Transcriber's Note:

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation in the original document have been preserved.

Footnote 2 has an anchor but no footnote text.

GLIMPSES OF THREE COASTS.

BY
HELEN JACKSON (H. H.),

AUTHOR OF "RAMONA," "A CENTURY OF DISHONOR," "VERSES," "SONNETS
AND LYRICS," "HETTY'S STRANGE HISTORY," "BITS OF TRAVEL,"
"BITS OF TRAVEL AT HOME," "ZEPH," "MERCY PHILBRICK'S
CHOICE," "BETWEEN WHILES," "BITS OF TALK
ABOUT HOME MATTERS," "BITS OF TALK FOR
YOUNG FOLKS," "NELLY'S SILVER
MINE," "CAT STORIES."

BOSTON:
ROBERTS BROTHERS.
1886.

Copyright, 1886,
By Roberts Brothers.

University Press:
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge.

CONTENTS.

GLIMPSES OF THREE COASTS.

I.
CALIFORNIA AND OREGON.

OUTDOOR INDUSTRIES IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA.

Climate is to a country what temperament is to a man,—Fate. The figure is not so fanciful as it seems; for temperament, broadly defined, may be said to be that which determines the point of view of a man's mental and spiritual vision,—in other words, the light in which he sees things. And the word "climate" is, primarily, simply a statement of bounds defined according to the obliquity of the sun's course relative to the horizon,—in other words, the slant of the sun. The tropics are tropic because the sun shines down too straight. Vegetation leaps into luxuriance under the nearly vertical ray: but human activities languish; intellect is supine; only the passions, human nature's rank weed-growths, thrive. In the temperate zone, again, the sun strikes the earth too much aslant. Human activities develop; intellect is keen; the balance of passion and reason is normally adjusted: but vegetation is slow and restricted. As compared with the productiveness of the tropics, the best that the temperate zone can do is scanty.

There are a few spots on the globe where the conditions of the country override these laws, and do away with these lines of discrimination in favors. Florida, Italy, the South of France and of Spain, a few islands, and South California complete the list.

These places are doubly dowered. They have the wealths of the two zones, without the drawbacks of either. In South California this results from two causes: first, the presence of a temperate current in the ocean, near the coast; second, the configuration of the mountain ranges which intercept and reflect the sun's rays, and shut South California off from the rest of the continent. It is, as it were, climatically insulated,—a sort of island on land. It has just enough of sea to make its atmosphere temperate. Its continental position and affinities give it a dryness no island could have; and its climatically insulated position gives it an evenness of temperature much beyond the continental average.

It has thus a cool summer and a temperate winter,—conditions which secure the broadest and highest agricultural and horticultural possibilities. It is the only country in the world where dairies and orange orchards will thrive together.

It has its own zones of climate; not at all following lines parallel to the equator, but following the trend of its mountains. The California mountains are a big and interesting family of geological children, with great gaps in point of age, the Sierra Nevada being oldest of all. Time was when the Sierra Nevada fronted directly on the Pacific, and its rivers dashed down straight into the sea. But that is ages ago. Since then have been born out of the waters the numerous coast ranges, all following more or less closely the shore line. These are supplemented at Point Conception by east and west ranges, which complete the insulating walls of South, or semi-tropic, California. The coast ranges are the youngest of the children born; but the ocean is still pregnant of others. Range after range, far out to sea, they lie, with their attendant valleys, biding their time, popping their heads out here and there in the shape of islands.

This colossal furrow system of mountains must have its correlative system of valleys; hence the great valley divisions of the country. There may be said to be four groups or kinds of these: the low and broad valleys, so broad that they are plains; the high mountain valleys; the rounded plateaus of the Great Basin, as it is called, of which the Bernardino Mountains are the southern rim; and the river valleys or cañons,—these last running at angles to the mountain and shore lines.

When the air in these valleys becomes heated by the sun, it rushes up the slopes of the Sierra Nevada as up a mighty chimney. To fill the vacuum thus created, the sea air is drawn in through every break in the coast ranges as by a blower. In the upper part of the California coast it sucks in with fury, as through the Golden Gate, piling up and demolishing high hills of sand every year, and cutting grooves on the granite fronts of mountains.

The country may be said to have three distinct industrial belts: the first, along the coast, a narrow one, from one to fifteen miles wide. In this grow some of the deciduous fruits, corn, pumpkins, and grain. Dairy and stock interests flourish. The nearness of the sea makes the air cool, with fogs at night. There are many ciénagas, or marshy regions, where grass is green all the year round, and water is near the surface everywhere. Citrus fruits do not flourish in this belt, except in sheltered spots at the higher levels.

The second industrial belt comprises the shorter valleys opening toward the sea; a belt of country averaging perhaps forty miles in width. In this belt all grains will grow without irrigation; all deciduous fruits, including the grape, flourish well without irrigation; the citrus fruits thrive, but need irrigation.

The third belt lies back of this, farther from the sea; and the land, without irrigation, is worthless for all purposes except pasturage. That, in years of average rain-fall, is good.

The soils of South California are chiefly of the cretaceous and tertiary epochs. The most remarkable thing about them is their great depth. It is not uncommon, in making wells, to find the soil the same to a depth of one hundred feet; the same thing is to be observed in cañons, cuts, and exposed bluffs on the sea-shore. This accounts for the great fertility of much of the land. Crops are raised year after year, sometimes for twenty successive years, on the same fields, without the soil's showing exhaustion; and what are called volunteer crops, sowing themselves, give good yields for the first, second, and even third year after the original planting.

To provide for a wholesome variety and succession of seasons, in a country where both winter and summer were debarred full reign, was a meteorological problem that might well have puzzled even Nature's ingenuity. But next to a vacuum, she abhors monotony; and to avoid it, she has, in California, resorted even to the water-cure,—getting her requisite alternation of seasons by making one wet and the other dry.

To define the respective limits of these seasons becomes more and more difficult the longer one stays in California, and the more one studies rain-fall statistics. Generally speaking, the wet season may be said to be from the middle of October to the middle of April, corresponding nearly with the outside limits of the north temperate zone season of snows. A good description of the two seasons would be—and it is not so purely humorous and unscientific as it sounds—that the wet season is the season in which it can rain, but may not; and the dry season is the season in which it cannot rain, but occasionally does.

Sometimes the rains expected and hoped for in October do not begin until March, and the whole country is in anxiety; a drought in the wet season meaning drought for a year, and great losses. There have been such years in California, and the dread of them is well founded. But often the rains, coming later than their wont, are so full and steady that the requisite number of inches fall, and the year's supply is made good. The average rain-fall in San Diego County is ten inches; in Los Angeles, San Bernardino, and Ventura counties, fifteen; in Santa Barbara, twenty. These five counties are all that properly come under the name of South California, resting the division on natural and climatic grounds. The political division, if ever made, will be based on other than natural or climatic reasons, and will include two, possibly three, more counties.

The pricelessness of water in a land where no rain falls during six months of the year cannot be appreciated by one who has not lived in such a country. There is a saying in South California that if a man buys water he can get his land thrown in. This is only an epigrammatic putting of the literal fact that the value of much of the land depends solely upon the water which it holds or controls.

Four systems of irrigation are practised: First, flooding the land. This is possible only in flat districts, where there are large heads of water. It is a wasteful method, and is less and less used each year. The second system is by furrows. By this system a large head of water is brought upon the land and distributed in small streams in many narrow furrows. The streams are made as small as will run across the ground, and are allowed to run only twenty-four hours at a time. The third system is by basins dug around tree roots. To these basins water is brought by pipes or ditches; or, in mountain lands, by flumes. The fourth system is by sub-irrigation. This is the most expensive system of all, but is thought to economize water. The water is carried in pipes laid from two to three feet under ground. By opening valves in these pipes the water is let out and up, but never comes above the surface.

The appliances of one sort and another belonging to these irrigation systems add much to the picturesqueness of South California landscapes. Even the huge, tower-like, round-fanned windmills by which the water is pumped up are sometimes, spite of their clumsiness, made effective by gay colors and by vines growing on them. If they had broad, stretching arms, like the Holland windmills, the whole country would seem a-flutter.

The history of the industries of South California since the American occupation is interesting in its record of successions,—successions, not the result of human interventions and decisions so much as of climatic fate, which, in epoch after epoch, created different situations.

The history begins with the cattle interest; hardly an industry, perhaps, or at any rate an unindustrious one, but belonging in point of time at the head of the list of the ways and means by which money has been made in the country. It dates back to the old mission days; to the two hundred head of cattle which the wise Galvez brought, in 1769, for stocking the three missions projected in Upper California.

From these had grown, in the sixty years of the friars' unhindered rule, herds, of which it is no exaggeration to say that they covered thousands of hills and were beyond counting. It is probable that even the outside estimates of their numbers were short of the truth. The cattle wealth, the reckless ruin of the secularization period, survived, and was the leading wealth of the country at the time of its surrender to the United States. It was most wastefully handled. The cattle were killed, as they had been in the mission days, simply for their hides and tallow. Kingdoms full of people might have been fed on the beef which rotted on the ground every year, and the California cattle ranch in which either milk or butter could be found was an exception to the rule.

Into the calm of this half-barbaric life broke the fierce excitement of the gold discovery in 1849. The swarming hordes of ravenous miners must be fed; beef meant gold. The cattlemen suddenly found in their herds a new source of undreamed-of riches. Cattle had been sold as low as two dollars and a half a head. When the gold fever was at its highest, there were days and places in which they sold for three hundred. It is not strange that the rancheros lost their heads, grew careless and profligate.

Then came the drought of 1864, which killed off cattle by thousands of thousands. By thousands they were driven over steep places into the sea to save pasturage, and to save the country from the stench and the poison of their dying of hunger. In April of that year, fifty thousand head were sold in Santa Barbara for thirty-seven and a half cents a head. Many of the rancheros were ruined; they had to mortgage their lands to live; their stock was gone; they could not farm; values so sank, that splendid estates were not worth over ten cents an acre.

Then came in a new set of owners. From the north and from the interior poured in the thriftier sheep men, with big flocks; and for a few years the wide belt of good pasturage land along the coast was chiefly a sheep country.

Slowly farmers followed; settling, in the beginning, around town centres such as Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Ventura. Grains and vegetables were grown for a resource when cattle and sheep should fail. Cows needed water all the year round; corn only a few months. A wheat-field might get time to ripen in a year when by reason of a drought a herd of cattle would die.

Thus the destiny of the country steadily went on toward its fulfilling, because the inexorable logic of the situation forced itself into the minds of the population. From grains and vegetables to fruits was a short and natural step, in the balmy air, under the sunny sky, and with the traditions and relics of the old friars' opulent fruit growths lingering all through the land. Each palm, orange-tree, and vineyard left on the old mission sites was a way-signal to the new peoples; mute, yet so eloquent, the wonder is that so many years should have elapsed before the road began to be thronged.

Such, in brief, is the chronicle of the development of South California's outdoor industries down to the present time; of the successions through which the country has been making ready to become what it will surely be, the Garden of the world,—a garden with which no other country can vie; a garden in which will grow, side by side, the grape and the pumpkin, the pear and the orange, the olive and the apple, the strawberry and the lemon, Indian corn and the banana, wheat and the guava.

The leading position which the fruit interest will ultimately take has been reached only in Los Angeles County. There the four chief industries, ranged according to their relative importance, stand as follows: Fruit, grain, wool, stock, and dairy. This county may be said to be pre-eminently the garden of the Garden. No other of the five counties can compete with it. Its fruit harvest is nearly unintermitted all the year round. The main orange crop ripens from January to May, though oranges hang on the trees all the year. The lemon, lime, and citron ripen and hang, like the orange. Apricots, pears, peaches, nectarines, strawberries, currants, and figs are plentiful in June; apples, pears, peaches, during July and August. Late in July grapes begin, and last till January. September is the best month of all, having grapes, peaches, pomegranates, walnuts, almonds, and a second crop of figs. From late in August till Christmas, the vintage does not cease.

The county has a sea-coast line of one hundred miles, and contains three millions of acres; two thirds mountain and desert, the remaining million good pasturage and tillable land. What is known as the great Los Angeles valley has an area of about sixty miles in length by thirty in width, and contains the three rivers of the county,—the Los Angeles, the Santa Ana, and the San Gabriel. Every drop of the water of these rivers and of the numberless little springs and streams ministering to their system is owned, rated, utilized, and, one might almost add, wrangled over. The chapters of these water litigations are many and full; and it behooves every new settler in the county to inform himself on that question first of all, and thoroughly.

In the Los Angeles valley lie several lesser valleys, fertile and beautiful; most notable of these, the San Gabriel valley, where was the site of the old San Gabriel Mission, twelve miles east of the town of Los Angeles. This valley is now taken up in large ranches, or in colonies of settlers banded together for mutual help and security in matter of water rights. This colony feature is daily becoming more and more an important one in the development of the whole country. Small individual proprietors cannot usually afford the purchase of sufficient water to make horticultural enterprises successful or safe. The incorporated colony, therefore, offers advantages to large numbers of settlers of a class that could not otherwise get foothold in the country,—the men of comparatively small means, who expect to work with their hands and await patiently the slow growth of moderate fortunes,—a most useful and abiding class, making a solid basis for prosperity. Some of the best results in South California have already been attained in colonies of this sort, such as Anaheim, Riverside, and Pasadena. The method is regarded with increasing favor. It is a rule of give and take, which works equally well for both country and settlers.

The South California statistics of fruits, grain, wool, honey, etc., read more like fancy than like fact, and are not readily believed by one unacquainted with the country. The only way to get a real comprehension and intelligent acceptance of them is to study them on the ground. By a single visit to a great ranch one is more enlightened than he would be by committing to memory scores of Equalization Board Reports. One of the very best, if not the best, for this purpose is Baldwin's ranch, in the San Gabriel valley. It includes a large part of the old lands of the San Gabriel Mission, and is a principality in itself.

There are over a hundred men on its pay-roll, which averages $4,000 a month. Another $4,000 does not more than meet its running expenses. It has $6,000 worth of machinery for its grain harvests alone. It has a dairy of forty cows, Jersey and Durham; one hundred and twenty work-horses and mules, and fifty thoroughbreds.

It is divided into four distinct estates: the Santa Anita, of 16,000 acres; Puente, 18,000; Merced, 20,000; and the Potrero, 25,000. The Puente and Merced are sheep ranches, and have 20,000 sheep on them. The Potrero is rented out to small farmers. The Santa Anita is the home estate. On it are the homes of the family and of the laborers. It has fifteen hundred acres of oak grove, four thousand acres in grain, five hundred in grass for hay, one hundred and fifty in orange orchards, fifty of almond trees, sixty of walnuts, twenty-five of pears, fifty of peaches, twenty of lemons, and five hundred in vines; also small orchards of chestnuts, hazel-nuts, and apricots; and thousands of acres of good pasturage.

From whatever side one approaches Santa Anita in May, he will drive through a wild garden,—asters, yellow and white; scarlet pentstemons, blue larkspur, monk's-hood; lupines, white and blue; gorgeous golden eschscholtzia, alder, wild lilac, white sage,—all in riotous flowering.

Entering the ranch by one of the north gates, he will look southward down gentle slopes of orchards and vineyards far across the valley, the tints growing softer and softer, and blending more and more with each mile, till all melt into a blue or purple haze. Driving from orchard to orchard, down half-mile avenues through orchards skirting seemingly endless stretches of vineyard, he begins to realize what comes of planting trees and vines by hundreds and tens of hundreds of acres, and the Equalization Board Statistics no longer appear to him even large. It does not seem wonderful that Los Angeles County should be reported as having sixty-two hundred acres in vines, when here on one man's ranch are five hundred acres. The last Equalization Board Report said the county had 256,135 orange and 41,250 lemon trees. It would hardly have surprised him to be told that there were as many as that in the Santa Anita groves alone. The effect on the eye of such huge tracts, planted with a single sort of tree, is to increase enormously the apparent size of the tract; the mind stumbles on the very threshold of the attempt to reckon its distances and numbers, and they become vaster and vaster as they grow vague.

The orange orchard is not the unqualifiedly beautiful spectacle one dreams it will be; nor, in fact, is it so beautiful as it ought to be, with its evergreen shining foliage, snowy blossoms, and golden fruit hanging together and lavishly all the year round. I fancy that if travellers told truth, ninety-nine out of a hundred would confess to a grievous disappointment at their first sight of the orange at home. In South California the trees labor under the great disadvantage of being surrounded by bare brown earth. How much this dulls their effect one realizes on finding now and then a neglected grove where grass has been allowed to grow under the trees, to their ruin as fruit-bearers, but incomparably heightening their beauty. Another fatal defect in the orange-tree is its contour. It is too round, too stout for its height; almost as bad a thing in a tree as in a human being. The uniformity of this contour of the trees, combined with the regularity of their setting in evenly spaced rows, gives large orange groves a certain tiresome quality, which one recognizes with a guilty sense of being shamefully ungrateful for so much splendor of sheen and color. The exact spherical shape of the fruit possibly helps on this tiresomeness. One wonders if oblong bunches of long-pointed and curving fruit, banana-like, set irregularly among the glossy green leaves, would not look better; which wonder adds to ingratitude an impertinence, of which one suddenly repents on seeing such a tree as I saw in a Los Angeles garden in the winter of 1882,—a tree not over thirty feet high, with twenty-five hundred golden oranges hanging on it, among leaves so glossy they glittered in the sun with the glitter of burnished metal. Never the Hesperides saw a more resplendent sight.

But the orange looks its best plucked and massed; it lends itself then to every sort and extent of decoration. At a citrus fair in the Riverside colony in March, 1882, in a building one hundred and fifty feet long by sixty wide, built of redwood planks, were five long tables loaded with oranges and lemons; rows, plates, pyramids, baskets; the bright redwood walls hung with great boughs, full as when broken from the tree; and each plate and pyramid decorated with the shining green leaves. The whole place was fairly ablaze, and made one think of the Arabian Nights' Tales. The acme of success in orange culture in California is said to have been attained in this Riverside colony, though it is only six years old, and does not yet number two thousand souls. There are in its orchards 209,000 orange-trees, of which 28,000 are in bearing, 20,000 lemon trees, and 8,000 limes.

The profits of orange culture are slow to begin, but, having once begun, mount up fast. Orange orchards at San Gabriel have in many instances netted $500 an acre annually. The following estimate, the result of sixteen years' experience, is probably a fair one of the outlay and income of a small orange grove:—

This estimate of cost of land is based on the price of the best lands in the San Gabriel valley. Fair lands can be bought in other sections at lower prices.

If first-class, healthy, thrifty budded trees are planted, they will begin to fruit the second year. The third year, a few boxes may be marketed. The fourth year, there will be an average yield of at least 75 oranges to the tree, which will equal:

The orchard is now clear gain, allowing $1,000 as interest on the investment. The increase in the volume of production will continue, until at the end of the tenth year an average of 1,000 oranges to a tree would not be an extraordinary yield.

To all these formulas of reckoning should be added one with the algebraic x representing the unknown quantity, and standing for insect enemies at large. Each kind of fruit has its own, which must be fought with eternal vigilance. No port, in any country, has more rigid laws of quarantine than are now enforced in California against these insect enemies. Grafts, cuttings, fruit, if even suspected, are seized and compelled to go through as severe disinfecting processes as if they were Cuban passengers fresh from a yellow fever epidemic.

The orange's worst enemy is a curious insect, the scale-bug. It looks more like a mildew than like anything alive; is usually black, sometimes red. Nothing but violent treatment with tobacco will eradicate it. Worse than the scale-bug, in that he works out of sight underground, is the gopher. He has gnawed every root of a tree bare before a tooth-mark on the trunk suggests his presence, and then it is too late to save the tree. The rabbit also is a pernicious ally in the barking business; he, however, being shy, soon disappears from settled localities; but the gopher stands not in fear of man or men. Only persistent strychnine, on his door-sills and thrust down his winding stairs, will save the orchard in which he has founded a community.

The almond and the walnut orchards are beautiful features in the landscape all the year round, no less in the winter, when their branches are naked, than in the season of their full leaf and bearing. In fact, the broad spaces of filmy gray made by their acres when leafless are delicious values in contrast with the solid green of the orange orchards. The exquisite revelation of tree systems which stripped boughs give is seen to more perfect advantage against a warm sky than a cold one, and is heightened in effect standing side by side with the flowing green pepper-trees and purple eucalyptus.

In the time of blossoms, an almond orchard, seen from a distance, is like nothing so much as a rosy-white cloud, floated off a sunset and spread on the earth. Seen nearer, it is a pink snow-storm, arrested and set on stalks, with an orchestra buzz of bees filling the air.

It is a pity that the almond-tree should not be more repaying; for it will be a sore loss to the beauty of the country when the orchards are gone, and this is only a question of time. They are being uprooted and cast out. The crop is a disappointing one, of uncertain yield, and troublesome to prepare. The nuts must be five times handled: first picked, then shucked, then dried, then bleached, and then again dried. After the first drying, they are dipped by basketfuls into hot water, then poured into the bleachers,—boxes with perforated bottoms. Underneath these is a sulphur fire to which the nuts must be exposed for fifteen or twenty minutes. Then they are again spread in a drying-house. The final gathering them up to send to market makes really a sixth handling; and after all is said and done, the nuts are not very good, being flavorless in comparison with those grown in Europe.

The walnut orchard is a better investment, and no less a delight to the eye. While young, the walnut-tree is graceful; when old, it is stately. It is a sturdy bearer, and if it did not bear at all, would be worth honorable place and room on large estates, simply for its avenues of generous shade. It is planted in the seed, and transplanted at two or three years old, with only twenty-seven trees to an acre. They begin to bear at ten years, reach full bearing at fifteen, and do not give sign of failing at fifty.

Most interesting of all South California's outdoor industries is the grape culture. To speak of grape culture is to enter upon a subject which needs a volume. Its history, its riches, past and prospective, its methods, its beautiful panorama of pictures, each by itself is worth study and exhaustive treatment. Since the days of Eschol, the vine and the vineyard have been honored in the thoughts and the imaginations of men; they furnished shapes and designs for the earliest sacred decorations in the old dispensation, and suggestions and symbols for divine parables in the new. No age has been without them, and no country whose sun was warm enough to make them thrive. It is safe to predict that so long as the visible frame of the earth endures, "wine to make glad the heart of man" will be made, loved, celebrated, and sung.

To form some idea of California's future wealth from the grape culture, it is only necessary to reflect on the extent of her grape-growing country as compared with that of France. In France, before the days of the phylloxera, 5,000,000 of people were supported entirely by the grape industry, and the annual average of the wine crop was 2,000,000,000 gallons, with a value of $400,000,000. The annual wine-yield of California is already estimated at about 10,000,000 gallons. Nearly one third of this is made in South California, chiefly in Los Angeles County, where the grape culture is steadily on the increase, five millions of new vines having been set out in the spring of 1882.

The vineyards offer more variety to the eye than the orange orchards. In winter, when leafless, they are grotesque; their stocky, twisted, hunchback stems looking like Hindoo idols or deformed imps, no two alike in a square mile, all weird, fantastic, uncanny. Their first leafing out does not do away with this; the imps seem simply to have put up green umbrellas; but presently the leaves widen and lap, hiding the uncouth trunks, and spreading over all the vineyard a beautiful, tender green, with lights and shades breaking exquisitely in the hollows and curves of the great leaves. From this on, through all the stages of blossoms and seed-setting, till the clusters are so big and purple that they gleam out everywhere between the leaves,—sometimes forty-five pounds on a single vine, if the vine is irrigated, twelve if it is left to itself. Eight tons of grapes off one acre have been taken in the Baldwin ranch. There were made there, in 1881, 100,000 gallons of wine and 50,000 of brandy. The vintage begins late in August, and lasts many weeks, some varieties of grapes ripening later than others. The vineyards are thronged with Mexican and Indian pickers. The Indians come in bands, and pitch their tents just outside the vineyard. They are good workers. The wine-cellars and the great crushing-vats tell the vineyards' story more emphatically even than the statistical figures. A vat that will hold 1,000 gallons piled full of grapes, huge wire wheels driving round and round in the spurting, foaming mass, the juice flying off through trough-like shoots on each side into seventy great vats; below, breathless men working the wheels, loads of grapes coming up momently and being poured into the swirling vat, the whole air reeking with winy flavor. The scene makes earth seem young again, old mythologies real; and one would not wonder to see Bacchus and his leopards come bowling up, with shouting Pan behind.

The cellars are still, dark, and fragrant. Forty-eight great oval-shaped butts, ten feet in diameter, holding 2,100 gallons each, I counted in one cellar. The butts are made of Michigan oak, and have a fine yellow color, which contrasts well with the red stream of the wine when it is drawn.

Notwithstanding the increase of the grape culture, the price of grapes is advancing, some estimates making it forty per cent higher than it was five years ago. It is a quicker and probably a more repaying industry than orange-growing. It is reckoned that a vineyard in its fourth year will produce two tons to the acre; in the seventh year, four; the fourth year it will be profitable, reckoning the cost of the vineyard at sixty dollars an acre, exclusive of the first cost of the land. The annual expense of cultivation, picking, and handling is about twenty-five dollars. The rapid increase of this culture has been marvellous. In 1848 there were only 200,000 vines in all California; in 1862 there were 9,500,000; in 1881, 64,000,000, of which at least 34,000,000 are in full bearing.

Such facts and figures are distressing to the advocates of total abstinence; but they may take heart in the thought that a by no means insignificant proportion of these grapes will be made into raisins, canned, or eaten fresh.

The raisin crop was estimated at 160,000 boxes for 1881. Many grape-growers believe that in raisin-making will ultimately be found the greatest profit. The Americans are a raisin-eating people. From Malaga alone are imported annually into the United States about ten tons of raisins, one half the entire crop of the Malaga raisin district. This district has an area of only about four hundred square miles. In California an area of at least twenty thousand square miles is adapted to the raisin.

A moderate estimate of the entire annual grape crop of California is 119,000 tons. "Allowing 60,000 tons to be used in making wines, 2,000 tons to be sent fresh to the Eastern States, and 5,000 tons to be made into raisins, there would still remain 52,000 tons to be eaten fresh or wasted,—more than one hundred pounds for each resident of California, including children."[1]

The California wines are as yet of inferior quality. A variety of still wines and three champagnes are made; but even the best are looked on with distrust and disfavor by connoisseurs, and until they greatly improve they will not command a ready market in America. At present it is to be feared that a large proportion of them are sold under foreign labels.

Prominent among the minor industries is honey-making. From the great variety of flowers and their spicy flavor, especially from the aromatic sages, the honey is said to have a unique and delicious taste, resembling that of the famous honey of Hymettus.

The crop for 1881, in the four southern counties, was estimated at three millions of pounds; a statistic that must seem surprising to General Fremont, who, in his report to Congress of explorations on the Pacific coast in 1844, stated that the honey-bee could not exist west of the Sierra Nevadas.

The bee ranches are always picturesque; they are usually in cañons or on wooded foot-hills, and their villages of tiny bright-colored hives look like gay Lilliputian encampments. It has appeared to me that men becoming guardians of bees acquire a peculiar calm philosophy, and are superior to other farmers and outdoor workers. It would not seem unnatural that the profound respect they are forced to entertain for insects so small and so wholly at their mercy should give them enlarged standards in many things; above all, should breed in them a fine and just humility toward all creatures.

A striking instance of this is to be seen in one of the most beautiful cañons of the San Gabriel valley, where, living in a three-roomed, redwood log cabin, with a vine-covered booth in front, is an old man kings might envy.

He had a soldier's warranty deed for one hundred and sixty acres of land, and he elected to take his estate at the head of a brook-swept gorge, four fifths precipice and rock. In the two miles between his cabin and the mouth of the gorge, the trail and the brook change sides sixteen times. When the brook is at its best, the trail goes under altogether, and there is no getting up or down the cañon. Here, with a village of bees for companions, the old man has lived for a dozen years. While the bees are off at work, he sits at home and weaves, out of the gnarled stems and roots of manzanita and laurels, curious baskets, chairs, and brackets, for which he finds ready market in Los Angeles. He knows every tree and shrub in the cañon, and has a fancy for collecting specimens of all the native woods of the region. These he shapes into paper-cutters, and polishes them till they are like satin. He came from Ohio forty years ago, and has lived in a score of States. The only spot he likes as well as this gorge is Don Yana, on the Rio Grande River, in Mexico. Sometimes he hankers to go there and sit under the shadow of big oaks, where the land slopes down to the river; but "the bee business," he says, "is a good business only for a man who has the gift of continuance;" and "it's no use to try to put bees with farms: farms want valleys, bees want mountains."

"There are great back-draws to the bee business, the irregularities of the flowers being chief; some years there's no honey in the flowers at all. Some explain it on one hypothesis and some on another, and it lasts them to quarrel over."

His phrases astonish you; also the quiet courtesy of his manner, so at odds with his backwoodsman's garb. But presently you learn that he began life as a lawyer, has been a judge in his time; and when, to show his assortment of paper-cutters, he lifts down the big book they are kept in, and you see that it is Voltaire's "Philosophical Dictionary," you understand how his speech has been fashioned. He keeps a diary of every hive, the genealogy of every swarm.

"No matter what they do,—the least thing,—we note it right down in the book. That's the only way to learn bees," he says.

On the outside wall of the cabin is fastened an observation hive, with glass sides. Here he sits, watch in hand, observing and noting; he times the bees, in and out, and in each one of their operations. He watches the queen on her bridal tour in the air; once the drone bridegroom fell dead on his note-book. "I declare I couldn't help feeling sort of sorry for him," said the old man.

In a shanty behind the house is the great honey-strainer, a marvellous invention, which would drive bees mad with despair if they could understand it. Into a wheel, with perforated spokes, is slipped the comb full of honey, the cells being first opened with a hot knife. By the swift turning of this wheel, the honey flies out of the comb, and pours through a cylinder into a can underneath, leaving the comb whole and uninjured, ready to be put back into the hive for the patient robbed bees to fill again. The receiving-can will hold fifteen hundred pounds; two men can fill it in a day; a single comb is so quickly drained that a bee might leave his hive on his foraging expedition, and before he could get his little load of honey and return, the comb could be emptied and put back. It would be vastly interesting to know what is thought and said in bee-hives about these mysterious emptyings of combs.

A still more tyrannical circumvention has been devised, to get extra rations of honey from bees: false combs, wonderful imitations of the real ones, are made of wax. Apparently the bees know no difference; at any rate, they fill the counterfeit full of real honey. These artificial combs, carefully handled, will last ten or twelve years in continual use.

The highest yield his hives had ever given him was one hundred and eighty pounds a hive.

"That's a good yield; at that rate, with three or four hundred hives, I'd do very well," said the old man. "But you're at the mercy of speculators in honey as well as everything else. I never count on getting more than four or five cents a pound. They make more than I do."

The bee has a full year's work in South California: from March to August inexhaustible forage, and in all the other months plenty to do,—no month without some blossoms to be found. His time of danger is when apricots are ripe and lady-bugs fly.

Of apricots, bees will eat till they are either drunk or stuffed to death; no one knows which. They do not live to get home. Oddly enough, they cannot pierce the skins themselves, but have to wait till the lady-bug has made a hole for them. It must have been an accidental thing in the outset, the first bee's joining a lady-bug at her feast of apricot. The bee, in his turn, is an irresistible treat to the bee-bird and lizard, who pounce upon him when he is on the flower; and to a stealthy moth, who creeps by night into hives and kills hundreds.

"Nobody need think the bee business is all play," was our old philosopher's last word. "It's just like everything else in life, and harder than some things."

The sheep industry is, on the whole, decreasing in California. In 1876, the wool crop of the entire State was 28,000 tons; in 1881, only 21,500. This is the result, in part, of fluctuations in the price of wool, but more of the growing sense of the greater certainty of increase from agriculture and horticulture.

The cost of keeping a sheep averages only $1.25 a year. Its wool sells for $1.50, and for each hundred there will be forty-five lambs, worth seventy-five cents each. But there have been droughts in California which have killed over one million sheep in a year; there is always, therefore, the risk of losing in one year the profits of many.

The sheep ranches are usually desolate places: a great stretch of seemingly bare lands, with a few fenced corrals, blackened and foul-smelling; the home and out-buildings clustered together in a hollow or on a hill-side where there is water; the less human the neighborhood the better.

The loneliness of the life is, of itself, a salient objection to the industry. Of this the great owners need know nothing; they can live where they like. But for the small sheepmen, the shepherds, and, above all, the herders, it is a terrible life,—how terrible is shown by the frequency of insanity among herders. Sometimes, after only a few months of the life, a herder goes suddenly mad. After learning this fact, it is no longer possible to see the picturesque side of the effective groups one so often comes on suddenly in the wildernesses: sheep peacefully grazing, and the shepherd lying on the ground watching them, or the whole flock racing in a solid, fleecy, billowy scamper up or down a steep hill-side, with the dogs leaping and barking on all sides at once. One scans the shepherd's face alone, with pitying fear lest he may be losing his wits.

A shearing at a large sheep ranch is a grand sight. We had the good fortune to see one at Baldwin's, at La Puente. Three thousand sheep had been sheared the day before, and they would shear twenty-five hundred on this day.

A shed sixty feet long by twenty-five wide, sides open; small pens full of sheep surrounding it on three sides; eighty men bent over at every possible angle, eighty sheep being tightly held in every possible position, eighty shears flashing, glancing, clipping; bright Mexican eyes shining, laughing Mexican voices jesting. At first it seemed only a confused scene of phantasmagoria. As our eyes became familiarized, the confusion disentangled itself, and we could note the splendid forms of the men and their marvellous dexterity in using the shears. Less than five minutes it took from the time a sheep was grasped, dragged in, thrown down, seized by the shearer's knees, till it was set free, clean shorn, and its three-pound fleece tossed on a table outside. A good shearer shears seventy or eighty sheep in a day; men of extra dexterity shear a hundred. The Indians are famous for skill at shearing, and in all their large villages are organized shearing-bands, with captains, that go from ranch to ranch in the shearing-season. There were a half-dozen Indians lying on the ground outside this shearing-shed at Puente, looking on wistfully. The Mexicans had crowded them out for that day, and they could get no chance to work.

A pay clerk stood in the centre of the shed with a leathern wallet full of five-cent pieces. As soon as a man had sheared his sheep, he ran to the clerk, fleece in hand, threw down the fleece, and received his five-cent piece. In one corner of the shed was a barrel of beer, which was retailed at five cents a glass; and far too many of the five-cent pieces changed hands again the next minute at the beer barrel. As fast as the fleeces were tossed out from the shed, they were thrown up to a man standing on the top of the roof. This man flung them into an enormous bale-sack, swinging wide-mouthed from a derrick; in the sack stood another man, who jumped on the wool to pack it down tight.

As soon as the shearers perceived that their pictures were being drawn by the artist in our party, they were all agog; by twos and threes they left their work and crowded around the carriage, peering, commenting, asking to have their portraits taken, quizzing those whose features they recognized; it was like Italy rather than America. One tattered fellow, whose shoeless feet were tied up in bits of gunny-bags, was distressed because his trousers were too short. "Would the gentleman kindly make them in the drawing a little farther down his legs? It was an accident they were so short." All were ready to pose and stand, even in the most difficult attitudes, as long as was required. Those who had done so asked, like children, if their names could not be put in the book; so I wrote them all down: "Juan Canero, Juan Rivera, Felipe Ybara, José Jesus Lopez, and Domingo Garcia." The space they will fill is a little thing to give; and there is a satisfaction in the good faith of printing them, though the shearers will most assuredly never know it.

The faces of the sheep being shorn were piteous; not a struggle, not a bleat, the whole of their unwillingness and terror being written in their upturned eyes. "As a sheep before her shearers is dumb" will always have for me a new significance.

The shepherd in charge of the Puente ranch is an Italian named Gaetano. The porch of his shanty was wreathed with vines and blossoms, and opened on a characteristic little garden, half garlic, the other half pinks and geraniums. As I sat there looking out on the scene, he told me of a young man who had come from Italy to be herder for him, and who had gone mad and shot himself.

"Three go crazy last year," he said. "Dey come home, not know noting. You see, never got company for speak at all."

This young boy grew melancholy almost at once, was filled with abnormal fears of the coyotes, and begged for a pistol to shoot them with. "He want my pistol. I not want give. I say, You little sick; you stay home in house; I send oder man. My wife she go town buy clothes for baptism one baby got. He get pistol in drawer while she gone." They found him lying dead with his catechism in one hand and the pistol in the other. As Gaetano finished the story, a great flock of two thousand shorn sheep were suddenly let out from one of the corrals. With a great burst of bleating they dashed off, the colly running after them. Gaetano seized his whistle and blew a sharp call on it. The dog halted, looked back, uncertain for a second; one more whistle, and he bounded on.

"He know," said Gaetano. "He take dem two tousand all right. I like better dat dog as ten men."

On the list of South California's outdoor industries, grain stands high, and will always continue to do so. Wheat takes the lead; but oats, barley, and corn are of importance. Barley is always a staple, and averages twenty bushels to the acre.

Oats average from thirty to forty bushels an acre, and there are records of yields of considerably over a hundred bushels.

Corn will average forty bushels an acre. On the Los Angeles River it has grown stalks seventeen feet high and seven inches round.

The average yield of wheat is from twenty to twenty-five bushels an acre, about thirty-three per cent more than in the States on the Atlantic slope.

In grains, as in so many other things, Los Angeles County is far in advance of the other counties. In 1879 there were in the county 31,500 acres in wheat; in 1881, not less than 100,000; and the value of the wheat crop, for 1882 was reckoned $1,020,000.

The great San Fernando valley, formerly the property of the San Fernando Mission, is the chief wheat-producing section of the county. The larger part of this valley is in two great ranches. One of them was bought a few years ago for $275,000; and $75,000 paid down, the remainder to be paid in instalments. The next year was a dry year; crops failed. The purchaser offered the ranch back again to the original owners, with his $75,000 thrown in, if they would release him from his bargain. They refused. The next winter rains came, the wheat crop was large, prices were high, and the ranch actually paid off the entire debt of $200,000 still owing on the purchase.

From such figures as these, it is easy to see how the California farmer can afford to look with equanimity on occasional droughts. Experience has shown that he can lose crops two years out of five, and yet make a fair average profit for the five years.

The most beautiful ranch in California is said to be the one about twelve miles west of Santa Barbara, belonging to Elwood Cooper. Its owner speaks of it humorously as a little "pocket ranch." In comparison with the great ranches whose acres are counted by tens of thousands, it is small, being only two thousand acres in extent; but in any other part of the world except California, it would be thought a wild jest to speak of an estate of two thousand acres as a small one.

Ten years ago this ranch was a bare, desolate sheep ranch,—not a tree on it, excepting the oaks and sycamores in the cañons. To-day it has twelve hundred acres under high cultivation; and driving from field to field, orchard to orchard, one drives, if he sees the whole of the ranch, over eleven miles of good made road. There are three hundred acres in wheat, one hundred and seventy in barley; thirty-five hundred walnut trees, twelve thousand almond, five thousand olive, two thousand fig and domestic fruit trees, and one hundred and fifty thousand eucalyptus trees, representing twenty-four varieties; one thousand grape-vines; a few orange, lemon, and lime trees. There are on the ranch one hundred head of cattle, fifty horses, and fifteen hundred sheep.

These are mere bald figures, wonderful enough as statistics of what may be done in ten years' time on South California soil, but totally inadequate even to suggest the beauty of the place.

The first relief to the monotony of the arrow-straight road which it pleased an impatient, inartistic man to make westward from Santa Barbara, is the sight of high, dark walls of eucalyptus trees on either side of the road. A shaded avenue, three quarters of a mile long, of these represents the frontages of Mr. Cooper's estate. Turning to the right, through a break in this wall, is a road, with dense eucalyptus woods on the left and an almond orchard on the right. It winds and turns, past knolls of walnut grove, long lines of olive orchard, and right-angled walls of eucalyptus trees shutting in wheat-fields. By curves and bends and sharp turns, all the time with new views, and new colors from changes of crop, with exquisite glimpses of the sea shot through here and there, it finally, at the end of a mile, reaches the brink of an oak-canopied cañon. In the mouth of this cañon stands the house, fronting south on a sunny meadow and garden space, walled in on three sides by eucalyptus trees.

To describe the oak kingdom of this cañon would be to begin far back of all known kingdoms of the country. The branches are a network of rafters upholding roof canopies of boughs and leaves so solid that the sun's rays pierce them only brokenly, making on the ground a dancing carpet of brown and gold flecks even in winter, and in summer a shade lighted only by starry glints.

Farther up the cañon are sycamores, no less stately than the oaks, their limbs gnarled and twisted as if they had won their places by splendid wrestle.

These oak-and-sycamore-filled cañons are the most beautiful of the South California cañons; though the soft, chaparral-walled cañons would, in some lights, press them hard for supremacy of place. Nobody will ever, by pencil or brush or pen, fairly render the beauty of the mysterious, undefined, undefinable chaparral. Matted, tangled, twisted, piled, tufted,—everything is chaparral. All botany may be exhausted in describing it in one place, and it will not avail you in another. But in all places, and made up of whatever hundreds of shrubs it may be, it is the most exquisite carpet surface that Nature has to show for mountain fronts or cañon sides. Not a color that it does not take; not a bloom that it cannot rival; a bank of cloud cannot be softer, or a bed of flowers more varied of hue. Some day, between 1900 and 2000, when South California is at leisure and has native artists, she will have an artist of cañons, whose life and love and work will be spent in picturing them,—the royal oak canopies; the herculean sycamores; the chameleon, velvety chaparral; and the wild, throe-built, water-quarried rock gorges, with their myriad ferns and flowers.

At the head of Mr. Cooper's cañon are broken and jutting sandstone walls, over three hundred feet high, draped with mosses and ferns and all manner of vines. I saw the dainty thalictrum, with its clover-like leaves, standing in thickets there, fresh and green, its blossoms nearly out on the first day of February. Looking down from these heights over the whole of the ranch, one sees for the first time the completeness of its beauty. The eucalyptus belts have been planted in every instance solely with a view to utility,—either as wind-breaks to keep off known special wind-currents from orchard or grain-field, or to make use of gorge sides too steep for other cultivation. Yet, had they been planted with sole reference to landscape effects, they could not better have fallen into place. Even out to the very ocean edge the groves run, their purples and greens melting into the purples and greens of the sea when it is dark and when it is sunny blue,—making harmonious lines of color, leading up from it to the soft grays of the olive and the bright greens of the walnut orchards and wheat-fields. When the almond trees are in bloom, the eucalyptus belts are perhaps most superb of all, with their dark spears and plumes waving above and around the white and rosy acres.

The leading industry of this ranch is to be the making of olive oil. Already its oil is known and sought; and to taste it is a revelation to palates accustomed to the compounds of rancid cocoanut and cotton-seed with which the markets are full. The olive industry will no doubt ultimately be one of the great industries of the whole country: vast tracts of land which are not suitable or do not command water enough for orange, grape, or grain culture, affording ample support to the thrifty and unexacting olive. The hill-slopes around San Diego, and along the coast line for forty or fifty miles up, will no doubt one day be as thickly planted with olives as is the Mediterranean shore. Italy's olive crop is worth thirty million dollars annually, and California has as much land suited to the olive as Italy has.

The tree is propagated from cuttings, begins to bear the fourth year, and is in full bearing by the tenth or twelfth. One hundred and ten can be planted to an acre. Their endurance is enormous. Some of the orchards planted by the friars at the missions over a hundred years ago are still bearing, spite of scores of years of neglect; and there are records of trees in Nice having borne for several centuries.

The process of oil-making is an interesting spectacle, under Mr. Cooper's oak trees. The olives are first dried in trays with slat bottoms, tiers upon tiers of these being piled in a kiln over a furnace fire. Then they are ground between stone rollers, worked by huge wheels, turned by horse-power. The oil, thus pressed out, is poured into huge butts or tanks. Here it has to stand and settle three or four months. There are faucets at different levels in these butts, so as to draw off different layers of oil. After it has settled sufficiently, it is filtered through six layers of cotton batting, then through one of French paper, before it is bottled. It is then of a delicate straw color, with a slight greenish tint,—not at all of the golden yellow of the ordinary market article. That golden yellow and the thickening in cold are sure proofs of the presence of cotton-seed in oil,—the pure oil remaining limpid in a cold which will turn the adulterated oils white and thick. It is estimated that an acre of olives in full bearing will pay fifteen hundred dollars a year if pickled, and two thousand dollars a year made into oil.

In observing the industries of South California and studying their history, one never escapes from an undercurrent of wonder that there should be any industries or industry there. No winter to be prepared for; no fixed time at which anything must be done or not done at all; the air sunny, balmy, dreamy, seductive, making the mere being alive in it a pleasure; all sorts of fruits and grains growing a-riot, and taking care of themselves,—it is easy to understand the character, or, to speak more accurately, the lack of character, of the old Mexican and Spanish Californians.

There was a charm in it, however. Simply out of sunshine, there had distilled in them an Orientalism as fine in its way as that made in the East by generations of prophets, crusaders, and poets.

With no more curiosity than was embodied in "Who knows?"—with no thought or purpose for a future more defined than "Some other time; not to-day,"—without greeds, and with the unlimited generosities of children,—no wonder that to them the restless, inquisitive, insatiable, close-reckoning Yankee seemed the most intolerable of all conquerors to whom they could surrender. One can fancy them shuddering, even in heaven, as they look down to-day on his colonies, his railroads, his crops,—their whole land humming and buzzing with his industries.

One questions also whether, as the generations move on, the atmosphere of life in the sunny empire they lost will not revert more and more to their type, and be less and less of the type they so disliked. Unto the third and fourth generation, perhaps, pulses may keep up the tireless Yankee beat; but sooner or later there is certain to come a slacking, a toning down, and a readjusting of standards and habits by a scale in which money and work will not be the highest values. This is "as sure as that the sun shines," for it is the sun that will bring it about.

FATHER JUNIPERO AND HIS WORK.
A SKETCH OF THE FOUNDATION, PROSPERITY, AND RUIN OF THE FRANCISCAN MISSIONS IN CALIFORNIA.

I.

During the years when Saint Francis went up and down the streets of Assisi, carrying in his delicate unused hands the stones for rebuilding St. Damiano, he is said to have been continually singing psalms, breaking forth into ejaculations of gratitude; his face beaming as that of one who saw visions of unspeakable delight. How much of the spirit or instinct of prophecy there might have been in his exultant joy, only he himself knew; but it would have been strange if there had not been vouchsafed to him at least a partial revelation of the splendid results which must of necessity follow the carrying out, in the world, of the divine impulses which had blazed up in his soul like a fire. As Columbus, from the trend of imperfectly known shores and tides, from the mysterious indications of vague untracked winds, could deduce the glorious certainty of hitherto undreamed continents of westward land, so might the ardent spiritual discoverer see with inextinguishable faith the hitherto undreamed heights which must be surely reached and won by the path he pointed out. It is certain that very early in his career he had the purpose of founding an order whose members, being unselfish in life, should be fit heralds of God and mighty helpers of men. The absoluteness of self-renunciation which he inculcated and demanded startled even the thirteenth century's standard of religious devotion. Cardinals and pope alike doubted its being within the pale of human possibility; and it was not until after much entreaty that the Church gave its sanction to the "Seraphic Saint's" band of "Fratri Minores," and the organized work of the Franciscan Order began. This was in 1208. From then till now, the Franciscans have been, in the literal sense of the word, benefactors of men. Other of the orders in the Catholic Church have won more distinction, in the way of learning, political power, marvellous suffering of penances and deprivation; but the record of the Franciscans is in the main a record of lives and work, like the life and work of their founder; of whom a Protestant biographer has written: "So far as can be made out, he thought little of himself, even of his own soul to be saved, all his life. The trouble had been on his mind how sufficiently to work for God and to help men."

Under the head of helping men, come all enterprises of discovery, development, and civilization which the earth has known; and in many more of these than the world generally suspects, has been an influence dating back to the saint of Assisi. America most pre-eminently stands his debtor. Of the three to whom belongs the glory of its discovery, one, Juan Perez de Marchena, was a Franciscan friar; the other two, Queen Isabella and Columbus, were members of Saint Francis's Third Order; and of all the splendid promise and wondrous development on the California coast to-day, Franciscan friars were the first founders.

In the Franciscan College at Santa Barbara is a daguerreotype, taken from an old portrait which was painted more than a hundred years ago, at the College of San Fernando, in Mexico. The face is one, once seen, never to be forgotten; full of spirituality and tenderness and unutterable pathos; the mouth and chin so delicately sensitive that one marvels how such a soul could have been capable of heroic endurance of hardship; the forehead and eyes strong, and radiant with quenchless purpose, but filled with that solemn, yearning, almost superhuman sadness, which has in all time been the sign and seal on the faces of men born to die for the sake of their fellows. It is the face of Father Junipero Serra, the first founder of Franciscan missions in South California. Studying the lineaments of this countenance, one recalls the earliest authentic portrait of Saint Francis,—the one painted by Pisano, which hangs in the sacristy of the Assisi church. There seems a notable likeness between the two faces: the small and delicate features, the broad forehead, and the expression of great gentleness are the same in both. But the saint had a joyousness which his illustrious follower never knew. The gayety of the troubadour melodies which Francis sung all through his youth never left his soul: but Serra's first and only songs were the solemn chants of the Church; his first lessons were received in a convent; his earliest desire and hope was to become a priest.

Serra was born of lowly people in the island of Majorca, and while he was yet a little child sang as chorister in the convent of San Bernardino. He was but sixteen when he entered the Franciscan Order, and before he was eighteen he had taken the final vows. This was in the year 1730. His baptismal name, Michael Joseph, he laid aside on becoming a monk, and took the name of Junipero, after that quaintest and drollest of all Saint Francis's first companions; him of whom the saint said jocosely, "Would that I had a whole forest of such Junipers!"

Studying in the Majorca Convent at the same time with Serra, were three other young monks, beloved and intimate companions of his,—Palon, Verger, and Crespí. The friendship thus early begun never waned; and the hearty and loving co-operation of the four had much to do with the success of the great enterprises in which afterward they jointly labored, and to which, even in their student days, they looked forward with passionate longing. New Spain was, from the beginning, the goal of their most ardent wishes. All their conversations turned on this theme. Long years of delay and monastic routine did not dampen the ardor of the four friends. Again and again they petitioned to be sent as missionaries to the New World, and again and again were disappointed. At last, in 1749, there assembled in Cadiz a great body of missionaries, destined chiefly for Mexico; and Serra and Palon received permission to join the band. Arriving at Cadiz, and finding two vacancies still left in the party, they pleaded warmly that Crespí and Verger be allowed to go also. At the very last moment this permission was given, and the four friends joyfully set sail in the same ship.

It is impossible at this distance of time to get any complete realization of the halo of exalted sentiment and rapture which then invested undertakings of this kind. From the highest to the lowest, the oldest to the youngest, it reached. Every art was lent to its service, every channel of expression stamped with its sign. Even on the rude atlases and charts of the day were pictures of monks embarking in ships of discovery; the Virgin herself looking on from the sky, with the motto above, "Matre Dei montravit via;" and on the ships' sails, "Unus non sufficit orbis."

In the memoir of Father Junipero, written by his friend Palon, are many interesting details of his voyage to Vera Cruz. It lasted ninety-nine days: provisions fell short; starvation threatened; terrific storms nearly wrecked the ship; but through all, Father Junipero's courage never failed. He said, "remembering the end for which they had come," he felt no fear. He performed mass each morning, and with psalms and exhortations cheered the sinking spirits of all on board.

For nineteen years after their arrival in Mexico, Father Junipero and his three friends were kept at work there, under the control of the College of San Fernando, in founding missions and preaching. On the suppression of the Jesuit Order, in 1767, and its consequent expulsion from all the Spanish dominions, it was decided to send a band of Franciscans to California, to take charge of the Jesuit missions there. These were all in Lower California, no attempt at settlement having been yet made in Upper California.

Once more the friends, glad and exultant, joined a missionary band bound to new wildernesses. They were but three now, Verger remaining behind in the College of San Fernando. The band numbered sixteen. Serra was put in charge of it, and was appointed president of all the California missions. His biographer says he received this appointment "unable to speak a single word for tears." It was not strange, on the realization of a hope so long deferred. He was now fifty-six years old; and from boyhood his longing had been to labor among the Indians on the western shores of the New World.

It was now the purpose of the Spanish Government to proceed as soon as possible to the colonization of Upper California. The passion of the Church allied itself gladly with the purpose of the State; and the State itself had among its statesmen and soldiers many men who were hardly less fervid in religion than were those sworn exclusively to the Church's service. Such an one was Joseph de Galvez, who held the office of Visitor-General and Commander, representing the person of the King, and inspecting the working of the Government in every province of the Spanish Empire. Upon him rested the responsibility of the practical organization of the first expedition into Upper California. It was he who ordered the carrying of all sorts of seeds of vegetables, grains, and flowers; everything that would grow in Old Spain he ordered to be planted in New. He ordered that two hundred head of cattle should be taken from the northernmost of the Lower California missions, and carried to the new posts. It was he also, as full of interest for chapel as for farm, who selected and packed with his own hands sacred ornaments and vessels for church ceremonies. A curious letter of his to Palon is extant, in which he says laughingly that he is a better sacristan than Father Junipero, having packed the holy vessels and ornaments quicker and better than he. There are also extant some of his original instructions to military and naval commanders which show his religious ardor and wisdom. He declares that the first object of the expedition is "to establish the Catholic religion among a numerous heathen people, submerged in the obscure darkness of paganism, to extend the dominion of the King our Lord, and to protect this peninsula from the ambitious views of foreign nations."

With no clearer knowledge than could be derived from scant records of Viscayno's voyage in 1602, he selected the two best and most salient points of the California coast, San Diego and Monterey, and ordered the founding of a mission at each. He also ordered the selection of a point midway between these two, for another mission to be called Buena Ventura. His activity, generosity, and enthusiasm were inexhaustible. He seems to have had humor as well; for when discussing the names of the missions to be founded, Father Junipero said to him, "But is there to be no mission for our Father St. Francis?" he replied, "If St. Francis wants a mission, let him show us his post, and we will put one there for him!"

The records of this first expedition into California are full of interest. It was divided into two parts, one to go by sea, and one by land; the sea party in two ships, and the land party in two divisions. Every possible precaution and provision was thought of by the wise Galvez; but neither precaution nor provision could make the journey other than a terrible one. Father Junipero, with his characteristic ardor, insisted on accompanying one of the land parties, although he was suffering severely from an inflamed leg, the result of an injury he had received twenty years before in journeying on foot from Vera Cruz to the city of Mexico. Galvez tried in vain to detain him; he said he would rather die on the road than not go, but that he should not die, for the Lord would carry him through. However, on the second day out, his pain became so great that he could neither sit, stand, nor sleep. Portalá, the military commander of the party, implored him to be carried in a litter; but this he could not brook. Calling one of the muleteers to him, he said,—

"Son, do you not know some remedy for this sore on my leg?"

"Father," replied the muleteer, "what remedy can I know? I have only cured beasts."

"Then consider me a beast," answered Serra; "consider this sore on my leg a sore back, and give me the same treatment you would apply to a beast."

Thus adjured, the muleteer took courage, and saying, "I will do it, Father, to please you," he proceeded to mix herbs in hot tallow, with which he anointed the wound, and so reduced the inflammation that Father Junipero slept all night, rose early, said matins and mass, and resumed his journey in comparative comfort. He bore this painful wound to the end of his life; and it was characteristic of the man as well as of the abnormal standards of the age, that he not only sought no measures for a radical cure of the diseased member, but, obstinately accepting the suffering as a cross, allowed the trouble to be aggravated in every way, by going without shoes or stockings and by taking long journeys on foot.

A diary kept by Father Crespí on his toilsome march from Velicatá to San Diego is full of quaint and curious entries, monotonous in its religious reiterations, but touching in its simplicity and unconscious testimony to his own single-heartedness and patience. The nearest approach to a complaint he makes is to say that "nothing abounds except stones and thorns." When they journey for days with no water except scanty rations from the precious casks they are carrying, he always piously trusts water will be found on the morrow; and when they come to great tracts of impenetrable cactus thickets, through which they are obliged to hew a pathway with axes, as through a forest, and are drenched to the skin in cold rains, and deserted by the Christian Indians whom they had brought from Lower California as guides, he mentions the facts without a murmur, and has even for the deserters only a benediction: "May God guard the misguided ones!" A far more serious grievance to him is that toward the end of the journey he could no longer celebrate full mass because the wafers had given out. Sometimes the party found themselves hemmed in by mountains, and were forced to halt for days while scouts went ahead to find a pass. More than once, hoping that at last they had found a direct and easy route, they struck down to the sea-shore, only to discover themselves soon confronted by impassable spurs of the Coast Range, and forced to toil back again up into the labyrinths of mesas and cactus plains. It was Holy Thursday, the 24th of March, when they set out, and it was not until the 13th of May that they reached the high ground from which they had their first view of the bay of San Diego, and saw the masts of the ships lying at anchor there,—"which sight was a great joy and consolation to us all," says the diary.

They named this halting-place "Espiritu Santo." It must have been on, or very near, the ridge where now runs the boundary line between the United States and Mexico, as laid down by the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. It is a grand promontory, ten miles southeast of San Diego, thrusting out to sea; bare of trees, but matted thick with the dewy ice-plant, and in early spring carpeted with flowers. An ugly monument of stone stands there, bearing the names of the American and Mexican commissioners who established this boundary line in October, 1849. It would seem much more fitting to have there a monument bearing the names of the heroic men—friars and soldiers of Spain—who on that spot, on May 14, 1769, sang the first Easter hymn heard on California shores.

It was a sore grief for Father Crespí that the commandant of the party would not wait here for him to say a mass of thanksgiving; but with the port in sight, impatience could not be restrained, and the little band pushed on. As soon as the San Diego camp was seen, the soldiers discharged a salute of fire-arms, which was answered instantly from shore and ship. Great joy filled every heart. The friars who had come by sea ran to meet and embrace their brothers. The gladness was dampened only by the sad condition of the ships' crews, many of whom were dead or dying. They had been four months, with their poor charts and poorer ships, making their way from La Paz up to San Diego; and in consequence of insufficient and unwholesome food, the scurvy had broken out among them. It was a melancholy beginning for the new enterprise. When, six weeks later, the second land party with Father Junipero arrived, eager to proceed to the establishing of the mission, they found that their first duty was to the sick and dying of their own people. In fifteen days twenty-nine of the sailors and soldiers died. The Indians, who at first had been gentle and friendly, grew each day more insolent and thievish, even tearing off the clothes of the sick lying helpless in the tents or tule huts on the beach. At last, on the 16th of July, a cross was set up facing the port, and in a rude booth of branches and reeds, mass was celebrated and the grand hymn of "Veni Creator" was sung, the pilgrims "supplying the want of an organ by discharging fire-arms," says the old record, and with only the "smoke of muskets for incense." Thus was founded the Mission of San Diego; and thus was laid the corner-stone of the civilization of California on July 16, 1769.

Two days before this the indefatigable Crespí had set off with another overland party, Portalá at its head, to find Monterey. On this journey, also, Father Crespí kept a diary,—little suspecting, probably, with how much interest it would be studied a century later. It was not strange that with only a compass and seventeenth-century charts to guide them along the zigzagging labyrinths of bays, headlands, and sand-hills which make the California shore, they toiled to no purpose seeking the Monterey harbor. It is pitiful to read the record of the days when they were close upon it, setting up a cross on one of its hills, and yet could not see it; even querying, so bewildered and lost were they, if it might not have been filled up with sands since Viscayno's time. Forty leagues north of it they went, and discovered the present bay of San Francisco, which they at once recognized by Viscayno's description; and recalling the speech of Galvez in regard to Saint Francis pointing out a port if he wanted a mission of his own name, the pious fathers thought it not unlikely that the saint himself had hidden Monterey from their sight, and led them to his own harbor. Month after month passed, and still they were wandering. They were footsore, weary, hungry, but not disheartened. Friendly Indians everywhere greeted them kindly, gave them nuts, and shell-fish, and bread made from acorn flour. At one time seventeen of the party were too ill to travel. Twice they halted and held council on the question of abandoning the search. Some were ready to continue as long as the provisions held out, then to eat their mules, and go back on foot. Fathers Crespí and Gomez volunteered to be left behind alone.

At last, on the 11th of November, it was decided to return by the route by which they had come. On the 20th, finding that their flour had been stolen by the soldiers, they divided the remainder into equal parts, giving to each person enough to last him two days. On Christmas Day they had a present of nuts from friendly Indians, and on New Year's Day they had the luck to kill a bear and three cubs, which gave them a feast for which they offered most devout thanksgivings. For the rest, they lived chiefly on mussels, with now and then a wild goose. On the 24th of January they came out on the table-lands above San Diego, six months and ten days from the time of their departure. Firing a salute, they were answered instantly by shots from the camp, and saw an eager crowd running to meet them, great anxiety having been felt at their long absence.

It is worth while, in studying the history of these Franciscan missions, to dwell on the details of the hardships endured in the beginning by their founders. Only narrow-minded bigotry can fail to see in them proofs of a spiritual enthusiasm and exaltation of self-sacrifice which are rarely paralleled in the world's history. And to do justice to the results accomplished, it is necessary to understand thoroughly the conditions at the outset of the undertaking.

The weary, returned party found their comrades in sorry plight. The scurvy had spread, and many more had died. Father Junipero himself had been dangerously ill with it; provisions were running low; the Indians were only half friendly, and were not to be trusted out of sight. The supply-ships looked for from Mexico had not arrived.

A situation more helpless, unprotected, discouraging, could not be conceived than that of this little, suffering band, separated by leagues of desert and leagues of ocean from all possible succor. At last an examination showed that there were only provisions sufficient left to subsist the party long enough to make the journey back to Velicatá. It seemed madness to remain longer; and Governor Portalá, spite of Father Junipero's entreaties, gave orders to prepare for the abandonment of the missions. He fixed the 20th of March as the last day he would wait for the arrival of the ship. This was Saint Joseph's Day. On the morning of it Father Junipero, who had been praying night and day for weeks, celebrated to Saint Joseph a high mass, with special supplications for relief. Before noon a sail was seen on the horizon. One does not need to believe in saints and saints' interpositions to feel a thrill at this coincidence, and in fancying the effect the sudden vision of the relief-ship must have produced on the minds of devout men who had been starving. The ship appeared for a few moments, then disappeared; doubtless there were some who scoffed at it as a mere apparition. But Portalá believed, and waited; and, four days later, in the ship came!—the "San Antonio," bringing bountiful stores of all that was needed.

Courage and cheer now filled the very air. No time was lost in organizing expeditions to go once more in search of the mysteriously hidden Monterey. In less than three weeks two parties had set off,—one by sea in the "San Antonio." With this went Father Junipero, still feeble from illness. Father Crespí, undaunted by his former six months of wandering, joined the land party, reaching the Point of Pines, on Monterey Harbor, seven days before the ship arrived. As soon as she came in sight, bonfires were lighted on the rocks, and the ship answered by firing cannon. It was a great rejoicing. The next day, June 1st, the officers of the two parties met, and exchanged congratulations; and on the third they took formal possession of the place: first, in the name of the Church, by religious ceremonies; secondly, in the name of the King of Spain, unfurling the royal standard, and planting it in the ground, side by side with the cross.

To one familiar with the beauty of the Monterey shore in June, the picture of this scene is vivid. The sand-dunes were ablaze with color; lupines in high, waving masses, white and yellow; and great mats of the glittering ice-plant, with myriads of rose-colored umbels, lying flat on the white sand. Many rods inland, the air was sweet with their fragrance, borne by the strong sea-wind. On long cliffs of broken, tempest-piled rocks stood ranks upon ranks of grand old cypress-trees,—gnarled, bent, twisted, defiant, full of both pathos and triumph in their loneliness, in this the only spot on earth to which they are native.

The booth of boughs in which the mass was performed was built under a large oak, on the same spot where Viscayno had landed and his Carmelite monks had said mass one hundred and sixty-seven years before. The ceremonies closed with a ringing Te Deum,—sailors, soldiers, monks, alike jubilant.

When the news of the founding of this second mission reached the city of Mexico, there was a furore of excitement. The bells of the city were rung; people ran up and down the streets telling each other; and the viceroy held at his palace a grand reception, to which went all persons of note, eager to congratulate him and Galvez. Printed proclamations, giving full accounts, were circulated, not only in Mexico but throughout Spain. No province so remote, no home so lowly, as to fail to hear the good news. It was indeed good news to both State and Church. The fact of the occupation of the new country was accomplished; the scheme for the conversion and salvation of the savage race was fairly inaugurated; Monterey and San Diego being assured, ultimate possession of the whole of the coast line between would follow. Little these gladdened people in Spain and Mexico realized, however, the cost of the triumph over which they rejoiced, or the true condition of the men who had won it.

The history of the next fifteen years is a history of struggle, hardship, and heroic achievement. The indefatigable Serra was the mainspring and support of it all. There seemed no limit to his endurance, no bound to his desires; nothing daunted his courage or chilled his faith. When, in the sixth year after the founding of the San Diego Mission, it was attacked by hostile Indians, one of the fathers being most cruelly murdered, and the buildings burned to the ground, Father Junipero exclaimed, "Thank God! The seed of the Gospel is now watered by the blood of a martyr; that mission is henceforth established;" and in a few months he was on the spot, with money and materials, ready for rebuilding; pressing sailors, neophytes, soldiers, into the service; working with his own hands, also, spite of the fears and protestations of all, and only desisting on positive orders from the military commander. He journeyed, frequently on foot, back and forth through the country, founding a new mission whenever, by his urgent letters to the College of San Fernando and to the Mexican viceroys, he had gathered together men and money enough to do so. In 1772, when perplexities seemed inextricably thickened and supplies had fallen so short that starvation threatened the missions, he took ship to San Blas. With no companion except one Indian boy, he toiled on foot from San Blas to Guadalajara, two hundred and forty miles. Here they both fell ill of fever, and sank so low that they were supposed to be dying, and the Holy Viaticum was administered to them. But they recovered, and while only partly convalescent, pushed on again, reaching the city of Mexico in February, 1773. Hard-hearted indeed must the Mexican viceroy have been to refuse to heed the prayers of an aged man who had given such proofs as this of his earnestness and devotion. The difficulties were cleared up, money and supplies obtained, and Father Junipero returned to his post with a joyful heart. Before leaving, he kissed the feet of the friars in the college, and asked their blessing, saying that they would never behold him more.

Father Junipero's most insatiable passion was for baptizing Indians; the saving of one soul thus from death filled him with unspeakable joy. His biographer illustrates this by the narrative of the first infant baptism attempted at the San Diego Mission. The Indians had been prevailed upon to bring an infant to receive the consecration. Everything was ready: Father Junipero had raised his hand to sprinkle the child's face; suddenly heathen terror got the better of the parents, and in the twinkling of an eye they snatched their babe and ran. Tears rolled down Father Junipero's cheeks: he declared that only some unworthiness in himself could have led to such a disaster; and to the day of his death he could never tell the story without tears, thinking it must be owing to his sins that the soul of that particular child had been lost.

When he preached he was carried out of himself by the fervor of his desire to impress his hearers. Baring his breast, he would beat it violently with a stone, or burn the flesh with a lighted torch, to enhance the effect of his descriptions of the tortures of hell. There is in his memoir a curious engraving, showing him lifted high above a motley group of listeners, holding in his hands the blazing torch and the stone.

In the same book is an outline map of California as he knew it. It is of the coast line from San Diego to San Francisco, and the only objects marked on it are the missions and dotted lines showing the roads leading from one to another. All the rest is a blank.

There were nine of these missions, founded by Serra, before his death in 1784. They were founded in the following order: San Diego, July 16, 1769; San Carlos de Monterey, June 3, 1770; San Antonio de Padua, July 14, 1771; San Gabriel, Sept. 8, 1771; San Luis Obispo, Sept. 1, 1772; San Francisco (Dolores), Oct. 9, 1776; San Juan Capistrano, Nov. 1, 1776; Santa Clara, Jan. 18, 1777; San Buena Ventura, March 31, 1782.

The transports into which Father Junipero was thrown by the beginning of a new mission are graphically told by the companion who went with him to establish the mission of San Antonio. With his little train of soldiers, and mules laden with a few weeks' supplies, he wandered off into the unexplored wilderness sixty miles south of Monterey, looking eagerly for river valleys promising fertility. As soon as the beautiful oak-shaded plain, with its river swift and full even in July, caught his eye, he ordered a halt, seized the bells, tied them to an oak bough, and fell to ringing them with might and main, crying aloud: "Hear, hear, O ye Gentiles! Come to the Holy Church! Come to the faith of Jesus Christ!" Not a human creature was in sight, save his own band; and his companion remonstrated with him. "Let me alone," cried Father Junipero. "Let me unburden my heart, which could wish that this bell should be heard by all the world, or at least by all the Gentiles in these mountains;" and he rang on till the echoes answered, and one astonished Indian appeared,—the first instance in which a native had been present at the foundation of a mission. Not long afterward came a very aged Indian woman named Agreda, begging to be baptized, saying that she had seen a vision in the skies of a man clad like the friars, and that her father had repeated to her in her youth the same words they now spoke.

The history of this San Antonio Mission justified Father Junipero's selection. The site proved one of the richest and most repaying, including, finally, seven large farms with a chapel on each, and being famous for the best wheat grown, and the best flour made in the country. The curious mill in which the flour was ground is still to be seen,—a most interesting ruin. It was run by water brought in a stone-walled ditch for many miles, and driven through a funnel-shaped flume so as to strike the side of a large water-wheel, revolving horizontally on a shaft. The building of this aqueduct and the placing of the wheel were the work of an Indian named Nolberto, who took the idea from the balance-wheel of a watch, and did all the work with his own hands. The walls are broken now; and the sands have so blown in and piled around the entrance, that the old wheel seems buried in a cellar; linnets have builded nests in the dusky corners, and are so seldom disturbed that their bright eyes gaze with placid unconcern at curious intruders.

Many interesting incidents are recorded in connection with the establishment of these first missions. At San Gabriel the Indians gathered in great force, and were about to attack the little band of ten soldiers and two friars preparing to plant their cross; but on the unfurling of a banner with a life-size picture of the Virgin painted on it, they flung away their bows and arrows, came running toward the banner with gestures of reverence and delight, and threw their beads and other ornaments on the ground before it, as at the feet of a suddenly recognized queen.

The San Gabriel Indians seem to have been a superior race. They spoke a soft, musical language, now nearly lost. Their name for God signified "Giver of Life." They had no belief in a devil or in hell, and persisted always in regarding them as concerning only white men. Robbery was unknown among them, murder was punished by death, and marriage between those near of kin was not allowed. They had names for the points of the compass, and knew the North Star, calling it Runi. They had games at which they decked themselves with flower garlands, which wreathed their heads and hung down to their feet. They had certain usages of politeness, such as that a child, bringing water to an elder, must not taste it on the way; and that to pass between two who were speaking was an offence. They had song contests, often lasting many days, and sometimes handed down to the next generation. To a people of such customs as these, the symbols, shows, and ceremonies of the Catholic Church must needs have seemed especially beautiful and winning.

The records of the founding of these missions are similar in details, but are full of interest to one in sympathy either with their spiritual or their historical significance. The routine was the same in all cases. A cross was set up; a booth of branches was built; the ground and the booth were consecrated by holy water, and christened by the name of a saint; a mass was performed; the neighboring Indians, if there were any, were roused and summoned by the ringing of bells swung on limbs of trees; presents of cloth and trinkets were given them to inspire them with trust, and thus a mission was founded. Two monks (never, at first, more) were appointed to take charge of this cross and booth, and to win, baptize, convert, and teach all the Indians to be reached in the region. They had for guard and help a few soldiers, and sometimes a few already partly civilized and Christianized Indians; several head of cattle, some tools and seeds, and holy vessels for the church service, completed their store of weapons, spiritual and secular, offensive and defensive, with which to conquer the wilderness and its savages. There needs no work of the imagination to help this picture. Taken in its sternest realism, it is vivid and thrilling; contrasting the wretched poverty of these single-handed beginnings with the final splendor and riches attained, the result seems wellnigh miraculous.

From the rough booth of boughs and reeds of 1770 to the pillars, arched corridors, and domes of the stately stone churches of a half-century later, is a change only a degree less wonderful than the change in the Indian, from the naked savage with his one stone tool, grinding acorn-meal in a rock bowl, to the industrious tiller of soil, weaver of cloth, worker in metals, and singer of sacred hymns. The steps of this change were slow at first. In 1772, at the end of five years' work, five missions had been founded, and four hundred and ninety-one Indians baptized. There were then, in these five missions, but nineteen friars and sixty soldiers. In 1786, La Perouse, a French naval commander, who voyaged along the California coast, leaves it on record that there were but two hundred and eighty-two soldiers, and about one hundred officers and friars, all told, in both Upper and Lower California, from Cape Saint Lucas to San Francisco, a line of eight hundred leagues. At this time there were five thousand one hundred and forty-three Indians, in the missions of Upper California alone. In the year 1800 there were, at the mission of San Diego, fifteen hundred and twenty-one Indians; and the San Diego garrison, three miles away from the mission, numbered only one hundred and sixty-seven souls,—officers, soldiers, servants, women, and children. Such figures as these seem sufficient refutation of the idea sometimes advanced, that the Indians were converted by force and held in subjection by terror. There is still preserved, in the archives of the Franciscan College at Santa Barbara, a letter written by Father Junipero to the Viceroy of Mexico, in 1776, imploring him to send a force of eighty soldiers to be divided among seven missions. He patiently explains that the friars, stationed by twos, at new missions, from sixty to a hundred miles distant from each other, cannot be expected to feel safe without a reasonable military protection; and he asks pertinently what defence could be made, "in case the enemy should tempt the Gentiles to attack us." That there was so little active hostility on the part of the savage tribes, that they looked so kindly as they did to the ways and restraints of the new life, is the strongest possible proof that the methods of the friars in dealing with them must have been both wise and humane.

During the first six years there was but one serious outbreak,—that at San Diego. No retaliation was shown toward the Indians for this; on the contrary, the orders of both friars and military commanders were that they should be treated with even greater kindness than before; and in less than two years the mission buildings were rebuilt, under a guard of only a half-score of soldiers with hundreds of Indians looking on, and many helping cheerfully in the work. The San Carlos Mission at Monterey was Father Junipero's own charge. There he spent all his time, when not called away by his duties as president of the missions. There he died, and there he was buried. There, also, his beloved friend and brother, Father Crespí, labored by his side for thirteen years. Crespí was a sanguine, joyous man, sometimes called El Beato, from his happy temperament. No doubt his gayety made Serra's sunshine in many a dark day; and grief at his death did much to break down the splendid old man's courage and strength. Only a few months before it occurred, they had gone together for a short visit to their comrade, Father Palon, at the San Francisco Mission. When they took leave of him, Crespí said, "Farewell forever; you will see me no more." This was late in the autumn of 1781, and on New Year's Day, 1782, he died, aged sixty years, and having spent half of those years in laboring for the Indians. Serra lived only two years longer, and is said never to have been afterwards the same as before. For many years he had been a great sufferer from an affection of the heart,—aggravated, if not induced, by his fierce beatings of his breast with a stone while he was preaching. But physical pain seemed to make no impression on his mind. If it did not incapacitate him for action, he held it of no account. Only the year before his death, being then seventy years old, and very lame, he had journeyed on foot from San Diego to Monterey, visiting every mission and turning aside into all the Indian settlements on the way. At this time there were on the Santa Barbara coast alone, within a space of eighty miles, twenty-one villages of Indians, roughly estimated as containing between twenty and thirty thousand souls. He is said to have gone weeping from village to village because he could do nothing for them.

He reached San Carlos in January, 1784, and never again went away. The story of his last hours and death is in the old church records of Monterey, written there by the hand of the sorrowing Palon, the second day after he had closed his friend's eyes. It is a quaint and touching narrative.

Up to the day before his death, his indomitable will upholding the failing strength of his dying body, Father Junipero had read in the church the canonical offices of each day, a service requiring an hour and a half of time. The evening before his death he walked alone to the church to receive the last sacrament. The church was crowded to overflowing with Indians and whites, many crying aloud in uncontrollable grief.

Father Junipero knelt before the altar with great fervor of manner, while Father Palon, with tears rolling down his cheeks, read the services for the dying, gave him absolution, and administered the Holy Viaticum. Then rose from choked and tremulous voices the strains of the grand hymn "Tantum Ergo,"—

"Tantum ergo Sacramentum

Veneremur cernui,

Et antiquum documentum

Novo cedat ritui;

Præstet fides supplementum

Sensuum defectui.

"Genitori genitoque

Laus et jubilatio,

Salus, honor, virtus quoque

Sit et benedictio;

Procedenti ab utroque

Compar sit laudatio."

A startled thrill ran through the church as Father Junipero's own voice, "high and strong as ever," says the record, joined in the hymn. One by one the voices of his people broke down, stifled by sobs, until at last the dying man's voice, almost alone, finished the hymn. After this he gave thanks, and returning to his cell-like room spent the whole of the night in listening to penitential psalms and litanies, and giving thanks to God; all the time kneeling or sitting on the ground supported by the loving and faithful Palon. In the morning, early, he asked for the plenary indulgence, for which he again knelt, and confessed again. At noon the chaplain and the captain of the bark "St. Joseph," then lying in port at Monterey, came to visit him. He welcomed them, and cordially embracing the chaplain, said, "You have come just in time to cast the earth upon my body." After they took their leave, he asked Palon to read to him again the Recommendations of the Soul. At its conclusion he responded earnestly, in as clear voice as in health, adding, "Thank God, I am now without fear." Then with a firm step he walked to the kitchen, saying that he would like a cup of broth. As soon as he had taken the broth, he exclaimed, "I feel better now; I will rest;" and lying down he closed his eyes, and without another word or sign of struggle or pain ceased to breathe, entering indeed into a rest of which his last word had been solemnly prophetic.

Ever since morning the grief-stricken people had been waiting and listening for the tolling death-bell to announce that all was over. At its first note they came in crowds, breathless, weeping, and lamenting. It was with great difficulty that the soldiers could keep them from tearing Father Junipero's habit piecemeal from his body, so ardent was their desire to possess some relic of him. The corpse was laid at once in a coffin which he himself had ordered made many weeks before. The vessels in port fired a salute of one hundred and one guns, answered by the same from the guns of the presidio at Monterey,—an honor given to no one below the rank of general. But the hundred gun salutes were a paltry honor in comparison with the tears of the Indian congregation. Soldiers kept watch around his coffin night and day till the burial; but they could not hold back the throngs of the poor creatures who pressed to touch the hand of the father they had so much loved, and to bear away something, if only a thread, of the garments he had worn.

His ardent and impassioned nature and his untiring labors had won their deepest affection and confidence. It was his habit when at San Carlos to spend all his time with them, working by their side in the fields, making adobe, digging, tilling, doing, in short, all that he required of them. Day after day he thus labored, only desisting at the hours for performing offices in the church. Whenever an Indian came to address him, he made the sign of the cross on his forehead, and spoke to him some words of spiritual injunction or benediction. The arbitrariness—or, as some of his enemies called it, haughty self-will—which brought Serra at times into conflict with the military authorities when their purposes or views clashed with his own, never came to the surface in his spiritual functions, or in his relation with the Indian converts. He loved them, and yearned over them as brands to be snatched from the burning. He had baptized over one thousand of them with his own hands; his whole life he spent for them, and was ready at any moment to lay it down if that would have benefited them more. Absolute single-heartedness like this is never misunderstood by, and never antagonizes equally single-hearted people, either high or low. But to be absolutely single-hearted in a moral purpose is almost inevitably to be doggedly one-ideaed in regard to practical methods; and the single-hearted, one-ideaed man, with a great moral purpose, is sure to be often at swords' points with average men of selfish interests and mixed notions. This is the explanation of the fact that the later years of Serra's life were marred by occasional collisions with the military authorities in the country. No doubt the impetuosity of his nature made him sometimes hot in resentment and indiscreet of speech. But in spite of these failings, he yet remains the foremost, grandest figure in the missions' history. If his successors in their administration had been equal to him in spirituality, enthusiasm, and intellect, the mission establishments would never have been so utterly overthrown and ruined.

Father Junipero sleeps on the spot where he labored and died. His grave is under the ruins of the beautiful stone church of his mission,—the church which he saw only in ardent and longing fancy. It was perhaps the most beautiful, though not the grandest of the mission churches; and its ruins have to-day a charm far exceeding all the others. The fine yellow tint of the stone, the grand and unique contour of the arches, the beautiful star-shaped window in the front, the simple yet effective lines of carving on pilaster and pillar and doorway, the symmetrical Moorish tower and dome, the worn steps leading up to the belfry,—all make a picture whose beauty, apart from hallowing associations, is enough to hold one spell-bound. Reverent Nature has rebuilt with grass and blossoms even the crumbling window-sills, across which the wind blows free from the blue ocean just beyond; and on the day we saw the place, golden wheat, fresh reaped, was piled in loose mounds on the south slope below the church's southern wall. It reminded me of the tales I had heard from many aged men and women of a beautiful custom the Indians had of scattering their choicest grains on the ground at the friars' feet, as a token of homage.

The roof of the church long ago fell in; its doors have stood open for years; and the fierce sea-gales have been sweeping in, piling sands until a great part of the floor is covered with solid earth on which every summer grasses and weeds grow high enough to be cut by sickles. Of the thousands of acres which the Mission Indians once cultivated in the San Carlos valley, only nine were finally decreed by the United States Government to belong to the church. These were so carelessly surveyed that no avenue of approach was left open to the mission buildings, and a part of the land had to be sold to buy a right of way to the church. The remnant left makes a little farm, by the rental of which a man can be hired to take charge of the whole place, and keep it, if possible, from further desecration and ruin. The present keeper is a devout Portuguese, whose broken English becomes eloquent as he speaks of the old friars whose graves he guards.

"Dem work for civilize," he said, "not work for money. Dey work to religion."

In clearing away the earth at the altar end of the church, in the winter of 1882, this man came upon stone slabs evidently covering graves. On opening one of these graves, it was found to hold three coffins. From the minute description, in the old records, of Father Junipero's place of burial, Father Carenova, the priest now in charge of the Monterey parish, became convinced that one of these coffins must be his. On the opposite side of the church is another grave, where are buried two of the earliest governors of California.

It is a disgrace to both the Catholic Church and the State of California that this grand old ruin, with its sacred sepulchres, should be left to crumble away. If nothing is done to protect and save it, one short hundred years more will see it a shapeless, wind-swept mound of sand. It is not in our power to confer honor or bring dishonor on the illustrious dead. We ourselves, alone, are dishonored when we fail in reverence to them. The grave of Junipero Serra may be buried centuries deep, and its very place forgotten; yet his name will not perish, nor his fame suffer. But for the men of the country whose civilization he founded, and of the Church whose faith he so glorified, to permit his burial-place to sink into oblivion, is a shame indeed!

II.

If the little grief-stricken band of monks who stood weeping around Junipero Serra's grave in 1784 could have foreseen the events of the next thirty years, their weeping would have been turned into exultant joy; but not the most daring enthusiast among them could have dreamed of the harvest of power destined to be raised from the seed thus sown in weakness.

Almost with his dying breath Father Junipero had promised to use "all his influence with God" in behalf of the missions. In the course of the next four months after his death more converts were baptized than in the whole three years previous; and it became at once the common belief that his soul had passed directly into heaven, and that this great wave of conversions was the result of his prayers. Prosperity continued steadily to increase. Mission after mission was successfully founded, until, in 1804, the occupation of the sea-coast line from San Francisco to San Diego was complete, there being nineteen mission establishments only an easy day's journey apart from each other.

The ten new missions were founded in the following order: Santa Barbara, Dec. 4, 1786; La Purissima, Dec. 8, 1787; Santa Cruz, Sept. 25, 1791; Soledad, Oct. 9, 1791; San José, June 11, 1797; San Juan Bautista, June 24, 1797; San Miguel, July 25, 1797; San Fernando Rey, Sept. 8, 1797; San Luis Rey de Francia, June 18, 1798; Santa Inez, Sept. 7, 1804.

Beginnings had also been made on a projected second line, to be from thirty to fifty miles back from the sea; and this inland chain of settlements and development promised to be in no way inferior to the first. The wealth of the mission establishments had grown to an almost incredible degree. In several of them massive stone churches had been built, of an architecture at once so simple and harmonious that, even in ruins, it is to-day the grandest in America; and it will remain, so long as arch, pillar, or dome of it shall stand, a noble and touching monument of the patient Indian workers who built, and of the devoted friars who designed, its majestic and graceful proportions.

In all of the missions were buildings on a large scale, providing for hundreds of occupants, for all the necessary trades and manufactures, and many of the ornamental arts of civilized life. Enormous tracts of land were under high cultivation; the grains and cool fruits of the temperate zone flourishing, in the marvellous California air, side by side with the palm, olive, grape, fig, orange, and pomegranate. From the two hundred head of cattle sent by the wise Galvez, had grown herds past numbering; and to these had been added vast flocks of sheep and herds of horses. In these nineteen missions were gathered over twenty thousand Indians, leading regular and industrious lives, and conforming to the usages of the Catholic religion.

A description of the San Luis Rey Mission, written by De Mofras, an attaché of the French Legation in Mexico in 1842, gives a clear idea of the form, and some of the methods, of the mission establishments:—

"The building is a quadrilateral, four hundred and fifty feet square; the church occupies one of its wings; the façade is ornamented with a gallery. The building is two stories in height. The interior is formed by a court ornamented with fountains, and decorated with trees. Upon the gallery which runs around it open the dormitories of the monks, of the majors-domo, and of travellers, small workshops, schoolrooms, and storerooms. The hospitals are situated in the most quiet parts of the mission, where also the schools are kept. The young Indian girls dwell in halls called monasteries, and are called nuns. Placed under the care of Indian matrons, who are worthy of confidence, they learn to make cloth of wool, cotton, and flax, and do not leave the monastery until they are old enough to be married. The Indian children mingle in schools with those of the white colonists. A certain number chosen among the pupils who display the most intelligence learn music, chanting, the violin, flute, horn, violoncello, or other instruments. Those who distinguish themselves in the carpenters' shops, at the forge, or in agricultural labors are appointed alcaldes, or overseers, and charged with the directions of the laborers."

Surrounding these buildings, or arranged in regular streets upon one side of them, were the homes of the Indian families. These were built of adobe, or of reeds, after the native fashion. The daily routine of the Indians' life was simple and uniform. They were divided into squads of laborers. At sunrise the Angelus bell called them to mass. After the mass they breakfasted, and then dispersed to their various labors. At eleven they were again summoned together for dinner, after which they rested until two, when they went again to work, and worked until the evening Angelus, just before sunset. After prayers and supper they were in the habit of dancing and playing games until bedtime. Their food was good. They had meat at noon, accompanied by posale, a sort of succotash made of corn, beans, and wheat, boiled together. Their breakfast and supper were usually of porridge made from different grains, called atole and pinole.

The men wore linen shirts, pantaloons, and blankets. The overseers and best workmen had suits of cloth like the Spaniards. The women received every year two chemises, one gown, and a blanket. De Mofras says:—

"When the hides, tallow, grain, wine, and oil were sold at good prices to ships from abroad, the monks distributed handkerchiefs, wearing apparel, tobacco, and trinkets among the Indians, and devoted the surplus to the embellishment of the churches, the purchase of musical instruments, pictures, church ornaments, etc.; still they were careful to keep a part of the harvest in the granaries to provide for years of scarcity."

The rule of the friars was in the main a kindly one. The vice of drunkenness was severely punished by flogging. Quarrelling between husbands and wives was also dealt with summarily, the offending parties being chained together by the leg till they were glad to promise to keep peace. New converts and recruits were secured in many ways: sometimes by sending out parties of those already attached to the new mode of life, and letting them set forth to the savages the advantages and comforts of the Christian way; sometimes by luring strangers in with gifts; sometimes, it is said, by capturing them by main force; but of this there is only scanty evidence, and it is not probable that it was often practised. It has also been said that cruel and severe methods were used to compel the Indians to work; that they were driven under the lash by their overseers, and goaded with lances by the soldiers. No doubt there were individual instances of cruelty; seeds of it being indigenous in human nature, such absolute control of hundreds of human beings could not exist without some abuses of the power. But that the Indians were, on the whole, well treated and cared for, the fact that so many thousands of them chose to remain in the missions is proof. With open wilderness on all sides, and with thousands of savage friends and relatives close at hand, nothing but their own free will could have kept such numbers of them loyal and contented. Forbes, in his history of California, written in 1832, says:—

"The best and most unequivocal proof of the good conduct of the fathers is to be found in the unbounded affection and devotion invariably shown toward them by their Indian subjects. They venerate them not merely as friends and fathers, but with a degree of devotion approaching to adoration."

The picture of life in one of these missions during their period of prosperity is unique and attractive. The whole place was a hive of industry: trades plying indoors and outdoors; tillers, herders, vintagers by hundreds, going to and fro; children in schools; women spinning; bands of young men practising on musical instruments; music, the scores of which, in many instances, they had themselves written out; at evening, all sorts of games of running, leaping, dancing, and ball-throwing, and the picturesque ceremonies of a religion which has always been wise in availing itself of beautiful agencies in color, form, and harmony.

At every mission were walled gardens with waving palms, sparkling fountains, groves of olive trees, broad vineyards, and orchards of all manner of fruits; over all, the sunny, delicious, winterless California sky.

More than mortal, indeed, must the Franciscans have been, to have been able, under these conditions, to preserve intact the fervor and spirit of self-abnegation and deprivation inculcated by the rules of their order. There is a half-comic pathos in the records of occasional efforts made by one and another of the presidents to check the growing disposition toward ease on the part of the friars. At one time several of them were found to be carrying silver watches. The watches were taken away, and sent to Guadalajara to be sold, the money to be paid into the Church treasury. At another time an order was issued, forbidding the wearing of shoes and stockings in place of sandals, and the occupying of too large and comfortable rooms. And one zealous president, finding that the friars occasionally rode in the carts belonging to their missions, had all the carts burned, to compel the fathers to go about on foot.

The friars were forced, by the very facts of their situation, into the exercise of a constant and abounding hospitality; and this of itself inevitably brought about large departures from the ascetic régime of living originally preached and practised. Most royally did they discharge the obligations of this hospitality. Travellers' rooms were kept always ready in every mission; and there were even set apart fruit orchards called "travellers' orchards." A man might ride from San Diego to Monterey by easy day's journeys, spending each night as guest in a mission establishment. As soon as he rode up, an Indian page would appear to take his horse; another to show him to one of the travellers' rooms. He was served with the best of food and wine as long as he liked to stay, and when he left he might, if he wished, take from the mission herd a fresh horse to carry him on his journey. All the California voyagers and travellers of the time speak in glowing terms of this generous and cordial entertaining by the friars. It was, undoubtedly, part of their policy as representatives of the State, but it was no less a part of their duty as Franciscans.

Some of the highest tributes which have been paid to them, both as men and as administrators of affairs, have come from strangers who, thus sojourning under their roofs, had the best opportunity of knowing their lives. Says Forbes:—

"Their conduct has been marked by a degree of benevolence, humanity, and moderation probably unexampled in any other situation.... I have never heard that they have not acted with the most perfect fidelity, or that they ever betrayed a trust, or acted with inhumanity."

This testimony is of the more weight that it comes from a man not in sympathy with either the religious or the secular system on which the friars' labors were based.

The tales still told by old people of festal occasions at the missions sound like tales of the Old World rather than of the New. There was a strange difference, fifty years ago, between the atmosphere of life on the east and west sides of the American continent: on the Atlantic shore, the descendants of the Puritans, weighed down by serious purpose, half grudging the time for their one staid yearly Thanksgiving, and driving the Indians farther and farther into the wilderness every year, fighting and killing them; on the sunny Pacific shore, the merry people of Mexican and Spanish blood, troubling themselves about nothing, dancing away whole days and nights like children, while their priests were gathering the Indians by thousands into communities, and feeding and teaching them.

The most beautiful woman known in California a half-century ago[2] still lives in Santa Barbara, white-haired, bright-eyed, eloquent-tongued to-day. At the time of her marriage, her husband being a brother of the Superior of the Santa Barbara mission, her wedding banquet was spread on tables running the whole length of the outer corridor of the mission. For three days and three nights the feasting and dancing were kept up, and the whole town was bid. On the day after her wedding came the christening or blessing of the right tower of the church. She and her husband, having been chosen godfather and godmother to the tower, walked in solemn procession around it, carrying lighted candles in their hands, preceded by the friar, who sprinkled it with holy water and burned incense. In the four long streets of Indians' houses, then running eastward from the mission, booths of green boughs, decorated with flowers, were set up in front of all the doors. Companies of Indians from other missions came as guests, dancing and singing as they approached. Their Indian hosts went out to meet them, also singing, and pouring out seeds on the ground for them to walk on. These were descendants of the Indians who, when Viscayno anchored off Santa Barbara in 1602, came out in canoes, bringing their king, and rowed three times around Viscayno's ship, chanting a chorus of welcome. Then the king, going on board the ship, walked three times around the deck, chanting the same song. He then gave to the Spaniards gifts of all the simple foods he had, and implored them to land, promising that if they would come and be their brothers, he would give to each man ten wives.

With the increase of success, wealth, and power on the part of the missions came increasing complexities in their relation to the military settlements in the country. The original Spanish plan of colonization was threefold,—religious, military, and civil. Its first two steps were a mission and a presidio, or garrison,—the presidio to be the guard of the mission; later was to come the pueblo,[3] or town. From indefiniteness in the understanding of property rights, and rights of authority, as vested under these three heads, there very soon arose confusion, which led to collisions,—collisions which have not yet ceased, and never will, so long as there remains a land-title in California to be quarrelled over. The law records of the State are brimful of briefs, counter-briefs, opinions, and counter-opinions regarding property issues, all turning on definitions which nobody has now clear right to make, of old pueblo and presidio titles and bounds.

In the beginning there were no grants of land; everything was done by royal decree. In the form of taking possession of the new lands, the Church, by right of sacred honor, came first, the religious ceremony always preceding the military. Not till the cross was set up, and the ground consecrated and taken possession of, in the name of God, for the Church's purposes, did any military commander ever think of planting the royal standard, symbolizing the king's possession. In the early days the relations between the military and the ecclesiastical representatives of the king were comparatively simple: the soldiers were sent avowedly and specifically to protect the friars; moreover, in those earlier days, soldiers and friars were alike devout, and, no doubt, had the mission interests more equally at heart than they did later. But each year's increase of numbers in the garrisons, and of numbers and power in the missions, increased the possibilities of clashing, until finally the relations between the two underwent a singular reversal; and the friars, if disposed to be satirical, might well have said that, however bad a rule might be which would not work both ways, a rule which did was not of necessity a good one, it being now the duty of the missions to support the presidios; the military governors being authorized to draw upon the friars not only for supplies, but for contributions of money and for levies of laborers.[4]

On the other hand, no lands could be set off or assigned for colonists without consent of the friars, and there were many other curious and entangling cross-purpose powers distributed between friars and military governors quite sufficient to make it next to impossible for things to go smoothly.

The mission affairs, so far as their own internal interests were concerned, were administered with admirable simplicity and system. The friars in charge of the missions were responsible directly to the president, or prefect, of the missions. He, in turn, was responsible to the president, or guardian, of the Franciscan College in San Fernando, in Mexico. One responsible officer, called procurador, was kept in the city of Mexico to buy supplies for the missions from stipends due, and from the drafts given to the friars by the presidio commanders for goods furnished to the presidios. There was also a syndic, or general agent, at San Bias, who attended to the shipping and forwarding of supplies. It was a happy combination of the minimum of functionaries with the maximum of responsibility.

The income supporting the missions was derived from two sources, the first of which was a fund, called the "Pious Fund," originally belonging to the Jesuit order, but on the suppression of that order, in 1868, taken possession of by the Spanish Government in trust for the Church. This fund, begun early in the eighteenth century, was made up of estates, mines, manufactories, and flocks,—all gifts of rich Catholics to the Society of Jesus. It yielded an income of fifty thousand dollars a year, the whole of which belonged to the Church, and was to be used in paying stipends to the friars (to the Dominicans in Lower as well as to the Franciscans in Upper California), and in the purchasing of articles needed in the missions. The missions' second source of income was from the sales of their own products: first to the presidios,—these sales paid for by drafts on the Spanish or Mexican Government; second, to trading ships, coming more and more each year to the California coast.

As soon as revolutionary troubles began to agitate Spain and Mexico, the income of the missions from abroad began to fall off. The Pious Fund was too big a sum to be honestly administered by any government hard pressed for money. Spain began to filch from it early, to pay the bills of her wars with Portugal and England; and Mexico, as soon as she had the chance, followed Spain's example vigorously, selling whole estates and pocketing their price, farming the fund out for the benefit of the State treasury, and, finally, in Santa Anna's time, selling the whole outright to two banking-houses. During these troublous times the friars not only failed frequently to receive their regular stipends allotted from the interest of this Pious Fund, but their agent was unable to collect the money due them for the supplies furnished to the presidios. The sums of which they were thus robbed by two governments—that, being ostensibly of the Catholic faith, should surely have held the Church's property sacred—mounted up in a few years to such enormous figures that restitution would have been practically impossible, and, except for their own internal sources of revenue, the missions must have come to bankruptcy and ruin.

However, the elements which were to bring about this ruin were already at work,—were, indeed, inherent in the very system on which they had been founded. The Spanish Government was impatient to see carried out, and to reap the benefit of, the pueblo feature of its colonization plan. With a singular lack of realization of the time needed to make citizens out of savages, it had set ten years as the period at the expiration of which the Indian communities attached to the missions were to be formed into pueblos,—the missions to be secularized, that is, turned into curacies, the pueblo being the parish. This was, no doubt, the wise and proper ultimate scheme,—the only one, in fact, which provided either for the entire civilization of the Indian or the successful colonization of the country. But five times ten years would have been little enough to allow for getting such a scheme fairly under way, and another five times ten years for the finishing and rounding of the work. It is strange how sure civilized peoples are, when planning and legislating for savages, to forget that it has always taken centuries to graft on or evolve out of savagery anything like civilization.

Aiming towards this completing of their colonization plan, the Spanish Government had very early founded the pueblos of Los Angeles and San José. A second class of pueblos, called, in the legal phrase of California's later days, "Presidial Pueblos," had originated in the settlement of the presidios, and gradually grown up around them. There were four of these,—San Diego, Monterey, Santa Barbara, and San Francisco.

It is easy to see how, as these settlements increased, of persons more or less unconnected with the missions, there must have grown up discontent at the Church's occupation and control of so large a proportion of the country. Ready for alliance with this discontent was the constant jealousy on the part of the military authorities, whose measures were often—and, no doubt, often rightly—opposed by the friars. These fomenting causes of disquiet reacted on the impatience and greed in Spain; all together slowly, steadily working against the missions, until, in 1813, the Spanish Cortes passed an act decreeing their secularization. This was set forth in sounding phrase as an act purely for the benefit of the Indians, that they might become citizens of towns. But it was, to say the least of it, as much for Spain as for the Indians, since, by its provisions, one half of the mission lands were to be sold for the payment of Spain's national debt. This act, so manifestly premature, remained a dead letter; but it alarmed the friars, and with reason. It was the tocsin of their doom, of the downfall of their establishments, and the ruin of their work.

Affairs grew more and more unsettled. Spanish viceroys and Mexican insurgents took turns at ruling in Mexico, and the representatives of each took turns at ruling in California. The waves of every Mexican revolution broke on the California shore. The College of San Fernando, in Mexico, also shared in the general confusion, and many of its members returned to Spain.

From 1817 to 1820 great requisitions were made by the Government upon the missions. They responded generously. They gave not only food, but money. They submitted to a tax, per capita, on all their thousands of Indians, to pay the expenses of a deputy to sit in the Mexican Congress. They allowed troops to be quartered in the mission buildings. At the end of the year 1820 the outstanding drafts on the Government, in favor of the missions, amounted to four hundred thousand dollars.

It is impossible, in studying the records of this time, not to feel that the friars were, in the main, disposed to work in good faith for the best interests of the State. That they opposed the secularization project is true; but it is unjust to assume that their motives in so doing were purely selfish. Most certainly, the results of the carrying out of that project were such as to prove all that they claimed of its untimeliness. It is easy saying, as their enemies do, that they would never have advocated it, and were not training the Indians with a view to it: but the first assertion is an assumption, and nothing more; and the refutation of the second lies in the fact that even in that short time they had made the savages into "masons, carpenters, plasterers, soap-makers, tanners, shoe-makers, blacksmiths, millers, bakers, cooks, brick-makers, carters and cart-makers, weavers and spinners, saddlers, ship hands, agriculturists, herdsmen, vintagers;—in a word, they filled all the laborious occupations known to civilized society."[5] Moreover, in many of the missions, plots of land had already been given to individual neophytes who seemed to have intelligence and energy enough to begin an independent life for themselves. But it is idle speculating now as to what would or would not have been done under conditions which never existed.

So long as Spain refused to recognize Mexico's independence, the majority of the friars, as was natural, remained loyal to the Spanish Government, and yielded with reluctance and under protest, in every instance, to Mexico's control. For some years President Sarria was under arrest for refusing to take the oath of allegiance to the Mexican republic. Nevertheless, it not being convenient to remove him and fill his place, he performed all his functions as president of the missions through that time. Many other friars refused to take the oath, and left the country in consequence. During three years the secularization project was continually agitated, and at intervals measures initiatory to it were decreed and sometimes acted upon.

The shifting governors of unfortunate California legislated for or against the mission interests according to the exigencies of their needs or the warmness or lukewarmness of their religious faith.

An act of one year, declaring the Indians liberated, and ordering the friars to turn over the mission properties to administrators, would be followed a few years later by an act restoring the power of the friars, and giving back to them all that remained to be rescued of the mission properties and converts. All was anarchy and confusion. During the fifty-five years that California was under Spanish rule she had but nine governors. During the twenty-four that she was under Mexican misrule she had thirteen. It would be interesting to know what the Indian populations thought, as they watched these quarrellings and intrigues among the Christians who were held up to them as patterns for imitation.

In a curious pamphlet left by one of the old friars, Father Boscana, is told a droll story of the logical inferences some of them drew from the political situations among their supposed betters. It was a band of San Diego Indians. When they heard that the Spanish viceroy in the city of Mexico had been killed, and a Mexican made emperor in his place, they forthwith made a great feast, burned up their chief, and elected a new one in his stead. To the stringent reproofs of the horrified friars they made answer: "Have you not done the same in Mexico? You say your king was not good, and you killed him. Well, our captain was not good, and we burned him. If the new one turns out bad, we will burn him too,"—a memorable instance of the superiority of example to precept.

At last, in 1834, the final blow fell on the missions. The Governor of California, in compliance with instructions received from Mexico, issued an authoritative edict for their secularization. It was a long document, and had many significant provisions in it. It said that the Indians were now to be "emancipated." But the 16th article said that they "should be obliged to join in such labors of community as are indispensable, in the opinion of the political chief, in the cultivation of the vineyards, gardens, and fields, which for the present remain unapportioned." This was a curious sort of emancipation; and it is not surprising to read, in the political records of the time, such paragraphs as this: "Out of one hundred and sixty Indian families at San Diego, to whom emancipation was offered by Governor Figueroa, only ten could be induced to accept it." The friars were to hand over all records and inventories to stewards or administrators appointed. Boards of magistrates were also appointed for each village. One half of the movable property was to be divided among the "emancipated persons," and to each head of a family was to be given four hundred square yards of land. Everything else—lands, movable properties, property of all classes—was to be put into the hands of the administrator, to be held subject to the Federal Government. Out of these properties the administrators were to provide properly for the support of the father or fathers left in charge of the church, the church properties, and the souls of the "emancipated persons." A more complete and ingenious subversion of the previously existing state of things could not have been devised; and it is hard to conceive how any student of the history of the period can see, in its shaping and sudden enforcing, anything except bold and unprincipled greed hiding itself under specious cloaks of right. Says Dwinelle, in his "Colonial History:"—

"Beneath these specious pretexts was undoubtedly a perfect understanding between the Government of Mexico and the leading men in California, that in such a condition of things the Supreme Government might absorb the Pious Fund, under the pretence that it was no longer necessary for missionary purposes, and thus had reverted to the State as a quasi escheat, while the co-actors in California should appropriate the local wealth of the missions by the rapid and sure process of administering their temporalities."

Of the manner in which the project was executed, Dwinelle goes on to say:—

"These laws, whose ostensible purpose was to convert the missionary establishments into Indian pueblos, their churches into parish churches, and to elevate the Christianized Indians to the rank of citizens, were after all executed in such a manner that the so-called secularization of the missions resulted in their plunder and complete ruin, and in the demoralization and dispersion of the Christianized Indians."

It is only just to remember, however, that these laws and measures were set in force in a time of revolution, when even the best measures and laws could have small chance of being fairly executed, and that a government which is driven, as Mexico was, to recruiting its colonial forces by batches of selected prison convicts, is entitled to pity, if not charity, in our estimates of its conduct. Of course, the position of administrator of a mission became at once a political reward and a chance for big gains, and simply, therefore, a source and centre of bribery and corruption.

Between the governors—who now regarded the mission establishments as State property, taking their cattle or grain as freely as they would any other revenue, and sending orders to a mission for tallow as they would draw checks on the treasury—and the administrators, who equally regarded them as easy places for the filling of pockets, the wealth of the missions disappeared as dew melts in the sun. Through all this the Indians were the victims. They were, under the administrators, compelled to work far harder than before; they were ill-fed and ill-treated; they were hired out in gangs to work in towns or on farms, under masters who regarded them simply as beasts of burden; their rights to the plots of land which had been set off for them were, almost without exception, ignored. A more pitiable sight has not often been seen on earth than the spectacle of this great body of helpless, dependent creatures, suddenly deprived of their teachers and protectors, thrown on their own resources, and at the mercy of rapacious and unscrupulous communities, in time of revolution. The best comment on their sufferings is to be found in the statistics of the mission establishments after a few years of the administrators' reign.

In 1834 there were, according to the lowest estimates, from fifteen to twenty thousand Indians in the missions. De Mofras's statistics give the number as 30,620. In 1840 there were left, all told, but six thousand. In many of the missions there were less than one hundred. According to De Mofras, the cattle, sheep, horses, and mules, in 1834, numbered 808,000; in 1842, but 6,320. Other estimates put the figures for 1834 considerably lower. It is not easy to determine which are true; but the most moderate estimates of all tell the story with sufficient emphasis. There is also verbal testimony on these points still to be heard in California, if one has patience and interest enough in the subject to listen to it. There are still living, wandering about, half blind, half starved, in the neighborhood of the mission sites, old Indians who recollect the mission times in the height of their glory. Their faces kindle with a sad flicker of recollected happiness, as they tell of the days when they had all they wanted to eat, and the padres were so good and kind: "Bueno tiempo! Bueno tiempo," they say, with a hopeless sigh and shake of the head.

Under the new régime the friars suffered hardly less than the Indians. Some fled the country, unable to bear the humiliations and hardships of their positions under the control of the administrators or majors-domo, and dependent on their caprice for shelter and even for food. Among this number was Father Antonio Peyri, who had been for over thirty years in charge of the splendid mission of San Luis Rey. In 1800, two years after its founding, this mission had 369 Indians. In 1827 it had 2,686; it owned over twenty thousand head of cattle, and nearly twenty thousand sheep. It controlled over two hundred thousand acres of land, and there were raised in its fields in one year three thousand bushels of wheat, six thousand of barley, and ten thousand of corn. No other mission had so fine a church. It was one hundred and sixty feet long, fifty wide, and sixty high, with walls four feet thick. A tower at one side held a belfry for eight bells. The corridor on the opposite side had two hundred and fifty-six arches. Its gold and silver ornaments are said to have been superb.

When Father Peyri made up his mind to leave the country, he slipped off by night to San Diego, hoping to escape without the Indians' knowledge. But, missing him in the morning, and knowing only too well what it meant, five hundred of them mounted their ponies in hot haste, and galloped all the way to San Diego, forty-five miles, to bring him back by force. They arrived just as the ship, with Father Peyri on board, was weighing anchor. Standing on the deck, with outstretched arms he blessed them, amid their tears and loud cries. Some flung themselves into the water and swam after the ship. Four reached it, and clinging to its sides, so implored to be taken that the father consented, and carried them with him to Rome, where one of them became a priest.

There were other touching instances in which the fathers refused to be separated from their Indian converts, and remained till the last by their side, sharing all their miseries and deprivations. De Mofras, in his visit to the country in 1842, found, at the mission of San Luis Obispo, Father Azagonais, a very old man, living in a hut, like the Indians, sleeping on a rawhide on the bare ground, with no drinking-vessel but an ox-horn, and no food but some dried meat hanging in the sun. The little he had he shared with the few Indians who still lingered there. Benevolent persons had offered him asylum; but he refused, saying that he would die at his post. At the San Antonio mission De Mofras found another aged friar, Father Gutierrez, living in great misery. The administrator of this mission was a man who had been formerly a menial servant in the establishment; he had refused to provide Father Gutierrez with the commonest necessaries, and had put him on an allowance of food barely sufficient to keep him alive.

At Soledad was a still more pitiful case. Father Sarria, who had labored there for thirty years, refused to leave the spot, even after the mission was so ruined that it was not worth any administrator's while to keep it. He and the handful of Indians who remained loyal to their faith and to him lived on there, growing poorer and poorer each day; he sharing his every morsel of food with them, and starving himself, till, one Sunday morning, saying mass at the crumbling altar, he fainted, fell forward, and died in their arms, of starvation. This was in 1838. Only eight years before, this Soledad mission had owned thirty-six thousand cattle, seventy thousand sheep, three hundred yoke of working oxen, more horses than any other mission, and had an aqueduct, fifteen miles long, supplying water enough to irrigate twenty thousand acres of land.

For ten years after the passage of the Secularization Act, affairs went steadily on from bad to worse with the missions. Each governor had his own plans and devices for making the most out of them, renting them, dividing them into parcels for the use of colonists, establishing pueblos on them, making them subject to laws of bankruptcy, and finally selling them. The departmental assemblies sometimes indorsed and sometimes annulled the acts of the governors. In 1842 Governor Micheltorena proclaimed that the twelve southern missions should be restored to the Church, and that the Government would not make another grant of land without the consent of the friars. This led to a revolution, or rather an ebullition, and Micheltorena was sent out of the country. To him succeeded Pio Pico, who remained in power till the occupation of California by the United States forces in 1846. During the reign of Pio Pico, the ruin of the mission establishments was completed. They were at first sold or rented in batches to the highest bidders. There was first a preliminary farce of proclamation to the Indians to return and take possession of the missions if they did not want them sold. These proclamations were posted up in the pueblos for months before the sales. In 1844 the Indians of Dolores, Soledad, San Miguel, La Purissima, and San Rafael[6] were thus summoned to come back to their missions,—a curious bit of half conscience-stricken, half politic recognition of the Indians' ownership of the lands, the act of the Departmental Assembly saying that if they (the Indians) did not return before such a date, the Government would declare said missions to be "without owners," and dispose of them accordingly. There must have been much bitter speech in those days when news of these proclamations reached the wilds where the mission Indians had taken refuge.

At last, in March, 1846, an act of the Departmental Assembly made the missions liable to the laws of bankruptcy, and authorized the governor to sell them to private persons. As by this time all the missions that had any pretence of existence left had been run hopelessly into debt, proceedings in regard to them were much simplified by this act. In the same year the President of Mexico issued an order to Governor Pico to use all means within his power to raise money to defend the country against the United States; and under color of this double authorization the governor forthwith proceeded to sell missions right and left. He sold them at illegal private sales; he sold them for insignificant sums, and for sums not paid at all; whether he was, to use the words of a well-known legal brief in one of the celebrated California land cases, "wilfully ignorant or grossly corrupt," there is no knowing, and it made no difference in the result.

One of the last acts of the Departmental Assembly, before the surrender of the country, was to declare all Governor Pico's sales of mission property null and void. And one of Governor Pico's last acts was, as soon as he had made up his mind to run away out of the country, to write to some of his special friends and ask them if there were anything else they would like to have him give them before his departure.

On the 7th of July, 1846, the American flag was raised in Monterey, and formal possession of California was taken by the United States. The proclamation of Admiral Sloat on this memorable occasion included these words: "All persons holding title to real estate, or in quiet possession of lands under color of right, shall have those titles and rights guaranteed to them." "Color of right" is a legal phrase, embodying a moral idea, an obligation of equity. If the United States Government had kept this guarantee, there would be living in comfortable homesteads in California to-day many hundreds of people that are now homeless and beggared,—Mexicans as well as Indians.

The army officers in charge of different posts in California, in these first days of the United States' occupation of the country, were perplexed and embarrassed by nothing so much as by the confusion existing in regard to the mission properties and lands. Everywhere men turned up with bills of sale from Governor Pico. At the San Diego mission the ostensible owner, one Estudillo by name, confessed frankly that he "did not think it right to dispose of the Indians' property in that way; but as everybody was buying missions, he thought he might as well have one."

In many of the missions, squatters, without show or semblance of title, were found; these the officers turned out. Finally, General Kearney, to save the trouble of cutting any more Gordian knots, declared that all titles of missions and mission lands must be held in abeyance till the United States Government should pronounce on them.

For several years the question remained unsettled, and the mission properties were held by those who had them in possession at the time of the surrender. But in 1856 the United States Land Commission gave, in reply to a claim and petition from the Catholic Bishop of California, a decision which, considered with reference to the situation of the mission properties at the time of the United States' possession, was perhaps as near to being equitable as the circumstances would admit. But, considered with reference to the status of the mission establishments under the Spanish rule, to their original extent, the scope of the work, and the magnificent success of their experiment up to the time of the revolutions, it seems a sadly inadequate return of property once rightfully held. Still, it was not the province of the United States to repair the injustices or make good the thefts of Spain and Mexico; and any attempt to clear up the tangle of confiscations, debts, frauds, and robberies in California, for the last quarter of a century before the surrender, would have been bootless work.

The Land Commissioner's decision was based on the old Spanish law which divided church property into two classes, sacred and ecclesiastical, and held it to be inalienable, except in case of necessity, and then only according to provisions of canon law; in the legal term, it was said to be "out of commerce." The sacred property was that which had been in a formal manner consecrated to God,—church buildings, sacred vessels, vestments, etc. Ecclesiastical property was land held by the Church, and appropriated to the maintenance of divine worship, or the support of the ministry; buildings occupied by the priests, or necessary for their convenience; gardens, etc. Following a similar division, the property of the mission establishments was held by the Land Commission to be of two sorts,—mission property and church property: the mission property, embracing the great tracts of land formerly cultivated for the community's purpose, it was decided, must be considered as government property; the church property, including, with the church buildings, houses of priests, etc., such smaller portions of land as were devoted to the immediate needs of the ministry, it was decided must still rightfully go to the Church. How many acres of the old gardens, orchards, vineyards, of the missions could properly be claimed by the Church under this head, was of course a question; and it seems to have been decided on very different bases in different missions, as some received much more than others. But all the church buildings, priests' houses, and some acres of land, more or less, with each, were pronounced by this decision to have been "before the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo solemnly dedicated to the use of the Church, and therefore withdrawn from commerce;" "such an interest is protected by the provisions of the treaty, and must be held inviolate under our laws." Thus were returned at last, into the inalienable possession of the Catholic Church, all that were left of the old mission churches, and some fragments of the mission lands. Many of them are still in operation as curacies; others are in ruins; of some not a trace is left,—not even a stone.

At San Diego the walls of the old church are still standing, unroofed, and crumbling daily. It was used as a cavalry barracks during the war of 1846, and has been a sheepfold since. Opposite it is an olive orchard, of superb hoary trees still in bearing; a cactus wall twenty feet high, and a cluster of date palms, are all that remain of the friars' garden.

At San Juan Capistrano, the next mission to the north, some parts of the buildings are still habitable. Service is held regularly in one of the small chapels. The priest lives there, and ekes out his little income by renting some of the mouldering rooms. The church is a splendid ruin. It was of stone, a hundred and fifty feet long by a hundred in width, with walls five feet thick, a dome eighty feet high, and a fine belfry of arches in which four bells rang. It was thrown down by an earthquake in 1812, on the day of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. Morning mass was going on, and the church was thronged; thirty persons were killed, and many more injured.

The little hamlet of San Juan Capistrano lies in harbor, as it were, looking out on its glimpse of sea, between two low spurs of broken and rolling hills, which in June are covered with shining yellow and blue and green, iridescent as a peacock's neck. It is worth going across the continent to come into the village at sunset of a June day. The peace, silence, and beauty of the spot are brooded over and dominated by the grand gray ruin, lifting the whole scene into an ineffable harmony. Wandering in room after room, court after court, through corridors with red-tiled roofs and hundreds of broad Roman arches, over fallen pillars, and through carved doorways, whose untrodden thresholds have sunk out of sight in summer grasses, one asks himself if he be indeed in America. On the interior walls are still to be seen spaces of brilliant fresco-work, in Byzantine patterns of superb red, pale green, gray and blue; and the corridors are paved with tiles, large and square. It was our good fortune to have with us, in San Juan Capistrano, a white-haired Mexican, who in his boyhood had spent a year in the mission. He remembered as if it were yesterday its bustling life of fifty years ago, when the arched corridor ran unbroken around the great courtyard, three hundred feet square, and was often filled with Indians, friars, officers, and gay Mexican ladies looking on at a bull-fight in the centre. He remembered the splendid library, filled from ceiling to floor with books, extending one whole side of the square: in a corner, where had been the room in which he used to see sixty Indian women weaving at looms, we stood ankle-deep in furzy weeds and grass. He showed us the doorway, now closed up, which led into the friars' parlor. To this door, every Sunday, after mass, came the Indians, in long processions, to get their weekly gifts. Each one received something,—a handkerchief, dress, trinket, or money. While their gifts were being distributed, a band of ten or twelve performers, all Indians, played lively airs on brass and stringed instruments. In a little baptistery, dusky with cobweb and mould, we found huddled a group of wooden statues of saints, which once stood in niches in the church; on their heads were faded and brittle wreaths, left from the last occasion on which they had done duty. One had lost an eye; another a hand. The gilding and covering of their robes were dimmed and defaced. But they had a dignity which nothing could destroy. The contours were singularly expressive and fine, and the rendering of the drapery was indeed wonderful,—flowing robes and gathered and lifted mantles, all carved in solid wood.

There are statues of this sort to be seen in several of the old mission churches. They were all carved by the Indians, many of whom showed great talent in that direction. There is also in the office of the justice—or alcalde, as he is still called—of San Juan Capistrano, a carved chair of noticeably bold and graceful design made by Indian workmen. A few tatters of heavy crimson brocade hang on it still, relics of the time when it formed part of a gorgeous paraphernalia and service.

Even finer than the ruins of San Juan Capistrano are those of the church at San Luis Rey. It has a perfectly proportioned dome over the chancel, and beautiful groined arches on either hand and over the altar. Four broad pilasters on each side of the church are frescoed in a curious mixing of blues, light and dark, with reds and black, which have faded and blended into a delicious tone. A Byzantine pulpit hanging high on the wall, and three old wooden statues in niches, are the only decorations left. Piles of dirt and rubbish fill the space in front of the altar, and grass and weeds are growing in the corners; great flocks of wild doves live in the roof, and have made the whole place unclean and foul-aired. An old Mexican, eighty years old, a former servant of the mission, has the ruin in charge, and keeps the doors locked still, as if there were treasure to guard. The old man is called "alcalde" by the village people, and seems pleased to be so addressed. His face is like wrinkled parchment, and he walks bent into a parenthesis, but his eyes are bright and young. As he totters along, literally holding his rags together, discoursing warmly of the splendors he recollects, he seems indeed a ghost from the old times.

The most desolate ruin of all is that of the La Purissima Mission. It is in the Lompoc valley, two days' easy journey north of Santa Barbara. Nothing is left there but one long, low adobe building, with a few arches of the corridor; the doors stand open, the roof is falling in: it has been so often used as a stable and sheepfold, that even the grasses are killed around it. The painted pulpit hangs half falling on the wall, its stairs are gone, and its sounding-board is slanting awry. Inside the broken altar-rail is a pile of stones, earth, and rubbish, thrown up by seekers after buried treasures; in the farther corner another pile and hole, the home of a badger; mud-swallows' nests are thick on the cornice, and cobwebbed rags of the old canvas ceiling hang fluttering overhead. The only trace of the ancient cultivation is a pear-orchard a few rods off, which must have been a splendid sight in its day; it is at least two hundred yards square, with a double row of trees all around, so placed as to leave between them a walk fifty or sixty feet wide. Bits of broken aqueduct here and there, and a large, round stone tank overgrown by grass, showed where the life of the orchard used to flow in, it has been many years slowly dying of thirst. Many of the trees are gone, and those that remain stretch out gaunt and shrivelled boughs, which, though still bearing fruit, look like arms tossing in vain reproach and entreaty; a few pinched little blossoms seemed to heighten rather than lessen their melancholy look.

At San Juan Bautista there lingers more of the atmosphere of the olden time than is to be found in any other place in California. The mission church is well preserved; its grounds are enclosed and cared for; in its garden are still blooming roses and vines, in the shelter of palms, and with the old stone sun-dial to tell time. In the sacristy are oak chests, full of gorgeous vestments of brocades, with silver and gold laces. On one of these robes is an interesting relic. A lost or worn-out silken tassel had been replaced by the patient Indian workers with one of fine-shredded rawhide; the shreds wound with silver wire, and twisted into tiny rosettes and loops, closely imitating the silver device. The church fronts south, on a little green locust walled plaza,—the sleepiest, sunniest, dreamiest place in the world. To the east the land falls off abruptly, so that the paling on that side of the plaza is outlined against the sky, and its little locked gate looks as if it would open into the heavens. The mission buildings used to surround this plaza; after the friars' day came rich men living there; and a charming inn is kept now in one of their old adobe houses. On the east side of the church is a succession of three terraces leading down to a valley. On the upper one is the old graveyard, in which it is said there are sleeping four thousand Indians.

In 1825 there were spoken at this mission thirteen different Indian dialects.

Just behind the church is an orphan girls' school, kept by the Sisters of the Sacred Heart. At six o'clock every morning the bells of the church ring for mass as they used to ring when over a thousand Indians flocked at the summons. To-day, at the sound, there comes a procession of little girls and young maidens, the black-robed sisters walking before them with crossed hands and placid faces. One or two Mexican women, with shawls over their heads, steal across the faint paths of the plaza, and enter the church.

I shall always recollect the morning when I went, too. The silence of the plaza was in itself a memorial service, with locust blossoms swinging incense. It was barely dawn in the church. As the shrill yet sweet childish voices lifted up the strains of the Kyrie Eleison, I seemed to see the face of Father Junipero in the dim lighted chancel, and the benediction was as solemn as if he himself had spoken it. Why the little town of San Juan Bautista continues to exist is a marvel. It is shut out and cut off from everything; only two or three hundred souls are left in it; its streets are grass-grown; half its houses are empty. But it has a charm of sun, valley, hill, and seaward off-look unsurpassed in all California. Lingering out a peaceful century there are many old men and women, whose memories are like magic glasses, reproducing the pictures of the past. One such we found: a Mexican woman eighty-five years old, portly, jolly, keen-tongued, keen-eyed; the widow of one of the soldiers of the old mission guard. She had had twelve children; she had never been ill a week in her life; she is now the village nurse, and almost doctor. Sixty years back she remembered. "The Indians used to be in San Juan Bautista like sheep," she said, "by the thousand and thousand." They were always good, and the padres were always kind. Fifty oxen were killed for food every eight days, and everybody had all he wanted to eat. There was much more water then than now, plenty of rain, and the streams always full. "I don't know whether you or we were bad, that it has been taken away by God," she said, with a quick glance, half humorous, half antagonistic.

The Santa Barbara Mission is still in the charge of Franciscans, the only one remaining in their possession. It is now called a college for apostolic missionary work, and there are living within its walls eight members of the order. One of them is very old,—a friar of the ancient régime; his benevolent face is well known throughout the country, and there are in many a town and remote hamlet men and women who wait always for his coming before they will make confession. He is like St. Francis's first followers: the obligations of poverty and charity still hold to him the literal fulness of the original bond. He gives away garment after garment, leaving himself without protection against cold; and the brothers are forced to lock up and hide from him all provisions, or he would leave the house bare of food. He often kneels from midnight to dawn on the stone floor of the church, praying and chanting psalms; and when a terrible epidemic of small-pox broke out some years ago, he labored day and night, nursing the worst victims of it, shriving them, and burying them with his own hands. He is past eighty, and has not much longer to stay. He has outlived many things beside his own prime: the day of the sort of faith and work to which his spirit is attuned has passed by forever.

The mission buildings stand on high ground, three miles from the beach, west of the town and above it, looking to the sea. In the morning the sun's first rays flash full on its front, and at evening they linger late on its western wall. It is an inalienable benediction to the place. The longer one stays there the more he is aware of the influence on his soul, as well as of the importance in the landscape of the benign and stately edifice.

On the corridor of the inner court hangs a bell which is rung for the hours of the daily offices and secular duties. It is also struck whenever a friar dies, to announce that all is over. It is the duty of the brother who has watched the last breath of the dying one to go immediately and strike this bell. Its sad note has echoed many times through the corridors. One of the brothers said, last year,—

"The first time I rang that bell to announce a death, there were fifteen of us left. Now there are only eight."

The sentence itself fell on my ear like the note of a passing-bell. It seems a not unfitting last word to this slight and fragmentary sketch of the labors of the Franciscan Order in California.

Still more fitting, however, are the words of a historian, who, living in California and thoroughly knowing its history from first to last, has borne the following eloquent testimony to the friars and their work:—

"The results of the mission scheme of Christianization and colonization were such as to justify the plans of the wise statesman who devised it, and to gladden the hearts of the pious men who devoted their lives to its execution.

"At the end of sixty years the missionaries of Upper California found themselves in the possession of twenty-one prosperous missions, planted on a line of about seven hundred miles, running from San Diego north to the latitude of Sonoma. More than thirty thousand Indian converts were lodged in the mission buildings, receiving religious culture, assisting at divine worship, and cheerfully performing their easy tasks.... If we ask where are now the thirty thousand Christianized Indians who once enjoyed the beneficence and created the wealth of the twenty-one Catholic missions of California, and then contemplate the most wretched of all want of systems which has surrounded them under our own government, we shall not withhold our admiration from those good and devoted men who, with such wisdom, sagacity, and self-sacrifice, reared these wonderful institutions in the wilderness of California. They at least would have preserved these Indian races if they had been left to pursue unmolested their work of pious beneficence."[7]

Note.—The author desires to express her acknowledgments to H. H. Bancroft, of San Francisco, who kindly put at her disposal all the resources of his invaluable library; also to the Superior of the Franciscan College in Santa Barbara, for the loan of important books and manuscripts and the photograph of Father Junipero.

THE PRESENT CONDITION OF THE MISSION INDIANS IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA.

The old laws of the kingdom of the Indies are interesting reading, especially those portions of them relating to Indians. A certain fine and chivalrous quality of honor toward the helpless and tenderness toward the dependent runs all through their quaint and cumbrous paragraphs.

It is not until one studies these laws in connection with the history of the confusions and revolutions of the secularization period, and of the American conquest of California, that it becomes possible to understand how the California Mission Indians could have been left so absolutely unprotected, as they were, in the matter of ownership of the lands they had cultivated for sixty years.

"We command," said the Spanish king, "that the sale, grant, and composition of lands be executed with such attention that the Indians be left in possession of the full amount of lands belonging to them, either singly or in communities, together with their rivers and waters; and the lands which they shall have drained or otherwise improved, whereby they may by their own industry have rendered them fertile, are reserved, in the first place, and can in no case be sold or aliened. And the judges who have been sent thither shall specify what Indians they may have found on the land, and what lands they shall have left in possession of each of the elders of tribes, caciques, governors, or communities."

Grazing estates for cattle are ordered to be located "apart from the fields and villages of the Indians." The king's command is that no such estates shall be granted "in any parts or place where any damage can accrue to the Indians." Every grant of land must be made "without prejudice to the Indians;" and "such as may have been granted to their prejudice and injury" must be "restored to whomever they by right shall belong."

"In order to avoid the inconveniences and damages resulting from the sale or gift to Spaniards of tracts of land to the prejudice of Indians, upon the suspicious testimony of witnesses," the king orders that all sales and gifts are to be made before the attorneys of the royal audiencias, and "always with an eye to the benefit of the Indians;" and "the king's solicitors are to be protectors of the Indians and plead for them." "After distributing to the Indians what they may justly want to cultivate, sow, and raise cattle, confirming to them what they now hold, and granting what they may want besides, all the remaining land may be reserved to us," says the old decree, "clear of any incumbrance, for the purpose of being given as rewards, or disposed of according to our pleasure."

In those day's everything in New Spain was thus ordered by royal decrees. Nobody had grants of land in the sense in which we use the word. When the friars wished to reward an industrious and capable Indian, and test his capacity to take care of himself and family, by giving him a little farm of his own, all they had to do, or did, was to mark off the portion of land, put the Indian on it and tell him it was his. There would appear to have been little more formality than this in the establishing of the Indian pueblos which were formed in the beginning of the secularization period. Governor Figueroa, in an address in 1834, speaks of three of these, San Juan Capistrano, San Dieguito, and Las Flores, says that they are flourishing, and that the comparison between the condition of these Indians and that of the Spanish townsmen in the same region is altogether in favor of the Indians.

On Nov. 16, 1835, eighty-one "desafiliados"—as the ex-neophytes of missions were called—of the San Luis Rey Mission settled themselves in the San Pasqual valley, which was an appanage of that mission. These Indian communities appear to have had no documents to show their right, either as communities or individuals, to the land on which they had settled. At any rate, they had nothing which amounted to a protection, or stood in the way of settlers who coveted their lands. It is years since the last trace of the pueblos Las Flores and San Dieguito disappeared; and the San Pasqual valley is entirely taken up by white settlers, chiefly on pre-emption claims. San Juan Capistrano is the only one of the four where are to be found any Indians' homes. If those who had banded themselves together and had been set off into pueblos had no recognizable or defensible title, how much more helpless and defenceless were individuals, or small communities without any such semblance of pueblo organization!

Most of the original Mexican grants included tracts of land on which Indians were living, sometimes large villages of them. In many of these grants, in accordance with the old Spanish law or custom, was incorporated a clause protecting the Indians. They were to be left undisturbed in their homes: the portion of the grant occupied by them did not belong to the grantee in any such sense as to entitle him to eject them. The land on which they were living, and the land they were cultivating at the time of the grant, belonged to them as long as they pleased to occupy it. In many of the grants the boundaries of the Indians' reserved portion of the property were carefully marked off; and the instances were rare in which Mexican grantees disturbed or in any way interfered with Indians living on their estates. There was no reason why they should. There was plenty of land and to spare, and it was simply a convenience and an advantage to have the skilled and docile Indian laborer on the ground.

But when the easy-going, generous, improvident Mexican needed or desired to sell his grant, and the sharp American was on hand to buy it, then was brought to light the helplessness of the Indians' position. What cared the sharp American for that sentimental clause, "without injury to the Indians"? Not a farthing. Why should he? His government, before him, had decided that all the lands belonging to the old missions, excepting the small portions technically held as church property, and therefore "out of commerce," were government lands. None of the Indians living on those lands at the time of the American possession were held to have any right—not even "color of right"—to them. That they and their ancestors had been cultivating them for three quarters of a century made no difference. Americans wishing to pre-empt claims on any of these so-called government lands did not regard the presence on them of Indian families or communities as any more of a barrier than the presence of so many coyotes or foxes. They would not hesitate to certify to the land office that such lands were "unoccupied." Still less, then, need the purchaser of tracts covered by old Mexican grants hold himself bound to regard the poor cumberers of the ground, who, having no legal right whatever, had been all their years living on the tolerance of a silly, good-hearted Mexican proprietor. The American wanted every rod of his land, every drop of water on it; his schemes were boundless; his greed insatiable; he had no use for Indians. His plan did not embrace them, and could not enlarge itself to take them in. They must go. This is, in brief, the summing up of the way in which has come about the present pitiable state of the California Mission Indians.

In 1852 a report in regard to these Indians was made to the Interior Department by the Hon. B. D. Wilson, of Los Angeles. It is an admirable paper, clear and exhaustive. Mr. Wilson was an old Californian, had known the Indians well, and had been eyewitness to much of the cruelty and injustice done them. He says:—

"In the fall of the missions, accomplished by private cupidity and political ambition, philanthropy laments the failure of one of the grandest experiments ever made for the elevation of this unfortunate race."

He estimates that there were at that time in the counties of Tulare, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, and San Diego over fifteen thousand Indians who had been connected with the missions in those counties. They were classified as the Tulareños, Cahuillas, San Luiseños, and Diegueños, the latter two being practically one nation, speaking one language, and being more generally Christianized than the others. They furnished, Mr. Wilson says, "the majority of the laborers, mechanics, and servants of San Diego and Los Angeles counties." They all spoke the Spanish language, and a not inconsiderable number could read and write it. They had built all the houses in the country, had taught the whites how to make brick, mud mortar, how to use asphalt on roofs; they understood irrigation, were good herders, reapers, etc. They were paid only half the wages paid to whites; and being immoderate gamblers, often gambled away on Saturday night and Sunday all they had earned in the week. At that time in Los Angeles nearly every other house in town was a grog-shop for Indians. In the San Pasqual valley there were twenty white vagabonds, all rum-sellers, squatted at one time around the Indian pueblo. The Los Angeles ayuntamiento had passed an edict declaring that "all Indians without masters"—significant phrase!—must live outside the town limits; also, that all Indians who could not show papers from the alcalde of the pueblo in which they lived, should be treated as "horse thieves and enemies."

On Sunday nights the squares and streets of Los Angeles were often to be seen full of Indians lying about helpless in every stage of intoxication. They were picked up by scores, unconscious, carried to jail, locked up, and early Monday morning hired out to the highest bidders at the jail gates. Horrible outrages were committed on Indian women and children. In some instances the Indians armed to avenge these, and were themselves killed.

These are a few out of hundreds of similar items to be gathered from the newspaper records of the time. Conditions such as these could have but one outcome. Twenty years later, when another special report on the condition of the California Mission Indians was asked for by the Government, not over five thousand Indians remained to be reported on. Vice and cruelty had reaped large harvests each year. Many of the rich valleys, which at the time of Mr. Wilson's report had been under cultivation by Indians, were now filled by white settlers, the Indians all gone, no one could tell where. In some instances whole villages of them had been driven off at once by fraudulently procured and fraudulently enforced claims. One of the most heart-rending of these cases was that of the Temecula Indians.

The Temecula valley lies in the northeast corner of San Diego County. It is watered by two streams and has a good soil. The Southern California Railroad now crosses it. It was an appanage of the San Luis Rey Mission, and the two hundred Indians who were living there were the children and grandchildren of San Luis Rey neophytes. The greater part of the valley was under cultivation. They had cattle, horses, sheep. In 1865 a "special agent" of the United States Government held a grand Indian convention there. Eighteen villages were represented, and the numbers of inhabitants, stock, vineyards, orchards, were reported. The Indians were greatly elated at this evidence of the Government's good intentions toward them. They set up a tall liberty-pole, and bringing forth a United States flag, which they had kept carefully hidden away ever since the beginning of the civil war, they flung it out to the winds in token of their loyalty. "It is astonishing," says one of the San Diego newspapers of the day, "that these Indians have behaved so well, considering the pernicious teachings they have had from the secessionists in our midst."

There was already anxiety in the minds of the Temecula Indians as to their title to their lands. All that was in existence to show that they had any, was the protecting clause in an old Mexican grant. To be sure, the man was still alive who had assisted in marking off the boundaries of their part of this original Temecula grant; but his testimony could establish nothing beyond the letter of the clause as it stood. They earnestly implored the agent to lay the case before the Interior Department. Whether he did or not I do not know, but this is the sequel: On April 15, 1869, an action was brought in the District Court, in San Francisco, by five men, against "Andrew Johnson, Thaddeus Stevens, Horace Greeley, and one thousand Indians, and other parties whose names are unknown." It was "a bill to quit title," an "action to recover possession of certain real estate bounded thus and thus." It included the Temecula valley. It was based on grants made by Governor Micheltorena in 1844. The defendants cited were to appear in court within twenty days.

The Indians appealed to the Catholic bishop to help them. He wrote to one of the judges an imploring letter, saying, "Can you not do something to save these poor Indians from being driven out?" But the scheme had been too skilfully plotted. There was no way—or, at any rate, no way was found—of protecting the Indians. The day came when a sheriff, bringing a posse of men and a warrant which could not be legally resisted, arrived to eject the Indian families from their houses and drive them out of the valley. The Indians' first impulse was as determined as it could have been if they had been white, to resist the outrage. But on being reasoned with by friends, who sadly and with shame explained to them that by thus resisting, they would simply make it the duty of the sheriff to eject them by force, and, if necessary, shoot down any who opposed the executing of his warrant, they submitted. But they refused to lift hand to the moving. They sat down, men and women, on the ground, and looked on, some wailing and weeping, some dogged and silent, while the sheriff and his men took out of the neat little adobe houses their small stores of furniture, clothes, and food, and piled them on wagons to be carried—where?—anywhere the exiles chose, so long as they did not chance to choose a piece of any white man's land.

A Mexican woman is now living in that Temecula valley who told me the story of this moving. The facts I had learned before from records of one sort and another. But standing on the spot, looking at the ruins of the little adobe houses, and the walled graveyard full of graves, and hearing this woman tell how she kept her doors and windows shut, and could not bear to look out while the deed was being done, I realized forcibly how different a thing is history seen from history written and read.

It took three days to move them. Procession after procession, with cries and tears, walked slowly behind the wagons carrying their household goods. They took the tule roofs off the little houses, and carried them along. They could be used again. Some of these Indians, wishing to stay as near as possible to their old home, settled in a small valley, only three miles and a half away to the south. It was a dreary, hot little valley, bare, with low, rocky buttes cropping out on either side, and with scanty growths of bushes; there was not a drop of water in it. Here the exiles went to work again; built their huts of reeds and straw; set up a booth of boughs for the priest, when he came, to say mass in; and a rude wooden cross to consecrate their new graveyard on a stony hill-side. They put their huts on barren knolls here and there, where nothing could grow. On the tillable land they planted wheat or barley or orchards,—some patches not ten feet square, the largest not over three or four acres. They hollowed out the base of one of the rocky buttes, sunk a well there, and found water.

I think none of us who saw this little refugee village will ever forget it. The whole place was a series of pictures; and knowing its history, we found in each low roof and paling the dignity of heroic achievement. Near many of the huts stood great round baskets woven of twigs, reaching half-way up to the eaves and looking like huge birds'-nests. These were their granaries, holding acorns and wheat. Women with red pottery jars on their heads and on their backs were going to and from the well; old men were creeping about, bent over, carrying loads of fagots that would have seemed heavy for a donkey; aged women sitting on the ground were diligently plaiting baskets, too busy or too old to give more than a passing look at us. A group of women was at work washing wool in great stone bowls, probably hundreds of years old. The interiors of some of the houses were exquisitely neat and orderly, with touching attempts at adornment,—pretty baskets and shelves hanging on the walls, and over the beds canopies of bright calico. On some of the beds, the sheets and pillow-cases were trimmed with wide hand-wrought lace, made by the Indian women themselves. This is one of their arts which date back to the mission days. Some of the lace is beautiful and fine, and of patterns like the old church laces. It was pitiful to see the poor creatures in almost every one of the hovels bringing out a yard or two of their lace to sell; and there was hardly a house which had not the lace-maker's frame hanging on the wall, with an unfinished piece of lace stretched in it. The making of this lace requires much time and patience. It is done by first drawing out all the lengthwise threads of a piece of fine linen or cotton; then the threads which are left are sewed over and over into an endless variety of intricate patterns. Sometimes the whole design is done in solid button-hole stitch, or solid figures are filled in on an open network made of the threads. The baskets were finely woven, of good shapes, and excellent decorative patterns in brown and black on yellow or white.

Every face, except those of the very young, was sad beyond description. They were stamped indelibly by generations of suffering, immovable distrust also underlying the sorrow. It was hard to make them smile. To all our expressions of good-will and interest they seemed indifferent, and received in silence the money we paid them for baskets and lace.

The word "Temecula" is an Indian word, signifying "grief" or "mourning." It seems to have had a strangely prophetic fitness for the valley to which it was given.

While I am writing these lines, the news comes that, by an executive order of the President, the little valley in which these Indians took refuge has been set apart for them as a reservation. No doubt they know how much executive orders creating Indian reservations are worth. There have been several such made and revoked in California within their memories. The San Pasqual valley was at one time set apart by executive order as a reservation for Indians. This was in 1870. There were then living in the valley between two and three hundred Indians; some of them had been members of the original pueblo established there in 1835.

The comments of the California newspapers on this executive order are amusing, or would be if they did not record such tragedy. It was followed by an outburst of virtuous indignation all along the coast. One paper said:

"The iniquity of this scheme is made manifest when we state the fact that the Indians of that part of the State are Mission Indians who are settled in villages and engaged in farming like the white settlers.... It would be gross injustice to the Indians themselves as well as to the white settlers in San Pasqual.... These Indians are as fixed in their habitations as the whites, and have fruit-trees, buildings, and other valuable improvements to make them contented and comfortable. Until within the past two or three years they raised more fruit than the white settlers of the southern counties. There is belonging to an Indian family there a fig-tree that is the largest in the State, covering a space sixty paces in diameter.... A remonstrance signed by over five hundred citizens and indorsed by every office-holder in the county has gone on to Washington against this swindle.... This act on the part of the Government is no better than highway robbery, and the persons engaged in it are too base to be called men. There is not a person in either of these valleys that will not be ruined pecuniarily if these orders are enforced."

Looking through files of newspapers of that time, I found only one that had the moral courage to uphold the measure. That paper said,—

"Most of the inhabitants are now Indians who desire to be protected in their ancient possessions; and the Government is about to give them that protection, after a long delay."

One editor, having nearly exhausted the resources of invective and false statement, actually had the hardihood to say that Indians could not be induced to live on this reservation because "there are no acorn-bearing trees there, and the acorns furnish their principal food."

The congressmen and their clients were successful. The order was revoked. In less than four years the San Pasqual Indians are heard from again. A justice of the peace in the San Pasqual valley writes to the district attorney to know if anything can be done to protect these Indians.

"Last year," he says, "the heart of this rancheria (village) was filed on and pre-empted. The settlers are beginning to plough up the land. The Los Angeles Land Office has informed the Indians that, not being citizens, they cannot retain any claim. It seems very hard," says the judge, "aside from the danger of difficulties likely to arise from it."

About this time a bill introduced in Congress to provide homes for the Mission Indians on the reservation plan was reported unfavorably upon by a Senate committee, on the ground that all the Mission Indians were really American citizens. The year following, the chief of the Pala Indians, being brought to the county clerk's office to register as a voter, was refused on the ground that, being an Indian, he was not a citizen. In 1850 a small band of Indians living in San Diego County were taxed to the amount of six hundred dollars, which they paid, the sheriff said, "without a murmur." The next year they refused. The sheriff wrote to the district attorney, who replied that the tax must be paid. The Indians said they had no money. They had only bows, arrows, wigwams, and a few cattle. Finally, they were compelled to drive in enough of their cattle to pay the tax. One of the San Diego newspapers spoke of the transaction as "a small business to undertake to collect taxes from a parcel of naked Indians."

The year before these events happened a special agent, John G. Ames, had been sent out by the Government to investigate and report upon the condition of the Mission Indians. He had assured them "of the sincere desire of the Government to secure their rights and promote their interests, and of its intention to do whatever might be found practicable in this direction." He told them he had been "sent out by the Government to hear their story, to examine carefully into their condition, and to recommend such measures as seemed under the circumstances most desirable."

Mr. Ames found in the San Pasqual valley a white man who had just built for himself a good house, and claimed to have pre-empted the greater part of the Indians' village. He "had actually paid the price of the land to the register of the land office of the district, and was daily expecting the patent from Washington. He owned that it was hard to wrest from these well-disposed and industrious creatures the homes they had built up. 'But,' said he, 'if I had not done it, somebody else would; for all agree that the Indian has no right to public lands.'"

This sketch of the history of the San Pasqual and Temecula bands of Indians is a fair showing of what, with little variation, has been the fate of the Mission Indians all through Southern California. The combination of cruelty and unprincipled greed on the part of the American settlers, with culpable ignorance, indifference, and neglect on the part of the Government at Washington has resulted in an aggregate of monstrous injustice, which no one can fully realize without studying the facts on the ground. In the winter of 1882 I visited this San Pasqual valley. I drove over from San Diego with the Catholic priest, who goes there three or four Sundays in a year, to hold service in a little adobe chapel built by the Indians in the days of their prosperity. This beautiful valley is from one to three miles wide, and perhaps twelve long. It is walled by high-rolling, soft-contoured hills, which are now one continuous wheat-field. There are, in sight of the chapel, a dozen or so adobe houses, many of which were built by the Indians; in all of them except one are now living the robber whites, who have driven the Indians out; only one Indian still remains in the valley. He earns a meagre living for himself and family by doing day's work for the farmers who have taken his land. The rest of the Indians are hidden away in the cañons and rifts of the near hills,—wherever they can find a bit of ground to keep a horse or two and raise a little grain. They have sought the most inaccessible spots, reached often by miles of difficult trail. They have fled into secret lairs like hunted wild beasts. The Catholic priest of San Diego is much beloved by them. He has been their friend for many years. When he goes to hold service, they gather from their various hiding-places and refuges; sometimes, on a special fête day, over two hundred come. But on the day I was there, the priest being a young man who was a stranger to them, only a few were present. It was a pitiful sight. The dilapidated adobe building, empty and comfortless; the ragged poverty-stricken creatures, kneeling on the bare ground,—a few Mexicans, with some gaudiness of attire, setting off the Indians' poverty still more. In front of the chapel, on a rough cross-beam supported by two forked posts, set awry in the ground, swung a bell bearing the date of 1770. It was one of the bells of the old San Diego Mission. Standing bareheaded, the priest rang it long and loud: he rang it several times before the leisurely groups that were plainly to be seen in doorways or on roadsides bestirred themselves to make any haste to come. After the service I had a long talk, through an interpreter, with an aged Indian, the oldest now living in the county. He is said to be considerably over a hundred, and his looks corroborate the statement. He is almost blind, and has snow-white hair, and a strange voice, a kind of shrill whisper. He says he recollects the rebuilding of the San Diego Mission; though he was a very little boy then, he helped to carry the mud mortar. This was one hundred and three years ago. Instances of much greater longevity than this, however, are not uncommon among the California Indians. I asked if he had a good time in the mission. "Yes, yes," he said, turning his sightless eyes up to the sky; "much good time," "plenty to eat," "atole," "pozzole," "meat;" now, "no meat;" "all the time to beg, beg;" "all the time hungry." His wife, who is older than he, is still living, though "her hair is not so white." She was ill, and was with relatives far away in the mountains; he lifted his hand and pointed in the direction of the place. "Much sick, much sick; she will never walk any more," he said, with deep feeling in his voice.

During the afternoon the Indians were continually coming and going at the shop connected with the inn where we had stopped, some four miles from the valley. The keeper of the shop and inn said he always trusted them. They were "good pay." "Give them their time and they'll always pay; and if they die their relations will pay the last cent." Some of them he would "trust any time as high as twenty dollars." When I asked him how they earned their money, he seemed to have no very distinct idea. Some of them had a little stock; they might now and then sell a horse or a cow, he said; they hired as laborers whenever they could get a chance, working at sheep-shearing in the spring and autumn, and at grape-picking in the vintage season. A few of them had a little wheat to sell; sometimes they paid him in wheat. There were not nearly so many of them, however, as there had been when he first opened his shop; not half so many, he thought. Where had they gone? He shrugged his shoulders. "Who knows?" he said.

The most wretched of all the Mission Indians now, however, are not these who have been thus driven into hill fastnesses and waterless valleys to wrest a living where white men would starve. There is in their fate the climax of misery, but not of degradation. The latter cannot be reached in the wilderness. It takes the neighborhood of the white man to accomplish it. On the outskirts of the town of San Diego are to be seen, here and there, huddled groups of what, at a distance, might be taken for piles of refuse and brush, old blankets, old patches of sail-cloth, old calico, dead pine boughs, and sticks all heaped together in shapeless mounds; hollow, one perceives on coming nearer them, and high enough for human beings to creep under. These are the homes of Indians. I have seen the poorest huts of the most poverty-stricken wilds in Italy, Bavaria, Norway, and New Mexico; but never have I seen anything, in shape of shelter for human creatures, so loathsome as the kennels in which some of the San Diego Indians are living. Most of these Indians are miserable, worthless beggars, drunkards of course, and worse. Even for its own sake, it would seem that the town would devise some scheme of help and redemption for such outcasts. There is a school in San Diego for the Indian children; it is supported in part by the Government, in part by charity; but work must be practically thrown away on children that are to spend eighteen hours out of the twenty-four surrounded by such filth and vice.

Coming from the study of the records of the old mission times, with the picture fresh and vivid of the tranquil industry and comfort of the Indians' lives in the mission establishments, one gazes with double grief on such a spectacle as this. Some of these Indian hovels are within a short distance of the beach where the friars first landed, in 1769, and began their work. No doubt, Father Junipero and Father Crespí, arm in arm, in ardent converse, full of glowing anticipation of the grand future results of their labors, walked again and again, up and down, on the very spot where these miserable wretches are living to-day. One cannot fancy Father Junipero's fiery soul, to whatever far sphere it may have been translated, looking down on this ruin without pangs of indignation.

There are still left in the mountain ranges of South California a few Indian villages which will probably, for some time to come, preserve their independent existence. Some of them number as many as two or three hundred inhabitants. Each has its chief, or, as he is now called, "capitan." They have their own system of government of the villages; it is autocratic, but in the main it works well. In one of these villages, that of the Cahuillas, situated in the San Jacinto range, is a school whose teacher is paid by the United States Government. She is a widow with one little daughter. She has built for herself a room adjoining the school-house. In this she lives alone, with her child, in the heart of the Indian village; there is not a white person within ten miles. She says that the village is as well-ordered, quiet, and peaceable as it is possible for a village to be; and she feels far safer, surrounded by these three hundred Cahuillas, than she would feel in most of the California towns. The Cahuillas (pronounced Kaweeyahs) were one of the fiercest and most powerful of the tribes. The name signifies "master," or "powerful nation." A great number of the neophytes of the San Gabriel Mission were from this tribe; but a large proportion of them were never attached to any mission.

Their last great chief, Juan Antonio, died twenty years ago. At the time of the Mexican War he received the title of General from General Kearney, and never afterward appeared in the villages of the whites without some fragmentary attempts at military uniform. He must have been a grand character, with all his barbarism. He ruled his band like an emperor, and never rode abroad without an escort of from twenty to thirty men. When he stopped one of his Indians ran forward, bent down, took off his spurs, then, kneeling on all-fours, made of his back a stool, on which Juan stepped in dismounting and mounting. In 1850 an Indian of this tribe, having murdered another Indian, was taken prisoner by the civil authorities and carried to Jurupa to be tried. Before the proceedings had begun, Juan, with a big following of armed Indians, dashed up to the court-house, strode in alone, and demanded that the prisoner be surrendered to him.

"I come not here as a child," he said. "I wish to punish my people my own way. If they deserve hanging, I will hang them. If a white man deserves hanging, let the white man hang him. I am done."

The prisoner was given up. The Indians strapped him on a horse, and rode back to their village, where, in an open grave, the body of the murdered man had been laid. Into this grave, on the top of the corpse of his victim, Juan Antonio, with his own hands, flung the murderer alive, and ordered the grave instantly filled up with earth.

There are said to have been other instances of his dealings with offenders nearly as summary and severe as this. He is described as looking like an old African lion, shaggy and fierce; but he was always cordial and affectionate in his relations with the whites. He died in 1863, of small-pox, in a terrible epidemic which carried off thousands of Indians.

This Cahuilla village is in a small valley, high up in the San Jacinto range. The Indians are very poor, but they are industrious and hard-working. The men raise stock, and go out in bands as sheep-shearers and harvesters. The women make baskets, lace, and from the fibre of the yucca plant, beautiful and durable mats, called "cocas," which are much sought after by California ranchmen as saddle-mats. The yucca fibres are soaked and beaten like flax; some are dyed brown, some bleached white, and the two woven together in a great variety of patterns.

In the San Jacinto valley, some thirty miles south of these Cahuillas, is another Indian village called Saboba. These Indians have occupied and cultivated this ground since the days of the missions. They have good adobe houses, many acres of wheat-fields, little peach and apricot orchards, irrigating ditches, and some fences. In one of the houses I found a neatly laid wooden floor, a sewing-machine, and the walls covered with pictures cut from illustrated newspapers which had been given to them by the school teacher. There is a Government school here, numbering from twenty to thirty; the children read as well as average white children of their age, and in manners and in apparent interest in their studies, were far above the average of children in the public schools.

One of the colony schemes, so common now in California, has been formed for the opening up and settling of the San Jacinto valley. This Indian village will be in the colony's way. In fact, the colony must have its lands and its water. It is only a question of a very little time, the driving out of these Saboba families as the Temeculas and San Pasquales were driven,—by force, just as truly as if at the point of the bayonet.

In one of the beautiful cañons opening on this valley is the home of Victoriano, an aged chief of the band. He is living with his daughter and grandchildren, in a comfortable adobe house at the head of the cañon. The vineyard and peach orchard which his father planted there, are in good bearing. His grandson Jesus, a young man twenty years old, in the summer of 1881 ploughed up and planted twenty acres of wheat. The boy also studied so faithfully in school that year—his first year at school—that he learned to read well in the "Fourth Reader;" this in spite of his being absent six weeks, in both spring and autumn, with the sheep-shearing band. A letter of his, written at my request to the Secretary of the Interior in behalf of his people, is touching in its simple dignity.

San Jacinto, Cal., May 29, 1882.

Mr. Teller.

Dear Sir,—At the request of my friends, I write you in regard to the land of my people.

More than one hundred years ago, my great-grandfather, who was chief of his tribe, settled with his people in the San Jacinto valley. The people have always been peaceful, never caring for war, and have welcomed Americans into the valley.

Some years ago a grant of land was given to the Estudillos by the Mexican Government. The first survey did not take in any of the land claimed by the Indians; but four years ago a new survey was made, taking in all the little farms, the stream of water, and the village. Upon this survey the United States Government gave a patent. It seems hard for us to be driven from our homes that we love as much as other people do theirs; and this danger is at our doors now, for the grant is being divided and the village and land will be assigned to some of the present owners of the grant.

And now, dear sir, after this statement of facts, I, for my people (I ask nothing for myself), appeal to you for help.

Cannot you find some way to right this great wrong done to a quiet and industrious people?

Hoping that we may have justice done us, I am

Respectfully yours,
José Jesus Castillo.

He was at first unwilling to write it, fearing he should be supposed to be begging for himself rather than for his people. His father was a Mexican; and he has hoped that on that account their family would be exempt from the fate of the village when the colony comes into the valley. But it is not probable that in a country where water is gold, a stream of water such as runs by Victoriano's door will be left long in the possession of any Indian family, whatever may be its relations to rich Mexican proprietors in the neighborhood. Jesus's mother is a tall, superbly formed woman, with a clear skin, hazel nut-brown eyes that thrill one with their limpid brightness, a nose straight and strong, and a mouth like an Egyptian priestess. She is past forty, but she is strikingly handsome still; and one does not wonder at hearing the tragedy of her early youth, when, for years, she believed herself the wife of Jesus's father, lived in his house as a wife, worked as a wife, and bore him his children. Her heart broke when she was sent adrift, a sadder than Hagar, with her half-disowned offspring. Money and lands did not heal the wound. Her face is dark with the sting of it to-day. When I asked her to sell me the lace-trimmed pillow-case and sheet from her bed, her cheeks flushed at first, and she looked away haughtily before replying. But, after a moment, she consented. They needed the money. She knows well that days of trouble are in store for them.

Since the writing of this paper news has come that the long-expected blow has fallen on this Indian village. The colony scheme has been completed; the valley has been divided up; the land on which the village of Saboba stands is now the property of a San Bernardino merchant. Any day he chooses, he can eject these Indians as the Temecula and the San Pasqual bands were ejected, and with far more show of legal right.

In the vicinity of the San Juan Capistrano Mission are living a few families of Indians, some of them the former neophytes of the mission. An old woman there, named Carmen, is a splendid specimen of the best longevity which her race and the California air can produce. We found her in bed, where she spends most of her time,—not lying, but sitting cross-legged, looking brisk and energetic, and always busy making lace. Nobody makes finer lace than hers. Yet she laughed when we asked if she could see to do such fine work without spectacles.

"Where could I get spectacles?" she said, her eyes twinkling. Then she stretched out her hand for the spectacles of our old Mexican friend who had asked her this question for us; took them, turned them over curiously, tried to look through them, shook her head, and handed them back to him with a shrug and a smile. She was twenty years older than he; but her strong, young eyes could not see through his glasses. He recollected her well, fifty years before, an active, handsome woman, taking care of the sacristy, washing the priests' laces, mending vestments, and filling various offices of trust in the mission. A sailor from a French vessel lying in the harbor wished to marry her; but the friars would not give their consent, because the man was a drunkard and dishonest. Carmen was well disposed to him, and much flattered by his love-making. He used to write letters to her, which she brought to this Mexican boy to read. It was a droll sight to see her face, as he, now white-haired and looking fully as old as she, reminded her of that time and of those letters, tapping her jocosely on her cheek, and saying some things I am sure he did not quite literally translate to us. She fairly colored, buried her face in her hands for a second, then laughed till she shook, and answered in voluble Spanish, of which also I suspect we did not get a full translation. She was the happiest Indian we saw; indeed, the only one who seemed really gay of heart or even content.

A few rods from the old mission church of San Gabriel, in a hut made of bundles of the tule reeds lashed to sycamore poles, as the San Gabriel Indians made them a hundred years ago, live two old Indian women, Laura and Benjamina. Laura is one hundred and two years old, Benjamina one hundred and seventeen. The record of their baptisms is still to be seen in the church books, so there can be no dispute as to their age. It seems not at all incredible, however. If I had been told that Benjamina was a three-thousand-year-old Nile mummy, resuscitated by some mysterious process, I should not have demurred much at the tale. The first time I saw them, the two were crouching over a fire on the ground, under a sort of booth porch, in front of their hovel. Laura was making a feint of grinding acorn-meal in a stone bowl; Benjamina was raking the ashes, with her claw-like old fingers, for hot coals to start the fire afresh; her skin was like an elephant's, shrivelled, black, hanging in folds and welts on her neck and breast and bony arms; it was not like anything human; her shrunken eyes, bright as beads, peered out from under thickets of coarse grizzled gray hair. Laura wore a white cloth band around her head, tied on with a strip of scarlet flannel; above that, a tattered black shawl, which gave her the look of an aged imp. Old baskets, old pots, old pans, old stone mortars and pestles, broken tiles and bricks, rags, straw, boxes, legless chairs,—in short, all conceivable rubbish,—were strewn about or piled up in the place, making the weirdest of backgrounds for the aged crones' figures. Inside the hut were two bedsteads and a few boxes, baskets, and nets; and drying grapes and peppers hung on the walls. A few feet away was another hut, only a trifle better than this; four generations were living in the two. Benjamina's step-daughter, aged eighty, was a fine creature. With a white band straight around her forehead close to the eyebrows and a gay plaid handkerchief thrown on above it, falling squarely each side of her face, she looked like an old Bedouin sheik.

Our Mexican friend remembered Laura as she was fifty years ago. She was then, even at fifty-two, celebrated as one of the swiftest runners and best ball-players in all the San Gabriel games. She was a singer, too, in the choir. Coaxing her up on her feet, patting her shoulders, entreating and caressing her as one would a child, he succeeded in persuading her to chant for us the Lord's Prayer and part of the litanies, as she had been wont to do it in the old days. It was a grotesque and incredible sight. The more she stirred and sang and lifted her arms, the less alive she looked. We asked the step-daughter if they were happy and wished to live. Laughing, she repeated the question to them. "Oh, yes, we wish to live forever," they replied. They were greatly terrified, the daughter said, when the railway cars first ran through San Gabriel. They thought it was the devil bringing fire to burn up the world. Their chief solace is tobacco. To beg it, Benjamina will creep about in the village by the hour, bent double over her staff, tottering at every step. They sit for the most part silent, motionless, on the ground; their knees drawn up, their hands clasped over them, their heads sunk on their breasts. In my drives in the San Gabriel valley I often saw them sitting thus, as if they were dead. The sight had an indescribable fascination. It seemed that to be able to penetrate into the recesses of their thoughts would be to lay hold upon secrets as old as the earth.

One of the most beautiful appanages of the San Luis Rey Mission, in the time of its prosperity, was the Pala valley. It lies about twenty-five miles east of San Luis, among broken spurs of the Coast Range, watered by the San Luis River, and also by its own little stream, the Pala Creek. It was always a favorite home of the Indians; and at the time of the secularization, over a thousand of them used to gather at the weekly mass in its chapel. Now, on the occasional visits of the San Juan Capistrano priest, to hold service there, the dilapidated little church is not half filled, and the numbers are growing smaller each year. The buildings are all in decay; the stone steps leading to the belfry have crumbled; the walls of the little graveyard are broken in many places, the paling and the graves are thrown down. On the day we were there, a memorial service for the dead was going on in the chapel; a great square altar was draped with black, decorated with silver lace and ghastly funereal emblems; candles were burning; a row of kneeling black-shawled women were holding lighted candies in their hands; two old Indians were chanting a Latin Mass from a tattered missal bound in rawhide; the whole place was full of chilly gloom, in sharp contrast to the bright valley outside, with its sunlight and silence. This mass was for the soul of an old Indian woman named Margarita, sister of Manuelito, a somewhat famous chief of several bands of the San Luiseños. Her home was at the Potrero,—a mountain meadow, or pasture, as the word signifies,—about ten miles from Pala, high up the mountain-side, and reached by an almost impassable road. This farm—or "saeter" it would be called in Norway,—was given to Margarita by the friars; and by some exceptional good fortune she had a title which, it is said, can be maintained by her heirs. In 1871, in a revolt of some of Manuelito's bands, Margarita was hung up by her wrists till she was near dying, but was cut down at the last minute and saved.

One of her daughters speaks a little English; and finding that we had visited Pala solely on account of our interest in the Indians, she asked us to come up to the Potrero and pass the night. She said timidly that they had plenty of beds, and would do all that they knew how to do to make us comfortable. One might be in many a dear-priced hotel less comfortably lodged and served than we were by these hospitable Indians in their mud house, floored with earth. In my bedroom were three beds, all neatly made, with lace-trimmed sheets and pillow-cases and patchwork coverlids. One small square window with a wooden shutter was the only aperture for air, and there was no furniture except one chair and a half-dozen trunks. The Indians, like the Norwegian peasants, keep their clothes and various properties all neatly packed away in boxes or trunks. As I fell asleep, I wondered if in the morning I should see Indian heads on the pillows opposite me; the whole place was swarming with men, women, and babies, and it seemed impossible for them to spare so many beds; but, no, when I waked, there were the beds still undisturbed; a soft-eyed Indian girl was on her knees rummaging in one of the trunks; seeing me awake, she murmured a few words in Indian, which conveyed her apology as well as if I had understood them. From the very bottom of the trunk she drew out a gilt-edged china mug, darted out of the room, and came back bringing it filled with fresh water. As she set it in the chair, in which she had already put a tin pan of water and a clean coarse towel, she smiled, and made a sign that it was for my teeth. There was a thoughtfulness and delicacy in the attention which lifted it far beyond the level of its literal value. The gilt-edged mug was her most precious possession; and, in remembering water for the teeth, she had provided me with the last superfluity in the way of white man's comfort of which she could think.

The food which they gave us was a surprise; it was far better than we had found the night before in the house of an Austrian colonel's son, at Pala. Chicken, deliciously cooked, with rice and chile; soda-biscuits delicately made; good milk and butter, all laid in orderly fashion, with a clean table-cloth, and clean, white stone china. When I said to our hostess that I regretted very much that they had given up their beds in my room, that they ought not to have done it, she answered me with a wave of her hand that "it was nothing; they hoped I had slept well; that they had plenty of other beds." The hospitable lie did not deceive me, for by examination I had convinced myself that the greater part of the family must have slept on the bare earth in the kitchen. They would not have taken pay for our lodging, except that they had just been forced to give so much for the mass for Margarita's soul, and it had been hard for them to raise the money. Twelve dollars the priest had charged for the mass; and in addition they had to pay for the candles, silver lace, black cloth, etc., nearly as much more. They had earnestly desired to have the mass said at the Potrero, but the priest would not come up there for less than twenty dollars, and that, Antonia said, with a sigh, they could not possibly pay. We left at six o'clock in the morning; Margarita's husband, the "capitan," riding off with us to see us safe on our way. When we had passed the worst gullies and boulders, he whirled his horse, lifted his ragged old sombrero with the grace of a cavalier, smiled, wished us good-day and good luck, and was out of sight in a second, his little wild pony galloping up the rough trail as if it were as smooth as a race-course.

Between the Potrero and Pala are two Indian villages, the Rincon and Pauma. The Rincon is at the head of the valley, snugged up against the mountains, as its name signifies, in a "corner." Here were fences, irrigating ditches, fields of barley, wheat, hay, and peas; a little herd of horses and cows grazing, and several flocks of sheep. The men were all away sheep-shearing; the women were at work in the fields, some hoeing, some clearing out the irrigating ditches, and all the old women plaiting baskets. These Rincon Indians, we were told, had refused a school offered them by the Government; they said they would accept nothing at the hands of the Government until it gave them a title to their lands.

The most picturesque of all the Mission Indians' hiding-places which we saw was that on the Carmel River, a few miles from the San Carlos Mission. Except by help of a guide it cannot be found. A faint trail turning off from the road in the river-bottom leads down to the river's edge. You follow it into the river and across, supposing it a ford. On the opposite bank there is no trail, no sign of one. Whether it is that the Indians purposely always go ashore at different points of the bank, so as to leave no trail; or whether they so seldom go out, except on foot, that the trail has faded away, I do not know. But certainly, if we had had no guide, we should have turned back, sure we were wrong. A few rods up from the river-bank, a stealthy narrow footpath appeared; through willow copses, sunk in meadow grasses, across shingly bits of alder-walled beach it creeps, till it comes out in a lovely spot,—half basin, half rocky knoll,—where, tucked away in nooks and hollows, are the little Indian houses, eight or ten of them, some of adobe, some of the tule-reeds: small patches of corn, barley, potatoes, and hay; and each little front yard fenced in by palings, with roses, sweet-peas, poppies, and mignonette growing inside. In the first house we reached, a woman was living alone. She was so alarmed at the sight of us that she shook. There could not be a more pitiful comment on the state of perpetual distrust and alarm in which the poor creatures live, than this woman's face and behavior. We tried in vain to reassure her; we bought all the lace she had to sell, chatted with her about it, and asked her to show us how it was made. Even then she was so terrified that although she willingly took down her lace-frame to sew a few stitches for us to see, her hands still trembled. In another house we found an old woman evidently past eighty, without glasses working button-holes in fine thread. Her daughter-in-law—a beautiful half-breed, with a still more beautiful baby in her arms—asked the old woman, for us, how old she was. She laughed merrily at the silly question. "She never thought about it," she said; "it was written down once in a book at the Mission, but the book was lost."

There was not a man in the village. They were all away at work, farming or fishing. This little handful of people are living on land to which they have no shadow of title, and from which they may be driven any day,—these Carmel Mission lands having been rented out, by their present owner, in great dairy farms. The parish priest of Monterey told me much of the pitiable condition of these remnants of the San Carlos Indians. He can do little or nothing for them, though their condition makes his heart ache daily. In that half-foreign English which is always so much more eloquent a language than the English-speaking peoples use, he said: "They have their homes there only by the patience of the thief; it may be that the patience do not last to-morrow." The phrase is worth preserving: it embodies so much history,—history of two races.

In Mr. Wilson's report are many eloquent and strong paragraphs, bearing on the question of the Indians' right to the lands they had under cultivation at the time of the secularization. He says:—

"It is not natural rights I speak of, nor merely possessory rights, but rights acquired and contracts made,—acquired and made when the laws of the Indies had force here, and never assailed by any laws or executive acts since, till 1834 and 1846; and impregnable to these.... No past maladministration of laws can be suffered to destroy their true intent, while the victims of the maladministration live to complain, and the rewards of wrong have not been consumed."

Of Mr. Wilson's report in 1852, of Mr. Ames's report in 1873, and of the various other reports called for by the Government from time to time, nothing came, except the occasional setting off of reservations by executive orders, which, if the lands reserved were worth anything, were speedily revoked at the bidding of California politicians. There are still some reservations left, chiefly of desert and mountainous lands, which nobody wants, and on which the Indians could not live.

The last report made to the Indian Bureau by their present agent closes in the following words:—

"The necessity of providing suitable lands for them in the form of one or more reservations has been pressed on the attention of the Department in my former reports; and I now, for the third and perhaps the last time, emphasize that necessity by saying that whether Government will immediately heed the pleas that have been made in behalf of these people or not, it must sooner or later deal with this question in a practical way, or else see a population of over three thousand Indians become homeless wanderers in a desert region."

I have shown a few glimpses of the homes, of the industry, the patience, the long-suffering of the people who are in this immediate danger of being driven out from their last footholds of refuge, "homeless wanderers in a desert."

If the United States Government does not take steps to avert this danger, to give them lands and protect them in their rights, the chapter of the history of the Mission Indians will be the blackest one in the black record of our dealings with the Indian race.

It must be done speedily if at all, for there is only a small remnant left to be saved. These are in their present homes "only on the patience of the thief; and it may be that the patience do not last to-morrow."

ECHOES IN THE CITY OF THE ANGELS.

The tale of the founding of the city of Los Angeles is a tale for verse rather than for prose. It reads like a page out of some new "Earthly Paradise," and would fit well into song such as William Morris has sung.

It is only a hundred years old, however, and that is not time enough for such song to simmer. It will come later, with the perfume of century-long summers added to its flavor. Summers century-long? One might say a stronger thing than that of them, seeing that their blossoming never stops, year in nor year out, and will endure as long as the visible frame of the earth.

The twelve devout Spanish soldiers who founded the city named it at their leisure with a long name, musical as a chime of bells. It answered well enough, no doubt, for the first fifty years of the city's life, during which not a municipal record of any sort or kind was written,—"Nuestra Señora Reina de los Angeles," "Our Lady the Queen of the Angels;" and her portrait made a goodly companion flag, unfurled always by the side of the flag of Spain.

There is a legend, that sounds older than it is, of the ceremonies with which the soldiers took possession of their new home. They were no longer young. They had fought for Spain in many parts of the Old World, and followed her uncertain fortunes to the New. Ten years some of them had been faithfully serving Church and King in sight of these fair lands, for which they hankered, and with reason.

In those days the soft, rolling, treeless hills and valleys, between which the Los Angeles River now takes its shilly-shallying course seaward, were forest slopes and meadows, with lakes great and small. This abundance of trees, with shining waters playing among them, added to the limitless bloom of the plains and the splendor of the snow-topped mountains, must have made the whole region indeed a paradise.

Navarro, Villavicencia, Rodriguez, Quintero, Moreno, Lara, Banegas, Rosas, and Canero, these were their names: happy soldiers all, honored of their king, and discharged with so royal a gift of lands thus fair.

Looking out across the Los Angeles hills and meadows to-day, one easily lives over again the joy they must have felt. Twenty-three young children there were in the band, poor little waifs of camp and march. What a "braw flitting" was it for them, away from the drum-beat forever into the shelter of their own sunny home! The legend says not a word of the mothers, except that there were eleven of them, and in the procession they walked with their children behind the men. Doubtless they rejoiced the most.

The Fathers from the San Gabriel Mission were there, with many Indian neophytes, and Don Felipe, the military governor, with his showy guard of soldiers.

The priests and neophytes chanted. The Cross was set up, the flag of Spain and the banner of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels unfurled, and the new town marked out around a square, a little to the north of the present plaza of Los Angeles.

If communities, as well as individuals, are happy when history finds nothing to record of them, the city of the Queen of the Angels must have been a happy spot during the first fifty years of its life; for not a written record of the period remains, not even a record of grants of land. The kind of grant that these worthy Spanish soldiers and their sons contented themselves with, however, hardly deserved recording,—in fact, was not a grant at all, since its continuance depended entirely on the care a man took of his house and the improvement he put on his land. If he left his house unoccupied, or let it fall out of repair, if he left a field uncultivated for two years, any neighbor who saw fit might denounce him, and by so doing acquire a right to the property. This sounds incredible, but all the historical accounts of the time agree on the point. They say,—

"The granting authorities could, and were by law required, upon a proper showing of the abandonment, to grant the property to the informant, who then acquired the same and no better rights than those possessed by his predecessor."

This was a premium indeed on staying at home and minding one's business,—a premium which amounted to coercion. One would think that there must have been left from those days teeming records of alienated estates, shifted tenures, and angry feuds between neighbor and neighbor. But no evidence remains of such strifes. Life was too simple, and the people were too ignorant.

Their houses were little more than hovels, built of mud, eight feet high, with flat roofs made of reeds and asphaltum. Their fields, with slight cultivation, produced all they needed; and if anything lacked, the rich vineyards, wheat-fields, and orchards of the San Gabriel Mission lay only twelve miles away. These vineyards, orchards, and granaries, so near at hand, must have been sore temptation to idleness. Each head of a family had been presented, by the paternal Spanish king, with "two oxen, two mules, two mares, two sheep, two goats, two cows, one calf, an ass, and one hoe." For these they were to pay in such small instalments as they were able to spare out of their pay and rations, which were still continued by the generous king.

In a climate in which flowers blossom winter and summer alike, man may bask in sun all the year round if he chooses. Why, then, should those happy Spanish soldiers work? Even the king had thought it unnecessary, it seems, to give them any implements of labor except "one hoe." What could a family do, in the way of work, with "one hoe"? Evidently, they did not work, neither they, nor their sons, nor their sons' sons after them; for, half a century later, they were still living a life of almost incredible ignorance, redeemed only by its simplicity and childlike adherence to the old religious observances.

Many of those were beautiful. As late as 1830 it was the custom throughout the town, in all the families of the early settlers, for the oldest member of the family—oftenest it was a grandfather or grandmother—to rise every morning at the rising of the morning star, and at once to strike up a hymn. At the first note every person in the house would rise, or sit up in bed and join in the song. From house to house, street to street, the singing spread; and the volume of musical sound swelled, until it was as if the whole town sang.

The hymns were usually invocations to the Virgin, to Jesus, or to some saint. The opening line of many of them was,—

"Rejoice, O Mother of God."

A manuscript copy of one of these old morning songs I have seen, and had the good fortune to win a literal translation of part of it, in the soft, Spanish-voiced, broken English, so pleasant to hear. The first stanza is the chorus, and was repeated after each of the others:—

"Come, O sinners,

Come, and we will sing

Tender hymns

To our refuge.

"Singers at dawn,

From the heavens above,

People all regions;

Gladly we too sing.

"Singing harmoniously,

Saying to Mary,

'O beautiful Queen,

Princess of Heaven!

"'Your beautiful head

Crowned we see;

The stars are adorning

Your beautiful hair;

"'Your eyebrows are arched,

Your forehead serene;

Your face turned always

Looks toward God;

"'Your eyes' radiance

Is like beautiful stars;

Like a white dove,

You are true to your spouse.'"

Each of these stanzas was sung first alone by the aged leader of the family choir. Then the rest repeated it; then all joined in the chorus.

It is said that there are still to be found, in lonely country regions in California, Mexican homes in which these sweet and holy "songs before sunrise" are sung.

Looking forward to death, the greatest anxiety of these simple souls was to provide themselves with a priest's cast-off robe to be buried in. These were begged or bought as the greatest of treasures; kept in sight, or always at hand, to remind them of approaching death. When their last hour drew near, this robe was flung over their breasts, and they died happy, their stiffening fingers grasping its folds. The dead body was wrapped in it, and laid on the mud floor of the house, a stone being placed under the head to raise it a few inches. Thus the body must lie till the time of burial. Around it, day and night, squatted, praying and singing, friends who wished not only to show their affection for the deceased, but to win indulgences for themselves; every prayer said thus, by the side of a corpse, having a special and specified value.

A strange demarkation between the sexes was enforced in these ceremonies. If it were a woman who lay dead, only women might kneel and pray and watch with her body; if a man, the circle of watchers must be exclusively of men.

A rough box, of boards nailed together, was the coffin. The body, rolled in the old robe whose virtues had so comforted its last conscious moments, was carried to the grave on a board, in the centre of a procession of friends chanting and singing. Not until the last moment was it laid in the box.

The first attempts to introduce more civilized forms of burial met with opposition, and it was only by slow degrees that changes were wrought. A Frenchman, who had come from France to Los Angeles, by way of the Sandwich Islands, bringing a store of sacred ornaments and trinkets, and had grown rich by sale of them to the devout, owned a spring wagon, the only one in the country. By dint of entreaty, the people were finally prevailed upon to allow their dead to be carried in this wagon to the burial-place. For a long time, however, they refused to have horses put to the wagon, but drew it by hand all the way; women drawing women, and men drawing men, with the same scrupulous partition of the sexes as in the earlier ceremonies. The picture must have been a strange one, and not without pathos,—the wagon, wound and draped with black and white, drawn up and down the steep hills by the band of silent mourners.

The next innovation was the introduction of stately catafalques for the dead to repose on, either in house or church, during the interval between their death and burial. There had been brought into the town a few old-fashioned, high-post, canopied bedsteads, and from these the first catafalques were made. Gilded, decorated with gold and silver lace, and hung with white and black draperies, they made a by no means insignificant show, which doubtless went far to reconcile people's minds to the new methods.

In 1838 there was a memorable funeral of a woman over a hundred years old. Fourteen old women watched with her body, which lay stretched on the floor, in the ancient fashion, with only a stone beneath the head. The youngest of these watchers was eighty-five. One of them, Tomasa Camera by name, was herself over a hundred years old. Tomasa was infirm of foot; so they propped her with pillows in a little cart, and drew her to the house that she might not miss of the occasion. All night long, the fourteen squatted or sat on rawhides spread on the floor, and sang and prayed and smoked: as fine a wake as was ever seen. They smoked cigarettes, which they rolled on the spot, out of corn-husks slit fine for the purpose, there being at that day in Los Angeles no paper fit for cigarettes.

Outside this body-guard of aged women knelt a circle of friends and relatives, also chanting, praying, and smoking. In this outer circle any one might come and go at pleasure; but into the inner ring of the watching none must come, and none must go out of it till the night was spent.

With the beginning of the prosperity of the City of the Angels, came the end of its primeval peace. Spanish viceroys, Mexican alcaldes and governors, United States commanders, naval and military, followed on each other's heels, with or without frays, ruling California through a succession of tumultuous years. Greedy traders from all parts of the world added their rivalries and interventions to the civil and military disputation. In the general anarchy and confusion, the peaceful and peace-loving Catholic Fathers were robbed of their lands, their converts were scattered, their industries broken up. Nowhere were these uncomfortable years more uncomfortable than in Los Angeles. Revolts, occupations, surrenders, retakings, and resurrenders kept the little town in perpetual ferment. Disorders were the order of the day and of the night, in small matters as well as in great.

The Californian fought as impetuously for his old way of dancing as for his political allegiance. There are comical traditions of the men's determination never to wear long trousers to dances; nor to permit dances to be held in houses or halls, it having been the practice always to give them in outdoor booths or bowers, with lattice-work walls of sycamore poles lashed together by thongs of rawhide.

Outside these booths the men sat on their horses looking in at the dancing, which was chiefly done by the women. An old man standing in the centre of the enclosure directed the dances. Stopping in front of the girl whom he wished to have join the set, he clapped his hands. She then rose and took her place on the floor; if she could not dance, or wished to decline, she made a low bow and resumed her seat.

To look in on all this was great sport. Sometimes, unable to resist the spell, a man would fling himself off his horse, dash into the enclosure, seize a girl by the waist, whirl around with her through one dance, then out again and into the saddle, where he sat, proudly aware of his vantage. The decorations of masculine attire at this time were such as to make riding a fine show. Around the crown of the broad-brimmed sombrero was twisted a coil of gold or silver cord; over the shoulders was flung, with ostentatious carelessness, a short cloak of velvet or brocade; the waistcoats were embroidered in gold, silver, or gay colors; so also were the knee-breeches, leggings, and stockings. Long silken garters, with ornamented tassels at the ends, were wound round and round to hold the stockings in place. Even the cumbrous wooden stirrups were carved in elaborate designs. No wonder that men accustomed to such braveries as these saw ignominy in the plain American trousers.

They seem to have been a variety of Centaur, these early Californian men. They were seldom off their horses except to eat and sleep. They mounted, with jingling silver spur and glittering bridle, for the shortest distances, even to cross a plaza. They paid long visits on horseback, without dismounting. Clattering up to the window or door-sill, halting, throwing one knee over the crupper, the reins lying loose, they sat at ease, far more at ease than in a house. Only at church, where the separation was inevitable, would they be parted from their horses. They turned the near neighborhood of a church on Sunday into a sort of picket-ground, or horse-trainers' yard, full of horse-posts and horses; and the scene was far more like a horse-fair than like an occasion of holy observance. There seems to have been a curious mixture of reverence and irreverence in their natures. They confessed sins and underwent penances with the simplicity of children; but when, in 1821, the Church issued an edict against that "escandalosisima" dance, the waltz, declaring that whoever dared to dance it should be excommunicated, the merry sinners waltzed on only the harder and faster, and laughed in their priests' faces. And when the advocates of decorum, good order, and indoor dancing gave their first ball in a public hall in Los Angeles, the same merry outdoor party broke every window and door in the building, and put a stop to the festivity. They persisted in taking this same summary vengeance on occasion after occasion, until, finally, any person wishing to give a ball in his own house was forced to surround the house by a cordon of police to protect it.

The City of the Angels is a prosperous city now. It has business thoroughfares, blocks of fine stone buildings, hotels, shops, banks, and is growing daily. Its outlying regions are a great circuit of gardens, orchards, vineyards, and corn-fields, and its suburbs are fast filling up with houses of a showy though cheap architecture. But it has not yet shaken off its past. A certain indefinable, delicious aroma from the old, ignorant, picturesque times lingers still, not only in byways and corners, but in the very centres of its newest activities.

Mexican women, their heads wrapped in black shawls, and their bright eyes peering out between the close-gathered folds, glide about everywhere; the soft Spanish speech is continually heard; long-robed priests hurry to and fro; and at each dawn ancient, jangling bells from the Church of the Lady of the Angels ring out the night and in the day. Venders of strange commodities drive in stranger vehicles up and down the streets: antiquated carts piled high with oranges, their golden opulence contrasting weirdly with the shabbiness of their surroundings and the evident poverty of their owner; close following on the gold of one of these, one has sometimes the luck to see another cart, still more antiquated and rickety, piled high with something—he cannot imagine what—terra-cotta red in grotesque shapes; it is fuel,—the same sort which Villavicencia, Quintero, and the rest probably burned, when they burned any, a hundred years ago. It is the roots and root-shoots of manzanita and other shrubs. The colors are superb,—terra-cotta reds, shading up to flesh pink, and down to dark mahogany; but the forms are grotesque beyond comparison: twists, querls, contortions, a boxful of them is an uncomfortable presence in one's room, and putting them on the fire is like cremating the vertebræ and double teeth of colossal monsters of the Pterodactyl period.

The present plaza of the city is near the original plaza marked out at the time of the first settlement; the low adobe house of one of the early governors stands yet on its east side, and is still a habitable building.

The plaza is a dusty and dismal little place, with a parsimonious fountain in the centre, surrounded by spokes of thin turf, and walled at its outer circumference by a row of tall Monterey cypresses, shorn and clipped into the shape of huge croquettes or brad-awls standing broad end down. At all hours of the day idle boys and still idler men are to be seen basking on the fountain's stone rim, or lying, face down, heels in air, in the triangles of shade made by the cypress croquettes. There is in Los Angeles much of this ancient and ingenious style of shearing and compressing foliage into unnatural and distorted shapes. It comes, no doubt, of lingering reverence for the traditions of what was thought beautiful in Spain centuries ago; and it gives to the town a certain quaint and foreign look, in admirable keeping with its irregular levels, zigzag, toppling precipices, and houses in tiers one above another.

One comes sometimes abruptly on a picture which seems bewilderingly un-American, of a precipice wall covered with bird-cage cottages, the little, paling-walled yard of one jutting out in a line with the chimney-tops of the next one below, and so on down to the street at the base of the hill. Wooden staircases and bits of terrace link and loop the odd little perches together; bright green pepper-trees, sometimes tall enough to shade two or three tiers of roofs, give a graceful plumed draping at the sides, and some of the steep fronts are covered with bloom, in solid curtains, of geranium, sweet alyssum, heliotrope, and ivy. These terraced eyries are not the homes of the rich: the houses are lilliputian in size, and of cheap quality; but they do more for the picturesqueness of the city than all the large, fine, and costly houses put together.

Moreover, they are the only houses that command the situation, possess distance and a horizon. From some of these little ten-by-twelve flower-beds of homes is a stretch of view which makes each hour of the day a succession of changing splendors,—the snowy peaks of San Bernardino and San Jacinto in the east and south; to the west, vast open country, billowy green with vineyard and orchard; beyond this, in clear weather, shining glints and threads of ocean, and again beyond, in the farthest outing, hill-crowned islands, misty blue against the sky. No one knows Los Angeles who does not climb to these sunny outlying heights, and roam and linger on them many a day. Nor, even thus lingering, will any one ever know more of Los Angeles than its lovely outward semblances and mysterious suggestions, unless he have the good fortune to win past the barrier of proud, sensitive, tender reserve, behind which is hid the life of the few remaining survivors of the old Spanish and Mexican régime.

Once past this, he gets glimpses of the same stintless hospitality and immeasurable courtesy which gave to the old Franciscan establishments a world-wide fame, and to the society whose tone and customs they created an atmosphere of simple-hearted joyousness and generosity never known by any other communities on the American continent.

In houses whose doors seldom open to English-speaking people, there are rooms full of relics of that fast-vanishing past. Strongholds also of a religious faith, almost as obsolete, in its sort and degree, as are the garments of the aged creatures who are peacefully resting their last days on its support.

In one of these houses, in a poverty-stricken but gayly decorated little bedroom, hangs a small oil-painting, a portrait of Saint Francis de Paula. It was brought from Mexico, fifty-five years ago, by the woman who still owns it, and has knelt before it and prayed to it every day of the fifty-five years. Below it is a small altar covered with flowers, candlesticks, vases, and innumerable knick-knacks. A long string under the picture is hung full of tiny gold and silver votive offerings from persons who have been miraculously cured in answer to prayers made to the saint. Legs, arms, hands, eyes, hearts, heads, babies, dogs, horses,—no organ, no creature, that could suffer, is unrepresented. The old woman has at her tongue's end the tale of each one of these miracles. She is herself a sad cripple; her feet swollen by inflammation, which for many years has given her incessant torture and made it impossible for her to walk, except with tottering steps, from room to room, by help of a staff. This, she says, is the only thing her saint has not cured. It is her "cross," her "mortification of the flesh," "to take her to heaven." "He knows best." As she speaks, her eyes perpetually seek the picture, resting on it with a look of ineffable adoration. She has seen tears roll down its cheeks more than once, she says; and it often smiles on her when they are alone. When strangers enter the room she can always tell, by its expression, whether the saint is or is not pleased with them, and whether their prayers will be granted. She was good enough to remark that he was very glad to see us; she was sure of it by the smile in his eye. He had wrought many beautiful miracles for her. Nothing was too trivial for his sympathy and help. Once when she had broken a vase in which she had been in the habit of keeping flowers on the altar, she took the pieces in her hands, and standing before him, said: "You know you will miss this vase. I always put your flowers in it, and I am too poor to buy another. Now, do mend this for me. I have nobody but you to help me." And the vase grew together again whole while she was speaking. In the same way he mended for her a high glass flower-case which stood on the altar.

Thus she jabbered away breathlessly in Spanish, almost too fast to be followed. Sitting in a high chair, her poor distorted feet propped on a cushion, a black silk handkerchief wound like a turban around her head, a plaid ribosa across her shoulders, contrasting sharply with her shabby wine-colored gown, her hands clasped around a yellow staff, on which she leaned as she bent forward in her eager speaking, she made a study for an artist.

She was very beautiful in her youth, she said; her cheeks so red that people thought they were painted; and she was so strong that she was never tired; and when, in the first year of her widowhood, a stranger came to her "with a letter of recommendation" to be her second husband, and before she had time to speak had fallen on his knees at her feet, she seized him by the throat, and toppling him backward, pinned him against the wall till he was black in the face. And her sister came running up in terror, imploring her not to kill him. But all that strength is gone now, she says sadly; her memory also. Each day, as soon as she has finished her prayers, she has to put away her rosary in a special place, or else she forgets that the prayers have been said. Many priests have desired to possess her precious miracle-working saint; but never till she dies will it leave her bedroom. Not a week passes without some one's arriving to implore its aid. Sometimes the deeply distressed come on their knees all the way from the gate before the house, up the steps, through the hall, and into her bedroom. Such occasions as these are to her full of solemn joy, and no doubt, also, of a secret exultation whose kinship to pride she does not suspect.

In another unpretending little adobe house, not far from this Saint Francis shrine, lives the granddaughter of Moreno, one of the twelve Spanish soldiers who founded the city. She speaks no word of English; and her soft black eyes are timid, though she is the widow of a general, and in the stormy days of the City of the Angels, passed through many a crisis of peril and adventure. Her house is full of curious relics, which she shows with a gentle, half-amused courtesy. It is not easy for her to believe that any American can feel real reverence for the symbols, tokens, and relics of the life and customs which his people destroyed. In her mind Americans remain to-day as completely foreigners as they were when her husband girded on his sword and went out to fight them, forty years ago. Many of her relics have been rescued at one time or another from plunderers of the missions. She has an old bronze kettle which once held holy water at San Fernando; an incense cup and spoon, and massive silver candlesticks; cartridge-boxes of leather, with Spain's ancient seal stamped on them; a huge copper caldron and scales from San Gabriel; a bunch of keys of hammered iron, locks, scissors, reaping-hooks, shovels, carding-brushes for wool and for flax: all made by the Indian workmen in the missions. There was also one old lock, in which the key was rusted fast and immovable, which seemed to me fuller of suggestion than anything else there of the sealed and ended past to which it had belonged; and a curious little iron cannon, in shape like an ale-mug, about eight inches high, with a hole in the side and in the top, to be used by setting it on the ground and laying a trail of powder to the opening in the side. This gave the Indians great delight. It was fired at the times of church festivals, and in seasons of drought to bring rain. Another curious instrument of racket was the matrarca, a strip of board with two small swinging iron handles so set in it that, in swinging back and forth, they hit iron plates. In the time of Lent, when all ringing of bells was forbidden, these were rattled to call the Indians to church. The noise one of them can make when vigorously shaken is astonishing. In crumpled bundles, their stiffened meshes opening out reluctantly, were two curious rush-woven nets which had been used by Indian women fifty years ago in carrying burdens. Similar nets, made of twine, are used by them still. Fastened to a leather strap or band passing around the forehead, they hang down behind far below the waist, and when filled out to their utmost holding capacity are so heavy that the poor creatures bend nearly double beneath them. But the women stand as uncomplainingly as camels while weight after weight is piled in; then slipping the band over their heads, they adjust the huge burden and set off at a trot.

"This is the squaw's horse," said an Indian woman in the San Jacinto valley one day, tapping her forehead and laughing good-naturedly, when the shopkeeper remonstrated with her husband, who was heaping article after article, and finally a large sack of flour, on her shoulders; "squaw's horse very strong."

The original site of the San Gabriel Mission was a few miles to the east of the City of the Angels. Its lands are now divided into ranches and colony settlements, only a few acres remaining in the possession of the Church. But the old chapel is still standing in a fair state of preservation, used for the daily services of the San Gabriel parish; and there are in its near neighborhood a few crumbling adobe hovels left, the only remains of the once splendid and opulent mission. In one of these lives a Mexican woman, eighty-two years old, who for more than half a century has washed and mended the priests' laces, repaired the robes, and remodelled the vestments of San Gabriel. She is worth crossing the continent to see: all white from head to foot, as if bleached by some strange gramarye; white hair, white skin, blue eyes faded nearly to white; white cotton clothes, ragged and not over clean, yet not a trace of color in them; a white linen handkerchief, delicately embroidered by herself, always tied loosely around her throat. She sits on a low box, leaning against the wall, with three white pillows at her back, her feet on a cushion on the ground; in front of her, another low box, on this a lace-maker's pillow, with knotted fringe stretched on it; at her left hand a battered copper caldron, holding hot coals to warm her fingers and to light her cigarettes. A match she will never use; and she has seldom been without a cigarette in her mouth since she was six years old. On her right hand is a chest filled with her treasures,—rags of damask, silk, velvet, lace, muslin, ribbon, artificial flowers, flosses, worsteds, silks on spools; here she sits, day in, day out, making cotton fringes and, out of shreds of silk, tiny embroidered scapulars, which she sells to all devout and charitable people of the region. She also teaches the children of the parish to read and to pray. The walls of her hovel are papered with tattered pictures, including many gay-colored ones, taken off tin cans, their flaunting signs reading drolly,—"Perfection Press Mackerel, Boston, Mass.," "Charm Baking Powder," and "Knowlton's Inks," alternating with "Toledo Blades" and clipper-ship advertisements. She finds these of great use in both teaching and amusing the children. The ceiling, of canvas, black with smoke, and festooned with cobwebs, sags down in folds, and shows many a rent. When it rains, her poor little place must be drenched in spots. One end of the room is curtained off with calico; this is her bedchamber. At the other end is a raised dais, on which stands an altar, holding a small statuette of the Infant Jesus. It is a copy in wood of the famous Little Jesus of Atoches in Mexico, which is worshipped by all the people in that region. It has been her constant companion and protector for fifty years. Over the altar is a canopy of calico, decorated with paper flowers, whirligigs, doves, and little gourds; with votive offerings, also, of gold or silver, from grateful people helped or cured by the Little Jesus. On the statuette's head is a tiny hat of real gold, and a real gold sceptre in the little hand; the breast of its fine white linen cambric gown is pinned by a gold pin. It has a wardrobe with as many changes as an actor. She keeps these carefully hid away in a small camphor-wood trunk, but she brought them all out to show to us.

Two of her barefooted, ragged little pupils scampered in as she was unfolding these gay doll's clothes. They crowded close around her knees and looked on, with open-mouthed awe and admiration: a purple velvet cape with white fringe for feast days; capes of satin, of brocade; a dozen shirts of finest linen, embroidered or trimmed with lace; a tiny plume not more than an inch long, of gold exquisitely carved,—this was her chief treasure. It looked beautiful in his hat, she said, but it was too valuable to wear often. Hid away here among the image's best clothes were more of the gold votive offerings it had received: one a head cut out of solid gold; several rosaries of carved beads, silver and gold. Spite of her apparently unbounded faith in the Little Jesus' power to protect her and himself, the old woman thought it wiser to keep these valuables concealed from the common gaze.

Holding up a silken pillow some sixteen inches square, she said, "You could not guess with what that pillow is filled." We could not, indeed. It was her own hair. With pride she asked us to take it in our hands, that we might see how heavy it was. For sixteen years she had been saving it, and it was to be put under her head in her coffin. The friend who had taken us to her home exclaimed on hearing this. "And I can tell you it was beautiful hair. I recollect it forty-five years ago, bright brown, and down to her ankles, and enough of it to roll herself up in." The old woman nodded and laughed, much pleased at this compliment. She did not know why the Lord had preserved her life so long, she said; but she was very happy. Her nieces had asked her to go and live with them in Santa Ana; but she could not go away from San Gabriel. She told them that there was plenty of water in the ditch close by her door, and that God would take care of the rest, and so he had; she never wants for anything; not only is she never hungry herself, but she always has food to give away. No one would suppose it, but many people come to eat with her in her house. God never forgets her one minute. She is very happy. She is never ill; or if she is, she has two remedies, which, in all her life, have never failed to cure her, and they cost nothing,—saliva and ear-wax. For a pain, the sign of the cross, made with saliva on the spot which is in pain, is instantaneously effective; for an eruption or any skin disorder, the application of ear-wax is a sure cure. She is very glad to live so close to the church; the father has promised her this room as long as she lives; when she dies, it will be no trouble, he says, to pick her up and carry her across the road to the church. In a gay painted box, standing on two chairs, so as to be kept from the dampness of the bare earth floor, she cherishes the few relics of her better days: a shawl and a ribosa of silk, and two gowns, one of black silk, one of dark blue satin. These are of the fashions of twenty years ago; they were given to her by her husband. She wears them now when she goes to church; so it is as if she were "married again," she says, and is "her husband's work still." She seems to be a character well known and held in some regard by the clergy of her church. When the bishop returned a few years ago from a visit to Rome, he brought her a little gift, a carved figure of a saint. She asked him if he could not get for her a bit of the relics of Saint Viviano. "Oh, let alone!" he replied; "give you relics? Wait a bit; and as soon as you die, I'll have you made into relics yourself." She laughed as heartily, telling this somewhat unecclesiastical rejoinder, as if it had been made at some other person's expense.

In the marvellously preserving air of California, added to her own contented temperament, there is no reason why this happy old lady should not last, as some of her Indian neighbors have, well into a second century. Before she ceases from her peaceful, pitiful little labors, new generations of millionnaires in her country will no doubt have piled up bigger fortunes than this generation ever dreams of, but there will not be a man of them all so rich as she.

In the western suburbs of Los Angeles is a low adobe house, built after the ancient style, on three sides of a square, surrounded by orchards, vineyards, and orange groves, and looking out on an old-fashioned garden, in which southernwood, rue, lavender, mint, marigolds, and gillyflowers hold their own bravely, growing in straight and angular beds among the newer splendors of verbenas, roses, carnations, and geraniums. On two sides of the house runs a broad porch, where stand rows of geraniums and chrysanthemums growing in odd-shaped earthen pots. Here may often be seen a beautiful young Mexican woman, flitting about among the plants, or sporting with a superb Saint Bernard dog. Her clear olive skin, soft brown eyes, delicate sensitive nostrils, and broad smiling mouth, are all of the Spanish madonna type; and when her low brow is bound, as is often her wont, by turban folds of soft brown or green gauze, her face becomes a picture indeed. She is the young wife of a gray-headed Mexican señor, of whom—by his own most gracious permission—I shall speak by his familiar name, Don Antonio. Whoever has the fortune to pass as a friend across the threshold of this house finds himself transported, as by a miracle, into the life of a half-century ago. The rooms are ornamented with fans, shells, feather and wax flowers, pictures, saints' images, old laces, and stuffs, in the quaint gay Mexican fashion. On the day when I first saw them, they were brilliant with bloom. In every one of the deep window-seats stood a cone of bright flowers, its base made by large white datura blossoms, their creamy whorls all turned outward, making a superb decoration. I went for but a few moments' call. I stayed three hours, and left carrying with me bewildering treasures of pictures of the olden time.

Don Antonio speaks little English; but the señora knows just enough of the language to make her use of it delicious, as she translates for her husband. It is an entrancing sight to watch his dark, weather-beaten face, full of lightning changes as he pours out torrents of his nervous, eloquent Spanish speech; watching his wife intently, hearkening to each word she uses, sometimes interrupting her urgently with, "No, no; that is not it,"—for he well understands the tongue he cannot or will not use for himself. He is sixty-five years of age, but he is young: the best waltzer in Los Angeles to-day; his eye keen, his blood fiery quick; his memory like a burning-glass bringing into sharp light and focus a half-century as if it were a yesterday. Full of sentiment, of an intense and poetic nature, he looks back to the lost empire of his race and people on the California shores with a sorrow far too proud for any antagonisms or complaints. He recognizes the inexorableness of the laws under whose workings his nation is slowly, surely giving place to one more representative of the age. Intellectually he is in sympathy with progress, with reform, with civilization at its utmost; he would not have had them stayed, or changed, because his people could not keep up, and were not ready. But his heart is none the less saddened and lonely.

This is probably the position and point of view of most cultivated Mexican men of his age. The suffering involved in it is inevitable. It is part of the great, unreckoned price which must always be paid for the gain the world gets, when the young and strong supersede the old and weak.

A sunny little southeast corner room in Don Antonio's house is full of the relics of the time when he and his father were foremost representatives of ideas and progress in the City of the Angels, and taught the first school that was kept in the place. This was nearly a half-century ago. On the walls of the room still hang maps and charts which they used; and carefully preserved, with the tender reverence of which only poetic natures are capable, are still to be seen there the old atlases, primers, catechisms, grammars, reading-books, which meant toil and trouble to the merry, ignorant children of the merry and ignorant people of that time.

The leathern covers of the books are thin and frayed by long handling; the edges of the leaves worn down as if mice had gnawed them: tattered, loose, hanging by yellow threads, they look far older than they are, and bear vivid record of the days when books were so rare and precious that each book did doubled and redoubled duty, passing from hand to hand and house to house. It was on the old Lancaster system that Los Angeles set out in educating its children; and here are still preserved the formal and elaborate instructions for teachers and schools on that plan; also volumes of Spain's laws for military judges in 1781, and a quaint old volume called "Secrets of Agriculture, Fields and Pastures," written by a Catholic Father in 1617, reprinted in 1781, and held of great value in its day as a sure guide to success with crops. Accompanying it was a chart, a perpetual circle, by which might be foretold, with certainty, what years would be barren and what ones fruitful.

Almanacs, histories, arithmetics, dating back to 1750, drawing-books, multiplication tables, music, and bundles of records of the branding of cattle at the San Gabriel Mission, are among the curiosities of this room. The music of the first quadrilles ever danced in Mexico is here: a ragged pamphlet, which, no doubt, went gleeful rounds in the City of the Angels for many a year. It is a merry music, simple in melody, but with an especial quality of light-heartedness, suiting the people who danced to it.

There are also in the little room many relics of a more substantial sort than tattered papers and books: a branding-iron and a pair of handcuffs from the San Gabriel Mission; curiously decorated clubs and sticks used by the Indians in their games; boxes of silver rings and balls made for decorations of bridles and on leggings and knee-breeches. The place of honor in the room is given, as well it might be, to a small cannon, the first cannon brought into California. It was made in 1717, and was brought by Father Junipero Serra to San Diego in 1769. Afterward it was given to the San Gabriel Mission, but it still bears its old name, "San Diego." It is an odd little arm, only about two feet long, and requiring but six ounces of powder. Its swivel is made with a rest to set firm in the ground. It has taken many long journeys on the backs of mules, having been in great requisition in the early mission days for the firing of salutes at festivals and feasts.

Don Antonio was but a lad when his father's family removed from the city of Mexico to California. They came in one of the many unfortunate colonies sent out by the Mexican Government during the first years of the secularization period, having had a toilsome and suffering two months, going in wagons from Mexico to San Blas, then a tedious and uncomfortable voyage of several weeks from San Blas to Monterey, where they arrived only to find themselves deceived and disappointed in every particular, and surrounded by hostilities, plots, and dangers on all sides. So great was the antagonism to them that it was at times difficult for a colonist to obtain food from a Californian. They were arrested on false pretences, thrown into prison, shipped off like convicts from place to place, with no one to protect them or plead their cause. Revolution succeeded upon revolution, and it was a most unhappy period for all refined and cultivated persons who had joined the colony enterprises. Young men of education and breeding were glad to earn their daily bread by any menial labor that offered. Don Antonio and several of his young friends, who had all studied medicine together, spent the greater part of a year in making shingles. The one hope and aim of most of them was to earn money enough to get back to Mexico. Don Antonio, however, seems to have had more versatility and capacity than his friends, for he never lost courage; and it was owing to him that at last his whole family gathered in Los Angeles and established a home there. This was in 1836. There were then only about eight hundred people in the pueblo, and the customs, superstitions, and ignorances of the earliest days still held sway. The missions were still rich and powerful, though the confusions and conflicts of their ruin had begun. At this time the young Antonio, being quick at accounts and naturally ingenious at all sorts of mechanical crafts, found profit as well as pleasure in journeying from mission to mission, sometimes spending two or three months in one place, keeping books, or repairing silver and gold ornaments.

The blowpipe which he made for himself at that time his wife exhibits now with affectionate pride; and there are few things she enjoys better than translating to an eager listener his graphic stories of the incidents and adventures of that portion of his life.

While he was at the San Antonio Mission, a strange thing happened. It is a good illustration of the stintless hospitality of those old missions, that staying there at that time were a notorious gambler and a celebrated juggler who had come out in the colony from Mexico. The juggler threatened to turn the gambler into a crow; the gambler, after watching his tricks for a short time, became frightened, and asked young Antonio, in serious good faith, if he did not believe the juggler had made a league with the devil. A few nights afterward, at midnight, a terrible noise was heard in the gambler's room. He was found in convulsions, foaming at the mouth, and crying, "Oh, father! father! I have got the devil inside of me! Take him away!"

The priest dragged him into the chapel, showered him with holy water, and exorcised the devil, first making the gambler promise to leave off his gambling forever. All the rest of the night the rescued sinner spent in the chapel, praying and weeping. In the morning he announced his intention of becoming a priest, and began his studies at once. These he faithfully pursued for a year, leading all the while a life of great devotion. At the end of that time preparations were made for his ordination at San José. The day was set, the hour came: he was in the sacristy, had put on the sacred vestments, and was just going toward the church door, when he fell to the floor, dead. Soon after this the juggler was banished from the county, trouble and disaster having everywhere followed on his presence.

On the first breaking out of hostilities between California and the United States, Don Antonio took command of a company of Los Angeles volunteers to repel the intruders. By this time he had attained a prominent position in the affairs of the pueblo; had been alcalde and, under Governor Michelorena, inspector of public works. It was like the fighting of children,—the impetuous attempts that heterogeneous little bands of Californians here and there made to hold their country. They were plucky from first to last; for they were everywhere at a disadvantage, and fought on, quite in the dark as to what Mexico meant to do about them,—whether she might not any morning deliver them over to the enemy. Of all Don Antonio's graphic narratives of the olden time, none is more interesting than those which describe his adventures during the days of this contest. On one of the first approaches made by the Americans to Los Angeles, he went out with his little haphazard company of men and boys to meet them. He had but one cannon, a small one, tied by ropes on a cart axle. He had but one small keg of powder which was good for anything; all the rest was bad, would merely go off "pouf, pouf," the señora said, and the ball would pop down near the mouth of the cannon. With this bad powder he fired his first shots. The Americans laughed; this is child's play, they said, and pushed on closer. Then came a good shot, with the good powder, tearing into their ranks and knocking them right and left; another, and another. "Then the Americans began to think, these are no pouf balls; and when a few more were killed, they ran away and left their flag behind them. And if they had only known it, the Californians had only one more charge left of the good powder, and the next minute it would have been the Californians that would have had to run away themselves," merrily laughed the señora as she told the tale.

This captured flag, with important papers, was intrusted to Don Antonio to carry to the Mexican headquarters at Sonora. He set off with an escort of soldiers, his horse decked with silver trappings; his sword, pistols, all of the finest: a proud beginning of a journey destined to end in a different fashion. It was in winter time; cold rains were falling. By night he was drenched to the skin, and stopped at a friendly Indian's tent to change his clothes. Hardly had he got them off when the sound of horses' hoofs was heard. The Indian flung himself down, put his ear to the ground, and exclaimed, "Americanos! Americanos!" Almost in the same second they were at the tent's door. As they halted, Don Antonio, clad only in his drawers and stockings, crawled out at the back of the tent, and creeping on all fours reached a tree up which he climbed, and sat safe hidden in the darkness among its branches listening, while his pursuers cross-questioned the Indian, and at last rode away with his horse. Luckily, he had carried into the tent the precious papers and the captured flag: these he intrusted to an Indian to take to Sonora, it being evidently of no use for him to try to cross the country thus closely pursued by his enemies.

All night he lay hidden; the next day he walked twelve miles across the mountains to an Indian village where he hoped to get a horse. It was dark when he reached it. Cautiously he opened the door of the hut of one whom he knew well. The Indian was preparing poisoned arrows: fixing one on the string and aiming at the door, he called out, angrily, "Who is there?"—"It is I, Antonio."—"Don't make a sound," whispered the Indian, throwing down his arrow, springing to the door, coming out and closing it softly. He then proceeded to tell him that the Americans had offered a reward for his head, and that some of the Indians in the rancheria were ready to betray or kill him. While they were yet talking, again came the sound of the Americans' horses' hoofs galloping in the distance. This time there seemed no escape. Suddenly Don Antonio, throwing himself on his stomach, wriggled into a cactus patch near by. Only one who has seen California cactus thickets can realize the desperateness of this act. But it succeeded. The Indian threw over the cactus plants an old blanket and some refuse stalks and reeds; and there once more, within hearing of all his baffled pursuers said, the hunted man lay, safe, thanks to Indian friendship. The crafty Indian assented to all the Americans proposed, said that Don Antonio would be sure to be caught in a few days, advised them to search in a certain rancheria which he described, a few miles off, and in an opposite direction from the way in which he intended to guide Don Antonio. As soon as the Americans had gone, he bound up Antonio's feet in strips of rawhide, gave him a blanket and an old tattered hat, the best his stores afforded, and then led him by a long and difficult trail to a spot high up in the mountains where the old women of the band were gathering acorns. By the time they reached this place, blood was trickling from Antonio's feet and legs, and he was well-nigh fainting with fatigue and excitement. Tears rolled down the old women's cheeks when they saw him. Some of them had been servants in his father's house, and loved him. One brought gruel; another bathed his feet; others ran in search of healing leaves of different sorts. Bruising these in a stone mortar, they rubbed him from head to foot with the wet fibre. All his pain and weariness vanished as by magic. His wounds healed, and in a day he was ready to set off for home. There was but one pony in the old women's camp. This was old, vicious, blind of one eye, and with one ear cropped short; but it looked to Don Antonio far more beautiful than the gay steed on which he had ridden away from Los Angeles three days before. There was one pair of ragged shoes of enormous size among the old women's possessions. These were strapped on his feet by leathern thongs, and a bit of old sheepskin was tied around the pony's body. Thus accoutred and mounted, shivering in his drawers under his single blanket, the captain and flag-bearer turned his face homeward. At the first friend's house he reached he stopped and begged for food. Some dried meat was given to him, and a stool on the porch offered to him. It was the house of a dear friend, and the friend's sister was his sweetheart. As he sat there eating his meat, the women eyed him curiously. One said to the other, "How much he looks like Antonio!" At last the sweetheart, coming nearer, asked him if he were "any relation of Don Antonio." "No," he said. Just at that moment his friend rode up, gave one glance at the pitiful beggar sitting on his porch, shouted his name, dashed toward him, and seized him in his arms. Then was a great laughing and half-weeping, for it had been rumored that he had been taken prisoner by the Americans.

From this friend he received a welcome gift of a pair of trousers, many inches too short for his legs. At the next house his friend was as much too tall, and his second pair of gift trousers had to be rolled up in thick folds around his ankles.

Finally he reached Los Angeles in safety. Halting in a grove outside the town, he waited till twilight before entering. Having disguised himself in the rags which he had worn from the Indian village, he rode boldly up to the porch of his father's house, and in an impudent tone called for brandy. The terrified women began to scream; but his youngest sister, fixing one piercing glance on his face, laughed out gladly, and cried, "You can't fool me; you are Antonio."

Sitting in the little corner room, looking out through the open door on the gay garden and breathing its spring air, gay even in midwinter, and as spicy then as the gardens of other lands are in June, I spent many an afternoon listening to such tales as this. Sunset always came long before its time, it seemed, on these days.

Occasionally, at the last moment, Don Antonio would take up his guitar, and, in a voice still sympathetic and full of melody, sing an old Spanish love-song, brought to his mind by thus living over the events of his youth. Never, however, in his most ardent youth, could his eyes have gazed on his fairest sweetheart's face with a look of greater devotion than that with which they now rest on the noble, expressive countenance of his wife, as he sings the ancient and tender strains. Of one of them, I once won from her, amid laughs and blushes, a few words of translation:—

"Let us hear the sweet echo

Of your sweet voice that charms me.

The one that truly loves you,

He says he wishes to love;

That the one who with ardent love adores you,

Will sacrifice himself for you.

Do not deprive me,

Owner of me,

Of that sweet echo

Of your sweet voice that charms me."

Near the western end of Don Antonio's porch is an orange-tree, on which were hanging at this time twenty-five hundred oranges, ripe and golden among the glossy leaves. Under this tree my carriage always waited for me. The señora never allowed me to depart without bringing to me, in the carriage, farewell gifts of flowers and fruit: clusters of grapes, dried and fresh; great boughs full of oranges, more than I could lift. As I drove away thus, my lap filled with bloom and golden fruit, canopies of golden fruit over my head, I said to myself often: "Fables are prophecies. The Hesperides have come true."

CHANCE DAYS IN OREGON.

The best things in life seem always snatched on chances. The longer one lives and looks back, the more he realizes this, and the harder he finds it to "make option which of two," in the perpetually recurring cases when "there's not enough for this and that," and he must choose which he will do or take. Chancing right in a decision, and seeing clearly what a blunder any other decision would have been, only makes the next such decision harder, and contributes to increased vacillation of purpose and infirmity of will, until one comes to have serious doubts whether there be not a truer philosophy in the "toss up" test than in any other method. "Heads we go, tails we stay," will prove right as many times out of ten as the most painstaking pros and cons, weighing, consulting, and slow deciding.

It was not exactly by "heads and tails" that we won our glimpse of Oregon; but it came so nearly to the same thing that our recollections of the journey are still mingled with that sort of exultant sense of delight with which the human mind always regards a purely fortuitous possession.

Three days and two nights on the Pacific Ocean is a round price to pay for a thing, even for Oregon, with the Columbia River thrown in. There is not so misnamed a piece of water on the globe as the Pacific Ocean, nor so unexplainable a delusion as the almost universal impression that it is smooth sailing there. It is British Channel and North Sea and off the Hebrides combined,—as many different twists and chops and swells as there are waves. People who have crossed the Atlantic again and again without so much as a qualm are desperately ill between San Francisco and Portland. There is but one comparison for the motion: it is as if one's stomach were being treated as double teeth are handled, when country doctors are forced to officiate as dentists, and know no better way to get a four-pronged tooth out of its socket than to turn it round and round till it is torn loose.

Three days and two nights! I spent no inconsiderable portion of the time in speculations as to Monsieur Antoine Crozat's probable reasons for giving back to King Louis his magnificent grant of Pacific coast country. He kept it five years, I believe. In that time he probably voyaged up and down its shores thoroughly. Having been an adventurous trader in the Indies, he must have been well wonted to seas; and being worth forty millions of livres, he could afford to make himself as comfortable in the matter of a ship as was possible a century and a half ago. His grant was a princely domain, an empire five times larger than France itself. What could he have been thinking of, to hand it back to King Louis like a worthless bauble of which he had grown tired? Nothing but the terrors of sea-sickness can explain it. If he could have foreseen the steam-engine, and have had a vision of it flying on iron roads across continents and mountains, how differently would he have conducted! The heirs of Monsieur Antoine, if any such there be to-day, must chafe when they read the terms of our Louisiana Purchase.

Three days and two nights—from Thursday morning till Saturday afternoon—between San Francisco and the mouth of the Columbia, and then we had to lie at Astoria the greater part of Sunday night before the tide would let us go on up the river. It was not waste time, however. Astoria is a place curious to behold. Seen from the water, it seems a tidy little white town nestled on the shore, and well topped off by wooded hills. Landing, one finds that it must be ranked as amphibious, being literally half on land and half on water. From Astoria proper—the old Astoria, which Mr. Astor founded, and Washington Irving described—up to the new town, or upper Astoria, is a mile and a half, two thirds bridges and piers. Long wooden wharves, more streets than wharves, resting on hundreds of piles, are built out to deep water. They fairly fringe the shore; and the street nearest the water is little more than a succession of bridges from wharf to wharf. Frequent bays and inlets make up, leaving unsightly muddy wastes when the tide goes out. To see family washing hung out on lines over these tidal flats, and the family infants drawing their go-carts in the mud below, was a droll sight. At least every other building on these strange wharf streets is a salmon cannery, and acres of the wharf surfaces were covered with salmon nets spread out to dry. The streets were crowded with wild-looking men, sailor-like, and yet not sailor-like, all wearing india-rubber boots reaching far above the knee, with queer wing-like flaps projecting all around at top. These were the fishers of salmon, two thousand of them, Russians, Finns, Germans, Italians,—"every kind on the earth," an old restaurant-keeper said, in speaking of them; "every kind on the earth, they pour in here, for four months, from May to September. They're a wild set; clear out with the salmon, 'n' don't mind any more 'n the fish do what they leave behind 'em."

All day long they kill time in the saloons. The nights they spend on the water, flinging and trolling and drawing in their nets, which often burst with the weight of the captured salmon. It is a strange life, and one sure to foster a man's worst traits rather than his best ones. The fishermen who have homes and families, and are loyal to them, industrious and thrifty, are the exception.

The site of Mr. Astor's original fort is now the terraced yard of a spruce new house on the corner of one of the pleasantest streets in the old town. These streets are little more than narrow terraces rising one above the other on jutting and jagged levels of the river-bank. They command superb off-looks across and up and down the majestic river, which is here far more a bay than a river. The Astoria people must be strangely indifferent to these views; for the majority of the finest houses face away from the water, looking straight into the rough wooded hillside.

Uncouth and quaint vehicles are perpetually plying between the old and the new towns; they jolt along fast over the narrow wooden roads, and the foot-passengers, who have no other place to walk, are perpetually scrambling from under the horses' heels. It is a unique highway: pebbly beaches, marshes, and salt ponds, alder-grown cliffs, hemlock and spruce copses on its inland side; on the water-side, bustling wharves, canneries, fishermen's boarding-houses, great spaces filled in with bare piles waiting to be floored; at every turn shore and sea seem to change sides, and clumps of brakes, fresh-hewn stumps, maple and madrone trees, shift places with canneries and wharves; the sea swashes under the planks of the road at one minute, and the next is an eighth of a mile away, at the end of a close-built lane. Even in the thickest settled business part of the town, blocks of water alternate with blocks of brick and stone.

The statistics of the salmon-canning business almost pass belief. In 1881 six hundred thousand cases of canned salmon were shipped from Astoria. We ourselves saw seventy-five hundred cases put on board one steamer. There were forty eight-pound cans in each case; it took five hours' steady work, of forty "long-shore men," to load them. These long-shore men are another shifting and turbulent element in the populations of the river towns. They work day and night, get big wages, go from place to place, and spend money recklessly; a sort of commercial Bohemian, difficult to handle and often dangerous. They sometimes elect to take fifty cents an hour and all the beer they can drink, rather than a dollar an hour and no beer. At the time we saw them, they were on beer wages. The foaming beer casks stood at short intervals along the wharf,—a pitcher, pail, and mug at each cask. The scene was a lively one: four cases loaded at a time on each truck, run swiftly to the wharf edge, and slid down the hold; trucks rattling, turning sharp corners; men laughing, wheeling to right and left of each other, tossing off mugs of beer, wiping their mouths with their hands, and flinging the drops in the air with jests,—one half forgave them for taking part wages in the beer, it made it so much merrier.

On Sunday morning we waked up to find ourselves at sea in the Columbia River. A good part of Oregon and Washington Territory seemed also to be at sea there. When a river of the size of the Columbia gets thirty feet above low-water mark, towns and townships go to sea unexpectedly. All the way up the Columbia to the Willamette, and down the Willamette to Portland, we sailed in and on a freshet, and saw at once more and less of the country than could be seen at any other time. At the town of Kalama, facetiously announced as "the water terminus of the Northern Pacific Railroad," the hotel, the railroad station, and its warehouses were entirely surrounded by water, and we sailed, in seemingly deep water, directly over the wharf where landings were usually made. At other towns on the way we ran well up into the fields, and landed passengers or freight on stray sand-spits, or hillocks, from which they could get off again on the other side by small boats. We passed scores of deserted houses, their windows open, the water swashing over their door-sills; gardens with only tops of bushes in sight, one with red roses swaying back and forth, limp and helpless on the tide. It seemed strange that men would build houses and make farms in a place where they are each year liable to be driven out by such freshets. When I expressed this wonder, an Oregonian replied lightly, "Oh, the river always gives them plenty of time. They've all got boats, and they wait till the last minute always, hoping the water'll go down."—"But it must be unwholesome to the last degree to live on such overflowed lands. When the water recedes, they must get fevers."—"Oh, they get used to it. After they've taken about a barrel of quinine, they're pretty well acclimated."

Other inhabitants of the country asserted roundly that no fevers followed these freshets; that the trade-winds swept away all malarial influences; that the water did no injury whatever to the farms,—on the contrary, made the crops better; and that these farmers along the river bottoms "couldn't be hired to live anywhere else in Oregon."

The higher shore lines were wooded almost without a break; only at long intervals an oasis of clearing, high up, an emerald spot of barley or wheat, and a tiny farm-house. These were said to be usually lumbermen's homes; it was warmer up there than in the bottom, and crops thrived. In the not far-off day when these kingdoms of forests are overthrown, and the Columbia runs unshaded to the sea, these hill shores will be one vast granary.

The city of Portland is on the Willamette River, fourteen miles south of the junction of that river with the Columbia. Seen from its water approach, Portland is a picturesque city, with a near surrounding of hills, wooded with pines and firs, that make a superb sky-line setting to the town, and to the five grand snow-peaks, of which clear days give a sight. These dark forests and spear-top fringes are a more distinctive feature in the beauty of Portland's site than even its fine waters and islands. It is to be hoped that the Portland people will appreciate their value, and never let their near hills be shorn of trees. Not one tree more should be cut. Already there are breaks in the forest horizons, which mar the picture greatly; and it would take but a few days of ruthless wood choppers' work to rob the city forever of its backgrounds, turning them into unsightly barrens. The city is on both sides of the river, and is called East and West Portland. With the usual perversity in such cases, the higher ground and the sunny eastern frontage belong to the less popular part of the city, the west town having most of the business and all of the fine houses. Yet in times of freshet its lower streets are always under water; and the setting-up of back-water into drains, cellars, and empty lots is a yearly source of much illness. When we arrived, two of the principal hotels were surrounded by water; from one of them there was no going out or coming in except by planks laid on trestle-work in the piazzas, and the air in the lower part of the town was foul with bad smells from the stagnant water.

Portland is only thirty years old, and its population is not over twenty-five thousand; yet it is said to have more wealth per head than any other city in the United States except New Haven. Wheat and lumber and salmon have made it rich. Oregon wheat brings such prices in England that ships can afford to cross the ocean to get it; and last year one hundred and thirty-four vessels sailed out of Portland harbor, loaded solely with wheat or flour.

The city reminds one strongly of some of the rural towns in New England. The houses are unpretentious, wooden, either white or of light colors, and uniformly surrounded by pleasant grounds, in which trees, shrubs, and flowers grow freely, without any attempt at formal or decorative culture. One of the most delightful things about the town is its surrounding of wild and wooded country. In an hour, driving up on the hills to the west, one finds himself in wildernesses of woods: spruce, maple, cedar, and pine; dogwood, wild syringa, honeysuckle, ferns and brakes fitting in for undergrowth; and below all, white clover matting the ground. By the roadsides are Linnæa, red clover, yarrow, May-weed, and dandelion, looking to New England eyes strangely familiar and unfamiliar at once. Never in New England woods and roadsides do they have such a luxurious diet of water and rich soil, and such comfortable warm winters. The white clover especially has an air of spendthrifty indulgence about it which is delicious. It riots through the woods, even in their densest, darkest depths, making luxuriant pasturage where one would least look for it. On these wooded heights are scores of dairy farms, which have no clearings except of the space needful for the house and outbuildings. The cows, each with a bell at her neck, go roaming and browsing all day in the forests. Out of thickets scarcely penetrable to the eye come everywhere along the road the contented notes of these bells' slow tinkling at the cows' leisure. The milk, cream, and butter from these dairy farms are of the excellent quality to be expected, and we wondered at not seeing "white clover butter" advertised as well as "white clover honey." Land in these wooded wilds brings from forty to eighty dollars an acre; cleared, it is admirable farm land. Here and there we saw orchards of cherry and apple trees, which were loaded with fruit; the cherry trees so full that they showed red at a distance.

The alternation of these farms with long tracts of forest, where spruces and pines stand a hundred and fifty feet high, and myriads of wild things have grown in generations of tangle, gives to the country around Portland a charm and flavor peculiarly its own; even into the city itself extends something of the same charm of contrast and antithesis; meandering footpaths, or narrow plank sidewalks with grassy rims, running within stone's-throw of solid brick blocks and business thoroughfares. One of the most interesting places in the town is the Bureau of Immigration of the Northern Pacific Railroad. In the centre of the room stands a tall case, made of the native Oregon woods. It journeyed to the Paris and the Philadelphia Expositions, but nowhere can it have given eloquent mute answer to so many questions as it does in its present place. It now holds jars of all the grains raised in Oregon and Washington Territory; also sheaves of superb stalks of the same grains, arranged in circles,—wheat six feet high, oats ten, red clover over six, and timothy grass eight. To see Swedes, Norwegians, Germans, Irish, come in, stand wonderingly before this case, and then begin to ask their jargon of questions, was an experience which did more in an hour to make one realize what the present tide of immigration to the New Northwest really is than reading of statistics could do in a year. These immigrants are pouring in, it is estimated, at the rate of at least a hundred and fifty a day,—one hundred by way of San Francisco and Portland, twenty-five by the Puget Sound ports, and another twenty-five overland by wagons; no two with the same aim, no two alike in quality or capacity. To listen to their inquiries and their narratives, to give them advice and help, requires almost preternatural patience and sagacity. It might be doubted, perhaps, whether this requisite combination could be found in an American; certainly no one of any nationality could fill the office better than it is filled by the tireless Norwegian who occupies the post at present. It was touching to see the brightened faces of his countrymen, as their broken English was answered by him in the familiar words of their own tongue. He could tell well which parts of the new country would best suit the Hardanger men, and the men from Eide. It must have been hard for them to believe his statements, even when indorsed by the home speech. To the ordinary Scandinavian peasant, accustomed to measuring cultivable ground by hand-breadths, and making gardens in pockets in rocks, tales of hundreds of unbroken miles of wheat country, where crops average from thirty-five to forty-five bushels an acre, must sound incredible; and spite of their faith in their countryman, they are no doubt surprised when their first harvest in the Willamette or Umpqua valley proves that his statements were under, rather than over, the truth.

The Columbia River steamers set off from Portland at dawn, or thereabouts. Wise travellers go on board the night before, and their first morning consciousness is a wonder at finding themselves afloat,—afloat on a sea; for it hardly seems like river voyaging when shores are miles apart, and, in many broad vistas, water is all that can be seen. These vistas, in times of high water, when the Columbia may be said to be fairly "seas over," are grand. They shine and flicker for miles, right and left, with green feathery fringes of tree-tops, and queer brown stippled points and ridges, which are house gables and roof-trees, not quite gone under. One almost forgets, in the interest of the spectacle, what misery it means to the owners of the gables and roof-trees.

At Washougal Landing, on the morning when we went up the river, all that was to be seen of the warehouse on the wharf at which we should have made landing was the narrow ridge-line of its roof; and this was at least a third of a mile out from shore. The boat stopped, and the passengers were rowed out in boats and canoes, steering around among tree-tops and houses as best they might.

The true shore-line of the river we never once saw; but it cannot be so beautiful as was the freshet's shore of upper banks and terraces,—dark forests at top, shifting shades of blue in every rift between the hills, iridescent rainbow colors on the slopes, and gray clouds, white-edged, piled up in masses above them, all floating apace with us, and changing tone and tint oftener than we changed course.

As we approached the Cascade Mountains, the scenery grew grander with every mile. The river cuts through this range in a winding cañon, whose sides for a space of four or five miles are from three to four thousand feet high. But the charm of this pass is not so much in the height and grandeur as in the beauty of its walls. They vary in color and angle, and light and shadow, each second,—perpendicular rock fronts, mossy brown; shelves of velvety greenness and ledges of glistening red or black stone thrown across; great basaltic columns fluted as by a chisel; jutting tables of rock carpeted with yellow and brown lichen; turrets standing out with firs growing on them; bosky points of cottonwood trees; yellow and white blossoms and curtains of ferns, waving out, hanging over; and towering above all these, peaks and summits wrapped in fleecy clouds. Looking ahead, we could see sometimes only castellated mountain lines, meeting across the river, like walls; as we advanced they retreated, and opened with new vistas at each opening. Shining threads of water spun down in the highest places, sometimes falling sheer to the river, sometimes sinking out of sight in forest depths midway down, like the famed fosses of the Norway fjords. Long sky-lines of pines and firs, which we knew to be from one hundred to three hundred feet tall, looked in the aerial perspective no more than a mossy border along the wall. A little girl, looking up at them, gave by one artless exclamation a true idea of this effect. "Oh," she cried, "they look just as if you could pick a little bunch of them." At intervals along the right-hand shore were to be seen the white-tented encampments of the Chinese laborers on the road which the Northern Pacific Railroad Company is building to link St. Paul with Puget Sound. A force of three thousand Chinamen and two thousand whites is at work on this river division, and the road is being pushed forward with great rapidity. The track looked in places as if it were not one inch out of the water, though it was twenty feet; and tunnels which were a hundred and thirty feet high looked only like oven mouths. It has been a hard road to build, costing in some parts sixty-five thousand dollars a mile. One spot was pointed out to us where twenty tons of powder had been put in, in seven drifts, and one hundred and forty cubic yards of rock and soil blown at one blast into the river. It is an odd thing that huge blasts like this make little noise, only a slight puff; whereas small blasts make the hills ring and echo with their racket.

Between the lower cascades and the upper cascades is a portage of six miles, past fierce waters, in which a boat could scarcely live. Here we took cars; they were overfull, and we felt ourselves much aggrieved at being obliged to make the short journey standing on one of the crowded platforms. It proved to be only another instance of the good things caught on chances. Next to me stood an old couple, the man's neck so burnt and wrinkled it looked like fiery red alligator's skin; his clothes, evidently his best, donned for a journey, were of a fashion so long gone by that they had a quaint dignity. The woman wore a checked calico sun-bonnet, and a green merino gown of as quaint a fashion as her husband's coat. With them was a veritable Leather Stocking,—an old farmer, whose flannel shirt, tied loosely at the throat with a bit of twine, fell open, and showed a broad hairy breast of which a gladiator might have been proud.

The cars jolted heavily, making it hard to keep one's footing; and the old man came near being shaken off the step. Recovering himself, he said, laughing, to his friend,—

"Anyhow, it's easier'n a buckin' Cayuse horse."

"Yes," assented the other. "'T ain't much like '49, is it?"

"Were you here in '49?" I asked eagerly.

"'49!" he repeated scornfully. "I was here in '47. I was seven months comin' across from Iowa to Oregon City in an ox team; an' we're livin' on that same section we took up then; an' I reckon there hain't nobody got a lien on to it yet. We've raised nine children, an' the youngest on em's twenty-one. My woman's been sick for two or three years; this is the first time I've got her out. Thought we'd go down to Columbus, an' get a little pleasure, if we can. We used to come up to this portage in boats, an' then pack everything on horses an' ride across."

"We wore buckskin clo'es in those days," interrupted Leather Stocking, "and spurs with bells; needn't do more 'n jingle the bells, 'n' the horse'd start. I'd like to see them times back agen, too. I vow I'm put to 't now to know where to go. This civilyzation," with an indescribably sarcastic emphasis on the third syllable, "is too much for me. I don't want to live where I can't go out 'n' kill a deer before breakfast any mornin' I take a notion to."

"Were there many Indians here in those days?" I asked.

"Many Injuns?" he retorted; "why, 'twas all Injuns. All this country 'long here was jest full on 'em."

"How did you find them?"

"Jest 's civil 's any people in the world; never had no trouble with 'em. Nobody never did have any thet treated 'em fair. I tell ye, it's jest with them 's 't is with cattle. Now there 'll be one man raise cattle, an' be real mean with 'em; an' they'll all hook, an' kick, an' break fences, an' run away. An' there 'll be another, an' his cattle 'll all be kind, an' come ter yer when you call 'em. I don't never want to know anythin' more about a man than the way his stock acts. I hain't got a critter that won't come up by its name an' lick my hand. An' it's jest so with folks. Ef a man's mean to you, yer goin' to be mean to him, every time. The great thing with Injuns is, never to tell 'em a yarn. If yer deceive 'em once, they won't ever trust yer again, 's long's yer live, an' you can't trust them either. Oh, I know Injuns, I tell you. I've been among 'em here more 'n thirty year, an' I never had the first trouble yet. There's been troubles, but I wa'n't in 'em. It's been the white people's fault every time."

"Did you ever know Chief Joseph?" I asked.

"What, old Jo! You bet I knew him. He's an A No. 1 Injun, he is. He's real honorable. Why, I got lost once, an' I came right on his camp before I knowed it, an' the Injuns they grabbed me; 't was night, 'n' I was kind o' creepin' along cautious, an' the first thing I knew there was an Injun had me on each side, an' they jest marched me up to Jo's tent, to know what they should do with me. I wa'n't a mite afraid; I jest looked him right square in the eye. That's another thing with Injuns; you've got to look 'em in the eye, or they won't trust ye. Well, Jo, he took up a torch, a pine knot he had burnin', and he held it close't up to my face, and looked me up an' down, an' down an' up; an' I never flinched; I jest looked him up an' down's good's he did me; 'n' then he set the knot down, 'n' told the men it was all right,—I was 'tum tum;' that meant I was good heart; 'n' they gave me all I could eat, 'n' a guide to show me my way, next day, 'n' I couldn't make Jo nor any of 'em take one cent. I had a kind o' comforter o' red yarn, I wore round my neck; an' at last I got Jo to take that, jest as a kind o' momento."

The old man was greatly indignant to hear that Chief Joseph was in Indian Territory. He had been out of the State at the time of the Nez Percé war, and had not heard of Joseph's fate.

"Well, that was a dirty mean trick!" he exclaimed,—"a dirty mean trick! I don't care who done it."

Then he told me of another Indian chief he had known well,—"Ercutch" by name. This chief was always a warm friend of the whites; again and again he had warned them of danger from hostile Indians. "Why, when he died, there wa'n't a white woman in all this country that didn't mourn 's if she'd lost a friend; they felt safe's long's he was round. When he knew he was dyin' he jest bade all his friends good-by. Said he, 'Good-by! I'm goin' to the Great Spirit;' an' then he named over each friend he had, Injuns an' whites, each one by name, and said good-by after each name."

It was a strange half-hour, rocking and jolting on this crowded car platform, the splendid tossing and foaming river with its rocks and islands on one hand, high cliffs and fir forests on the other; these three weather-beaten, eager, aged faces by my side, with their shrewd old voices telling such reminiscences, and rising shrill above the din of the cars.

From the upper cascades to the Dalles, by boat again; a splendid forty miles' run, through the mountain-pass, its walls now gradually lowering, and, on the Washington Territory side of the river, terraces and slopes of cleared lands and occasional settlements. Great numbers of drift-logs passed us here, coming down apace, from the rush of the Dalles above. Every now and then one would get tangled in the bushes and roots on the shore, swing in, and lodge tight to await the next freshet.

The "log" of one of these driftwood voyages would be interesting; a tree trunk may be ten years getting down to the sea, or it may swirl down in a week. It is one of the businesses along the river to catch them, and pull them in to shore, and much money is made at it. One lucky fisher of logs, on the Snake River Fork, once drew ashore six hundred cords in a single year. Sometimes a whole boom gets loose from its moorings, and comes down stream, without breaking up. This is a godsend to anybody who can head it off and tow it in shore; for by the law of the river he is entitled to one half the value of the logs.

At the Dalles is another short portage of twelve miles, past a portion of the river which, though less grand than its plunge through the Cascade Mountains, is far more unique and wonderful. The waters here are stripped and shred into countless zigzagging torrents, boiling along through labyrinths of black lava rocks and slabs. There is nothing in all Nature so gloomy, so weird, as volcanic slag; and the piles, ridges, walls, palisades of it thrown up at this point look like the roof-trees, chimneys, turrets of a half-engulfed Pandemonium. Dark slaty and gray tints spread over the whole shore, also; it is all volcanic matter, oozed or boiled over, and hardened into rigid shapes of death and destruction. The place is terrible to see. Fitting in well with the desolateness of the region was a group of half-naked Indians crouching on the rocks, gaunt and wretched, fishing for salmon; the hollows in the rocks about them filled with the bright vermilion-colored salmon spawn, spread out to dry. The twilight was nearly over as we sped by, and the deepening darkness added momently to the gloom of the scene.

At Celilo, just above the Dalles, we took boat again for Umatilla, one hundred miles farther up the river.

Next morning we were still among lava beds: on the Washington Territory side, low, rolling shores, or slanting slopes with terraces, and tufty brown surfaces broken by ridges and points of the black slag; on the Oregon side, high brown cliffs mottled with red and yellow lichens, and great beaches and dunes of sand, which had blown into windrows and curving hillock lines as on the sea-shore. This sand is a terrible enemy for a railroad to fight. In a few hours, sometimes, rods of the track are buried by it as deep as by snow in the fiercest winter storms.

The first picture I saw from my state-room windows, this morning, was an Indian standing on a narrow plank shelf that was let down by ropes over a perpendicular rock front, some fifty feet high. There he stood, as composed as if he were on terra firma, bending over towards the water, and flinging in his salmon net. On the rocks above him sat the women of his family, spreading the salmon to dry. We were within so short a distance of the banks that friendly smiles could be distinctly seen; and one of the younger squaws, laughing back at the lookers-on on deck, picked up a salmon, and waving it in her right hand ran swiftly along towards an outjutting point. She was a gay creature, with scarlet fringed leggings, a pale green blanket, and on her head a twisted handkerchief of a fine old Dürer red. As she poised herself, and braced backwards to throw the salmon on deck, she was a superb figure against the sky; she did not throw straight, and the fish fell a few inches short of reaching the boat. As it struck the water she made a petulant little gesture of disappointment, like a child, threw up her hands, turned, and ran back to her work.

At Umatilla, being forced again to "make option which of two," we reluctantly turned back, leaving the beautiful Walla Walla region unvisited, for the sake of seeing Puget Sound. The Walla Walla region is said to be the finest stretch of wheat country in the world. Lava slag, when decomposed, makes the richest of soil,—deep and seemingly of inexhaustible fertility. A failure of harvests is said never to have been known in that country; the average yield of wheat is thirty-five to forty bushels an acre, and oats have yielded a hundred bushels. Apples and peaches thrive, and are of a superior quality. The country is well watered, and has fine rolling plateaus from fifteen hundred to three thousand feet high, giving a climate neither too cold in winter nor too hot in summer, and of a bracing quality not found nearer the sea. Hearing all the unquestionable tributes to the beauty and value of this Walla Walla region, I could not but recall some of Chief Joseph's pleas that a small share of it should be left in the possession of those who once owned it all.

From our pilot, on the way down, I heard an Indian story, too touching to be forgotten, though too long to tell here except in briefest outline. As we were passing a little village, half under water, he exclaimed, looking earnestly at a small building to whose window-sills the water nearly reached: "Well, I declare, Lucy's been driven out of her house this time. I was wondering why I didn't see her handkerchief a-waving. She always waves to me when I go by." Then he told me Lucy's story.

She was a California Indian, probably of the Tulares, and migrated to Oregon with her family thirty years ago. She was then a young girl, and said to be the handsomest squaw ever seen in Oregon. In those days white men in wildernesses thought it small shame, if any, to take Indian women to live with them as wives, and Lucy was much sought and wooed. But she seems to have had uncommon virtue or coldness, for she resisted all such approaches for a long time.

Finally, a man named Pomeroy appeared; and, as Lucy said afterward, as soon as she looked at him, she knew he was her "tum tum man," and she must go with him. He had a small sloop, and Lucy became its mate. They two alone ran it for several years up and down the river. He established a little trading-post, and Lucy always took charge of that when he went to buy goods. When gold was discovered at Ringgold Bar, Lucy went there, worked with a rocker like a man, and washed out hundreds of dollars' worth of gold, all which she gave to Pomeroy. With it he built a fine schooner and enlarged his business, the faithful Lucy working always at his side and bidding. At last, after eight or ten years, he grew weary of her and of the country, and made up his mind to go to California. But he had not the heart to tell Lucy he meant to leave her. The pilot who told me this story was at that time captain of a schooner on the river. Pomeroy came to him one day, and asked him to move Lucy and her effects down to Columbus. He said he had told her that she must go and live there with her relatives, while he went to California and looked about, and then he would send for her. The poor creature, who had no idea of treachery, came on board cheerfully and willingly, and he set her off at Columbus. This was in the early spring. Week after week, month after month, whenever his schooner stopped there, Lucy was on the shore, asking if he had heard from Pomeroy. For a long time, he said, he couldn't bear to tell her. At last he did; but she would not believe him. Winter came on. She had got a few boards together and built herself a sort of hut, near a house where lived an eccentric old bachelor, who finally took compassion on her, and to save her from freezing let her come into his shanty to sleep. He was a mysterious old man, a recluse, with a morbid aversion to women; and at the outset it was a great struggle for him to let even an Indian woman cross his threshold. But little by little Lucy won her way: first she washed the dishes; then she would timidly help at the cooking. Faithful, patient, unpresuming, at last she grew to be really the old man's housekeeper as well as servant. He lost his health, and became blind. Lucy took care of him till he died, and followed him to the grave, his only mourner,—the only human being in the country with whom he had any tie. He left her his little house and a few hundred dollars,—all he had; and there she is still, alone, making out to live by doing whatever work she can find in the neighborhood. Everybody respects her; she is known as "Lucy" up and down the river. "I did my best to hire her to come and keep house for my wife, last year," said the pilot. "I'd rather have her for nurse or cook than any white woman in Oregon. But she wouldn't come. I don't know as she's done looking for Pomeroy to come back yet, and she's going to stay just where he left her. She never misses a time, waving to me, when she knows what boat I'm on; and there isn't much going on on the river she don't know."

It was dusk when the pilot finished telling Lucy's story. We were shooting along through wild passages of water called Hell Gate, just above the Dalles. In the dim light the basaltic columnar cliffs looked like grooved ebony. One of the pinnacles has a strange resemblance to the figure of an Indian. It is called the Chief, and the semblance is startling,—a colossal figure, with a plume-crowned head, turned as if gazing backward over the shoulder; the attitude stately, the drapery graceful, and the whole expression one of profound and dignified sorrow. It seemed a strangely fitting emphasis to the story of the faithful Indian woman.

It was near midnight when we passed the Dalles. Our train was late, and dashed on at its swiftest. Fitful light came from a wisp of a new moon and one star; they seemed tossing in a tumultuous sea of dark clouds. In this glimmering darkness the lava walls and ridges stood up, inky black; the foaming water looked like molten steel, the whole region more ghastly and terrible than before.

There is a village of three thousand inhabitants at the Dalles. The houses are set among lava hillocks and ridges. The fields seemed bubbled with lava, their blackened surfaces stippled in with yellow and brown. High up above are wheat-fields in clearings, reaching to the sky-line of the hills. Great slopes of crumbling and disintegrating lava rock spread superb purple and slate colors between the greens of forests and wheat-fields. It is one of the memorable pictures on the Columbia.

To go both up and down a river is a good deal like spending a summer and a winter in a place, so great difference does it make when right hand and left shift sides, and everything is seen from a new stand-point.

The Columbia River scenery is taken at its best going up, especially the gradual crescendo of the Cascade Mountain region, which is far tamer entered from above. But we had a compensation in the clearer sky and lifted clouds, which gave us the more distant snow-peaks in all their glory; and our run down from the Dalles to Portland was the best day of our three on the river. Our steamer was steered by hydraulic pressure; and it was a wonderful thing to sit in the pilot-house and see the slight touch of a finger on the shining lever sway the great boat in a second. A baby's hand is strong enough to steer the largest steamboat by this instrument. It could turn the boat, the captain said, in a maelstrom, where four men together could not budge the rudder-wheel.

The history of the Columbia River navigation would make by itself an interesting chapter. It dates back to 1792, when a Boston ship and a Boston captain first sailed up the river. A curious bit of history in regard to that ship is to be found in the archives of the old Spanish government in California. Whenever a royal decree was issued in Madrid in regard to the Indies or New Spain, a copy of it was sent to every viceroy in the Spanish Dominions; he communicated it to his next subordinate, who in turn sent it to all the governors, and so on, till the decree reached every corner of the king's provinces. In 1789 there was sent from Madrid, by ship to Mexico, and thence by courier to California, and by Fages, the California governor, to every port in California, the following order:—

"Whenever there may arrive at the port of San Francisco a ship named the 'Columbia,' said to belong to General Washington of the American States, commanded by John Kendrick, which sailed from Boston in 1787, bound on a voyage of discovery to the Russian settlements on the northern coast of the peninsula, you will cause said vessel to be examined with caution and delicacy, using for this purpose a small boat which you have in your possession."

Two months after this order was promulgated in the Santa Barbara presidio, Captain Gray, of the ship "Washington," and Captain Kendrick of the ship "Columbia," changed ships in Wickmanish harbor. Captain Gray took the "Columbia" to China, and did not sail into San Francisco harbor at all, whereby he escaped being "examined with caution and delicacy" by the small boat in possession of the San Francisco garrison. Not till the 11th of May, 1792, did he return and sail up the Columbia River, then called the Oregon. He renamed it, for his ship, "Columbia's River;" but the possessive was soon dropped.

When one looks at the crowded rows of steamboats at the Portland wharves now, it is hard to realize that it is only thirty-two years since the first one was launched there. Two were built and launched in one year, the "Columbia" and the "Lot Whitcomb." The "Lot Whitcomb" was launched on Christmas Day; there were three days' feasting and dancing, and people gathered from all parts of the Territory to celebrate the occasion.

It is also hard to realize, when standing on the Portland wharves, that it is less than fifty years since there were angry discussions in the United States Congress as to whether or not it were worth while to obtain Oregon as a possession, and in the Eastern States manuals were being freely distributed, bearing such titles as this: "A general circular to all persons of good character wishing to emigrate to the Oregon Territory." Even those statesmen who were most earnest in favor of the securing of Oregon did not perceive the true nature of its value. One of Benton's most enthusiastic predictions was that an "emporium of Asiatic commerce" would be situated at the mouth of the Columbia, and that "a stream of Asiatic trade would pour into the valley of the Mississippi through the channel of Oregon." But the future of Oregon and Washington rests not on any transmission of the riches of other countries, however important an element in their prosperity that may ultimately become. Their true riches are their own and inalienable. They are to be among the great feeders of the earth. Gold and silver values are unsteady and capricious; intrigues can overthrow them; markets can be glutted, and mines fail. But bread the nations of the earth must have. The bread-yielder controls the situation always. Given a soil which can grow wheat year after year with no apparent fatigue or exhaustion, a climate where rains never fail and seed-time and harvest are uniformly certain, and conditions are created under which the future success and wealth of a country may be predicted just as surely as the movements of the planets in the heavens.

There are three great valleys in western Oregon,—the Willamette, the Umpqua, and the Rogue River. The Willamette is the largest, being sixty miles long by one hundred and fifty wide. The Umpqua and Rogue River together contain over a million of acres. These valleys are natural gardens; fertile to luxuriance, and watered by all the westward drainage of the great Cascade Range, the Andes of North America, a continuation of the Sierra Nevada. The Coast Range Mountains lie west of these valleys, breaking, but not shutting out, the influence of the sea air and fogs. This valley region between these two ranges contains less than a third of the area of Washington and Oregon. The country east of the Cascade Mountains is no less fertile, but has a drier climate, colder winters, and hotter summers. Its elevation is from two to four thousand feet,—probably the very best elevations for health. A comparison of statistics of yearly death-rates cannot be made with absolute fairness between old and thick-settled and new and sparsely settled countries. Allowance must be made for the probably superior health and strength of the men and women who have had the youth and energy to go forward as pioneers. But, making all due allowance for these, there still remains difference enough to startle one between the death-rates in some of the Atlantic States and in these infant empires of the New Northwest. The yearly death-rate in Massachusetts is one out of fifty-seven; in Vermont one out of ninety-seven; in Oregon one out of one hundred and seventy-two; and in Washington Territory one out of two hundred and twenty-eight.

As we glided slowly to anchorage in Portland harbor, five dazzling snow-white peaks were in sight on the horizon,—Mount Hood, of peerless shape, strong as if it were a bulwark of the very heavens themselves, yet graceful and sharp-cut as Egypt's pyramids; St. Helen's, a little lower, yet looking higher, with the marvellous curves of its slender shining cone, bent on and seemingly into the sky, like an intaglio of ice cut in the blue; miles away in the farthest north and east horizons, Mounts Tacoma and Adams and Baker, all gleaming white, and all seeming to uphold the skies.

These eternal, unalterable snow-peaks will be as eternal and unalterable factors in the history of the country as in its beauty to the eye. Their value will not come under any head of things reckonable by census, statistics, or computation, but it will be none the less real for that: it will be an element in the nature and character of every man and woman born within sight of the radiant splendor; and it will be strange if it does not ultimately develop, in the empire of this New Northwest, a local patriotism and passionate loyalty to soil as strong and lasting as that which has made generations of Swiss mountaineers ready to brave death for a sight of their mountains.

II.
SCOTLAND AND ENGLAND.

A BURNS PILGRIMAGE.

A shining-beached crescent of country facing to the sunset, and rising higher and higher to the east till it becomes mountain, is the county of Ayrshire, fair and famous among the southern Scotch highlands. To a sixty-mile measure by air, between its north and south promontories, it stretches a curving coast of ninety; and when Robert Burns strolled over its breezy uplands, he saw always beautiful and mysterious silver lines of land thrusting themselves out into the mists of the sea, pointing to far-off island peaks, seeming sometimes to bridge and sometimes to wall vistas ending only in sky. These lines are as beautiful, elusive, and luring now as then, and in the inalienable loyalty of nature bear testimony to-day to their lover.

This is the greatest crown of the hero and the poet. Other great men hold fame by failing records which moth and fire destroy. The places that knew them know them no more when they are dead. Marble and canvas and parchment league in vain to keep green the memory of him who did not love and consecrate by his life-blood, in fight or in song, the soil where he trod. But for him who has done this,—who fought well, sang well,—the morning cloud, and the wild rose, and broken blades of grass under men's feet, become immortal witnesses; so imperishable, after all, are what we are in the habit of calling the "perishable things of this earth."

More than two hundred years ago, when the followers and holders of the different baronies of Ayrshire compared respective dignities and values, they made a proverb which ran:—

"Carrick for a man; Kyle for a coo;

Cunningham for butter and cheese; Galloway for woo."

Before the nineteenth century set in, the proverb should have been changed; for Kyle is the land through which "Bonnie Doon" and Irvine Water run, and there has been never a man in all Carrick of whom Carrick can be proud as is Kyle of Robert Burns. It has been said that a copy of his poems lies on every Scotch cottager's shelf, by the side of the Bible. This is probably not very far from the truth. Certain it is, that in the villages where he dwelt there seems to be no man, no child, who does not apparently know every detail of the life he lived there, nearly a hundred years ago.

"Will ye be drivin' over to Tarbolton in the morning?" said the pretty young vice-landlady of the King's Arms at Ayr, when I wrote my name in her visitors' book late one Saturday night.

"What made you think of that?" I asked, amused.

"And did ye not come on account o' Burns?" she replied. "There's been a many from your country here by reason of him this summer. I think you love him in America a'most as well as we do oursel's. It's vary seldom the English come to see anythin' aboot him. They've so many poets o' their own, I suppose, is the reason o' their not thinkin' more o' Burns."

All that there was unflattering in this speech I forgave by reason of the girl's sweet low voice, pretty gray eyes, and gentle, refined hospitality. She might have been the daughter of some country gentleman, welcoming a guest to the house; and she took as much interest in making all the arrangements for my drive to Tarbolton the next morning as if it had been a pleasure excursion for herself. It is but a dull life she leads, helping her widowed mother keep the King's Arms,—dull, and unprofitable too, I fear; for it takes four men-servants and seven women to keep up the house, and I saw no symptom of any coming or going of customers in it. A stillness as of a church on weekdays reigned throughout the establishment. "At the races and when the yeomanry come," she said, there was something to do; but "in the winter nothing, except at the times of the county balls. You know, ma'am, we've many county families here," she remarked with gentle pride, "and they all stop with us."

There is a compensation to the lower orders of a society where rank and castes are fixed, which does not readily occur at first sight to the democratic mind naturally rebelling against such defined distinctions. It is very much to be questioned whether, in a republic, the people who find themselves temporarily lower down in the social scale than they like to be or expect to stay, feel, in their consciousness of the possibility of rising, half so much pride or satisfying pleasure as do the lower classes in England, for instance, in their relations with those whom they serve, whose dignity they seem to share by ministering to it.

The way from Ayr to Tarbolton must be greatly changed since the day when the sorrowful Burns family trod it, going from the Mount Oliphant farm to that of Lochlea. Now it is for miles a smooth road, on which horses' hoofs ring merrily, and neat little stone houses, with pretty yards, line it on both sides for some distance. The ground rises almost immediately, so that the dwellers in these little suburban houses get fine off-looks seaward and a wholesome breeze in at their windows. The houses are built joined by twos, with a yard in common. They have three rooms besides the kitchen, and they rent for twenty-five pounds a year; so no industrious man of Ayr need be badly lodged. Where the houses leave off, hedges begin,—thorn and beech, untrimmed and luxuriant, with great outbursts of white honeysuckle and sweet-brier at intervals. As far as the eye could see were waving fields of wheat, oats, and "rye-grass," which last being just ripe was of a glorious red color. The wheat-fields were rich and full, sixty bushels to the acre. Oats, which do not take so kindly to the soil and air, produce sometimes only forty-eight.

Burns was but sixteen when his father moved from Mount Oliphant to the Lochlea farm, in the parish of Tarbolton. It was in Tarbolton that he first went to dancing-school, joined the Freemasons, and organized the club which, no doubt, cost him dear, "The Bachelors of Tarbolton." In the beginning this club consisted of only five members besides Burns and his brother; afterward it was enlarged to sixteen. Burns drew up the rules; and the last one—the tenth—is worth remembering, as an unconscious defining on his part of his ideal of human life:—

"Every man proper for a member of this society must have a friendly, honest, open heart, above everything dirty or mean, and must be a professed lover of one or more of the sex. The proper person for this society is a cheerful, honest-hearted lad, who, if he has a friend that is true, and a mistress that is kind, and as much wealth as genteelly to make both ends meet, is just as happy as this world can make him."

Walking to-day through the narrow streets of Tarbolton, it is wellnigh impossible to conceive of such rollicking good cheer having made abiding-place there. It is a close, packed town, the houses of stone or white plaster,—many of them low, squalid, with thatched roofs and walls awry; those that are not squalid are grim. The streets are winding and tangled; the people look poor and dull. As I drove up to the "Crown Inn," the place where the Tarbolton Freemasons meet now, and where some of the relics of Burns's Freemason days are kept, the "first bells" were ringing in the belfry of the old church opposite, and the landlord of the inn replied with a look of great embarrassment to my request to see the Burns relics,—

"It's the Sabbath, mem."

Then he stood still, scratching his head for a few moments, and then set off, at full run, down the street without another word.

"He's gone to the head Mason," explained the landlady. "It takes three to open the chest. I think ye'll na see it the day." And she turned on her heel with a frown and left me.

"They make much account o' the Sabbath in this country," said my driver. "Another day ye'd do better."

Thinking of Burns's lines to the "Unco Guid," I strolled over into the churchyard opposite, to await the landlord's return. The bell-ringer had come down, and followed me curiously about among the graves. One very old stone had carved upon it two high-top boots; under these, two low shoes; below these, two kneeling figures, a man and a woman, cut in high relief; no inscription of any sort.

"What can it mean?" I asked.

The bell-ringer could not tell; it was so old nobody knew anything about it. His mother, now ninety years of age, remembered seeing it when she was a child, and it looked just as old then as now.

"There's a many strange things in this graveyard," said he; and then he led me to a corner where, enclosed by swinging chains and stone posts, was a carefully kept square of green turf, on which lay a granite slab. "Every year comes the money to pay for keeping that grass green," he said, "and no name to it. It's been going on that way for fifty years."

The stone-wall around the graveyard was dilapidated, and in parts was falling down.

"I suppose this old wall was here in Burns's time," I said.

"Ay, yes," said the bell-ringer; and pointing to a low, thatched cottage just outside it, "and yon shop—many's the time he's been in it playin' his tricks."

The landlord of the inn now came running up, with profuse apologies for the ill success of his mission. He had been to the head Mason, hoping he would come over and assist in the opening of the chest, in which were kept a Mason's apron worn by Burns, some jewels of his, and a book of minutes kept by him. But "bein' 's it's the Sabbath," and "he's sick in bed," and it was "against the rules to open the regalia chest unless three Masons were present," the kindly landlord, piling up reason after reason, irrespective of their consistency with each other, went on to explain that it would be impossible; but I might see the chair in which Burns always sat. This was a huge oaken chair, black with age, and furrowed with names cut deep in the wood. It was shaped and proportioned like a child's high-chair, and had precisely such a rest for the feet as is put on children's high-chairs. To this day the Grand Mason sits in it at their meetings, and will so long as the St. James Lodge exists.

"They've been offered hundreds of pounds for that chair, mem, plain as it is. You'd not think it; but there's no money'd buy it from the lodge," said the landlord.

The old club-house where the jolly "Bachelors of Tarbolton" met in Burns's day is a low, two-roomed, thatched cottage, half in ruins. The room where the bachelors smoked, drank, and sang is now little more than a cellar filled with rubbish and filth,—nothing left but the old fireplace to show that it was ever inhabited. In the other half of the cottage lives a laborer's family,—father, mother, and a young child: their one room, with its bed built into the wall, and their few delf dishes on the dresser, is probably much like the room in which Burns first opened his wondrous eyes. The man was lying on the floor playing with his baby. At the name of Burns, he sprang up with a hearty "Ay, weel," and ran out in his blue-stocking feet to show me the cellar, of which, it was plainly to be seen, he was far prouder than of his more comfortable side of the house. The name by which the inn was called in Burns's day he did not know. But "He's a Mason over there; he'll know," he cried; and before I could prevent him, he had darted, still shoeless, across the road, and asked the question of a yet poorer laborer, who was taking his Sunday on his door-sill with two bairns between his knees. He had heard, but had "forgotten." "Feyther'll know," said the wife, coming forward with the third bairn, a baby, in her arms. "I'll rin an' ask feyther." The old man tottered out, and gazed with a vacant, feeble look at me, while he replied impatiently to his daughter: "Manson's Inn, 't was called; ye've heard it times eneuch."

"I dare say you always drink Burns's health at the lodge when you meet," I said to the laborer.

"Ay, ay, his health's ay dronkit," he said, with a coarse laugh, "weel dronkit."

A few rods to the east, and down the very road Burns was wont to come and go between Lochlea and Tarbolton, still stands "Willie's mill,"—cottage and mill and shed and barn, all in one low, long, oddly joined (or jointed) building of irregular heights, like a telescope pulled out to its full length; a little brook and a bit of gay garden in front. In the winter the mill goes by water from a lake near by; in the summer by steam,—a great change since the night when Burns went

"Todlin' down on Willie's mill,"

and though he thought he

"Was na fou, but just had plenty,"

could not for the life of him make out to count the moon's horns.

"To count her horns, wi' a' my power,

I set mysel';

But whether she had three or four

I could na tell."

To go by road from Tarbolton to Lochlea farm is to go around three sides of a square, east, north, and then west again. Certain it is that Burns never took so many superfluous steps to do it; and as I drove along I found absorbing interest in looking at the little cluster of farm buildings beyond the fields, and wondering where the light-footed boy used to "cut across" for his nightly frolics. There is nothing left at Lochlea now of him or his; nothing save a worn lintel of the old barn. The buildings are all new; and there is a look of thrift and comfort about the place, quite unlike the face it must have worn in 1784. The house stands on a rising knoll, and from the windows looking westward and seaward there must be a fine horizon and headlands to be seen at sunset. Nobody was at home on this day except a barefooted servant-girl, who was keeping the house while the family were at church. She came to the door with an expression of almost alarm, at the unwonted apparition of a carriage driving down the lane on Sunday, and a stranger coming in the name of a man dead so long ago. She evidently knew nothing of Burns except that, for some reason connected with him, the old lintel was kept and shown. She was impatient of the interruption of her Sabbath, and all the while she was speaking kept her finger in her book—"Footprints of Jesus"—at the place where she had been reading, and glanced at it continually, as if it were an amulet which could keep her from harm through the worldly interlude into which she had been forced.

"It's a pity ye came on the Sabba-day," remarked the driver again, as we drove away from Lochlea. "The country people 'ull not speak on the Sabbath." It would have been useless to try to explain to him that the spectacle of this Scottish "Sabba-day" was of itself of almost as much interest as the sight of the fields in which Robert Burns had walked and worked.

The farm of Mossgiel, which was Burns's next home after Lochlea, is about three miles from Tarbolton, and only one from Mauchline. Burns and his brother Gilbert had become tenants of it a few months before their father's death in 1784. It was stocked by the joint savings of the whole family; and each member of the family was allowed fair rates of wages for all labor performed on it. The allowance to Gilbert and to Robert was seven pounds a year each, and it is said that during the four years that Robert lived there, his expenses never exceeded this pittance.

To Mossgiel he came with new resolutions. He had already reaped some bitter harvests from the wild oats sown during the seven years at Lochlea. He was no longer a boy. He says of himself at this time,—

"I entered on Mossgiel with a full resolution, 'Come, go; I will be wise.'"

Driving up the long, straight road which leads from the highway to the hawthorn fortress in which the Mossgiel farm buildings stand, one recalls these words, and fancies the brave young fellow striding up the field, full of new hope and determination. The hawthorn hedge to-day is much higher than a man's head, and completely screens from the road the farm-house and the outbuildings behind it. The present tenants have lived on the farm forty years, the first twenty in the same house which stood there when Robert and Gilbert Burns pledged themselves to pay one hundred and twenty pounds a year for the farm. When the house was rebuilt, twenty years ago, the old walls were used in part, and the windows were left in the same places; but, instead of the low, sloping-roofed, garret-like rooms upstairs, where Burns used to sleep and write, are now comfortable chambers of modern fashion.

"Were you not sorry to have the old house pulled down?" I said to the comely, aged farm-wife.

"'Deed, then, I was very prood," she replied; "it had na 'coomodation, and the thatch took in the rain an' all that was vile."

In the best room of the house hung two autograph letters of Burns's plainly framed: one, his letter to the lass of ——, asking her permission to print the poem he had addressed to her; the other, the original copy of the poem. These were "presented to the house by the brother of the lady," the woman said, and they had "a great value now." But when she first came to this part of the country she was "vary soorpreezed" to find the great esteem in which Burns's poetry was held. In the North, where she had lived, he was "na thocht weel of." Her father had never permitted a copy of his poems to be brought inside his doors, and had forbidden his children to read a word of them. "He thocht them too rough for us to read." It was not until she was a woman grown, and living in her husband's house, that she had ever ventured to disobey this parental command, and she did not now herself think they were "fitted for the reading of young pairsons." "There was much more discreet writin's," she said severely; an opinion which there was no gainsaying.

There is a broader horizon to be seen, looking westward from the fields of Mossgiel, than from those of Lochlea; the lands are higher and nobler of contour. Superb trees, which must have been superb a century ago, stand to right and left of the house,—beeches, ashes, oaks, and planes. The fields which are in sight from the house are now all grass-grown. I have heard that twenty years ago, it was confidently told in which field Burns, ploughing late in the autumn, broke into the little nest of the

"Wee sleekit, cow'rin', tim'rous beastie,"

whom every song-lover has known and pitied from that day to this, and whose misfortunes have answered ever since for a mint of reassuring comparison to all of us, remembering that "the best-laid schemes o' mice an' men" must "gang aft aglee;" and the other field, also near by, where grew that mountain daisy,

"Wee, modest, crimson-tippèd flower,"

whose name is immortal in our hearts as that of Burns. This farm-wife, however, knew nothing about them. The stern air of the north country in which she had been reared still chilled somewhat her thoughts of Burns and her interest in his inalienable bond on the fields of her farm.

It is but a mile from Mossgiel's gate to Mauchline, the town of "bonnie Jean" and Nansie Tinnoch and Gavin Hamilton. Surely a strange-assorted trio to be comrades of one man. Their houses are still standing: Jean's a tumble-down thatched cottage, looking out of place enough between the smart, new houses built on either side of it; Gavin Hamilton's, a dark, picturesque stone house, joined to the ruins of Mauchline Castle; and Nansie Tinnoch's, a black and dilapidated hovel, into which it takes courage to go. It stands snugged up against the wall of the old graveyard, part below it and part above it,—a situation as unwholesome as horrible; a door at the head of the narrow stairway opening out into the graveyard itself, and the slanting old stones leering in at the smoky windows by crowds. In the days when all the "country side" met at the open-air services in this churchyard,

"Some thinkin' on their sins, an' some on their claes,"

no doubt Nancy Tinnoch's was a lighter, whiter, cheerier place than now; else the "Jolly Beggars" would never have gone there to tipple.

It was the nooning between services when I reached Mauchline, and church-goers from a distance were taking their beer and crackers decorously in the parlor of the inn. As the intermission was only three quarters of an hour long, this much of involuntary dissipation was plainly forced on them; but they did not abuse it, I can testify. They partook of it as of a passover: young men and maidens as sober and silent as if they had been doing solemn penance for sins, as indeed, from one point of view, it might perhaps be truly said that they were.

By dint of some difficult advances I drew one or two of them into conversation about the Mossgiel farm and the disappearance of the old relics of Burns's life in that region. It was a great pity, I said, that the Mossgiel house had to be taken down.

"'Deed, then, it was na such thing," spoke up an elderly man. "It was na moor than a wreck, an' I'm the mon who did it."

He was the landlord of the farm, it appeared. He seemed much amused at hearing of the farm-wife's disapproval of Burns's verses, and of her father's prohibition of them.

"He was a heepocritical auld Radical, if ye knows him," he said angrily. "I hope we'll never have ony worse readin' in our country than Robert Bur-r-r-ns." The prolongation of the "r" in the Scotch way of saying "Burns" is something that cannot be typographically represented. It is hardly a rolling of the "r," nor a multiplication of it; but it takes up a great deal more time and room than any one "r" ought to.

After the landlady had shown to me the big hall where the Freemasons meet, "the Burns' Mother Lodge," and the chest which used to hold the regalia at Tarbolton in Burns's day, and the little bedroom in which Stedman and Hawthorne had slept,—coming also to look at Burns's fields,—she told me in a mysterious whisper that there was a nephew of Burns's in the kitchen, who would like to see me, if I would like to see him. "A nephew of Burns's!" I exclaimed. "Weel, not exactly," she explained, "but he's a grand-nephew of Burns's wife; she thet was Jean, ye know," with a deprecating nod and lowering of the eyelid. So fast is the clutch of a Scotch neighborhood on its traditions of offended virtue, even to-day poor Jean cannot be mentioned by a landlady in her native town without a small stone cast backward at her.

Jean's grand-nephew proved to be a middle-aged man; not "ower weel-to-do," the landlady said. He had tried his hand at doctoring both in Scotland and America,—a rolling stone evidently, with too much of the old fiery blood of his race in his veins for quiet and decorous prosperity. He, too, seemed only half willing to speak of poor "Jean,"—his kinswoman; but he led me to the cottage where she had lived, and pointed out the window from which she was said to have leaned out many a night listening to the songs of her lover when he sauntered across from the Whiteford Arms, Johnny Pigeon's house, just opposite, "not fou, but having had plenty" to make him merry and affectionate. Johnny Pigeon's is a "co-operative store" now; and new buildings have altered the line of the street so that "Rob Mossgiel" would lose his way there to-day.

The room in which Burns and his "bonnie Jean" were at last married in Gavin Hamilton's house, by Hamilton himself, is still shown to visitors. This room I had a greater desire to see than any other spot in Mauchline. "We can but try," said the grand-nephew; "but it's a small chance of seeing it the Sabba."

The sole tenant of this house now is the widow of a son of Gavin Hamilton's. Old, blind, and nearly helpless, she lives there alone with one family servant, nearly as old as herself, but hale, hearty, and rosy as only an old Scotchwoman can be. This servant opened the door for us, her cap, calico gown, and white apron all alike bristling with starch, religion, and pride of family. Her mistress would not allow the room to be shown on the Sabbath, she said. Imploringly it was explained to her that no other day had been possible, and that I had come "all the way from America."

"Ye did na do weel to tak the Sabbath," was her only reply, as she turned on her heel to go with the fruitless appeal to her mistress. Returning, she said curtly,—

"She winna shew it on the Sabbath."

At this crisis my companion, who had kept in the background, stepped forward with,—

"You don't know me, Elspie, do ye?"

"No, sir," she said stiffly, bracing herself up mentally against any further heathenish entreaties.

"What, not know ——?" repeating his name in full.

Presto! as if changed by a magician's trick, the stiff, starched, religious, haughty family retainer disappeared, and there stood, in the same cap, gown, and apron, a limber, rollicking, wellnigh improper old woman, who poked the grand-nephew in the ribs, clapped him on the shoulder, chuckling, ejaculating, questioning, wondering, laughing, all in a breath. Reminiscence on reminiscence followed between them.

"An' do ye mind Barry, too?" she asked. (This was an old man-servant of the house.) "An' many's the quirrel, an' many's the gree we had."

Barry was dead. Dead also was the beautiful girl whom my companion remembered well,—dead of a broken heart before she was eighteen years of age. Forbidden to marry her lover, she had drooped and pined. He went to India and died. It was in a December the news of his death came, just at Christmas time, and in the next September she followed him.

"Ay, but she was a bonnie lass," said Elspie, the tears rolling down her face.

"I dare say she [nodding his head toward the house]—I dare say she's shed many a salt tear over it; but naebody 'ill ever know she repentit," quoth the grand-nephew.

"Ay, ay," said Elspie. "There's a wee bit closet in every hoos."

"'Twas in that room she died," pointing up to a small ivy-shaded window. "I closed her eyes wi' my hands. She's never spoken of. She was a bonnie lass."

The picture of this desolate old woman, sitting there alone in her house, helpless, blind, waiting for death to come and take her to meet that daughter whose young heart was broken by her cruel will, seemed to shadow the very sunshine on the greensward in the court. The broken arches and crumbling walls of the old stone abbey ruins seemed, in their ivy mantles, warmly, joyously venerable by contrast with the silent, ruined, stony old human heart still beating in the house they joined.

In spite of my protestations, the grand-nephew urged Elspie to show us the room. She evidently now longed to do it; but, casting a fearful glance over her shoulder, said: "I daur na! I daur na! I could na open the door that she'd na hear 't." And she seemed much relieved when I made haste to assure her that on no account would I go into the room without her mistress's permission. So we came away, leaving her gazing regretfully after us, with her hand shading her eyes from the sun.

Going back from Mauchline to Ayr, I took another road, farther to the south than the one leading through Tarbolton, and much more beautiful, with superb beech-trees meeting overhead, and gentlemen's country-seats, with great parks, on either hand.

On this road is Montgomerie Castle, walled in by grand woods, which Burns knew so well.

"Ye banks and braes and streams around

The castle o' Montgomery,

Green be your woods and fair your flowers,

Your waters never drumlie!

There simmer first unfauld her robes,

And there the langest tarry,

For there I took the last fareweel

O' my sweet Highland Mary."

Sitting in the sun, on a bench outside the gate-house, with his little granddaughter on his lap, was the white-haired gate-keeper. As the horses' heads turned toward the gate, he arose slowly, without a change of muscle, and set down the child, who accepted her altered situation also without a change of muscle in her sober little face.

"Is it allowed to go in?" asked the driver.

"Eh—ye'll not be calling at the hoos?" asked the old man, surprised.

"No, I'm a stranger; but I like to see all the fine places in your country," I replied.

"I've no orders," looking at the driver reflectively; "I've no orders—but—a decent pairson"—looking again scrutinizingly at me,—"I think there can be no hairm." And he opened the gate.

Grand trees, rolling tracts of velvety turf, an ugly huge house of weather-beaten stone, with white pillars in front; conservatories joining the wings to the centre; no attempt at decorative landscape art; grass, trees, distances,—these were all; but there were miles of these. It was at least a mile's drive to the other entrance to the estate, where the old stone gateway house was in ruin. I fancy that it was better kept up in the days before an Earl of Eglinstoune sold it to a plain Mr. Patterson.

At another fine estate nearer Ayr, where an old woman was gate-keeper, and also had "no orders" about admitting strangers, the magic word "America" threw open the gates with a sweep, and bent the old dame's knees in a courtesy which made her look three times as broad as she was long. This estate had been "always in the Oswald family, an' is likely always to be, please God," said the loyal creature, with another courtesy at the mention, unconsciously devout as that of the Catholic when he crosses himself. "An' it's a fine country ye've yersel' in America," she added politely. The Oswald estate has acres of beautiful curving uplands, all green and smooth and open; a lack of woods near the house, but great banks of sunshine instead, make a beauty all their own; and the Ayr Water, running through the grounds, and bridged gracefully here and there, is a possession to be coveted. From all points is a clear sight of sea, and headlands north and south,—Ayr harbor lying like a crescent, now silver, now gold, afloat between blue sky and green shore, and dusky gray roof-lines of the town.

The most precious thing in all the parish of Ayr is the cottage in which Burns was born. It is about two miles south from the centre of the town, on the shore of "Bonnie Doon," and near Alloway Kirk. You cannot go thither from Ayr over any road except the one Tam o' Shanter took: it has been straightened a little since his day, but many a rod of it is the same that Maggie trod; and Alloway Kirk is as ghostly a place now, even at high noon, as can be found "frae Maidenkirk to Johnny Groat's." There is nothing left of it but the walls and the gable, in which the ancient bell still hangs, intensifying the silence by its suggestion of echoes long dead.

The Burns cottage is now a sort of inn, kept by an Englishman whose fortunes would make a tale by themselves. He fought at Balaklava and in our civil war; and side by side on the walls of his dining-room hang, framed, his two commissions in the Pennsylvania Volunteers and the menu of the Balaklava Banquet, given in London to the brave fellows that came home alive after that fight. He does not love the Scotch people.

"I would not give the Americans for all the Scotch ever born," he says, and is disposed to speak with unjust satire of their apparent love of Burns, which he ascribes to a perception of his recognition by the rest of the world and a shamefaced desire not to seem to be behindhand in paying tribute to him.

"Oh, they let on to think much of him," he said. "It's money in their pockets."

The room in which Burns was born is still unaltered, except in having one more window let in. Originally, it had but one small square window of four panes. The bed is like the beds in all the old Scotch cottages, built into the wall, similar to those still seen in Norway. Stifling enough the air surely must have been in the cupboard bed in which the "waly boy" was born.

"The gossip keekit in his loof;

Quo' scho, 'Wha lives will see the proof,—

This waly boy will be nae coof;

I think we'll ca' him Robin.'"

Before he was many days old, or, as some traditions have it, on the very night he was born, a violent storm "tirled" away part of the roof of the poor little "clay biggin," and mother and babe were forced to seek shelter in a neighbor's cottage. Misfortune and Robin early joined company, and never parted. The little bedroom is now the show-room of the inn, and is filled with tables piled with the well-known boxes, pincushions, baskets, paper-cutters, etc., made from sycamore wood grown on the banks of Doon and Ayr. These articles are all stamped with some pictures of scenery associated with Burns or with quotations from his verses. It is impossible to see all this money-making without thinking what a delicious, rollicking bit of verse Burns would write about it himself if he came back to-day. There are those who offer for sale articles said to be made out of the old timbers of the Mossgiel house; but the Balaklava Englishman scouts all that as the most barefaced imposture. "There wasn't an inch of that timber," he says,—and he was there when the house was taken down—"which wasn't worm-eaten and rotten; not enough to make a knife-handle of!"

One feels disposed to pass over in silence the "Burns Monument," which was built in 1820, at a cost of over three thousand pounds; "a circular temple supported by nine fluted Corinthian columns, emblematic of the nine muses," say the guide-books. It stands in a garden overlooking the Doon, and is a painful sight. But in a room in the base of it are to be seen some relics at which no Burns lover can look unmoved,—the Bibles he gave to Highland Mary, the ring with which he wedded Jean (taken off after her death), and two rings containing some of his hair.

It is but a few steps from this monument down to a spot on the "banks o' bonnie Doon," from which is a fine view of the "auld brig." This shining, silent water, and the overhanging, silent trees, and the silent bell in the gable of Alloway Kirk, speak more eloquently of Burns than do all nine of the Corinthian muse-dedicated pillars in his monument.

So do the twa brigs of Ayr, which still stand at the foot of High Street, silently recriminating each other as of old.

"I doubt na, frien', ye'll think ye'r nae sheep-shank

When ye are streekit o'er frae bank to bank,"

sneers the Auld; and

"Will your poor, narrow foot-path of a street,

Where twa wheelbarrows tremble when they meet,

Your ruined, formless bulk o' stane and lime,

Compare wi' bonny brigs o' modern time?"

retorts the New; and "the sprites that owre the brigs of Ayr preside" never interrupt the quarrel. Spite of all its boasting, however, the new bridge cracked badly two years ago, and had to be taken down and entirely rebuilt.

The dingy little inn where

"Tam was glorious,

O'er a' the ills o' life victorious,"

is still called by his name, and still preserves, as its chief claims to distinction, the big wooden mug out of which Tam drank, and the chair in which he so many market-nights

"Gat planted unco richt."

The chair is of oak, wellnigh black as ebony, and furrowed thick with names cut upon it. The smart young landlady who now keeps the house commented severely on this desecration of it, and said that for some years the house had been "keepit" by a widow, who was "in no sense up to the beesiness," and "a' people did as they pleased in the hoos in her day." The mug has a metal rim and base; but spite of these it has needed to be clasped together again by three ribs of cane, riveted on. "Money couldn't buy it," the landlady said. It belongs to the house, is mentioned always in the terms of lease, and the house has changed hands but four times since Tam's day.

In a tiny stone cottage in the southern suburbs of Ayr, live two nieces of Burns, daughters of his youngest sister, Isabella. They are vivacious still, and eagerly alive to all that goes on in the world, though they must be well on in the seventies. The day I called they had "just received a newspaper from America," they said. "Perhaps I knew it. It was called 'The Democrat.'" As I was not able to identify it by that description, the younger sister made haste to fetch it. It proved to be a paper printed in Madison, Iowa. The old ladies were much interested in the approaching American election, had read all they could find about General Garfield, and were much impressed by the wise reticence of General Grant. "He must be a vary cautious man; disna say enough to please people," they said, with sagacious nods of approbation. They remembered Burns's wife very well, had visited her when she was living, a widow, at Dumfries, and told with glee a story which they said she herself used to narrate, with great relish, of a pedler lad who, often coming to the house with wares to sell in the kitchen, finally expressed to the servant his deep desire to see Mrs. Burns. She accordingly told him to wait, and her mistress would, no doubt, before long come into the room. Mrs. Burns came in, stood for some moments talking with the lad, bought some trifle of him, and went away. Still he sat waiting. At last the servant asked why he did not go. He replied that she had promised he should see Mrs. Burns.

"But ye have seen her; that was she," said the servant.

"Eh, eh?" said the lad. "Na! never tell me now that was 'bonnie Jean'!"

Burns's mother, too (their grandmother), they recollected well, and had often heard her tell of the time when the family lived at Lochlea, and Robert, spending his evenings at the Tarbolton merry-makings with the Bachelors' Club or the Masons, used to come home late in the night, and she used to sit up to let him in. These doings sorely displeased the father; and at last he said grimly, one night, that he would sit up to open the door for Robert. Trembling with fear, the mother went to bed, and did not close her eyes, listening apprehensively for the angry meeting between father and son. She heard the door open, the old man's stern tone, Robert's gay reply; and in a twinkling more the two were sitting together over the fire, the father splitting his sides with half-unwilling laughter at the boy's inimitable descriptions and mimicry of the scenes he had left. Nearly two hours they sat there in this way, the mother all the while cramming the bed-clothes into her mouth, lest her own laughter should remind her husband how poorly he was carrying out his threats. After that night "Rob" came home at what hour he pleased, and there was nothing more heard of his father's sitting up to reprove him.

They believed that Burns's intemperate habits had been greatly exaggerated. Their mother was a woman twenty-five years old, and the mother of three children when he died, and she had never once seen him the "waur for liquor." "There were vary mony idle people i' the warld, an' a great deal o' talk," they said. After his father's death he assumed the position of the head of the house, and led in family prayers each morning; and everybody said, even the servants, that there were never such beautiful prayers heard. He was a generous soul. After he left home he never came back for a visit, however poor he might be, without bringing a present for every member of the family; always a pound of tea for his mother, "and tea was tea then," the old ladies added. To their mother he gave a copy of Thomson's "Seasons," which they still have. They have also some letters of his, two of which I read with great interest. They were to his brother, and were full of good advice. In one he says:—

"I intended to have given you a sheetful of counsels, but some business has prevented me. In a word, learn taciturnity. Let that be your motto. Though you had the wisdom of Newton or the wit of Swift, garrulousness would lower you in the eyes of your fellow-creatures."

In the other, after alluding to some village tragedy, in which great suffering had fallen on a woman, he says,—

"Women have a kind of steady sufferance which qualifies them to endure much beyond the common run of men; but perhaps part of that fortitude is owing to their short-sightedness, as they are by no means famous for seeing remote consequences in their real importance."

The old ladies said that their mother had liked "Jean" on the whole, though "at first not so weel, on account of the connection being what it was." She was kindly, cheery, "never bonny;" but had a good figure, danced well and sang well, and worshipped her husband. She was "not intellectual;" "but there's some say a poet shouldn't have an intellectual wife," one of the ingenuous old spinsters remarked interrogatively. "At any rate, she suited him; an' it was ill speering at her after all that was said and done," the younger niece added, with real feeling in her tone. Well might she say so. If there be a touching picture in all the long list of faithful and ill-used women, it is that of "bonnie Jean,"—the unwedded mother of children, the forgiving wife of a husband who betrayed others as he had betrayed her,—when she took into her arms and nursed and cared for her husband's child, born of an outcast woman, and bravely answered all curious questioners with, "It's a neebor's bairn I'm bringin' up." She wrought for herself a place and an esteem of which her honest and loving humility little dreamed.

There is always something sad in seeking out the spot where a great man has died. It is like living over the days of his death and burial. The more sympathetically we have felt the spell of the scenes in which he lived his life, the more vitalized and vitalizing that life was, the more are we chilled and depressed in the presence of places on which his wearied and suffering gaze rested last. As I drove through the dingy, confused, and ugly streets of Dumfries, my chief thought was, "How Burns must have hated this place!" Looking back on it now, I have a half-regret that I ever saw it, that I can recall vividly the ghastly graveyard of Saint Michael's, with its twenty-six thousand gravestones and monuments, crowded closer than they would be in a marble-yard, ranged in rows against the walls without any pretence of association with the dust they affect to commemorate. What a ballad Burns might have written about such a show! And what would it not have been given to him to say of the "Genius of Coila, finding her favorite son at the plough, and casting her mantle over him,"—that is, the sculptured monument, or, as the sexton called it, "Máwsolem," under which he has had the misfortune to be buried. A great Malvern bathwoman, bringing a bathing-sheet to an unwilling patient, might have been the model for the thing. It is hideous beyond description, and in a refinement of ingenuity has been made uglier still by having the spaces between the pillars filled in with glass. The severe Scotch weather, it seems, was discoloring the marble. It is a pity that the zealous guardians of its beauty did not hold it precious enough to be boarded up altogether.

The house in which Burns spent the first eighteen months of his dreary life in Dumfries is now a common tenement-house at the lower end of a poor and narrow street. As I was reading the tablet let into the wall, bearing his name, a carpenter went by, carrying his box of tools slung on his shoulder.

"He only had three rooms there," said the man, "those three up there," pointing to the windows; "two rooms and a little kitchen at the back."

The house which is usually shown to strangers as his is now the home of the master of the industrial school, and is a comfortable little building joining the school. Here Burns lived for three years; and here, in a small chamber not more than twelve by fifteen feet in size, he died on the 21st of July, 1796, sadly harassed in his last moments by anxiety about money matters and about the approaching illness of his faithful Jean.

Opening from this room is a tiny closet, lighted by one window.

"They say he used to make up his poetry in here," said the servant-girl; "but I dare say it is only a supposeetion; still, it 'ud be a quiet place."

"They say there was a great lot o' papers up here when he died," she added, throwing open the narrow door of a ladder-like stairway that led up into the garret, "writin's that had been sent to him from all over the world, but nobody knew what become of them. Now that he's so much thought aboot, I wonder his widow did not keep them. But, ye know, the poor thing was just comin' to be ill; that was the last thing he wrote when he knew he was dyin', for some one to come and stay with her; and I dare say she was in such a sewither she did not know about anything."

The old stone stairs were winding and narrow,—painted now, and neatly carpeted, but worn into depressions here and there by the plodding of feet. Nothing in the house, above or below, spoke to me of Burns so much as did they. I stood silent and rapt on the landing, and saw him coming wearily up, that last time; after which he went no more out forever, till he was borne in the arms of men, and laid away in Saint Michael's graveyard to rest.

That night, at my lonely dinner in the King's Arms, I had the Edinburgh papers. There were in them three editorials headed with quotations from Burns's poems, and an account of the sale in Edinburgh, that week, of an autograph letter of his for ninety-four pounds!

Does he think sadly, even in heaven, how differently he might have done by himself and by earth, if earth had done for him then a tithe of what it does now? Does he know it? Does he care? And does he listen when, in lands he never saw, great poets sing of him in words simple and melodious as his own?

"For now he haunts his native land

As an immortal youth: his hand

Guides every plough;

He sits beside each ingle-nook,

His voice is in each rushing brook,

Each rustling bough.

"His presence haunts this room to-night,

A form of mingled mist and light

From that far coast.

Welcome beneath this roof of mine!

Welcome! this vacant chair is thine,

Dear guest and ghost!"[8]

GLINTS IN AULD REEKIE.

As soon as one comes to know Edinburgh, he feels a gratitude to that old gentleman of Fife who is said to have invented the affectionate phrase "Auld Reekie." Perhaps there never was any such old gentleman; and perhaps he never did, as the legend narrates, regulate the hours of his family prayers, on summer evenings, by the thickening smoke which he could see rising from Edinburgh chimneys, when the cooking of suppers began.

"It's time now, bairns, to tak the beuks an' gang to our beds; for yonder's Auld Reekie, I see, putting on her nichtcap," are the words which the harmless little tradition puts into his mouth. They are wisely dated back to the reign of Charles II., a time from which none now speak to contradict; and they serve as well as any others to introduce and emphasize the epithet which, once heard, is not forgotten by a lover of Edinburgh, remaining always in his memory, like a pet name of one familiarly known.

It is not much the fashion of travellers to become attached to Edinburgh. Rome for antiquity, London for study and stir, Florence for art, Venice for art and enchantment combined,—all these have pilgrims who become worshippers, and return again and again to them, as the devout return to shrines. But few return thus to Edinburgh. It continually happens that people planning routes of travel are heard to say, "I have seen Edinburgh," pronouncing the word "seen" with a stress indicating a finality of completion. Nobody ever uses a phrase in that way about Rome or Venice. It is always, "We have been in," "spent a winter in," "a summer in," or "a month in" Rome, or Venice, or any of the rest; and the very tone and turn of the phrase tell the desire or purpose of another winter, or summer, or month in the remembered and longed-for place.

But Edinburgh has no splendors with which to woo and attract. She is "a penniless lass;" "wi' a lang pedigree," however,—as long and as splendid as the best, reaching back to King Arthur at least, and some say a thousand years farther, and assert that the rock on which her castle stands was a stronghold when Rome was a village. At any rate, there was a fortress there long before Edinburgh was a town, and that takes it back midway between the five hundredth and six hundredth year of our Lord. From that century down to this it was the centre of as glorious and terrible fighting and suffering as the world has ever seen. Kingly besieged and besiegers, prisoners, martyrs, men and women alike heroic, their presences throng each doorway still; and the very stones at a touch seem set ringing again with the echoes of their triumphs and their agonies.

To me, the castle is Edinburgh. Looking from the sunny south windows of Prince's Street across at its hoary front is like a wizard's miracle, by which dead centuries are rolled back, compressed into minutes. At the foot of its north precipices, where lay the lake in which, in the seventeenth century, royal swans floated and plebeian courtesans were ducked, now stretches a gay gardened meadow, through which flash daily railway trains. Their columns of blue smoke scale the rocks, coil after coil, but never reach the citadel summit, being tangled, spent, and lost in the tops of trees, which in their turn seem also to be green-plumed besiegers, ever climbing, climbing. For five days I looked out on this picture etched against a summer sky: in black, by night; in the morning, of soft sepia tints, or gray,—tower, battlement, wall, and roof, all in sky lines; below these the wild crags and precipices, a mosaic of grays, two hundred feet down, to a bright greensward dotted with white daisies. Set steadily to the sunrise, by a west wind which never stopped blowing for the whole five days, streamed out the flag. To have read on its folds, "Castelh-Mynyd-Agned," or "Castrum Puellarum," would not have seemed at any hour a surprise. There is nowhere a relic of antiquity which so dominates its whole environment as does this rock fortress. Its actuality is sovereign; its personality majestic. The thousands of modern people thronging up and down Prince's Street seem perpetrating an impertinent anachronism. The times are the castle's times still; all this nineteenth-century haberdashery and chatter is an inexplicable and insolent freak of interruption. Sitting at one's Prince's Street windows, one sees it not; overlooks it as meaningless and of no consequence. Instead, he sees the constable's son, in Bruce's day, coming down that two hundred feet of precipice, hand over hand, on a bit of rope ladder, to visit the "wench in town" with whom he was in love; and anon turning this love-lore of his to patriotic account, by leading Earl Douglas, with his thirty picked Scots, up the same precipices, in the same perilous fashion, to surprise the English garrison, which they did to such good purpose that in a few hours they retook the castle, the only one then left which Bruce had not recovered. Or, when morning and evening mists rise slowly up from the meadow, veil the hill, and float off in hazy wreaths from its summit, he fancies fagots and tar-barrels ablaze on the esplanade, and the beauteous Lady Glammis, with her white arms crossed on her breast, burning to death there, with eyes fixed on the windows of her husband's prison. Scores of other women with "fayre bodies" were burned alive there; men, too, their lovers and sons,—all for a crime of which no human soul ever was or could be guilty. Poor, blinded, superstitious earth, which heard and saw and permitted such things! Even to-day, when the ground is dug up on that accursed esplanade, there are found the ashes of these martyrs to the witchcraft madness.

That grand old master-gunner, too, of Cromwell's first following,—each sunset gun from the castle seemed to me in honor of his memory, and recalled his name. "May the devil blaw me into the air, if I lowse a cannon this day!" said he, when Charles's men bade him fire a salute in honor of the Restoration. Every other one of Cromwell's men in the garrison had turned false, and done ready service to the king's officers; but not so Browne. It was only by main force that he was dragged to his gun, and forced to fire it. Whether the gun were old, and its time had come to burst, or whether the splendid old Puritan slyly overweighed his charge, it is open to each man's preference to believe; but burst the gun did, and, taking the hero at his word, "shuites his bellie from him, and blew him quyte over the castle wall," says the old record. I make no doubt myself that it was just what the master-gunner intended.

Thirty years later there were many gunners in Edinburgh Castle as brave as he, or braver,—men who stood by their guns month after month, starving by inches and freezing; the snow lying knee-deep on the shattered bastions; every roof shelter blown to fragments; no fuel; their last well so low that the water was putrid; raw salt herrings the only food for the men, and for the officers oatmeal, stirred in the putrid water. This was the Duke of Gordon's doing, when he vowed to hold Edinburgh Castle for King James, if every other fortress in Scotland went over to William. When his last hope failed, and he gave his men permission to abandon the castle and go out to the enemy, if they chose, not a man would go. "Three cheers for his grace," they raised, with their poor starved voices, and swore they would stay as long as he did. From December to June they held out, and then surrendered, a handful of fifty ghastly, emaciated, tottering men. Pity they could not have known how much grander than victories such defeats as theirs would read by and by!

Hard by the castle was the duke's house, in Blair's Close; in this he was shut up prisoner, under strict guard. The steps up which he walked that day, for the first time in his life without his sword, are still there; his coronet, with a deer-hound on either side, in dingy stone carving, above the low door. It is one of the doorways worth haunting, in Edinburgh. Generations of Dukes of Gordon have trodden its threshold, from the swordless hero of 1689 down to the young lover who, in George the Third's day, went courting his duchess, over in Hyndford's Close, at the bottom of High Street. She was a famous beauty, daughter of Lady Maxwell; and thanks to one gossip and another, we know a good deal about her bringing-up. There was still living in Edinburgh, sixty years ago, an aged and courtly gentleman, who recollected well having seen her riding a sow in High Street; her sister running behind and thumping the beast with a stick. Duchesses are not made of such stuff in these days. It almost passes belief what one reads in old records of the ways and manners of Scottish nobility in the first half of the eighteenth century. These Maxwells' fine laces were always drying in the narrow passage from their front stair to their drawing-room; and their undergear hanging out on a pole from an upper window in full sight of passers-by, as is still the custom with the poverty-stricken people who live in Hyndford's Close.

On the same stair with the Maxwells lived the Countess Anne of Balcarres, mother of eleven children, the eldest of whom wrote "Auld Robin Gray." She was poor and proud, and a fierce Jacobite to the last. To be asked to drink tea in Countess Anne's bedchamber was great honor. The room was so small that the man-servant, John, gorgeous in the Balcarres livery, had to stand snugged up to the bedpost. Here, with one arm around the post, he stood like a statue, ready to hand the teakettle as it was needed. When the noble ladies differed about a date or a point of genealogy, John was appealed to, and often so far forgot his manners as to swear at the mention of assumers and pretenders to baronetcies.

There is an endless fascination in going from house to house, in their old wynds and closes, now. A price has to be paid for it,—bad smells, filth underfoot, and, very likely, volleys of ribald abuse from gin-loosened tongues right and left and high up overhead; but all this only emphasizes the picture, and makes one's mental processions of earls and countesses all the livelier and more vivid.

Some of these wynds are so narrow and dark that one hesitates about plunging into them. They seem little more than rifts between dungeons: seven, eight, and nine stories high, the black walls stretch up. If there is a tiny courtyard, it is like the bottom of a foul well; and looking to the hand's-breadth of sky visible above, it seems so far up and so dark blue, one half expects to see its stars glimmering at noonday. A single narrow winding stone stair is the only means of going up and down; and each floor being swarming full of wretched human beings, each room a tenement house in itself, of course this common stairway becomes a highway of contentions, the very battle-ground of the house. Progress up or down can be stopped at a second's notice; a single pair of elbows is a blockade. How sedan chairs were managed in these corkscrew crevices is a puzzle; yet we read that the ladies of quality went always in sedan chairs to balls and assemblies.

In the Stamp Office Close, now the refuge of soot-venders, old-clothes dealers, and hucksters of lowest degree, tramps, beggars, and skulkers of all sorts, still is locked tight every night a big carved door, at foot of the stair down which used to come stately Lady Eglintoune, the third, with her seven daughters, in fine array. It was one of the sights of the town to see the procession of their eight sedan chairs on the way to a dance. The countess herself was six feet tall, and her daughters not much below her; all strikingly handsome, and of such fine bearing that it went into the traditions of the century as the "Eglintoune air." There also went into the traditions of the century some details of the earl's wooing, which might better have been kept a secret between him and his father-in-law. The second Lady Eglintoune was ailing, and like to die, when Sir Archibald Kennedy arrived in Edinburgh, with his stalwart but beautiful daughter Susanna. She was much sought immediately; and Sir Archibald, in his perplexity among the many suitors, one day consulted his old friend Eglintoune. "Bide a wee, Sir Archy," replied the earl,—"bide a wee; my wife's very sickly." And so, by waiting, the fair Susanna became Countess of Eglintoune. It would seem as if Nature had some intent to punish the earl's impatient faithlessness to his sickly wife; for, year after year, seven years running, came a daughter, and no son, to the house of Eglintoune. At last the earl, with a readiness to ignore marital obligations at which his third countess need not have been surprised, bluntly threatened to divorce her if she bore him no heir. Promptly the spirited Susanna replied that nothing would please her better, provided he would give her back all she brought him. "Every penny of it, and welcome!" retorted the earl, supposing she referred to her fortune. "Na, na, my lord," replied the lady, "that winna do. Return me my youth, beauty, and virginity, and dismiss me when you please;" upon which the matter dropped. In the end, the earl fared better than he deserved, three sons being given him within the next five years.

For half a century Lady Eglintoune was a prominent figure in Scottish social life. Her comings and goings and doings were all chronicled, and handed down. It is even told that when Johnson and Boswell visited her at her country-place, she was so delighted with Johnson's conversation that she kissed him on parting,—from which we can argue her ladyship's liking for long words. She lived to be ninety-one, and amused herself in her last days by taming rats, of which she had a dozen or more in such subjection that at a tap on the oak wainscoting of her dining-room they came forth, joined her at her meal, and at a word of command retired again into the wainscot.

When twenty-first-century travellers go speiring among the dingy ruins of cities which are gay and fine now, they will not find relics and traces of such individualities as these. The eighteenth century left a most entertaining budget, which we of to-day are too busy and too well educated to equal. No chiel among us all has the time to take gossip notes of this century; and even if he did, they would be dull enough in comparison with those of the last.

Groping and rummaging in Hyndford's Close, one day, for recognizable traces of Lady Maxwell's house, we had the good fortune to encounter a thrifty housewife, of the better class, living there. She was coming home, with her market-basket on her arm. Seeing our eager scenting of the old carvings on lintels and sills, and overhearing our mention of the name of the Duchess of Gordon, she made bold to address us.

"It waur a strange place for the nobeelity to be livin' in, to be sure," she said. "I'm livin' mysil in ane o' the best of 'im, an' it's na mair space to 't than ud turn a cat. Ye're welcome to walk up, if ye like to see what their dwellin's waur like in the auld time. It's a self-contained stair ye see," she added with pride, as she marshalled us up a twisting stone stairway, so narrow that even one person, going alone, must go cautiously to avoid grazing elbows and shins on the stone walls, at every turn. "I couldna abide the place but for the self-contained stair: there's not many has them," she continued. "Mind yer heads! mind yer heads! There's a stoop!" she cried; but it was too late. We had reached, unwarned, a point in the winding stair where it was necessary to go bent half double; only a little child could have stood upright. With heads dizzy from the blow and eyes half blinded by the sudden darkness, we stumbled on, and brought out in a passage-way, perhaps three feet wide and ten long, from which opened four rooms: one the kitchen, a totally dark closet, not over six feet square; a tiny grate, a chair, table, and a bunk in the wall, where the servant slept, were all its furniture. The woman lighted a candle to show us how convenient was this bunk for the maid "to lie." Standing in the middle of the narrow passage, one could reach his head into kitchen, parlor, and both bedrooms without changing his position. The four rooms together would hardly have made one good-sized chamber. Nothing but its exquisite neatness and order saved the place from being insupportable! Even those would not save it when herring suppers should be broiling in the closet surnamed kitchen. Up a still smaller, narrower crevice in the wall led a second "self-contained stair," dark as midnight, and so low roofed there was no standing upright in it, even at the beginning. This led to what the landlady called the "lodgers' flairt." We had not courage to venture up, though she was exceedingly anxious to show us her seven good bedrooms, three double and four single, which were nightly filled with lodgers, at a shilling a night.

Only the "verra rayspectable," she said, came to lodge with her. Her husband was "verra pairticular." Trades-people from the country were the chief of their customers, "an' the same a-comin' for seven year, noo." No doubt she has as lively a pride, and gets as many satisfactions between these narrow walls, as did the lords and ladies of 1700. Evidently not the least of her satisfactions was the fact that those lords and ladies had lived there before her.

Nowhere are Auld Reekie's antitheses of new and old more emphasized than in the Cowgate. In 1530 it was an elegant suburb. The city walls even then extended to enclose it, and it was eloquently described, in an old divine's writings, as the place "ubi nihil est humile aut rusticum, sed omnia magnifica."

In one of its grassy lanes the Earl of Galloway built a mansion. His countess often went to pay visits to her neighbors, in great state, driving six horses; and it not infrequently happened that when her ladyship stepped into her coach, the leaders were standing opposite the door at which she intended to alight.

Here dwelt, in 1617, the famous "Tam o' the Cowgate," Earl of Haddington, boon companion of King James, who came often to dine with him, and gave him the familiar nickname of Tam. Tam was so rich he was vulgarly believed to have the philosopher's stone; but he himself once gave a more probable explanation of his wealth, saying that his only secret lay in two rules,—"never to put off till to-morrow that which could be done to-day," and "never to trust to another what his own hand could execute."

To-day there is not in all the world, outside the Jewish Ghetto of Rome, so loathly wretched a street as this same Cowgate. Even at high noon it is not always safe to walk through it; and there are many of its wynds into which no man would go without protection of the police. Simply to drive through it is harrowing. The place is indescribable. It seems a perpetual and insatiable carnival of vice and misery. The misery alone would be terrible enough to see; but the leering, juggling, insolent vice added makes it indeed hellish. Every curbstone, door-sill, alley mouth, window, swarms with faces out of which has gone every trace of self-respect or decency; babies' faces as bad as the worst, and the most aged faces worst of all. To pause on the sidewalk is to be surrounded, in a moment, by a dangerous crowd of half-naked boys and girls, whining, begging, elbowing, cursing, and fighting. Giving of an alms is like pouring oil on a fire. The whole gang is ablaze with envy and attack: the fierce and unscrupulous pillage of the seventeenth century is re-enacted in miniature in the Cowgate every day, when an injudicious stranger, passing through, throws a handful of pennies to the beggars. The general look of hopeless degradation in the spot is heightened by the great number of old-clothes shops along the whole line of the street. In the days when the Cowgate was an elegant suburb, the citizens were permitted by law to extend their upper stories seven feet into the street, provided they would build them of wood cut in the Borough Forest, a forest that harbored robbers dangerous to the town. These projecting upper stories are invaluable now to the old-clothes venders, who hang from them their hideous wares, in double and treble lines, fluttering over the heads and in the faces of passers-by; the wood of the Borough Forest thus, by a strange irony of fate, still continuing to harbor dangers to public welfare. If these close-packed tiers of dangling rags in the Cowgate were run out in a straight single line, they would be miles long; a sad beggars' arras to behold. The preponderance of tattered finery in it adds to its melancholy: shreds of damask; dirty lace; theatrical costumes; artificial flowers so crumpled, broken, and soiled that they would seem to have been trodden in gutters,—there was an indefinable horror in the thought that there could be even in the Cowgate a woman creature who could think herself adorned by such mockeries of blossoms. But I saw more than one poor soul look at them with longing eyes, finger them, haggle at the price, and walk away disappointed that she could not buy.

The quaint mottoes here and there in the grimy walls, built in when the Cowgate people were not only comfortable but pious, must serve often now to point bitter jests among the ungodly. On one wretched, reeking tenement is: "Oh, magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt his name together. 1643." On another, "All my trist is in ye Lord."

A token I saw in the Cowgate of one life there not without hope and the capacity of enjoyment. It was in a small window, nine stories up from the ground, in a wynd so close that hands might be clasped from house to house across it. It was a tiny thing, but my eye fell on it with as much relief as on a rift of blue sky in a storm: it was a little green fern growing in a pot. Outside the window it stood, on a perilously narrow ledge. As I watched it I grew frightened, lest the wind should blow it down, or a vicious neighbor stone it off. It seemed the brave signal flying of a forlorn hope, of a dauntless, besieged soul that would never surrender; and I shall recollect it long after every other picture of the Cowgate scenes has grown dim.

The more respectable of the pawnbrokers' or second-hand-goods shops in Edinburgh are interesting places to rummage. If there were no other record of the slow decay and dwindling fortunes of the noble Scottish folk, it could be read in the great number of small dealers in relics of the olden time.

Old buckles and brooches and clan badges; chains, lockets, seals, rings; faded miniatures, on ivory or in mosaics, of women as far back as Mary's time, loved then as well as was ever Mary herself, but forgotten now as if they had never been; swords rusty, bent, battered, and stained; spoons with forgotten crests; punch-ladles worn smooth with the merry-makings of generations,—all these one may find in scores of little one-roomed shops, kept perhaps by aged dames with the very aroma of the antique Puritanism lingering about them still.

In such a room as this I found a Scotch pebble brooch with a quaint silver setting, reverently and cautiously locked in a glass case. On the back of it had been scratched, apparently with a pin, "Margret Fleming, from her brother." I bore it away with me triumphantly, sure that it had belonged to an ancestor of Pet Marjorie.

Almost as full of old-time atmosphere as the pawnbrokers' shops are the antiquarian bookstores. Here one may possess himself, if he likes, of well-thumbed volumes with heraldic crests on titlepages, dating back to the earliest reading done by noble earls and baronets in Scotland; even to the time when not to know how to read was no indelible disgrace. In one of these shops, on the day I bought Margret Fleming's brooch, I found an old torn copy of "Pet Marjorie." Speaking of Dr. Brown and Rab to the bookseller,—himself almost a relic of antiquity,—I was astonished and greatly amused to hear him reply: "It's a' a feection.... He can't write without it.... I knoo that darg.... A verra neece darg he was, but—a—a—a"—with a shake of the head—"it's a verra neece story, verra neece.... He wrote it up, up; not but that Rab was a verra neece darg. I knoo the darg wull."

Not a word of more definite disclaimer or contradiction could I win from the canny old Scot. But to have hastily called the whole story a lee, from beginning to end, would hardly have shaken one's confidence in it so much as did the thoughtful deliberation of his "He was a verra neece darg. I knoo the darg wull."

One of our "cawdies," during our stay in Edinburgh, was a remarkable fellow. After being for twenty years a gentleman's servant, he had turned his back on aristocracy, and betaken himself to the streets for a living; driving cabs, or piloting strangers around the city, as might be. But his earlier habits of good behavior were strong in him still, and came to the surface quickly in associations which revived them. His conversation reminded us forcibly of somebody's excellent saying that Scotland would always be Scott-land. Not a line of Scott's novels which this vagabond cawdie did not seemingly know by heart. Scottish history, too, he had at his tongue's end, and its most familiar episodes sounded new and entertaining as he phrased them. Even the death of Queen Mary seemed freshly stated, as he put it, when, after summing up the cruelties she had experienced at the hands of Elizabeth, he wound up with, "And finally she beheaded her, and that was the last of her,"—a succinctness of close which some of Mary's historians would have done well to simulate.

Of Jeanie Deans and Dumbiedikes he spoke as of old acquaintances. He pointed out a spot in the misty blue distance where was Dumbiedikes' house, where Jeanie's sweetheart dwelt, and where the road lay on which Jeanie went to London.

"It was there the old road to London lay; and wouldn't you think it more natural, sir, that it was that way she went, and it was there she met Dumbiedikes, and he gave her the purse? I'll always maintain, sir, that it was there she got it."

Of the two women, Jeanie Deans and Mary Queen of Scots, Jeanie was evidently the vivider and more real in his thoughts.

The second day of our stay in Edinburgh was a gay day in the castle. The 71st Highlanders had just returned from a twelvemonth's stay at Gibraltar. It was people's day. Everywhere the bronzed, tired, happy-looking fellows, in their smartened uniforms, were to be encountered, strolling, lounging, sitting with sweethearts or wives,—more of the former than the latter. It struck me also that the women were less good-looking than the men; but they were all beautified by happiness, and the merry sounds of their laughter, and the rumble of skittles playing filled all the place. Inside the castle, the room in which the regalia were on exhibition was thronged with country people, gazing reverently on its splendors.

"Keep yer eye on't, as ye walk by, an' mark the changes o' 't," I heard one old lady say to her husband, whose wandering gaze seemed to her neglectful of the opportunity.

A few gay-dressed women, escorted by officers, held themselves apart from the soldiers' sweethearting, and were disposed, I thought, to look a little scornfully on it. The soldiers did not seem to mind the affront, if they saw it; no doubt, they thought their own sweethearts far the better looking, and if they had ever heard of it would have quoted with hearty good-will the old ballad,—

"The lassies o' the Cannongate,

Oh, they are wondrous nice:

They winna gie a single kiss,

But for a double price.

"Gar hang them, gar hang them,

Hie upon a tree;

For we'll get better up the gate,

For a bawbee!"

Most picturesque of all the figures to be seen in Edinburgh are the Newhaven fishwives. With short, full blue cloth petticoats, reaching barely to their ankles; white blouses and gay kerchiefs; big, long-sleeved cloaks of the same blue cloth, fastened at the throat, but flying loose, sleeves and all, as if thrown on in haste; the girls bareheaded; the married women with white caps, standing up stiff and straight in a point on the top of the head; two big wickerwork creels, one above the other, full of fish, packed securely, on their broad shoulders, and held in place by a stout leather strap passing round their foreheads, they pull along at a steady, striding gait, up hill and down, carrying weights that it taxes a man's strength merely to lift. In fact, it is a fishwife's boast that she will run with a weight which it takes two men to put on her back. By reason of this great strength on the part of the women, and their immemorial habit of exercising it; perhaps also from other causes far back in the early days of Jutland, where these curious Newhaven fishing-folk are said to have originated,—it has come about that the Newhaven men are a singularly docile and submissive race. The wives keep all the money which they receive for the fish, and the husbands take what is given them,—a singular reversion of the situation in most communities. I did not believe this when it was told me; so I stopped three fishwives one day, and without mincing matters put the question direct to them. Two of them were young, one old. The young women laughed saucily, and the old woman smiled; but they all replied unhesitatingly, that they had the spending of all the money.

"It's a' spent i' the hoos," said one, anxious not to be thought too selfish,—"it's a' spent i' the hoos. The men, they cam home an' tak their sleep, an' then they'll be aff agen."

"It 'ud never do for the husbands to stoop in tha city, an' be spendin' a' the money," added the old woman, with severe emphasis.

I learned afterward that on the present system of buying and selling the fish, the fishermen do receive from their labor an income independent of their wives. They are the first sellers of the fish,—selling them in quantity to the wholesale dealers, who sell in turn at auction to the "retail trade," represented by the wives. This seems an unjust system, and is much resented by both husbands and wives; but it has been established by law, and there is no help for it. It came in with the introduction of the steam trawlers. "They're the deestrooction o' the place," said one of the fish women. "A mon canna go oot wi' his lines an' mak a livin' noo. They just drag everything; they tak a' the broods; they're dooin' a worrld o' harrm. There's somethin' a dooin' aboot it in the House o' Commons, noo, but a canna till hoo it wull go. They ull be the deestrooction o' this place, if they're na pit stop to." And she shook her fist vindictively at a puffing trawler which had just pushed away from the wharf.

Whoever would see the Newhaven fishwives at their best must be on the Newhaven wharf by seven o'clock in the morning, on a day when the trawlers come in and the fish is sold. The scene is a study for a painter.

The fish are in long, narrow boxes, on the wharf, ranged at the base of the sea wall; some sorted out, in piles, each kind by itself: skates, with their long tails, which look vicious, as if they could kick; hake, witches, brill, sole, flounders, huge catfish, crayfish, and herrings, by the ton. The wall is crowded with men, Edinburgh fishmongers, come to buy cheap on the spot. The wall is not over two feet wide; and here they stand, lean over, jostle, slip by to right and left of each other, and run up and down in their eager haste to catch the eye of one auctioneer, or to get first speech with another. The wharf is crowded with women,—an army in blue, two hundred, three hundred, at a time; white caps bobbing, elbows thrusting, shrill voices crying, fiery blue eyes shining, it is a sight worth going to Scotland for. If one has had an affection for Christie Johnstone, it is a delightful return of his old admiration for her. A dozen faces which might be Christie's own are flashing up from the crowd; one understands on the instant how that best of good stories came to be written. A man with eyes in his head and a pen in his hand could not have done less. Such fire, such honesty, such splendor of vitality, kindle the women's faces. To spend a few days among them would be to see Christie Johnstone dramatized on all sides.

On the morning when I drove out from Edinburgh to see this scene, a Scotch mist was simmering down,—so warm that at first it seemed of no consequence whatever, so cold that all of a sudden one found himself pierced through and through with icy shivers. This is the universal quality of a Scotch mist or drizzle.

The Newhaven wharf is a narrow pier running out to sea. On one side lay the steam trawlers, which had just unloaded their freight; on the other side, on the narrow, rampart-like wall of stone, swarmed the fishmonger men. In this line I took my place, and the chances of the scramble. Immediately the jolly fishwives caught sight of me, and began to nod and smile. They knew very well I was there to "speir" at them.

"Ye'll tak cauld!" cried one motherly old soul, with her white hair blowing wildly about almost enough to lift the cap off her head. "Com doon! Ye'll tak cauld."

I smiled, and pointed to my water-proof cloak, down which, it must be admitted, the "mist" was trickling in streams, while the cloak itself flapped in the wind like a loose sail. She shook her head scornfully.

"It's a grat plass to tak cauld!" she cried. "Ye'll doo wull to com doon."

There were three auctioneers: one, a handsome, fair-haired, blue-eyed young fellow, was plainly a favorite with the women. They flocked after him as he passed from one to another of the different lots of fish. They crowded in close circles around him, three and four deep; pushing, struggling, rising on tiptoes to look over each other's shoulders and get sight of the fish.

"What's offered for this lot o' fine herrings? One! One and sax! Thrippence ha'! Going, going, gone!" rang above all the clatter and chatter of the women's tongues. It was so swift that it seemed over before it was fairly begun; and the surging circles had moved along to a new spot and a new trade. The eyes of the women were fixed on the auctioneer's eyes; they beckoned; they shook forefingers at him; now and then a tall, stalwart one, reaching over less able-bodied comrades, took him by the shoulder, and compelled him to turn her way; one, most fearless of all, literally gripped him by the ear and pulled his head around, shrieking out her bid. When the pressure got unbearable, the young fellow would shake himself like a Newfoundland dog, and, laughing good-naturedly, whirl his arms wide round to clear a breathing space; the women would fall back a pace or two, but in a moment the rings would close up again, tighter than ever.

The efforts of those in the outer ring to break through or see over the inner ones were droll. Arms and hands and heads seemed fairly interlinked and interwoven. Sometimes a pair of hands would come into sight, pushing their way between two bodies, low down,—just the two hands, nothing more, breaking way for themselves, as if in a thicket of underbrush; presently the arms followed; and then, with a quick thrust of the arms to right and left, the space would be widened enough to let in the head, and when that was fairly through the victory was won. Straightening herself with a big leap, the woman bounded in front of the couple she had so skilfully separated, and a buzzing "bicker" of angry words would rise for a moment; but there was no time to waste in bad temper where bargains were to be made or lost in the twinkling of an eye.

An old sailor, who stood near me on the wall, twice saved me from going backwards into the sea, in my hasty efforts to better my standpoint. He also seemed to be there simply as a spectator, and I asked him how the women knew what they were buying; buying, as they did, by the pile or the box.

"Oh, they'll giss, verra near," he said; "they've an eye on the fish sense they're bawn. God knows it's verra little they mak," he added, "an' they'll carry's much's two men o' us can lift. They're extrawnery strang."

As a lot of catfish were thrown down at our feet, he looked at them with a shudder and exclaimed,—

"I'd no eat that."

"Why not?" said I. "Are they not good?"

"Ah, I'd no eat it," he replied, with a look of superstitious terror spreading over his face. "It doesna look richt."

A fresh trawler came in just as the auction had nearly ended. The excitement renewed itself fiercely. The crowd surged over to the opposite side of the pier, and a Babel of voices arose. The skipper was short and fat, and in his dripping oilskin suit looked like a cross between a catfish and a frog.

"Here, you Rob," shouted the auctioneer, "what do you add to this fine lot o' herrin'?"

"Herring be d——d!" growled the skipper, out of temper, for some reason of his own; at which a whirring sound of ejaculated disapprobation burst from the women's lips.

The fish were in great tanks on the deck. Quickly the sailors dipped up pails of the sea-water, dashed it over them, and piled them into baskets, in shining, slippery masses: the whole load was on the pier, sorted, and sold in a few minutes.

Then the women settled down to the work of assorting and packing up their fish. One after another they shouldered their creels and set off for Edinburgh. They seemed to have much paying back and forth of silver among themselves, one small piece of silver that I noticed actually travelling through four different hands in the five minutes during which I watched it. Each woman wore under her apron, in front, a sort of apron-like bag, in which she carried her money. There was evidently rivalry among them. They spied closely on each other's loads, and did some trafficking and exchange before they set off. One poor old creature had bought only a few crayfish, and as she lifted her creel to her back, and crawled away, the women standing by looked over into her basket, and laughed and jeered at her; but she gave no sign of hearing a word they said.

Some of them were greatly discontented with their purchases when they came to examine them closely, especially one woman who had bought a box of flounders. She emptied them on the ground, and sorted the few big ones, which had been artfully laid on the top; then, putting the rest, which were all small, in a pile by themselves, she pointed contemptuously to the contrast, and, with a toss of her head, ran after the auctioneer, and led him by the sleeve back to the spot where her fish lay. She was as fierce as Christie herself could have been at the imposition. She had paid the price for big flounders, and had got small ones. The auctioneer opened his book and took out his pencil to correct the entry which had been made against her.

"Wull, tak aff saxpence," he said.

"Na! na!" cried she. "They're too dear at seven saxpence."

"Wull, tak aff a saxpence; it is written noo,—seven shillin'."

She nodded, and began packing up the flounders.

"Will you make something on them at that price?" I asked her.

"Wull, I'll mak me money back," she replied; but her eyes twinkled, and I fancy she had got a very good bargain, as bargains go in Newhaven; it being thought there a good day's work to clear three shillings,—a pitiful sum, when a woman, to earn it, must trudge from Newhaven to Edinburgh (two miles) with a hundred pounds of fish on her back, and then toil up and down Edinburgh hills selling it from door to door. One shilling on every pound is the auctioneer's fee. He has all the women's names in his book, and it is safe to trust them; they never seek to cheat, or even to put off paying. "They'd rather pay than not," the blue-eyed auctioneer said to me. "They're the honestest folks i' the warld."

As the last group was dispersing, one old woman, evidently in a state of fierce anger, approached and poured out a torrent of Scotch as bewildering and as unintelligible to me as if it had been Chinese. Her companions gazed at her in astonishment; presently they began to reply, and in a few seconds there was as fine a "rippet" going on as could have been heard in Cowgate in Tam's day. At last a woman of near her own age sprang forward, and approaching her with a determined face, lifted her right hand with an authoritative gesture, and said in vehement indignation, which reminded me of Christie again,—

"Keep yersil, an' haud yer tongue, noo!"

"What is she saying?" I asked. "What is the matter?"

"Eh, it is jist nathin' at a'," she replied. "She's thet angry, she doesna knaw hersil."

The faces of the Newhaven women are full of beauty, even those of the old women: their blue eyes are bright and laughing, long after the sea wind and sun have tanned and shrivelled their skins and bleached their hair. Blue eyes and yellow hair are the predominant type; but there are some faces with dark hazel eyes of rare beauty and very dark hair,—still more beautiful,—which, spite of its darkness, shows glints of red in the sun. The dark blue of their gowns and cloaks is the best color-frame and setting their faces could have; the bunched fulness of the petticoat is saved from looking clumsy by being so short, and the cloaks are in themselves graceful garments. The walking in a bent posture, with such heavy loads on the back, has given to all the women an abnormal breadth of hip, which would be hideous in any other dress than their own. This is so noticeable that I thought perhaps they wore under their skirts, to set them out, a roll, such as is worn by some of the Bavarian peasants. But when I asked one of the women, she replied,—

"Na, na, jist the flannel; a' tuckit."

"Tucked all the way up to the belt?" said I.

"Na, na," laughing as if that were a folly never conceived of,—"na, na." And in a twinkling she whipped her petticoat high up, to show me the under petticoat, of the same heavy blue cloth, tucked only a few inches deep. Her massive hips alone were responsible for the strange contour of her figure.

The last person to leave the wharf was a young man with a creel of fish on his back. My friend the sailor glanced at him with contempt.

"There's the only man in all Scotland that 'ud be seen carryin' a creel o' fish on his back like a woman," said he. "He's na pride aboot him."

"But why shouldn't men carry creels?" I asked. "I'm sure it is very hard work for women."

The sailor eyed me for a moment perplexedly, and then as if it were waste of words to undertake to explain self-evident propositions, resumed,—

"He worked at it when he was a boy, with his mother; an' now he's no pride left. There's the whole village been at him to get a barrow; but he'll not do't. He's na pride aboot him."

What an interesting addition it would be to the statistics of foods eaten by different peoples to collect the statistics of the different foods with which pride's hunger is satisfied in different countries! Its stomach has as many and opposite standards as the human digestive apparatus. It is, like everything else, all and only a question of climate. Not a nabob anywhere who gets more daily satisfaction out of despising his neighbors than the Newhaven fishermen do out of their conscious superiority to this poor soul, who lugs his fish in a basket on his back like a woman, and has "na pride aboot him."

If I had had time and opportunity to probe one layer farther down in Newhaven society, no doubt I should have come upon something which even this pariah, the fish-carrying man, would scorn to be seen doing.

After the last toiling fishwife had disappeared in the distance, and the wharf and the village had quieted down into sombre stillness, I drove to "The Peacock," and ate bread and milk in a room which, if it were not the very one in which Christie and her lover supped, at least looked out on the same sea they looked upon. And a very gray, ugly sea it was, too; just such an one as used to stir Christie's soul with a heat of desire to spin out into it, and show the boys she was without fear. On the stony beach below the inn a woman was spreading linen to dry. Her motions as she raised and bent, and raised and bent, over her task were graceful beyond measure. Scuds of rain-drops swept by now and then; and she would stop her work, and straightening herself into a splendid pose, with one hand on her hip, throw back her head, and sweep the whole sky with her look, uncertain whether to keep on with her labor or not; then bend again, and make greater haste than before.

As I drove out of the village I found a knot of the women gossiping at a corner. They had gathered around a young wife, who had evidently brought out her baby for the village to admire. It was dressed in very "braw attire" for Newhaven,—snowy white, and embroidery, and blue ribbons. It was but four weeks old, and its tiny red face was nearly covered up by the fine clothes. I said to a white-haired woman in the group,—

"Do you recollect when it was all open down to the sea here,—before this second line of newer cottages was built?"

She shook her head and replied, "I'm na so auld 's I luik; my hair it wentit white—" After a second's pause, and turning her eyes out to sea as she spoke, she added, "A' 't once it wentit white."

A silence fell on the group, and looks were exchanged between the women. I drove away hastily, feeling as one does who has unawares stepped irreverently on a grave. Many grief-stricken queens have trod the Scottish shores; the centuries still keep their memory green, and their names haunt one's thoughts in every spot they knew. But more vivid to my memory than all these returns and returns the thought of the obscure fisherwoman whose hair, from a grief of which the world never heard, "a' 't once wentit white."

CHESTER STREETS.

If it be true, as some poets think, that every spot on earth is full of poetry, then it is certainly also true that each place has its own distinctive measure; an indigenous metre, so to speak, in which, and in which only, its poetry will be truly set or sung.

The more one reflects on this, in connection with the spots and places he has known best in the world, the truer it seems. Memories and impressions group themselves in subtle co-ordinations to prove it. There are surely woods which are like stately sonnets, and others of which the truth would best be told in tender lyrics; brooks which are jocund songs, and mountains which are Odes to Immortality. Of cities and towns it is perhaps even truer than of woods and mountains; certainly, no less true. For instance, it would be a bold poet who should attempt to set pictures of Rome in any strain less solemn than the epic; and is it too strong a thing to say that only a foolish one would think of framing a Venice glimpse or memory in anything save dreamy songs, with dreamiest refrains? Endless vistas of reverie open to the imagination once entered on the road of this sort of fancy,—reveries which play strange pranks with both time and place, endow the dreamer with a sort of post facto second sight, and leave him, when suddenly roused, as lost as if he had been asleep for a century. For sensations of this kind Chester is a "hede and chefe cyte." Simply to walk its streets is to step to time and tune of ballads; the very air about one's ears goes lilting with them; the walls ring; the gates echo; choruses rollic round corners,—ballads, always ballads, or, if not a ballad, a play, none the less lively,—a play with pageants and delightful racket.

Such are the measure and metre to-day of "The Cyte of Legyons, that is Chestre in the marches of Englonde, towards Wales, betwegne two armes of the see, that bee named Dee and Mersee. Thys cyte in tyme of Britons was hede and chefe cyte of Venedocia, that is North Wales. Thys cyte in Brytyshe speech bete Carthleon, Chestre in Englyshe, and Cyte of Legyons also. For there laye a wynter, the legyons that Julius Cæsar sent to wyne Irlonde. And after, Claudius Cæsar sent legyons out of the cyte for to wynn the Islands that bee called Orcades. Thys cyte hath plenty of cyne land, of corn, of flesh, and specyally of samon. Thys cyte receyveth grate marchandyse and sendeth out also. Northumbres destroyed this cyte but Elfleda Lady of Mercia bylded it again and made it mouch more."

This is what was written of Chester, more than six hundred years ago, by one Ranulph Higden, a Chester Abbey monk,—him who wrote those old miracle plays, except for which we very like had never had such a thing as a play at all, and William Shakspeare had turned out no better than many another Stratford man.

All good Americans who reach England go to Chester. They go to see the cathedral, and to buy old Queen Anne furniture. The cathedral is very good in its way, the way of all cathedrals, and the old Queen Anne furniture is now quite well made; but it is a marvel that either cathedral or shop can long hold a person away from Chester streets. One cannot go amiss in them; at each step he is, as it were, button-holed by a gable, an arch, a pavement, a door-sill, a sign, or a gate with a story to tell. A story, indeed? A hundred, or more; and if anybody doubts them, or has by reason of old age, or over-occupation with other matters, got them confused in his mind, all he has to do is to step into a public library, which is kept in a very private way, in a by-street, by two aged Cestrian citizens and a parish boy. Here, if he can convince these venerable Cestrians of his respectability, he may go a-junketing by himself in that delicious feast of an old book, the "Vale-Royale" of England, published in London in 1656, and written, I believe, a half-century or so earlier.

Never was any bit of country more praised than this beautiful Chester County, "pleasant and abounding in plenteousness of all things needful and necessary for man's use, insomuch that it merited and had the name of the Vale-Royale of England."

The old writer continues:—

"The ayr is very wholesome, insomuch that the people of the Country are seldome infected with Diseases or Sicknesses; neither do they use the help of the Physicians nothing so much as in other countries. For when any of them are sick they make him a Posset and tye a kerchief on his head, and if that will not amend him, then God be merciful to him!"

And of the river Dee,—

"To which water no man can express how much this ancient city hath been beholden; nay, I suppose if I should call it the Mother, the Nurse, the Maintainer, the Advancer and Preserver thereof, I should not greatly erre."

And again, of the shifting "sands o' Dee," this ancient and devout man, taking quite another view than that of the thoughtless or pensive lyrists, later, says,—

"The changing and shifting of the water gave some occasion to the Britons in that Infancy of the Christian Religion to attribute some divine honor and estimation to the said water: though I cannot believe that to be any cause of the name of it."

His pious deduction from the exceeding beauty of the situation of the city is that it is "worthy, according to the Eye, to be called a city guarded with Watch of Holy and Religious men, and through the Mercy of our Saviour always fenced and fortified with the merciful assistance of the Almighty." To keep it thus guarded, the monks of Vale-Royale did their best. Witness the terms in which their grant was couched:—

"All the mannours, churches, lands and tenements aforesaid, in free pure and perpetual alms forever; with Homages, Rents, Demesnes, Villenages, Services of Free Holders and Bond, with Villains and their Families, Advowsons, Wards, Reliefs, Escheates, Woods, Plains, Meadows, Pastures, Wayes, Pathes, Heaths, Turfs, Forests, Waters, Ponds, Parks, Fishing, Mills in Granges, Cottages within Borough and without, and in all other places with all Easments, Liberties, Franchises and Free Customs any way belonging to the aforesaid Mannours, Churches, lands and tenements."

Plainly, if the devil or any of his followers were caught in the Vale-Royale, they could be legally ejected as trespassers.

He was not, however, without an eye to worldly state, this devout writer, for he speaks with evident pride of the fine show kept up by the mayor of Chester:—

"The Estate that the Mayor of Chester keepeth is great. For he hath both Sword Bearer and Mace Bearer Sergeants, with their silver maces, in as good and decent order as in any other city in England. His housekeeping accordingly; but not so chargeable as in all other cities, because all thing are better cheap there.... He remaineth, most part of the day at a place called the Pendice which is a brave place builded for the purpose at the high Crosse under St. Peters Church, and in the middest of the city, of such a sort that a man may stand therein and see into the markets or four principal streets of the city."

Nevertheless, there was once a mayor of Chester who did not see all he ought to have seen in the principal streets of the city; for his own daughter, out playing ball "with other maids, in the summer time, in Pepur Street," stole away from her companions, and ran off with her sweetheart, through one of the city gates, at the foot of that street, which gate the enraged mayor ordered closed up forever, as if that would do any good; and some sharp-tongued and sensible Cestrian immediately phrased the illogical action in a proverb: "When the daughter is stolen, shut the Pepur gate." This saying is to be heard in Chester to this day, and is no doubt lineal ancestor of our own broader apothegm, "When the mare's stolen, lock the stable."

There are many lively stories about mayors of Chester. There was a mayor in 1617 who made a very learned speech to King James, when he rode in through East Gate, with all the train soldiers of the city standing in order, "each company with their ensigns in seemly sort," the array stretching up both sides of East Gate Street. This mayor's name was Charles Fitton. He delivered his speech to the king; presented to him a "standing cup with a cover double gilt, and therein a hundred jacobins of gold;" likewise delivered to him the city's sword, and afterward bore it before him, in the procession. But when King James proposed, in return for all these civilities, to make a knight of him, Charles Fitton sturdily refused; which was a thing so strange for its day and generation that one is instantly possessed by a fire of curiosity to know what Charles Fitton's reasons could have been for such contempt of a knight's title. No doubt there is a story hanging thereby,—something to do with a lady-love, not unlikely; and a fine ballad it would make, if one but knew it. The records, however, state only the bare fact.

Then there was, a hundred years later than this, a man who got to be mayor of Chester by a very strange chance. He was a ribbon-weaver, in a small way, kept a shop in Shoemaker's Row, and lived in a little house backing on the Falcon Inn. All of a sudden he blossomed out into a rich silk-mercer; bought a fine estate just outside the city, built a grand house, and generally assumed the airs and manners of a dignitary. As is the way of the world now, so then: people soon took him at his surface showing, forgot all about the mystery of his sudden wealth, and presently made him mayor of Chester. Afterward it came out, though never in such fashion that anything was done about it, how the mayor got his money. Just before the mysterious rise in his fortunes, a great London banking-house had been robbed of a large sum of money by one of its clerks, who ran away, came to Chester, and went into hiding at the Falcon Inn. He was tracked and overtaken late one night. Hearing his pursuers on the stairs, he sprang from his bed and threw the treasure bags out of the window, plump into the ribbon-weaver's back-yard; where the disappointed constables naturally never thought of looking, and went back to London much chagrined, carrying only the man, and no money. None of the money having been found on the robber, he escaped conviction, but subsequently, for another offence, was tried, convicted, and executed. I take it for granted that it must have been he who told in his last hours what he did with the money bags: for certainly no one else knew,—that is, no one else except Mr. Samuel Jarvis, the ribbon-weaver, who, much astonished, had picked them up before daylight, the morning after they had been thrown into his back-yard. It is certain that he kept his mouth shut, and proceeded to turn the money to the best possible account in the shortest possible time. But an evil fate seemed to attach to the dishonestly gotten riches; Jarvis dying without issue, his estate all went to a man named Doe, "a gardener, at Greg's Pit," whose sons and grandsons spent the last penny of it in riotous living. So there is now "nothing to show for" that money, for the stealing of which one man was tried for his life, and another man made mayor of Chester; which would all come in capitally in a ballad, if a ballad-monger chose.

Of the famous Chester Rows, nobody has ever yet contrived to give a description intelligible to one who had not seen them. The more familiarly they are known, the more fantastic and bewildering they seem, and the less one is sure how to speak of them. Whether it is that the sidewalk goes upstairs, or the front second-story bedroom comes down into the street; whether the street itself be in the basement or the cellar, or the sidewalk be on the roofs of the houses;—where any one of them all begins or leaves off, it would be a courageous narrator that tried to explain. They appear to have been as much of a puzzle two hundred years ago as to-day; for the devout old chronicler of the Vale-Royale, essaying to describe them, wrote the following paragraph, which, delicious as it is to those who know Chester, I think must be a stumbling-block and foolishness to those who do not. He says there is "a singular property of praise to this city, whereof I know not the like of any other: there be towards the street fair rooms, both for shops and dwelling-houses, to which there is rather a descent than an equal height with the floor or pavement of the street. Yet the principal dwelling-houses and shops for the chiefest Trades are mounted a story higher, and before the Doors and Entries a continued Row, on either side the street, for people to pass to and fro all along the said houses, out of all annoyance of Rain, or other foul weather, with stairs fairly built, and neatly maintained to step down out of those Rowes into the open streets: almost at every second house: and the said Rowes built over the head with such of the Chambers and Rooms for the most part as are the best rooms in every one of the said houses.

"It approves itself to be of most excellent use, both for dry and easy passage of all sorts of people upon their necessary occasions, as also for the sending away, of all or the most Passengers on foot from the passage of the street, amongst laden and empty Carts, loaden and travelling Horses, lumbering Coaches, Beer Carts, Beasts, Sheep, Swine, and all annoyances, which what a confused trouble it makes in other cities, especially where great stirring is, there's none that can be ignorant."

He also suggests another advantage of this arrangement, which seems by no means unlikely to have been part of its original reason for being; namely, that "when the enemy entered they might avoid the danger of the Horsemen, and might annoy the Enemies as they passed through the Streets." Probably in this writer's day the marvel of the construction of the Rows was even greater than it is now; in many instances the first story was excavated out of solid rock, so you began by going downstairs at the outset. These first stories of the ancient Cestrians are beneath the cellars of the Rows to-day; and every now and then, in deepening a vault or cellar-way, workmen come on old Roman altars, built there by the "Legyons" of Julius, or Claudius Cæsar, dedicated to "Nymphs and Fountains," or other genii of the day; baths, too, with their pillars and perforated tiles still in place, as they were in the days when cleanly and luxurious Roman soldiers took Turkish baths there, after hot victories. Knowing about these lower strata adds a weird charm to the fascination of strolling along in the balconies above, looking in, now at a jeweller's window, now at a smart haberdashery shop, now at some neat housekeeper's bedroom window, now into a mysterious chink-like passage-way winding off into the heart of the building; and then, perhaps, presto! descending a staircase a few feet, to another tier of similar shop-windows, domiciles, garret alleys, and dormer-window bazars; and the next thing, plump down again, ten feet or so more, into the very street itself. Indeed are they, as the "Vale-Royale" says, "a singular property of praise to this city, whereof I know not the like of any other."

One manifest use and enjoyment of this medley of in and out, up and down, above and below, balconies, basements, attics, dormer windows, gables, and casements, the old chronicler failed to mention, but there can never have been a day or a generation which has not discovered it, and that is the convenient overlooking of all that goes on in the street below. What rare and comfortable nooks for the spying on processions, and all manner of shows and spectacles! To sit snug in one's best chamber, ten feet above the street, ten feet out into it, with windows looking up and down the highway,—what vantage it must have been in the days when the Miracle Plays went wheeling along from street to street, played on double scaffolded carts; the players attiring themselves on the lower scaffold, while the play was progressing on the upper! They began to do this in Chester in the year of our Lord 1268. There were generally in use at one time twenty-four of the wheeled stages; as soon as one play was over, its stage was wheeled along to the next street, and another took its place. The plays were called Mysteries, and were devised for the giving of instruction in the Old and New Testament, which had been so long sealed books to the people. Luther gave them his sanction, saying, "Such spectacles often do more good and produce more impression than sermons."

The old chronicles are full of quaint and interesting entries in regard to these plays. The different trades and guilds of the city represented different acts in the holy dramas:—

The Barkers and Tanners, The Fall of Lucifer.

Drapers and Hosiers, The Creation of the World.

Drawers of Dee and Water Leaders, Noe and his Shippe.

Barbers, Wax Chandlers, and Leeches, Abraham and Isaac.

Cappers, Wire Drawers, and Pinners, Balak and Balaam with Moses.

Wrights, Slaters, Tylers, Daubers, and Thatchers, The Nativity.

In 1574 these plays were played for the last time. There had been several attempts before to suppress them. One Chester mayor, Henry Hardware by name, being a "godly and zealous man, caused the gyauntes in the mid-somer show to be broken up, not to go; and the devil in his feathers he put awaye, and the caps, and the canes, and dragon and the naked boys."

But it was reserved for another mayor, Sir John Savage, Knight, to have the honor of finally putting an end to the pageants. "Sir John Savage, knight, being Mayor of Chester, which was the laste time they were played, and we praise God, and praye that we see not the like profanation of holy Scriptures, but O, the mercie of God for the time of our ignorance!" says an old history, written in 1595.

At intervals between these pious suppressions, carnal and pleasure-loving persons made great efforts to restore the plays; and there are some very curious accounts of expenditures made in Chester, under mayors less godly than Hardware and Savage, for the rehabilitation of some of the old properties of the sacred pageants:—

"For finding all the materials with the workmanship of the four great giants, all to be made new, as neere as may be, lyke as they were before, at five pounds a giant, the least that can be, and four men to carry them at two shillings and sixpence each."

These redoubtable giants, which could not be made at less than five pounds apiece, were constructed out of "hoops, deal boards, nails, pasteboard, scale-board, paper of various sorts, buckram size cloth, old sheets for their bodies, sleeves and shirts, tinsille, tinfoil, gold and silver leaf, colors of different kinds, and glue in abundance." Last, not least, came the item, "For arsknick to put into the paste to save the giants from being eaten by the rats, one shilling and fourpence."

It is at first laughable to think of a set of city fathers summing up such accounts as these for a paper baby show, but upon second thought the question occurs whether city funds are any better administered in these days. The paper giants, feathered devils, and dragons were cheaper than champagne suppers and stationery now-a-days in "hede and chefe" cities.

When the Mystery Plays were finally forbidden, it seemed dull times for a while in Chester; but at last the people contrived an ingenious resuscitation of the old amusements under new names, and with new themes, to which nobody could object. They dramatized old stories, legends, histories of kings, and the like. The story of Æneas and Queen Dido was one of the first played. No doubt all the "gyauntes" and hobble-de-horses which had not been eaten up by rats and moths came in as effectively in the second dispensation as in the first. The only one of the later plays of which an account has been preserved was played in 1608, in honor of the oldest son of James I., by the sheriff of Chester, who himself wrote a flaming account of it. He says:—

"Zeal produced it, love devized it, boyes performed it, men beheld it, and none but fools dispraised it.... The chiefest part of this people-pleasing spectacle consisted in three Bees, that is, Boyes, Beastes, and Bels."

Allegory, mythology, music, fireworks, and ground and lofty tumbling were jumbled together in a fine way, in the sheriff's show. Envy was on horseback with a wreath of snakes around her head; Plenty, Peace, Fame, and Joy were personated; Mercury came down from heaven with wings, in a cloud; a "wheele of fire burning very cunningly, with other fireworks, mounted the Crosse by the assistance of ropes, in the midst of heavenly melody;" and, to top off with, a grotesque figure climbed up to the top of the "Crosse," and stood on his head, with his feet in the air, "very dangerously and wonderfully to the view of the beholders, and casting fireworks very delightfull." Truly, the sheriff's language seems hardly too strong, when he says that none but fools dispraised his spectacle.

These secular shows never attained the popularity of the old Mystery Plays. That mysterious halo of attraction which always invests the forbidden undoubtedly heightened the reputed charm of the never-more-to-be-seen sacred pageants, and led people to continually depreciate the value of all entertainments offered as substitutes for them. Probably in the midst of the heavenly melodies and "fireworks very delightfull," at the sheriff's grand show, old men went about shaking their heads regretfully, and saying, "Ah, but you should have seen the gyaunts we used to have forty years ago, and the way they played the Fall of Lucifer in 1574; there's never been anything like it since;" and immediately all the young people who had never seen a Miracle Play began to be full of dissatisfied wonder as to what they were like.

But what the shows and pageants lacked in the early days of the seventeenth century, grand processions went a long way towards making up. It is evident that Chester people never missed an occasion for turning out in fine array; and there being always somebody who took the trouble to write a full account of the parade, we of to-day know almost as much about it as if we had been on the spot. The old chronicles in the Chester public library are running over with quaint and gay stories of such doings as the following:

"Came to Chester, being Saturday, the Duchess of Tremoyle, from France, mother-in-law to the Lord Strange: and all the Gentry of Cheshier, Flintshier, and Denbighshier went to meet her at Hoole's Heath, with the Earl of Derby; being at least six hundred horse. All the Gentle Men of the artelery yard lately erected in Chester, met her in Cow Lane, in very stately manner, all with greate white and blew fethers, and went before her chariot, in march, to the Bishop's Pallas, and making a yard, let her thro the middest, and then gave her three volleys of shot, and so returned to their yard.... So many knights, esquires, and Gentle Men never were in Chester, no, not to meet King James when he went to Chester."

This Cow Lane is now called Frodsham Street; and on one of its corners is the building in which William Penn, in his day, preached more than once, setting forth doctrines which the Duchess of Tremoyle would have much disrelished in her day, as would also the "artelery Gentle Men" with their "greate white and blew fethers." King James himself is said to have once dropped in at this Quaker meeting-house when Penn was preaching, and to have sat, attentive, through the entire discourse.

And so we come down through the centuries, from the pasteboard "gyaunt" and glued dragon, winged Mercury with fire-wheel, Duchess of Tremoyle with her plumed horsemen, to the grim but gentle Quaker, holding feathers pernicious, plays deadly, and permitting to the people nothing but plain yea and nay. Of all this, and worlds more like it, and gayer and wilder,—sadder, too,—is the Chester air so brimful that, as I said in the beginning, it seems perpetually to go lilting about one's ears.

Leaving the library, with its quaint and fascinating old records, and turning aside at intervals from the more ancient landmarks of the streets to observe the ways and conditions of the Cestrians now, the traveller is no less repaid. Every rod of the sidewalk is a study for its present as well as for its past. The venders are a guild by themselves, as much to-day as they were in the sixteenth century. They build up their stuffs, their old chairs, chests, brooms, crockery and tinware, in stacks of confusion, in shelf-like balconies, on beams hanging overhead and in corners and nooks underfoot, all along the most ancient of the Rows. It is a piece of good luck to walk past half a dozen doors there without jostling something on the right or left, and bringing down a clattering pile on one's heels. From shadowy recesses, men and women eager for trade dart out, eying the stranger sharply. They are connoisseurs in customers, if in nothing else, the Cestrian dealers of to-day. They know at a glance who will give ten shillings and sixpence for a cream jug without any nose, and with a big crack in one side, on the bare chance of its being old Welsh. There is much excuse for their spreading out their goods over the highway, as they do, for the shops themselves are closets,—six by eight, eight by ten; ten by twelve is a spacious mart, in comparison with the average. Deprived of the outside nooks between the pillars of the arcade, the dealers would be sorely put to it for room. It is becoming, however, a disputed question whether the renting of these shops includes any right to the covered ways in front of them; and there is great anxiety among the inhabitants of the more dilapidated portions of the Rows in consequence.

"There's a deespute with the corporation, mem, as to whether we hown the stalls or not," said an energetic furniture-wife (if fish-wife, why not furniture-wife?) to me one day, as I was laughingly steering a cautious passage among her shaky pyramids of fourth or twentieth hand furniture. "It's lasted a while now, an' they've not forced us to give 'em hup as yet; but I'm afeard they may bring it about," she added, with the dogged humility of her class. "They've everything their own way,—the corporation."

It is worth while to take a turn down some of the crevice-like alleys in these Rows, and see where the people live; see also where the nobility gets part of its wherewithal to eat, drink, and be clothed.

Often there is to be seen at the far end of these crevices a point of sunlight; like the gleaming point of light seen ahead, in going through a rayless tunnel. This betokens a tiny court-yard in the rear. These court-yards are always well worth seeing. They are paved, sometimes with tiles evidently hundreds of years old. The different properties of the dozens of families living in tenements opening on the court are arranged around its sides, apparently each family keeping scrupulously to its own little hand's-breadth of room; frequently a tiny flower-bed, or a single plant in a pot, gives a gleam of cheer to the place. In such a court-yard as this, I found, one morning, a yellow-haired, blue-eyed little maid, scrubbing away for dear life, with a broom and soap-suds, on the old tiles. She was not over nine years old; her bare legs and feet were pink and chubby, and she had a smile like a sunbeam.

"I saw the sun shining in here so brightly that I walked up the alley to see how it got in," I said to her.

"Yes, mem," she said, with a courtesy. "It do shine in here beautiful." And she looked up at the sky, smiling.

"Have you lived here long?" I asked.

"About nine months, mem. I'm only in service, mem," she continued with a deprecating courtesy, modestly anxious to disclaim the honor of having any proprietary right in the place.

"We've five rooms, mem," she went on. "It's a very nice lodging, if you'd like to see it." And she threw open a door into an infinitesimal parlor, out of which opened a still smaller dining-room, lighted only by a window in the parlor door. There were two bedrooms above, reached by a nearly upright stairway, not over two feet wide. The fifth room was a "beautiful washroom," which the little maiden exhibited with even more pride than she had shown the parlor. "It's three families has it together, mem," she explained. "It's a great thing to get a washroom. And we've a coal-hole, too, mem," she said eagerly; "you passed it, coming up." And she stepped a few paces down the alley, and threw open a door into a rayless place possibly five by seven feet in size. "It used to be a bedroom, mem, to the opposite house; but it's empty now, so we gets it for coal." I could not take my eyes from the child's face, as she prattled and pattered along. She looked like an angel. Her face shone with loyalty, pride, and happiness. I envied the poverty-stricken dwellers in this court their barefooted handmaiden, and would have taken her then and there, if I could, into my own service for her lifetime. As we stood talking, another door opened, and a grizzled old head popped out.

"Good-morning, mem," said the child cheerily, making the same respectful courtesy she had made to me. "I'm just showin' the lady what nice lodgin's we've 'ere in the court."

"Humph," said the old woman gruffly, as she tottered out, leaving her door wide open; "they're nothin' to boast of."

Her own lodging certainly was not. It was literally little more than a chamber in the wall: it had no window, except one small square pane above the door. You could hardly stand upright in it, and not much more than turn around. The walls were hung full: household utensils, clothes, even her two or three books, were hung up by strings; there being only room for one tiny table, besides the stove. In one corner stood a step-ladder, which led up through a hole in the ceiling to the cranny overhead in which she slept. This was all the old woman had. She lived here alone, and she paid to the Duke of Westminster two shillings and sixpence a week for the rent of the place. "It's dear at the rent," she said; "but it's a respectable place, an' I think a deal o' that." And she sighed.

The name of the Duke of Westminster and the value of that two and sixpence to his grace meant more to me that morning than it would have done twenty-four hours earlier; for on the previous afternoon we had visited his palace, the famous Eaton Hall. We had walked there for weary hours over marble floors, under frescoed domes, through long lines of statues, of pictures, of stained-glass windows, hangings, carvings, and rare relics and trophies innumerable. We had seen the duchess's window balcony, one waving mass of yellow musk. "Her ladyship is very fond of musk. It is always to be kept flowering at her window," we were told.

We had walked also through a glass corridor three hundred and seventy-five yards long, draped with white clematis and heliotrope on one side, and on the other banked high with geraniums, carnations, and all manner of flowers. Opening at intervals in these banks of flowers were doors into other conservatories: one was filled chiefly with rare orchids, like an enchanted aviary of hummingbirds, arrested on the wing; gold and white, purple and white, brown and gold, green, snowy white, orange; some of them as large as a fleur-de-lis. Another house was filled with ferns and palms, green, luxuriant, like a bit of tropical forest brought across seas for his grace's pleasure. The most superb sight of all was the lotus house. Cleopatra herself might have flushed with pleasure at beholding it. A deep tank, sixty feet long, and twenty wide, filled with white and blue and pink blossoms, floating, swaying, lolling on the dark water; while, seemingly to uphold the glass roof canopying this lotus-decked sea, rose slender columns, wreathed with thunbergia vines in full bloom, yellow, orange, and white; the glass walls of the building were set thick and high with maiden-hair and other rare ferns, interspersed at irregular intervals with solid masses of purple or white flowers. The spell of the place, of its warm, languid air, was beyond words: it was bewildering.

All this being vivid in my mind, I started at hearing his grace's name from the old woman's lips.

"So these houses belong to the Duke of Westminster, do they?" I replied.

"Yes, 'ee's the 'ole o' 't," she answered; "an' a power o' money it brings 'im in, considerin' its size. 'Ee 's big rents in this town. Mebbe ye've bin out t' 'is 'all? It's a gran' sight, I'm told. I've never seen it."

I was minded then to tell about the duke's flowers. It would have been only a bit of a fairy story to the little maid, a bright spot in her still bright horizons; but I forebore, for the sake of the old woman's soul, already enough wrung and embittered by the long strain of her hard lot, and its contrast with that of her betters, without having that contrast enforced by a vivid picture of the duke's hothouses. My own memory of them was darkened forever,—unreasonably so, perhaps; but the antithesis came too suddenly and soon for me ever to separate the pictures.

The archæologist in Chester will frequently be lured from its streets to its still more famous walls. This side Rome there is no such piece of Roman masonry work, to be seen. Here, indeed, is the air full of ballad measures, to which one must step, if he go his way thinking at all. The four great gates, north, south, east, and west,—three kept by earls, and only one owned by the citizens; the lesser posterns, with commoner names, born of their different sorts of traffic, or the fords to which they led; the towers and turrets, fought over, lost and won, and won and lost, trod by centuries of brave fighters whose names live forever; bridgeways and arches in their own successions, of as noble lineage as any lineages of men,—of such are the walls of Chester. They surround the old city; are nearly two miles in length, and were originally of the width prescribed in the ancient Roman manual of Vitruvius, "that two armed men may pass each other without impediment." There are many places, now, however, which would by no means come up to that standard; Nature having usurped much space with her various growths, and time having been chipping away at them as well. In fact, on some portions of the wall, there is only a narrow grassy footpath, such as might wind around in a village churchyard. To come up by hoary stone stairs, out of the bustling street, atop of the wall, and out on such a bit of footpath as this, with an outlook over the Rood Eye meadow and off toward the region of the old Welsh castles, is a fine early-morning treat in Chester. Some of the towers are now sunk to the ignoble uses of heterogeneous museums. Old women have the keys, and for a fee admit curious people to the ancient chambers and keeps, where, after having the satisfaction of standing where kings have stood, and looking off over fields where kings' battles were fought, they can gaze at glass cases full of curiosities and relics of one sort and another, sometimes of an incredible worthlessness. In the tower known as King Charles's Tower, from the fact of Charles I. having stood there, on the 27th of September, 1645, overlooking the to him luckless battle of Rowton Moor, is the most miscellaneous collection of odds and ends ever offered to public gaze. A very old woman keeps the key of this tower, and is herself by no means the least of the curiosities in it. She was born in Chester, and recollects well when all the space outside the old walls, which is now occupied by the modern city, was chiefly woods; she used to go, in her childhood, to play and to gather flowers in them. The fact that King Charles once looked through the window of this turret has grown, by a sort of geometrical ratio relative to the number of years she has been reiterating the statement, into a colossally disproportionate place in her mind.

"The king, mem, stood just where you're standin' now," she says over and over and over, in a mechanical manner, as long as you remain in the tower. I wondered if she said it all night, in her sleep; and if, if one were to spend a whole day in the tower, she would never stop saying it. She was an enthusiastic show-woman of her little store; undismayed by any amount of indifference on the part of her listeners. "'Ere 's a face you know, mem, I dare say," producing from one corner of the glass case a cheap newspaper picture, much soiled, of General Grant. "'Ee was in this tower last summer, and 'ee was much hinterested."

Next to General Grant's portrait came "a ring snake from Kentucky." "It's my brother, mem, brought that over: twenty years ago, 'ee was in Hamerica. You must undustand the puttin' of 'em hup better than we do, mem, for 'ere's these salamanders was only put hup two years ago, an' they've quite gone a'ready, in that time."

She had a statuette of King Charles, Cromwell's chaplain's broth bowl, a bit of a bedquilt of Queen Anne's, a black snake from Australia, a fine-tooth comb from Africa, a tattered fifty-cent piece of American paper currency, and a string of shell money from the South Sea Islands, all arranged in close proximity. Taking up the bit of American currency, she held it out toward us, saying inquiringly, "Hextinct now, mem, I believe?" I think she can hardly have recovered even yet from the bewilderment into which she was thrown by our convulsive laughter and ejaculated reply, "Oh, no! Would that it were!"

In a clear day can be seen from this tower, a dozen or so miles to the south, the ruins of a castle built by Earl Randel Blundeville. He was the Earl Randel of whom Roger Lacy, constable of Cheshire in 1204, made a famous rescue, once on a time. The earl, it seems, was in a desperate strait, besieged in one of his castles by the Welsh; perhaps in this very castle. Roger Lacy, hearing of the earl's situation, forthwith made a muster of all the tramps, beggars, and rapscallions he could find,—"a tumultuous rout," says the chronicle, "of loose, disorderly, and dissolute persons, players, minstrels, shoemakers and the like,—and marched speedily towards the enemy." The Welsh, seeing so great a multitude coming, raised their siege and fled; and the earl, thus delivered, showed his gratitude to Constable Roger by conferring upon him perpetual authority over the loose, idle persons in Cheshire; making the office hereditary in the Lacy family. A thankless dignity, one would suppose, at best; by no means a sinecure, at any time, and during the season of the Midsummer Fairs a terrible responsibility: it being the law of the land that during those fairs the city of Chester was for the space of one month a free city of refuge for all criminals, of whatsoever degree; in token of which a glove was hung out at St. Peter's Church, on the first day of the fairs.

There is another good tale of Roger Lacy's prowess. He seems to have been a roving fighter, for he once held a castle in Normandy, for King John, against the French, "with such gallantry that after all his victuals were spent, having been besieged almost a year, and many assaults of the enemy made, but still repulsed by him, he mounts his horse, and issues out of the castle with his troop into the middest of his enemies, chusing rather to die like a soldier, than to starve to death. He slew many of the enemy, but was at last with much difficulty taken prisoner; so he and his soldiers were brought prisoners to the King of France, where, by the command of the king, Roger Lacy was to be held no strict prisoner, for his great honesty and trust in keeping the Castle so gallantly.... King John's letter to Roger Lacy concerning the keeping of the said castle, you may see among the Norman writings put out by Andrew du Chesne, and printed at Paris in 1619." Of all of which, if no ballad have ever been written, it is certain that songs must have been sung by minstrels at the time; and the name of the brave Roger's lady-love was well suited to minstrelsy, she being one Maud de Clare. Plain Roger Lacy and Maud de Clare! The dullest fancy takes a leap at the sound of the two names.

In the same old chronicle which gives these and many other narratives of Roger Lacy is the history of a singular, half-witted being, who was known in Vale-Royale, in the fifteenth century, as Nixon the Prophet. How much that the old records claim for him, in the way of minute and minutely fulfilled prophecies, is to be set down to the score of ignorant superstition, it is hard now to say; but there must have been some foundation in fact for the narrative. Robert Nixon was the son of a farmer in Cheshire County, and was born in the year 1467. His stupidity and ignorance were said to be "invincible." No efforts could make him understand anything save the care of cattle, and even in this he showed at times a brutish and idiotic cruelty. He had a very rough, coarse voice, but said little, sometimes passing whole months without opening his lips to speak. He began very early to foretell events, and with an apparently preternatural accuracy. When he was a lad, he was seen, one day, to abuse an ox belonging to his brother. To a person threatening to inform his brother of this act, Robert replied that three days later his brother would not own the ox. Sure enough, on the next day a life inheritance came into the estate on which his brother was a tenant, and that very ox was taken for the "heriot bond to the new owner." One of the abbey monks having displeased him, he exclaimed,—

"When you the harrow come on high,

Soon a raven's nest will be."

The couplet was thought at the time to be simple nonsense; but as it turned out, the last abbot of that monastery was named Harrow, and when the king suppressed the monastery he gave the domain to Sir Thomas Holcroft, whose crest was a raven.

It was also one of Nixon's predictions that the two abbeys of Vale-Royale and Norton should meet on Orton bridge and the thorn growing in the abbey yard should be its door.

When the abbeys were pulled down, in the time of the Reformation, stones taken from each of them were used in rebuilding that bridge; and the thorn-tree was cut down, and placed as a barrier across the entrance to the abbey court, to keep the sheep from entering there.

The most remarkable of Nixon's predictions or revelations was at the time of the battle on Bosworth Field between Richard III. and Henry VII. On that day, as he was driving a pair of oxen, he stopped suddenly, and with his whip pointing now one way, now another, cried aloud, "Now, Richard," "Now, Harry!" At last he said, "Now, Harry, get over that ditch, and you gain the day!" The ploughmen with him were greatly amazed, and related to many persons what had passed. When a courier came through the country announcing the result of the battle, he verified every word Nixon had said.

This courier, when he returned to court, recounted Nixon's predictions; and King Henry was so impressed by them that he at once sent orders to have him brought to the palace.

Before this messenger arrived, Nixon ran about like a madman, weeping and crying that the king was about sending for him, and that he must go to court to be starved to death.

In a few days the royal messenger appeared. Nixon was turning the spit in his brother's kitchen. Just before the messenger came in sight, he shrieked out, "He is on the road! He is coming for me! I shall be starved!"

Lamenting loudly, he was carried away almost by force, and taken into the presence of the king, who tried him with various tests: among others, he hid a diamond ring, and commanded Nixon to find it; but all the answer he got from the cunning varlet was, "He that hideth can find." The king caused all he said to be carefully noted and put down in writing; gave him the run of the palace, and commanded that no one should molest or offend him in any way.

One day, when the king was setting off on a hunt, Nixon ran to him, crying and begging to be allowed to go too; saying that his time had come now, and he would be starved if he were left behind. To humor his whim and ease his fears, the king gave him into the especial charge and keeping of one of the chief officers of the court. The officer, in turn, to make sure that no ill befell the poor fellow, locked him up in one of his private rooms, and with his own hands carried food to him. But after a day or two, a very urgent message from the king calling this officer suddenly away, in the haste of his departure he forgot Nixon, and left him locked up in the apartment. No one missed him or discovered him; and when at the end of three days the officer returned, Nixon was found dead,—dead, as he had himself foretold, of starvation. It is a strange and pitiful story, a tale suited to its century, and could not be left out were there ever to be written a ballad-history of the Vale-Royale's olden days.

It is a question, in early mornings in Chester, whether to take a turn on the ancient walls, listening to echoes such as these from all the fair country in sight in embrace of the Dee, or to saunter through the market, and hear the shriller but no less characteristic voice of Cestrian life to-day.

Markets are always good vantage-grounds for studying the life and people of a place or region. The true traveller never feels completely at home in a town till he has been in the markets. Many times I have gathered from the chance speech of an ignorant market man or woman information I had been in search of for days. Markets are especially interesting in places where caste and class lines are strongly drawn, as in England. The market man or woman whose ancestors have been of the same following, and who has no higher ambition in life than to continue, and if possible enhance, the good will and the good name of the business, is good authority to consult on all matters within his range. There is a self-poise about him, the result of his satisfaction with his own position, which is dignified and pleasing.

On my last morning in Chester, I spent an hour or two in the markets, and encountered two good specimens of this class. One was a fair, slender girl, so unexceptionably dressed in a plain, well-cut ulster that, as I observed her in the crowd of market-women, I supposed she was a young housekeeper, out for her early marketing; but presently, to my great astonishment, I saw her with her own hands measuring onions into a huckster-woman's basket. On drawing nearer, I discovered that she was the proprietress of a natty vegetable cart, piled full of all sorts of green stuff, which she was selling to the sellers. She could not have been more than eighteen. Her manner and speech were prompt, decisive, business-like; she wasted no words in her transactions. Her little brother held the sturdy pony's reins, and she stood by the side of the cart, ready to take orders. She said that she lived ten miles out of town; that she and her three brothers had a large market garden, of which they did all the work with their own hands, and she and this lad brought the produce to market daily.

"I make more sellin' 'olesale than sellin' standin'," she said; "an' I'm 'ome again by ten o'clock, to be at the work."

I observed that all who bought from her addressed her as "miss," and bore themselves toward her with a certain respectfulness of demeanor, showing that they considered her avocation a grade or so above their own.

A matronly woman, with pink cheeks and bright hazel eyes, had walked in from her farm, a distance of six miles, because the load of greens, eggs, poultry, and flowers was all that her small pony could draw. Beautiful moss roses she had, at "thrippence" a bunch.

"No, no, Ada, not any more," she said, in a delicious low voice, to a child by her side, who was slyly taking a rose from one of the baskets. "You've enough there. It hurts them to lie in the 'ot sun.—My daughter, mem," she explained, as the little thing shrunk back, covered with confusion, and pretended to be very busy arranging the flowers on a little board laid across two stones, behind which she was squatted,—"my daughter, mem. All the profits of the flowers they sell are their own, mem. They puts it all in the missionary box. They'd eighteen an' six last year, mem, in all, besides what they put in the school box. Yes, mem, indeed they had."

It struck me that this devout mother took a strange view of the meaning of the word "own," and I did not spend so much money on Ada's flowers as I would have done if I had thought Ada would have the spending of it herself, in her own childish way. But I bought a big bunch of red and white daisies, and another of columbines, white pinks, ivy, and poppies; and the little maid, barely ten years old, took my silver, made change, and gave me the flowers with a winsome smile and a genuine market-woman's "Thank you, mem."

It was a pretty scene: the open space in front of the market building, filled with baskets, bags, barrows, piles of fresh green things, chiefly of those endless cabbage species, which England so proudly enumerates when called upon to mention her vegetables; the dealers were principally women, with fresh, fair faces, rosy cheeks, and soft voices; in the outer circle, scores of tiny donkey-carts, in which the vegetables had been brought. One chubby little girl, surely not more than seven, was beginning her market-woman's training by minding the donkey, while her mother attended to trade. As she stood by the donkey's side, her head barely reached to his ears; but he entered very cleverly into the spirit of the farce of being kept in place by such a mite, and to that end employed her busily in feeding him with handfuls of grass. If she stopped, he poked his nose into her neck and rummaged under her chin, till she began again. All had flowers to sell, if it were only a single bunch, or plant in a pot; and there were in the building several fine stalls entirely filled with flowers,—roses, carnations, geraniums, and wonderful pansies. Noticing, in one stall, a blossom I had never before seen, I asked the old woman who kept the stand to tell me its name. She clapped her hand to her head tragically. "'Deed, mem, it's strange. Ye're the second has asked me the name o' that flower; an' it's gone out o' my head. If the young lady that has the next stand was here, she'd tell ye. It was from her I got the roots: she's a great botanist, mem, an' a fine gardener. Could I send ye the name o' 't, mem? I'd be pleased to accommodate ye, an' may be ye'd like a root or two o' 't. It's a free grower. We've 'ad a death in the house, mem,—my little grandchild, only a few hours ill,—an' it seems like it 'ad confused the 'ole 'ouse. We've not 'ad 'eart to take pains with the flowers yet."

The old woman's artless, garrulous words smote like a sudden bell-note echo from a far past,—an echo that never ceases for hearts that have once known how bell-notes sound when bells toll for beloved dead! The thoughts her words woke seemed to span Chester's centuries more vividly than all the old chronicle traditions and legends, than sculptured Roman altar, or coin, or graven story in stone. The strange changes they recorded were but things of the surface, conditions of the hour. Through and past them all, life remained the same. Grief and joy do not alter shape or sort. Love and love's losses and hurts are the same yesterday, to-day, and forever.

III.
NORWAY, DENMARK, AND GERMANY.

BERGEN DAYS.

The hardest way to go to Norway is by way of the North Sea. It is two days' and two nights' sail from Hull to Bergen; and two days and two nights on the North Sea are nearly as bad as two days and two nights on the English Channel would be. But the hardest way is the best way, in this as in so many other things. No possible approach to Norway from the Continent can give one the sudden characteristic impression of Norway sea and shore which he gets as he sails up the Stavanger Fjord, and sees the town of Stavanger looking off from its hillside over the fleets of island and rock that lie moored in its harbor.

At first sight it seems as if there were no Norway coast at all, only an endless series of islands beyond islands, never stayed by any barrier of mainland; or as if the mainland itself must be being disintegrated from its very centre outwards, breaking up and crumbling into pieces. Surely, the waters, when they were commanded to stay from off the earth, yielded the command but a fragmentary obedience so far as this region was concerned.

The tradition of the creation of Norway seems a natural outgrowth of the place,—the only way, in fact, of accounting for the lay of the land. The legend declares that Norway was made last, and in this wise: On the seventh day, while God was resting from his labors, the devil, full of spite at seeing so fair a world, hurled into the ocean a gigantic rock,—a rock so large that it threatened to break the axis of the universe. But the Lord seized it, and fixed it firm in place, with its myriad jutting points just above the waters. Between these points he scattered all the earth he had left; nothing like enough to cover the rock, or to make a respectable continent,—only just enough to redeem spots here and there, and give man a foothold on it. The fact that forty per cent of the whole surface of Norway is over three thousand feet above the sea is certainly a corroboration of this legend.

This island fringe gives to the coast of Norway an indefinable charm,—the charm of endless maze, vista, expectation, and surprise; lure, also, suggestion, dim hint, and reticent revelation, like a character one cannot fathom, and behavior one can never reckon on. Though the ship sail in and out of the labyrinths never so safely and quickly, fancy is always busy at deep-sea soundings; bewildered by the myriad shapes, and half conscious of a sort of rhythm in their swift, perpetual change, as if they, and not the ship, were gliding. The vivid verdure on them in spots has more the expression of something momentarily donned and worn than of a growth. It seems accidental and decorative, flung on suddenly; then, again, soft, thick, inexhaustible, as if the islands might be the tops of drowned forests.

Stavanger is one of the most ancient towns in Norway. It looks as if it were one of the most ancient in the world; its very brightness, with its faded red houses, open windows, and rugged pavements, being like the color and smile one sees sometimes on a cheerful, wrinkled, old face. The houses are packed close together, going up-hill as hard as they can; roofs red tiled; gable ends red tiled also, which gives a droll eyebrow effect to the ends of the houses, and helps wonderfully to show off pretty faces just beneath them, looking out of windows. All the windows open in the middle, outwards, like shutters; and it would not be much risk to say that there is not a window-sill in all Stavanger without flowers. Certainly, we did not see one in a three hours' ramble. From an old watchtower, which stands on the top of the first sharp hill above the harbor, is a sweeping off-look, seaward and coastward, to north and south: long promontories, green and curving, with low red roofs here and there, shot up into relief by the sharp contrast of color; bays of blue water breaking in between; distant ranges of mountains glittering white; thousands of islands in sight at once. Stavanger's approach strikes Norway's key-note with a bold hand, and old Norway and new Norway meet in Stavanger's market-place. An old cathedral, the oldest but one in the country, looks down a little inner harbor, where lie sloops loaded with gay pottery of shapes and colors copied from the latest patterns out in Staffordshire. These are made by peasants many miles away, on the shores of the fjords: bowls, jars, flower-pots, jugs, and plates, brown, cream-colored, red, and white; painted with flowers, and decorated with Grecian and Etruscan patterns in simple lines. The sloop decks are piled high with them,—a gay show, and an odd enough freight to be at sea in a storm. The sailors' heads bob up and down among the pots and pans, and the salesman sits flat on the deck, lost from view, until a purchaser appears. Miraculously cheap this pottery is, as well as fantastic of shape and color; one could fit out his table off one of these crockery sloops, for next to nothing. Along the wharves were market-stands of all sorts: old women selling fuchsias, myrtles, carrots, and cabbages, and blueberries, all together; piles of wooden shoes, too,—clumsy things, hollowed out of a single chunk of wood, shaped like a Chinese junk keel, and coarsely daubed with black paint on the outside; no heel to hold them on, and but little toe. The racket made by shuffling along on pavements in them is amazing, and "down at the heel" becomes a phrase of new significance, after one has heard the thing done in Norway.

Just outside the market-place we came upon our first cariole; it was going by like the wind, drawn by a little Norwegian pony, which seemed part pincushion, part spaniel, part fat snowbird, and the rest pony, with a shoe-brush, bristles up, for a mane. Such good-will in his trot, and such a sense of honor and independence in the wriggle of his head, and such affectionateness all over him, no wonder the Norwegians love such a species of grown-up useful pet dogs. Hardy they are, and, if they choose, swift; obey voices better than whips, and would rather have bread than hay to eat, at any time of day. The cariole is a kind of compressed sulky, open, without springs; the narrow seat, narrow even for one person, set high up on elastic wooden shafts, which rest on the axle-tree at the back, and on a sort of saddle-piece in front. The horse is harnessed very far forward in the low thills, and has the direct weight on his shoulders. A queerer sight than such a vehicle as this, coming at a Norwegian pony's best rate towards you, with a pretty Norwegian girl driving, and standing up on the cross-piece behind her a handsome Norwegian officer, with his plumed head above hers, bent a little to the right or left, and very close, lovers of human nature in picturesque situations need not wish to see. Less picturesque, and no doubt less happy for the time being, but no less characteristic, was the first family we saw in Stavanger taking an airing; a square wooden box for a wagon,—nothing more than a vegetable bin on wheels. This held two large milk-cans, several bushels of cabbages, four children, and their mother. The father walked sturdily beside the wagon, his head bent down, like his pony's; serious eyes, a resolute mouth, and a certain look of unjoyous content marked him as a good specimen of the best sort of Norwegian peasant. The woman and the children wore the same look of unjoyous and unmirthful content; silent, serious, satisfied, they all sat still among the cabbages. So solemn a thing is it to be born in latitude north. Had those cabbages grown in the Campagna, the man would have been singing, the woman laughing, and the young ones rolling about in the cart like kittens.

From Stavanger to Bergen is a half-day's sail: in and out among islands, promontories, inlets, rocks; now wide sea on one hand, and rugged shore on the other; now a very archipelago of bits of land and stone flung about in chaotic confusion, on all sides. Many of the islands are nothing but low beds of granite, looking as if it were in flaky slices like mica, or else minutely roughened and stippled, as though cooled suddenly from a tremendous boil. Some of these islands have oases of green in them; tiny red farm-houses, sunk in hollows, with narrow settings of emerald around them; hand's-breadth patches of grain here and there, left behind as from some harvest, which the hungry sea is following after to glean. No language can describe the fantastic, elusive charm of this islet and rocklet universe: half sadness, half cheer, half lonely, half teeming, altogether brilliant and brimming with beauty; green land, gray rock, and blue water, surging, swaying, blending, parting, dancing together, in stately and contagious pleasure. On the north horizon rise grand snow-topped peaks; broad blue bays make up into the land walled by mountains; snow fjelds and glaciers glitter in the distance; and waterfalls, like silver threads, shine from afar on the misty clouds. At every new turn is a hamlet or house, looking as if it had just crept into shelter; one solitary boat moored at the base of its rock, often the only token of a link kept with the outer world.

The half-day's sail from Stavanger to Bergen is all like this, except that after one turns southward into the Bergen Fjord the mysterious islanded shores press closer, and the hill shores back of them rise higher, so that expectancy and wonder deepen moment by moment, till the moment of landing on Bergen's water rim. "Will there be carriages at the wharf?" we had asked of the terrible stewardess who had tyrannized over our ship for two days, like a French Revolution fishwoman. "Carriages!" she cried, with her arms akimbo. "The streets in Bergen are so steep carriages can't drive down them. The horses would tumble back on the carriage,"—a purely gratuitous fiction on her part, for what motive it is hard to conceive. But it much enhanced the interest with which we gazed at the rounding hills, slowly hemming us in closer and closer, and looking quite steep enough to justify the stewardess's assertion. By clocks, it was ten o'clock at night; by sky, about dawn, or just after sunset; by air, atmosphere, light, no time which any human being ever heard named or defined. There is nothing in any known calendar of daylight, twilight, or nightlight which is like this Norwegian interval between two lights. It is weird, bewildering, disconcerting. You don't know whether you are glad or sorry, pleased or scared; whether you really can see or not; whether you'd better begin another day's work at once, or make believe it is time to go to bed.

If somebody would invent a word which should bear the same interesting, specific, and intelligible relation to light and dark that "amphibious" does to land and water, it would be, in describing Norway twilight, of more use than all the rest of the English language put together. Perhaps the Norwegians have such a word. I think it highly probable they have, and I wish I knew it.

In this strange illuminated twilight, we landed on the silent Bergen wharf. The quay was in shadow of high warehouses. A few nonchalant and leisurely men and boys were ambling about; custom-house men, speaking the jargon of their race, went through the farce of appearing to ransack our luggage. Our party seemed instantaneously to have disintegrated, in the half darkness, into odds and ends of unassorted boxes and people, and it was with gratitude as for a succession of interpositions of a superior and invincible power that we finally found ourselves together again in one hotel, and decided that, on the whole, it was best to go to bed, in spite of the light, because, as it was already near midnight, it would very soon be still lighter, and there would be no going to bed at all.

The next day, we began Bergen by driving out of it (a good way always, to begin a place). No going out of Bergen eastward or westward except straight up skyward, so steep are the slopes. Southward the country opens by gentler ascents, and pretty country houses are built along the road for miles,—all of wood, and of light colors, with much fantastic carving about them; summer-houses perched on the terraces, among lime, birch, and ash trees. One which we saw was in octagon shape, and had the roof thick sodded with grass, which waved in the wind. The eight open spaces of the sides were draped with bright scarlet curtains, drawn away tight on each side, making a Gothic arch line of red at each opening. It looked like somebody's gay palanquin set down to wait.

Our driver's name was Nils. He matched it: short, sturdy, and good-natured; red cheeks and shining brown eyes. His ponies scrambled along splendidly, and stopped to rest whenever they felt like it,—not often, to be sure, but they had their own way whenever they did, and were allowed to stand still. Generally they put their heads down and started off of their own accord in a few seconds; occasionally Nils reminded them by a chuckle to go on.

There is no need of any society for the prevention of cruelty to animals in Norway. The Norwegian seems to be instinctively kind to all beasts of bondage. At the foot of steep hills is to be seen everywhere the sign, "Do not forget to rest the horses." The noise Nils made when he wished to stop his ponies gave us a fright, the first time we heard it. It is the drollest sound ever invented for such a use: a loud call of rolling r's; an ingenious human parody on a watchman's rattle; a cross between a bellow and a purr. It is universal in Norway, but one can never become accustomed to it unless he has heard it from infancy up.

The wild and wooded country through which we drove was like parts of the northern hill country of New England: steep, stony hills; nooks full of ferns; bits of meadow in sunlight and shadow, with clover, and buttercups, and bluebells, and great mossy bowlders; farm-houses snugged down in hollows to escape the wind; lovely dark tarns, with pond-lilies afloat, just too far from the shore for arms to reach them. Only when we met people, or when the great blue fjord gleamed through the trees below us, did we know we were away from home. It is a glory when an arm of the sea reaches up into the heart of a hill country, so that men may sail to and from mountain bases. No wonder that the Vikings went forth with the passion of conquering, and yet forever returned and returned, with the passion of loving their gamle Norge.

When we came back to the inn, we were invited into the landlady's own parlor, and there were served to us wine and milk and sweet tarts, in a gracious and simple hospitality. The landlady and her sister were beautiful old ladies, well past sixty, with skins like peaches, and bright eyes and quick smiles. High caps of white lace, trimmed with sky-blue ribbons, and blue ostrich feathers laid on them like wreaths above the forehead, gave to their expression a sort of infantile elegance which was bewitching in its unworldliness; small white shawls thrown over their shoulders, and reaching only just below the belt, like those worn by old Quaker women, corroborated the simplicity of the blue ribbons, and added to the charm. They had all the freshness and spotlessness of Quakers, with color and plumes added; a combination surely unique of its kind. One of these old ladies was as gay a chatterer as if she were only seventeen. She had not one tooth in her mouth; but her mouth was no more made ugly by the absence of teeth, as are most old women's mouths, than a baby's mouth is made ugly by the same lack. The lips were full and soft and red; her face was not wrinkled; and when she talked and laughed and nodded, the blue ostrich feathers bobbing above, she looked like some sort of miraculous baby, that had learned to talk before "teething."

Her niece, who was our only interpreter, and too shy to use quickly and fluently even the English she knew, was in despair at trying to translate her. "It is too much, too much," she said. "I cannot follow; I am too far behind," and she laughed as heartily as her aunt. The old lady was brimful of stories: she had known Bergen, in and out, for half a century, and forgotten nothing. It was a great pleasure to set her going, and get at her narrative by peeps, as one sees a landscape through chinks in a fence, when one is whirling by in a railway train. One of her best stories was of "the man who was brought back from the dead by coffee."

It seemed that when she was young there lived in Bergen three old women, past whose house an eccentric old bachelor used to walk every day at a certain hour. When he came back from his walk, he always stopped at their house and drank a cup of coffee. This he had done for a great many years. "He was their watch to tell the time by," and when he first passed the house they began to make the coffee, that it should be ready on his return. At last he fell ill and died, and two of these old women were hired to sit up one night and watch the corpse. It is the custom in Norway to keep all dead bodies one week before burial, if not in the house where they have died, then in the chapel at the graveyard. "When we do die on a Wednesday, we shall not be buried till another Wednesday have come," said the niece, explaining this custom.

These old women were sitting in the room with the corpse, talking and sipping hot coffee together, and saying how they should miss him; that never more would he go by their house and stop to get his coffee.

"At any rate, he shall taste the coffee once more," said one of them, and she put a spoonful of the hot coffee into the corpse's lips, at which the old gentleman stirred, drew a long breath, and began to lift himself up, upon which the women uttered such shrieks that the city watchman, passing by, broke quickly into the house, to see what was the matter. Entering the room, he found the watchers senseless on the floor, and the corpse sitting bolt upright in his coffin, looking around him, much bewildered. "And he did live many years after that time,—many, many years. My aunt did know him well," said the niece.

Other of her stories were of the sort common to the whole world,—stories of the love, sorrow, tragedy, mystery, which are inwoven in the very warp and woof of human life; the same on the bleak North Sea coast as on bright Southern shores. It seemed, however, a little more desolate to have lived in the sunless North seventy years of such life as had been dealt to one Bergen woman, who had but just passed away. Seventy years she had lived in Bergen, the last thirty alone, with one servant. In her youth she had been beautiful; and when she was still little more than a child had come to love very dearly the eldest son in a neighbor's house. Their parents were friends; the young people saw each other without restraint, familiarly, fondly, and a great love grew up between them. They were suffered to become betrothed, but for some unassigned reason their marriage was forbidden. For years they bore with strange patience their parents' apparently capricious decision. At last the blow fell. One of the fathers, lying at the point of death, revealed a terrible secret. This faithful betrothed man and woman were own brother and sister. The shame of two homes, the guilt of two unsuspected wrong-doers, was told; the mystery was cleared up, and more than one heart broken. Bitter as was the grief of the two betrothed, who could now never wed, there must have been grief still more terrible in the hearts of those long ago wedded, and so long deceived. The father died as soon as he had confessed the guilty secret. The young man left Norway, and died in some far country. The girl lived on,—lived to be seventy,—alone with her sorrow and disgrace.

Two other Bergen lovers had had better fate. Spite of fathers and mothers who had forbidden them to meet, it fell out for them to be safely married, one night, in the very teeth of the closest watching. The girl was permitted to go, under the escort of a faithful man-servant, to a wedding dance at a friend's house. The man-servant was ordered to stand guard at the door, till the dance was over; if the lover appeared, the girl was to be instantly taken home. Strange oversight, for parents so much in earnest as that, to forget that houses have more than one door! When the mirth was at its height, the girl stole away by the back door, and fled to her lover. At length the dance was over, and the guests were leaving; anxiously the faithful servitor, who had never once left the doorstep, looked for his young mistress. The last guest departed; his mistress did not appear. In great terror he entered; the house was searched in vain; no one knew when she had taken her leave. Trembling, he ran back to the father with the unwelcome news; and both going in hot haste to the lover's house, there they found the two young people sitting gay and happy over cake and wine, with the excellent clergyman who had that very hour made them man and wife.

The old lady had a firm and unalterable belief in ghosts, as indeed she had some little right to have, one was forced to admit, after hearing her stories. "And could you believe that after a man is dead he should be seen again as if he were alive?" said the niece. "My aunt is so sure, so sure she have seen such; also my aunt's sister, they did both did see him."

At one time the two sisters hired a house in Bergen, and lived together. In one of the upper halls stood a small trunk, which had been left there by a sailor, in payment of a debt he had owed to the owner of the house. One day, in broad daylight, there suddenly appeared, before the younger sister, the shape of a man in sailor's dress. He walked toward her, holding out a paper. She spoke to him wonderingly, asking what he wanted. At the sound of her voice he vanished into thin air. She fainted, and was for some weeks seriously ill. A few months later, the same figure appeared in the bedroom of the eldest sister (the old lady who told these stories). He came in the night, and approached her bed holding out a white paper in his hands. "My aunt say she could cut the shape in paper like the hat he wore on his head; she did see it so plain to-day as she have seen it then, and it shall be fifty years since he did come by her bed. She was so scared she would not have the trunk of the sailor to stand in the house longer; and after the trunk had gone away he did come no more to their house."

Another instance of this ghost-seeing was truly remarkable, and not so easily explained by any freak of imagination. Walking, one day, in a public garden, with a friend, she saw coming down the path toward them a singular old woman in a white nightcap and short white bedgown,—both very dirty. The old woman was tossing her arms in the air, and behaving so strangely that she thought she must be drunk, and turned laughingly to her friend, about to say, "What can be the matter with this old woman?" when, to her surprise, she saw her friend pale, fainting, ready to fall to the ground. She seized her in her arms, called for help, and carried her to a seat. On returning to consciousness, her friend exclaimed, "It was my mother! It was my mother!" The mother had been dead some months, had always worn in her illness this white cotton nightcap and short bedgown, and had been, it seemed, notoriously untidy.

"Now my aunt did never see that old woman in all her life," continued the niece. "So what think you it was, in that garden, that both them did see the same thing at one time? And my aunt's friend she get so very sick after that, she were sick in bed for a long time. My aunt will believe always she did see the mother's ghost; and she says she have seen a great many more that she never tells to anybody."

All this ghost-seeing has not sobered or saddened the old lady a whit, and she looks the last person in the world to whom sentimental or mischief-making spirits would be likely to address themselves: but there is certainly something uncanny, to say the least of it, in these experiences of hers.

One of the most novel pleasures in Bergen is old-silver hunting. There are shops where old silver is to be bought in abundance and at dear prices: old belts, rings, slides, buttons, brooches, spoons, of quaint and fantastic styles, some of them hundreds of years old. But the connoisseur in old-silver hunting will not confine his search for treasures to the large shops on the thoroughfares. He will roam the city, keeping a sharp eye for little boxes tucked up on walls of houses, far down narrow lanes and by-ways,—little boxes with glass sides, and a silver spoon or two, or an old buckle or brooch, shining through. This is the sign that somewhere in that house he will come on a family that has tucked away in some closet a little box of old silver that they will sell. Often they are workers in silver in a small way; have a counter in the front parlor, and a tiny work-room opening out behind, where they make thin silver spoons with twisted handles, and brooches with dangling disks and crosses, such as all the peasant women wear to-day, and a hundred years hence their grandchildren will be selling to English and American travellers as "old silver." The next century, however, will not gather such treasures as this one; there is no modern silver to compare with the ancient. It is marvellous to see what a wealth of silver the old Norwegians wore: buckles and belts which are heavy, buttons which weigh down any cloak, and rings under which nineteenth-century fingers, and even thumbs, would ache. And the farther back we go the weightier become the ornaments. In the Museum of Northern Antiquities in Copenhagen are necklaces of solid gold, which it seems certain that noble Norwegian women wore in King Olaf's time,—necklaces in shape of a single snake, coiled, so heavy that they are not easily lifted in one hand; bracelets, also of the same snake shape, which a modern wrist could not wear half an hour without pain.

In these out-of-the-way houses where old silver is to be bought one sees often picturesque sights. Climbing up a narrow stairway, perhaps two, you find a door with the upper half glass, through which you look instantly into the bosom of the family,—children playing, old ladies knitting, women cooking; it seems the last place in the world to come shopping; but at the first glimpse of the foreign face and dress through the window, somebody springs to open the door. They know at once what it means. You want no interpreter to carry on your trade: the words "old silver" and "how much?" are all you need. They will not cheat you. As you enter the room, every member of the family who is sitting will rise and greet you. The youngest child will make its little bow or courtesy. The box of old silver will be brought out and emptied on a table, and you may examine its miscellany as long as you like. If an article pleases you, and you ask its price, it is taken into the work-room to be weighed; a few mysterious Norsk words come back from the weigher, and the price is fixed. If you hesitate at the sum, they will lower it if they can; if not, they will await your departure quietly, with a dignity of hospitable instinct that would deem it an offence to betray any impatience. I had once the good luck to find in one of these places a young peasant woman, who had come with her lover to bargain for the silver-and-gilt crown without which no virtuous Bergen bride will wed. These crowns are dear, costing often from fifty to a hundred dollars. Sometimes they are hired for the occasion; but well-to-do families have pride in possessing a crown which is handed down and worn by generation after generation. These lovers were evidently not of the rich class: they wore the plainest of clothes, and it was easy to see that the prices of the crowns disquieted them. I made signs to the girl to try one of them on. She laughed, blushed, and shook her head. I pressed my entreaties as well as I could, being dumb; but "Oh, do!" is intelligible in all languages, if it is enforced by gesture and appealing look. The old man who had the silver to sell also warmly seconded my request, lifted the crown himself, and set it on the girl's head. Turning redder and redder, she cried, "Ne, ne!" but did not resist; and once the crown was on her head she could not leave off looking at herself in the glass. It was a very pretty bit of human nature. The lover stole up close behind her, shy, but glowing with emotion, reached up, and just touched the crown timidly with one finger: so alike are men in love all the world over and all time through. The look that man's face wore has been seen by the eyes of every wife since the beginning of Eden, and it will last the world out. I slipped away, and left them standing before the glass, the whole family crowding around with a chorus of approving and flattering exclamations. Much I fear she could not afford to buy the crown, however. There was a hopeless regret in her pretty blue eyes. As I left the house I stepped on juniper twigs at the very next door; the sidewalk and the street were strewn thick with them, the symbol of death either in that home or among its friends. This is one of the most simple and touching of the Norwegian customs: how much finer in instinct and significance than the gloomy streamer of black crape used by the civilization calling itself superior!

The street was full of men and women going to and from the market-place: women with big wooden firkins strapped on their backs, and a firkin under each arm (these firkins were full of milk, and the women think nothing of bringing them in that way five or six miles); men with big sacks of vegetables strapped on in the same way, one above another, almost as high as their heads. One little girl, not nine years old, bore a huge basket of green moss, bigger than herself, lashed on her fragile shoulders. The better class brought their things in little two-wheeled carts, they themselves mounted up on top of sacks, firkins, and all; or, if the cart were too full, plodding along on foot by its side, just as bent as those who were carrying loads on their back. A Bergen peasant man or woman who stands upright is a rare thing to see. The long habit of carrying burdens on the back has given them a chronic stoop, which makes them all look far older than they are.

The sidewalks were lined with gay displays of fruit, flowers, and wooden utensils. Prettiest among these last were the bright wooden trunks and boxes which no Norwegian peasant will be without. The trunks are painted bright scarlet, with bands and stripes of gay colors; small boxes to be carried in the hand, called tines (pronounced teeners), are charming. They are oval, with a high perch at each end like a squirrel trap; are painted bright red, with wreaths of gay flowers on them, and mottoes such as "Not in every man's garden can such flowers grow," or, "A basket filled by love is light to carry." Bowls, wooden plates, and drinking-vessels, all of wood, are also painted in gay colors and designs, many of which seem to have come from Algiers.

Everybody who can sell anything, even the smallest thing, runs, or stands, or squats in the Bergen streets to sell it. Even spaces under high doorsteps are apparently rented for shops, rigged up with a sort of door, and old women sit crouching in them, selling blueberries and dark bread. One man, clad in sheepskin that looked a hundred years old, I saw trying to sell a bit of sheepskin nearly as old as that he was wearing; another had a basket with three bunches of wild monkshood, pink spiræa, and blue larkspur, and one small saucer full of wild strawberries; boys carrying one pot with a plant growing in it, or a tub of sour milk, or a string of onions, or bunch of juniper boughs; women sitting on a small butter-tub upside down, their butter waiting sale around them in tubs or bits of newspaper, they knitting for dear life, or sewing patches on ragged garments; other groups of women sitting flat on the stones, surrounded by piles of juniper, moss, green heath, and wreaths made of kinni-kinnick vines, green moss, and yellow flowers. These last were for graves. The whole expression of the scene was of dogged and indomitable thriftiness, put to its last wits to turn a penny and squeeze out a living. Yet nobody appeared discontented; the women looked friendly, as I passed, and smiled as they saw me taking out my note-book to write them down.

The Bergen fish-market is something worth seeing. It isn't a market at all; or rather it is a hundred markets afloat and bobbing on water, a hundred or more little boats all crowded in together in an armlet of the sea breaking up between two quays. To see the best of it one must be there betimes in the morning, not later than seven. The quays will be lined with women, each woman carrying a tin coal-scuttle on her arm, to take home her fish in. From every direction women are coming running with tin scuttles swinging on their arms; in Bergen, fish is never carried in any other way. The narrow span of water between the quays is packed as close as it can be with little boats shooting among the sloops and jagts, all pushing up to the wharf. The steps leading down to the water are crowded with gesticulating women; screaming and gesticulating women hang over the railings above, beckoning to the fishermen, calling to them, reaching over and dealing them sharp whacks with their tin scuttles, if they do not reply. "Fisherman! I say, Fisherman! Do you hear me or not?" they shout. Then they point to one particular fish, and insist on having it handed up to them to examine; if it does not please them, they fling it down with a jerk, and ask for another. The boats were full of fish: silver-skinned herring, mackerel, salmon, eels, and a small fish like a perch, but of a gorgeous dark red color; others vermilion and white, or iridescent opal, blue, and black; many of them writhing in death, and changing color each second. Every few minutes a new boat would appear darting in, wriggling its way where it had seemed not one boat more could come; then a rush of the women to see what the new boat had brought, a fresh outburst of screams and gesticulations; then a lull and a sinking back to the noisy monotone of the previous chaffering. Some of the boats were rowed by women,—splendid creatures, in gay red bodices and white head-dresses, standing with one foot on the seat, and sculling their little craft in and out, dexterously shoving everybody to make way.

On the wharf were a few dealers with stands and baskets of fish; these were for the poorer people. "Fish that have died do be to be brought there," said my guide, with a shudder and an expressive grimace, "for very little money; it is the poor that take." Here were also great tubs of squirming eels, alive in every inch from tip to tip. "Too small to cook," said one woman, eying them contemptuously; and in a twinkling she thrust her arm into the squirming mass, grasped a dozen or more at once, lifted them out and flirted them into the seller's face, then letting them fall back with a splash into the tub, "H'm, pretty eels those are!" she said. "Put them back into the water with their mothers:" at which a great laugh went up, and the seller muttered something angrily which my guide would not translate for me.

On our way home I stopped to look at a group of peasant women in gay costumes. Two of them were from the Hardanger county, and wore the beautiful white head-dress peculiar to that region: a large triangular piece of fine crimped dimity pinned as closely as a Quaker cap around the face; the two corners then rolled under and carried back over a wooden frame projecting several inches on each side the head; the central point hanging down behind, over the shoulders,—by far the most picturesque of all the Norwegian head-dresses. A gentleman passing by, seeing my interest in these peasant dresses, spoke to the friend who was with me, whom he knew slightly, and said that if the American lady would like to examine one of those peasant costumes he had one which he would be happy to show to me.

The incident is worth mentioning as a fair illustration of the quick, ready, and cordial good-will of which Norwegians are full. Is there any other country in the world where a man would take that sort and amount of trouble for a chance traveller, of whom he knew nothing?

This Norwegian led us to his house, and opened two boxes in which were put away the clothes of his wife, who had been dead two years. This peasant costume which he showed to us she had had made to wear to the last ball she had attended. It was a beautiful costume; strictly national and characteristic, and made of exquisite materials. The belt was of silver-gilded links, with jewels set in them; the buttons for wrists and throat of the white blouse were of solid silver, with gold Maltese crosses hanging from them; the brooches and vest ornaments the same; the stomacher of velvet, embroidered thick with beads and gold; the long white apron with broad lace let in. All were rich and beautiful. It was strange to see the dead woman's adornments thus brought out for a stranger to admire; but it was done with such simplicity and kindliness that it was only touching, as no shadow of disrespect was in it. I felt instantly, like a friend, reverent toward the relics of the woman I had never seen.

One of our pleasantest Bergen days was a day that wound up with a sunset picnic on the banks of a stray bit of sea, which had gone so far on its narrow roadway east, among hill and meadow and rock, that it was like an inland lake; and the track by which its tides slipped back and forth looked at sunset like little more than a sunbeam, broader and brighter than the rest which were slanting across. We had come to it by several miles' driving to the north and east, over steep and stony hills, up which the road wound in loops, zigzagging back and forth, with superb views out seaward at every turn; at the top, another great sweep of view away from the sea, past a desolate lake and stony moor, to green hills and white mountains in the east. We seemed above everything except the snow-topped peaks. At our feet, to the west, lay the little sunny fjord; green meadows and trees and a handful of houses around it; daisies and clover and tangles of potentilla by the roadside; clumps of ragged robin also, which goes better named in Norway, being called "silken blossom;" mountain ash, larch, maple, and ash trees: bowlders of granite covered with mosses and lichens, bedded on every side,—it was as winning a spot as sun and sea and summer could make anywhere. On the edge of the fjord, lifted a little above it, as on a terrace, was a small white cottage, with a bit of garden, enclosed by white palings, running close to the water. Roses, southernwood, currants, lilacs, cherry-trees, potatoes, and primroses filled it full. We leaned over the paling and looked. An old woman, with knitting in her hand, came quickly out, and begged us to come in and take some flowers. No sooner had we entered the garden than a second old woman came hurrying with scissors to cut the flowers; and in a second more a third old woman with a basket to hold them. It was not easy to stay their hands. Then, nothing would do but we must go into the house and sit down, and see the brothers: two old men, one a clergyman, the other stone blind. "I can English read in my New Testament," said the clergyman, "but I cannot understand." "Yes, to be sure," said the blind brother, echoing him. And it was soon evident to us that it was not only sight of which the old man had been bereft; his wits were gone too; all that he could do now was to echo in gentle iteration every word that his brother or sisters said. "Yes, to be sure," was his instantaneous comment on every word spoken. "I think they are all just a little crazy. I am more happy now that we are away," said my friend, as we departed with our roses. "I do know I have heard that to be crazy is in that family." Crazy or not, they were a very happy family on that sunny terrace, and sane enough to have chosen the loveliest spot to live in within ten miles of Bergen.

Another of our memorable Bergen days was marked by a true Norwegian dinner in a simple Bergen home. "The carriage that shall take you will come at six," the hostess had said. Punctual to the hour it came; red-cheeked Nils and the cheery little ponies. On the threshold we were met by the host and hostess, both saying, "Welcome." As soon as we took our seats at table a toast was offered: "Welcome to the table" (Welkommen tilbords). The meal was, as we had requested, a simple Norwegian dinner. First, a soup, with balls made of chicken: the meat scraped fine while it is raw; then pounded to a paste with cream in a marble mortar, the cream added drop by drop, as oil is added to salad dressing; this, delicately seasoned, made into small round balls and cooked in the boiling soup, had a delicious flavor, and a consistency which baffled all our conjecture. Next came salmon, garnished with shreds of cucumber, and with clear melted butter for sauce. Next, chickens stuffed tight with green parsley, and boiled; with these were brought vegetables, raspberry jam, and stewed plums, all delicious. Next, a light omelet, baked in a low oval tin pan, in which it was brought to the table, the pan concealed in a frame of stiff white dimity with a broad frill embroidered in red. Cheese and many other dishes are served in this way in Norway, adorned with petticoats, or frills of embroidered white stuffs. With this omelet were eaten cherry sweetmeats, with which had been cooked all the kernels from the cracked stones, giving a rare flavor and richness to the syrup. After this, nuts, coffee, and cordials. When the dinner was over, the host and the hostess stood in the doorway, one on either hand; as we passed between them, they bowed to each one, saying, "God be with you." It is the custom of each guest to say, "Tak fur maden" ("Thanks for the meal"). After dinner our hostess played for us Norwegian airs, wild and tender, and at ten o'clock came Nils and the ponies to take us home.

The next day the jagts came in, a sight fine enough to stir one's blood; ten of them sailing into harbor in line, the same as they sailed in Olaf's day,—their prows curling upward, as if they stepped high on the waters from pride, and their single great square sail set on their one mast doggedly across their decks, as if they could compel winds' courses to suit them. They had been only four days running down from Heligoland, ahead of a fierce north wind, which had not so much as drawn breath even night or day, but blown them down flying. A rare piece of luck for the jagts to hit such a wind as that: when the wind faces them, they are sometimes four weeks on the way; for their one great stolid sail amidships, which is all very well with the wind behind it, is no kind of a sail to tack with, or to make headway on a quartering wind. The Vikings must have had a hard time of it, often, manœuvring their stately craft in Mediterranean squalls, and in the Bay of Biscay. One of these jagts bore a fine scarlet silk flag with a yellow crown on it. It was called the king's jagt, because, a year ago, the king had visited it, spent some time on board, and afterward sent this flag as a gift to the captain. We hired an old boatman to row us alongside, and clambered on board up a swinging ladder; then up another ladder, still longer, to the top of the square mountain of salt codfish which filled three fourths of the deck. Most of it was to go to Spain, the skipper said,—to Spain and the Mediterranean. "It was well for Norway that there were so many Roman Catholic Countries:" no danger of an overstock of the fish market in Europe so long as good Catholics keep Lent every spring and Fridays all the year round. If the Catholics were to be converted, Norway would be plunged into misery. One tenth of her whole population live off, if not on, fish; the value of the fisheries is reckoned at over ten millions of dollars a year. Not a fish goes free on the Norway coast. Even the shark has to give up his liver for oil, from which item alone the Norwegians get about half a million of dollars yearly. The herring, shining, silvery, slippery fellows that they are, are the aristocrats of the Norway waters; the cod is stupid, stays quietly at home on his banks, breeds and multiplies, and waits to be caught year after year in the same places. But the herring shoals are off and on, at capricious pleasure, now here, now there, and to be watched for with unremitting vigilance. Kings' squadrons might come to Norway with less attention than is given to them. Flash, flash, flash, by electric telegraph from point to point all along the Norway shore, is sent like lightning the news of the arrival of their majesties the herring.

Our boatman rowed us across the harbor to the landing at the foot of the market-place. Climbing the steep hill, so steep that the roadway for vehicles zigzags five times across it between bottom and top, we looked back. Four more of the jagts were coming in,—colors flying, sails taut; six more were in sight, it was said, farther out in the fjord. The harbor was crowded with masts; the gay-colored houses and red roofs and gables of the city on the east side of the harbor stood out in relief against the gray, stony background of the high hill to which they cling. The jagts seem to change the atmosphere of the whole scene, and set it three centuries back. In the sunset light, they looked as fine and fierce as if they had just brought Sigurd home from Jerusalem.

Another memorable Bergen day was a day at Valestrand, on the island Osteroën. Valestrand is a farm which has been in the possession of Ole Bull's family for several generations, and is still in the possession of Ole Bull's eldest son. It lies two hours' sail north from Bergen,—two hours, or four according to the number of lighters loaded with cotton bales, wood, etc., which the steamer picks up to draw. Steamers on Norway fjords are like country gentlemen who go into the city every day and come out at night, always doing unexpected errands for people along the road. No steamer captain going out from Bergen may say how many times he will stop on his journey, or at what hour he will reach its end: all of which is clear profit for the steamboat company, no doubt, but is worrying to travellers; especially to those who leave Bergen of a morning at seven, as we did, invited to breakfast at Valestrand at nine, and do not see Osteroën's shore till near eleven. People who were not going to Valestrand to breakfast that day were eating breakfast on board, all around us: poor people eating cracknels and dry bread out of baskets; well-to-do people eating sausage, eggs, and coffee, neatly served at little tables on deck, and all prepared in a tiny coop below-stairs, hardly big enough for one person to turn around in. It is an enticing sight always for hungry people to see eating going on; up to a certain point it whets appetite, but beyond that it is both insult and injury.

The harbor of Valestrand is a tiny amphitheatre of shallow water. No big craft can get to the shore. As the steamer comes to a stop opposite it, the old home of Ole Bull is seen on a slope at the head of the harbor, looking brightly out over a bower of foliage to the southern sun. It appears to be close to the water, but, on landing, one discovers that he is still a half hour's walk away from it. A little pathway of mossy stones, past an old boat-house, on whose thatched roof flowering grasses and a young birch-tree were waving, leads up from the water to the one road on the island. Wild pansies, white clover, and dandelions, tinkling water among ferns and mosses, along the roadsides, made the way beautiful; low hills rose on either side, softly wooded with firs and birches feathery as plumes; in the meadows, peasant men and women making hay,—the women in red jackets and white blouses, a delight to the eye. Just in front of the house is a small, darkly shaded lake, in which there is a mysterious floating island, which moves up and down at pleasure, changing its moorings often.

The house is wooden, and painted of a pale flesh-color. The architecture is of the light and fantastic order of which so much is to be seen in Norway,—the instinctive reaction of the Norwegian against the sharp, angular, severe lines of his rock-made, rock-bound country; and it is vindicated by the fact that fantastic carvings, which would look trivial and impertinent on houses in countries where Nature herself had done more decorating, seem here pleasing and in place. Before the house were clumps of rose-bushes in blossom, and great circles of blazing yellow eschscholtzias. In honor of our arrival, every room had been decorated with flowers and ferns; and clumps of wild pansies in bloom had been set along the steps to the porch. Ole Bull's own chamber and music-room are superb rooms, finished in yellow pine, with rows of twisted and carved pillars, and carved cornices and beams and panels, all done by Norwegian workmen.

Valestrand was his home for many years, abandoned only when he found one still more beautiful on the island of Lysoen, sixteen miles southwest of Bergen.

A Norwegian supper of trout freshly caught, and smothered in cream, croquettes, salad, strawberries, goat's-milk cheese, with fine-flavored gooseberry wine, served by a Norwegian maid in a white-winged head-dress, scarlet jacket, and stomacher of gay beads, closed our day. As we walked back to the little moss-grown wharf, we found two peasants taking trout from the brook. Just where it dashed foaming under a little foot-bridge, a stake-lined box trap had been plunged deep in the water. As we were passing, the men lifted it out, dripping, ten superb trout dashing about wildly in it, in terror and pain; the scarlet spots on their sides shone like garnet crystals in the sun, as the men emptied them on the ground, and killed them, one by one, by knocking their heads against a stone with a sharp, quick stroke, which could not have been so cruel as it looked.

On our way back to Bergen we passed several little rowboats, creeping slowly along, loaded high with juniper boughs. They looked like little green islands broken loose from their places and drifting out to sea.

"For somebody's sorrow!" we said thoughtfully, as we watched them slowly fading from sight in the distance; but we did not dream that in so few days the green boughs would have been strewn for the burial of the beloved musician whose home we had just left.

The day of the burial of Ole Bull is a day that will never be forgotten in Bergen. From mothers to children and to children's children will go down the story of the day when from every house in Bergen Norway's flag floated at half-mast, because Ole Bull was dead, and the streets of Bergen for two miles—all the way from the quay to the cemetery—were strewn with green juniper boughs, for the passage of the procession bearing his body in sad triumph to the grave. It must have been a touching sight. Early in the morning a steamer had gone down to Lysoen to receive the body. This steamer on entering the Bergen Fjord was met by fifteen others, all draped in black, to act as its convoy. As the fleet approached the harbor, guns fired from the fort, and answered by the steamers, made peals of echoes rolling away gloriously among the hills. The harbor was crowded with shipping from all parts of the world; every vessel's flag was at half-mast. The quay was covered thick with green juniper, and festoons of green draped its whole front to the very water's edge. Every shop and place of business was shut; the whole population of the city stood waiting, silent, reverent, for the landing of the dead body of the artist who had loved Norway even as well as he loved the art to which his heart and life had been given. While the body was borne from the boat and placed in the high catafalque, a band played national airs of his arranging. Young girls dressed in black bore many of the trophies which had been given to him in foreign countries. His gold crown and orders were carried by distinguished gentlemen of Bergen. As the procession passed slowly along, flowers were showered on the coffin, and tears were seen on many faces, but the silence was unbroken.

At the grave, Norway's greatest orator and poet, Björnstjerne Björnson, spoke a few words of eloquent love and admiration. The grave was made on a commanding spot in the centre of Bergen's old cemetery, in which interments had been forbidden for many years. This spot, however, had been set apart more than thirty years ago, to be reserved for the interment of some great man. It had been refused to the father and framer of the Norwegian Constitution, Christie, whose statue stands in Bergen, but it was offered for Ole Bull; so much more tenderly does the world love artists than statesmen! The grave was lined with flowers and juniper, and juniper and flowers lay thick-strewn on the ground for a great space about. After the coffin had been put in the grave, and the relatives had gone away, there was paid a last tribute to Ole Bull,—a tribute more touching and of more worth than the king's letter, the gold crown, all the orders, and the flags of the world at half mast; meaning more love than the pine-strewn streets of the silent city and the tears on its people's faces,—a tribute from poor peasants, who had come in from the country far and near, men who knew Ole Bull's music by heart, who in their lonely, poverty-stricken huts had been proud of the man who had played their "Gamle Norge" before the kings of the earth. These men were there by hundreds, each bringing a green bough, or a fern, or a flower; they waited humbly till all others had left the grave, then crowded up, and threw in, each man, the only token he had been rich enough to bring. The grave was filled to the brim; and it is not irreverent to say that to Ole Bull, in heaven, there could come no gladder memory of earth than that the last honors paid him there were wild leaves and flowers of Norway, laid on his body by the loving hands of Norway peasants.

FOUR DAYS WITH SANNA.

A pair of eyes too blue for gray, too gray for blue; brown hair as dark as hair can be, being brown and not black; a face fine without beauty, gentle but firm; a look appealing, and yet full of a certain steadfastness, which one can see would be changed to fortitude at once if there were need; a voice soft, low, and of a rich fulness, in which even Norwegian sks flow melodiously and broken English becomes music,—this is a little, these are a few features, of the portrait of Sanna, all that can be told to any one not knowing Sanna herself. And to those who do know her it would not occur to speak of the eyes, or the hair, or the shy, brave look: to speak of her in description would be lost time and a half-way impertinence; she is simply "Sanna."

When she said she would go with me and show me two of the most beautiful fjords of her country, her beloved Norway, I found no words in which to convey my gladness. He who journeys in a foreign country whose language he does not know is in sorrier plight for the time being than one born a deaf-mute. Deprived all of a sudden of his two chief channels of communication with his fellows, cut off in an hour from all which he has been wont to gain through his ears and express by his tongue, there is no telling his abject sense of helplessness. The more he has been accustomed to free intercourse, exact replies, ready compliance, and full utterance among his own people, the worse off he feels himself now. It is ceaseless humiliation added to perpetual discomfort. And the more novel the country, and the greater his eagerness to understand all he sees, the greater is his misery: the very things which, if he were not this pitiful deaf-mute, would give him his best pleasures, are turned into his chief torments; even evident friendliness on the part of those he meets becomes as irritating a misery as the sound of waterfalls in the ears of Tantalus. Nowhere in the world can this misery of unwilling dumbness and deafness be greater, I think, than it is in Norway. The evident good-will and readiness to talk of the Norwegian people are as peculiarly their own as are their gay costumes and their flower-decked houses. Their desire to meet you half-way is so great that they talk on and on, in spite of the palpable fact that not one word of all they say conveys any idea to your mind; and at last, when your despair has become contagious, and they accept the situation as hopeless, they seize your hand in both of theirs, and pressing it warmly let it fall with a smile and a shake of the head, which speak volumes of regret both for their own loss and for yours.

It took much planning to contrive what we could best do in the four days which were all that we could have for our journey. The comings and goings of steamboats on the Norway fjords, their habits in the matter of arriving and departing, the possibilities and impossibilities of carioles, caleches, peasant carts and horses, the contingencies and uncertainties of beds at inns,—all these things, taken together, make any programme of journeying, in any direction in Norway, an aggregate of complications, risks, and hindrances enough to deter any but the most indomitable lovers of Nature and adventure. Long before it was decided which routes promised us most between a Saturday afternoon and the next Wednesday night, I had abandoned all effort to grapple understandingly with the problems, and left the planning entirely to my wiser and more resolute companion. Each suggestion that I made seemed to involve us in deeper perplexities. One steamer would set off at three in the morning; another would arrive at the same hour; a third would take us over the most beautiful parts of a fjord in the night; on a fourth route nothing in the way of vehicles could be procured, except the peasant's cart, a thing in which no human being not born a Norwegian peasant can drive for half a day without being shaken to a jelly; on a fifth we should have to wait three days for a return boat; on another it was unsafe to go without having received beforehand the promise of a bed, the accommodations for travellers being so scanty. The old puzzle of the fox and the goose and the corn is an a b c in comparison with the dilemma we were in. At last, when I thought I had finally arranged a scheme which would enable us to see two of the finest of the fjords within our prescribed time, a scheme which involved spending a day and a night in the little town of Gudvangen, in the valley of Nerodal, Sanna exclaimed, shuddering, "We cannot! we cannot! The mountains are over us. We can sleep at Gudvangen; but a whole day? No! You shall not like a whole day at Gudvangen. The mountains are so—" And she finished her sentence by another shudder and a gesture of cowering, which were more eloquent than words. So the day at Gudvangen was given up, and it was arranged that we were to wait one day at some other point on the road, wherever it might seem good, and upon no account come to Gudvangen for anything more than to take the steamer away from it.

The heat of a Bergen noon is like a passing smile on a stern face. It was cold at ten, and it will be cold again long before sunset; you have your winter wrap on your arm, and you dare not be separated from it, but the mid-day glares at and down on you, and makes the wrap seem not only intolerable but incongruous. As we drove to the steamer at twelve o'clock, with fur-trimmed wraps and heavy rugs filling the front seat of the carriage, and our faces flushed with heat, I said, "What an absurd amount of wraps for a midsummer journey! I have a mind to let Nils carry back this heavy rug."

"I think you shall be very glad if you have it," remarked Sanna. "Oh!" she exclaimed with a groan, "there is Bob."

Bob is Sanna's dog,—a small black spaniel, part setter, with a beautiful head and eye, and a devotion to his mistress which lovers might envy. Never, when in her presence, does he remove his eyes from her for many minutes. He either revolves restlessly about her like an alert scout, or lays himself down with a sentry-like expression at her feet.

"Oh, what is to do with Bob?" she continued, gazing helplessly at me. The rascal was bounding along the road, curvetting, and wagging his tail, and looking up at us with an audacious leer on his handsome face. "He did understand perfectly that he should not come," said Sanna; hearing which, Bob hung back, behind the carriage.

"Nils must carry him back," I said. Then, relenting, seeing the look of distress on Sanna's face, I added, "Could we not take him with us?"

"Oh, no, it must be impossible," she replied. "It is for the lambs. He does drive them and frighten them. He must stay, but we shall have trouble."

Fast the little Norwegian ponies clattered down to the wharf. No Bob. As we went on board he was nowhere to be seen. Anxiously Sanna searched for him, to give him into Nils's charge. He was not to be found. The boat began to move. Still no Bob. We settled ourselves comfortably; already the burdensome rug was welcome. "I really think Bob must have missed us in the crowd," I said.

"I do not know, I do not think," replied Sanna, her face full of perplexity. "Oh!" with a cry of dismay. "He is here!"

There he was! Abject, nearly dragging his body on the deck like a snake, his tail between his legs, fawning, cringing, his eyes fixed on Sanna, he crawled to her feet. Only his eyes told that he felt any emotion except remorse; they betrayed him; their expression was the drollest I ever saw on a dumb creature's face. It was absurd; it was impossible, incredible, if one had not seen it; as plainly as if words had been spoken, it avowed the whole plot, the distinct exultation in its success. "Here I am," it said, "and I know very well that now the steamer has begun to move you are compelled to take me with you. My heart is nearly broken with terror and grief at the thought of your displeasure, but all the same I can hardly contain myself for delight at having outwitted you so completely." All this while he was wriggling closer and closer to her feet, watching her eye, as a child watches its mother's, for the first show of relenting. Of course we began to laugh. At the first beginning of a smile in Sanna's eyes, he let his tail out from between his legs, and began to flap it on the deck; as the smile broadened, he gradually rose to his feet; and by the time we had fairly burst into uncontrolled laughter, he was erect, gambolling around us like a kid, and joining in the chorus of our merriment by a series of short, sharp yelps of delight, which, being interpreted, would doubtless have been something like, "Ha, ha! Beat 'em, and they 're not going to thrash me, and I'm booked for the whole journey now, spite of fate! Ha, ha!" Then he stretched himself at our feet, laid his nose out flat on the deck, and went to sleep as composedly as if he had been on the hearth-rug at home; far more composedly than he would had he dreamed of the experiences in store for him.

"Poor Bob!" said Sanna. "It must be that we shall send him back by the steamer." Poor Bob, indeed! Long before we reached our first landing, Bob was evidently sea-sick. The beautiful water of the great Hardanger Fjord was as smooth as an inland lake; changing from dark and translucent green in the narrowing channels, where the bold shores came so near together that we could count the trees, to brilliant and sparkling blue in the wider opens. But little cared Bob for the beauty of the water; little did it comfort him that the boat glided as gently as is possible for a boat to move. He had never been on a boat before, and did not know it was smooth. Piteously he roamed about, from place to place, looking off; then he would come and stand before Sanna, quivering in every fibre, and looking up at her with sorrowful appeal in his eyes. His thoughts were plainly written in his countenance now, as before; but nobody could have had the heart to laugh at him. Poor fellow! He was not the first creature that has been bowed down by the curse of a granted prayer.

Presently there came a new trouble. All along the Hardanger Fjord are little hamlets and villages and clusters of houses, tucked in in nooks among rocks and on rims of shore at the base of the high, stony walls of mountains, and snugged away at the heads of inlets. Many of these are places of summer resort for the Bergen people, who go out of town into the country in summer, I fancy, somewhat as the San Francisco people do, not to find coolness, but to find warmth; for the air in these sheltered nooks and inlets of the fjords is far softer than it is in Bergen, which has the strong sea wind blowing in its teeth all the while. On Saturdays the steamers for the Hardanger country are crowded with Bergen men going out to spend the Sunday with their families or friends who are rusticating at these little villages. At many of these spots there is no landing except by small boats; and it was one of the pleasantest features of the sail, the frequent pausing of the steamer off some such nook, and the putting out of the rowboats to fetch or to carry passengers. They would row alongside, half a dozen at a time, bobbing like corks, and the agile Norwegians would skip in and out of and across them as deftly as if they were stepping on firm floor. The Norwegian peasant is as much at home in a boat as a snail in his shell,—women as well as men; they row, stand, leap, gesticulate, lift burdens, with only a rocking plank between their feet and fathomless water, and never seem to know that they are not on solid ground. In fact, they are far more graceful afloat than on ground: on the land they shuffle and walk in a bent and toil-worn attitude, the result of perpetual carrying of loads on their backs; but they bend to their oars with ease and freedom, and wheel and turn and shoot and back their little skiffs with a dexterity which leaves no room for doubt that they can do anything they choose on water. It would not have astonished me, any day, to see a Norwegian coming towards me in two boats at once, one foot in each boat, walking on the water in them, as a man walks on snow in snow-shoes. I never did see it, but I am sure they could do it.

When these boats came alongside, Bob peered wistfully over the railings, but did not offer to stir. The connection between this new variety of water craft and terra firma he did not comprehend. But at the first landing which we reached, he gazed for a moment intently, and then bounded forward like a shot, across the gangway, in among the crowd on the wharf, in a twinkling.

"Oh!" shrieked Sanna, "Bob is on shore!" And she rushed after him, and brought him back, crestfallen. But he had learned the trick of it; and after that, his knack at disappearing some minutes before we came to a wharf—thereby luring us into a temporary forgetfulness of him—and then, when we went to seek him, making himself invisible among the people going on shore, was something so uncanny that my respect for him fast deepened into an awe which made an odd undercurrent of anxiety, mingling with my enjoyment of the beauties of the fjord. It was strange, while looking at grand tiers of hills rising one behind the other, with precipitous fronts, the nearer ones wooded, the farther ones bare and stony, sometimes almost solid rock, walling the beautiful green and blue water as if it had been a way hewn for it to pass; shining waterfalls pouring down from the highest summits, straight as a beam of light, into the fjord, sometimes in full torrents dazzling bright, sometimes in single threads as if of ravelled cloud, sometimes in a broken line of round disks of glittering white on the dark green, the course of the water in the intervals between being marked only by a deeper green and a sunken line in the foliage,—it was strange, side by side with the wonder at all this beauty, to be wondering to one's self also what Bob would do next. But so it was hour by hour, all of our way up the Hardanger Fjord, till we came, in the early twilight at half-past ten o'clock, to Eide, our journey's end. The sun had set—if in a Norway summer it can ever be truly said to set—two hours before, and in its slow sinking had turned the mountains, first pink, then red, then to an opaline tint, blending both pink and red with silver gray and white; all shifting and changing so fast that the mountains themselves seemed to be quivering beneath. Then, of a sudden, they lost color and turned gray and dark blue. Belts and downstretching lines of snow shone out sternly on their darkened summits; a shadowy half-moon rose above them in the southeast, and the strange luminous night lit up the little hamlet of Eide, almost light like day, as we landed.

At first sight Eide looked as if the houses, as well as the people, had just run down to the shore to meet the boat: from the front windows of the houses one might easily look into the cabin windows of the boat,—so narrow strips of shore do the mountain walls leave sometimes along these fjords, and such marvellous depth of water do the fjords bring to the mountains' feet.

"Have you written for rooms? Where are you going? There isn't a bed in Eide," were the first words that greeted us from some English people who had left Bergen days before, and whom we never expected to see again. The disappearing, reappearing, and turning up of one's travelling acquaintances in Norway is one of the distinctive experiences of the country. The chief routes of tourist travel are so involved with each other, and so planned for exchange, interchange, and succession of goers and comers, that the perpetual rencontres of chance acquaintances are amusing. It is like a performance of the figures of a country-dance on a colossal scale, so many miles to a figure; and if one sits down quietly at any one of the large inns for a week, the great body of Norway tourists for that week will be pretty sure to pass under his inspection.

At Holt's, in Bergen, one sees, say forty travellers, at breakfast, any morning. Before supper at eight in the evening these forty have gone their ways, and a second forty have arrived, and so on; and wherever he goes during the following week he will meet detachments of these same bands: each man sure that he has just done the one thing best worth doing, and done it in the best way; each eloquent in praise or dispraise of the inns, the roads, and the people, and ready with his "Oh, but you must be sure to see" this, that, or the other.

There were those who sat up all night in Eide, that night, for want of a bed; but Bob and we were well lodged in a pretty bedroom, with two windows white-curtained and two beds white-ruffled to the floor, on which were spread rugs of black-and-white goatskins edged with coarse home-made blue flannel. In the parlor and the dining-room of the little inn, carved book-cases and pipe-cases hung on the walls; ivies trained everywhere; white curtains, a piano, black-worsted-covered high-backed chairs, spotless table linen, and old silver gave an air of old-fashioned refinement to the rooms, which was a surprise.

The landlady wore the peasant's costume of the Hardanger country: the straight black skirt to the ankles, long white apron, sleeveless scarlet jacket, with a gay beaded stomacher over a full white blouse, shining silver ornaments at throat and wrists, and on her head the elegant and dignified head-dress of fine crimped white lawn, which makes the Hardanger wives by far the most picturesque women to be seen in all Norway.

At seven in the morning a young peasant girl opened our bedroom door cautiously to ask if we would have coffee in bed. Bob flew at her with a fierce yelp, which made her retreat hastily, and call for protection. Being sharply reproved by Sanna, Bob stood doggedly defiant in the middle of the floor, turning his reproachful eyes from her to the stranger, and back again, plainly saying, "Ungrateful one! How should I know she was not an enemy? That is the way enemies approach." The girl wore the peasant maiden's dress: a short black skirt bound with scarlet braid, sewed to a short sleeveless green jacket, which was little wider than a pair of suspenders between the shoulders behind. Her full, long-sleeved white blouse came up high in the throat, and was fastened there by two silver buttons with Maltese crosses hanging from them by curiously twisted chains. Her yellow hair was braided in two thick braids, and wound tight round her head like a wreath. She had a fair skin, tender, honest blue eyes, and a face serious enough for a Madonna. But she laughed when she brought us the eggs for our breakfast, kept warm in many folds of linen napkin held down by a great motherly hen of gray china with a red crest on its head.

The house was a small white cottage; at the front door a square porch, large enough to hold two tables and seats for a dozen people; opposite this a vine-wreathed arch and gate led into a garden, at the foot of which ran a noisy little river. An old bent peasant woman was always going back and forth between the house and the river, carrying water in two pails hung from a yoke on her shoulders. A bit of half-mowed meadow joined the garden. It had been mowed at intervals, a little piece at a time, so that the surface was a patchwork of different shades of green. The hay was hung out to dry on short lines of fence here and there. Grass is always dried in this way in Norway, and can hang on the fences for two weeks and not be hurt, even if it is repeatedly wet by rain. One narrow, straggling street led off up the hillside, and suddenly disappeared as if the mountains had swallowed it. The houses were thatched, with layers of birch bark put under the boards; sods of earth on top; and flowers blooming on them as in a garden. One roof was a bed of wild pansies, and another of a tiny pink flower as fine as a grass; and young shoots of birch waved on them both. The little river which ran past the inn garden had come down from the mountains through terraced meadows, which were about half and half meadow and terrace; stony and swampy, and full of hillocks and hollows. New England has acres of fields like them; only here there were big blue harebells and pink heath, added to clover and buttercups, wild parsley and yarrow. On tiny pebbly bits of island here and there in the brook grew purple thistles, "snow flake," and bushes of birch and ash.

Bob rollicked in the lush grass, as we picked our way among the moist hollows of this flowery meadow. In Sanna's hand dangled a bit of rope, which he eyed suspiciously. She had brought it with her to tie him up, when the hour should come for him to be carried on board the steamer. He could not have known this, for he had never been tied up in his life. But new dangers had roused new wariness in his acute mind: he had distinctly heard the word "steamer" several times that morning, and understood it. I said to him immediately after breakfast, "Bob, you have to go home by the steamer this morning." He instantly crept under the sofa, his tail between his legs, and cowered and crouched in the farthest corner; no persuasions could lure him out, and his eyes were piteous beyond description. Not until we had walked some distance from the house, in a direction opposite to the steamer wharf, did he follow us. Then he came bounding, relieved for the time being from anxiety. At last Sanna, in a feint of play, tied the rope around his neck. His bewilderment and terror were tragic. Setting all four feet firmly on the ground, he refused to stir, except as he was dragged by main force. It was plain that he would be choked to death before he would obey. The rope project must be abandoned. Perhaps he could be lured on board, following Sanna. Vain hope! Long before we reached the wharf, the engine of the boat gave a shrill whistle. At the first sound of it Bob darted away like the wind, up the road, past the hotel, out of sight in a minute. We followed him a few rods, and then gave it up. Again he had outwitted us. We walked to the steamer, posted a letter, sat down, and waited. The steamer blew five successive signals, and then glided away from the wharf. In less than three minutes, before she was many rods off, lo, Bob! back again, prancing around us with glee, evidently keeping his eye on the retreating steamboat, and chuckling to himself at his escape.

"O Bob, Bob!" groaned Sanna. "What is to do with you?"

We were to set off for Vossevangen by carriage at three; at half-past two poor Bob was carried, struggling, into the wood-shed, and tied up. His cries were piteous, almost more than we could bear. I am sure he understood the whole plot; but the worst was to come. By somebody's carelessness, the wood-shed door was opened just as we were driving away from the porch. With one convulsive leap and cry, Bob tore his rope from the log to which it was tied, and darted out. The stable boys caught him, and held him fast; his cries were human. Sanna buried her face in her hands and exclaimed, "Oh, say to the driver that he go so fast as he can!" And we drove away, leaving the poor, faithful, loving creature behind, to be sent by express back to Bergen on the steamer the next day. It was like leaving a little child alone among strangers, heart-broken and terrified. When we returned to Bergen we learned that he had touched neither food nor drink till he reached home, late the next night.

To go from Eide to Vossevangen, one must begin by climbing up out of Eide. It is at the bottom of a well, walled by green hills and snow-topped mountains; at the top of the well the country spreads out for a little, only to meet higher hills, higher mountains. Here lies a great lake, rimmed by broad borders of reeds, which shook and glistened in the wind and sun like the spears of half-drowned armies as we passed. Clumps and groves of ash-trees on the shores of this lake looked like huge clumsy torches set in the ground: their tops had been cut down again and again, till they had grown as broad as they were high. The leaves are used for the feed of sheep, and the boughs for firewood; and as in the frugal Norwegian living nothing that can be utilized is left to lie idle, never an ash-tree has the chance to shoot up, become tall and full of leaf. Magpies flitted in and out among them.

"One is for sorrow, and two are for joy, three must be a marriage, and four do bring good fortune, we do say in Norway," said Sanna. "But I think we shall have all sorrow and joy, and to be married many times over, if it be true," she added, as the noisy, showy creatures continued to cross our road by twos and threes.

High up on the hills, just in the edge of snow patches, sæters were to be seen, their brown roofs looking as much a part of the lonely Nature as did the waterfalls and the pine-trees. On all sides shone the water,—trickling fosses down precipices, outbursting fosses from ravines and dells; just before us rose a wall some three thousand feet high, over which leaped a foaming cataract.

"We shall go there," said Sanna, pointing up to it. Sure enough, we did. By loops so oval and narrow they seemed twisted as if to thread their way, as eyes of needles are threaded, the road wound and doubled, and doubled and wound, six times crossing the hill front in fifteen hundred feet. At each double, the valley sank below us; the lake sank; the hills which walled the lake sank; the road was only a broad rift among piled bowlders. In many places these bowlders were higher than our heads; but there was no sense of danger, for the road was a perfect road, smooth as a macadamized turnpike. Along its outer edge rows of thickly set rocks, several feet high, and so near each other that no carriage could possibly fall between; in the most dangerous places stout iron bars were set from rock to rock; these loops of chain ladder up the precipice were as safe as a summer pathway in a green meadow. On a stone bridge of three arches we crossed the waterfall: basins of rocks above us, filled with spray; basins and shelves and ledges of rocks below us, filled with spray; the bridge black and slippery wet, and the air thick with spray, like a snow-storm; precipices of water on the right and the left. It was next to being an eagle on wing in a storm to cross that bridge in upper air. At the sixth turn we came out abreast of the top of the waterfall, and in a moment more had left all the stress and storm and tumult of waters behind us, and glided into a sombre, still roadway beside a calm little river deep in a fir forest. Only the linnæa had won bloom out of this darkness; its courageous little tendrils wreathed the tree trunks nestled among the savage rocks, and held up myriads of pink cups wet with the ceaseless spray. It was a dreary, lonely place; miles of gaunt swamp, forest, and stony moor; here and there a farm-house, silent as if deserted.

"Where are all the people? Why do we not see any one moving about the houses?" I asked.

"In the house, reading, every one," replied Sanna. "On a Sunday afternoon, if there is no service in church, all Norwegian farm people do go into their houses, and spend all afternoon in reading and in religion."

At last we reached a more open country,—an off look to the west; new ranges of snow-topped mountains came in sight. We began to descend; another silent river slipping down by our side; two more dark, shining lakes. On the shore of one, a peasant man—the first living creature we had seen for ten miles—was taking his cart out of a little shed by the roadside. This shed was the only sign of human habitation to be seen in the region. His horse stood near by, with a big barrel slung on each side: they were barrels of milk, which had just been brought down in this way from a sæter which we could see, well up in the cloud region, far above the woods on the left. Down the steep path from this sæter the man had walked, and the horse bearing the barrels of milk had followed. Now the barrels were to be put in the cart, and carried to Eide. Ten miles more that milk was to be carried before it reached its market; and yet, at the little inn in Eide, for a breakfast, at which one may drink all the milk he desires, he will be asked to pay only thirty-five cents. What else beside milk? Fresh salmon, trout, two kinds of rye bread and two of white, good butter, six kinds of cheese, herrings done in oil and laurel leaves in tiny wooden barrels, cold sausage, ham, smoked salmon (raw), coffee and tea, and perhaps—wild strawberries: this will be the Eide summer-morning breakfast. The cheese feature in the Norwegian breakfast is startling at first: all colors, sizes, shapes, and smells known of cheese; it must be owned they are not savory for breakfast, but the Norwegian eats them almost as a rite. He has a proverb in regard to cheese as we have of fruit: "Gold in the morning, silver at noon, and lead at night;" and he lives up to it more implicitly than we do to ours.

As we neared Vossevangen, the silent river grew noisier and noisier, and at last let out all its reserves in a great torrent which leaped down into the valley with a roar. This torrent also was bridged at its leap; and the bridge seemed to be in a perpetual quiver from the shock of it. The sides of the rocky gorge below glistened black like ebony; they had been worn into columnar grooves by the centuries of whirling waters; the knotted roots of a fir forest jutted out above them, and long spikes of a beautiful white flower hung out from their crevices in masses of waving snowy bloom. It looked like a variety of the house-leek, but no human hand could reach it to make sure.

Vossevangen is a little farming hamlet on the west shore of a beautiful lake. The region is one of the best agricultural districts in western Norway; the "Vos" farmers are held to be fortunate and well to do, and their butter and cheese always bring high prices in market.

On the eastern shore of the lake is a chain of mountains, from two to four thousand feet high; to the south, west, and north rise the green hills on which the farms lie; above these, again, rise other hills, higher and more distant, where in the edges of the snow tracts or buried in fir forests are the sæters, the farmers' summer homes.

As we drove into the village we met the peasants going home from church: the women in short green or black gowns, with gay jackets and white handkerchiefs made into a flying-buttress sort of head-dress on their heads; the men with knee-breeches, short vests, and jackets thick trimmed with silver buttons. Every man bowed and every woman courtesied as we passed. To pass any human being on the highway without a sign or token of greeting would be considered in Norway the height of ill manners; any child seen to do it would be sharply reproved. Probably few things would astonish the rural Norwegian more than to be told that among the highly civilized it is considered a mark of good breeding, if you chance to meet a fellow-man on the highway, to go by him with no more recognition of his presence than you would give to a tree or a stone wall.

It is an odd thing that a man should be keeping the Vossevangen Hotel to-day who served in America's civil war, was for two years in one of the New York regiments, and saw a good deal of active service. He was called back to Norway by the death of his father, which made it necessary for him to take charge of the family estate in Vossevangen. He has married a Vossevangen woman, and is likely to end his days there; but he hankers for Chicago, and always will. He keeps a fairly good little hotel, on the shores of the lake, with a row of willow-trees in front; dwarf apple-trees, gooseberry and currant bushes, and thickets of rhubarb in his front yard; roses, too, besides larkspur and phlox; but the rhubarb has the place of honor. The dining-room and the parlor were, like those at Eide, adorned with ivies and flowering plants; oleanders in the windows and potted carnations on the table. In one corner of the dining-room was a large round table covered with old silver for sale: tankards, chains, belts, buttons, coins, rings, buckles, brooches, ornaments of all kinds,—hundreds of dollars' worth of things. There they lay, day and night, open to all who came; and they had done this, the landlady said, for years, and not a single article had ever been stolen: from which it is plain that not only is the Norwegian honest himself, there must be a contagion in his honesty, which spreads it to all travellers in his country.

The next morning, early, we set off in a peasant's cart to visit some of the farm-houses.

"Now you shall see," said Sanna, "that it was not possible if you had all day to ride in this kind of wagon."

It did not take long to prove the truth of her remark. A shallow wooden box set on two heavy wheels; a wooden seat raised on two slanting wooden braces, so high that one's feet but just reach the front edge of the box; no dasher, no sides to seat, no anything, apparently, after you are up, except your hard wooden seat and two pounding wheels below,—this is the peasant wagon. The horse, low down between two heavy thills, is without traces, pulls by a breast collar, is guided by rope reins, and keeps his heels half the time under the front edge of the box. The driver stands up in the box behind you, and the rope reins are in your hair, or on your neck, shoulders, ears, as may be. The walloping motion of this kind of box, drawn by a frisky Norwegian horse over rough roads, is droll beyond description. But when it comes to going down hills in it, and down hills so steep that the box appears to be on the point of dumping you between the horse's ears at each wallop, it ceases to be droll, and becomes horrible. Our driver was a splendid specimen of a man,—six feet tall, strong built, and ruddy. When he found that I was an American, he glowed all over, and began to talk rapidly to Sanna. He had six brothers in America.

"They do say that they all have it very good there," interpreted Sanna; "and he thinks to go there himself so soon as there is money to take all. It must be that America is the best country in the world, to have it so good there that every man can have it good."

The roads up the hills were little more than paths. Often for many rods there was no trace of wheels on the stony ledges; again the track disappeared in a bit of soft meadow. As we climbed, the valley below us rounded and hollowed, and the lake grew smaller and smaller to the eye; the surrounding hills opened up, showing countless valleys winding here and there among them. It was a surpassingly beautiful view. Vast tracts of firs, inky black in the distances, emphasized the glittering of the snow fields above them and the sunny green of the nearer foregrounds below.

The first farm which we visited lay about three miles north of the village,—three miles north and up. The buildings were huddled together, some half dozen of them, in a haphazard sort of way, with no attempt at order, no front, no back, and no particular reason for approaching one way rather than another. Walls of hewn logs, black with age; roofs either thatched, or covered with huge slabs of slate, laid on irregularly and moss-grown; rough stones or logs for doorsteps; so little difference between the buildings that one was at a loss to know which were meant for dwellings and which for barns,—a more unsightly spot could hardly be imagined. But the owners had as quick an instinct of hospitality as if they dwelt in a palace. No sooner did Sanna mention that I was from America, and wished to see some of the Norwegian farm-houses, than their faces brightened with welcome and good-will, and they were ready to throw open every room and show me all their simple stores.

"There is not a man in all Vos," they said, "who has not a relative in America." And they asked eager question after question, in insatiable curiosity, about the unknown country whither their friends had gone.

The wives and daughters of the family were all away, up at the sæter with the cows; only the men and the servant maids were left at home to make the hay. Would I not go up to the sæter? The mistress would be distressed that an American lady had visited the farm in her absence. I could easily go to the sæter in a day. It was only five hours on horseback, and about a half-hour's walk, at the last, over a path too rough even for riding. Very warmly the men urged Sanna to induce me to make the trip. They themselves would leave the haying and go with me, if I would only go; and I must never think I had seen Norwegian farming unless I had seen the sæter also, they said.

The maids were at dinner in the kitchen. It was a large room, with walls not more than eight feet high, black with smoke; and in the centre a square stone trough, above which was built a funnel chimney. In this hollow trough a fire smouldered, and above it hung an enormous black caldron, full of beer, which was being brewed. One of the maids sprang from her dinner, lifted a trap door in the floor, disappeared in the cellar, and presently returned, bringing a curious wooden drinking-vessel shaped like a great bowl, with a prow at each side for handles, and painted in gay colors. This was brimming full of new beer, just brewed. Sanna whispered to me that it would be bad manners if we did not drink freely of it. It was passed in turn to each member of the party. The driver, eying me sharply as I forced down a few mouthfuls of the nauseous drink, said something to Sanna.

"He asks if American ladies do not like beer," said Sanna. "He is mortified that you do not drink. It will be best that we drink all we can. It is all what they have. Only I do hope that they give us not brandy."

There was no window in the kitchen, no ventilation except through the chimney and the door. A bare wooden table, wooden chairs, a few shelves, where were ranged some iron utensils, were all the furniture of the gloomy room. The maids' dinner consisted of a huge plate of fladbröd and jugs of milk; nothing else. They would live on that, Sanna said, for weeks, and work in the hay-fields from sunrise till midnight.

Opposite the kitchen was the living-room,—the same smoky log walls, bare floors, wooden chairs and benches. The expression of poverty was dismal.

"I thought you said these people were well to do!" I exclaimed.

"So they are," replied Sanna. "They are very well off; they do not know that it is not comfort to be like this. They shall have money in banks, these people. All the farmers in Vos are rich."

Above the living-room were two bedrooms and clothes-rooms. Here, in gay painted scarlet boxes and hanging from lines, were the clothes of the family and the bed linen of the house. Mistress and maid alike must keep their clothes in this common room. The trunks were ranged around the sides of the room, each locked with a key big enough to lock prison doors. On one side of one of the rooms were three bunk beds built in under the eaves. These were filled with loose straw, and had only blankets for covers. Into this straw the Norwegian burrows by night, rolled in his blankets. The beds can never be moved, for they are built in with the framework of the house. No wonder that the Norwegian flea has, by generations of such good lodging and food, become a triumphant Bedouin marauder, in comparison with whom the fleas of all other countries are too petty to deserve mention.

The good-natured farmer opened his mother's box as well as his wife's, and with awkward and unaccustomed hands shook out their Sunday costumes for us to see. From another box, filled with soft blankets and linen, he took out a bottle of brandy, and pouring some into a little silver bowl, with the same prow-shaped handles as the wooden one we had seen in the kitchen, pressed us to drink. One drop of it was like liquid fire. He seemed hurt that we refused more, and poured it down his own throat at a gulp, without change of a muscle. Then he hid the brandy bottle again under the blankets, and the little silver cup in the till of his mother's chest, and locked them both up with the huge keys.

Downstairs we found an aged couple, who had come from another of the buildings, hearing of our presence. These were the grandparents. The old woman was eighty-four, and was knitting briskly without glasses. She took us into the storerooms, where were bins of flour and grain; hams of beef and pork hanging up; wooden utensils of all sorts, curiously carved and stained wooden spoons, among other things,—a cask full of them, put away to be used "when they had a merry-making." Here also were stacks of fladbröd. This is the staple of the Norwegian's living; it is a coarse bread made of dark flour, in cakes as thin as a wafer and as big round as a barrel. This is baked once a year, in the spring, is piled up in stacks in the storerooms, and keeps good till the spring baking comes round again. It is very sweet and nutritious: one might easily fare worse than to have to make a meal of it with milk. On one of the storeroom shelves I spied an old wooden drinking-bowl, set away with dried peas in it. It had been broken, and riveted together in the bottom, but would no longer hold water, so had been degraded to this use. It had once been gayly painted, and had a motto in old Norwegian around the edge: "Drink in good-will, and give thanks to God." I coveted the thing, and offered to buy it. It was a study to see the old people consult with each other if they should let it go. It seemed that when they first went to housekeeping it had been given to them by the woman's mother, and was an old bowl even then. It was certainly over a hundred years old, and how much more there was no knowing. After long discussion they decided to sell it to me for four kroner (about one dollar), which the son thought (Sanna said) was a shameful price to ask for an old broken bowl. But he stood by in filial submission, and made no loud objection to the barter. The old woman also showed us a fine blanket, which had been spun and woven by her mother a hundred years ago. It was as gay of color and fantastic of design as if it had been made in Algiers. This too she was willing to sell for an absurdly small price, but it was too heavy to bring away. At weddings and other festivities these gay blankets are hung on the walls; and it is the custom for neighbors to lend all they can on such occasions.

The next farm we visited belonged to the richest people in Vos. It lay a half-mile still higher up, and the road leading to it seemed perilously steep. The higher we went, the greater the profusion of flowers: the stony way led us through tracts of bloom, in blue and gold; tall spikes of mullein in clumps like hollyhocks, and "shepherd's bells" in great purple patches.

The buildings of this farm were clustered around a sort of court-yard enclosure, roughly flagged by slate. Most of the roofs were also slated; one or two were thatched, and these thatched roofs were the only thing that redeemed the gloom of the spot, the sods on these being bright with pansies and grasses and waving raspberry bushes. Here also we found the men of the family alone at home, the women being gone on their summering at the sæter. The youngest son showed us freely from room to room, and displayed with some pride the trunks full of blankets and linen, and the rows of women's dresses hanging in the chambers. On two sides of one large room these were hung thick one above another, no variety in them, and no finery; merely a succession of strong, serviceable petticoats, of black, green, or gray woollen. The gay jackets and stomachers were packed away in trunks; huge fur-lined coats, made of the same shape for men and for women, hung in the storeroom. Some of the trunks were red, painted in gay colors; some were of polished cedar, finished with fine brass mountings. As soon as a Norwegian girl approaches womanhood, one of these trunks is given her, set in its place in the clothes-room, and her accumulations begin. Clothes, bedding, and silver ornaments seem to be the only things for which the Norwegian peasant spends his money. In neither of these houses was there an article of superfluous furniture, not even of ordinary comfort. In both were the same bunk beds, built in under the eaves; the same loose, tossed straw, with blankets for covering; and only the coarsest wooden chairs and benches for seats. The young man opened his mother's trunk, and took from one corner a beautiful little silver beaker, with curling, prow-shaped handles. In this the old lady had packed away her silver brooches, buttons, and studs for the summer. Side by side with them, thrown in loosely among her white head-dresses and blouses, were half a dozen small twisted rolls of white bread. Sanna explained this by saying that the Norwegians never have this bread except at their most important festivals; it is considered a great luxury, and these had no doubt been put away as a future treat, as we should put away a bit of wedding-cake to keep. Very irreverently the son tipped out all his mother's ornaments into the bottom of the trunk, and proceeded to fill the little beaker with fiery brandy from a bottle which had been hid in another corner. From lip to lip it was passed, returning to him wellnigh untasted; but he poured the whole down at a draught, smacked his lips, and tossed the cup back into the trunk, dripping with the brandy. Very much that good old Norwegian dame, when she comes down in the autumn, will wonder, I fancy, what has happened to her nicely packed trunk of underclothes, dry bread, and old silver.

There were several storerooms in these farm buildings, and they were well filled with food, grain, flour, dried meats, fish, and towers of fladbröd. Looms with partly finished webs of cloth in them were there set away till winter; baskets full of carved yellow spoons hung on the wall. In one of the rooms, standing on the sill of the open window, were two common black glass bottles, with a few pond-lilies in each,—the only bit of decoration or token of love of the beautiful we had found. Seeing that I looked at the lilies with admiration, the young man took them out, wiped their dripping stems on his coat-sleeve, and presented them to me with a bow that a courtier might have envied. The grace, the courtesy, of the Norwegian peasant's bow is something that must date centuries back. Surely there is nothing in his life and surroundings to-day to create or explain it. It must be a trace of something that Olaf Tryggveson—that "magnificent, far-shining man"—scattered abroad in his kingdom eight hundred years ago, with his "bright, airy, wise way" of speaking and behaving to women and men.

One of the buildings on this farm was known, the young man said, to be at least two hundred years old. The logs are moss-grown and black, but it is good for hundreds of years yet. The first story is used now for a storeroom. From this a ladder led up to a half-chamber overhead, the front railed by a low railing; here, in this strange sort of balcony bedroom, had slept the children of the family, all the time under observation of their elders below.

Thrust in among the rafters, dark, rusty, bent, was an ancient sword. Our guide took it out and handed it to us, with a look of awe on his face. No one knew, he said, how long that sword had been on the farm. In the earliest writings by which the estate had been transferred, that sword had been mentioned, and it was a clause in every lease since that it should never be taken away from the place. However many times the farm might change hands, the sword must go with it, for all time. Was there no legend, no tradition, with it? None that his father or his father's father had ever heard; only the mysterious entailed charge, from generation to generation, that the sword must never be removed. The blade was thin and the edge jagged, the handle plain and without ornament; evidently the sword had been for work, and not for show. There was something infinitely solemn in its inalienable estate of safe and reverent keeping at the hands of men all ignorant of its history. It is by no means impossible that it had journeyed in the company of that Sigurd who sailed with his splendid fleet of sixty ships for Palestine, early in the twelfth century. Sigurd Jorsalafarer, or Traveller to Jerusalem, he was called; and no less an authority than Thomas Carlyle vouches for him as having been "a wise, able, and prudent man," reigning in a "solid and successful way." Through the Straits of Gibraltar to Jerusalem, home by way of Constantinople and Russia, "shining with renown," he sailed, and took a hand in any fighting he found going on by the way. Many of his men came from the region of the Sogne Fjord; and the more I thought of it the surer I felt that this old sword had many a time flashed on the deck of his ships.

Our second day opened rainy. The lake was blotted out by mist; on the fence under the willows sat half a dozen men, roosting as unconcernedly as if it were warm sunshine.

"It does wonder me," said Sanna, "that I find here so many men standing idle. When the railroad come, it shall be that the life must be different."

A heroic English party, undeterred by weather, were setting off in carioles and on horseback. Delays after delays occurred to hinder them. At the last moment their angry courier was obliged to go and fetch the washing, which had not arrived. There is a proverb in Norway, "When the Norwegian says 'immediately,' look for him in half an hour."

Finally, at noon, in despair of sunshine, we also set off: rugs, water-proofs; the india-rubber boot of the carriage drawn tight up to the level of our eyes; we set off in pouring sheets of rain for Gudvangen. For the first two hours the sole variation of the monotony of our journey was in emptying the boot of water once every five minutes, just in time to save a freshet in our laps. High mountain peaks, black with forests or icy white with snow, gleamed in and out of the clouds on either hand, as we toiled and splashed along. Occasional lightings up revealed stretches of barren country, here and there a cluster of farm-houses or a lowly church. On the shores of a small lake we passed one of these lonely churches. Only two other buildings were in sight in the vast expanse: one, the wretched little inn where we were to rest our horses for half an hour; the other, the parsonage. This last was a pretty little cottage, picturesquely built of yellow pine, half bowered in vines, looking in that lonely waste as if it had lost itself and strayed away from some civilized spot. The pastor and his sister, who kept house for him, were away; but his servant was so sure that they would like to have us see their home that we allowed her to show it to us. It was a tasteful and cosey little home: parlor, study, and dining-room, all prettily carpeted and furnished; books, flowers, a sewing-machine, and a piano. It did one's heart good to see such an oasis of a home in the wilderness. Drawn up on rests in a shed near the house, was an open boat, much like a wherry. The pastor spent hours every day, the maid said, in rowing on the lake. It was his great pleasure.

Up, up we climbed: past fir forests, swamps, foaming streams,—the wildest, weirdest road storm-driven people ever crossed. Spite of the rain, half-naked children came flying out of hovels and cabins to open gates: sometimes there would be six in a row, their thin brown hands all stretched for alms, and their hollow eyes begging piteously; then they would race on ahead to open the next gate. The moors seemed but a succession of enclosed pasture-lands. Now and then we passed a little knot of cabins close to the road, and men who looked kindly, but as wild as wild beasts, would come out and speak to the driver; their poverty was direful to see. At last, at the top of a high hill, we halted; the storm stayed; the clouds lifted and blew off. At our feet lay a black chasm; it was like looking down into the bowels of the earth. This was the Nerodal Valley; into it we were to descend. Its walls were three and four thousand feet high. It looked little more than a cleft. The road down this precipitous wall is a marvel of engineering. It is called the Stalheimscleft, and was built by a Norwegian officer, Captain Finne. It is made in a series of zigzagging loops, which are so long and so narrow that the descent at no point appears steep; yet as one looks up from any loop to the loop next above, it seems directly over his head. Down this precipice into the Nerodal Valley leap two grand fosses, the Stalheimfos and the Salvklevfos; roaring in ceaseless thunder, filling the air, and drenching the valley with spray. Tiny grass-grown spaces between the bowlders and the loops of the road had all been close mowed; spaces which looked too small for the smallest reaping-hook to swing in were yet close shorn, and the little handfuls of hay hung up drying on hand's-breadths of fence set up for the purpose. Even single blades of grass are too precious in Norway to be wasted.

As we walked slowly down this incredible road, we paused step by step to look first up, then down. The carriage waiting for us below on the bridge looked like a baby wagon. The river made by the meeting of these two great cataracts at the base of the precipice was only a little silver thread flowing down the valley. The cataracts seemed leaping from the sky, and the sky seemed resting on the hill-tops; masses of whirling and floating clouds added to the awesome grandeur of the scene. The Stalheimfos fell into a deep, basin-shaped ravine, piled with great bowlders, and full of birch and ash shrubs; in the centre of this, by some strange play of the water, rose a distinct and beautifully shaped cone, thrown up closely in front of the fall, almost blending with it, and thick veiled in the tumultuous spray,—a fountain in a waterfall. It seemed the accident of a moment, but its shape did not alter so long as we watched it; it is a part of the fall.

Five miles down this cleft, called valley, to Gudvangen run the road and the little river and the narrow strips of meadow, dark, thin, and ghastly; long months in utter darkness this Nerodal lies, and never, even at summer's best and longest, has it more than a half-day of sun. The mountains rise in sheer black walls on either hand,—bare rock in colossal shafts and peaks, three, four, and even five thousand feet high; snow in the rifts at top; patches of gaunt firs here and there; great spaces of tumbled rocks, where avalanches have slid; pebbly and sandy channels worn from side to side of the valley, where torrents have rushed down and torn a way across; white streams from top to bottom of the precipices, all foam and quiver, like threads spun out on the sward, more than can be counted; they seem to swing down out of the sky as spider threads swing swift and countless in a dewy morning.

Sanna shuddered. "Now you see, one could not spend a whole day in Nerodal Valley," she said. "It does wonder me that any people will live here. Every spring the mountains do fall and people are killed."

On a narrow rim of land at base of these walls, just where the fjord meets the river, is the village of Gudvangen, a desolate huddle of half a dozen poor houses. A chill as of death filled the air; foul odors arose at every turn. The two little inns were overcrowded with people, who roamed restlessly up and down, waiting for they knew not what. An indescribable gloom settles on Gudvangen with nightfall. The black waters of the fjord chafing monotonously at the base of the black mountains; the sky black also, and looking farther off than sky ever looked before, walled into a strip, like the valley beneath it; hemmed in, forsaken, doomed, and left seems Gudvangen. What hold life can have on a human being kept in such a spot it is hard to imagine. Yet we found three very old women hobnobbing contentedly there in a cave of a hut. Ragged, dirty, hideous, hopeless one would have thought them; but they were all agog and cheery, and full of plans for repairing their house. They were in a little log stable, perhaps ten feet square, and hardly high enough to stand upright in: they were cowering round a bit of fire in the centre; their piles of straw and blankets laid in corners; not a chair, not a table. Macbeth's witches had seemed full-dressed society women by the side of these. We peered timidly in at the group, and they all came running towards us, chattering, glad to see strangers, and apologizing for their condition, because, as they said, they had just turned in there together for a few days, while their house across the way was being mended. Not a light of any description had they, except the fire. The oldest one hobbled away, and returned with a small tallow candle, which she lit and held in her hand, to show us how comfortable they were, after all; plenty of room for three piles of straw on the rough log floor. Their "house across the way" was a little better than this; not much. One of the poor old crones had "five children in America." "They wanted her to come out to America and live with them, but she was too old to go away from home," she said. "Home was the best place for old people," to which the other two assented eagerly. "Oh, yes, home was the best place. America was too far."

It seemed a miracle to have comfort in an inn in so poverty-stricken a spot as this, but we did. We slept in straw-filled bunks, set tight into closets under the eaves; only a narrow doorway by which to get in and out of bed; but there were two windows in the room, and no need to stifle. And for supper there was set before us a stew of lamb, delicately flavored with curry, and served with rice, of which no house need be ashamed. That so palatable a dish could have issued from the place which answered for kitchen in that poor little inn was a marvel; it was little more than a small dark tomb. The dishes were all washed out-of-doors in tubs set on planks laid across two broken chairs at the kitchen door; and the food and milk were kept in an above-ground cellar not three steps from the same door. This had been made by an immense slab of rock which had crashed down from the mountain top, one day, and instead of tearing through the house and killing everybody had considerately lodged on top of two other bowlders, roofing the space in, and forming a huge stone refrigerator ready to hand for the innkeeper. The enclosed space was cold as ice, and high enough and large enough for one to walk about in it comfortably. I had the curiosity to ask this innkeeper how much he could make in a year off his inn. When he found that I had no sinister motive in the inquiry, he was freely communicative. At first he feared, Sanna said, that it might become known in the town how much money he was making, and that demands might be made on him in consequence. If the season of summer travel were very good, he said he would clear two hundred dollars; but he did not always make so much as that. He earned a little also by keeping a small shop, and in the winter that was his only resource. He had a wife and two children, and his wife was not strong, which made it harder for them, as they were obliged always to keep a servant.

Even in full sunlight, at nine of the morning, Gudvangen looked grim and dangerous, and the Nerö Fjord water black. As we sailed out, the walls of the valley closed up suddenly behind us, as with a snap which might have craunched poor little Gudvangen to death. The fjord is as wild as the pass; in fact, the same thing, only that it has water at bottom instead of land, and you can sail closer than you can drive at base of the rocky walls. Soon we came to the mouth of another great fjord, opening up another watery road into the mountains; this was the Aurland, and on its farther shore opened again the Sognedal Fjord, up which we went a little way to leave somebody at a landing. Here were green hills and slopes and trees, and a bright yellow church, shaped like a blancmange mould in three pyramid-shaped cones, each smaller than the one below.

"Here is the finest fruit orchard in all Scandinavia," said Sanna, pointing to a pretty place just out of the town, where fields rose one above the other in terraces on south-facing slopes, covered thick with orchards. "It belongs to an acquainted with me: but she must sell it. She is a widow, and she cannot take the care to herself."

Back again across the mouth of the Aurland Fjord, and then out into the great Sogne Fjord, zigzagging from side to side of it, and up into numerous little fjords where the boat looked to be steering straight into hills,—we seemed to be adrift, without purpose, rather than on a definite voyage with a fixed aim of getting home. The magnificent labyrinths of walled waters were calm as the heavens they reflected; the clouds above and clouds below kept silent pace with each other, and we seemed gliding between two skies. Great snow fjelds came in sight, wheeled, rose, sank, and disappeared, as we passed; sometimes green meadows stretched on either side of us, then terrible gorges and pinnacles of towering rock. Picture after picture we saw, of gay-colored little villages, with rims of fields and rocky promontories; snow fjelds above, and fir forests between; glittering waterfalls shooting from the sky line to the water, like white lightning down a black stone front, or leaping out in spaces of feathery snow, like one preternatural blooming of the forests all the way down the black walls rising perpendicularly thousands of feet; tiers of blue mountains in the distance, dark blue on the nearest, and shading off to palest blue at the sky line; the fjord dark purple in the narrows, shading to gray in the opens; illuminated spaces of green, now at the shore, now half-way up, now two-thirds-way up to the sky; tops of hills in sunlight; bars of sunlight streaming through dark clefts. Then a storm-sweep across the fjord, far in our wake,—swooping and sweeping, and gone in a half-hour; blotting out the mountains; then turning them into a dark-slate wall, on which white sails and cross-sunbeams made a superb shining. And so, between the sun and the storm, we came to Valestrand, and sent off and took on boat-loads of pleasuring people,—the boats with bright flags at prow and stern, and gay-dressed women with fantastic parasols like butterflies poised on their edges,—Valestrand, where, as some say, Frithiof was born; and as all say, he burnt one of Balder's great temples. Then Ladvik, on a green slope turning to gold in the sun; its white church with a gray stone spire relieved against a bank of purple gloom; the lights sinking lower and the shadows stretching farther every minute; shadows of hills behind which the sun had already gone, thrown sharp and black on hills still glowing in full light; hills before us, shimmering in soft silver gray and pale purple against a clear golden west; hills behind us, folding and folded in masses of rosy vapor; shining fosses leaping down among them; the colors changing like the colors of a prism minute by minute along the tops of the ranges,—this was the way our day on the Sogne Fjord drew near its ending. Industriously knitting, with eyes firm fastened on her needles, sat an English matron near us on the deck. Not one glance of her eye did she give to the splendors of sky and water and land about her.

"I do think that lady must be in want of stockings very much," remarked Sanna quietly; "but she need not to come to Norway to knit."

Far worse, however, than the woman who knitted were the women and the men who talked, loudly, stupidly, vulgarly, around us. It was mortifying that their talk was English, but they were not Americans. At last they drove us to another part of the deck, but not before a few phrases of their conversation had been indelibly stamped on my memory.

"Well, we were in Dresden two days: there's only the gallery there; that's time enough for that."

"Raphaels,—lots of Raphaels."

"I don't care for Raphaels, anyhow. I'll tell you who I like; I like Veronese."

"Well, I'm very fond of Tintoretto."

"I like Titians; they're so delicate, don't you know?"

"Well, who's that man that's painted such dreadful things,—all mixed up, don't you know? In some places you see a good many of them."

"You don't mean Rembrandt, do you? There are a lot of Rembrandts in Munich."

"There was one picture I liked. I think it was a Christ; but I ain't sure. There were four children on the ground, I remember."

When the real sunset came we were threading the rocky labyrinths of the Bergen Fjord. It is a field of bowlders, with an ocean let in; nothing more. Why the bowlders are not submerged, since the water is deep enough for big ships to sail on, is the perpetual marvel; but they are not. They are as firm in their places as continents, myriads of them only a few feet out of water; and when the sun as it sinks sends a flood of gold and red light athwart them, they turn all colors, and glow on the water like great smoke crystals with fire shining through. To sail up this fjord in the sunset is to wind through devious lanes walled with these jewels, and to look off, over and above them, to fields of purple and gray and green, islands on islands on islands, to the right and to the left, with the same jewel-walled lanes running east and west and north and south among them; the sky will stream with glowing colors from horizon to horizon, and the glorious silence will be broken by no harsher sound than the low lapsing of waters and the soft whirr of gray gulls' wings.