeling that he considers you a silly, cracked-brain girl, or perhaps an unsuccessful angler in matrimonial waters; he seems to think that there is no use teaching you, because you will throw down all, and run for the first man that beckons to you. That sort of presumption is insufferable to me."

"Oh, well, Carrie, you know those old Doctors, they get a certain jog-trot way of arranging human life; and then men that are happily married are in such bliss, and such women-worshipers that they cannot make up their mind that anybody they care about should not enter their paradise."

"I do not despise their paradise," said Caroline; "I think everybody most happy that can enter it. I am thankful to see that they can. I am delighted and astonished every day at beholding the bliss and satisfaction with which really nice, pretty girls take up with the men they do, and I think it all very delightful; but it's rather hard on me that, since I can't have that, I mustn't have anything else."

"After all, Caroline, is not your dissatisfaction with the laws of nature?"

"Not exactly; I won't quarrel with the will that made me a woman, not in my deepest heart. Neither being a woman do I want to be unwomanly. I would not, if I could, do as Georges Sand did, put on men's clothes and live a man's life. Anything of that sort in a woman is very repulsive and disgusting to me. At the same time, I do think that the customs and laws of society might be modified so as to give to women who do not choose to marry, independent position and means of securing home and fortune. Marriage never ought to be entered on as a means of support. It seems to me that our sex are enough weighted by nature, and that therefore all the laws and institutions of society ought to act in just the contrary direction, and tend to hold us up—to widen our way, to encourage our efforts, because we are the weaker party, and need it most. The world is now arranged for the strong, and I think it ought to be re-arranged for the weak."

I paused, and pondered all that she had been saying.

"My mother—" I began.

"Now, please don't quote your mother to me. I know what she would say. If two angels were sent down from Heaven, the one to govern an empire, and the other to sweep the streets, they would not wish to change with each other; it is perhaps true.

"But then, you see, that is only possible because they are angels. Your mother has got up somewhere into that region, but I am down in the low lands, and must do the best I can on my plane. I can conceive of those moral heights where one thing is just as agreeable as another, but I have not yet reached them. Besides, you know Jacob wrestled with his angel, and was commended for it; and I think we ought to satisfy ourselves by good, strong effort that our lot is of God. If we really cannot help ourselves, we may be resigned to it as His will."

"Caroline," I said, "if you might have exactly what you want, what would it have been?"

"In the first place, then, exactly the same education with my brothers. I hear of colleges now, somewhere far out west, where a brother and sister may go through the same course together; that would have suited me. I am impatient of half-education. I am by nature very thorough and exact. I want to be sure of doing whatever I undertake as well as it can be done. I don't want to be flattered and petted for pretty ignorance. I don't want to be tolerated in any half way, slovenly work of any kind because I am a woman. When I have a thorough general education, I then want to make professional studies. I have a great aptitude for medicine. I have a natural turn for the care of sick, and am now sent for far and near as one of the best advisers and watchers in case of sickness. In that profession I don't doubt I might do great good, be very happy, have a cheerful home of own, and a pleasant life-work; but I don't want to enter it half taught. I want to be able to do as good work as any man's; to be held to the same account, and receive only what I can fairly win."

"But, Caroline, a man's life includes so much drudgery."

"And does not mine? Do you suppose that the care of all the house and dairy, the oversight of all my father's home affairs, is no drudgery? Much of it is done with my own hands, because no other work than mine can content me. But when you and I went to school together, it was just so: you know I worked out my own problems and made my own investigations. Now all that is laid aside; at least, all my efforts are so hap-hazard and painfully incomplete, that it is discouraging to me."

"But would not your father consent?"

"My father is a man wedded to the past, and set against every change in ideas. I have tried to get his consent to let me go and study, and prepare myself to do something worth doing, but he is perfectly immovable. He says I know more now than half the women, and a great deal too much for my good, and that he cannot spare me. At twenty-one he makes no further claim on any of my brothers; their minority comes to an end at a certain period—mine, never."

We were walking in the moonlight up and down under the trees by the house. Caroline suddenly stopped.

"Cousin," she said, "if you succeed; if you get to be what I hope you will—high in the world, a prosperous editor—speak for the dumb, for us whose lives burn themselves out into white ashes in silence and repression."

"I will," I said.

"You will write to me; I shall rejoice to hear of the world through you—and I shall rejoice in your success," she added.

"Caroline," I said, "do you give up entirely wrestling with the angel?"

"No; if I did, I should not keep up. I have hope from year to year that something may happen to bring things to my wishes; that I may obtain a hearing with papa; that his sense of justice may be aroused; that I may get Uncle Jacob to do something besides recite verses and compliment me; that your mother may speak for me."

"You have never told your heart to my mother?"

"No; I am very reticent, and these adoring wives have but one recipe for all our troubles."

"I think, Caroline, that her's is a wide, free nature, that takes views above the ordinary level of things, and that she would understand and might work for you. Tell her what you have been telling me."

"You may, if you please. I will talk with her afterward perhaps she will do something for me."

CHAPTER XI.

WHY DON'T YOU TAKE HER?

The next day I spoke to my uncle Jacob of Caroline's desire to study, and said that some way ought to be provided for taking her out of her present confined limits.

He looked at me with a shrewd, quizzical expression, and said: "Providence generally opens a way out for girls as handsome as she is. Caroline is a little restless just at present, and so is getting some of these modern strong-minded notions into her head. The fact is, that our region is a little too much out of the world; there is nobody around here, probably, that she would think a suitable match for her. Caroline ought to visit, now, and cruise about a little in some of the watering-places next summer, and be seen. There are few girls with a finer air, or more sure to make a sensation. I fancy she would soon find the right sphere under these circumstances."

"But does it not occur to you, uncle, that the very idea of going out into the world, seeking to attract and fall in the way of offers of marriage, is one from which such a spirit as Caroline's must revolt? Is there not something essentially unwomanly in it—something humiliating? I know, myself, that she is too proud, too justly self-respecting, to do it. And why should a superior woman be condemned to smother her whole nature, to bind down all her faculties, and wait for occupation in a sphere which it is unwomanly to seek directly, and unwomanly to accept when offered to her, unless offered by the one of a thousand for whom she can have a certain feeling?"

"To tell the truth," said my uncle, looking at me again, "I always thought in my heart that Caroline was just the proper person for you—just the woman you need—brave, strong, and yet lovely; and I don't see any objection in the way of your taking her."

Elderly people of a benevolent turn often get a matter-of-fact way of arranging the affairs of their juniors that is sufficiently amusing. My uncle spoke with a confidential air of good faith of my taking Caroline as if she had been a lot of land up for sale. Seeing my look of blank embarrassment, he went on:

"You perhaps think the relationship an objection, but I have my own views on that subject. The only objection to the intermarriage of cousins is one that depends entirely on similarity of race peculiarities. Sometimes cousins inheriting each from different races, are physiologically as much of diverse blood as if their parents had not been related, and in that case there isn't the slightest objection to marriage. Now, Caroline, though her father is your mother's brother, inherits evidently the Selwyn blood. She's all her mother, or rather her grandmother, who was a celebrated beauty. Caroline is a Selwyn, every inch, and you are as free to marry her as any woman you can meet."

"You talk as if she were a golden apple, that I had nothing to do but reach forth my hand to pick," said I. "Did it never occur to you that I couldn't take her if I were to try?"

"Well, I don't know," said Uncle Jacob, looking me over in a manner which indicated a complimentary opinion. "I'm not so sure of that. She's not in the way of seeing many men superior to you."

"And suppose that she were that sort of woman who did not wish to marry at all?" said I.

My uncle looked quizzical, and said, "I doubt the existence of that species."

"It appears to me," said I, "that Caroline is by nature so much more fitted for the life of a scholar than that of an ordinary domestic woman, that nothing but a most absorbing and extraordinary amount of personal affection would ever make the routine of domestic life agreeable to her. She is very fastidious and individual in her tastes, too, and the probabilities of her finding the person whom she could love in this manner are very small. Now it appears to me that the taking for granted that all women, without respect to taste or temperament, must have no sphere or opening for their faculties except domestic life, is as great an absurdity in our modern civilization as the stupid custom of half-civilized nations, by which every son, no matter what his character, is obliged to confine himself to the trade of his father. I should have felt it a hardship to be condemned always to be a shoemaker if my father had been one."

"Nay," said my uncle, "the cases are not parallel. The domestic sphere of wife and mother to which woman is called, is divine and god-like; it is sacred, and solemn, and no woman can go higher than that, and anything else to which she devotes herself, falls infinitely below it."

"Well, then," said I, "let me use another simile. My father was a minister, and I reverence and almost adore the ideal of such a minister, and such a ministry as his was. Yet it would be an oppression on me to constrain me to enter into it. I am not adapted to it, or fitted for it. I should make a failure in it, while I might succeed in a lower sphere. Now it seems to me that just as no one should enter the ministry as a means of support or worldly position, but wholly from a divine enthusiasm, so no woman should enter marriage for provision, or station, or support; but simply and only from the most purely personal affection. And my theory of life would be, to have society so arranged that independent woman shall have every facility for developing her mind and perfecting herself that independent man has, and every opportunity in society for acquiring and holding property, for securing influence, and position, and fame, just as man can. If laws are to make any difference between the two sexes, they ought to help, and not to hinder the weaker party. Then, I think, a man might feel that his wife came to him from the purest and highest kind of love—not driven to him as a refuge, not compelled to take him as a dernier resort, not struggling and striving to bring her mind to him, because she must marry somebody,—but choosing him intelligently and freely, because he is the one more to her than all the world beside."

"Well," said my uncle, regretfully, "of course I don't want to be a matchmaker, but I did hope that you and Caroline would be so agreed; and I think now, that if you would try, you might put these notions out of her head, and put yourself in their place."

"And what if I had tried, and become certain that it was of no use?"

"You don't say she has refused you!" said my uncle, with a start.

"No, indeed!" said I. "Caroline is one of those women whose whole manner keeps off entirely all approaches of that kind. You may rely upon it, uncle, that while she loves me as frankly and truly and honestly as ever sister loved a brother, yet I am perfectly convinced that it is mainly because I have kept myself clear of any misunderstanding of her noble frankness, or any presumption founded upon it. Her love to me is honest comradeship, just such as I might have from a college mate, and there is not the least danger of its sliding into anything else. There may be an Endymion to this Diana, but it certainly won't be Harry Henderson."

"H'm!" said my uncle. "Well, I'm afraid then that she never will marry, and you certainly must grant that a woman unmarried remains forever undeveloped and incomplete."

"No more than a man," said I. "A man who never becomes a father is incomplete in one great resemblance to the divine being. Yet there have been men with the element of fatherhood more largely developed in celibacy than most are in marriage. There was Fénelon, for instance, who was married to humanity. Every human being that he met held the place of a child in his heart. No individual experience of fatherhood could make such men as he more fatherly. And in like manner there are women with more natural motherhood than many mothers. Such are to be found in the sisterhoods that gather together lost and orphan children, and are their mothers in God. There are natures who do not need the development of marriage; they know instinctively all it can teach them. But they are found only in the rarest and highest regions."

"Well," said my uncle, "for every kind of existence in creation God has made a mate, and the eagles that live on mountain tops, and fly toward the sun, have still their kindred eagles. Now, I think, for my part, that if Fénelon had married Madame Guyon, he would have had a richer and a happier life of it, and she would have gone off into fewer vagaries, and they would have left the Church some splendid children, who might, perhaps, have been born without total depravity. You see these perfected specimens owe it to humanity to perpetuate their kind."

"Well," said I, "let them do it by spiritual fatherhood and motherhood. St. Paul speaks often of his converts as those begotten of him—the children of his soul; a thousand-fold more of them there were, than there could have been if he had weighted himself with the care of an individual family. Think of the spiritual children of Plato and St. Augustine!"

"This may be all very fine, youngster," said, my uncle, "but very exceptional; yet for all that, I should be sorry to see a fine woman like Caroline withering into an old maid."

"She certainly will," said I, "unless you and mother stretch forth your hands and give her liberty to seek her destiny in the mode in which nature inclines her. You will never get her to go husband-hunting. The mere idea suggested to her of exhibiting her charms in places of resort, in the vague hope of being chosen, would be sufficient to keep her out of society. She has one of those independent natures to which it is just as necessary for happiness that she should make her own way, and just as irksome to depend on others, as it is for most young men. She has a fine philosophic mind, great powers of acquisition, a curiosity for scientific research; and her desire is to fit herself for a physician,—a sphere perfectly womanly, and in which the motherly nature of woman can be most beautifully developed. Now, help her with your knowledge through the introductory stages of study, and use your influence afterward to get her father to give her wider advantages."

"Well, the fact is," said my uncle, "Caroline is a splendid nurse; she has great physical strength and endurance, great courage and presence of mind, and a wonderful power of consoling and comforting sick people. She has borrowed some of my books, and seemed to show a considerable acuteness in her remarks on them. But somehow the idea that a lovely young woman should devote herself to medicine, has seemed to me a great waste, and I never seriously encouraged it."

"Depend upon it," said I, "Caroline is a woman who will become more charming in proportion as she moves more thoroughly and perfectly in the sphere for which nature has adapted her. Keep a great, stately, white swan shut up in a barn-yard and she has an ungainly gait, becomes morose, and loses her beautiful feathers; but set her free to glide off into her native element and all is harmonious and beautiful. A superior woman, gifted with personal attractions, who is forgetting herself in the enthusiasm of some high calling or profession, never becomes an old maid; she does not wither; she advances as life goes on, and often keeps her charms longer than the matron exhausted by family cares and motherhood. A charming woman, fully and happily settled and employed in a life-work which is all in all to her, is far more likely to be attractive and to be sought than one who enters the ranks of the fashionable waiters on Providence."

"Well, well," said my uncle, "I'll think of it. The fact is, we fellows of three-score ought to be knocked on the head peaceably. We have the bother of being progressive all through our youth, and by the time we get something settled, up comes your next generation and begins kicking it all over. It's too bad to demolish the house we spend our youth in building just when we want rest, and don't want the fatigue of building over."

"For that matter," said I, "the modern ideas of woman's sphere were all thought out and expressed in the Greek mythology ages and ages ago. The Greeks didn't fit every woman to one type. There was their pretty, plump little Aphrodite, and their godlike Venus de Milo; there was Diana—the woman of cold, bright, pure physical organization,—independent, free, vigorous. There was Minerva, the impersonation of the purely intellectual woman, who neither wished nor sought marriage. There was Juno, the house-keeper and domestic queen, and Ceres, the bread-giver and provider. In short, the Greeks conceived a variety of spheres of womanhood; but we, in modern times, have reduced all to one—the vine that twines, and the violet hid in the leaves; as if the Victoria Regia hadn't as good a right to grow as the daisy, and as if there were not female oaks and pines as well as male!"

"Well, after all," he said, "the prevalent type of sex through nature, is that of strength for man and dependence for woman."

"Nay," said I; "if you appeal to nature in this matter of sex, there is the female element in grand and powerful forms, as well as in gentle and dependent ones. The she-lion and tiger are more terrible and untamable than the male. The Greek mythology was a perfect reflection of nature, and clothed woman with majesty and power as well as with grace; how splendid those descriptions of Homer are, where Minerva, clad in celestial armor, leads the forces of the Greeks to battle! What vigor there is in their impersonation of the Diana; the woman strong in herself, scorning physical passion, and terrible to approach in the radiant majesty of her beauty, striking with death the vulgar curiosity that dared to profane her sanctuary! That was the ideal of a woman, self-sufficient, victorious, and capable of a grand, free, proud life of her own, not needing to depend upon man. The Greeks never would have imagined such goddesses if they had not seen such women, and our modern civilization is imperfect if it does not provide a place and sphere for such types of womanhood. It takes all sorts of people to make up a world, and there ought to be provision, toleration, and free course for all sorts."

"Well, youngster," said my uncle, "I think you'll write tolerable leaders for some radical paper, one of these days, but you fellows that want to get into the chariot of the sun and drive it, had better think a little before you set the world on fire. As for your Diana, I thank Heaven she isn't my wife, and I think it would be pretty cold picking with your Minerva."

"Permit me to say, uncle, that in this 'latter day glory' that is coming, men have got to learn to judge women by some other standard than what would make good wives for them, and acknowledge sometimes a femininity existing in and for itself. As there is a possible manhood complete without woman, so there is a possible womanhood complete without man."

"That's not the Christian idea," said my uncle.

"Pardon me," I replied, "but I believe it is exactly what St. Paul meant when he spoke of the state of celibacy, in devotion to the higher spiritual life, as being a higher state for some men and women than marriage."

"You are on dangerous ground there," said my uncle, "you will run right into monastic absurdity."

"High grounds are always dangerous grounds," said I, "full of pitfalls and precipices, yet the Lord has persisted in making mountains, precipices, pitfalls, and all, and being made they may as well be explored, even at the risk of breaking one's neck. We may as well look every question in the face, and run every inquiry to its ultimate."

"Go it then," said my uncle, "and joy go with you; the chariot of the sun is the place for a prospect! Up with you into it, my boy, that kind of driving is interesting; in fact, when I was young, I should have liked it myself, but if you don't want to kick up as great a bobbery as Phæton did, you'd better mind his father's advice: spare the whip, and use the reins with those fiery horses of the future."

"But, now," said I, "as the final result of all this, will you help Caroline?"

"Yes, I will; soberly and seriously, I will. I'll drive over there and have a little talk with the girl, as soon as you're gone."

"And, uncle," said I, "if you wish to gain influence with her, don't flatter nor compliment; examine her, and appoint her tasks exactly as you would those of a young man in similar circumstances. You will please her best so; she is ready to do work, and make serious studies; she is of a thorough, earnest nature, and will do credit to your teaching."

"What a pity she wasn't born a boy," said my uncle, under his breath.

"Well, let you and me do what we can," said I, "to bring in such a state of things in this world that it shall no longer be said of any woman that it was a pity not to have been born a man."

Subsequently I spoke to my mother on the same subject and gave her an account of my interview with Caroline.

I think that my mother, in her own secret heart, had cherished very much the same hopes for me that had been expressed by Uncle Jacob. Caroline was an uncommon person, the star of the little secluded neighborhood, and my mother had seen enough of her to know that, though principally absorbed in the requirements of a very hard domestic sphere she possessed an uncommon character and great capabilities. Between her and my mother, however, there had been that silence which often exists between two natures, both sensitive and both reticent, who seem to act as non-conductors to each other. Caroline stood a little in awe of the moral and religious force of my mother, and my mother was a little chilled by the keen intellectualism of Caroline.

There are people that cannot understand each other without an interpreter, and it is not unfrequently easier for men and women to speak confidentially to each other than to their own sex. There are certain aspects in which each sex is sure of more comprehension than from its own. I served, in this case, as the connecting wire of the galvanic battery to pass the spark of sympathetic comprehension between these two natures.

My mother was one of those women naturally timid, reticent, retiring, encompassed by physical diffidence as with a mantle—so sensitive that, even in an argument with me, the blood would flush into her cheeks—yet, she had withal that deep, brooding, philosophical nature, which revolves all things silently, and with intensest interest, and comes to perfectly independent conclusions in the irresponsible liberty of solitude. How many times has this great noisy world been looked out on, and silently judged by these quiet thoughtful women of the Virgin Mary type, who have never uttered their magnificat till they uttered it beyond the veil! My mother seemed to be a woman in whom religious faith had risen to that amount of certainty and security, that she feared no kind of investigation or discussion, and had no prejudices or passionate preferences. Thus she read the works of the modern physical philosophical school with a tranquil curiosity, and a patient analysis, apparently enjoying every well-turned expression, and receiving with interest, and weighing with deliberation every record of experiments, and every investigation of facts. Her faith in her religion was so perfect that she could afford all these explorations, no more expecting her Christian hopes to fall, through any discoveries of modern science, than she expected the sun to cease shining on account of the contradictory theories of astronomers. They who have lived in communion with God have a mode of evidence unknown to philosophers; a knowledge at first hand. In the same manner, the wideness of Christian charity gave my mother a most Catholic tolerance for natures unlike her own.

"I have always believed in the doctrine of vocations," she said, as she listened to me; "it is one of those points where the Romish church has shown a superior good sense in discovering and making a place for every kind of nature."

"Caroline has been afraid to confide in you, lest you should think her struggles to rise above her destiny, and her dissatisfaction with it, irreligious."

"Far from it," said my mother; "I wholly sympathize with her; people don't realize what it is to starve faculties; they understand physical starvation, but the slow fainting and dying of desires and capabilities for want of anything to feed upon, the withering of powers for want of exercise, is what they do not understand. This is what Caroline is condemned to, by the fixed will of her father, and whether any mortal can prevail with him, I don't know."

"You might, dear mother, I am sure."

"I doubt it; he has a manner that freezes me. I think in his hard, silent, interior way, he loves me, but any argument addressed to him, any direct attempt to change his opinions and purpose only makes him harder."

"Would it not, then, be her right to choose her course without his consent—and against it?" My mother sat with her blue eyes looking thoughtfully before her.

"There is no point," she said slowly, "that requires more careful handling, to discriminate right from wrong, than the limits of self-sacrifice. To a certain extent it is a virtue, and the noblest one, but there are rights of the individual that ought not to be sacrificed; our own happiness has its just place, and I cannot see it to be more right to suffer injustice to one's self than to another, if one can help it. The individual right of self-assertion of child against parent is like the right of revolution in the State, a difficult one to define, yet a real one. It seems to me that one owes it to God, and to the world, to become all that one can be, and to do all that one can do, and that a blind, unreasoning authority that forbids this is to be resisted by a higher law. If I would help another person to escape from an unreasoning tyranny, I ought to do as much for myself."

"And don't you think," said I, "that the silent self-abnegation of some fine natures has done harm by increasing in those around them the habits of tyranny and selfishness?"

"Undoubtedly," said my mother, "many wives make their husbands bad Christians, and really stand in the way of their salvation, by a weak, fond submission, and a sort of morbid passion for self-sacrifice—really generous and noble men are often tempted to fatal habits of selfishness in this way."

"Then would it not be better for Caroline to summon courage to tell her father exactly how she feels and views his course and hers?"

"He has a habit," said my mother, "of cutting short any communication from his children that doesn't please him by bringing down his hand abruptly and saying, 'No more of that, I don't want to hear it.' With me he accomplishes the same by abruptly leaving the room. The fact is," said my mother, after a pause, "I more than suspect that he set his foot on something really vital to Caroline's life, years ago, when she was quite young."

"You mean an attachment?"

"Yes. I had hoped that it had been outgrown or superseded, probably it may be, but I think she is one of the sort in which such an experience often destroys all chance for any other to come after it."

"Were you told of this?"

"I discovered it by an accident, no matter how. I was not told, and I know very little, yet enough to enable me to admire the vigor with which she has made the most of life, the cheerfulness and thoroughness with which she has accepted hard duties. Well," she added, after a pause, "I will talk with Caroline, and we will see what can be done, and then," she added, "we can carry the matter to a higher One, who understands all, and holds all in his hands."

My mother spoke with a bright assured force of this resort, sacred in every emergency.

This was the last night of my stay at home, the next day I was to start for my ship to go to Europe. I sat up late writing to Caroline, and left the letter in my mother's hands.

CHAPTER XII.

I LAY THE FIRST STONE IN MY FOUNDATION.

My story now opens in New York, whither I am come to seek my fortune as a maker and seller of the invisible fabrics of the brain.

During my year in Europe I had done my best to make myself known at the workshops of different literary periodicals, as a fabricator of these airy wares. I tried all sorts and sizes of articles, from grave to gay, from lively to severe, sowing them broadcast in various papers, without regard to pecuniary profit, and the consequence was that I came back to New York as a writer favorably known, who had made something of a position. To be sure my foot was on the lowest round of the ladder, but it was on the ladder, and I meant to climb.

"To climb—to what?" In the answer a man gives to that question lies the whole character of his life-work. If to climb be merely to gain a name, and a competence, a home, a wife, and children, with the means of keeping them in ease and comfort, the question, though beset with difficulties of practical performance, is comparatively simple. But if in addition to this a man is to build himself up after an ideal standard, as carefully as if he were a temple to stand for eternity; if he is to lend a hand to help that great living temple which God is perfecting in human society, the question becomes more complicated still.

I fear some of my fair readers are by this time impatient to see something of "my wife." Let me tell them for their comfort that at this moment, when I entered New York on a drizzly, lonesome December evening she was there, fair as a star, though I knew it not. The same may be true of you, young man. If you are ever to be married, your wife is probably now in the world; some house holds her, and there are mortal eyes at this hour to whom her lineaments are as familiar as they are unknown to you. So much for the doctrine of predestination.

But at this hour that I speak of, though the lady in question was a living and blessed fact, and though she looked on the same stars, and breathed the same air, and trod daily the same sidewalk with myself, I was not, as I perceive, any the wiser or better for it at this particular period of my existence.

In fact, though she was in a large part the unperceived spring and motive of all that I did, yet at this particular time I was so busy in adjusting the material foundations of my life that the ideas of marrying and giving in marriage were never less immediately in my thoughts. I came into New York a stranger. I knew nobody personally, and I had no time for visiting.

I had been, in the course of my wanderings, in many cities. I had lingered in Paris, Rome, Florence, and Naples, and, with the exception of London, I never found a place so difficult to breathe the breath of any ideality, or any enthusiasm, or exaltation of any description, as New York. London, with its ponderous gloom, its sullen, mammoth, aristocratic shadows, seems to benumb, and chill, and freeze the soul; but New York impressed me like a great hot furnace, where twig, spray, and flower wither in a moment, and the little birds flying over, drop down dead. My first impulse in life there was to cover, and conceal, and hide in the deepest and most remote caverns of my heart anything that was sacred, and delicate, and tender, lest the flame should scorch it. Balzac in his epigrammatic manner has characterized New York as the city where there is "neither faith, hope, nor charity," and, as he never came here, I suppose he must have taken his impressions from the descriptions of unfortunate compatriots, who have landed strangers and been precipitated into the very rush and whirl of its grinding selfishness, and its desperate don't-care manner of doing things. There is abundance of selfishness and hardness in Paris, but it is concealed under a veil of ideality. The city wooes you like a home, it gives you picture-galleries, fountains, gardens, and grottoes, and a good natured lounging population, who have nothing to do but make themselves agreeable.

I must confess that my first emotion in making my way about the streets of New York, before I had associated them with any intimacy or acquaintances, was a vague sort of terror, such as one would feel at being jostled among cannibals, who on a reasonable provocation wouldn't hesitate to skin him and pick his bones. There was such a driving, merciless, fierce "take-care-of-yourself, and devil take the hindmost" air, even to the drays and omnibuses, and hackmen, that I had somewhat the feeling of being in an unregulated menagerie, not knowing at what moment some wild beast might spring upon me. As I became more acquainted in the circles centering around the different publications, I felt an acrid, eager, nipping air, in which it appeared to me that everybody had put on defensive armor in regard to his own innermost and most precious feelings, and like the lobster, armed himself with claws to seize and to tear that which came in his way. The rivalry between great literary organs was so intense, and the competition so vivid, that the offering of any flower of fancy or feeling to any of them, seemed about as absurd as if a man should offer a tea-rose bud to the bawling, shouting hackman that shake their whips and scream at the landing.

Everything in life and death, and time and eternity, whether high as Heaven, or deep as hell, seemed to be looked upon only as subject matter for advertisement, and material for running a paper. Hand out your wares! advertise them and see what they will bring, seemed to be the only law of production, at whose behest the most delicate webs and traceries of fancy, the most solemn and tender mysteries of feeling, the most awful of religious emotions came to have a trademark and market value! In short, New York is the great business mart, the Vanity Fair of the world, where everything is pushed by advertising and competition, not even excepting the great moral enterprise of bringing in the millennium; and in the first blast and blare of its busy, noisy publicity and activity, I felt my inner spirits shrink and tremble with dismay. Even the religion of this modern century bears the deep impress of the trade-mark, which calendars its financial value.

I could not but think what the sweet and retiring Galilean, who in the old days was weary and worn with the rush of crowds in simple old Palestine, must think if he looks down now, on the way in which his religion is advertised and pushed in modern society. Certain it is, if it be the kingdom of God that is coming in our times, it is coming with very great observation, and people have long since forgot the idea that they are not to say "Lo, here!" and "Lo, there!" since that is precisely what a large part of the world are getting their living by doing.

These ideas I must confess bore with great weight on my mind, as I had just parted from my mother, whose last words were that whatever else I did, and whether I gained anything for this life or not, she trusted that I would live an humble, self-denying, Christian life. I must own that for the first few weeks of looking into the interior management of literary life in New York, the idea at times often seemed to me really ludicrous. To be humble, yet to seek success in society where it is the first duty to crow from morning till night, and to praise, and vaunt, and glorify, at the top of one's lungs, one's own party, or paper, or magazine, seemed to me sufficiently amusing. However, in conformity with a solemn promise made to my mother, I lost no time in uniting myself with a Christian body, of my father's own denomination, and presented a letter from the Church in Highland to the brethren of the Bethany Church.

And here I will say that for a young man who wants shelter, and nourishment and shade for the development of his fine moral sensibilities, a breakwater to keep the waves of materialism from dashing over and drowning his higher life, there is nothing better, as yet to be found, than a union with some one of the many bodies of differing names and denominations calling themselves Christian Churches. A Christian Church, according to the very best definition of the name ever yet given, is a congregation of faithful men in which the pure word of God is preached, and the sacraments duly ministered according to Christ's ordinance; and making due allowance for all the ignorance, and prejudice, and mistakes, and even the willful hypocrisy, which, as human nature is, must always exist in such connections, I must say that I think these Churches are the best form of social moral culture yet invented, and not to be dispensed with till something more fully answering the purpose has been tested for as long a time as they.

These are caravans that cross the hot and weary sands of life, and while there may be wrangling and undesirable administration at times within them, yet, after all, the pilgrim that undertakes alone is but a speck in the wide desert, too often blown away, and withering like the leaf before the wind.

The great congregation of the Bethany on Sabbath days, all standing up together and joining in mighty hymn-singing, though all were outwardly unknown to me, seemed to thrill my heart with a sense of solemn companionship, in my earliest and most sacred religious associations. It was a congregation largely made up of young men, who like myself were strangers, away from home and friends, and whose hearts, touched and warmed by the familiar sounds, seemed to send forth magnetic odors like the interlocked pine trees under the warm sunshine of a June day.

I have long felt that he who would work his brain for a living, without premature wear upon the organ, must have Sunday placed as a sacred barrier of entire oblivion, so far as possible, of the course of his week-day cares. And what oblivion can be more complete than to rise on the wings of religious ordinance into the region of those diviner faculties by which man recognizes his heirship to all that is in God?

In like manner I found an oasis in the hot and hurried course of my week-day life, by dropping in to the weekly prayer-meeting. The large, bright, pleasant room seemed so social and home-like, the rows of cheerful, well-dressed, thoughtful people, seemed, even before I knew one of them, fatherly, motherly, brotherly, and sisterly, as they joined with the piano in familiar hymn-singing, while the pastor sat among them as a father in his family, and easy social conversation went on with regard to the various methods and aspects of the practical religious life.

To me, a stranger, and naturally shy and undemonstrative, this socialism was in the highest degree warming and inspiring. I do not mean to set the praise of this Church above that of a hundred others, with which I might have become connected, but I will say that here I met the types of some of those good old-fashioned Christians that Hawthorne celebrates in his "Celestial Railroad," under the name of Messrs. "Stick to the Right," and "Foot it to Heaven," men better known among the poor and afflicted than in fashionable or literary circles, men who, without troubling their heads about much speculation, are footing it to Heaven on the old, time-worn, narrow way, and carrying with them as many as they can induce to go.

Having thus provided against being drawn down and utterly swamped in the bread-and-subsistence struggle that was before me, I sought to gain a position in connection with some paper in New York. I had offers under consideration from several of them. The conductors of "The Moral Spouting Horn" had conversed with me touching their projects, and I had also been furnishing letters for the "Great Democracy," and one of the proprietors had invited me to a private dinner, I suppose for the purpose of looking me over and trying my paces before he concluded to purchase me.

Mr. Goldstick was a florid, middle-aged man, with a slightly bald head, an easy portliness of manner, and that air of comfortable patronage which men who are up in the world sometimes carry towards young aspirants. It was his policy and his way to put himself at once on a footing of equality with them, easy, jolly, and free; justly thinking that thereby he gained a more unguarded insight into the inner citadel of their nature, and could see in the easy play of their faculties just about how much they could be made to answer his purposes. I had a chatty, merry dinner of it, and found all my native shyness melting away under his charming affability. In fact, during the latter part of the time, I almost felt that I could have told him anything that I could have told my own mother. What did we not talk about that is of interest in these stirring times? Philosophy, history, science, religion, life, death, and immortality—all received the most graceful off-hand treatment, and were discussed with a singular unanimity of sentiment—that unanimity which always takes place when the partner in a discussion has the controlling purpose to be of the same mind as yourself. When, under the warm and sunny air of this genial nature, I had fully expanded, and confidence was in full blossom, came the immediate business conversation in relation to the paper.

"I am rejoiced," said Mr. Goldstick, "in these days of skepticism to come across a young man with real religious convictions. I am not, I regret to say, a religious professor myself, but I appreciate it, Mr. Henderson, as the element most wanting in our modern life."

Here Mr. Goldstick sighed and rolled up his eyes, and took a glass of wine.

I felt encouraged in this sympathetic atmosphere to unfold to him my somewhat idealized views of what might be accomplished by the daily press, by editors as truly under moral vows and consecrations, as the clergymen who ministered at the altar.

He caught the idea from me with enthusiasm, and went on to expand it with a vigor and richness of imagery, and to illustrate it with a profusion of incidents, which left me far behind him, gazing after him with reverential admiration.

"Mr. Henderson," said he, "The Great Democracy is not primarily a money-making enterprise—it is a great moral engine; it is for the great American people, and it contemplates results which look to the complete regeneration of society."

I ventured here to remark that the same object had been stated to me by the Moral Spouting Horn.

His countenance assumed at once an expression of intense disgust.

"Is it possible," he said, "that the charlatan has been trying to get hold of you? My dear fellow," he added, drawing near to me with a confidential air, "of course I would be the last man to infringe on the courtesies due to my brethren of the press, and you must be aware that our present conversation is to be considered strictly confidential."

I assured him with fervor that I should consider it so.

"Well, then," he said, "between ourselves, I may say that The Moral Spouting Horn is a humbug. On mature reflection," he added, "I don't know but duty requires me to go farther, and say, in the strictest confidence, you understand, that I consider The Moral Spouting Horn a swindle."

Here it occurred to me that the same communication had been made in equal confidence, by the proprietor of The Moral Spouting Horn in relation to The Great Democracy. But, much as I was warmed into confidence by the genial atmosphere of my friend, I had still enough prudence to forbear making this statement.

"Now," said he, "my young friend, in devoting yourself to the service of The Great Democracy you may consider yourself as serving the cause of God and mankind in ways that no clergyman has an equal chance of doing. Beside the press, sir, the pulpit is effete. It is, so to speak," he added, with a sweep of the right hand, "nowhere. Of course the responsibilities of conducting such an organ are tremendous, tremendous," he added, reflectively, as I looked at him with awe; "and that is why I require in my writers, above all things, the clearest and firmest moral convictions. Sir, it is a critical period in our history; there is an amount of corruption in this nation that threatens its dissolution; the Church and the Pulpit have proved entirely inadequate to stem it. It rests with the Press."

There was a solemn pause, in which nothing was heard but the clink of the decanter on the glass, as he poured out another glass of wine.

"It is a great responsibility," I remarked, with a sigh.

"Enormous!" he added, with almost a groan, eyeing me sternly. "Consider," he went on, "the evils of the tremendously corrupted literature which is now being poured upon the community. Sir, we are fast drifting to destruction, it is a solemn fact. The public mind must be aroused and strengthened to resist; they must be taught to discriminate; there must be a just standard of moral criticism no less than of intellectual, and that must be attended to in our paper."

I was delighted to find his views in such accordance with my own, and assured him I should be only too happy to do what I could to forward them.

"We have been charmed and delighted," he said, "with your contributions hitherto; they have a high moral tone and have been deservedly popular, and it is our desire to secure you as a stated contributor in a semi-editorial capacity, looking towards future developments. We wish that it were in our power to pay a more liberal sum than we can offer, but you must be aware, Mr. Henderson, that great moral enterprises must always depend, in a certain degree, on the element of self-sacrifice in its promoters."

I reflected, at this moment, on my father's life, and assented with enthusiasm—remarking that "if I could only get enough to furnish me with the necessaries of life I should be delighted to go into the glorious work with him, and give to it the whole enthusiasm of my soul."

"You have the right spirit, young man," he said. "It is delightful to witness this freshness of moral feeling." And thus, before our interview was closed, I had signed a contract of service to Mr. Goldstick, at very moderate wages, but my heart was filled with exulting joy at the idea of the possibilities of the situation.

I was young, and ardent; I did not, at this moment, want to make money so much as to make myself felt in the great world. It was the very spirit of Phæton; I wanted to have a hand on the reins, and a touch of the whip, and guide the fiery horses of Progress.

I had written stories, and sung songs, but I was not quite content with those; I wanted the anonymous pulpit of the Editor to speak in, the opportunity of being the daily invisible companion and counselor of thousands about their daily paths. The offer of Mr. Goldstick, as I understood it, looked that way, and I resolved to deserve so well of him by unlimited devotion to the interests of the paper, that he should open my way before me.

CHAPTER XIII.

BACHELOR COMRADES.

I soon became well acquainted with my collaborators on the paper. It was a pleasant surprise to be greeted in the foreground by the familiar face of Jim Fellows, my old college class-mate.

Jim was an agreeable creature, born with a decided genius for gossip. He had in perfection the faculty which phrenologists call individuality. He was statistical in the very marrow of his bones, apparently imbibing all the external facts of every person and everything around him, by a kind of rapid instinct. In college, Jim always knew all about every student; he knew all about everybody in the little town where the college was situated, their name, history, character, business, their front door and their back door affairs. No birth, marriage, or death ever took Jim by surprise; he always knew all about it long ago.

Now, as a newspaper is a gossip market on a large scale, this species of talent often goes farther in our modern literary life than the deepest reflection or the highest culture.

Jim was the best-natured fellow breathing; it was impossible to ruffle or disturb the easy, rattling, chattering flow of his animal spirits. He was like a Frenchman in his power of bright, airy adaptation to circumstances, and determination and ability to make the most of them.

"How lucky!" he said, the morning I first shook hands with him at the office of the Great Democracy; "you are just on the minute; the very lodging you want has been vacated this morning by old Styles; sunny room—south windows—close by here—water, gas, and so on, all correct; and, best of all, me for your opposite neighbor."

I went round with him, looked, approved, and was settled at once, Jim helping me with all the good-natured handiness and activity of old college days. We had a rattling, gay morning, plunging round into auction-rooms, bargaining for second-hand furniture, and with so much zeal did we drive our enterprise, seconded by the co-labors of a whom Jim patronized, that by night I found myself actually settled in a home of my own, making tea in Jim's patent bachelor tea-kettle, and talking over his and my affairs with the freedom of old cronies. Jim made no scruple in inquiring in the most direct manner as to the terms of my agreement with Mr. Goldstick, and opened the subject succinctly, as follows:

"Now, my son, you must let your old grandfather advise you a little about your temporalities. In the first place; what's Old Soapy going to give you?"

"If you mean Mr. Goldstick," said I——

"Yes," said he, "call him 'Soapy' for short. Did he come down handsomely on the terms?"

"His offers were not as large as I should have liked; but then, as he said, this paper is not a money-making affair, but a moral enterprise, and I am willing to work for less."

"Moral grandmother!" said Jim, in a tone of unlimited disgust. "He be—choked, as it were. Why, Harry Henderson, are your eye-teeth in such a retrograde state as that? Why, this paper is a fortune to that man; he lives in a palace, owns a picture gallery, and rolls about in his own carriage."

"I understood him," said I, "that the paper was not immediately profitable in a pecuniary point of view."

"Soapy calls everything unprofitable that does not yield him fifty per cent. on the money invested. Talk of moral enterprise! What did he engage you for?"

I stated the terms.

"For how long?"

"For one year."

"Well, the best you can do is to work it out now. Never make another bargain without asking your grandfather. Why, he pays me just double; and you know, Harry, I am nothing at all of a writer compared to you. But then, to be sure, I fill a place you've really no talent for."

"What is that?"

"General professor of humbug," said Jim. "No sort of business gets on in this world without that, and I'm a real genius in that line. I made Old Soapy come down, by threatening to 'rat,' and go to the Spouting Horn, and they couldn't afford to let me do that. You see, I've been up their back stairs, and know all their little family secrets. The Spouting Horn would give their eye-teeth for me. It's too funny," he said, throwing himself back and laughing.

"Are these papers rivals?" said I.

"Well, I should 'rayther' think they were," said he, eyeing me with an air of superiority amounting almost to contempt. "Why, man, the thing that I'm particularly valuable for is, that I always know just what will plague the Spouting Horn folks the most. I know precisely where to stick a pin or a needle into them; and one great object of our paper is to show that the Spouting Horn is always in the wrong. No matter what topic is uppermost, I attend to that, and get off something on them. For you see, they are popular, and make money like thunder, and, of course, that isn't to be allowed. Now," he added, pointing with his thumb upward, "overhead, there is really our best fellow—Bolton. Bolton is said to be the best writer of English in our day; he's an A No. 1, and no mistake; tremendously educated, and all that, and he knows exactly to a shaving what's what everywhere; he's a gentleman, too; we call him the Dominie. Well, Bolton writes the great leaders, and fires off on all the awful and solemn topics, and lays off the politics of Europe and the world generally. When there's a row over there in Europe, Bolton is magnificent on editorials. You see, he has the run of all the rows they have had there, and every bobbery that has been kicked up since the Christian era. He'll tell you what the French did in 1700 this, and the Germans in 1800 that, and of course he prophesies splendidly on what's to turn up next."

"I suppose they give him large pay," said I.

"Well, you see, Bolton's a quiet fellow and a gentleman—one that hates to jaw—and is modest, and so they keep him along steady on about half what I would get out of them if I were in his skin. Bolton is perfectly satisfied. If I were he, I shouldn't be, you see. I say, Harry, I know you'd like him. Let me bring him down and introduce him," and before I could either consent or refuse, Jim rattled up stairs, and I heard him in an earnest, persuasive treaty, and soon he came down with his captive.

I saw a man of thirty-three or thereabouts, tall, well formed, with bright, dark eyes, strongly-marked features, a finely-turned head, and closely-cropped black hair. He had what I should call presence—something that impressed me, as he entered the room, with the idea of a superior kind of individuality, though he was simple in his manners, with a slight air of shyness and constraint. The blood flushed in his cheeks as he was introduced to me, and there was a tremulous motion about his finely-cut lips, betokening suppressed sensitiveness. The first sound of his voice, as he spoke, struck on my ear agreeably, like the tones of a fine instrument, and, reticent and retiring as he seemed, I felt myself singularly attracted toward him.

What impressed me most, as he joined in the conversation with my rattling, free and easy, good-natured neighbor, was an air of patient, amused tolerance. He struck me as a man who had made up his mind to expect nothing and ask nothing of life, and who was sitting it out patiently, as one sits out a dull play at the theater. He was disappointed with nobody, and angry with nobody, while he seemed to have no confidence in anybody. With all this apparent reserve, he was simply and frankly cordial to me, as a new-comer and a fellow-worker on the same paper.

"Mr. Henderson," he said, "I shall be glad to extend to you the hospitalities of my den, such as they are. If I can at any time render you any assistance, don't hesitate to use me. Perhaps you would like to walk up and look at my books? I shall be only too happy to put them at your disposal."

We went up into a little attic room whose walls were literally lined with books on all sides, only allowing space for the two southerly windows which overlooked the city.

"I like to be high in the world, you see," he said, with a smile.

The room was not a large one, and the center was occupied by a large table, covered with books and papers. A cheerful coal-fire was burning in the little grate, a large leather arm-chair stood before it, and, with one or two other chairs, completed the furniture of the apartment. A small, lighted closet, whose door stood open on the room, displayed a pallet bed of monastic simplicity.

There were two occupants of the apartment who seemed established there by right of possession. A large Maltese cat, with great, golden eyes, like two full moons, sat gravely looking into the fire, in one corner, and a very plebeian, scrubby mongrel, who appeared to have known the hard side of life in former days, was dozing in the other.

Apparently, these genii loci were so strong in their sense of possession that our entrance gave them no disturbance. The dog unclosed his eyes with a sleepy wink as we came in, and then shut them again, dreamily, as satisfied that all was right.

Bolton invited us to sit down, and did the honors of his room with a quiet elegance, as if it had been a palace instead of an attic. As soon as we were seated, the cat sprang familiarly on the table and sat down cosily by Bolton, rubbing her head against his coat-sleeve.

"Let me introduce you to my wife," said Bolton, stroking her head. "Eh, Jenny, what now?" he added, as she seized his hands playfully in her teeth and claws. "You see, she has the connubial weapons," he said, "and insists on being treated with attention; but she's capital company. I read all my articles to her, and she never makes an unjust criticism."

Puss soon stepped from her perch on the table and ensconced herself in his lap, while I went round examining his books.

The library showed varied and curious tastes. The books were almost all rare.

"I have always made a rule," he said, "never to buy a book that I could borrow."

I was amused, in the course of the conversation, at the relations which apparently existed between him and Jim Fellows, which appeared to me to be very like what might be supposed to exist between a philosopher and a lively pet squirrel—it was the perfection of quiet, amused tolerance.

Jim seemed to be not in the slightest degree under constraint in his presence, and rattled on with a free and easy slang familiarity, precisely as he had done with me.

"What do you think Old Soapy has engaged Hal for?" he said. "Why, he only offers him—" Here followed the statement of terms.

I was annoyed at this matter-of-fact way of handling my private affairs, but on meeting the eyes of my new friend I discerned a glance of quiet humor which re-assured me. He seemed to regard Jim only as another form of the inevitable.

"Don't you think it is a confounded take-in?" said Jim.

"Of course," said Mr. Bolton, with a smile, "but he will survive it. The place is only one of the stepping-stones. Meanwhile," he said, "I think Mr. Henderson can find other markets for his literary wares, and more profitable ones. I think," he added, while the blood again rose in his cheeks, "that I have some influence in certain literary quarters, and I shall be happy to do all that I can to secure to him that which he ought to receive for such careful work as this. Your labor on the paper will not by any means take up your whole power or time."

"Well," said Jim, "the fact is the same all the world over—the people that grow a thing are those that get the least for it. It isn't your farmers, that work early and late, that get rich by what they raise out of the earth, it's the middlemen and the hucksters. And just so it is in literature; and the better a fellow writes, and the more work he puts into it, the less he gets paid for it. Why, now, look at me," he said, perching himself astride the arm of a chair, "I'm a genuine literary humbug, but I'll bet you I'll make more money than either of you, because, you see, I've no modesty and no conscience. Confound it all, those are luxuries that a poor fellow can't afford to keep. I'm a sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal, but I'm just the sort of fellow the world wants, and, hang it, they shall pay me for being that sort of fellow. I mean to make it shell out, and you see if I don't. I'll bet you, now, that I'd write a book that you wouldn't, either of you, be hired to write, and sell one hundred thousand copies of it, and put the money in my pocket, marry the handsomest, richest, and best educated girl in New York, while you are trudging on, doing good, careful work, as you call it."

"Remember us in your will," said I.

"Oh, yes, I will," he said. "I'll found an asylum for decayed authors of merit—a sort of literary 'Hotel des Invalides.'"

We had a hearty laugh over this idea, and, on the whole, our evening passed off very merrily. When I shook hands with Bolton for the night, it was with a silent conviction of an interior affinity between us.

It is a charming thing in one's rambles to come across a tree, or a flower, or a fine bit of landscape that one can think of afterward, and feel richer for their its in the world. But it is more when one is in a strange place, to come across a man that you feel thoroughly persuaded is, somehow or other, morally and intellectually worth exploring. Our lives tend to become so hopelessly commonplace, and the human beings we meet are generally so much one just like another, that the possibility of a new and peculiar style of character in an acquaintance is a most enlivening one.

There was something about Bolton both stimulating and winning, and I lay down less a stranger that night than I had been since I came to New York.

CHAPTER XIV.

HAPS AND MISHAPS.

I entered upon my new duties with enthusiasm, and produced some editorials, for which I was complimented by Mr. Goldstick.

"That's the kind of thing wanted!" he said; "a firm, moral tone, and steady religious convictions; that pleases the old standards."

Emboldened by this I proceeded to attack a specific abuse in New York administration, which had struck me as needing to be at once righted. If ever a moral trumpet ought to have its voice, it was on this subject. I read my article to Bolton; in fact I had gradually fallen into the habit of referring myself to his judgment.

"It is all perfectly true," he remarked, when I had finished, while he leaned back in his chair and stroked his cat, "but they never will put that into the paper, in the world."

"Why!" said I, "if ever there was an abuse that required exposing, it is this."

"Precisely!" he replied.

"And what is the use," I went on, "of general moral preaching that is never applied to any particular case?"

"The use," he replied calmly, "is that that kind of preaching pleases everybody, and increases subscribers, while the other kind makes enemies, and decreases them."

"And you really think that they won't put this article in?" said I.

"I'm certain they won't," he replied. "The fact is this paper is bought up on the other side. Messrs. Goldstick and Co. have intimate connection with Messrs. Bunkam and Chaffem, who are part and parcel of this very affair."

I opened my mouth with astonishment. "Then Goldstick is a hypocrite," I said.

"Not consciously," he answered, calmly.

"Why!" said I, "you would have thought by the way he talked to me that he had nothing so much at heart as the moral progress of society, and was ready to sacrifice everything to it."

"Well," said Bolton, quietly, "did you never see a woman who thought she was handsome, when she was not? Did you never see a man who thought he was witty, when he was only scurrilous and impudent? Did you never see people who flattered themselves they were frank, because they were obtuse and impertinent? And cannot you imagine that a man may think himself a philanthropist, when he is only a worshiper of the golden calf? That same calf," he continued, stroking his cat till she purred aloud, "has the largest Church of any on earth."

"Well," said I, "at any rate I'll hand it in."

"You can do so," he replied, "and that will be the last you will hear of it. You see, I've been this way before you, and I have learned to save myself time and trouble on these subjects."

The result was precisely as Bolton predicted.

"We must be a little careful, my young friend," said Mr. Goldstick, "how we handle specific matters of this kind; they have extended relations that a young man cannot be expected to appreciate, and I would advise you to confine yourself to abstract moral principles; keep up a high moral standard, sir, and things will come right of themselves. Now, sir, if you could expose the corruptions in England it would have an admirable moral effect, and our general line of policy now is down on England."

A day or two after, however, I fell into serious disgrace. A part of my duties consisted in reviewing the current literature of the day; Bolton, Jim, and I, took that department among us, and I soon learned to sympathize with the tea-tasters, who are said to ruin their digestion by an incessant tasting of the different qualities of tea. The enormous quantity and variety of magazines and books that I had to "sample" in a few days brought me into such a state of mental dyspepsia, that I began to wish every book in the Red Sea. I really was brought to consider the usual pleas and tone of book notices in America to be evidence of a high degree of Christian forbearance. In looking over my share, however, I fell upon a novel of the modern, hot, sensuous school, in which glowing coloring and a sort of religious sentimentalism were thrown around actions and principles which tended directly to the dissolution of society. Here was exactly the opportunity to stem that tide of corruption against which Mr. Goldstick so solemnly had warned me. I made the analysis of the book a text for exposing the whole class of principles and practices it inculcated, and uttering my warning against corrupt literature; I sent it to the paper, and in it went. A day or two after Mr. Goldstick came into the office in great disorder, with an open letter in his hand.

"What's all this?" he said; "here's Sillery and Peacham, blowing us up for being down on their books, and threatening to take away their advertising from us."

Nobody seemed to know anything about it, till finally the matter was traced back to me.

"It was a corrupt book, Mr. Goldstick," said I, with firmness, "and the very object you stated to me was to establish a just moral criticism."

"Go to thunder! young man," said Mr. Goldstick, in a tone I had never heard before. "Have you no discrimination? are you going to blow us up? The Great Democracy, sir, is a great moral engine, and the advertising of this publishing house gives thousands of dollars yearly towards its support. It's an understood thing that Sillery and Peacham's books are to be treated handsomely."

"I say, Captain," said Jim, who came up behind us at this time, "let me manage this matter; I'll straighten it out; Sillery and Peacham know me, and I'll fix it with them."

"Come! Hal, my boy!" he said, hooking me by the arm, and leading me out.

We walked to our lodgings together. I was gloriously indignant all the way, but Jim laughed till the tears rolled down his cheeks.

"You sweet babe of Eden," said he, as we entered my room, "do get quiet! I'll sit right down and write a letter from the Boston correspondent on that book, saying that your article has created a most immense sensation in the literary circles of Boston, in regard to its moral character, and exhort everybody to rush to the book-store and see for themselves. Now, 'hush, my dear, lie still and slumber,' while I do it."

"Why, do you mean to go to Boston?" said I.

"Only in spirit, my dear. Bless you! did you suppose that the Boston correspondents, or any other correspondents, are there, or anywhere else in fact, that they profess to be? I told you that I was the professor of humbug. This little affair lies strictly in my department."

"Jim!" said I, solemnly, "I don't want to be in such a network of chicanery."

"Oh, come, Hal, nobody else wants to be just where they are, and after all, it's none of your business; you and Bolton are great moral forty-pounders. When we get you pointed the right way for the paper you can roar and fire away at your leisure, and the moral effect will be prodigious. I'm your flying-artillery—all over the field everywhere, pop, and off again; and what is it to you what I do? Now you see, Hal, you must just have some general lines about your work; the fact is, I ought to have told you before. There's Sillery and Peacham's books have got to be put straight along: you see there is no mistake about that; and when you and Bolton find one you can't praise honestly, turn it over to me. Then, again, there's Burill and Bangem's books have got to be put down. They had a row with us last year, and turned over their advertising to the Spouting Horn. Now, if you happen to find a bad novel among their books show it up, cut into it without mercy; it will give you just as good a chance to preach, with your muzzle pointed the right way, and do exactly as much good. You see there's everything with you fellows in getting you pointed right."

"But," said I, "Jim, this course is utterly subversive of all just criticism. It makes book notices good for nothing."

"Well, they are not good for much," said Jim reflectively. "I sometimes pity a poor devil whose first book has been all cut up, just because Goldstick's had a row with his publishers. But then there's this comfort—what we run down, the Spouting Horn will run up, so it is about as broad as it is long. Then there's our Magazines. We're in with the Rocky Mountains now—we've been out with them for a year or two and cut up all their articles. Now you see we are in, and the rule is, to begin at the beginning and praise them all straight through, so you'll have plain sailing there. Then there's the Pacific—you are to pick on that all you can. I think you had better leave that to me. I have a talent for saying little provoking things that gall people, and that they can't answer. The fact is, the Pacific has got to come down a little, and come to our terms, before we are civil to it."

"Jim Fellows"—I began,

"Come, come, go and let off to Bolton, if you have got anything more to say;" he added, "I want to write my Boston letter. You see, Hal, I shall bring you out with flying colors, and get a better sale for the book than if you hadn't written."

"Jim," said I, "I'm going to get out of this paper."

"And pray, my dear Sir, what will you get into?"

"I'll get into one of the religious papers."

Jim upon this leaned back, kicked up his heels, and laughed aloud. "I could help you there," he said. "I do the literary for three religious newspapers now. These solemn old Dons are so busy about their tweedle-dums and tweedle-dees of justification and election, baptism and church government, that they don't know anything about current literature, and get us fellows to write their book notices. I rather think that they'd stare if they should read some of the books that we puff up. I tell you, Christy's Minstrels are nothing to it. Think of it, Hal,—the solemn Holy Sentinel with a laudatory criticism of Dante Rosetti's "Jenny" in it—and the Trumpet of Zion with a commendatory notice of Georges Sand's novels." Here Jim laughed with a fresh impulse. "You see the dear, good souls are altogether too pious to know anything about it, and so we liberalize the papers, and the publishers make us a little consideration for getting their books started in religious circles."

"Well, Jim," said I, "I want to just ask you, do you think this sort of thing is right?"

"Bless your soul now!" said Jim, "if you are going to begin with that, here in New York, where are you going to end—'Where do you 'spect to die when you go to?'—as the old darkey said."

"Well," said I, "would you like to have Dante Rosetti's "Jenny" put into the hands of your sister or younger brother, recommended by a religious newspaper?"

"Well, to tell the truth, Hal, I didn't write those notices. Bill Jones wrote them. Bill's up to anything. You know every person in England and this country have praised Dante Rosetti, and particularly "Jenny," and religious papers may as well be out of the world as out of fashion,—and so mother she bought a copy for a Christmas present to sister Nell. And I tell you if I didn't get a going over about it!"

"I showed her the article in the Holy Sentinel, but it didn't do a bit of good. She made me promise I wouldn't write it up, and I never have. She said it was a shame. You see mother isn't up to the talk about high art, that's got up now a days about Dante Rosetti and Swinburne, and those. I thought myself that "Jenny" was coming it pretty strong,—and honest now, I never could see the sense in it. But then you see I am not artistic. If a fellow should tell a story of that kind to my sister, I should horsewhip him, and kick him down the front steps. But he dresses it up in poetry, and it lies around on pious people's tables, and nobody dares to say a word because it's "artistic." People are so afraid they shall not be supposed to understand what high art is, that they'll knuckle down under most anything. That's the kind of world we live in. Well! I didn't make the world and I don't govern it. But the world owes me a living, and hang it! it shall give me one. So you go up to Bolton, and leave me to do my work; I've got to write columns, and then tramp out to that confounded water-color exhibition, because I promised Snooks a puff,—I shan't get to bed till twelve or one. I tell you it's steep on a fellow now."

I went up to Bolton, boiling, and bubbling and seething, with the spirit of sixteen reformers in my veins. The scene, as I opened the door, was sufficiently tranquilizing. Bolton sat reading by the side of his shaded study-lamp, with his cat asleep in his lap; the ill-favored dog, before mentioned, was planted by his side, with his nose upturned, surveying him with a fullness of doggish adoration and complacency, which made his rubbishly shop-worn figure quite an affecting item in the picture. Crouched down on the floor in the corner, was a ragged, unkempt, freckled-faced little boy, busy doing a sum on a slate.

"Ah! old fellow," he said, as he looked up and saw me. "Come in; there, there, Snubby," he said to the dog, pushing him gently into his corner; "let the gentleman sit down. You see you find me surrounded by my family," he said. "Wait one minute," he added, turning to the boy in the corner, and taking his slate out of his hand, and running over the sum. "All right, Bill. Now here's your book." He took a volume of the Arabian Nights from the table, and handed it to him, and Bill settled himself on the floor, and was soon lost in "Sinbad the Sailor." He watched him a minute or two, and then looked round at me, with a smile. "I wouldn't be afraid to bet that you might shout in that fellow's ear and he wouldn't hear you, now he is fairly in upon that book. Isn't it worth while to be able to give such perfect bliss in this world at so small an expense? I've lost the power of reading the Arabian Nights, but I comfort my self in seeing this chap."

"Who is he?" said I.

"Oh, he's my washerwoman's boy. Poor fellow. He has hard times. I've set him up in selling newspapers. You see, I try now and then to pick up one grain out of the heap of misery, and put it into the heap of happiness, as John Newton said."

I was still bubbling with the unrest of my spirit, and finally overflowed upon him with the whole history of my day's misadventures, and all the troubled thoughts and burning indignations that I had with reference to it.

"My dear fellow," he said, "take it easy. We have to accept this world as a fait accompli. It takes some time for us to learn how little we can do to help or to hinder. You cannot take a step in the business of life anywhere without meeting just this kind of thing; and one part of the science of living is to learn just what our own responsibility is, and to let other people's alone. The fact is," he said, "the growth of current literature in our times has been so sudden and so enormous that things are in a sort of revolutionary state with regard to it, in which it is very difficult to ascertain the exact right. For example, I am connected with a paper which is simply and purely, at bottom, a financial speculation; its owners must make money. Now, they are not bad men as the world goes—they are well-meaning men—amiable, patriotic, philanthropic—some of them are religious; they, all of them, would rather virtue would prevail than vice, and good than evil; they, all of them, would desire every kind of abuse to be reformed, and every good cause to be forwarded, that could be forwarded without a sacrifice of their main object. As for me, I am not a holder or proprietor. I am simply a servant engaged by these people for a certain sum. If I should sell myself to say what I do not think, or to praise what I consider harmful, to propitiate their favor, I should be a dastard. They understand perfectly that I never do it, and they never ask me to. Meanwhile, they employ persons who will do these things. I am not responsible for it any more than I am for anything else which goes on in the city of New York. I am allowed my choice among notices, and I never write them without saying, to the best of my ability, the exact truth, whether literary or in a moral point of view. Now, that is just my stand, and if it satisfies you, you can take the same."

"But," said I, "It makes me indignant, to have Goldstick talk to me as he did about a great self-denying moral enterprise—why, that man must know he's a liar."

"Do you think so?" said he. "I don't imagine he does. Goldstick has considerable sentiment. It's quite easy to get him excited on moral subjects, and he dearly loves to hear himself talk—he is sincerely interested in a good number of moral reforms, so long as they cost him nothing; and when a man is working his good faculties, he is generally delighted with himself, and it is the most natural thing in the world, to think that there is more of him than there is. I am often put in mind of that enthusiastic young ruler that came to the Saviour, who had kept all the commandments, and seemed determined to be on the high road to saintship. The Saviour just touched him on this financial question, and he wilted in a minute. I consider that to be still the test question, and there are a good many young rulers like him, who don't keep all the commandments."

"Your way of talking," said I, "seems to do away with all moral indignation."

He smiled, and then looked sadly into the fire—"God help us all," he said. "We are all struggling in the water together and pulling one another under—our best virtues are such a miserable muddle—and then—there's the beam in our own eye."

There was a depth of pathos in his dark eyes as he spoke, and suddenly a smile flashed over his features, and looking around, he said—

"So, what do you think of that, my cat,

And what do you think of that, my dog."

CHAPTER XV.

I MEET A VISION.

"I say, Hal, do you want to get acquainted with any of the P. G.'s here in New York? If you do, I can put you on the track."

"P. G.'s?" said I, innocently.

"Yes; you know that's what Plato calls pretty girls. I don't believe you remember your Greek. I'm going out this evening where there's a lot of 'em—splendid house on Fifth avenue—lots of tin—girls gracious. Don't know which of 'em I shall take yet. Don't you want to go with me and see?"

Jim stood at the looking-glass brushing his hair and arranging his necktie.

"Jim Fellows, you are a coxcomb," said I.

"I don't know why I shouldn't be," said he. "The girls fairly throw themselves at one's head. They are up to all that sort of thing. Besides, I'm on the lookout for my fortune, and it all comes in the way of business. Come, now, don't sit there writing all the evening. Come out, and let me show you New York by gaslight."

"No," said I; "I've got to finish up this article for the Milky Way. The fact is, a fellow must be industrious to make anything, and my time for seeing girls isn't come yet. I must have something to support a wife on before I look round in that direction."

"The idea, Harry, of a good-looking fellow like you, not making the most of his advantages! Why, there are nice girls in this city that could help you up faster than all the writing you can do these ten years. And you sitting, moiling and toiling, when you ought to be making some lovely woman happy!"

"I shall never marry for money, Jim, you may depend upon that."

"Bah, bah, black sheep," said Jim. "Who is talking about marrying for money? A fine girl is none the worse for fifty thousand dollars, and I can give you a list of twenty that you can go round among until you fall in love, and not come amiss anywhere, if it's falling in love that you want to do."

"Oh, come, Jim," said I, "do finish your toilet and be off with yourself if you are going. I don't blame a woman who marries for money, since the whole world has always agreed to shut her out of any other way of gaining an independence. But for a man, with every other avenue open to him, to mouse about for a rich wife, I think is too dastardly for anything."

"That would make a fine point for a paragraph," said Jim, turning round to me, with perfect good humor. "So I advise you to save it for the moral part of the paper. You see, if you waste too much of that sort of thing on me, your mill may run low. It's a deuced hard thing to keep the moral agoing the whole year, you'll find."

"Well," said I, "I am going to try to make a home for a wife, by good, thorough work, done just as work ought to be done; and I have no time to waste on society in the meanwhile."

"And when you are ready for her," said Jim, "I suppose you expect to receive her per 'Divine Providence' Express, ticketed and labeled, and expenses paid. Or, may be she'll be brought to you some time by genii, as the Princess of China was brought to the Prince of Tartary, when he was asleep. I used to read about that in the Arabian tales."

I give this little passage of my conversation with Jim, because it is a pretty good illustration of the axiom, that "It is not in man that walketh to direct his steps." When we have announced any settled purpose or sublime intention, in regard to our future course of life, it seems to be the delight of fortune to throw us directly into circumstances in which we shall be tempted to do what we have just declared we never will do, and the fortunes of our lives turn upon the most inconsiderable hinges.

Mine turned upon an umbrella.

The next morning I had business in the very lowermost part of the city, and started off without my umbrella; but being weather-wise, and discerning the face of the sky, I went back to my room and took it. It was one of those little pet objects of vertu, to which a bachelor sometimes treats himself in lieu of domestic luxuries. It had a finely-carved handle, which I bought in Dieppe, and which caused it to be peculiar among all the umbrellas in New York.

It was one of those uncertain, capricious days that mark the coming in of April, when Nature, like a nervous beauty, doesn't seem to know her own mind, and laughs one moment and cries the next with a perplexing uncertainty.

The first part of the morning the amiable and smiling predominated, and I began to regret that I had encumbered myself with the troublesome precaution of an umbrella while tramping around down town. In this mood of mind I sat at Fulton Ferry waiting the starting of the Bleecker street car, when suddenly the scene was enlivened to my view by the entrance of a young lady, who happened to seat herself exactly opposite to me.

Now, as a writer, an observer of life and manners, I had often made quiet studies of the fair flowers of modern New York society as I rode up and down in the cars. In no other country in the world, perhaps, has a man the opportunity of being vis-à-vis with the best and most cultured class of young women in the public conveyances. In England, this class are veiled and secluded from gaze by all the ordinances and arrangements of society. They go out only in their own carriage; they travel in reserved compartments of the railway carriages; they pass from these to reserved apartments in the hotels, where they are served apart in family privacy as much as in their own dwellings. So that the stranger traveling in the country, unless he have introductions to the personal hospitality of these circles, has almost no way of forming any opinion even as to the external appearance of its younger women. In France, a still stricter régime watches over the young, unmarried girl, who is kept in the shade of an almost conventual seclusion till marriage opens the doors of her prison. The young American girl, however, of the better and of the best classes, is to be met and observed everywhere. She moves through life with the assured step of a princess, too certain of her position and familiar with her power even to dream of a fear. She looks on her surroundings from above with the eye of a mistress, and expects, of course, to see all things give way before her, as in our republican society they generally do.

During the few months I had spent in New York I had diligently kept out of society. The permitted silent acquaintance with my fair countrywomen which I gained while riding up and down the street conveyances, became, therefore, a favorite and harmless source of amusement. Not an item in the study escaped me, not a feather in that rustling and wonderful plumage of fashion that bore them up, was unnoted. I mused on styles, and characteristics, and silently wove in my own mind histories to correspond with the various physiognomies I studied. Let not the reader imagine me staring point blank, with my mouth open, at all I met. The art of noting without appealing to note, of seeing without seeming to see, was one that I cultivated with assiduity.

Therefore, without any impertinent scrutiny, satisfied myself of the fact that a feminine presence of an unusual kind and quality was opposite to me. It was, at first glance, one of the New York princesses of the blood, accustomed to treading on clouds and breathing incense. There was a quiet savoir faire and self-possession as she sat down on her seat, as if it were a throne; and there was a species of repressed vitality and decision in all her little involuntary movements that interested me as live things always do interest, in proportion to their quantum of life. We all are familiar with the fact that there are some people, who, let them sit still as they may, and conduct themselves never so quietly, nevertheless impress their personality on those around them, and make their presence felt. An attraction of this sort drew my eyes toward my neighbor. She was a young lady of medium height, slender and elastic figure, features less regularly beautiful than piquant and expressive. I remarked a pair of fine dark eyes the more from the contrast with a golden crêpe of hair. The combination of dark eyes and lashes with fair hair, always produces effect of a striking character. She was attired as became a Fifth Avenue princess, who has the world of fashion at her feet,—yet, to my thinking, as one who had chosen and adapted her material with an eye of taste. A delicate cashmere was folded carelessly round her shoulders, and her little hands were gloved with a careful nicety of fit; and dangling from one finger was a toy purse of gold and pearl, in which she began searching for the change to pay her fare. I saw, too, as she investigated, an expression of perplexity, slightly tinged with the ludicrous, upon her face. I perceived at a glance the matter. She was surveying a ten-dollar note with a glance of amused vexation, and vainly turning over her little purse for the smaller change or tickets available in the situation. I leaned forward and offered, as gentlemen generally do, to take her fare and pass it forward. With a smile of apology she handed me the bill, and showed the little empty purse. "Allow me to arrange it," I said. She smiled and blushed. I passed up the ticket necessary for the occasion, returned her bill, bowed, and immediately looked another way with sedulous care.

It requires an extra amount of discretion and delicacy to make it tolerable to a true lady to become in the smallest degree indebted to a gentleman who is a stranger. I was aware that my fair vis-à-vis was inwardly disturbed at having inadvertently been obliged to accept from me even so small an obligation as a fare ticket; but as matters were, there was no help for it. On the whole, though I was sorry for her, I could not but regard the incident as a species of good luck for myself. We rode along—perhaps each of us conscious at times of being attentively considered by the other, until the cars turned up Park Row before the Astor House; she signalled the conductor to stop, and got out. Here it was that the beneficent intentions of the fates, in causing me to bring my umbrella, were made manifest.

THE UMBRELLA.

"Before a very elegant house in Fifth Avenue my unknown alighted, and the rain still continuing, there was an excuse for my still attending her up the steps."

Just as the car started again, came one of those sudden gushes of rain with which perverse April delights to ruffle and discompose unwary passengers. It was less a decent, decorous shower, than a dash of water by the bucketful. Immediately I jumped out and stepped to the side of my gentle neighbor, begging her to allow me to hold my umbrella over her, and see her in safety across Broadway. She meant to have stopped at one or two places, she said, but it rained so she would thank me to put her into a Fifth Avenue stage. So we went together, threading our way through rushing and trampling carriages, horses, and cars,—a driving storm above, below, and around, which seemed to throw my fair princess entirely upon my protection for a few moments, till I had her safe in the up-town omnibus. As it was my route, also, I, too, entered, and by this time feeling a sort of privilege of acquaintance, arranged the fare for her, and again received a courteous and apologetic acknowledgment. Before a very elegant house in Fifth Avenue my unknown alighted, and the rain still continuing, there was an excuse for my attending her up the steps, and ringing the door-bell for her.

We were kept waiting in this position several minutes, when she very gracefully expressed her thanks for my kindness, and begged that I would walk in.

Surprised and pleased, I excused myself on plea of engagements, but presented her with my card, and said I would do myself the pleasure of calling at another time.

With a little laugh and blush she handed me a card from the tiny pearl and gold case, on which was engraved "Eva Van Arsdel," and in the corner, "Wednesdays."

"We receive on Wednesdays, Mr. Henderson," she said, "and mamma will be so happy to make your acquaintance."

Here the door opened, and my fairy princess vanished from view, with a parting vision of a blush, smile, and bow, and I was left outside with the rain and the mud and the dull, commonplace grind of my daily work.

The house, as I noted it, was palatial in its aspect. Clear, large windows, which seemed a single sheet of crystal, gave a view of banks of flowering hyacinths, daffodils, crocuses, and roses, curtained in by misty falls of lace drapery. Evidently it was one of those Circean regions of retreat, where the lovely daughters of fashionable wealth in New York keep guard over an eternal lotus-eater's paradise; where they tread on enchanted carpets, move to the sound of music, and live among flowers and odors a life of blissful ignorance of toil or care.

"To what purpose," I thought to myself, "should I call there, or pursue the vision into its own regions? Æneas might as well try to follow Venus to the scented regions above Idalia, where her hundred altars forever burn, and her flowers never die."

But yet I was no wiser and no older than other men at three-and-twenty, and the little card which I had placed in my vest pocket seemed to diffuse an agreeable, electric warmth, which constantly reminded me of its presence there. I took it out and looked at it. I spelled the name over, and dwelt on every letter. There was so much positive character in the little lady,—such a sort of spicy, racy individuality, that the little I had seen of her was like reading the first page of an enchanting romance, and I could not repress a curiosity to go on with it. To-day was Monday; the reception day was Wednesday. Should I go?

Prudence said, "No; you are a young man with your way to make; you are self-dependent; you are poor; you have no time to spend in helping rich idle people to hunt butterflies, and string rose-leaves, and make dandelion-chains. If you set your foot over one of those enchanted thresholds, where wealth and idleness rule together, you will be bewildered, enervated, and spoiled for any really high or severe task-work; you will become an idler, a dangler; the power of sustained labor and self-denial will depart from you, and you will run like a breathless lackey after the chariot of wealth and fashion."

On the other hand, as the little bit of enchanted pasteboard gently burned in my vest pocket, it said:

"Why should you be rude? It is incumbent on you as a gentleman to respond to the invitation so frankly given. Besides, the writer who aspires to influence society must know society; and how can one know society unless one studies it? A hermit in his cell is no judge of what is going on in the world. Besides, he does not overcome the world who runs away from it, but he who meets it bravely. It is the part of a coward to be afraid of meeting wealth and luxury and indolence on their own grounds. He really conquers who can keep awake, walking straight through the enchanted ground; not he who makes a detour to get round it."

All which I had arrayed in good set terms as I rode back to my room, and went up to Bolton to look up in his library the authorities for an article I was getting out on the Domestic Life of the Ancient Greeks. Bolton had succeeded in making me feel so thoroughly at home in his library that it was to all intents and purposes as if it were my own.

As I was tumbling over the books that filled every corner, there fell out from a little niche a photograph, or rather ambrotype, such as were in use in the infancy of the art. It fell directly into my hand, so that taking it up it was impossible not to perceive what it was, and I recognized in an instant the person. It was the head of my cousin Caroline, not as I knew her now, but as I remembered her years ago, when she and I went to the Academy together.

It is almost an involuntary thing, on such occasions, to exclaim, "Who is this?" But Bolton was so very reticent a being that I found it extremely difficult to ask him a personal question. There are individuals who unite a great winning and sympathetic faculty with great reticence. They make you talk, they win your confidence, they are interested in you, but they ask nothing from you, and they tell you nothing. Bolton was all the while doing obliging things for me and for Jim, but he asked nothing from us; and while we felt safe in saying anything in the world before him, and while we never felt at the moment that conversation flagged, or that there was any deficiency in sympathy and good fellowship on his part, yet upon reflection we could never recall anything which let us into the interior of his own life-history.

The finding of this little memento impressed me, therefore, oddly,—as if a door had suddenly been opened into a private cabinet where I had no right to look, or an open letter which I had no right to read had been inadvertently put into my hands. I looked round on Bolton, as he sat quietly bending over a book that he was consulting, with his pen in hand and his cat at his elbow; but the question I longed to ask stuck fast in my throat, and I silently put back the picture in its place, keeping the incident to ponder in my heart. What with the one pertaining to myself, and with the thoughts suggested by this, I found myself in a disturbed state that I determined to resist by setting myself a definite task of so many pages of my article.

In the evening, when Jim came in, I recounted my adventure and showed him the card.

He surveyed it with a prolonged whistle. "Good now!" he said; "the ticket sent by the Providence Express. I see—"

"Who are these Van Arsdels, Jim?"

"Upper tens," said Jim, decisively. "Not the oldest Tens, but the second batch. Not the old Knickerbocker Vanderhoof, and Vanderhyde, and Vanderhorn set that Washy Irving tells about,—but the modern nobs. Old Van Arsdel does a smashing importing business—is worth his millions—has five girls, all handsome—two out—two more to come out, and one strong-minded sister who has retired from the world, and isn't seen out anywhere. The one you saw was Eva; they say she's to marry Wat Sydney,—the greatest match there is going in New York. How do you say—shall you go, Wednesday?"

"Do you know them?"

"Oh, yes. Alice Van Arsdel is a splendid girl, and we are good friends, and I look in on them sometimes just to give them the light of my countenance. They are always after me to lead the German in their parties; but I've given that up. Hang it all! it's too steep on a fellow that has to work all day, with no let up, to be kept dancing till daylight with those girls. It don't pay!"

"I should think not," said I.

"You see," pursued Jim, "these girls have nothing under heaven to do, and when they've danced all night, they go to bed and sleep till eleven or twelve o'clock the next day and get their rest; while we fellows have to be up and in our offices at eight o'clock next morning. The fact is, it may do for once or twice, but it knocks a fellow up pretty fast. It's a bad thing for the fellows; they get to taking wine and brandy and one thing or another to keep up, and the Devil only knows what comes of it."

"And are these Van Arsdels in that frivolous set?" said I.

"Well, you see they are not really frivolous, either; they are nice girls, well educated, graduated at the Universal Thingumbob College, where they teach girls everything that ever has been heard of, before they are seventeen. And then they have lived in Paris, and lived in Germany, and lived in Italy, and picked up all the languages; so that when they have anything to say they have a choice of four languages to say it in."

"And have they anything to say worth hearing in any of the four?" said I.

"Well, yes, now, honor bright. There's Alice Van Arsdel: she's ambitious as the devil, but, after all, a good, warm-hearted girl under it—and smart! there's no doubt of that."

"And this lady?" said I, fingering the card.

"Eva? Well, she's had a great run; she's killing, as they say, and she's pretty—no denying that; and, really, there's a good deal to her,—like the sponge cake at the bottom of the trifle, you know, with a good smart flavor of wine and spice."

"And she's engaged to—whom did you say?"

"Wat Sydney."

"And what sort of a man is he?"

"What sort? why, he's a rich man; owns all sorts of things,—gold mines in California, and copper mines in Lake Superior, and salt works, and railroads. In fact, the thing is to say what he doesn't own. Immense head for business,—regular steel-trap to deal with,—has the snap of a pike."

"Pleasing prospect for a domestic companion," said I.

"Oh, as to that, I believe Wat is good-hearted enough to his own folks. They say he is very devoted to his old mother and a parcel of old maid aunts, and as he's rich, it's thought a great virtue. Nobody sings my praises, I notice, because I mind my mammy and Aunt Sarah. You see it takes a million-power solar microscope to bring out fellows' virtues."

"Is the gentleman handsome?"

"Well, if he was poor, nobody would think much of his looks. If he had, say, a hundred thousand or two, he would be called fair to middling in looks. As it is, the girls rave about him. He's been after Eva now for six months, and the other girls are ready to tear her eyes out. But the engagement hasn't come out yet. I think she's making up her mind to him."

"Not in love, then?"

"Well, she's been queen so long she's blasée and difficult, and likes to play with her fish before she lands him. But of course she must have him. Girls like that must have money to keep 'em up; that's the first requisite. I tell you the purple and fine linen of these princesses come to something. Now, as rich men go, she'd find ten worse than Wat where there's one better. Then she's been out three seasons. There's Alice just come out, and Alice is a stunner, and takes tremendously! And then there's Angeline, a handsome, spicy little witch, smarter than either, that is just fluttering, and scratching, and tearing her hair with impatience to have her turn. And behind Angeline there's Marie—she's got a confounded pair of eyes. So you see there's no help for it; Miss Eva must abdicate and make room for the next comer."

"Well," said I, "about this reception?"

"Oh! go, by all means," said Jim. "It will be fun. I'll go with you. You see it's Lent now, thank the stars! and so there's no dancing,—only quiet evenings and lobster salad; because, you see, we're all repenting of our sins and getting ready to go at it again after Easter. A fellow now can go to receptions, and get away in time to have a night's rest, and the girls now and then talk a little sense between whiles. They can talk sense when they like, though one wouldn't believe it of 'em. Well, take care of yourself, my son, and I'll take you round there on Wednesday evening." And Jim went whistling down the stairs, leaving me to finish my article on the Domestic Manners of the Greeks.

I remember that very frequently that evening, while stopping to consider how I should begin the next sentence, I unconsciously embellished the margin of my manuscript by writing "Eva, Eva, Eva Van Arsdel" in an absent-minded, mechanical way. In fact, from that time, that name began often to obtrude itself on every bit of paper when I tried my pen.

The question of going to the Wednesday evening reception was settled in the affirmative. What was to hinder my taking a look at fairy land in a purely philosophical spirit? Nothing, certainly. If she were engaged she was nothing to me,—never would be. So, clearly there was no danger.

CHAPTER XVI.

THE GIRL OF OUR PERIOD.

[Letter from Eva Van Arsdel to Mrs. Courtney.]

My Dear Friend and Teacher:—I scarcely dare trust myself to look at the date of your kind letter. Can it really be that I have let it lie almost a year, hoping, meaning, sincerely intending to answer it, and yet doing nothing about it? Oh! my dear friend, I was a better girl while I was under your care than I am now; in those times I really did my duties; I never put off things, and I came somewhere near satisfying myself. Now, I live in a constant whirl—a whirl that never ceases. I am carried on from day to day, from week to week, from month to month, with nothing to show for it except a succession of what girls call "good times." I don't read any thing but stories; I don't study; I don't write; I don't sew; I don't draw, or play, or sing, to any real purpose. I just "go into society," as they call it. I am an idler, and the only thing I am good for is that I help to adorn a house for the entertainment of idlers; that is about all.

Now Lent has come, and I am thankful for the rest from parties and dancing; but yet Lent makes me blue, because it gives me some time to think; and besides that, when all this whirligig stops awhile, I feel how dizzy and tired it has made me. And then I think of all that you used to tell me about the real object of life, and all that I so sincerely resolved in my school-days that I would do and be, and I am quite in despair about myself.

It is three years since I really "came out," as the phrase goes. Up to that time I was far happier than I have been since, because I satisfied myself better. You always said, dear friend, that I was a good scholar, and faithful to every duty; and those days, when I had a definite duty for each hour, and did it well, were days when I liked myself better than now. I did enjoy study. I enjoyed our three years in Europe, too, for then, with much variety and many pleasures, I had regular studies; I was learning something, and did not feel that I was a mere do-nothing.

But since I have been going into company I am perfectly sick of myself. For the first year it was new to me, and I was light-headed and thought it glorious fun. It was excitement all the time—dressing, and going, and seeing, and being admired, and, well—flirting. I confess I liked it, and went into it with all my might,—parties, balls, opera, concerts all the winter in New York, and parties, balls, etc. at Newport and Saratoga in Summer. It was a sort of prolonged delirium. I didn't stop to think about anything, and lived like a butterfly, by the hour. Oh! the silly things I have said and done! I find myself blushing hot when I think of them, because, you see, I am so excitable, and sometimes am so carried away, that afterward I don't know what I may have said or done!

And now all this is coming to some end or other. This going into company can't last forever. We must be married—that's what we are for, they say; that's what all this dressing, and dancing, and flying about has got to end in. And so mamma and Aunt Maria are on thorns, to get me off their hands and well established. I have been out three seasons. I am twenty-three, and Alice has just come out, and it is expected, of course, that I retire with honor. I will not stop to tell you that I have rejected about the usual number of offers that young ladies in my position get, and I haven't seen anybody that I care a copper for.

Well, now, in this crisis, comes this Mr. Sidney, who proposed to me last Fall, and I refused point-blank, simply and only because I didn't love him, which seemed to me at that time reason enough. Then mamma and Aunt Maria took up the case, and told me that I was a foolish girl to throw away such an offer: a man of good character and standing, an excellent business man, and so immensely rich—with such a splendid place at Newport, and another in New York, and a fortune like Aladdin's lamp!

I said I didn't love him, and they said I hadn't tried; that I could love him if I only made up my mind to, and why wouldn't I try? Then papa turned in, who very seldom has anything to say to us girls, or about any family matters, and said how delighted he should be to see me married to a man so capable of taking care of me. So, among them all, I agreed that I would receive his visits and attentions as a friend, with a view to trying to love him; and ever since I have been banked up in flowers and confectionery, and daily drifting into relations of closer and closer intimacy.

Do I find myself in love? Not a bit. Frankly, dear friend, to tell the awful truth, the thing that weighs down my heart is, that if this man were not so rich, I know I shouldn't think of him. If he were a poor young man, just beginning business, I know I should not give him a second thought; neither would mother, nor Aunt Maria, nor any of us. But here are all these worldly advantages! I confess I am dazzled by them. I am silly, I am weak, I am ambitious. I like to feel that I may have the prize of the season—the greatest offer in the market. I know I am envied and, oh, dear me! though it's naughty, yet one does like to be envied. Besides, to tell the truth, though I am not in love with him, I am not in love with anybody else. I respect him, and esteem him, and all that, in a quiet, negative sort of way, and mother and Aunt Maria say everything else will come—after marriage. Will it? Is it right? Is this the way I ought to marry?

But then, you know, I must marry somebody—that, they say, is a fixed fact. It seems to be understood that I am a sort of helpless affair, to be taken care of, and that now is my time to be disposed of; and they tell me every day that if I let this chance go, I shall regret it all my life.

Do you know I wish there were convents that one could go out of the world into? Cousin Sophia Sewell has joined the Sisters of St. John, and says she never was so happy. She does look so cheerful, and she is so busy from morning till night, and has the comfort of doing so much good to a lot of those poor little children, that I envy her.

But I cannot become a Sister. What would mamma say if she knew I even thought of it? Everybody would think me crazy. Nobody would believe how much there is in me that never comes to light, nor how miserable it makes me to be the poor, half-hearted thing that I am.

You know, dear friend, about sister Ida's peculiar course, and how very much it has vexed mamma. Yet, really and truly, I can't help respecting Ida. It seems to me she shows a real strength of principle that I lack. She went into gay society only a little while before she gave it up, and her reasons, I think, were good ones. She said it weakened her health, weakened her mind; that there was no use in it, and that it was just making her physically and morally helpless, and that she wanted to live for a purpose of her own. She wanted to go to Paris, and study for the medical profession; but neither papa, nor mamma, nor any of the family would hear of it. But Ida persisted that she would do something, and finally papa took her into his business, to manage the foreign correspondence, which she does admirably, putting all her knowledge of languages to account. He gives her the salary of a confidential clerk, and she lays it up, with the intention finally of carrying her purpose.

Ida is a good, noble woman, of a strength and independence perfectly incomprehensible to me. I can desire, but I cannot do; I am weak and irresolute. People can talk me round, and do anything with me, and I cannot help myself.

Another thing makes me unhappy. Ida refused to be confirmed when I was, because, she said, confirmation was only a sham; that the girls were just as wholly worldly after as before, and that it did no earthly good.

Well, you see, I was confirmed; and, oh dear me! I was sincere, God knows. I wanted to be good—to live a higher, purer, nobler life than I have lived; and yet, after all, it is I, the child of the Church, that am living a life of folly, and show, and self-indulgence; and it is Ida, who doubts the Church, that is living a life of industry, and energy, and self-denial.

Why is it? The world that we promise to renounce, that our sponsors promised that we should renounce—what is it, and where is it? Do those vows mean anything? if so, what? I mean to do all that I ought to; but how to know what? There's Aunt Maria, my god-mother, she did the renouncing for me at my baptism, and promised solemnly that I should abjure "the vain pomp and glory of the world, with all covetous desires of the same; that I should not follow, or be led by them;" yet she has never, that I can see, had one thought of anything else but how to secure to me just exactly those very things. That I should be first in society, be admired, followed, flattered, and make a rich, splendid marriage, has been her very heart's desire and prayer; and if I should renounce the vain pomp and glory of the world, really and truly, she would be utterly heart-broken. So would mamma.

I don't mean to lay all the blame on them, either. I have been worldly, too, and ambitious, and wanted to shine, and been only too willing to fall in with all their views.

But it really is hard for a person like me to stand alone, against my own heart, and all my relatives, particularly when I don't know exactly, in each case, what to do, and what not; where to begin to resist, and where to yield.

Ida says that it is a sin to spend nights in dancing, so that one has to lie in bed like an invalid all the next day. She says it is a sin to run down one's health for no good purpose; and yet we girls all do it—everybody does it. We all go from party to party, from concert to ball, and from ball to something else. We dance the German three or four nights a week; and then, when Sunday comes, sometimes I find that there is the Holy Communion—and then I am afraid to go. I am like the man that had not on the wedding garment.

It seems to me that our church services were made for real Christians—people like the primitive Christians, who made a real thing of it; they gave up everything and went down and worshiped in the catacombs, for instance. I remember seeing those catacombs where they held their church far down under ground, when I was in Rome. There would be some meaning in such people's using our service, but when I try to go through with it I fear to take such words on my lips. I wonder that nobody seems to feel how awful those words are, and how much they must mean, if they mean anything. It seems to me so solemn to say to God, as we do say in the communion service, "Here we offer and present unto Thee, O, Lord, ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto Thee"——

I see so many saying this who never seem to think of it again; and, oh, my dear friend, I have said it myself, and been no better afterward, and now, alas, I too often turn away from the holy ordinance because I feel that it is only a mockery to utter them, living as I do.

About this marriage. Mr. Sydney is not at all a religious man; he is all for this world, and I don't think I shall grow much better by it.

I wish there were somebody that could strengthen me, and help me to be my better self. I have dreams of a sort of man like King Arthur, and the Knights of the Holy Grail—a man, noble, holy, and religious. Such an one I would follow if I broke away from everyone else; but, alas, no such are in our society, at least I never have met any. Yet I have it in me to love, even to death, if I found a real hero. I marked a place in a book the other day, which said:

"There is not so much difficulty in being willing to die for one, as finding one worth dying for."

I haven't, and they laugh at me as a romantic girl when I tell them what I would do if I found my ideal.

Well, I suppose you see how it's all likely to end. We drift, and drift and drift, and I shouldn't wonder if I drifted at last into this marriage. I see it all before me, just what it will be,—a wonderful wedding, that turns all New York topsy turvy—diamonds, laces, cashmeres, infinite flowers, and tuberoses of course, till one's head aches,—clang and ding, and bang and buzz;—triumphal processions to all the watering-places; tour in Europe, and then society life in New York, ad infinitum.

Oh, dear, if I only could get up some enthusiasm for him! He likes me, but he don't like the things that I like, and it is terribly slow work entertaining him—but when we are married we shan't see so much of each other, I suppose, and shall get on as other folks do. Papa and mamma hardly ever see much of each other, but I suppose they are all right. Aunt Maria says, love or no love at the beginning, it all comes to this sort of jog-trot at the end. The husband is the man that settles the bills, and takes care of the family, that's all.

Ida says—but I won't tell you what Ida says—she always makes me feel blue.

Do write me a good scolding letter; rouse me up; shame me, scold me, talk hard to me, and see if you can't make something of me. Perhaps it isn't too late.

Your affectionate bad girl,

Eva.

[Letter from Mrs. Courtney to Eva Van Arsdel.]

My Dear Child:—You place me in an embarrassing position in asking me to speak on a subject, when your parents have already declared their wishes.

Nevertheless, my dear, I can but remind you that you are the child of an higher than any earthly mother, and in an affair of this moment you should take counsel of our holy Church. Take your prayer-book and read her solemn service, and see what those marriage vows are that you think of taking. Are these to be taken lightly and unadvisedly?

I recollect, when I was a young girl, we used to read Sir Charles Grandison, and one passage in the model Harriet Byron's letters I copied into my scrap-book. Speaking of one who had proposed to her, she says:

"He seems to want the mind that I would have the man blessed with that I am to vow to love and honor. I purpose whenever I marry to make a very good, and even dutiful wife; must I not vow obedience, and shall I break my marriage vow? I would not, therefore, on any consideration, marry a man whose want of knowledge might make me stagger in the performance of my duty to him; who would, perhaps, command from caprice or want of understanding what I think unreasonable to be complied with."

I quote this because I think it is old fashioned good sense, in a respectable old English novel, worth a dozen of the modern school. To me, there is indicated in your description of Mr. Sydney, just that lack of what you would need in a husband, which would make difficult, perhaps impossible, the performance of your marriage vows. It is evident that his mind does not impress yours or control yours, and that there are no mental sympathies between you.

That a man is a good business man; that he is fitted to secure the rent or taxes of the house one lives in, and to pay one's bills, is not all. Think, my child, that this man, for whom you can "get up no enthusiasm," whose company wearies you, is the one whom you are proposing to take by the hand before God's altar, and solemnly promise that forsaking all others, you will keep only unto him, so long as you both shall live, to love, to honor, and to obey. Can you do it?

You say you can get up no enthusiasm for this man, yet you have a conception of a man for whom you could leave all things; whom you could love unto the death.

It is out of just such marriages, made by girls with just such hearts as yours, that come all these troubles that are bringing holy marriage into disrepute in our times. A woman marries, thoughtlessly and unadvisedly, a man whom she consciously does not love, hoping that she shall love him, or that she shall do as well as others do; then by accident or chance she is thrown into the society of the very one whom she could have loved with enthusiasm, and married, for himself alone. The modern school of novels are full of these wretched stories, and people now are clamoring for free divorce, to get out of marriages that they never ought to have fallen into.

Amid all this confusion the Church stands from age to age and teaches. She shows you exactly what you are to promise; she warns you against promising lightly, or unadvisedly, and I can only refer my dear child to her mother's lessons. Marriage vows, like confirmation vows, are recorded in Heaven, and must not be broken.

The time for reflection is before they are made. Instead of clamoring for free divorce, as a purifier of marriage, all Christians should purify it as the church recommends, by the great care with which they enter into it. That is my doctrine, my love. I am a good old English Church-woman, and don't believe in any modern theories. The teachings of the prayer-book are enough for me. I know that, in spite of them all, there are thoughtless confirmation vows and marriage vows daily uttered in our church, but it is not for want of clear and solemn instruction. But you, my love, with your conscientiousness, and good sense, and really noble nature, will I am sure act worthily of yourself in this matter.

Another consideration I suggest to you. This man, whom I suppose to be a worthy and excellent man, has his rights. He has the right to the whole heart of the woman he marries—to whom at the altar he gives himself and all which he possesses. A woman who has what you call an enthusiasm for a man, can do much with him. She can bear with his faults; she can inspire and lead him; she can raise him in the scale of being. But without this enthusiasm, this real love, she can do nothing of the kind; it is a thing that cannot be dissembled, or affected. And after marriage, the man who does not find this in his wife, has the best reason to think himself defrauded.

Now, if for the sake of possessing a man's worldly goods, his advantages of fortune and station, you take that relation when you really are unable to give him your heart, you act dishonestly. You take and enjoy what you cannot pay for. Not only that, but you deprive him through all his life of the blessing of being really loved, which he might obtain with some other woman.

The fact is, you have been highly cultivated in certain departments; your tastes would lead you into the world of art and literature. He has been devoted to business, and in that way has amassed a fortune, but he has no knowledge, and no habits that would prepare him to sympathise with you.

I am not here undervaluing the worth of those strong, sterling qualities which belong to an upright and vigorous man. There are many women who are impressed by just that sort of power, and admire it in men, as they do physical strength and courage; it dazzles their imagination, and they fall in love accordingly. You happen to have another kind of fancy—he is not of your sort.

But there are doubtless women whom he would fully satisfy; who would find him a delightful companion who, in short, would be exactly what you are not, in love with him. My dear, men need wives who are in love with them. Simple tolerance is not enough to stand the strain of married life, and to marry when you cannot truly love is to commit an act of dishonesty and injustice. Remembering, therefore, that you are about to do what never can be undone, and what must make or mar your whole future, I speak this in all sincere plainness, because I am, and ever must be,

Your affectionate and true friend,

M. Courtney.