Lippincott&#x27;s Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 12, No. 28, July, 1873

FROM PHILADELPHIA TO BALTIMORE.

In 1832 a few adventurous men obtained a charter for a railroad from Baltimore to Port Deposit: other charters were granted by Delaware and Pennsylvania in succeeding years, and at last in 1838 all were consolidated as the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad Company, and became a through all-rail line, interrupted only by the Susquehanna and some minor water-courses, under one management, beginning at Philadelphia and ending at Baltimore. But the country was too young and weak to make this a strong road, either in capital or business. It struggled along with a heavy debt, poor road-bed, imperfect rail (in some parts the old strap rail), few locomotives and cars, and inconvenient dépôts, making but little progress up to 1851, when Mr. Samuel M. Felton was brought from Boston to assume the presidency.

Seeing the actual and future importance of the line, some Eastern men bought up the stock, put in the necessary money and encouraged Mr. Felton to begin an entire revolution in the road. The road-bed was perfected and widened for a double track, new dépôts erected in Baltimore and Philadelphia, new rails laid, new branches opened; and whereas Mr. Felton found the road with only a single track, 25 locomotives and 308 cars, he left it with many miles of double track, its dépôts rebuilt, 49 locomotives and 1145 cars. When he took the road its locomotives traveled 312,840 miles per year, and earned $718,010, at a cost of $252,184.54: when he left it, borne down by disease, the locomotives traveled 780,537 miles per year, at a cost of $1,960,649. The capital stock in 1851 was $3,850,000, and paid three and a half per cent.: it is now $13,486,250, and pays eight per cent.

When the war broke out in 1862 this road was the key of the continent, and the fact that it was officered and controlled by Northern and energetic men saved it from destruction or becoming an engine in the hands of our enemies. Over it hundreds of thousands of soldiers and citizens were carried to the front, and millions of tons of merchandise and supplies were poured into the quarter-master's, commissary's and medical departments all along the line.

In 1864, worn out by disease, the able manager laid down his authority, to be taken up by another vigorous New England man, who in his turn has given almost life-blood to carry the road on to greatness.

Since 1864 the advance in earnings has not been so great as in the four preceding years, because of the necessary reduction in travel and transportation since the war. But enormous improvements have been made, thousands of steel rails have been laid, locomotives, freight cars and passenger cars of the most beautiful description have been added to the stock, new dépôts made (some of the finest in the country), a new line planned and executed, carrying the road from the meadows and marshes of the Delaware through the valleys and beautiful rolling uplands of Delaware county to Chester, avoiding all danger from floods, and going over or under twenty-seven streets to enter the city without possible peril to life or limb. A whole railroad system subsidiary to this road has been developed in Delaware, and to-day, with the best road-bed, double tracks, steel rails, the best locomotives, the best passenger cars in the country, supplied with all the modern improvements of brake, platform and signal, and a perfectly drilled corps of subordinates, this road may challenge the attention of the country, and be pointed out as one of the best evidences of the growth and prosperity of Philadelphia.

The dépôt in Philadelphia, at the corner of Broad street and Washington avenue, is a large and spacious building, which does not pretend to be a model of domestic architecture, but is roomy and reasonably well ventilated. The bell rings, we take our seats and move out through the usual coal-yards and shanties and suburbs, passing the United States Arsenal, until we reach Gray's Ferry, where we see the Schuylkill, beautiful at high tide, the high banks opposite once a famous estate, now the seat of the Almshouse, where four thousand paupers live in the winter and about fifteen hundred in the summer. So mild and pleasant is this climate that the majority of the paupers creep out, like the blue bottleflies, with the coming of spring, preferring to sleep in barns or under the green trees all the summer, rather than endure the hard beds, discipline and regular habits of the Almshouse. The rains of summer may fill their old bones with rheumatism for winter, but there are charms in the life of the stroller, who feeds to-day at a farm-house, or works a few hours to-morrow for a trifle to get whisky and tobacco, but has no notes to pay, no house to maintain, no servants to support.

Gray's Ferry is an old historic name, for here Washington and the men of the Revolution crossed again and again. The old rope ferry was succeeded by the old horse ferry, and now there are three railroads here—the Darby Improvement, the Junction (which goes to West Philadelphia and makes the connection for the great Southern Air-line), and the old line, which leads us out, through the old Bartram Gardens, where an enthusiastic botanist made the first and best collection of trees and plants in this country, on to the marshes of the Delaware. The mighty river, widening into a bay, flows on to the ocean, its bosom furrowed by thousands of keels and whitened by myriad sails. We look over wide acres of marshes, now green with the tender colors of spring, the corn-fields of the higher portion giving by their brown earth beautiful contrasts of color, the rows of corn just coming into sight. All over these meadows stand huge oak trees and elms, amongst whose branches the vessels seem to glide. But beautiful as the scene is, it is a bad place for a railroad, for when the great river rushes down swollen by some freshet, and is met by the incoming tide, the water sets back over the marshes and threatens to sweep away the track or put out the fires of the locomotives; and to cross streams and tideways many draw-bridges, with their attendant dangers, must be maintained. To avoid all these difficulties, Mr. Hinckley planned the change which is known as the Darby Improvement, carrying the road from Gray's Ferry to Chester over and through the high lands of Darby and Ridley. We shall no longer hear the brakeman shout out "Gibson's," "Lazaretto,", "Tinicum" (called by the Indians Tenecunck), "Crum Creek." We shall no longer wonder that the train should be stopped for so few passengers to get on or off, for in future our car will take us over a road-bed so perfectly laid with steel rails that a full glass of water will not spill as the train hurries on through a thickly settled country. Look quickly from the window at the country you are traversing: see the beautiful station at Bonnaffon, and the magnificent oak tree, worth a hundred stations, that stands in a field just beyond. We cannot enumerate all the beauties and objects of interest that line the road: every valley opens a pleasant view, every hill is covered with handsome houses, comfortable farmeries or superb trees. Before the road was made, these lands, lying on a ridge high above the river, perfectly healthy and offering the most desirable homes for city people, were inaccessible, but now they can be reached, and have been already appreciated. Most of the land has grown too valuable for farming, and has been bought up and laid out with different degrees of care for suburban residences.

Darby is one of the oldest towns in the State, and contributes largely to the business of the road. Mills were built here in 1696, and it was divided into Upper and Lower Darby in 1786. The first of the new towns is Sharon Hill, where a large amount of land has been laid out in the rectangular method, and already many of the lots are sold to actual settlers: a machine-shop has been established, and the railroad has built a very nice station for passengers.

Next to Sharon Hill comes Glenolden, where hill and dale, wood and meadow and a beautiful stream, offer all the picturesqueness that can charm an enthusiastic or artistic eye, together with good building-sites and every advantage that fertile and forest-clad land can give to one who would exchange the heat and pavements of a city for rural life. From Glenolden it is but a short distance to Norwood and to Moore's Crossing, where the company are erecting turnouts, engine-houses, etc., and from here, eight miles from the city, numerous trains will run to Philadelphia to accommodate the workingmen who, it is believed, will come out to live on these cool and breezy uplands.

GLENOLDEN.

From Moore's we soon get to Ridley Park, which was described at length in a former Number. The two stations at Ridley are models of beauty in their way: the principal station spans the road-bed, wide enough here for four tracks, and is probably the most picturesque in the country, as well as very convenient. Crum Lynne Station is remarkable for the beautiful sculpture of the capitals of the pilasters to the architraves of the windows, the architect having designed each one for this building, using the flowers and fruits and birds and animals of the region for his ornamental work, instead of the usual cornice and frieze and capital of Grecian architecture.

CRUM LYNNE FALLS.

But the train sweeps us away from Ridley limits, past Leiperville with its primeval railway, and on to . As we round the curve and rush through the woods we see on the left the broad river with its three-masted schooners, ships and steamers, and on the right the spires and houses of the town; and first and predominant the Military School of Colonel Hyatt. This school was incorporated by act of Legislature in 1862, and is devoted to both civil and military education. The studies and drill are so combined as to secure good mental and physical culture; and to ensure good military instruction the State and the United States have contributed arms of all kinds. Scholars come from all parts of the country, and even the West Indies; and as the standard of scholarship is high, the graduates compare favorably with those from other institutions.

Chester is one of the oldest towns on the line of the road by actual years, but one of the youngest in growth. First called by the Indians Mackaponacka, and then by the settlers Upland, it had a justice of the peace court in 1676. Its court-house was built in 1724. Its first newspaper was published in 1819. For many years Chester dozed away in dignified quiet as the county-town: its court-house and jail gave it all the honor it required. But the streams made good mill-sites, the deep waterfront along the river offered splendid wharfage and chances for shipbuilding, and, as good luck would have it, a rivalry awoke which ended in loading Media with the county buildings and relieving Chester. Since then it has doubled and trebled: mills and factories are on all sides, and its shipyards are not easily surpassed. Roach's shipyard covers twenty-three acres. The firm make their own engines and everything required in iron shipbuilding from keel to topmast. They have six vessels now on the stocks, and employ eleven hundred men, and have room for sixteen hundred. They have built for every trade from the coaster to the East Indiaman, varying in size from six hundred to four thousand tons, and their vessels pass unchallenged amongst the best in the world.

VIEW OF CHESTER.

Nor is trade the only feature of the town. About half a mile from the dépôt, on a gentle eminence, is the Crozer Theological Seminary. The approach from Chester for the pedestrian, along the shrub-, vine- and tree-clad banks of Chester Creek into and across the wide lawn, is a delightful walk. The principal building was erected by John P. Crozer for a normal school. During the war he gave it to the government for a hospital, and when he died in 1866 left it to his sons, desiring them to devote it to some benevolent use. They have responded in a munificent manner by establishing a school for training young men for the ministry, with accommodations for a hundred students, houses for the professors, a church, a library building, lecture-halls and all the required conveniences for a great and successful school. They have added an endowment fund of two hundred and twenty-eight thousand dollars, the whole gift being about three hundred and ninety thousand dollars, and one of the family has since given twenty-five thousand dollars as a library fund. The seminary was opened in 1868 with fifteen students: there are now fifty from all parts of the Union.

But the most complaisant conductor of the most accommodating special train could not wait any longer for us, and we must hurry on through Lamokin, where the Baltimore Central, a tributary road, turns off and traverses a most picturesque country, round by Port Deposit to Perryville, where it again reaches the main road. At Lamokin are works where steel of a peculiar kind is manufactured under a European patent. From here the road again clings to the shore of the Delaware, and until we reach Wilmington the river, with its sails and its blue water, is on the left—on the right a high ridge, which ends in the valley of the Shell Pot and Brandywine at Wilmington.

We flash past Linwood to stop a moment at Claymont, where the ridge comes nearer the river and offers superb sites for buildings. Why Claymont has not grown more no one seems to know. There are schools and churches, fine rolling land, noble river-views, and all that can make a country home delightful. That the place has attractions for lovers of the picturesque may be inferred from the fact that it counts among its residents an artist of such wide and well-founded celebrity as Mr. F.O.C. Darley, whose delineations of American life and scenery, especially in the form of book-illustrations, have been familiar to the public for the past thirty years. With so many years of fame, Mr. Darley counts but fifty-two of life, and in the enjoyment of vigorous health still continues the practice of his art, executing many commissions from Europe, where his genius is as highly appreciated as at home.

VIEW OF DELAWARE RIVER NEAR CLAYMONT.

VIEW AT CLAYMONT: CREEK AND BRIDGE.

But we must stick to our train, which carries us through the Red Bank Cut to Ellerslie Station, where occurred the first accident of a serious character which has happened on this road for eighteen years, and which was due only to a willful violation of orders by an old and very trusted conductor. At Ellerslie are the Edgemoor Iron-works of Messrs. William Sellers & Co., where every known improvement in the manufacture of iron is being tested and applied. The next curve in the road shows us the meadows of the Shell Pot and the Brandywine, with Wilmington in the distance. The Brandywine, famous in our history, runs through as picturesque a valley as there is in America, combining all that the climate of Delaware permits in trees, shrubs, vines and flowers with the wildness and variety of the valley of the Pemigewasset or the wild Ammonoosuck. In this rare valley are mills as old as the settlement of the country, and quaint hamlets that seem to belong to Europe rather than America.

At Wilmington the system of the Delaware railroads begins: it spreads out over the peninsula of Delaware and the Eastern Shore of Maryland like a huge left hand. The thumb touches Chestertown and Centreville, the fore finger Oxford, the middle finger Cambridge, the ring finger Crisfield, the little finger Lewes; and this hand gathers into the main road every year millions of baskets of peaches, and millions more of oysters in baskets and sacks, and crates of berries, and car-loads of hardwood and lumber. Under the influence of these roads the sleepy peninsula is beginning a new career.

We cannot go down the peninsula, so let us keep on to Baltimore, pausing, however, for a moment as we cross Mason and Dixon's line near Elkton. Little did Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon dream, as they set that tangent point for the determination of the boundary-lines of the three States, how famous they would become. But there the simple monument stands in the open fields, and there it must remain so long as the three States need a boundary.

Soon after leaving Mason and Dixon we strike the first of the great estuaries of the Delaware and Susquehanna, which are the delight of the sportsman, the naturalist and the tourist. No matter at what season of the year you approach North-east, Principio, the Susquehanna River or Stemmer's Run—no matter at what time of the day—the views are always fine. The water spreads out in huge widening bays, and loses itself in the forest or hides behind some projecting headland; and when, as is often the case, the surface of the water is actually darkened with large flocks of wild fowl, the variety as well as beauty of the scene could not be heightened. Such shooting-ground for sportsmen exists nowhere else on this coast easily accessible. At Perryville, Havre de Grace, Bush River and many other places the chance sportsman can find every accommodation, while clubs of gentlemen have leased many of the best points, and established little houses where they may be comfortable when the day's sport is over, and where they can leave from season to season boats, decoys and all the paraphernalia of the sport. To recount the names of canvas-backs, red heads, bald pates and innumerable other ducks, to tell of the tens, fifties, hundreds shot in a single day, would add nothing to the excitement of any sportsman who has seen from the cars the huge flocks of birds rise and sweep out to sea when scared by some passing train or boat.

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PRINCIPIO.

BRIDGE OVER THE SUSQUEHANNA AT HAVRE DE GRACE.

If every passenger could stop once, and study the Susquehanna bridge crossing the river between Perryville and Havre de Grace, he would have a most profound respect for its projectors and builders. For many years all transport by cars was interrupted here, and travelers and merchandise were transported by ferry-boat, causing wearisome delays and extra expense. But now a bridge 3273 feet long and with 1000 feet of trestling, resting on thirteen huge piers built on foundations in water from twenty-seven to sixty feet deep, and costing a million and a half of dollars, carries all safely over, and defies floods and ice. This bridge, one of the triumphs of engineering and a just source of pride to the road, has already saved in time and trouble a large percentage of its cost. It was threatened the past winter by the ice-pack which filled the river back to Port Deposit, and which seemed to promise for some time the destruction of that well-named little town. It is hard to believe that in a country so extensive as ours, with all kinds of lands and town-sites, any one could begin to build a town in such a situation. It clings to the broken and rocky shores and hillsides as lichens adhere to rocks and to the bark of trees or swallows' nests to the eaves of a barn. There it is, however, and, judging from its costly houses, churches and business appearance, its inhabitants have found it a profitable place to stay in. Port Deposit last winter, when the river was filled with ice from shore to shore and for miles in both directions, fissured and cracked and covered with mud, logs and débris, seemed on the verge of destruction; and it was easy to believe that if the river did rise suddenly the moving mass of ice, like some huge glacier, would sweep away all evidences of humanity, leaving behind only the glacial scratches and the roches moutonnées. Overhanging the railroad is a very remarkable profile rock which has attained some celebrity, and is shown in one of our sketches.

MOUNT ARARAT--PROFILE ROCK.

PORT DEPOSIT.

From Port Deposit to Baltimore the country is more rolling than from Perryville to Wilmington, and there are many picturesque points. One could find at Gunpowder River and Stemmer's Run several beautiful points of view, but by the time he reaches these places the traveler begins to get impatient for the great city, the terminus of his wanderings, which soon begins to announce itself by more thickly congregated houses, and roads cut straight through hill and valley, regardless of cost or the destruction of local charms of hill and dale.

If one were to judge by the streets, he would think Baltimorians lived only on oysters, for the new streets seem wholly built of their shells, making them very white, glaring and offensive to the unaccustomed eye. But the attention is soon diverted from houses and roads, to the bay and to Fort McHenry, which lies before the town like a sleeping lion. Few forts in the country are more interesting or have played a more important part in our military history; but all its military reputation is less interesting than the fact that whilst confined to a British vessel, one of the fleet unsuccessfully bombarding the fort, Francis Key wrote the "Star-Spangled Banner," now a national hymn. A bomb thrown into the fort at that time by the British has been preserved on a pillar ever since—almost the only local reminder of the facts of the bombardment.

FORT MCHENRY.

THE BRITISH SHELL.

At Baltimore we leave the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad, sorry to part from so good a road and one so important to the welfare of the country. It is a link in the great system, and one kept very bright and well polished by its managers. Their course has been to pay only a moderate dividend, and use the rest of the earnings to improve the road and its belongings, and to foster the interests of the people who use it. Such wise policy must build it strongly into the affections and interests of those who live along it, and ensure its being each year a better and better-paying road.

ROBERT MORRIS COPELAND.

CHARITY CROSS.

Tinted are her cheeks with rose

She is waiting in the snows

Of the falling apple-blows.

Tinklings of a drowsy rill

Come from the upland orchard hill,

Niches in her dreams to fill.

Dotted is her rustic shawl

With the apple-leaves that fall:

Twilight splendors cover all.

Deeper lined than earthly grace,

Rest of heaven doth in her face

Rejoice in its abiding-place.

Charity Cross, it groweth late:

Household duties for you wait,

Just beyond the garden-gate.

Leave the apple-blooms to fall,

Far-off brook to vainly call:

Lightly climb the orchard wall.

All your dreamings softly fold:

Let them drift away untold

In the dying sunset's gold.

Down the path that leads between

Ferns and mosses, shaded green,

The gabled house is dimly seen.

Winds, with poplar trees at play,

Chafe with tossing boughs all day

Weather-beaten walls of gray.

Open wide the trellised door:

Sunset glories go before,

Fall upon the kitchen floor,

Turn to gold the swinging loom

Standing in the corner's gloom

Of the low brown-raftered room.

Brazen dogs that ever sleep

Silently the entrance keep

Of the fireplace huge and deep.

Charity, stop no more to dream:

Covers lift with puffing steam;

Waiting stands the risen cream.

Change to white your apron gray,

Sprinkled clothes to fold away,

Ready for another day.

Quickly now the table spread

With its homespun cloth of red,

Savory meats and snowy bread.

On the shelf a pink-lipped shell,

That for ever tries to tell

Ocean music, learned so well.

Tiptoe on the cricket stand:

Take it in your sun-browned hand—

Shell from eastern tropic land.

Let your clear voice through it ring,

Homeward the hired help to bring

From the distant meadow-spring.

Far away they hear the call:

Look! they come by orchard wall,

Where the apple-blossoms fall.

One that foremost leads the plough

Sees you in the doorway now—

Breaks a bending apple-bough;

Waves it by the meadow creek:

Answering blushes on your cheek

Tell the words you do not speak.

Out upon the rippling river

Purple lights of sunset quiver,

Rustling leaves reflected shiver.

Shell in hand, she goes to greet

Her lover, where the turf-grown street

And the meadow pathway meet.

Insect voices far away,

Hushed in silence through the day,

Whisper in the night of May,

While in vain the pink-lipped shell,

Murmuring in its hollow cell,

Would its own love-story tell.

Through the drifting apple-snow,

Where the four-leafed clovers grow,

Hand in hand they homeward go;

And they vow, whate'er the weather,

Mid the brier, through the heather,

They will walk life's way together.

Parting when the day grows late,

If a moment at the gate

One alone is left to wait,

Yet each other they will greet

Where life's shadeless, dusty street

And the heavenly pathway meet.

MARGARET MASON.

BERRYTOWN.

CHAPTER XI.

Catharine sprang from her bed at daybreak that morning. She could scarcely stop singing in the bath. She had so much to do, so much to do! The air blew briskly, the factory bells were clanging, the bees buzzed, the pretty white curtains were flapping. It was a busy world, and she was busiest of all. Had she not Hugh Guinness's fate in hand? She felt like a lad when he comes of age or makes his first venture in business. Jane heard her singing noisily for a while, but when breakfast was ready she did not come down.

She was standing in front of her glass, staring at it as though the chubby, insignificant face there were the Sphinx and could answer the riddles of life. McCall's remark had suddenly recurred to her: "What is Hugh Guinness to you? You belong to another man." With a flash, Mr. Muller, natty and plump, had stood before her, curiously unfamiliar, mildly regarding her through his spectacles. Her husband! Why had she never understood that until this morning? Her crossed hands lay on her wide blue-veined shoulders. She almost tore the flesh from them. "I belong to no man!" she cried.

She could not shake off the thought of him, as she usually did. He stood beside her, do what she would—the fat body and legs, the finical dress, the wearisome platitudes, a regiment of blue-coated, thick-lipped children behind him.

"If the best were done for them that could be hoped, they would but grow up miniature Mullers; and to think of that!" said Kitty. She had given her life to him. If she lived to be gray-headed, he alone owned her, mind and body. "If I were dead in my coffin, he would put his mild, fat little hand on me, and look forward to owning me in heaven! Oh-h!" This last was the one unendurable pang to Catharine.

Jane at the moment thrust her black face in: "He's come. Hurry up, honey! Mr. Muller, ob course. Shell I do up your hair, chile?"

Kitty shook her head and smiled. She would have had a kind smile for Jane and her like if she had been held by thumbscrews. Stooping to button her gaiters, she caught sight of her face in the glass. There were dark hollows under the eyes: they had the look of an older, graver woman than she had ever been before. Kitty hung up the green dress she had meant to wear, and took down a rose-colored one. Mr. Muller was talking down stairs. There was reality. There was her work and her husband. Why, she had the account-books of the school in her upper bureau-drawer at that moment, and in the lower ones her wedding things. Dresses and cloaks all made; and such lovely linen! As for Hugh Guinness, he was, after all, but a perplexing shadow, a riddle that turned from her the more she tried to make him real. She went down.

"Why, Catharine!" He held her hand, patting it between his own, which were warm and moist. "I really could not deny myself a glimpse of you, though I was sent on an errand by Maria to the station. But all roads end for me in the Book-shop. That is natural—he! he!"

"Yes, it is natural."

"It must be only a glimpse, though. I begged of Jane a cup of hot tea, to take off the chill of this morning air. Ah, here it is: thank you, my good girl. Only a glimpse, for Maria's business was urgent: Maria's business always is urgent. But I was to intercept Doctor McCall on his way to the cars."

"Is he going this morning?"

"Yes. Not to return, it appears."

"Not to return?" Her voice seemed hardly to have the energy of a question in it.

"But I," with a shrug and significant laugh, "am not to allow him to go. Behold in me an emissary of Love! You; would not have suspected a Mercury in your William, Catharine?" Within the last month he had begun to talk down in this fashion to her, accommodating himself to her childish tastes.

"What is Mercury's errand?"

"Aha! you curious little puss! How a woman does prick her ears at the mention of a love-story! Though, I suppose, this one is wellnigh its end. Maria made no secret of it. Doctor McCall, I inferred from what she said, had been pouring out his troubles in her ear, and she sent me to bring him back to her with the message that she had found a way of escape from them. Eh? Did you speak? You did not know what, dear?"

"I did not know that Maria had the right to bring him back. They are—"

"Engaged? Oh, certainly. At least—It is an old attachment, and Maria is such a woman to manage, you know! Is that the tea-pot, Jane? Just fill my cup again. Oh yes, I suppose it is all settled."

Catharine was standing by the window. The wind blew in chilly and strong, while Mr. Muller behind her sipped his tea and ambled in his talk. Crossing the meadow, going down the road, she saw the large figure of a man in a loose light overcoat, who swung in his gait and carried his hat in his hand as a boy would do. Even if he had loved her, she could not, like Maria, have gone a step to meet him, nor intoned the Song of Solomon. But he did not love her.

She turned to her companion: "There is something I wished to say."

"In one moment, my dear." He was sweetening his tea. Hanging the silver tongs on the lid, he looked up: "Good God, Catharine! what is it?"

"I wished to tell you—no, don't touch me, please—this is a mistake which we have made, and it is better to let it go no farther. It ought to end now."

"End? Now?" But he was not surprised. The pale face staring at her over the half-emptied cup looked as if it had been waiting to hear this; so that they began the subject, as it were, in the middle. So much had already been said between them without words. He set the cup down, even in that moment folding his napkin neatly with shaking fingers. Kitty did not laugh. She never laughed at him afterward. Something in that large, loose figure yonder, going away from her to the woman he loved, had whetted her eyesight and her judgment. She saw the man at last under Muller's weak finical ways, and the manly look he gave her.

"You mean that there must be no—no marriage?"

"No. I'm very sorry. It has been my fault. But I thought—"

"You thought you loved me, and you do not. Don't cry, Kitty."

A long silence followed, which seemed to Catharine like that of death. It was noticeable that he did not make a single effort to change her resolution or to keep her. It seemed as if he must have been waiting for her to waken some day and see the gulf between them.

"Don't cry, Kitty," he said again, under his breath. He stood by the empty fireplace, resting his dainty foot on the fender and looking down on it: he took out his handkerchief, shook out its folds and wiped his face, which was hot and parched. Kitty was sorry, as she said—sorry and scared, as though she had been called on to touch the corpse of one dear to her friends, but whose death cost her nothing. That she was breaking an obligation she had incurred voluntarily troubled her very little.

"Yes, I thought you would say this one day," he said at last. "I think you are right to take care of yourself. I was too old a man for you to marry. But I would have done all I could. I have been very fond of you," looking at her.

"Yes. You never seemed old to me sir."

"And your work for the poor children? I thought, dear, you felt that the Lord called you to that?"

"So I did. But I don't think I feel it so much to-day." Catharine's eyes were wide with this new terror. Was she, then, turning her back on her God?

She was, after all, he thought, nothing but a frightened, beautiful child.

"I should have been too rough for you," he said. How was he to suspect the heights from which she had looked down on his softness and flippancy?

She observed that he said not a word of the preparations he had made, the house furnished, the expectant congregation, or the storm of gossip and scandal which would follow him as a jilted lover. Was the real wound, then, so deep? Or did he overlook such trifles, as men do?

"I did not forget the new dresses and underclothes," thought Kitty, mean and mortified.

He roused himself as Jane came in: "No, Jane, no more tea. Yes, that is my cup on the mantel-shelf."

"Dah's a gen'leman, Miss Kitty. I took him in the Book-shop. 'T mought be Spellissy 'bout de oats. Tink it is Spellissy."

"You had better go, Catharine," taking up his hat.

"It is not important." The door closed after Jane. She came close to him, irresolute. What could she say? She thought, with the heat of childishness, that she would give the blood out of her body, drop by drop, to comfort him. She wished that she had gone on and married him. "But I cannot say that I love him." This was a matter for life and death—even Kitty's polite soul recognized that—and not for a civil lie.

Again the man asserted himself before the woman: "No, there is nothing for you to say, Catharine," smiling. "There are some things it is better not to varnish over with words." He took up his hat after a pause, and turned a feeble, uncertain face to the window: "I—I might as well go now: I have a prayer-meeting this afternoon."

"And when you go you mean never to come back again?" cried Kitty, pale and red in a moment. "That's to be the end of it all?"

"What more can there be? It's all said." Yet after he had walked to the door he stood on the steps, looking about the room which had grown so familiar and dear to him. At Kitty he did not look.

"Will you have a rose?" breaking one hastily from the trailing branches at the window. "To remember the old Book-shop." She had never given him anything before.

He threw it down: "I do not need a rose to make me remember," bitterly. "It is all said, child? You have nothing to tell me?" looking furtively at her.

For a long time she did not speak: "No, nothing."

"Good-bye, Kitty."

Kitty did not answer him. The tears ran hot and salt over her round cheeks as she watched the little man disappear through the walnuts. She went up stairs, and, still crying, chose one or two maudlin sonnets and a lock of black hair as mementoes to keep of him. She did keep them as long as she lived, and used frequently to sigh over them with a sentimental tenderness which the real Muller never had won from her.

CHAPTER XII.

Miss Muller's message was never delivered, but Doctor McCall did not leave Berrytown that morning. Going down the road, he had caught sight of the old Book-house, and Kitty in her pink wrapper at the window. He overheard Symmes, the clerk at the station, say to some lounger that Peter Guinness would be at home that day or the next. He took his valise to the baggage-room.

"My business is not pressing," he said to Symmes. "No need to be off until this evening."

Perhaps he could see the old man, himself unseen, he thought with a boyish choking in his throat. He could surely give one more day to the remembrance of that old sweet, hearty boy's life without wronging the wretched ghost of a wife whose hand clutched so much away from him.

Miss Muller, seeing him on the bridge from the windows of her room, supposed her message had been given: "He has stayed to know how he may win me." For the first time she faced the riddle squarely. In the morning she had only wished weakly to keep him beside her.

He was married. Popular novels offered recipes by the score for the cure of such difficulties in love. But Maria was no reader of novels. Out of a strict Calvinistic family she and her brother had leaped into heterodoxy—William to pause neatly poised on the line where Conventionalism ended; Maria to flounder in an unsounded quagmire, which she believed the well of Truth. Five years ago she would have felt her chance of salvation in danger if she had spoken to a woman who persisted in loving a married man. But five years work strange changes in the creeds of young women now-a-days; and Maria's heart was choosing her creed for her to-day, according to the custom of her sex.

She saw Doctor McCall idly leaning over the foot-bridge of the creek while he smoked. Passion and brilliancy unknown to them before came into her dark eyes: she stretched out her hands as though she would have dragged him to her: "Must I give him up because of this wife whom he long ago cast off?"

If she tempted him to marry her? She knew what name her old church, her old friends, even her father, who was still living, would apply to her. Some of these people with whom she had lately cast in her lot had different views on the subject of marriage. Hitherto, Maria had kept clear of them. "The white wings of her Thought," she had said, "should not be soiled by venturing near impurity." Now she remembered their arguments against marriage as profound and convincing.

"I could not suggest to him myself this way of escape," she thought, the red dying her face and neck. "I could not." But there was to be a meeting that very evening of the "Inner Light Club," in which Maria was a M.H.G. (Most Honorable Guide), and the subject for discussion would be, "Shall marriage in the Advanced Consolidated Republic be for life or for a term of years?" The profoundest thinkers in the society would bring to this vital question all their strength and knowledge, and, as they had all made up their minds beforehand against bondage and babies, the verdict was likely to be unanimous.

She would contrive that McCall should be one of the audience: the wisdom and truth of the arguments would shine in like a great light on his life, and he would start up a new man, throwing aside this heaviest yoke of social slavery. She would be there ("with a black lace mantilla and veil—so much better than a bonnet," she breathlessly resolved), and at the sight of her he would feel the divine force of true love bringing them together, and claim her as his own.

The modern Cleopatra fights upon the rostrum, in lieu of "sixty sail," and uses as weapons newspaper and club, instead of purple robe and "cloyless sauce of epicurean cook," but the guerdon of the battle is none the less Mark Antony.

At sundown that evening Doctor McCall was piloted by little Herr Bluhm to his office; the Herr, according to his wont, sternly solemn, McCall disposed to be hilarious, as suited the pleasant temperature of the evening.

"Club, eh? Inner Light? Oh yes, I've no objections. One picks up good ideas here, there, anywhere. Meets in your office?"

"Yes—a shabby, vulgar place to the outer eye, but so many noble souls have there struggled out of darkness into light, such mighty Truths have been born there which will guide the age, that to me it is the very Holy Ground of Ideas."

"So?" McCall looked at the little man out of the corner of his eye, and nodded gravely.

"It is a Woman's Club, though men take part in it. But we have such faith in the superior integrity and purity of woman's mind when brought to bear on great but hackneyed questions that we willingly stand back until she has given her verdict. The magnet, sir, pointing out with inexplicable intelligence the true path to humanity."

"Well, I don't know about that. Though it's very likely, very likely," hurriedly. McCall had no relish for argument about it. He was more secure of his intellect in the matter of peaches than inner lights. Cowed and awed as he could have been by no body of men, he followed Bluhm up a dirty flight of stairs into the assemblage of Superior Women. The office was by nature a chamber with gaudy wall-paper of bouquets and wreaths. Viewed as an office, it was well enough, but in the aesthetic, light of a Holy Ground of Ideas it needed sweeping. The paper, too, hung in flaps from the damp walls: dusty files of newspapers, an empty bird-cage, old boots, a case of medical books, a pair of dilapidated trousers filled up one side of the room. A pot of clove-pinks in the window struggled to drown with spicy fragrance the odor of stale tobacco smoke. There was a hempen carpet, inch deep with mud and dust, on the floor. Seated round an empty fireplace, on cane chairs and in solemn circle, were about forty followers of the Inner Light. McCall perceived Maria near the window, the dusky twilight bringing out with fine effect her delicate, beautiful face. He turned quickly to the others, looking for the popular type of the Advanced Female, in loose sacque and men's trousers, with bonnet a-top, hair cut short, sharp nose and sharper voice. She was not there. A third of the women were Quakers, with their calm, benign faces for the most part framed by white hair—women who, having fought successfully against slavery, when that victory was won had taken up arms against the oppressors of women with devout and faithful purpose. The rest McCall declared to himself to be "rather a good-looking lot—women who had," he guessed shrewdly, "been in lack of either enough to eat or somebody to love in the world, and who fancied the ballot-box would bring them an equivalent for a husband or market-money."

A little dish-faced woman in rusty black, and with whitish curls surmounted by a faded blue velvet bonnet laid flat on top of her head, had the floor: "Mr. Chairman—I mean Miss Chairman—the object of our meeting this evening is, Shall marriage in the Consolidated Republic—"

"I object!" Herr Bluhm sprang to his feet, wrapping a short mantle like a Roman toga across his chest, and wearing a portentous frown upon his brow, "There is business of the last meeting which is not finished. Shall the thanks of this club be presented to the owners of the Berrytown street-cars for free passes therein? That is the topic for consideration. I move that a vote of thanks be passed;" and he sat down gloomily.

"I do not second that motion." A tall woman, with the magisterial sweep of shawl and wave of the arm of a cheap boarding-house keeper, rose. "I detect a subtle purpose in that offer. There is a rat behind that arras. There is a prejudice against us in the legislature, and the car company wish no mention of Woman Suffrage to be made in Berrytown until their new charter is granted. Are we so cheaply bought?—bribed by a dead-head ticket!"

"The order of the day," resumed the little widow placidly, "is, Shall marriage in the Consol—"

"Legislature!" piped a weak voice in the crowd. "They only laugh at us in the legislature."

"Let them laugh: they laughed at the slave." The speaker hurled this in a deep bass voice full at McCall. She was a black-browed, handsome young woman, wrapped in a good deal of scarlet, who sat sideways on one chair with her feet on the rung of another. "How long will the world dare to laugh?" fixing him fiercely with her eye.

"Upon my word, madam, I don't know," McCall gasped, and checked himself, hot and uncomfortable.

A fat, handsomely-dressed woman jolted the chair in front of her to command attention: "On the question of marriage—"

"Address the chair," growled Bluhm.

"Miss Chairman, I want to say that I ought to be qualified to speak on marriage, being the mother of ten, to say nothing of twice twins."

"The question before the house is the street-car passes," thundered Bluhm. "I move that we at least thank them for their offer. When a cup of tea is passed me, I thank the giver: when the biscuits are handed, I do likewise. It is a simple matter of courtesy."

"I deny it," said the black-browed female with a tone of tragedy. "What substantial tea has been offered? what biscuits have been baked? It is not tea: it is bribery! It is not biscuits: it is corruption!"

"I second Herr Bluhm's motion."

"Miss Chairman, put the question on its passage."

A mild old Quakeress rose, thus called on: "Thee has made a motion, Friend Bluhm, and Sister Carr says she seconds it; so it seems to me—Indeed I don't understand this parliamentary work."

"You're doing very nicely."

"All right!" called out several voices.

"Why should we have these trivial parliamentary forms?" demanded the Tragic Muse, as McCall called her. "Away with all worn-out garments of a degraded Past! Shall the rebellious serf of man still wear his old clothes?"

"But," whispered McCall to Bluhm, "when will the great thinkers you talked of begin to speak on those mighty truths—"

"Patience! These are our great thinkers. The logical heads some of them have! Woman," standing up and beginning aloud, apropos to nothing—"Woman is destined to purify the ballot-box, reform the jury, whiten the ermine of the judge. [Applause.] When her divine intuitions, her calm reason, are brought into play—" Prolonged applause, in the midst of which Bluhm, again apropos to nothing, abruptly sat down.

"The order of the day," said the little woman in black, "is, Shall marriage—"

"What about the car company?"

"Let's shelve that."

"The question of marriage," began Bluhm, up again with a statelier wrap of his toga, "is the most momentous affecting mankind. It demands free speech, the freest speech. Are we resolved to approach it in proud humility, giving to the God within ourselves and within our neighbor freedom to declare the truth?"

"Ay!" "Ay!" from forty voices. Maria, pale and trembling, watched McCall.

"Free speech is our boast," piped the widow. "If not ours, whose?"

"Before you go any farther," said the Muse with studied politeness, "I have a question to put to Herr Bluhm. Did you did you not, sir, in Toombs's drug-store last week, denominate this club a caravan of idiots?" A breathless silence fell upon the assembly. Bluhm gasped inarticulately. "His face condemns him," pursued his accuser. "Shall such a man be allowed to speak among us? Ay, to take the lead among us?"

Cries of "No!" "No!"

"What becomes of your free speech?" cried Bluhm, red and stammering with fury. "I was angry. I am rough, perhaps, but I seek the truth, as those do not who"—advancing and shaking his shut hand at the Muse—"who 'smile and smile, and are a villain still.'"

"The order of the day"—the widow's voice rose above the din tranquilly—"is Shall marriage in the Consolidated Republic be contracted for life or for a term of years?"

The next moment Maria felt her arm grasped. "Come out of this," whispered McCall, angry and excited. "This is no place for you, Maria. Did you hear what they are going to discuss?"

"Yes," as he whisked her out of the door.

"Then I'm sorry for it. Such things oughtn't to be mentioned in a lady's presence. If I had a sister, she should not know there was such a thing as bigamy. Good God!" wiping his forehead with his handkerchief, "if women are not pure and spotless, what have we to look up to? And these shallow girls, who propose to reform the world, begin by dabbling with the filth of the gutter, if they do no worse?"

"Shallow girls?" He was so big and angry that she felt like a wren or sparrow in his hold. But the stupidity of him! the blind idiocy! She eyed him from head to foot with a bitterness and contempt unutterable—a handsome six-foot animal, with his small brain filled with smaller, worn-out prejudices! The way of escape had been set before him, and he had spurned it—and her!

"I don't see what it can matter to you," she said politely, disengaging herself, "whether I make friends with these people and am stained with the filth of the gutter or not?" She had a half-insane consciousness that she was playing her last card.

"Why, to be sure it matters. You and I have been good friends always, Maria, and I don't like to see you fellowship with that lot. What was it Bluhm called them?" laughing. "That was rough in Bluhm—rough. They're women."

"You are going?"

"In the next train, yes, I waited to see a—a friend, but he did not come. It's just as well, perhaps," his face saddened. "Well, good-bye, Maria. Don't be offended at me for not approving of your friends. Why, bless my soul! such talk is—it's not decent;" and with a careless shake of the hand he was gone.

Maria told herself that she despised a man who could so dismiss the great social problem and its prophets with a fillip of his thumb. She turned to go in to the assemblage of prophets. They were all that was left her in life. But she did not go in. She went to her bare chamber, and took Hero up on her lap and cried over him. "You love me, doggy?" she said.

She had an attack of syncope that night, for which no pack or sitz proved a remedy; and it was about that time that the long and painful affection of the ulnar nerve began which almost destroyed her usefulness as a surgeon.

CHAPTER XIII.

That evening, as Miss Muller sat alone with Hero in her room (just as the neuralgia was beginning), the door opened and Miss Vogdes entered. The girl turned a harassed, worn countenance toward Maria, and stumbled awkwardly over her words. It was not, certainly, because she was conscious that she had used William Muller cruelly. She had forgotten that William Muller lived.

She had been thinking of Maria all day. She was the woman whom Doctor McCall loved. By the time night came Kitty had a maddening desire to see again this woman that he loved—to touch her, hear her speak. She had been used to regard her as a disagreeable bore, but now she looked on her as a woman set apart from all the world. She had made a poor excuse to come up to the Water-cure: now that she was there she half forgot it. Maria's delicate face, her quick grace of motion, her clear, well-bred voice, were so many stabs to Kitty, each of which touched the quick. Maria's hair hung loosely over her shoulders: it was very soft and thick. She wondered if Doctor McCall had ever touched it. "Though what right have I to know?" For some reason this last was the pang that tugged hardest at Kitty's heart.

"I brought a message for Doctor McCall," she said, fumbling in her pocket—"that is, for you to deliver to him, Maria."

Miss Muller turned her shoulder to her: "Doctor McCall is gone—I don't know where."

She started forward: "Gone? To come again, you mean?"

"No—never to come back!" vehemently.

Kitty stood by her silent a moment: "William told me that you sent for him, that he loved you, Maria—that you would be married some of these days."

Miss Muller hesitated: there was no use in revealing her humiliation to this girl: "There was an obstacle in the way. Doctor McCall is peculiarly hedged in by circumstances."

"And you could not find the way of escape?"

"No." She did not see the flash of triumph on the girl's face, or notice when she went out.

Kitty was human. "At least," she muttered going down the hill, "I shall not have to see her his wife." When she had reached the Book-shop she took from her pocket a coarse yellow envelope containing a telegram directed to Hugh Guinness in his father's care. She turned it over. This was a bond between them which even Maria did not share: she alone knew that he was Hugh Guinness.

"What am I to do with this?"

Doctor McCall was gone, never to come back. It was like touching his hand far off to read this message to him. Besides, Kitty was curious. She opened the envelope.

"Come to me at once. You will soon be free," without any signature but an initial. The melodramatic mystery of it would have cautioned knowing women, but Kitty was not knowing.

"If he had received this an hour ago, the 'way of escape' would have been found. He would have been free to marry Maria." So much she understood. She sat down and was quiet for half an hour. It was the first wretched half hour of her life—so wretched that she forgot to cry.

"It would make him very happy to marry Maria," she said, getting up and speaking aloud. Then she opened the door and went up to her chamber, her thoughts keeping time with her swift motions. It seemed to her that she still spoke aloud. "If I were a man I could go to this house in Philadelphia and receive this message, which will set him free" (beginning to fold the dresses in her closet). "It will never reach him otherwise. I could find and bring him to Maria. But I never was five miles from Berrytown in my life, I never could go" (dragging out a great trunk and packing the dresses into it). "It would be a friendly thing for some man to do for him. Maria could not do so much" (cramming in undergarments enough for a year's wear). "If I were a man! He'd not snub me then as he does now, when I am only Kitty. If this could be done it would bring happiness for life to him." (The trunk was packed as she had seen her mother's. She was on her knees, trying to force down the lid, but her wrists were too weak.) "He would come back at once. How lovely Maria looked in that black lace mantilla! He would kiss her mouth and smooth her hair." (Kitty, still kneeling, was staring at the wall with pale cheeks and distended eyes. The lock snapped as it shut. She rose and began putting on her gray hat and veil.) "No woman could go to the city through that dark; and there is a storm coming. If I did it, what would he care for me? I am only Kitty. I would sit in the window here alone year after year, growing into a neglected old maid, and watch him go by with his happy wife and children. I need not interfere. I can throw the telegram into the fire and let them both go their ways. What are they to me?" She had buttoned her sacque and gloves, and now went up to the glass. It was a childish face that she looked at, but one now exceptionally grave and reserved.

She walked quickly down and tapped at the kitchen door: "When the porter comes for my trunk, Jane, give it to him. Tell my mother when she comes it was necessary for me to leave home to help a friend. I shall be back in a few days—if I am alive."

"De Lord be good to us, honey!" Jane stood aghast. Kitty came suddenly up to the old woman and kissed her. She felt quite alone in the world in beginning this desperate undertaking. The next moment she passed the window and was gone.

Miss Muller, with a satchel and shawl-strap, would have started coolly at an hour's notice alone for the Yosemite or Japan. But Kitty, with the enormous trunk, which was her sole idea of travel, set out through the night and storm, feeling death clutching at her on every side.

An hour after nightfall that evening the Eastern express-train reached the station beyond Berrytown, bringing home Peter and his wife, triumphant. Her money had covered a larger extent of muslins and laces than she hoped for—enough to convert the raw school-girl Kitty, when she was married, into a leader of church-going fashion.

Mrs. Guinness leaned back in the plush car-seat, planning the wedding-breakfast. That was now her only care. Out in the world of shops and milliners her superstitious dread of a man long since dead had seemed to her absurd.

"I have had some unreasonable fears about Kitty," she said to Peter, who was beginning to nod opposite to her. "But all will be well when she is Muller's wife."

Another train passed at the moment they reached the station. Her eye ran curiously over the long line of faces in the car-windows to find some neighbor or friend.

She touched Peter's arm: "How like that is to Kitty!" nodding toward a woman's head brought just opposite to them. The train began to move, and the woman turned her face toward them: "Merciful Heaven, it is Kitty!"

The engine sent out its shrill foreboding whistle and rushed on, carrying the girl into the darkness. Behind her in the car as it passed her mother saw the face of Hugh Guinness.

CHAPTER XIV.

Doctor McCall had been five minutes too late for the first train, and so had been delayed for the express in which Kitty started on her adventure. Commonplace accidents determine commonplace lives, was a favorite maxim of the Berrytown Illuminati. The Supreme Intelligence whom they complimented with respect could not be expected to hold such petty trifles or petty lives in His controlling hand.

Doctor McCall had seen Catharine when she first entered the station. Her very manner had the air of flight and secresy. Puzzled and annoyed, he sat down in the rear of the car, himself unseen. When they reached Philadelphia it was not yet dawn. The passengers rushed out of the cars: Kitty sat quiet. She had never slept outside of the Book-house before. She looked out at the dim-lighted dépôt, at the slouching dark figures that stole through it from time to time, the engines, with their hot red eyes, sweeping back and forward in the distance, breaking the night with portentous shrieks. Where should she go? She had never been in a hotel in her life: she had no money. If she ventured into the night she would be arrested, no doubt, as a vagrant. She had a gallant heart to take care of Hugh Guinness's life, but her poor little woman's body was quaking in deadly fear for herself. In a moment a decent mulatto woman, whom McCall had sent, came from the waiting-room into the deserted car.

"There is a room for ladies, where you can be comfortable until daybreak, madam," she said respectfully.

"I am much obliged to you," said Catharine.

When she saw how young she was, the mulatto, a motherly body, took her into a little inner snuggery used to store packages: "You can turn the key, and sleep if you will until morning."

"I'll not close my eyes until my errand is done," thought Kitty, and sat down in a rocking-chair, placing her satchel beside her. In five minutes she was fast asleep. McCall, pacing up and down the platform, could see her through the open window. He forgot to wonder why she had come. There was a certain neatness and freshness about her which he thought he had never observed in other women. After her night's travel her dress fell soft and gray as though just taken from the fold, her petticoat, crisp and white, peeped in one place to sight. How dainty and well-fitting were the little boots and gloves! Where the hair was drawn back, too, from her forehead he could see the blue veins and pink below the skin, like a baby's. He did not know before what keen eyes he had. But this was as though a breath of the old home when he had been a child, one of the dewy Bourbon roses in his father's garden, had followed him to the stifling town. It made the station different—even the morning. Fresh damp winds blew pleasantly from the reddening sky. The white marble steps and lintels of the street shone clean and bright; the porters going by to the freight dépôt gave him good-day cheerfully. In the window the old mulatto had some thriving pots of ivy and fragrant geraniums. Even a dog that came frisking up the sidewalk rubbed itself in a friendly fashion against his legs.

McCall suddenly remembered a journey he had made long ago, and a companion whose breath was foul with opium as her head at night rested on his shoulder.

But there was no need that one woman's breath should sicken him even now with the whole world; and again he stopped in his walk to look at Kitty.

The fresh wind blowing on her wakened her presently. The mulatto was anxious to serve her: it was always the case with people of her class after Kitty had once spoken to them.

"I should like fresh water and towels," she said coolly, as though toilet appurtenances were to be found at every street corner. The woman paused, and then with a queer smile brought them. In a a few moments McCall saw her come out fresher than before.

"Where is this house?" showing a name and number to the mulatto, who read it once or twice, and then looked steadily at Kitty.

"Are you going alone to that place?"

"Certainly."

The woman gave her the directions without further parley, adding that it was about six miles distant, and turned away. Catharine followed her to thank her, and put a dollar note in her hand. It was all the money she had.

She walked on down the rapidly filling streets—for miles, as she thought. The hurry and rush of the day had begun. The sense of nothingness in the midst of this great multitude came upon Kitty. The fear, the excitement began to tell on her: yesterday she had eaten but little in her pity for Muller. "Which was very foolish of me," she said to herself. "Now I've no money to buy anything to eat. I have acted in this matter without common sense." The sun lighted up the yellow leaves of the maples along the sidewalk. The wind blew strongly up from the rivers. She passed a stand with some withered apples and stale cakes, and put her hand in her pocket, then with a wistful look went on.

It was late in the morning before she reached her journey's end. Showing her paper now and then, she had noticed the curious inquiring look which both men and women gave her on reading it. She found herself at last under a long gray stone wall pierced by an iron-knobbed gate. By the side of it a man was setting out on an eating-stand a half-eaten ham, chaffy rolls and pies yellow with age. The man was an old, cleanly shaven fellow, whose aquiline nose reminded her with a twinge of conscience of Mr. Muller.

"Am I near to this house?" showing her paper.

"Here," nodding back at the stone wall, cutting his pies.

"This! What is this place, sir?"

"Moyamensing Prison." He finished cutting the pies carefully, and then, wiping the knife, looked up at her, and suddenly came from behind the stand:

"You're not well?" pushing a seat toward her. "Here's some water. Or coffee?"

She sat down: "Oh, it's nothing. Only I've traveled a long way, and I did not know it was a prison I was coming to."

"Won't you have some coffee? You don't look rugged."

"No, thank you."

"Well, it's not what you've been used to, of course. But hot." He put the water within her reach and drew aside, looking at her now and then. He was used to the pale faces and tears of women at that gate. "Though she's different from them as has friends here," he thought, silencing one or two noisy customers by a look. Presently he came up to her: "You're afeard to go in there alone, young lady?"

"Yes, I am. What shall I do?"

"I thought as much. Yonder comes the chaplain. I'll speak to him," going to meet two gentlemen who crossed the street.

"You wished to see a prisoner?" one of them said, coming up to her.

Kitty was herself again. She stood up and bowed with her old-fashioned, grave politeness: "I do not know. It was this that brought me here," handing him the telegram.

"Ah? I remember," glancing at it. "Number 243 sent it, you recollect?" to his companion. "But this is addressed to Hugh Guinness?" turning inquiringly to Kitty.

"I am a—a member of his family. He was not at home, and I came to receive the message for him."

"Will you go in with us, doctor?" The chaplain turned to his companion.

"Presently. There is a man coming up the street I want to see."

The chaplain motioned her to follow him, casting a curious glance back at her. They passed up into the long stone corridors, tier over tier, with the lines of square iron doors, each with its slate dangling outside, with a name scrawled on it. He stopped at one, opened it and drew back, motioning her to enter.

Kitty caught sight of the damp wall of a cell, and stopped.

"Shall I go in with you?" seeing her shiver.

"No: Mr. Guinness might wish the message kept as private as possible."

"It is very probable. The prisoner is very ill, or you could not have a private interview."

She went in, and the door closed behind her. It was a moment before she could distinguish any object in the dimly lighted cell. Then she saw the square window, the cobwebbed walls, and close at hand a narrow pallet, on which lay a woman in a coarse and soiled night-dress. She was tall and gaunt: one arm was thrown over her head, framing a heavy-jawed, livid face, with dull black eyes fixed on Catharine.

"Who are you?" she said.

Kitty went straight up to her. The foul smell made her head reel. But this was only a woman, after all; and one in great bodily need—dying, she thought. Kitty was a born nurse. She involuntarily straightened the wretched pillows and touched the hot forehead before she spoke: "I came instead of Hugh Guinness. You had a message for him."

"I don't know. It doesn't matter for that," her eyes wandering. The soft touch and the kind face bending over her were more to her just now than all that had gone before in her life. "It is here the pain is," moving Kitty's hand to her side. The pain filled the dull eyes with tears. "This is a poor place to die in," trying to smile.

"Oh, you are not going to die," cheerfully. "Let me lift you up higher on the pillows. Put your arm about me—so. You're not too heavy for me to lift."

The woman, when she was arranged, took Kitty's fingers and feebly held them to her side. "It is so long since anybody took care of me. I sha'n't live till to-morrow. Don't leave me—don't go away."

"I'll not go away," said Kitty.

The man whom the prison physician had waited to meet was Doctor McCall. He had followed Kitty so far, unwilling to interfere by speaking to her. But when he saw her enter Moyamensing he thought that she needed a protector. "Ha, Pollard, is this you?" stopping to shake hands. They were old acquaintances, and managed, in spite of their profession, to see something of each other every year. McCall ran up to town once or twice through the winter, and stayed at Pollard's house, and Pollard managed to spend a week or two with him in peach season.

"I thought I knew your swing, McCall, two squares off. Looking for me?"

"No: I followed a lady, a friend of mine, who has just gone in at the gate."

"You know her, eh?" eagerly. "A most attractive little girl, I thought: She went in with the chaplain to see one of the prisoners."

McCall paused, his hand on the gate. A horrible doubt stopped his heart-beating for an instant. But how utterly absurd it was! Only because this black shadow pursued him always could such a fancy have come to him. "The prisoner is a woman?" with forced carelessness.

"Yes. A poor wretch brought here last spring for shoplifting. Her term's out next week. She has had a sharp attack of pneumonia, and has not much strength to bear it: she is a miserable wreck from opium-eating."

"Opium-eating? Can I go in?" said McCall.

"Certainly."

When the woman heard their steps on the corridor she said to Catharine, "I hear my husband coming now."

"That will be pleasant for you," kindly, wondering to herself what sort of a ruffian had chosen this creature for a mate and had the burden of her to carry.

"Yes, I know his step," turning dully to the door. It opened, and Hugh Guinness stood on the threshold.

He halted one brief moment. It seemed to Catharine that he was an older man than she had known him.

"It is you, then, Louise?" he said calmly, going up to the bed and looking down on her, his hands clasped, as usual, behind him.

"Yes, it is I. I thought you would like to see me and talk things over before I died, Hugh." She held out her hand, but he did not touch it. Looking at her a moment from head to foot as she lay in her unclean garments, he turned to where the other woman stood, a ray of light from the window shining on her fair hair and innocent face: "Do you know that I am Hugh Guinness, Kitty?"

"I knew that long ago."

"This," nodding down at the pallet, "is my wife. Now do you know why I could not go home to my father or to you?"

"God help us!" ejaculated Pollard. The next moment, remembering himself, he put his hand on McCall's shoulder: "I understand. When you were a boy, eh? Never mind: every man has his own trouble to carry."

"I've been a very real trouble to you, Hugh," whined Louise. "But I always loved you: I always meant to come back to you."

"When her later husbands had abandoned her." McCall laughed savagely, turning away.

She started up on the pallet, clenching her bony, dirty hands: "There were faults on both sides. I never would have been the woman I am if you had loved me. What will you do with me now?"

There was a dead silence in the cell, broken only by the heavy breathing of the woman. McCall stood dumb, looking first at Catharine and then at his wife.

"This is what he will do," said Kitty's clear, quiet tones. "You shall be washed and dressed, and taken home as his wife, to live or die as suits God's will."

"Never," muttered McCall.

"How soon can she leave this—this place?" she said, turning as if he had not spoken to Pollard.

"As soon as she is able to be moved. But," hesitating, with a doubtful look at McCall, "is that plan best?"

"Why, she's his wife!" with her innocent eyes wide. "He has no right to desert her. She will die if she is not properly cared for," turning to McCall.

"Do you stay with me: don't leave me," holding Kitty's sleeve. "If you would nurse me, I should get well."

"It is impossible that the lady should nurse you," said Pollard.

Kitty sat down: she began to tremble and turn white. "She has nobody but me. I'll stay," she said quietly.

McCall beckoned his fellow-physician out into the corridor.

"My dear fellow—" Pollard began.

"No: I know you sympathize with me. But we will not talk of this matter. Is that woman dying?"

"I'm afraid—that is, I think not. She is decidedly better to-day than she was last night. With care she may recover."

Kitty came out and stood with them in the corridor. McCall looked at her with amazement. The shy, silly school-girl, afraid to find her way about Berrytown, bore herself in this desperate juncture like the sagest of matrons.

"Is there no hospital to which she can be taken?" she said to Pollard.

"Yes, of course, of course."

"I'll go with her there, then. You know," laying her hand on McCall's arm, "you did marry her. You ought to try to help her poor body and soul as long as she lives."

"Would you have me take her as my wife again?"

"Not for an hour!" cried Kitty vehemently. She went into the cell, but came back in a moment: "Will you bring me some breakfast? I shall not be of much use here until it comes."

"She has more of the angel in her than any woman I ever knew," muttered McCall.

"She has a good deal of common sense, apparently," rejoined Pollard.

Kitty went with McCall's wife to the hospital, and helped to nurse her for a week. Pains and chills and nausea she could help, but for the deeper disease of soul, for the cure of which Kitty prayed on her knees, often with tears, there was little hope in her simple remedies, unless the cure and its evidence lay deep enough for only God's eye to see.

The woman's nature, of a low type at birth, had grown more brutal with every year of drunkenness and vice. She died at last, alone with Kitty.

"She said, the last thing, 'God be merciful to me a sinner!'" Kitty told the chaplain. "But I am afraid she hardly understood the meaning."

"He understood, my dear child. We can leave her with Him, You must go home now: you have done all you could. Doctor McCall will go with you?"

"No, I shall go alone: I came alone."

"He will follow you home to Berrytown, then?" for the chaplain was but a man, and his curiosity was roused to know the exact relation between McCall and this old-fashioned, lovable girl.

Kitty hesitated: "I think he will come to Berrytown again. There is some business there which his wife's death will leave him free now to attend to."

She went to a sofa and sat down: "I shall be glad to be at home," beginning to cry. "I want to see father."

"Broke down utterly," the chaplain told his wife, "as soon as her terrible work was done."

As for Kitty, it seemed to her that her work in life and death was over for ever.

"You must come back," she said when McCall put her in the cars, looking like a ghost of herself. "Your father will be wanting to see you. And—and Maria."

"Maria? What the deuce is Maria to me?"

It was no ghost of Kitty that came home that evening. The shy, lively color came and went unceasingly, and her eyes sparkled.

"Poor Maria!" she whispered to her pillow as she went to bed—"poor Maria!"

CHAPTER XV.

It was a long time before he came. Months afterward, one evening when the express-train rushed into the dépôt, Catharine went down through the walnut trees into the garden. She stopped in the shadow as a man's figure crossed the fields. The air was cool—it was early spring. The clouds in the west threw the Book-house into shadow. Hugh Guinness, coming home, could see the narrow-paned windows twinkling behind the walnut boughs. It was just as he had left it when he was a boy. There was the cow thrusting her head through a break in the fence he had made himself; the yellow-billed ducks quacked about the pond he had dug in the barnyard; the row of lilacs by the orchard fence were just in blossom: they were always the latest on the farm, he remembered. He saw Kitty, like the heart of his old home, waiting for him. Her white dress and the hair pushed back from her face gave her an appearance of curious gentleness and delicacy.

When he came to her he took both her hands in his.

"You will come to your father now?" she said, frightened and pale.

They walked side by side down the thick rows of young saplings. There was a cool bank overgrown with trumpet-creeper. Inside, he caught sight of a little recess or cave, and a gray old bench on which was just room for two.

"Will you stop here and sit down one moment?" she said.

It was nothing to him but a deserted spring-house. It was the one enchanted spot of Kitty's life.

Half an hour afterward they found old Peter playing on his violin at the doorstep. Kitty had often planned an effective bringing back of Hugh to him, but she forgot it all, and creeping up put her hands about his neck. "Father! look there, father!" she whispered.

The Book-house still stands among its walnuts in Berrytown. But a shrewd young fellow from New York has charge of it now, who deals principally in school-books and publications relative to Reforms and raspberries. Old Peter Guinness still holds an interest in it, although his chief business is that of special agent for libraries in buying rare books and pamphlets. He comes down for two or three weeks in winter to look into matters. But since his wife died he makes his home in Delaware with his son, who married, as all Berrytown knows, Kitty Vogdes after she behaved so shamefully to Mr. Muller.

Mrs. Guinness died in high good-humor with her son-in-law. "Doctor McCall," she assured her neighbors, "was exactly the man she should have chosen for Catharine. She had known him from a boy, and knew that his high social position and wealth were only his deserts. A member—vestryman indeed—of St. Luke's Church, the largest in Sussex county."

The farm-people in the sleepy, sunny Delaware neighborhood have elected Kitty a chief favorite. "A gentle, good-natured little woman, with no opinions of her own. A bit too fond of dress perhaps, and a silly, doting mother, but the most neighborly, lovable creature alive, after all."

Miss Muller was down in St. George's lecturing last fall, and made her mark, as she always does. But the Guinness men were now hopelessly conservative. She made her home with Kitty.

"A fine woman," old Peter said the morning after she was gone.

"Never knew a woman with a finer mind," said Hugh. "Nor many men."

"She nurses that dog as if it were a baby," said Kitty sharply. "It's silly! It's disgusting!"

Peter twanged his bow on the porch, looking down over the great farm-slopes stretching away in the morning light.

"We have everything to make life good to us, Hugh," he said after Kitty had gone. "And the best thing, to my notion, is an old-fashioned woman in the house, with no notion of ruling, like that Muller girl and her set."

Hugh was romping with his boy: "Do you know your first business in this world, sir? To take care of your mother," glancing at the garden, where Kitty, in her pretty white dress, was clipping chrysanthemums.

She rules him and the house and their lives absolutely, with but little regard for justice. But he has never suspected it. She hardly knows herself that she does it.

REBECCA HARDING DAVIS.

STRANGE SEA INDUSTRIES AND ADVENTURES.

The wrecker on the Florida reefs, who steps from the Peninsula into the marine world, will tell you there is nothing so like the land as the water. The crystal atmosphere of this land of meridional spring, the masses of tawny green in forests of the pine, and the deeper foliage of the live-oak and wild-orange, even that fire of flower in phaenogamous plants peculiar to the Peninsula, have their fellowship and counterparts in the lustrous scenery of the submarine world. Even the beauty of moon-like lakes and river springs is realized in the salt envelope of the under-world. Washing the keel of the submerged vessel, or bursting with a sudden chill through the tepid waters of the Gulf, with a sensible difference to feeling and to sight, the diver recognizes a river in the strata, a wayside spring in the mid-sea fountain.

As the huge volume of many Florida springs, and their peculiar characteristic of sudden sinking, give them a distinguishable quality, so the like may be recognized in the fresh-water outbursts of the neighboring seas. Silver Spring in Marion county tosses out three hundred million gallons per day; Manatee Spring discharges a less volume, but is noted for the presence of the sea-cow (Trichecus muriatus); Santa Fé, Econfinna, Chipola and Oscilla are rivers which, like classic Acheron, descend and disappear with a full head—lost rivers, as they are aptly named. Pass to the marine world, and south-west of Bataban, in the Gulf of Xagua (Cuba), a river-fountain throws up a broad white disk like a flower of water on a liquid stem, visible on the violet phosphorescence of the Caribbean Sea. Its impetuous force makes it dangerous to unwary crafts; and, to add to its recognizable characteristics, in its pure waters is to be found the sea-cow—found there and in Manatee Bay and Spring alone. To the geologist such rivers are not mysteries. The lower strata of the limestone formation are hollowed out into vast cavernous channels and chambers, through which rolls for ever the hoarse murmur of multitudinous waters. It would require the conception of a Milton or the stern Florentine who pictured Malebolge to depict those hollow passages and lofty galleries, wrought into fantastic shapes by carbon chisels, and all pure snow-white, yet unrecognizable in the sublime horror of great darkness.

It is to the animal and vegetable coral the sea owes its arborescent and floriform scenery, the counterpart of the forest and phaenogamous beauty that adorns the land. The home of these wonderful creatures must be visited to realize the beauty of their dwellings and the wonderful structures they produce. A diver who explored the serene sea about the Hayti banks gives a beautiful description of the splendors of the under-world. The white, chalky bottom is visible from the surface at a depth of one hundred feet. Over that brilliant floor the filtered sunshine spreads a cloth of gold continually flecked with sailing shadows and fluctuating tints. The singular clearness of the medium removes that lovely violet drapery which surrounds like a pavilion the submarine palace, and allows a wider scope of vision. But the scene here is not the play of sunbeams or the magic glory of the prismal waters. Form adds its grace to the loveliness of color and the play of light and shadow. The structures, the work of astraea, madrepores, andreas and meandrinas, bear a singular resemblance to fabrications of the architect. One massive dome or archway, a hundred feet in diameter, rises to the surface. Its front is carved in elaborate tracery and crusted with serpulae, looking like the fret-and flower-work that covers Saracenic architecture. Looking through this into the violet ambuscade, the eye falls upon colonnades, light slender shafts a foot in diameter, that seem to support the paly-golden, lustrous roof. It is curiously like a vast temple, spreading every way in vault and colonnade, on which religious enthusiasm or barbaric royalty has worked with a reckless waste of art and labor. Nor is it the cold and shapely beauty of the stone: it seems to be a temple built of many-colored glass. To understand the magnificence of the wonderful structure, the reader must have in mind the laws affecting light in transmission through water—the frangibility of the rays, the frequent alternations in dispersion, reflection, interference and accidental and complementary color. He must recollect that every indentation, every twist of stony serpulae or fluting of the zoophyte catches the light and divides and splinters it into radiance, burning with a fringe of silver fire or flashing steel. When the mind has conceived of that, there is to add the vivid beauty of the living coral, its hue of molten colored glass spreading a radiant mucus over the stony skeleton.

But he has not yet entered into an entire conception of its loveliness. The arborescent and phaenogamous forms of the coral are to be noticed. Here is a plant: it has a pale, gray-blue stalk, and all over it are delicate green leaves, fronds or tentacles, as you please to call them. There is a fan-shaped shrub whose starry fronds recall the Chaemerops serrulata of the adjacent shore. The ament, so to speak, of the Parasmilia centralis, the catkin of the sea, recalls its terrene counterpart. There are other flowers in fascicles and corymbs. The rose is not lacking, but glows with the radiant beauty of its petaliferous sister; the columnar trunks of stony trees, covered with green, flossy mosses, are scattered about; and fresh fountains gush from the rocks, the white water as clearly distinguishable from the ultramarine as in the upper atmosphere.[¹]

But some varieties of beauty in the coral belong to calmer seas: among others, the Red Sea is noticed for the exquisite loveliness of its coralline formations. An American explorer, well known in submarine diving, once visited that gulf sacred in history, and for a purpose certainly as singular as anything he found there. It was, to use his own words, "to fish for Pharaoh's golden chariot-wheels," lost in that famous pursuit. Is it possible, in the nature of things, for such an expedition to be made by any but an American? It takes a strong Bible faith, allied to a simple but strong self-confidence, to start a man on such an adventure. The curious transforming magic of the sea had its effect on the Arab dragoman he had engaged to assist him. Having settled on the exact spot, the swart Arabian descended, but signaled to return almost immediately, and was brought to the surface in open-eyed wonder. With all the hyperbole of Oriental imagination he swore positively to the finding of the chariot-wheels, and added the jewelry of Pharaoh's household. He was so earnest and so exact in the matter of the golden wheel, set with precious stones, that, though the captain dryly asked if he did not meet King Pharaoh himself, taking a moist throne and keeping court with the fishes, he none the less had the line attached and drew up—the rude wheel of a Tartar wagon, transformed under water, but plain and ugly enough above.

"The djin did it," explained the Arab. "It is a palace of the djins, howadji."

Though the adventurous explorer failed in his design on the defunct Egyptian, he was rewarded by some compensating views and discoveries. He saw there the Xenia elongata, a shrub-like coral distinguished for the beauty of its colors, having stellar tentacles, rose-colored, blue and lilac, an inch in diameter, and looking like flowers of living jewelry; another with a long cue, like a tress of hair, and others of allied beauty.

The coral-stone is seen and admired on centre-tables and in jewelry, but this is really the least pleasing beauty in the organism. The animal, subjected to exposure, is a brown mucus that dissipates in the sun and air, but clothed in its native element this glutinous substance is instinct with radiant life, the bodies being rose-color and the arms a pure white. Sometimes they grow in clusters and corymbs, gleaming with a pure, translucent color that fluctuates and changes in the light

Like colors of a shell,

That keep the hue and polish of the wave.

Our searcher found one unexpected verification of the story in Exodus. The passage in the Bible does not leave altogether in mystery the natural means by which the transit was effected. We are told of the strong east wind and the wall of waters. At the point near Suez a shoal extends quite across the sea. For several days this wind had borne back the shallow waters, descending as it did from the rugged mountain-slopes, and opening or sweeping back the deep as it were. Then the tide came, thrust forward in accumulated volume, until it made a real wall of waters that stood up in a huge crested, angry foam. It was sufficiently like to cause the explorer to apprehend the possibility of finding Pharaoh by traveling the same watery road. Another question that has puzzled scholars found a solution in the American's observation. Smith's Bible Dictionary discusses learnedly the name of this curious gulf, written [Greek: ae eruthra thalassa] in the Septuagint. The Dictionary surmises that the name was derived from the red western mountains, red coral zoophytes, etc., and appears to give little weight to the real and natural reason which came under our American's notice. On one occasion the diver observed, while under sea, that the curious wavering shadows, which cross the lustrous golden floor like Frauenhofer's lines on the spectrum, began to change and lose themselves. A purple glory of intermingled colors darkened the violet curtains of the sea-chambers, reddening all glints and tinges with an angry fire. Instead of that lustrous, golden firmament, the thallassphere darkened to crimson and opal. The walls grew purple, the floor as red as blood: the deep itself was purpled with the venous hue of deoxidized life-currents.

The view on the surface was even more magnificent. The sea at first assumed the light tawny or yellowish red of sherry wine. Anon this wine-color grew instinct with richer radiance: as far as eye could see, and flashing in the crystalline splendor of the Arabian sun, was a glorious sea of rose. The dusky red sandstone hills, with a border of white sand and green and flowered foliage, like an elaborately wrought cup of Bohemian glass enameled with brilliant flowers, held the sparkling liquid petals of that rosy sea. The surface, on examination, proved to be covered with a thin brickdust layer of infusoriae slightly tinged with orange. Placed in a white glass bottle, this changed to a deep violet, but the wide surface of the external sea was of that magnificent and brilliant rose-color. It was a new and pleasing example of the lustrous, ever-varying beauty of the ocean world. It was caused by diatomaceae, minute algae, which under the microscope revealed delicate threads gathered in tiny bundles, and containing rings, like blood-disks, of that curious coloring-matter in tiny tubes.

This miracle of beauty is not without its analogies in other seas. The medusae of the Arctic seas, an allied existence, people the ultramarine blue of the cold, pure sea with vivid patches of living green thirty miles in diameter. These minute organisms are doubly curious from their power of astonishing reproduction and the strange electric fire they display. Minute as these microscopic creatures are, every motion and flash is the result of volition, and not a mere chemic or mechanic phosphorescence. The Photocaris lights a flashing cirrus, on being irritated, in brilliant kindling sparks, increasing in intensity until the whole organism is illuminated. The living fire washes over its back, and pencils in greenish-yellow light its microscopic outline. Nor do these little creatures lack a beauty of their own. Their minute shields of pure translucent silex are elaborately wrought in microscopic symbols of mimic heraldry. They are the chivalry of the deep, the tiny knights with lance and cuirass, and oval bossy shield carved in quaint conceits and ornamental fashion. Nor must we despise them when we reflect upon their power of accretion. The Gallionellae, invisible to the naked eye, can, of their heraldic shields and flinty armor, make two cubic feet of Bilin polishing slate in four days. By straining sea-water, a web of greenish cloth of gold, illuminated by their play of self-generated electric light, has been collected. Humboldt and Ehrenberg speak of their voracity, their power of discharging electricity at will, and their sporting about, exhibiting an intelligent enjoyment of the life God has given to them. Man and his works perish, but the monuments of the infusoriae are the flinty ribs of the sea, the giant bones of huge continents, heaped into mountain-ranges over which the granite and porphyry have set their stony seal for ever. Man thrives in his little zone: the populous infusoriae crowd every nook of earth from the remote poles to the burning equatorial belt.

As the coral, in its soft, milky chalk, gives a name to tropical seas, so also it is a question to my simplicity if the Yellow Sea, Black Sea and White Sea do not owe their color and name, in part at least, to microscopic infusoriae. One of these, the Yellow Sea, is very similar in many characteristics to our beautiful southern gulf, and there is connected with it an incident or two illustrative of submarine adventure which is the partial purpose of this desultory sketch.

About the time our American was investing in Pharaoh's golden chariot-wheels an East Indiaman was trading its way from the English docks, eighteen weary weeks' sail by seamen's law, and more tedious by delays. They exchanged for bullion on the Gold Coast; for bullion and bad Cape brandy at Good Hope to sell to the Mohammedans, who are forbidden to drink it. At Bombay and Calcutta they exchanged bullion and brandy for opium to sell to the Chinese, who are forbidden to buy or use it. Whether the coolie trade was included in its iniquities or not, I cannot say. Very possibly that was the return cargo. From Ceylon they proceed to Siam, and thence to Hong-Kong, where they drop anchor in the offing, and by a special custom the cargo is sold and paid for in sycee silver before disfreighting, and the bullion is in the safe of the huge smuggler, although the opium has not yet been removed. The Chinese restrictive laws are very severe; but when we note that ninety thousand gallons of confiscated whisky were seized in godly Massachusetts in one year, we can infer the difficulties in the Maine law of the Celestials. The custom is for a hong, a smuggler in a Chinese junk, to draw up beside the English contrabandist and transfer the cargo in the outer harbor.

It is afternoon, and the great slumbering ocean breathes, but not with the quick, palpitating tide of the Atlantic. The smuggler sits on the oleaginous sea, tinged to ochreous yellow, waiting for evening and the confederate junk. The tropic twilight comes on swift red-golden wings that fan the vivid stars to brightness, and the rising tide breaks the surface into wrinkles of phosphorescent fire. High over head is the wide, unbroken canopy of the Pacific sky, and the gush of a larger moon than ours fills all the sphere with splendor as the huge ship stirs lazily in its Narcissus poise over its own reflection. There is a reddish glow in the western horizon over Hong-Kong, a fainter glimmer west by south over Macao, and farther west and north the reflected glories of the sacred city of Canton. The three make a semicircular crescent, like a great floating moon, on the horizon. A coral islet juts out between the cities under which the huge smuggler affects to play "I spy"—only affects, for she does not care for the authorities she bribes nor the laws she despises.

But the wind draws up the curtain of cloud by strands of rainy cordage, and men aloft are loosing the reefed topsail, bracing the after-yards and setting them for a run in on the larboard tack. They handle gaskets, bunt-lines, leech-lines, fix her best bib and spencer, like a country girl for a run up to town. Men are swarming about the yards and rigging. That is not all: Lascars, stevedores, supercargoes, the hong merchants, agents, are all busy breaking bulk. The India opium is covered with petals of the plant and stowed in chests lined with hides and covered with gunny; and these cases are locked in by stays, spars and bulkheads to prevent jamming. Helter-skelter and confusion alow and aloft, on the yards, rigging, deck, between decks and under hatches. The captain and purser are gloating over the sycee silver, for the Chinese government is as jealous of its exportation as of the importation of opium; and the sky and the sea are dark and angry. In a slovenly way the sails are trimmed, and she edges clumsily around the point with the bullion and opium, the full freight and gains of a year's voyaging and trading. Half an hour or an hour hence she will be free, and the junk dropping down to sea with the drugs in her. All at once a shriek or yell of "Hard aport!" and a great iron outward-bound steamer from Hong-Kong bursts into the unwieldy Chinaman, goes crunching through her like ripping pasteboard; tears her open; snarls through steamy nostrils and cindery fiery mouth, and growls over her wreck. And the sodden, stupefied merchantman, as if drunk with opium, goes yelling and staggering with her sleepy drugs to the bottom, and stays there, sycee silver and all.

From pricking his way across the Tartar plains, and probing in the Dead Sea and eating its fruits, just to know that living crustaceae could be found in one and pulpy flesh in the other, our Launfal, looking for the Sangreal in chariot-wheels, wound his devious way to the Flowery Kingdom, having tried a stroke or two at pearl-diving, and given some valuable hints, that were wasted, in Red Sea fishing and the Suez Canal. The sleepy Celestial seasons had gone flowering their way to paradise, and the opium-smuggler and her sycee silver lay safe and swallowed in ribs and jowl of quicksand. Our American proposed to have it up by the locks. Two things said Nay—the coral insect, which was using it in its architectural designs, and the hungry quicksand. Worst of all, the American could not find it. They hid the bulky vessel in hills of sand, and after two months' labor in submarine armor the speculator was beaten. "Get a coolie," said a resident China merchant, and he did.

Every seaport city of China is a twin. It is two cities—one inland, narrow-streeted, paved with rubble stones; the other at sea, floating on bamboo reeds. The amphibious inmates of the marine town never go ashore, but are a species of otter or seal. Besides, they are first-class thieves, as well as cowardly, cruel pirates and wreckers. They will steal the sheathing from a copper-bottomed vessel in broad daylight, and at night a guard-boat is necessary for protection. They will defy a sentry on shipboard—steal his ship from under him while he is wondering what he is set to guard. They are all expert divers, as familiar with the sea-bottom as with their own ugly little hovels. Such a native was found, and for a dollar spotted the submerged vessel in her matrix of sand and coral.

"Now set a guard-boat," said the Englishman, "or he will steal the line, to get another dollar for finding the smuggler again."

But the want of experts defeated the plan, after all. It was necessary to use a petard to lay bare the treasure, and no one had the necessary skill. When the American consented to lost time and defeat the cyclone threw another spoil in his way. The East like the West Indies is the brooding-place of storms, which in gyratory coils, like a lasso thrown wide and large, go twisting north by west. It caught a French frigate in the loop, and flung her poor bones on the coral reefs, and the hungry sand absorbed her. It is a peculiarity of those seas. But she was found, and the petard, like a huge axe wielded by a giant's arms, cut into her treasure-house and rescued it. The American's expenses for a journey round the world were paid.

I have heard a sufficiently incredible story of a man submerged in a Chinese junk and under water twelve hours, yet taken out alive. A Chinese junk is the nightmare of marine architecture. It is owned in partnership by a company, but there is this difference from an ordinary charter-party. Each man owns his share or allotment of the vessel, and it is divided off into actual compartments or boxes made water-proof; and each one of these pigeon-holes the hong or merchant owns and stocks to suit himself. All open out upon the upper deck, and are battened down—sometimes with a glass skylight if used as a chamber. The structure in junk form is the thing's proper registry, since any departure from the ancient model would subject her to heavy taxation as an alien vessel.[²] It is a very effectual mode of preventing any improvement in shipbuilding among the Chinese.

One of these clumsy arks went on the rocks in a typhoon, and was covered over her deck, leaving, however, the projecting skylight on or near a level with the surface. The hong was in this cuddy-hole, frantic between personal loss and personal peril. Suddenly there was a jar and a crash, and the sea beat over her. Fortunately, the skylight was closed water-tight, but, unfortunately, some of the spars and rigging blocked up the exit, even if he had dared the venture. The bolts of the sea barred him in.

But Chinese wreckers and Chinese thieves are on the alert. Wattai, or some such queer piratical Celestial with devilish propensities, went for the spoil, settling the salvage by arithmetic of his own. The wreck was removed from the skylight, and under the water, in that dense chamber, stagnant with mephitic air, the bruised, stupefied hong was found.

As is apparent from a previous example, the tendency of the sea-sand to absorb and conceal a sunken vessel is one of those difficulties that beset the explorer. But for that the recovery of treasure would be more frequent, the profession or business more lucrative. The number of vessels sunk annually, we learn from Lloyd's statistics, is one hundred thousand tons to the English commercial marine; and out of 551 vessels lost to the royal navy, 391 were sunk. Sir Charles Lyell estimates that there might be collected in the sea more evidences of man's art and industry than exist at any one time on the surface of the earth. But while the sea preserves, it hides. An example of the kind occurred in the wreck of the Golden Gate, a California steamer heavy with bullion. It occurred during the war, and the only expert diver within reach was an expatriated rebel. He had been a man of fortune, but, venturing too rashly in the Confederacy, he lost by confiscation and perhaps persecution. However, he was the man for the insurance companies, and a treaty was concluded, allowing him sixty per cent. salvage.

The vessel had gone down in tide water. The persistent sea had rocked and rocked it, and washed the tenacious quicksands about it, and finally concealed it. The search for it was long and tedious, and once given up or nearly given up. But as the disappointed diver was preparing to ascend his foot touched something firm, which proved to be a part of the wooden frame of the ship.

But even when found the difficulties had only begun. The tenacious, elastic sand defied all tools or leverage: no petard could blast so fickle and treacherous a substance. Wit and ingenuity can devise where ordinary art or engineering has failed. The diver took a lesson from the neighboring gold-miner, whose hydrostatic pump chisels away the mountain-side to lay bare the mother quartz. Fitted with such an engine, he swept the silted sand from the deck of the prize, and dug it out of the elastic matrix after the fashion of Macduff's birth.

By a great misfortune, incipient jealousies and the eager spirit of covetousness now showed themselves. It was at first whispered, and then asseverated, that if the bullion was once recovered the rebel might whistle for his sixty per cent. salvage. It was a bitter, bad time—a time of mistrust and suspicion—and the plan of defrauding the diver was only too feasible. He would be involved in a suit with a wealthy company at a time when prejudice, if not the form of law, regarded him as having forfeited a citizen's right. It placed him in a difficult position—more difficult because he could get no safe assurance, and was evidently suspected and watched. The diver concluded that his only way to secure his sixty per cent. salvage was to take it.

So it was that, with something of the feelings of the resurrectionists, a bold, dark party went to rob the charnel-house of the sea, to spoil it of its golden bones and wedgy ingots of silver. They chose a mirky night, when the thick air seemed too clotted and moist to break into hurly-burly of storm, and yet too heavy and dank to throw off the black envelope of fog and cloud. The black, oleaginous water seemed to slope from the muffled oar in a gluey, shining wave, and the heavy ripple at the bow of their boat parted in a long, adhesive roll, sloping away, but not breaking into froth or glisten of electric fire. The air and the sea seemed brooding in a heavy, hopeless misery, and the strange sense of plundering, not the living, but the dead, as if the sunken vessel was a huge coffin, was upon them. With that cautious sense of superstitious dread choking their muttered whispers, they reached the spot and prepared to descend. The task of sinking through that pitchy consistence, into the intricacy of that black, coffin-like hold, among the drowned corpses, to do a deed of doubtful right, must have intensified the horror of great darkness and that sublimity of silence that in the under-sea peoples the void shadows with horrible existences and fills the concave with voices. But it was done; and with trembling eagerness the weighty ingots, the unalloyed bars, were safely shipped, loading down the boat. Then louder and louder came the dash of oars. For a few moments they felt the way with muffled stroke into the shrouding shadows. But practiced ears caught the softened roll in the rollocks, and keen eyes marked the shadowy boat in the deepening gloom. It must be the skilled oar and adroit steering that saves them now, but not far away lie the long shadows of the shelving coast and its black-bearded forest. The swing of the oars became bold, open and exciting, and angry challenges passed. But the burden of the heavy gold fought against them, like the giant's harp calling Master! Master! on the shoulders of flying Jack of the Bean-stalk. The light, trim craft of the pursuers edged upon them, and the shadow of an angry struggle in the pitchy, reeking night gloomed over them. "No, no," said the leader: "no bloodshed for the cursed stuff! Here, give me a lift;" and with a heave and plunge the massy rouleaux splashed into the water, and the boat rose lighter with an easier conscience. The sea shut close-fisted over its own, while the pursuing boat paused and eddied about it, as if held to the treasure by invisible, impalpable strands. The pursuit was abandoned, and the betrayed or treacherous diver escaped. But busy rumor reports that he returned at leisure to the spot, and that the bullion of the Golden Gate went to replenish the forfeited fortune of the bold ex-rebel. Believe as you like, good reader.

The sea-sand, in its industrious zeal in covering up memorials of man's art and industry, is often curiously assisted by the zoophytes and vegetation of the ocean, as well as guarded in its labor by abnormal monsters of piscine creation. An example of this occurred in an amusing venture after Lafitte's gold. While the Gulf coast of Western Louisiana is fortified, in its immature terre tremblante, by the coral reefs and islets, it has the appearance of having been torn into ragged edges by the hydrostatic pressure of the Gulf Stream. On one of these little islets or keys, hard by Caillon Bay, the rumor went that the buccaneer had sunk a Spanish galleon laden with pieces of eight and ingots of despoiled Mexico. The people thereabout are a simple, credulous race of Spanish Creoles, speaking no English, keeping the saints' days, and watching the salt-pans of the more energetic but scarcely more thrifty Americans with curious wonder. They chanced in their broken tongue to commit the story of the treasure to a diver of an equally simple faith, who set about putting it to more practical use than to gild an hour with an old legend. They told how the spook of the Spanish captain haunted the wreck, and that the gold was guarded by a dragon in the shape of a monstrous horned and mottled frog, or some other devil of the sea, to which the diver did seriously incline, but not to make him give up the undertaking. He prudently, however, consulted with an old Indian witch, and so received the devil's good word, and piously got a bottle of holy water from the priest, and thus was well fenced in above and below.

But his coadjutors were inexperienced, and perhaps his own courage was of that saccharine character that gets oozy and slushy in moist perils. When descending with his leaded boots on the dark green outline of sea mosses that in the clear Gulf invested the vessel in a verdurous coat, by some mistake he was let down with a slip, and went hurtling through the rotten planks, losing his holy water and sending his witch's wand—well, to its original owner. He crushed through, and the infinite dust of infusoriae and diatomaceae choked his vision. The Teredo navalis, whose labors are so destructive in southern seas, had perforated the old hulk, and converted the vessel into a spongy mass of wood, clay and lime. Innumerable algae and curious fungi of the sea, hydroids, delicate-frost formed emerald plumuluria and campanuluna, bryozoa, mollusks, barnacles and varieties of coral had used it as a builder's quarry and granary. As the geologist finds atom by atom of an organism converted into a stony counterfeit, these busy existences had preserved the vessel's shape, but converted the woody fibre to their own uses. He could see nothing at first but a mixture of green and ochreous dust, through which tiny electric fires went quivering and shaking. In the confusion he lost the signal line, and had no way of making his condition known. Plunging about as the sea dust began to settle, and already more intent on finding the life-line and getting out of that than of securing Lafitte's gold, he observed some spectators not pleasant to look upon. A lobster or a crab is much pleasanter upon the table than in the sea, and there were other things he knew, and some he believed, might not take his hasty visit pleasantly. There was the horseshoe-fish with ugly strings hanging from his base, disagreeable arachnides, strange star fish and their parasites, and, curiously, a large wolfish fish that had built a nest and was watching it and him—watching him with no agreeable or timid expression in its angry eyes. He was just expecting Victor Hugo's devil fish to complete his horror when a sudden, sharp, bone-breaking shock struck him from an electrical eel or marine torpedo. This was a real and sensible danger, and as he struggled to ascend the hulk to the rotten half-deck, the spongy substance gave way, the treacherous quicksand, with its smooth, tenacious throat-clutch, slid down and caught him. The danger was real and imminent, when his companions above, observing the slide, drew him up. And that, I believe, was the first and last attempt to levv on Lafitte's gold.

But the experience of Pharaoh and the danger of our rambling wrecker are not the only instances of the wall of waters or the destruction it causes. Nine days after a storm in the Gulf, a traveler, finding his way from the salt-pans of Western Louisiana, took a little fishing-craft. There was that fresh purity in the air and the sea which follows the bursting of the elements. The numerous "bays" and keys that indent the shore looked fresher and brighter, and there was that repentant beauty in Nature which aims to soothe us into forgetfulness of its recent angry passions. The white-winged sea-birds flew about, and tall water-fowl stood silently over their shadows like a picture above and below. The water sparkled with salt freshness, and the roving winds sat in the shoulder of the sail, resting and riding to port.

The little bark slipped along the shores and shallows, and in and out by key and inlet, seeing its shadow on the pure white sand that seemed so near its keel. The last vestige of the storm was gone, and the little Gulf-world seemed fresher and gladder for it. The tropical green grasses and water-plants hung their long, linear, hairlike sheaths in graceful curves, and patches of willow-palm and palmetto, in many an intricate curve and involution, made a labyrinth of verdure. The wild loveliness of the numerous slips and channels, where never a boat seemed to have sailed since the Indian's water-logged canoe was tossed on the shadowy banks, was enhanced by the vision of distant ships, their sails even with the water, or broken by the white buildings of a sleepy plantation in its bower of fig and olive and tall moss-clustered pines.

Suddenly the traveler fancied he heard a cry, but the fishermen said No—it was the scream of water-fowl or the shrill call of an eagle far above dropping down from the blue zenith; and they sailed on. Again he heard the distant cry, and was told of the panther in the bush and wild birds that drummed and called with almost human intonation; and they sailed on again. But again the mysterious, troubled cry arose from the labyrinth of green, and the traveler entreated them to go in quest of it. The fishers had their freight for the market—delay would deteriorate its value; but the anxious traveler bade them put about and he would bear the loss.

It was well they did. There, in the dense coverts of the sea-swamps, amid the brackish water-growths and grasses, they found a man and woman, ragged, torn, starved. For nine days they had had no food but the soft pith of the palmetto, coarse mussels or scant poison-berries, their bed the damp morass, and their drink the brackish water; and they told the wild and terrible story of Last Island.

Last Island was the Saratoga and Long Branch of the South, the southern-most watering-place in the Gulf. Situated on a fertile coral island enriched by innumerable flocks of wild-fowl, art had brought its wealth of fruit and flower to perfection. The cocoanut-palm, date-palm and orange orchards contrasted their rich foliage in the sunshine with the pineapple, banana and the rich soft turf of the mesquit-grass. The air was fragrant with magnolia and orange bloom, the gardens glittering with the burning beauty of tropical flower, jessamine thickets and voluptuous grape arbors, the golden wine-like sun pouring an intoxicating balm over it; graceful white cottages festooned with vines, with curving chalet or Chinese roofs colored red; pinnacled arbors and shadowy retreats of espaliers pretty as a coral grove; and a fair shining hotel in the midst, with arcades and porches and galleries--the very dream of ease and luxury, as delicate and trim as if made of cut paper in many forms of prettiness. Here was the nabob's retreat; in this balmy garden of delight all that luxury, art and voluptuous desire could hint or hope for was collected; and nothing harsh or poor or rugged jarred the fullness of its luxurious ease.

Ten nights before its fragrant atmosphere was broken into beautiful ripples by the clang and harmony of dancing music. It was the night of the "hop." The hotel was crowded. Yachts and pleasure-vessels pretty as the petals of a flower tossed on the water, or as graceful shells banked the shores; and the steamer at twilight came breathing short, excited breaths with the last relay, for it was the height of the summer season. In their light, airy dresses, as the music swam and sung, bright-eyed girls floated in graceful waltzes down the voluptuous waves of sound, and the gleam of light and color was like a butterflies' ball. The queenly, luscious night sank deeper, and lovers strolled in lamp-lighted arcades, and dreamed and hoped of life like that, the fairy existence of love and peace; and so till, tired of play, sleep and rest came in the small hours.

Hush! All at once came the storm, not, as in northern latitudes, with premonitory murmur and fretting, lashing itself by slow degrees into white heat and rain, but the storm of the tropics, carrying the sea on its broad, angry shoulders, till, reaching the verdurous, love-clustered little isle, it flung the bulk of waters with all its huge, brawny force right upon the cut-paper prettinesses, and broke them into sand and splinters. Of all those pretty children with blue and with opalescent eyes, arrayed like flowers of the field; of all those lovers dreaming of love in summer dalliance, and of cottages among figs and olives; of all the vigorous manhood and ripe womanhood, with all the skill and courage of successful life in them,—not a tithe was saved. The ghastly maw of the waters covered them and swallowed them. A few sprang, among crashing timbers, on a floor laden with impetuous water—the many perhaps never waked at all, or woke to but one short prayer. The few who were saved hardly knew how they were saved—the many who died never knew how they were slain or drowned.

It has twice been my fortune in life to see such a storm, and to know its sudden destruction: once, to see a low, broad, shelving farm-house disappear to the ground timbers before my eyes, as if its substance had vanished into air, while great globes of electric fire burst down and sunk into the ground; once, to see a pine forest of centuries' growth cut down as grass by the mower's scythe. I do not think it possible to see a third and survive, and I do not wish my soul to be whirled away in the vortex of such a storm.

At noon or later, after the ruin of Last Island, a gentleman of a name renowned in South-western story found himself clinging to a bush in the wild waters, lashed by the long whips of branches, half dead with fatigue and fear. For a time the hurly-burly blinded and hid everything, and the long roll rocked and tore at him in desperate endeavor to wrench loose his bleeding fingers. The impulse of the wind and storm at such a time is as of a solid body, and there is a look of solidity in the very appearance of the magnificent force. But as it abated he thought he heard a faint cry, and looking around he saw a poor girl in the ribbons of her night-dress clinging to a branch, and slipping from her feeble hold. Tired as he was, and wild and dangerous as the attempt might be, he did not dare to leave her to perish. Choosing his time in a lull, he struck out to the bush, and reached it just as her ebbing strength gave way. He took her in his sturdy arms, and, clinging with tooth and nail, stayed them both to their strange anchorage. Faint, half conscious, disrobed as she was, in the sweet, delicate features, the curve of the lip, and the raven tresses clothed in seaweed, he recognized the Creole belle of last night's hop. He cheered and encouraged her, pointing out that the storm was abating, had abated. It could not be long until search-boats came, and while he had strength to live she should share it. It proved true. Generous and hardy fishers and ships had come at once to the scene of disaster, and were busy picking up the few spared by wind and wave. They found the two clinging together and to that slight bush, and took them off, wrapping them in ready, rough fishermen's coats. The reader can see the end of that story. A meeting so appointed had its predestined end in a love-match. So we leave it and them: the rest of their lives belongs to them, not to us.

The pair found by our fishing-smack were a wealthy planter and his wife. For nine days of starvation and danger they had clung together. When I think of the husband's manly care in thus abiding by the wife, I find it hard to reconcile it with the fact that he only valued his life and hers at a few dollars—not enough to compensate the traveler for the loss incurred as demurrage to the fishermen.

Now Last Island is but a low sandy reef, on which a few straggling fruit trees try to keep the remembrance of its bygone beauty. It is as bare and desolate as the bones of those who filled its halls in the cataclysm of that dreadful night—bones which now waste to whiteness on sterile shores or are wrought into coral in the under-sea.

WILL WALLACE HARNEY.

Footnote 1: [(return)] The difficulty, I am aware, in venturing on a description is, that it will appear rather a fever of fancy than an accurate chromoscope. I can only point to the fact that the revelation of the intense beauty of the sea has in recent years fallen rather to the naturalist than the poet, the accurate and scientific prose of the former surpassing the idealization of the latter.

Footnote 2: [(return)] By recent provision the Chinese are allowed to buy foreign vessels.

POSEY'S NUGGET.

When the California "gold fever" broke out in the spring of 1849, Doctor Hanchett was living at Clarksville in Southern Indiana. Doctor Hanchett, it should be stated, had received his professional title not by the favor of any medical college or other learned institution, but through the simpler and less formal method that obtains among the free and generous people amongst whom his lines were cast. The process may be explained in a few words. In the fall of 1846 a recruiting station was established at Vicksburg to enlist volunteers for the war with Mexico, and Hanchett, at that time a resident of Vicksburg, and laboring in a profession—the saltatorial, to wit—a shade less illustrious than that to which he was so soon to attain, was the first man in the city to enlist. This momentous circumstance procured for him not only the prompt recognition of a patriotic press, which blazoned his name abroad with so many eccentricities of spelling that he came near losing his identity, but also gave him a claim in courtesy to such a position in the organization of his company, within the grasp of the mere high private, as he might select. After due deliberation he chose that of company commissary—an office unknown, I think, to the United States Army Regulations, but none the less familiar to our volunteer service. To this post he was promptly appointed by his captain; and, thus placed in the line of promotion, he rose rapidly till he attained the rank of hospital steward. The thing was done. Hanchett was Doctor Hanchett from that day, and the title was very much the larger part of the man ever after. How he had lived for forty years or more without it is still a mystery.

When the war was over, Doctor Hanchett stranded upon the northern bank of the Ohio, in the State of Indiana. As a returning brave he was, naturally, quite warmly received. As a veteran not unwilling to recount his adventures by flood and field, he speedily became famous as the hero of many deeds of valor and of blood. He had been assistant surgeon of his regiment, it appeared, but nevertheless had fought in the ranks in every important engagement of the war from Monterey to Churubusco, and the number of men who had fallen by his own hand from first to last he could not undertake to estimate. Though traces of a somewhat lively imagination might be detected in most of the doctor's stories, there is really no good reason to doubt that he spoke the simple truth when he averred that with his red right hand he had mowed down men like grass, for he actually retained the position of hospital steward throughout the whole term of his service.

Finding himself after the lapse of a few weeks not without honor in this Indiana town, he struck out suddenly one day a brilliant idea: he would devote his remaining years to the practice of the profession into which Fortune had so kindly inducted him. He hired a house, hung out his banner, and wrote to his wife and daughter, who had remained at Vicksburg, to come on immediately to his new home, as his fortune was now made.

Hanchett had married, at an early stage in his original career, the only daughter of a bankrupt Vicksburg storekeeper. This young woman, who had doubtless found ample opportunity for the practice of domestic economy in the paternal home, soon proved herself to be a most excellent housekeeper on her own account. She was a jewel indeed to her improvident husband, who, finding that she made shift by one means or another to keep the family larder supplied, whether he kept her purse supplied or not, dismissed a great care from his mind at once and for ever, and thenceforth to the end of his days never exerted himself beyond his natural bent. As the daughter, Dora Hanchett, grew to womanhood, she divided her mother's burden with her, and ultimately, as the mother's health failed, relieved her of it almost entirely.

The family once reunited and domiciled in their new home, it soon became evident to the most casual observer that Dora exercised the functions of commander-in-chief of that force, and that the doctor, notwithstanding his brilliant record in the field, had been incontinently reduced to the ranks, and subjected to a rather rigid discipline. Let it not be inferred, however, that Dora ruled with a high hand or with a rod of iron. Far from it. She was the quietest and meekest of tyrants, controlling not by conscious will or effort, but by divine commission, as many a woman does.

Not only was Dora the head of the household in the sense of directing its internal affairs, but she likewise soon proved herself to be its mainstay as bread-winner. The doctor under her hands became a dignified and not unornamental figure-head to the concern, in whom she took a certain filial pride. His banner was still allowed to hang upon the outer wall, and, as some slight justification of the legend borne upon it, the semblance of an office was maintained for him, where he spent many solitary and irksome hours daily in the semblance of professional study and work. But his income did not amount even to a semblance, and upon Dora, therefore, devolved the task of maintaining the cuisine as well as the character of the establishment. She had been accustomed to this duty indeed ever since, upon becoming a schoolteacher at the age of sixteen, she had proved her capacity to perform it. She early found her place in the public schools of Clarksville, and so the pot was soon boiling merrily, and the demands of the doctor's magnificent appetite were duly honored at sight.

Thus, Doctor Hanchett was enabled to live a life of elegant leisure, devoid of care and fruitful of enjoyment to a man of his temperament, for some fourteen months. Then he was suddenly smitten with the "gold fever," and went raging through the town, seeking whom he might infect. It was one of the curiosities of this singular epidemic that it claimed not only those youthful and adventurous spirits who were by common consent held to be its legitimate victims, but carried off also old and infirm men, chronic invalids, and, stranger still, such shiftless, incompetent and altogether worthless cumberers of the ground as this Doctor Hanchett; thus proving itself to be, like most other contagions, a not entirely unmixed evil.

Not wholly through the efforts of Doctor Hanchett, it is safe to say, but in due process of time and events, a company was mustered in Clarksville to go overland to California, as so many other companies were mustered in hundreds of other towns all over the country in that memorable spring of '49. This company, composed principally of men from the surrounding country, and containing only two or three residents of the village proper, regarded itself as peculiarly fortunate in being able to count among its members a gentleman like Doctor Hanchett, who, besides being a physician, was an old campaigner, and thus likely to prove doubly desirable as a comrade in an expedition like that upon which they were embarked.

It being definitely settled that the doctor was to march with his company upon a certain day not far distant, it devolved upon his chancellor of the exchequer to provide the sinews of war. Whether Dora found this duty an agreeable one or not, she performed it promptly and cheerfully. The little hoard that by the sharpest economy the frugal girl had contrived to save from her earnings was placed in the doctor's hands without reserve, to be appropriated, first to the purchase of an outfit, and next to the defrayment of the general expenses of the campaign.

Proverbially careful and judicious in the expenditure of money, as may be supposed, in the purchase of his supplies on this occasion Doctor Hanchett quite outshone himself. Besides the indispensable pans and shovels and picks with which every man provided himself, Doctor Hanchett laid in an assortment of miscellaneous drugs and surgical instruments, that added a new lustre to his distinction in the eyes of his comrades. But it was in the compilation of his wardrobe and his deadly weapons that he displayed an individuality of taste altogether unique. It being now the month of May, and the journey across the Plains being expected to occupy about three months, the doctor, who was a small man, bought first a great—uncommonly great—coat, that fitted him about as snugly as a sentry-box might have done; secondly, a pair of cavalry boots, the tops of which towered almost to his eyebrows; and thirdly, a silk hat of the very finest and very tallest description to be found in the market. Then he purchased a pair of large Colt's revolvers, handsomely mounted in silver, and had his name engraved on the plate in bold letters—"ELIAS HANCHETT, M.D.;" and his armory was completed by the addition of numerous and various knives of vast length and breadth of blade, into the hasp of each of which was let a neat silver plate, upon which was engraved his name—"ELIAS HANCHETT, M.D." Thus clad and thus arsenaled, he bore down upon Dora with much elation as she was returning home from her school, and proudly challenged her admiration. Of course the loving girl responded heartily, notwithstanding her thrifty and methodical soul was racked to see such few of her hardly-earned coins as remained unexpended falling to the ground and rolling away in all directions as the doctor turned pocket after pocket inside out in search of yet another and another knife to surprise her withal.

At last the company got off, going by river to Council Bluffs, and thence striking out upon the almost interminable trail, that, however surely it might lead to fortune, was far from being a royal road thereto. It was two months later when a member of the party, compelled by ill-health to abandon the tedious journey and return home, brought to Clarksville the first intelligence of the achievements of Doctor Hanchett in the capacity of a physician and surgeon in actual practice. These achievements cannot be recorded here, but a single incident may be mentioned as indicating the estimation in which the doctor's skill speedily came to be held by his companions. Before the expedition had been three weeks upon the march his surviving comrades, taking alarm at the rapidly augmenting number of lonely graves with which they were dotting the dreary trail, hastily formed a conspiracy to despoil him of his enginery of death. Under the silent stars, what time the doctor was sleeping the deep sleep of the overworked practitioner, his medicine-case and his miscellaneous assortment of cutlery were quietly spirited away, and were never seen again. The doctor proclaimed his loss upon waking in the morning, and felt it keenly. He declared, however, that he deplored the casualty chiefly in the interest of his companions, who were thus deprived, at one fell blow, of his further services; and he cursed very heartily, in the same interest, the "dastardly red-skins," whom he assumed to be guilty of the theft.

Dora and her mother waited long and anxiously for a letter from the doctor's own hand, and after many months it came. It was dated from "the Heart of the Gold Region," and, after asking them to join him in due ascriptions of thanks to the Almighty Powers for his deliverance from many perils and his safe arrival in the promised land, and after passing lightly over the invaluable services he had been able to render to his companions in his professional capacity—it was not for a modest man to dwell upon these—the doctor proceeded to state frankly that his success in the gold fields had far exceeded his most sanguine hopes; that, indeed, he might even then call himself an opulent man, inasmuch as nothing but the necessary papers were wanting to confirm him in the possession of a half interest in the Big Grizzly Claim—a claim that promised an enormously rich yield as soon as arrangements could be perfected for developing it. He advised his daughter to give up her school at once, and to begin to prepare herself for that happy change in her circumstances which was now so near at hand; and he closed by requesting her to send him by return of mail fifty dollars, and more if she could possibly spare more, as he urgently required a little money for "present needs."

Is it necessary to say how this clear-headed and conscientious girl acted upon reading this transparent balderdash? She knew, as well as you and I know, that the whole thing was a clumsy game of her worthy sire to deplete once more the little hoard that had been slowly growing during his absence. She knew that her mother, who had worn her life out trying to support an ornamental husband, was fast failing in health, and might very soon require such attendance as nothing but money could procure. And of course she went directly to the bank, drew out her entire deposit, and sped it on its way to Elias Hanchett, M.D., before the sun went down.

It was nearly a year after the arrival of his first letter when another epistle was received from the absent doctor. Bad news this time—the worst of bad news. He had been stricken down by a terrible malady at a most critical moment in his affairs, and the consequence was that his interests had suffered irretrievably. He might call himself, in short, a ruined man. He felt that his distress of mind, together with the physical anguish of his disease, was more than he could bear up against for many hours longer. It was hard for an old man to die thus among strangers, far from his own hearthstone and the gentle influences that clustered round it. But he should be consoled in his last hour by the reflection that he had always maintained his family liberally, and had tried to be a kind and indulgent husband and father; and he hoped that his daughter, thus left alone in the world without any earthly protector, would not wholly despair, but would strive for his sake to bear up against adversity, and prove herself worthy of the father who had lost his life in trying to serve her in his old age. And so farewell! His eyes were now about to close for the last time upon the scenes of this earth. Signed ELIAS HANCHETT, M.D., with the customary flourish beneath the name, as bravely executed as if the writer might have twenty years of life ahead of him yet. But stay! P.S. Would not his dear daughter, for whom he had sacrificed so much, grant him one last little favor? He had not means enough left out of the sad wreck of his fortune to procure him decent burial. Would she not send him a small sum for that purpose? She might direct it to his own address, for if he were gone it would be received by a friend, who would apply it faithfully according to the directions he should leave. "And now again farewell! And may we meet above!" Signed ELIAS HANCHETT, M.D. Flourish as usual.

I do not believe that Dora Hanchett's honest estimate of this letter was very far different from our own. I am persuaded that she was mentally incapable of being seriously deceived by it. But the heart of woman is the mystery of the universe. In the face of her honest judgment, in the truth of that clear common sense that constituted the strongest trait in her character, this absurd girl went about bemoaning in dead earnest and in the bitterest grief the death of her father. This lasted a week; by which time she had succeeded in convincing her mother, at least, that the affliction was a real one; and that good lady, being finally, as she believed, released from her responsibility, and having no occasion to live longer, quietly and peacefully passed away. And Dora, by the light of this actual sorrow, came after a while to acknowledge to herself that she had been breaking her heart over a fictitious one.

Of course the money had gone on before this time, and she was far from wishing to recall it now. If her father was alive, he was welcome to it, she said, for he could not possibly put it to a worse use than that to which it had been dedicated.

A girl as good as Dora could not be left friendless, whatever domestic affliction she might suffer; and so with all her trouble she had no opportunity to become absorbed in her sorrow. It would have pained her unspeakably if she had been aware that her friends generally, however, so far from inclining to grieve with her grief at the possibility of her father's death, were quite unanimous in the view that such a dispensation would be "the best thing for Dory that ever turned up." For her part, she could not, after all, rid her mind of the apprehension that her father might possibly have been in as serious extremity as his letter represented. And if so, and she neglected to do her utmost to succor him in his need, what peace could she ever find in this world again? In this way she dwelt upon the subject, until at last she convinced herself that her whole duty lay in nothing less than an immediate effort to go to him. If, fortunately, she should find him alive and well, she would gladly share his fortune, however hard it might be, and would never leave him so long as he lived. But if, as she feared, he should prove to be indeed sick and near his end in that wild region, where, she asked, should his daughter be but at his side?

This is the ridiculous way in which such headstrong creatures as this Dora Hanchett are accustomed to meet you when you seek to point out to them the unreasonableness of a line of conduct on which they have set their hearts.

Deaf to all arguments, therefore, Dora shut up her house and set about making preparations for her journey. In the adjoining county, as she had learned, a company of gold-hunters had been organized, and was then on the point of starting for the Sacramento Valley, in which was situated the little town from which her father had last written. Of this company of sixty men she knew but one, and he was a mere boy in years, the youngest of the party. This was Hiram Bridge, familiarly termed Posey in honor of his native county, who four years before had been one of Dora's first pupils in her Clarksville school. She was little more than a girl herself at that time, and Hiram was her biggest boy; and her recollection now of the bond of good-fellowship that soon grew up between herself and the shy, overgrown but not overbright lad relieved her of any hesitation she might otherwise have felt in applying to him to obtain permission for her to accompany his party to its destination.

"Yes, you can go, Miss Hanchett," Posey quietly replied to her appeal.

"But will the rest of the men be willing?" she suggested.

"Doesn't signify," said Posey.

She did prevail on him, however, as a matter of form, to mention the subject to his comrades; but as he never took the trouble to report to her what action, if any, they took in the matter, she started at last, relying altogether on his single friendship for protection. That was no mean reliance, though, as she soon began to realize. He was an immense fellow, six feet two in height, and broad in proportion; and he soon proved to Dora that, however readily he had undertaken her safe conduct, he did not lightly esteem that charge, but was determined to aid and befriend her in every way possible. Thus at the outset she found herself relieved of much of the embarrassment and annoyance she had believed to be inseparable from such a journey in such companionship. Posey himself she did not find to be companionable in the ordinary sense of that word, notwithstanding his constant kindness. He was of a quiet turn, reserved; of speech, rather forbidding of countenance, and did not wear his excellent heart upon his sleeve. There were few surface indications of the gold that was in him. Dora was not long, however, in finding the auriferous vein; and, to drop metaphor, she soon became conscious of a very warm sentiment of gratitude growing up in her heart toward her uncouth guide, philosopher and friend.

Posey's outfit consisted of a pair of powerful mules and a covered wagon, with the usual mining and cooking utensils, and the provisions necessary for the journey. In the forward part of this wagon, while the expedition was on the march, Dora sat enthroned; and in its dusky recesses she made her couch at night. Not only did the loyal Posey devote himself to her guardianship by day, but he kept watch and ward by night, sitting bolt upright within a couple of yards of his precious charge until the stars grew pale in the dawn. Then, if opportunity offered, he would snatch a surreptitious nap, still disdaining to lie down, however; and it frequently occurred that the earlier risers in the camp would discover Posey sitting on the ground, embracing his nether limbs with his long arms, while his head, with its close-cut, sandy hair, sank slumberous between his towering knees, like the sun going down between two mountain-peaks. To such a length did he carry these romantic vigils that he shortly came to look as gaunt and hollow-eyed as Famine. In addition to which he had to endure no end of raillery from his not too considerate or fastidious companions, who, so far from inclining to harm a hair of Dora's head, were generally wholly indifferent to her presence, and could not enter into Posey's solicitude on her behalf.

Just here, also, Jake Savage, who had spent a year in the mines and was piloting the present expedition, was reminded of a story, which he obligingly related to Posey, apropos.

"You see, Posey," said Jake, "me and Hooker—Hooker was my chum—had been scratchin' and washin' for about seven or eight dollars a day down there to McCracken's Bend, till we got disgusted, and we made up our minds that if we couldn't make more'n that we might as well give up and strike for the States. But just then who should come along but little Bill Skinner, bound all so fast for up the gulch? Bill had been prospectin' around all summer on his own hook, but hadn't struck nothin' yet, and was so much worse off than we was that Hooker and me concluded to stay by a while longer. A day or two afore, we found out, little Bill had run across a Digger somewhere that had told him—the Lord knows how, for I never see a Digger that, could talk English more'n a mule,—but this Digger told little Bill that up the gulch there was rich diggin's. And so Bill was on the rampage to get there. Of course me and Hooker we didn't take no stock in that yarn, and little Bill went off alone.

"A couple of months after that me and Hooker see we'd got to do something pretty quick or starve, and so we made up our minds to prospect a little. We headed up the gulch, but without ever thinkin' of little Bill, and as indications was good, we kept on in the same direction for a couple of days. It was on the third day out, and we'd got about twenty miles from the Bend, and hadn't struck nothin' yet to bet on, when all of a sudden Hooker yells out, 'Holy Moses, Jake! look-a there!' and what do you s'pose we see?

"About as fur as from here to that mule there, leanin' ag'in a tree, sot little Bill Skinner—what was left of him, I mean, for he was as dead as a dornick. And what do you s'pose he was a-settin' on? A nugget of the pure metal worth forty thousand dollars! Yes, sir! We could see in a minute how it was. Bill had found this nugget, and bein' weak for want of grub, of course he couldn't carry it. So he had sot down on it to guard it. And there he sot and sot. He dassent go to sleep for fear somebody'd hook it, and he couldn't leave it to get any grub for the same reason. We could see he'd browsed 'round on the bushes as fur as he could reach, but that couldn't keep him alive long, and so there he'd sot and sot till finally he'd pegged out.

"And that's what's the matter with Posey. I wakes up in the night and sees him a-settin' thar by that wagon, and says I to myself, 'Thar sets Posey on his nugget!' And one of these fine mornin's we'll find nothin' but Posey's bones a-settin' there, and his buttons and such like."

About this time, as they were now nearing the region where danger from Indian raids was apprehended, Savage's company and another party hailing from Illinois joined forces for mutual protection, and all proceeded thenceforward under Savage's direction. Accompanying this Illinois party was a woman going out to the diggings to join her husband, who was prospering, and had sent for her to come on. The two women thereafter keeping constantly together, Posey felt his responsibility so far lightened that he occasionally indulged himself in a "square" night's sleep, while Dora and her new-found friend slumbered beneath his ample wagon-cover.

His partial separation from Dora, occasioned by the advent of this other woman on the scene, soon opened Posey's eyes to the fact that a total separation from her would take the ground entirely from under his feet, and leave him in a condition that he felt disinclined to contemplate so long as there might be a chance to avert such a calamity. He accordingly improved the first opportunity that offered, and cast himself at the feet of Dora—literally, mind you, on the lee side of a sage bush—and lisped his love. On this sacred ground let us tread as lightly as may be. Suffice it that Posey's suit prospered, and that presently a little programme came to be agreed upon between the contracting parties to this effect: They would go on for the present precisely as if nothing had happened—Dora to seek her father and Posey to seek his fortune. As soon, however, as Dora should have succeeded in restoring the doctor to health, or had haply buried him, Posey should be notified, and they would thereupon be married. Then Dora would open a school somewhere, wherever she might chance to find the indispensable children, while Posey, accompanied by his newly-fledged father-in-law, if perchance that worthy individual should be spared, would launch into the mines and conquer Fortune at the point of the pick.

Time flew fast with the lovers after this, and they were quite startled one day when Savage informed them that they were upon the very borders of the promised land.

That evening, an hour before sunset, the train was halted for the night at a point whence the travel-worn adventurers could look down for the first time into the Sacramento Valley, and render thanks in their various ways that the end of their tedious pilgrimage was almost reached. As Dora Hanchett and Posey stood together upon a green knoll, following with their eyes the winding trail that their feet were to descend on the morrow, they descried, toiling slowly toward them, one of those returning bands of unsuccessful and discouraged veterans—the reflux of the great wave of immigration constantly pouring into the golden valley—which they had frequently met in the course of their long journey. As the cavalcade drew nearer, Dora's attention fixed itself upon a curious figure that brought up the rear. Mounted upon a loose aggregation of bones and ears that purported to be a mule, this mysterious figure gradually approached, while Dora watched it as if fascinated. On and on it came, and still she gazed, spell-bound. Opposite her it paused. There was no longer any doubt: it was He. Clad in the mangled remains of the original great-coat, the original boot-tops yet towering in the region of his ears, and the upper half of the original beaver crowning his well-developed brain, there He was. Slowly and carefully he descended from the back of his shambling steed, settled himself well in his boots, pulled up the collar of his great-coat—and there was little but collar left of it—tipped the curtailed and weatherbeaten stovepipe to the proper angle, opened his paternal arms and feebly embraced his daughter. He announced himself to all concerned as a broken man—a poor unfortunate going home to die, where his bones might rest with those of his ancestors, and where his humble name and his honorable record in the service of his country would be cherished by his fellow-citizens after he should be gone. Providence had surely, in his extremity, drawn his daughter to his succor. Now he was relieved of all anxiety, and might turn his mind to things above. His daughter would fan the spark of life, and keep it burning, God willing, till the old home should be reached. Then he would release her from her labor of love. Then he would be at peace with all the world, and would cheerfully die in the midst of his weeping friends. He had up to this hour been haunted with the apprehension that his poor old frame might be left to moulder somewhere in the wide, inhospitable desert that stretched between him and his roof-tree. Now that dreadful apprehension was banished. The Lord had remembered his own. Dora would walk beside his beast and protect him, and the knowledge that she had thus been instrumental in prolonging her father's life would be her exceeding great reward.

A most enchanting prospect for Dora, was it not? Even she did not put her neck under the yoke until she had first informed her father of her momentous secret, and invited him to assume his rôle in the programme already mentioned as arranged by her lover and herself. But, as a matter of course, he scorned the suggestion. Posey begged and raved, but without avail. The girl never had a question in her mind as to her duty from the moment she saw her father approaching. She must do as he said—go back with him as his slave. There was no help for it.

And so the lovers held a hurried consultation, pledged eternal fidelity and all that, agreed that Posey should go on and make his fortune, and that when Dora should be released by death from her duty to her father he should either come back for her or she should go to him, and then they would be married. Meantime, he engaged to write to her frequently, and she promised to write to him faithfully once every week. And then farewell!

By this time the doctor's party had left him far behind, and naturally, considering the capabilities of his steed, he was growing impatient to move on. The early stars were already coming out, and he testily reminded Dora, as she lingered over her leavetaking, that there was no more time to lose. And so, without a murmur, the devoted soul turned her back upon all her new-born hope and joy, and dutifully took up the long and dreadful homeward march on foot. And Posey, his heart in his mouth and his tongue charged with unutterable execrations, gazed gloomily down into the darkening valley, that half an hour before had been filled with a radiance "that never shone on land or sea." And as he gazed all the bad in him persistently rose up to curse the despicable author of his woe, while all the good in him—about an even balance—rose up to bless the fast-disappearing idol of his heart.

Slowly and painfully, day after day, the little company of stragglers toiled on toward their distant homes, the redoubtable doctor, with his unwilling beast and his willing bond-woman, ever bringing up the rear. No one but Dora herself could know how grievously she suffered in her chains—how her very heart's blood was gradually consumed by the vampire whom she chose to cherish and obey because it was her misfortune to be his daughter.

The old home was reached at last. On the whole, the doctor had rather enjoyed the journey, and brought to the family board, as of yore, a tremendous appetite. He "resumed practice at the old stand" without delay, publishing a card to that effect in the village newspaper. He seemed scarcely to note the absence of his wife, who for a quarter of a century had been wearing her life out in a vain endeavor to justify his existence on this globe. In short, he speedily settled back into his old habit of life, and appeared to have totally forgotten that he had come home to die. And Dora, too, soon lapsed into her old routine of schoolkeeping, and so once more the pot boiled merrily. Once a week, with scrupulous regularity, she wrote her promised letter to Posey, and she waited long and anxiously for some word from him, but in vain. Weary weeks lost themselves in months, and month after month crept slowly away till almost a year had passed, and still the faithful soul famished for some token that she was not forgotten. Then one evening she went home from her school to find that the heavens had fallen. Her father, whom she had left four hours before apparently in the highest health and spirits, was dead. The village physician attributed his sudden death to apoplexy, which seems illogical. But he was dead, whatever the cause, and his orphaned daughter mourned him with as genuine a grief as ever wrung a human heart.

When in process of time the first transports of grief had subsided there seemed to be nothing left for Dora to do but to concentrate all the overflowing tenderness and devotion of her heart upon her lover, and to brood and pine over his long-continued silence. She never doubted that he had written to her, for the mail-service to and from the gold regions was notoriously unreliable in those days, and she was by no means the only one who looked in vain for letters thence. At last she could bear the suspense no longer. The spring had opened early, and a party in a neighboring town was to start for the diggings by the middle of April. This party, in which were already included two women, Dora resolved to join. Once let her reach that indefinite region denominated "the mines," and she felt the most unquestioning faith in her ability to find her lover.

And so once more the dauntless girl set out upon that long and tedious journey of three thousand miles. Not many weeks passed before the inevitable homeward-bound stragglers began to be encountered, and of these Dora eagerly sought information concerning the object of her quest.

"Bridge? No, marm," was almost uniformly the reply to her first question in that direction.

"He was sometimes called Posey," she would then suggest; and at last she found a man who acknowledged that he knew Posey. "He was at the Buny Visty in Carter's Gulch at last accounts," this individual informed her, but he omitted to commit himself as to the nature of Posey's occupation. "Wife, p'r'aps?" he observed, incidentally.

"No, sir," said Dora.

"Sister?"

"No."

"Ah! Well, he's a stocky chap, that Posey, and ought to make his fortune in the mines, if anybody could. But nobody can't—take my word for't. Look at me!"

He was a spectacle indeed. The retrogressive Doctor Hanchett had been quite an exquisite in the matter of apparel compared with this tatterdemalion. With Dora's companions he was less reticent concerning the character and calling of Posey than he had been with Dora herself. By his account it appeared that Posey had spent about a month in the mines without striking a single streak of luck to hearten him. At the end of that time, completely discouraged, he went to the nearest village and advertised himself as willing to work for his board at anything that might offer. The thing that offered was a situation as assistant bar-tender at the Buena Vista gambling-house. Posey accepted this situation with ardor, and discharged the delicate duties pertaining to the place so satisfactorily that he very soon found himself promoted to the distinguished position of "stool pigeon." In this capacity he developed shining talents, and the Buena Vista's gaming-tables soon became the most famous resort in all that region for those confiding birds whose favorite amusement appears to lie in being plucked. And thus Posey went on prospering until he achieved a partnership in the concern; and his partner soon after being suddenly called to that bourne whence no traveler returns, Posey found himself sole proprietor and manager of an uncommonly flourishing concern in an uncommonly lively line of business.

All this information was carefully kept by her companions from the ears of Dora, of course; and she, having obtained the long-coveted trace by means of which she felt sure that she could not fail to find her lover, was quite cheerful and happy throughout the remainder of the seemingly endless journey.

The end neared at last, however, and as Dora recognized the familiar landmarks that told her she had almost reached the fruition of her hope deferred, her eyes brightened daily, a new flush came into her thin cheeks; and though she grew more quiet and abstracted than formerly, it was plain that her reveries had no tinge of darkness, her hope no shadow of fear, her faith no alloy of doubt. And when the time came for her to part with the good people in whose company she had traveled so far, she bade them adieu with a light heart, and at once set out alone by stage for Carter's Gulch.

Reaching the straggling, ill-conditioned village at nightfall, she asked the driver, as she alighted in front of the stage-office, to direct her to the Buena Vista.

"The Buny Visty! The Buny Visty's not a hotel, ma'am," that individual explained. "It's the Golden Gate that you want, I reckon."

"No, sir," she replied confidently. "I have a friend at the Buena Vista—Mr.—Mr. Posey. Perhaps," she went on, with a little tremor in her voice, "you can tell me if he is well?"

"Posey!" He stopped some moments at the word and looked in blank amazement at the delicate, tender, unmistakably honest face that confronted him. Then he continued hastily: "Never better. Saw him yesterday morning. You see that green lantern? That's the Buny Visty. Good-night, ma'am. I stay here—if you should want a friend, you know. Good-night."

Dora thanked him for his kindness, returned his salutation, and tripped away with unruffled spirits. She had been so much concerned to conceal her own agitation as she mentioned the name of her lover that she had quite overlooked the astonishment with which that name had seemed to transfix the driver.

As she picked her way along the dark and muddy sidewalk she could not help complaining a little petulantly to herself because the stage-office had not been located nearer to that distant green lantern. But she was not the girl to lose heart now. Bravely she plodded on, and when at last she was able to discern the words "Buena Vista" upon the beacon toward which she was toiling, suddenly her heart gave a great bound, the tears rushed to her eyes, her knees quaked beneath her, and from her pious soul there went up an earnest thanksgiving to the dear Father of us all for His great mercy in bringing her safely to the end of her momentous journey.

It was some minutes before she could so far compose herself as to be able to proceed; and when she did move forward again, I think a vague notion of the true character of the Buena Vista began to cast a shadow upon her ardor. As she came within a couple of rods of the isolated wooden building in front of which the green lantern was suspended she was suddenly startled at hearing several shots discharged in quick succession within, and a minute later three or four men rushed hastily into the street and hurried away, evidently without noticing her, though they passed within a few feet of her as she stood, almost paralyzed with alarm, just outside the door. Her fright was gone in a moment, however—soon enough, indeed, to enable her to satisfy herself that none of these fugitives was the man she sought. As the door stood wide open, there seemed nothing for her to do but enter, which she did at once. The front apartment of the saloon, though lighted, she found to be a mere ante-room, bare of all furniture save a few chairs; and without pausing here the resolute girl, who must have had a foreboding of the awful truth by this time, passed on into the gambling-room in the rear. There, stretched upon the floor, shot through the heart, lay the stark form of the man she had journeyed so far and so patiently and hopefully to find. He had grown muscular and brawny since she parted with him. His face, too, had changed, and not for the better: it was flushed, sodden and bearded, and the beard was dyed black. She knelt down beside the corpse and took one of the great hands in her own. It was still warm! But the chill of death crept over it as she held it to her heart, and thus her last ray of hope expired.

She sat still by her dead till the man's former companions came to prepare the body for burial. As it was borne to the lonely grave upon the hillside she walked beside the rough coffin. And when the grave was reached she dropped upon her knees beside it, and poured forth in a clear voice a fervent petition to the Most High to receive, for the sake of the dear Saviour who died for all the world, the soul of this poor sinner.

They had said that she might bear up till the funeral was over, but that then she would break down. She did not. The next morning she set her face to the East, and began again, for the fourth time, that awful journey across the Plains. We need not follow her throughout its length. She reached her home worn and sick, but nevertheless at once took up her old school and went on with it a few weeks. And then the end came.

LOUIS A. ROBERTS.

FRANCESCA'S WORSHIP.

In the deep afternoon, when westering calms

Brooded above the streets of Rome, and hushed

Their noisier clamor, at her orisons,

In San Domenico, Francesca knelt.

All day her charities had overflowed

For others. Husband, children, friends had claimed

Service ungrudged; the poor had gotten their dole,

Doubled by reason of her soothing hands;

Sick eyes had lifted at her coming, as lifts

The parcht Campagna grass at the cool kisses

Of winds that have been dallying with the snows

Of Alban mountain-tops. And now, released

From outward ministries, and free to turn

Inward, and up the solemn aisle of thought

Conduct her soul, she bowed with open page

Before the altar: "Tenuisti manum

Dexteram meam."

On her lips she held

The words caressingly, as she would taste

Each syllable and drain its separate sweetness,

When, breaking on her still seclusion, came

A messenger: "Sweet mistress, grace I pray!

But unaware our lord hath come again,

Bringing his gossips; and he bade me fetch

My lady, if only for a one half hour,

Saying the wine was flavorless without

Her hand to pour it."

At the word she rose,

And unreluctant followed. No undertow

Of hidden regret disturbed the azure calm

Of those clear eyes that still reflected heaven.

Then, when they all had drunk and been refreshed,

And forth had ridden, Francesca sought her place,

And pored again above the Psalter's leaf:

"In voluntate tua deduxisti,"

Conning it over with a tender joy,

As if she verily felt her human hand

Close claspt in God's, and heard Him guiding her

With audible counsel; when there fell a touch

Upon her arm: "The Sister Barbara

Comes seeking wherewithal to dress some wounds

Got in a brawl upon the Esquiline."

And now athwart the western windows streamed

Rainbows of shafted light, as thither again

Francesca came to read her "Offices."

A beam, that seemed a golden pencil held

Within the fingers of the Christ that glowed

In the great oriel, pointed to the words

Where she had paused to do the Sister's hest:

"Cum gloria suscepisti me." She kissed

The blazoned leaf, thanks nestling at her heart,

That now, at last, no duty disallowing,

Her loosened soul out through the sunset bars

Might float, and catch heaven's crystal shimmer. But scarce

Had meditation smoothed the wing of thought

Before the hangings of the door were parted

With yet a further summoning. From a Triton

That spouted in the court her three-year boy,

Who thither had climbed, had fallen, and naught would soothe

The bruised brow save the sweet mother-kiss.

"I come," she said, her forehead half divine

With saintly patience. "For Thou wouldst teach me, Lord,

That Thou art just as near me ministering

At home as in these consecrated aisles;

And 'tis true worship, pouring of the wine

For him I love, or holding 'twixt my hands

The little throbbing head; since where my duty

Calls is the altar where I serve Thee best."

When under the Campagna's purple rim

The sun had sunken so long that all was gray,

Softly across the dusky sacristy

Francesca glided back. The Psalter lay

Scarcely discernible amid the gloom;

But lo the marvel! On the darken'd page

The verse which thrice she had essayed to read

Now shone illuminate, silver-clear, as though

God's hand had written it with the flash of stars.

MARGARET J. PRESTON.

OUR HOME IN THE TYROL.

CHAPTER V.

We had not gone many yards when we noticed a grand old mansion with gray slopes of roof and stone galleries on arched pillars, and, asking its history, learned that it was a deserted seat of the counts of Arlberg, inhabited now by our guide in quality of forester, and where he had his sister Nanni and brother Hansel to live with him.

We kept gradually ascending by the side of deep, turfy meadows, passing many a rich brown wooden chalet, with views ever and anon of our distant village and its stately Hof. Soon we turned into a woody gorge and began climbing the steep saddle of the Scharst; and as we slowly toiled upward in the pleasant summer air, amongst the aromatic fir trees, some verses came into my head out of a little German book, Jakob Stainer, by Herr Reif, which we had given as a parting present to Schuster Alois:

The fiddle-maker Stainer

Goes whistling on his way:

A master like to Stainer

Is not found every day.

He passes lofty beech trees,

And old oaks stout and good,

Because that which he seeks for

Grows not in every wood.

But yonder in the sunshine,

Above the dark green shade,

Behold a hazel-fir tree—

"Jörgel," said I, "as you are a forester and know all the trees in the wood, I wish you would show me a hazel-fir tree."

"Wohl gut," he replied. "Higher up the chances are small but what we pass one. I only pray the gracious Fräulein to say those verses over again."

When I had done so he wished to know whether the fiddle-maker Stainer were a real man or no.

"Why, good Jörgel," I replied, "he was a real Tyroler like yourself, only you are not likely to have met with him, seeing that he died and was buried some two hundred years ago. Yes, a very real man, who did his work well, but to little profit. He was a peasant lad of Absam, who, probably going to Innspruck whilst the archduke Leopold and his Italian consort, Claudia dei Medici, kept their gay court there, thought Italian violins were harsh and unsatisfactory in tone, and so quietly worked out one of a different make from his own principles; which has since gained for him the name of 'the father of the German violin.' He never expected to earn such a title. He had begun making violins when he was twenty: he worked very slowly, only made a few, and sold them at a moderate price to the foreign dealers who came to the fairs at Hall. They soon became asked after, for they excelled as instruments from the first moment that they were touched, and retain to this day the clearest and the fullest notes, like the middle tones of the flute, wonderfully sympathetic and rich. The peculiar excellency is probably owing to the extreme care which he showed in the selection of the wood. He used the hazel-fir tree, it is said. He selected the wood himself, striking the trunk with his hammer to hear its tones before he felled it. He would wander for days through the mountain forests searching suitable trees. He studied each one, and only chose that which exactly answered his purpose—generally those of which the topmost boughs were already dead.

"When wood was being precipitated down the mountain-slides, he would seat himself in some safe spot near at hand, and listen to the different tones which the trunks uttered as they struck against the rocks in their fall. He chose from these 'singing trees' those which pleased his ear the most. He was also particular about the rings on the stems of the felled trees. They must be harmonious and regular, neither too near nor too far apart. For those portions of the violin which were made in separate pieces he used very old wood, preferring old inner doors and wainscoting.

"Although one of the most celebrated violin-makers that ever lived, this peasant always remained poor. It is true that one grand duke favored him, but then his patron died, and whilst the emperor permitted him to be the court fiddle-maker, he was scandalized, like the rest of the world, by his reading Lutheran books, picked up in the market at Hall. These books caused him to be thrown into prison as a heretic, and although in time released, debts and poverty embittering his life, he became introverted and melancholy, until finally the humble, patient worker, who had sent forth so much melody into the world, was strapped to the wooden bench of his cottage at Absam, a heart-broken maniac. The merciful messenger Death released him after several years, but the bench and the hole in the wood by means of which he was bound may still be seen.

"When the artist was forgotten his works increased greatly in value. This occasioned other makers to endeavor to multiply their number, introducing many spurious Stainer violins, which gradually brought down the market value. Nevertheless, genuine Stainer violins are recognizable, and still retain a fancy price. Mozart possessed one which he greatly prized, using it as his solo quartette instrument. It belongs now to a professor in the Mozarteum at Salzburg, and was played upon at the Mozart festival in 1856.

"But a violin with a still more remarkable history figured during the festivities attending the marriage of the present emperor of Austria. During the visit of the emperor Charles VI., King Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia and other princes to the great nobleman Count Wenzel von Trautmannsdorf, the generous and lavish host became sorely perplexed how to provide George Stezitzky, a splendid violinist, with a suitable instrument. At this point he opportunely heard that there was an old fiddler in the court who begged permission to play before the august company. The request being granted, the musician commenced playing, and immediately sent princes and nobles into raptures over the tones of his violin. The count therefore stopped him, and offered to buy it. This quite threw the old man into despair. 'It was a Stainer violin,' he replied, 'and his whole livelihood was bound up in it.' The count, however, was not to be thwarted: he gave him fifty ducats for the piece he had played, and then concluded the bargain on the following conditions: three hundred gulden for the violin, besides a house to live in, food and a quart of wine daily; ten gulden monthly, two barrels of beer and one suit of clothes yearly, fruit and as many hares as he needed for his kitchen. The agreement having been concluded, George Stezitzky played a solo on the violin: then received it as a present from the count. The man who had parted with it lived sixteen years more, thus costing the count in actual money 8733 florins 20 kreuzers, equal to 10,380 florins 24 kreuzers of the present currency. A large sum to give for a violin."

"Yes," replied Jörgel, who appeared to have been much interested by the whole history; "but what puzzles me is, how a poor devil who worked so slow could be a genius. I thought sharp people took more after the Almighty, and hurried up their work in the twinkling of an eye."

"Do the trees which you look after shoot up in the twinkling of an eye?"

"Why, no. Good, stout wood, with strength enough to resist storms and to cleave to the rocks of these mountainsides, takes a lifetime. I often warn the peasants against cutting their trees down. It is easy to destroy, but not to build up, I tell them; and the trees as they stand are the best preventatives against land-slips."

"Have you always been a forester?" we asked.

Not he. It was true that in fine weather he often wandered for thirty miles a day, his district reaching as far, but he had seen more of the world than these fir woods. He had been in the habit, as a young man, of taking horses for sale into Italy, where he had seen Milan cathedral and the town-hall in Bergamo. He, however, gave up his trade in 1831, as his father died in that year of dropsy, and his mother ten days after of sorrow, and he thought it only right to stay with his sister Nanni. Franz had gone off and married a rich widow against his advice, for he knew she would treat a second husband as a day-laborer; and what he had predicted proved true. However, she and her money were gone out of the family now. Her body lay in the graveyard, and he supposed that the priest who said masses for her soul knew where it was by this time. As for Hansel, he was still at liberty, and had well played his part in the world. He had protected the emperor Ferdinand when he fled with his consort to Innspruck in 1848, standing as sentinel at the gate of the faithful city. Later on he had marched with the Tyrolese imperial Jäger corps into Hungary, and fought for the same master there. Again in 1866 he was righting under the archduke Albert, until, on the feast of Johanni, he was disabled at the battle of Custozza by a wound in his foot. The victory over the Italians made him for a time forget the pain, but afterward it grew dreadful, lasting for seventeen months, and not an army surgeon could help him. Then, however, he determined to try a cow-doctor, who in two weeks set him on his pins again.

"And you might not believe it," continued Jörgel, who grew animated in his narration, "but I too have seen service. In the last war between Italy and Austria the students of Innspruck formed a corps, and young Count Arlberg, being an active volunteer, proposed that I should go as cook. The motion was carried, and I marched with one hundred and ninety-three young gentlemen to Bira. Sometimes with help and sometimes with none, I cooked for them all. I fed them on meat dumplings and plenten, until in a few weeks the cook and the soldaten—or the cook and the salaten, which you will—had to pull up stakes and beat an honorable retreat through the Breimer. At Brixen I bade farewell to my regiment, and have since, under Count Arlberg the father, looked after stocks and stones, and not soldiers. Well, well! Austria has lost Italy, but the Tyrol can hold up its head, for it stands now as a great natural rampart between the two countries."

We had been resting during Jörgel's narration: the long rays of the declining sun now warned us to hasten on. Margaret, full of energy and desirous of pushing forward up the almost vertical path, soon began to lag behind. Thus I, looking back and waiting for her, saw a comely peasant-woman who, quickly climbing the hill behind, offered her the assistance of her arm. Although this was gratefully declined, the stranger, apparently troubled at the sight of the tired lady, tarried at her side, trying to be of service. She had a melodious voice and a restful air, which made us, though she was but a poor illiterate woman, feel better for her presence. Thus she was allowed to carry our shawls, and whenever we rested she strayed into wayside glens, returning with offerings of mellow bilberries; and finally she cheered our lagging energies with the assurance that we should soon see blue sky peeping through the trees, and that then there would be no more climbing. At this point, Jörgel, who had been carefully examining each tree as we passed, expressed his fear that no actual hazel-fir tree grew along this path. He, however, pointed out a well grown fir tree, saying that a hazelfichte merely possessed a straighter and a smoother stem.

We had begun truly to descend, and our friendly woman, seeing that "Shank's mare" required no further encouragement, bade us a friendly good-evening, with a cheerful "May you live long and well!" She had almost dipped out of sight when our Jörgel, with praiseworthy forethought, called after her to apprise the bath people, as she passed, of our advent.

The path had become broader and more beaten. There was a gradual sense of some human being, either from personal or unselfish interests, having once been at work to make the woods still more attractive and enjoyable. Benches of flat stones were raised at points where snow-fields, fantastic and stern dolomite peaks and wooded slopes formed exquisite pictures set in frames of stately, well-grown fir trees—here a smooth lawn with its little shrine and wooden seat for the wayfarer to meditate on the Flight into Egypt, which Jörgel called the "witches' ground;" there, under a spreading tree, a rural table and seats—proofs that we must be approaching the bath-house; and no little were we pleased by these signs of care and judgment, especially as none of the rural bowers were either bran-new or in a state of decay, but harmonizing with the tidy negligence of the woods themselves.

"These paths promise well for the baths," we remarked to Jörgel.

"Might have done so once," he replied, "but it was the old Frau Wirthin who put them up. She was a woman with a head and a will, and she took a pride in the place, seeing that the baths are as old as the mountains, and they had been in her family since the Lord made the Tyrol. Now they are in the hands of her son Seppl and his sister Moidel. However, I never mix myself up in what does not concern me. The master is at liberty, and so is she, and it is not for me or my old Nanni to speak against unmarried people. Both they and we are bound for Herzing when we die, the spinsters to howl in the moor and we men in the wood. That is what the lads and lasses say of us;" and he gave a dry little laugh. "Ask my opinion of the water, and I'll answer you straightforward. It's an elixir, a perfect elixir;" and he repeated the sentence with the proud consciousness of using a dictionary word. "As for the house, the master and the old maid, judge for yourselves, or ask them that sent you here."

So saying, he sturdily marched on ahead, as if fearing to be compromised. We did not feel encouraged, especially with night steadily falling down upon us. Still less was the future hopeful when Jörgel pointed with his stick in advance, exclaiming, "Arrived at last!"

Yes, arrived at an old weatherbeaten chalet, with a crazy barn to keep it company, dilapidated and tottering as if in the bankruptcy court, standing abruptly on the borders of the black fir wood, the air filled with the odor of concentrated pigstye; dark male figures playing at skittles on the path, and having to stop the game to enable us to reach the door; black male figures playing at cards and drinking wine in the dusky, close old parlor or stube, made still more gloomy by the large, projecting brick stove, unlighted at this season of the year.

We should never have proceeded on a voyage of discovery had not the thick folds of a woman's yellow petticoat flickered before us on the steps of a smoke-stained ladder.

Jörgel, who, with the utmost determination, resolved to fulfill his duty as guide, marshaled us up this old creaking ladder, then up a second, until we stopped in an open gallery sheltered by the wooden eaves, where a feeble old woman nursed an idiot child in the gloaming. And yet what a landscape to relieve this desolate foreground!—slumbrous mountains, dewy meadows, peaceful villages, over which the calm of Sunday lay. We stood drinking in the tranquil scene, when a woman in blue apron and of rapid motion quickly touched my elbow with a large key; and bidding us follow she hastily flung open the door of a narrow wainscoted closet, smelling of hay. "She had no other room," she blurted forth, and then, without word of apology, disappeared as speedily as she had come. We found ourselves the owners of two large bedsteads and two dilapidated chairs: everywhere in the house we had caught glimpses of broken-backed chairs, witnesses either of poverty or riot.

A modest tap at the door announced worthy Jörgel. He tried to comfort us in his rough and honest way, with "They that sent you here are to blame."

We interrupted him, saying that the fault lay with ourselves.

"Well, well! how could you tell? But have no fears. This house is disorderly for the want of a head, but remember, there's an elixir of life in the water. I'm very much satisfied with what you have paid me, and the next time we meet we shall regard each other as old acquaintance."

He lifted his empty kraxe upon his shoulders, and went out. We waited to see his square figure appear in the path below, like those who were parting not only from a friend, but a protector. It was some minutes before he was visible. We discovered shortly afterward that not wishing to leave us in our desolation, and perceiving that some "Herrschaft" must be in the house, as the best room had not been given us, he had boldly introduced himself to them, and thus we found ourselves committed by Jörgel to a fresh Good Samaritan in the shape of a well-to-do draper's wife, Frau T——. We knew her by name, but did not deal at her shop. Still, she was ruled by no selfish thoughts, and out of the genuine kindliness of her heart she joyfully fulfilled Jörgel's commission. It was she who insisted on preparing our supper; it was her cloth that was spread on the table in the gallery as the quietest, most suitable spot in the riotous house, she smoothing our scruples by declaring it her pleasure, only regretting that we should have arrived on such a noisy night, for the house was usually very still. It was her servant who showed the deaf old woman, the one help of the establishment, how to make our beds.

The aged crone, Nanni—half the female population of the Tyrol are called either after the Virgin Mary or her traditionary mother, Saint Ann—gazed in intense astonishment when we screamed to her our simple requirements. We asked for a light, and she brought us a tallow candle stuck in a bottle. We asked for a pitcher of water, and she muttered something about the spout.

Worn-out, weary, very grateful to the good Frau T——, we went to bed, but not to sleep. That would have been a vain endeavor, for shrill laughter, loud words and boisterous songs, in which the high tones of wild female voices rose painfully above the gruff singing of half-besotted men, penetrated the room, whilst the old rafters groaned and creaked from the heavy tramp of dancers below. All our belief in the sobriety and goodness of the Tyrolese seemed swept away, and a sense of their coarseness and dissipation to have taken its place. We were in a very pandemonium, which never ceased until the sun was rising.

Nor was the evil mitigated when we learned from the landlord's sister a few hours later that the guests were only returning from Scapulary Sunday in Reischach. Most of them belonged to the next village, and had rested here on their way. After prayers it was right to sing and dance: why should they not? And, look you, when wine got into people's head, what could she do? She could not turn them out.

"Yes, but the master, her brother, might."

She shook her head ominously, and hurried into the kitchen—a smoky old kitchen, but quaint from the little windows with the old ox-eyed panes of thick glass.

It impressed itself forcibly on our minds that Seppl had compromised himself on the preceding night. He was to be seen nowhere; only the bustling sister Moidel, who had already swept out and cleaned the scene of the late dissipation, and was now busy over our coffee, and the old Nanni, who with bare feet and wet petticoats intimated that she had scrubbed the female bath-room and placed two freshly scoured tubs there at our disposition.

Both women meant kindly by us: the pleasant fir woods and the fresh air seemed to whisper to us to stay. So we gave up the plan which we had resolutely made in the night of leaving that very morning, and by so doing found Bad Scharst not only endurable, but really, in a very rough and ready way, enjoyable. The remembrance of the wild, riotous night even became enveloped with a certain interest when we recollected that this grim attempt at pleasure was in sober reality one of those Tyrolese peasant balls which are represented in such fair and attractive colors on the stage, in pictures or in novels. It was well to be undeceived, and to see the deep shadows as well as the bright side of Tyrolese life.

And what matter if for one night we had lost our sleep, whilst we breathed exhilarating ozone and drank water which, to quote Jörgel, was truly an elixir of life? For all our temporary and trifling inconveniences we found rich compensation when after an easy ascent of two hours we reached the topmost platform of the mountain, the Kronplatz. To the north, reaching from east to west, a long, unbroken chain of glaciers, from the Furtschläg to the Gross Venediger Spitze with its untrodden snows. Below us, at some four thousand feet, the broad, rich Pusterthal, with its comfortable villages and its pastoral tributary valleys. To the south, the stern limestone peaks of the dolomite region; the Vedretta Marmolata, with its breastplate of ice, king of these barbaric giants, the splintered pinnacles of the Drei Zinnen, the pyramidal Antalao, and many another jagged, appalling mountain, stern as the bewildering doctrines of election and reprobation, whilst the pure glistening snow, green meadows and pleasant woods opposite seemed to breathe forth the gentle, winning truths of the glad tidings of peace.

It was delicious to lie on the short turf in an ethereal region with a perception of the burden and heat of the day in the valley below; yet the fresh breeze of the mountain drove us with a sense of hunger back to the baths.

Having spoken of the scenery, let us now speak of the guests. There were not many. Frau T——, ourselves and a young woman, a sewing-machinist, occupied the available chambers of the chalet. The rest were used as receptacles for hay and milk: the ground floor contained the stube, the kitchen, the pigstye, or rather the room set apart for the pig, and the cow-house. Several poor guests, men and woman, hovered about the door of the barn. They slept in the various lofts, divided into rooms, and cooked for themselves in a common kitchen adjoining the bath-rooms. These were two long wooden sheds, in which rows of large tubs were placed. The patients bathed twice a day, being covered over with boards and a horse-rug, but the head was left free. There was no doctor: each could doctor himself by lying in the hot water and drinking more or fewer glasses of the iron water daily. It poured from a spout into a wooden trough between the chalet and the barn; and this explained old Nanni's mutterings after our arrival.

Although the peasant bathers as a class made no distinct impression on us, the half dozen men looking like facsimiles of each other, and the seven women appearing always to be one and the same, still there were one or two figures which stand prominently forth, from the more direct relations into which we came with them.

First, an old peasant-woman, whom we heard, as we descended from the Kronplatz, singing to a crying baby as we approached the house:

Engeli, Bengeli, wilt thou go to America?

Rumelti, Pumelti, wilt thou go to England?

She instantly stopped her ditty when she saw us emerge from the wood.

Curious, was it not? and yet we had neither brought our passports with us, nor had we followed the example of previous guests and proved our learning by writing our names and birthplaces in the visitors' book—a large volume for which every door-lintel and piece of wainscot in the house acted as leaves. No, but some little bird had been whispering about us on the mountain-side.

The next figure is another peasant-woman, tall and somewhat thin, with a patient, beseeching look in her face. This I quietly perceived whilst I sat busily writing near the house at a table which Moidel had carried out for me, yet I would not look up, because she stood eyeing me with an innocent stare, as if wishful to enter into conversation. A few minutes later a buxom matron stepped forth from the passage of the chalet. It acted as a convenient thoroughfare on the road between Reischach and Geisselburg. Her daughter, a girl of sixteen, who was with her, wore two beaver hats, the uppermost evidently bran-new and a fresh purchase. The first peasant-woman addressed the newcomer with a "God greet thee, Trina! Thou hast been shopping, I see."

"God greet thee, Gertraud! It is only a new hat for the moidel. We were going down for Scapulary Sunday; so I thought I might go on to town and sell thirty pounds of cow-hair, the savings of ten years; for, now there's to be a railway, beds are wanted, and as I received more than I expected, Moidel got her hat."

Then lowering her voice and pointing in my direction: "One of the strange ladies? I saw the other in the wood gathering strawberries. I heard she came from America, but she was quite pretty, without either black skin or thick lips. There must be some mistake. But, Gertraud, how's the sick little maid?"

"Very weak—cannot last long. The doctor was up yesterday, and he said it was useless his coming again: however, he left it something soothing. Adieu, Trina: greet all at home."

At first amused by the notions these fellow-creatures possessed of us, then forgetting them in the trouble which I perceived occupied the poor woman's mind, I lifted up my head when her friends were gone and inquired if she had a sick child.

"Oh, na, na! not of my own. I'm nursing a little maid of five years old: the father is a government postilion and the mother in service, and so she brought her up here to see if the air and the water would strengthen her. She is their only child. No, I myself live about an hour from here: you can see my cottage amongst the cherry trees on the slopes yonder. It looks nearer than it is, for there is a hidden ravine between. Ah, Herr je! I've had children too, and have had to give them all up. They are waiting for me with the dear God; but, Herr je! it's long toiling and hoping to reach them. However, you'll oblige me and tell me where you have really come from?"

"From Rome," was the reply.

"Mein Gott! as far off as heaven! The creation is frightfully big! Well, I must not loiter. I came out to say a prayer, then to chop wood for Moidel."

An hour later, while sitting at supper in the passage, the most convenient and quiet place as we imagined, we found all the guests marching past us, each saluting us with "A good appetite to you!" or else "May you eat well!" They had been called together by Frau T—— and the sewing-machinist, Fraülein Magdalena, for Rosenkranz.

Hardly were they kneeling in the chapel, a small building at the farther side of the chalet, when the pig marched also up the passage, and grunting out his "Guten appetit," proposed taking his place at our table. We drove him out of doors: he waited behind the house corner to avoid detection until we were comfortably seated, when again he was at our side, snuffing the dishes in the air and grunting his "Guten appetit."

We were in despair. Moidel was not forthcoming, and we found that we could not shut the door against our intruding visitor.

"Was thust du? Na, na! Draus, draus, Kloane!" ("What dost thou? No, no! Out with thee, little one!"), said a voice in the passage; and a short man, with a good-natured, half-foolish face, after releasing himself from a heavily-laden basket which he carried on his back, walked through the passage and out of the farther door, attended by the pig, who lovingly rubbed his snout against him. The stranger knelt down at one of the shattered windows of the chapel, his four-footed companion standing patiently by him, until the orison was over and the worshipers trooped out of the little chapel. Then the knowing pig trotted off to his own quarters, whilst one voice exclaimed, "You are back again, Seppl?"

"You've not forgotten my bread?" said a second.

"You've brought me the knitting needles?" said a third.

"You left the letter at the Lamb and Flag?" added a fourth.

This, then, was the master, evidently the common messenger of all, who, whilst the guests called him behind his back "Headless Seppl," had managed to fulfill two dozen verbal commissions to everybody's satisfaction. This was the landlord, whom we had pictured lying in a drunken lethargy in some hay barn after the bout of the night before. How we had maligned an evidently simple, honest soul, who had been toiling from early morning, and who, having discharged the orders of his different customers, started up the steep mountain-side, and we heard him calling "Koos, koos, koos," lovingly to his cows! It was only when he had milked them, patted them, called each by its name, seen them comfortably housed for the night, that he had time to think of resting or eating his dumplings for supper.

It was the fourth morning of our stay, and we were preparing to leave. Seppl's basket was already packed with our belongings, and he, the good beast of burden, had orders in half an hour to act as our guide, when suddenly Moidel flew out of the kitchen, exclaiming, "He is coming! he is coming!" and wiping her arms on her apron rushed down the green meadows beyond the chapel. Fräulein Magdalena, dropping her work, uttered a joyful cry. "Yes, it is he! it's Herr Pflersch!" she said, turning to us. "The king of Bad Scharst. Ah! why don't you stay, for glorious days will begin? I've been here eleven years at the same time as Herr Pflersch, and we have none of us gone to bed for seven days together. We play at cards and he tells us tales."

The excitement in the whole establishment became universal. Herr Pflersch was our grocer, a burly, good-natured man, who bowed politely to us when he arrived at the house, led by a troop of admiring and rejoicing friends. He was attended by his cook, and had brought with him a sackful of provisions and his feather bed, which came toiling up the hill in a cart.

Fräulein Magdalena stood rapturously before the welcome guest, offering him a quart glass of water: "No beer to offer you, Herr Pflersch, but glorious water, Herr Pflersch."

Moidel apologized for not going a step of the way with us, "But Herr Pflersch had come;" and whilst she said so she began putting one of Herr Pflersch's own wax candles into a brass candlestick. "I have, however, a favor to ask of you," she continued: "that is, if we ever happen to meet on the high-road in the Pusterthal, you'll allow me to recognize you." A humble request indeed, poor soul!

Gertraud came down from the barn to say good-bye to us. The "little maid" was still lingering, but she added mysteriously, "She'll be knocking thrice at her mother's door to-morrow."

Walking across the meadows, this time taking a different way from that by which we had arrived, we met several groups of peasant-men carrying bundles in their hands, who asked Seppl if the Herr had arrived, and being answered in the affirmative, they hurried on, as if desirous to act as Knights of the Round Table to King Pflersch.

CHAPTER VI.

In sending word to Anton to fetch us from the inn at Nieder Olang that especial afternoon, we had not been aware that we had chosen a place and hour when most of the pious male Catholics were gathered thither to accord an unflinching, unequivocal assent to the Infallibility dogma, as well as to condemn from the bottom of their clerical or rustic souls the foul heresy of Old Catholicism, which was spreading far and wide in the adjoining kingdom of Bavaria. Most of the farmers and all the parish priests were assembled. The spacious Widum or parsonage, in festal array, kept open house, the large church was full to overflowing, whilst the ample inn being still more crammed we preferred waiting for Anton in a shady nook opposite. Here we had ample leisure to observe the rows of clerical and bucolic backs ranged against the open inn windows, and to listen to the hum of serious voices, sounding as if a spiritual mass meeting were being held over seitels of wine. It was a curious sight a quarter of an hour later, the conclave being at an end, to watch the priests flocking forth, some so old and shabby, in such stained, rusty frockcoats, that their very assumption of dignity appeared painfully grotesque; others, more scrupulously clean, displayed with pride a blue silk ribbon bound as an order across their breasts; but whether shabby or decent, whether singly or in groups, they were invariably received bareheaded by the respectful villagers waiting outside, whilst a double salvo of homage was awarded by priest and layman to a tall, elegant Italian monsignor from Brixen, who, tucking up gracefully his rich violet garments, walked with infinite care from the inn to the Widum, disappearing from view under the gateway.

All the clergy now departing in various directions were complacently chuckling over the security of their position, their quiet, unquestioning sheep obediently following whithersoever they might lead them. It was not always so in the Tyrol. In former ages, especially at the time of the Reformation, the people had used their independent judgment, allowing themselves neither to be oppressed nor led astray. In these latter days, however, their freer, nobler instincts have been overpowered by the marvelous, almost incredible, influence of the Jesuits. In the last century, when this order was suppressed, the Tyrolese gymnasiums were immediately improved, schools for the people were opened, and such was the spirit of the age that the barons Sternbach, Turn, Taxis and other noblemen became Freemasons—an act which their descendants, now shackled with Jesuitical influences, regard with the deepest horror. After the revolution of 1848 a spirit of reaction arose in the Tyrol, which holds the people back, retards progress and keeps the country far behind other European lands.

A very embodiment of this retrograding subordination stood before us in the form of Seppl, who, dull, poor both in mind and pocket, still lingered entranced with wonder and amazement at a power which appeared to him capable of governing both earth and heaven.

Rich bauers and poor laborers in this peaceful, wealthy portion of the Tyrol become daily more blindly attached to the priests. Should there happen to be a thinker amongst them, he must keep his questionings to himself: he will find no sympathy in his neighbors. In towns such as Innsbruck, however, he will discover many fellows, for a feeling of reaction has awakened there a more liberal, independent spirit.

If Seppl might be taken as an extreme type of the provincial mode of thought, so might a young student with whom we shortly became acquainted be regarded as representing that of the town. Pursuing a long course of medical studies at the Innsbruck University, he implied rather by his actions than by any outward expressions that he regarded his worthy country relations as zealots, absented himself from Rosenkranz and long family graces, and spoke compassionately of his relatives as being "very naïve;" and these simple, unsophisticated people in their turn, though staggered by this spirit of quiet innovation and rebellion in their midst, made their minds easy on the score that a man of the world, such as he was, and honorably providing for himself, could not be expected to be such as they were. He had not time for prayers and confessions: he must study, and then must enjoy relaxation; but some of their extra petitions might be put to his account. Not that this was ever expressed in so many words: it was rather from our own quiet observations that we drew these inferences. Nor did opportunities fail, seeing that our new acquaintance was in fact no other than the "Herr Student," the saintly personage whom we had imagined in long black Noah's Ark coat, wearing the orthodox clerical stock embroidered with blue and white beads, leading Rosenkranz, and, should we ever have the honor of his acquaintance, saying three Ave Marias before conversing with heretics.

Instead of this, behold a good-looking, cheerful young man in gold spectacles, wearing a suit the color of ripe chestnuts, who, whilst we began impatiently to look for Anton, appeared before us like a good genius from the inn, introduced himself and apologized that we should have been kept waiting. "I regret," he added, "that I was not aware of your arrival until the kellnerin pointed you out through the window; otherwise I should have taken the liberty to explain to you that my brother may be a little late. He brought me and two friends over earlier in the day, and had then to attend to a little business. Mein compliment;" and with a low bow he returned to the inn.

We no longer anxiously inquired of each other whether the ever-ready Anton had received our message, rather whether we had not put him to considerable inconvenience when there was business of the Hofbauer's to be attended to. And next, how in the world, if the Herr Student, who had so suddenly appeared on the scene, were here with two friends, we could all return in the gig?

Nor did this dilemma seem likely to decrease when we spied in the far distant windings of the road, dotted over with the receding black groups of priests and their supporters, a moving object approaching in our direction bearing unmistakable resemblance to the gig and broad-backed horse, but with a female figure seated behind Anton—a perplexity which grew greater when, the distance becoming less, the figure assumed a still more elegant form, holding a fashionable sunshade in her hand, which suddenly began to wave persistently in our direction.

Who could it be? We imagined, we hoped, we doubted, until ten minutes later our astonishment ended in a joyous reality as we clasped in our arms our dear, friend E——. She had arrived in our absence on a visit to us at the Hof, and the good family, desirous of affording us a joyful surprise, had proposed that Anton should drive her over to meet us at Nieder Olang. The Herr Student was in the secret. This had made him prudently cut our conversation short and return to his friends in the inn.

E—— brought bouquets of flowers for us from the aunt and Moidel, but there was no reason for us to hurry back: there were still several hours of daylight. The sturdy horse having already accomplished some eighteen or twenty miles since morning, made no objection to a rest and feed of hay in the stable, whilst Anton was content to sit with his brother and his two friends in the stube before the trio started on foot for the Hof. It seemed rather a desire to show the strangers the neighborhood than any inclination to attend the clerical meeting which had brought the Herr Student to Nieder Olang this afternoon. And we, glad of an hour's delay, started immediately with E——, the sunny summer afternoon made brighter by this joyous meeting, to visit the adjoining hamlet of Mitter Olang.

The three small adjacent villages of Upper, Middle and Lower Olang, lying amongst monotonous fields and destitute themselves of any picturesque beauty, would be passed over by the stranger as totally devoid of interest; but, thanks to Dr. Staffler's topographical work, Das deutsche Tirol und Voralberg, the mention of Peter Sigmair of Mitter Olang had excited a strong desire in us to see the spot where he had lived and died.

After the battle of Austerlitz, in 1805, the defeated emperor of Austria signed a treaty with Napoleon ceding Venice to the French and the Tyrol to their ally, Bavaria. The Tyrolese thus found themselves suddenly separated from an empire the fortunes of which they had shared for some five hundred years. If the country had outwardly become Bavarian, the hearts of the people remained essentially Austrian, and bitterly did they resent having to obey a government in league with the French, the sworn foe of Austria. Thus they determined on the first opportunity to throw off the hated yoke. The Bavarians had promised by the treaty to leave intact the Tyrolese constitution. They soon, however, forced the young men into the army to fight their battles, dissolved the religious houses, and eventually dismissed both bishops and parish priests. This was more than these extremely religious people could brook. The Bavarians had broken faith in not preserving the constitution: now they were free from their oath, they declared. In this sentiment the emperor of Austria warmly seconded them, and secret plots of rebellion began speedily to ferment through the land. In 1809, the memorable, never-to-be-forgotten year Nine of Tyrolese history, the earnestly longed-for opportunity arrived. In April of this year the Austrians declared war against France, and on the 8th of the same month the enthusiastic patriot Johann Maria von Kolb appeared in the market-place of Innichen, where he issued written proclamations, still preserved at Bruneck, bidding all the parish priests and the inhabitants of the Upper Pusterthal instantly to rise, throw off the Bavarian yoke and join the beloved Austrian troops, which were now marching in that direction.

Incited by Von Kolb and other leaders, the people rose and welcomed the Austrians. The Bavarian troops stationed at Bruneck hastily retreated to Brixen, and the Austrians entered the chief town of the Pusterthal on April 12. Peace now reigned in the district for several months. The rest of the Tyrol, however, was in commotion. In May the Bavarians were again back in the country, and the French coming to their assistance. The people rose under the leadership of the brave Hofer. They won a great victory at Iselberg, but in October the French had taken possession of Innsbruck, and the treaty of Schonbrunn immediately followed, in which the Tyrolese, again handed over to Bavaria, were ordered to lay down their arms.

The people disobeyed: they were incredulous, believing the official documents to be forged; and, although he knew better, Von Kolb strengthened them in this belief. He, together with Peter Kemenater, a wealthy wirth, and George Lantschner, the priest of Weitenthal, urged the people to rise and fight for their country, setting at naught any treaty of peace. Thus, though the French troops were allowed by the town authorities to enter Bruneck on November 5, the people remained in a state of turbulence, the men of Taufers immediately rising and fighting the French at Gaisz, the first village in their valley, and although defeated and driven back, the neighboring peasants of Aufhofen took up the attack, having in their turn their village plundered and some of the inhabitants killed by the enemy.

Von Kolb and his party next encouraged the Landsturm or people en masse to assail the French general Moreau in Brixen, causing his friend, General Almeras, to leave Bruneck in charge of a small troop and to hurry to his rescue. The very same afternoon (November 30) the priest Lantschner, accompanied by the wirth of Mühlen in the Taufersthal, Johann Hofer, marched at the head of an army of peasants on Bruneck. In the mean time, Almeras, prevented by a general uprising from reaching Brixen, turned back with his troops dressed as a private, and made most of the way by mountain-paths on foot, fearing to remain in his carriage, as immediately after starting his cook had been shot dead on the coach-box. Approaching Bruneck, the general discovered the concourse of the armed peasants to be far greater than he had imagined, and a whole day elapsed before his entry into the town could be effected. On December 2 the insurgents advanced nearer and nearer, pouring down from the neighboring village of Percha, which they had chosen as their head-quarters. At one o'clock they pushed before them two sledges loaded with hay from Edelsheim, and one filled with straw from Percha, and, forming by this means a barricade in front of the Capuchin monastery, began firing, whilst troops of peasants still marched forward from other villages. More used to plough-shares than swords, however, the peasants, numbering ten thousand men, instead of surrounding the town, as they might easily have done, merely attacked it on the north side, thus enabling the French general with a handful of cavalry and infantry to surprise them in the rear. Confusion and a most ignominious defeat ensued, the peasants fleeing across the meadows and fields, some being killed and others taken prisoners. Although repulsed, they were not reduced, and animated by the rash, vindictive Von Kolb, made several fresh skirmishes. Standing up in the village street of Percha, this leader animated them still to fresh attacks, and sent special messengers north, south, east and west, vowing fire and vengeance to all who succumbed; but on December 6, fresh French troops having come to the aid of General Almeras, the peasants saw that their cause was lost and refused to listen. Thus ceased the peasant war.

The town of Bruneck, which had suffered greatly from the double siege, still venerates the memory of General Almeras, who exerted himself on its behalf, whilst his liberality toward the peasants, whom he regarded as ignorant and misguided, was equally praiseworthy, mitigating in many instances the severity of the council of war.

Although the insurgents were dispersed, most of the French officers, unlike General Almeras, condescended to the bitterest revenge against the disarmed people. All the leaders who had not concealed themselves were captured and summarily shot without trial. Von Kolb, however, escaped with his life: disguised as a seller of lemons, he fled over the Redensberg, and passing through Antholz managed to reach Stiermark. Another still more remarkable man, Father Joachim, known amongst the people as Red Beard, wading through deep snow managed to hide himself for many months in the castle of Goldrain. In August of 1810, disguised as an artisan, he reached Switzerland, Milan, and finally Vienna, where the emperor, as a reward for his valiant deeds, presented him with the living of Hietzing in the neighborhood of Vienna.

Our long but necessary preamble now brings us to Peter Sigmair. He too had a price set on his head, having acted as lieutenant in the popular cause, and had accordingly sought a safe retreat in the mountains. Soon, however, a friend brought him word that his old father, George Sigmair, the Tharer-wirth of Mitter Olang, when attending to some business in Bruneck on St. Thomas's Day, had been arrested by command of General Broussier, with orders that he should be shot if his son did not give himself up before three days. The son might have comforted himself with the thought that it would be impossible for the general to put so tyrannical a threat into execution, but the consciousness of his father in such danger conquered all other feelings. He immediately started for Bruneck, and gave himself up. His father was instantly liberated, whilst he, bound in chains, was sent to Bozen, but brought back to Bruneck at the beginning of January, 1810, when in his cell in the castle he quietly heard his sentence—that he should be shot before the door of his father's inn at Mitter Olang, and that his body should then be hung on a gallows as a solemn warning to refractory peasants. His young wife, maddened with grief, penetrated to the presence of the French general, clasped his knees and plead in vain for mercy. He remained perfectly impassive to her entreaties, but granted a favor to a young priest, Franz von Mörl, who accompanied the prisoner in his last moments—namely, that, instead of before the window, the execution should take place at a small wayside chapel on the confines of the village. And so Peter Sigmair was shot at the age of thirty-six, honored for his valor, but still more for his filial piety.

We were now standing on the very spot, before the humble, whitewashed chapel. Above the entrance, which was closed, a rude fresco, much injured by weather, commemorated the deed. Some soldiers in very high-waisted regimentals were taking aim at Peter Sigmair, who knelt blindfolded, wearing the full peasant costume, which, more ordinary in those days, is still used for marriages, and is consequently represented even now on mortuary tablets as indicative of the heavenly wedding-garment.

After seeing the now desolate, forsaken chapel, we bent our steps into the village to visit the Wirth-haus. A friendly, quiet peasant-woman met us in the dark passage, and showed us into a clean, comfortable wainscoted room, the zechstube. We ordered some wine for the good of the house, which was brought by an equally quiet peasant-man. Setting it on the table, he hovered about the room in an uncertain way, but confided to us eventually that he was the landlord. The woman then came and introduced herself as his sister, and they both stood silently before us in a house as silent as themselves, the great festival at the neighboring hamlet having probably thinned their custom. It was evident that they had plenty of leisure to answer any questions, and we had soon learned from them that the old Tharer-wirth was their grandfather.

"You must know," said the sister, "I have read in big printed letters that Onkel Peter's little children, holding up their little hands, prayed the cruel general with tears to spare their father. It is a pity that what is put in print can never be altered, because he had no children. He had only a young wife, who afterward married a bauer at Antholz, where their son is the priest."

"Yes," said the wirth. "If there had been children, they would have succeeded, not my mother. It was before either of us was born, but she often told us of it—how cold it was, in the depth of winter, on the Name of Jesus Day. Onkel Peter marched with a cross placed in his hands, which were bound behind him, from Bruneck, being led to a house near the inn at Nieder Olang, since burnt down, where he confessed. At the wayside chapel he next received the sacrament, and then the soldiers shot him."

Were there any mementoes of him in the house? we asked.

"Oh, not now. His belt used to lie about the house, but had been either carried off or lost." And then one of the good souls intimated that it was sad to have a relation publicly executed: he must pass as a criminal. It did their hearts good to find that strangers from other parts did not look upon him as such. It was natural that they and the villagers should think well of him, but they were poor ignorant people at the best. However, criminal or not, all the school-children in Tyrol read about him now. He was stuck in their primers and called a hero and a patriot; only, even in the lesson-book, the mistake had again been made of giving him children. The wirth thought it must be for effect—to make the tale more thrilling.

"We often puzzle ourselves about the rights and wrongs of Onkel Peter's death," concluded the simple man; "but this will always be clear to us, that three foreign ladies visiting the house out of respect to his memory speaks well for him."

Thus we left the staid brother and sister quietly gratified by our call, and returning to Nieder Olang found the kellnerin of the now deserted inn awaiting us with a nosegay of stately white lilies. The gig too was ready, and with our dear friend E—— at our side we drove homeward in the silent summer evening. We passed Percha, a small group of peaceful houses and a church, contrasting forcibly with the wild, tumultuous scenes which it must have witnessed when the enthusiast Von Kolb and his companions convulsed the peasantry;—and passed over the upland plains where the ten thousand peasants had been repulsed and scattered—a corn-giving land, affluent with myriad golden shocks, like a perpetual Joseph's dream.

The Hof proved too quiet and healthful a resting-place, and its inmates too genuinely good and honest, for us to bid it a lasting farewell in '71. Behold us, therefore, in the following summer again within its friendly walls, where we at first settled down to a harmonious, industrious routine of several weeks: then an extreme desire seizing upon some of us to see more of the glories of mountain and valley around, we set out one and all for six days of pure holiday enjoyment; part of the programme being for the more adventurous, attended by Moidel, to climb to the Olm on a visit to Jakob.

MARGARET HOWITT.

[TO BE CONTINUED]

WITH THE AMERICAN AMBULANCE CORPS AT PARIS.

We were sitting under the trees in the Champs Élysées, in sight of the ruined Tuileries, when my friend gave me the following reminiscences. In repeating what I can recall of them, as nearly as I can in his own language, I shall use names with almost as great freedom as he did—a fact for which I think I owe no apology.

"Restore that wreck of the Tuileries," said my friend—but I shall let him tell his story without quotation-marks, and without the interruption of my urging and questionings, that finally got him almost as much interested in his subject as I was myself—Restore that wreck of the Tuileries, and these gay equipages and these loiterers in the Avenue would repeat for you, very nearly, the scene of my first service with the American ambulance. That was before I was a regular member of the corps—in fact, before the corps which operated at the siege of Paris had been properly formed. Dr. Sims, Dr. Tom Pratt, Frank Hayden and others, with three ambulance-wagons, were going to the front: we heard a great deal of "à Berlin!" in the streets in those days. I came down this way to the Palais d'Industrie to see them off, and when I did see the American ladies raising the colors to march through the crowd, I couldn't help taking part in the procession. So I put on the brassard of Geneva—a red cross on a white band strapped on the arm, being the ambulance badge established in 1864 by the International Convention of Geneva—and seized one of the sticks with a sack on the end of it, and began asking contributions for the wounded as the cortege moved on.

It was one of the most exciting scenes I ever witnessed, our march for miles through the crowded boulevards to the station of the Northern Railway. Dr. Sims walked behind his own horses, which headed the procession, and the throng everywhere commented admiringly upon the chic of the fine animals. The American ladies—there were three of them—marched beside the wagons, bearing the French and American colors and the red cross of the International ambulance. We filled and emptied and refilled our sacks with the Napoleons from the monde in their flash barouches and from the loungers of the clubs, and with the greasy sous of the workingmen and grisettes. Many took out purses containing five sous and gave three: many took out purses containing silver and copper, and gave the silver. Old men with feeble sight and hearing would hobble up to us through the crowd and ask, "What is this?"

"For the wounded," we would say—"for France!"

And trembling hands would be thrust into pockets, and "God's blessing on you!" would go with their silver or sous.

Well, well, it was a great day. It was, I believe, the largest collection ever taken up in Paris for the wounded. We shouted ourselves hoarse when the train bore the corps away for Mézières. They served through the war, part of the time with the French, part of the time with the Prussians. Many of them have since been decorated by both governments.

It is to Dr. Evans that the American ambulance owes more perhaps than to any one man. It supported itself, our corps did, and Dr. Evans furnished the largest portion of the money. He had some American ambulance-wagons and the material for a field hospital brought over and exhibited at the Exposition of 1867, and these were still in his possession. They were early offered to the American corps, but a misunderstanding between Dr. Evans and Dr. Sims caused the latter to go to the field with wagons, etc. furnished by the International ambulance. So we who formed the American corps at Paris during the siege had the use of Dr. Evans's wagons and material. The doctor himself accompanied the empress in her flight; but from England he sent money whenever he could get it into Paris, and did all in his power for the ambulance.

Some time before the Prussians had closed in upon us it was ordered that the useless mouths (bouches inutiles) should leave the city. Of course thousands left. We who remained expected we should have to go into the ranks. I liked the excitement of the thing, and stayed through it all. Meanwhile, Dr. John Swinburne, who was formerly, I believe, a health officer of New York, had been invited to take charge of the American hospital at Paris. Dr. Evans's tents were pitched in the Avenue de l'Impératrice, in the place where the dog-show used to be. This was our headquarters all through the siege, though at last, as winter came on, the tents were not large or comfortable enough to hold the wounded, and so we built barracks there. George Kidder, Will Dreyer and I joined the corps together. My first service was to beg Bowles Brothers' American flag and hoist it over our tents. Then our duties consisted for a while in loafing about the grounds, driving tent pegs, greasing the wagons and drawing up rules for our own government, for there was no fighting just then. Those were the bright, sunny days of September. Montretout and Châtillon had been taken, the Zouaves had disgraced themselves, and we were utterly cut off from the world. We elected two captains. One was William B. Bowles, and the other Joseph K. Riggs of Washington. They were to serve on alternate days.

One morning we went down in our wagons, drawn by horses belonging to members of our corps, and reported to the "International Society for the Aid of the Wounded." We found them at the Palais d'Industrie. They did not think much of us, as we could not help perceiving, but they finally consented to let us go out at the first sortie—namely, that of Villejuif, when the French tried to take the villages of Thiais and L'Hay. We got upon the field just as the firing was over. The French had taken one village at the point of the bayonet, but at last they had retired so precipitately that they had left their wounded in the Prussian lines. There the poor fellows lay, in among the yellow wheat, with great well-fed Prussians prancing around them on horseback. It was a terrible scene, especially to me, being the first of the kind I had ever seen. But after a while I was so busy with the others, picking up the wounded and burying the dead, that somehow I lost my first overwhelming sense of the horror of the spectacle.

We smelt our first powder—that is, a few stray balls came among us—at Châtillon. Returning from this latter fight, we saw the burning of the palace of St. Cloud. It was a beautiful October sunset and evening, and the sight was indescribably grand.

You will, however, get a better idea of our share in a sortie if I tell you more particularly of the next one, that of Malmaison. It was there, in fact, that we began to make our reputation. This was the sortie fraught with most real danger to the Germans. They had not then had time to establish their lines, and if the attack had been followed up with more men, the French, it is thought, might have taken Versailles and cut the enemy's line of communication. As it was, the Prussians had everything packed and horses saddled, ready to leave Versailles at a moment's notice. Ur. Sarazin, chief surgeon of Ducrot's corps, had asked us to rendezvous at the Rond Point de Courbevoie, just behind Mont Valérien, where the French had a battery. On our way out there that beautiful October afternoon, as we were driving up the hill from Porte Maillot, the American flag and the colors of the International ambulance flying over our five wagons, we were met by the whole provisional government of France. Jules Ferry hailed us and asked a ride. They were going to see the fight. We took them all in: we had in our wagon Rochefort, Ferry and Favre; the others took seats as the wagons came up. We left them on a sort of platform which had been built for them upon the pedestal of the famous knee-breeches-and-cocked-hat statue of the First Napoleon, which was replaced by the Roman-togaed one upon the Column Venôdme. The first-mentioned statue had even then been toppled over and carted away. We went on to the top of the hill of Courbevoie, whence, however, we were promptly ordered back. From our station farther in the rear, lying down in our wagons, we watched the bombs and the smoke of the musketry rising over the hill. The French were beating the Prussians back with great slaughter, as we heard from couriers constantly sent in.

Suddenly, Dr. Sarazin rode into our midst and shouted, "Ambulance Américaine, en avant!" Putting spurs to his horse, he galloped down the road, we following at a brisk trot. Halfway to Rueil he drew up and said, "Pass that windmill, turn to the right, and you will be on the field." We plunged on through potato-patches and vineyards, our hearts in our mouths. As we drew past the windmill, which was on a knoll in the descent from Mont Valérien, we came upon the French reserves, massed by regiments behind the artillery and mitrailleuses which lined the crest of the hill we were on. Just behind them were Trochu and his staff. An aide-de-camp galloped toward us as we approached, and told us to take down our flags, shouting that we would draw fire. He had to tell us that only once: our flags came down like a shot. The fight was going on in the valley just beneath us. The sun was setting, the windows of Mont Valérien shimmered with its slanting rays, the green woods grew darker, and the blue smoke curled lazily over the combatants. Away in the distance the aqueduct of Marly ran in gray relief against the red of the evening sky. From this aqueduct, as we learned afterward, King William, the crown prince, Moltke and Bismarck were watching the struggle. Our little red-legged liners had pushed the Germans across the open space and were pressing them in the wood. We grew excited, and the boys began making for the crest of the hill among the artillery, when one of our party, a well-known American here in Paris, cried out, "Gentlemen, as a clergyman and father of a family, I forbid you to go any farther forward and risk your lives." Whereupon Mr. William Bowles, aroused, but in his usual manner in moments of excitement—namely, with his hands in his vest pockets and his eyes beaming through his gold spectacles—observed, "Gentlemen, oh that be d——d! As an American and your captain, I command you to follow me." And we followed him, singing at the tops of our voices, "While we were marching through Georgia."

What would have become of us, carried away as we were, no one knows, if we had not been marched back again by higher orders. We were straightway sent down to the right, toward Malmaison, to gather the wounded. We passed Trochu and staff, who saluted us, and we wound down the hill, with the infantry before us, and the cannon and mitrailleuses behind us bellowing over our heads. The French soldiery sent up cheer after cheer for "les Américains" as we made our way, still shouting, "While we were marching through Georgia." There were twenty or twenty-five of us, and we made some noise. In the streets of Rueil we found the dead and wounded very thick. We filled our wagons with the wounded, and started back for our hospital at Paris. In our wagon we had seven, so we had to walk along beside it. It was late in the night when we reached the city gate. There we were confronted by sentinels with glaring torches, challenged, asked the number of our wounded, and then allowed to rattle and creak over the draw-bridge. Just inside the walls we were met by a surging mass of anxious men, women and children.

"What regiment have you?" they would shout. "Has the Hundred-and-fifth been engaged? Have the Zouaves been in?"

"Yes," exclaimed one from our wagon, rising on his elbow, "they have been in, and many haven't come out again." Then snatching his fez from his head, he waved it in the glare of the torches, I and cried, "Vive la France! vive la République!"

That poor fellow was shot in the hip. We so far cured him at the hospital that I saw him hobbling into the fight upon a cane, his gun strapped across his back, at the last sortie of the besieged. I got very well acquainted with him, too, at the hospital, as I did with many another gallant fellow on both sides. He was an educated gentleman of Alsace: he had entered the Zouaves as a volunteer at the outbreak of the war, and had fought it all through in the ranks. He was sergeant when he was wounded. After the war and Commune were over I was touched on the shoulder by some one sitting upon the seat back of me at the Opéra Comique one night, and there was my brave friend the sergeant, safe and almost sound through all.

At the hospital, the night after the sortie I have just been telling you of, we worked with our wounded until nearly morning. Dr. Swinburne, I think, did not go to bed at all. And right here I ought to introduce you more particularly to the old doctor. Take the portrait of General Grant, run a good many streaks of gray through his hair and beard, a few more lines on his forehead and crows' feet around his eyes, and you have an idea of the doctor's looks. He is a man of great energy and few words—a surgical genius and a great lover of horses. He could or would explain nothing. At last we got to calling him "Old Compound Fracture," for he would say, when we were starting for a fight likely to be serious, "Boys, don't mind those slightly wounded fellows—let the Frenchmen pick them up: just bring me along the compound fractures." These latter were his hobby. He fairly doted on a man whom ordinary surgeons would have given up in despair; and I believe he was the happiest man in Paris when the first patient who had his leg shattered in a half dozen places began hobbling about the camp on crutches. The soldiers got to hear of him at last. More than one poor fellow lying on the field grievously wounded swore he would be taken to no place but to the American hospital.

Our next important sortie was at Champigny. That was the occasion when Ducrot was surely going to push through the German lines. In his proclamation he had announced that he would re-enter Paris victorious or dead. Of course he did not keep his promise. We were all to rendezvous at the Champs de Mars that morning at four o'clock. About three of the same morning Mont Valérien opened fire, and then Issy, then Vanves, then Mont Rouge, and so the flash and roar of cannon went round the whole city. That was our reveille. It was cold, very cold, that morning, and we waited at the rendezvous a long time in company with the French, Italian, Swiss and other ambulance corps. The great Doctor Ricord was there, and some of us heard then for the first time that he is an American from Baltimore. Chenu, Nellaton and several other famous surgeons were also there, shivering with us as we waited and waited for the push through the lines, which never came. Well, when at last the fight did occur, it made plenty of work for our wagons. For the next two days they were constantly going to and fro between the field and our hospital. Everywhere we went along the lines now we were recognized and made way for. One night, as one of our wagons was trying to cross the field, it was halted with the question, "What ambulance is that?"

"Is it necessary to ask?" shouted a French soldier out of the darkness. "It is the Americans', of course: they are everywhere."

At this sortie there rode with us a little French abbé, whom some of the boys had picked up weeks before roaming about the outposts among the trenches. He had won their hearts by his utter contempt of fire as he prayed with and confessed everybody he could lay hands on. At the sortie of Châtillon he had discovered one of our corps bringing in to the wagons at the risk of his life a huge pumpkin. The abbé imagined that Americans must set great value upon pumpkins if they were willing to secure them at such hazard, and he described the whole incident in L'Univers, the ultra-Catholic paper of Paris. In the course of a few days the ambulance Américaine received two or three polite notes from religious French maiden ladies, saying that they had a few pumpkins which were at the service of the gentlemen of the corps. We received the pumpkins, and skirmished for the ingredients of pumpkin-pie, which the matron of our hospital baked for us. This was an unknown use for pumpkins in France, and those pies cost about their weight in silver. Sugar we had—it was the eggs that cost. Horsemeat and pumpkin-pie! There was a wild extravagance in that dinner, but then it was patriotic—at least the dessert was.

We nearly froze to death at Bourget, but I have not time to tell you of it. I must pass on to the last sortie—toward Montretout and Malmaison. That was a dark, foggy, leaden morning, with a drizzling rain. We passed through the whole French army on our way out—line, National Guards, Mobiles, artillery, cavalry: we passed through them all, everywhere meeting with a grateful reception. Sometimes they cheered us and our wagons (now increased to eight) and our immense coffee-pot. This last was an institution: it consisted of three great boilers mounted on wheels. Before the meat gave out we used sometimes to put soup in our coffee-pot and take it to the field. Coffee by some means we still had. Even on the desolate morning I am now telling you of many a poor foot-soldier who had been upon the almost impassable roads all night had been cheered by a sly tin cupful of the precious liquid as we trudged on toward the field. Well, we were finally ordered to halt at the little village of Rueil, within a stone's throw of the church where Josephine and Hortense lie buried. I climbed a hill on the left, and saw the French pushing toward Buzenval. They could see nothing before them but a line of fire—not a Prussian above the low wall in front of the thick mass of wood. Though I could see these Frenchmen dropping down by hundreds, they went steadily on and on. Some of them were National Guards who had never before been under fire. It was here that young Henri Regnault fell, with many other Parisians known in literature and art. After a while the Germans began shelling the hill on which I was, and I scampered down to the open square where the wagons were. It was not long, however, till another German battery got to throwing shells into this square, each discharge bringing them nearer and nearer to us. Suddenly a shell struck the corner house in front of us. The door opened in a very deliberate way, and out came a man in a blouse, smoking a pipe, and followed by a woman with a baby in her arms. He leisurely locked the door behind him, and put the key into his pocket. Then he started slowly across the square, with his wife and baby still behind him. As he passed us I exclaimed, "For Heaven's sake, what are you doing here with that baby? Don't you see they are shelling all around us?"

"Yes, I see, I see: one of them struck our house just now. I've got another one up here, and we're moving to it." And without taking his hands out of his pockets or his pipe out of his mouth, he strolled on across the open square, followed by his wife, who seemed absorbed only in hushing the baby as it wailed in fright at the sound of the bursting shells.

The French line was soon thrown back, and we filled our wagons with wounded and started for the city, the shells still falling unpleasantly thick and near. One of them struck right under our coffee-pot, and, exploding, sent it in a hundred directions. The horses which drew it did not happen to be hit, but they took fright and dashed off, wrecking what was left of the coffee-pot wagon. We got back to town as fast as we knew how that day. We tried to go out again at night, but could make no headway against the crowd of wagons, artillery and the retreating army on the roads. It was an utterly demoralized mob. We barely escaped massacre by a regiment of Belleville National Guards, who were mad, raving mad, accusing everybody of incapacity and treason. The next day we went out with a burying-party, and found members of this same National Guard thickly strewn among the vines of Buzenval and Montretout, and we buried them. In their new knap-sacks we found crested note-paper and many such things, showing their owners' rank and want of military experience at the same time. Some of these articles were stained with blood. We saw out there the young lady who was soon to have married Henri Regnauit. She was looking for his body among the dead, and found it during the day. Young Regnault, it is claimed, was introducing a new school in French painting. He had made some remarkable studies in Algiers, one of the results of which was the well-known picture of Salomé in the Salon of 1870. I have said we saw his betrothed searching for his body among the dead; and the memory of that sweet, brave girl in that awful scene has lent a pathos to the story of his life and death which I do not get out of the writers and painters who have since dwelt so much and so lovingly upon the subject.

George McFarland of New York and two other fellows got lost from our wagons the night before, when we left the field. They took refuge in a tomb, where half a dozen poor wounded had crawled before them. They remained there for three long hours, hearing the shells burst around them from a tremendous cross-fire of the Germans. These three fellows, by the by, were the unlucky men of the ambulance. Whenever, by any chance, any of us were missing late at night, it was always they. When the wagons were full, the roads dusty or covered with sleet, it was they too who failed to get a seat, and had to walk to town. When our eatables had disappeared, or we had no wine or drink of any kind, they were sure to come in hungry, thirsty and foot-sore from some distant part of the field. At Champigny they slept on a billiard-table; upon the Plateau d'Avron they just happened around when the Prussians began the awful bombardment which obliged the French to scurry off, leaving guns and stores. This, they said, was their worst day out, for they half ran, half rolled down the hillside through a rain of shells, about a hundred guns, they maintained, having been concentrated upon that particular plateau. At Rueil one of them was just coming up to get a cup of coffee when the shell struck our coffee-pot. I witnessed the escape that time, and it did truly seem miraculous.

I think I may state it as a fact that if it had not been for the loss of that coffee-pot we should never have eaten the cook's dog. It came about in this natural—or perhaps I should say unnatural—way. In the early days of the siege, you see, some poor wretch who lived near our hospital possessed, as is almost always the case with a Frenchman removed a quarter of a degree, say, above abject poverty, a favorite dog. One day his beast and house were made glad by the appearance of two pups. They were tawny, bright-eyed little fellows, and the Frenchman loved them with a love that the Anglo-Saxon knows not of, especially in the matter of dogs. Well, provisions got scarcer and scarcer, and finally, with an anguish that I have no right to ridicule, and as the only thing left for him to do, the poor Frenchman brought his pups around and presented them to the cook of our hospital. Here the little fellows waxed fat and strong, and were soon great favorites, not only of the good-natured cook, but of all the fellows of the ambulance. Perhaps you never saw a pot of horse-soup boiling: if you have, you will never forget the great blotches of fat that float upon the surface of it. Many skimmings of this did John Cook, as we used to call our chef, put aside for the pups. In the course of time, however, famine began to invade the ambulance. The canned meat and the hams had long since disappeared; a horse belonging to one of our corps, found overtaken by mysterious death in his stall, had been devoured; but the two pups, fat and tender, no one ventured to attack. And they had the powerful protection of the cook. Still, it made our mouths water to see them gambol in their sleekness. At length came the memorable morning of the last sortie at Montretout. Then for the first time we mounted the cook upon our coffee-pot wagon, with an extra large brassard around his arm, allowing him about three times the ordinary amount of linen to show how peacefully and culinarily he was neutral. Poor fellow! I am sorry to say he was soon demoralized that day. The coffee he had brewed was a success, but he could not stand Krupp shells. Long before one of them had exploded under his coffee-pot he had wanted to go home. At that fearful moment he completely lost his head and—his white cap. How he got back to the hospital not even himself ever knew. It was long after nightfall when he wandered in, weary, listless, sorrowful. One of the pups came up to greet him as he crossed the threshold of the kitchen. The chef met that welcome with an unfeeling kick, he was so demoralized. The fate of the pup was sealed. Scarce had the cook found his way to a bed in one of the tents when the scullions made for the pup, and had his fat frizzing on the gridiron and his bones dancing in a seething soup-pot. We all had a feast that night. Even the cook himself had a greasy morsel brought to his bedside. But somehow thenceforth the name of that dog was never mentioned, and his brother led a more luxurious, a sleeker life than ever. We had learned, I think, the old moral of being moved by sorrow for the dead to be kinder to the living.

As I have said before, we became very well acquainted with many of the wounded men at our hospital. With some, indeed, we contracted strong friendships. We buried many by subscription, thus rescuing them from the fosse commune to which soldiers, French or German, were as a rule consigned within the French lines. Among others was a fair-haired Saxon by the name of Bruno, almost a boy in years, who was brought in from Champigny. He won our hearts from the very first by asking that a suffering Frenchman who lay beside him might have his wounds dressed before his own. He was dangerously and painfully wounded himself, yet no one ever heard him complain. I shall never hear the "Wacht am Rhein" without thinking of him, for he was the first one that I ever heard sing it. He sang it to me one night in return for some old German songs I had tried to cheer him with; that is, he sang some of it: his voice was so feeble that I had to stop him. He seemed to expect death, and was prepared for it. His long, wavy blonde hair and his beardless boy face were always beautiful, but imagine them when his blue eyes were lit up by the sentiment of that song!

The next night, when I came to visit Bruno, a French National Guard was dying not far from him, with wife and family kneeling around the bed. The tent was hushed, and I hesitated a moment at the door. One or two American ladies, volunteer nurses of the ambulance, were grouped near the dying man back of the family. Suddenly, Lisette, an Alsatian nurse who worked devotedly night and day for friend or foe alike, and who in her neat white cap had been standing in a corner wiping her eyes, approached me and said in her broad German French, "Partonn, but I will pray for this poor unfortunate." And she dropped on her knees beside the bed and commenced aloud in German a simple, earnest, honest prayer to which the scene and the language gave an effect utterly indescribable. There were few dry eyes in the tent. Soon after that I could tell by the movements about the bed that the poor National Guard was dead. I turned to the bedside of the wounded Saxon, and found his hands clasped upon his breast and his lips muttering a prayer for his enemy.

It was near Christmas then, and to cheer Bruno after the foregoing scene I spoke to him of the merry Christmas-times in the Fatherland. He shook his head mournfully: "Ach Gott! die werd' ich nie wiedersehen" ("I shall never see them again"). The only thing which he seemed very much to regret was that he should not live long enough to get the cross he had won, so that it might be sent to his father at his little village on the Elbe. Well, the next afternoon we were gathered in the same mournful and hushed way about his bedside. The dying Saxon alone broke the silence. There is no way of reproducing in English the wonderful pathos of his speech, mellow even in its faintness. I suppose I ought to say that his mind was wandering, but at the time it did not seem so to me. He spoke first of the green fields approaching his native village, then of the flowers; and then finally he exclaimed, "There gleams the Elbe, and there comes father!—Father!" And in the joy of that meeting, real or imaginary, a smile parting his lips, he died.

We gave the gentle Saxon the poor honor of a separate grave, and as soon after the siege as I could get a letter out I wrote to his father, sending the few little trinkets that had been trusted to my keeping. In the answer and thanks of the lonely old man—for he was now widowed and childless—there was something almost as sad as the death I have been telling you of. He could not hear enough of his son's last days, and our correspondence ceased only when my minutest details had been given.

I have already told you of our last sortie, and really of our last service as a corps. A few days after the loss of our coffee-pot the armistice was declared. Those were sad times. I can't tell you of the despair of that whole city. It makes me dizzy even to remember it. When the people saw that their endurance, suffering, starvation for those long months had been unavailing, there were no bounds to their speech or acts. The two words, "Treason!" and "Bread!" were heard everywhere. Men wept like children. Many actually lay down and died, half starved, half heartbroken. These things will never be written up—they never can be written up. It needed hope with the scant food so many had lived on. The city at the mercy of the conquerors—But there is no use in trying to recall those wild, miserable days. The air was charged with the common despair. I saw the burning of the Tuileries and all the horrors of the Commune, but nothing ever had such an effect upon me as that.

I must, however, before I draw these reminiscences to a close, tell you about Major O'Flynn, of Her Majesty's Indian army. It was he who brought the pumpkin into camp at Châtillon. That he should have risked his life most recklessly in doing it was nothing odd, as you will soon learn. It was only a little droll that he should have taken just that time and place to gratify his curiosity. He had heard Americans talk a great deal about pumpkin-pies, and he wanted to know if they were as good as their reputation; so he took the first chance and the first pumpkin that came in his way. Major Thomas Vincent O'Flynn, of Her Majesty's Indian army, was of course an Irishman. He was tall, tawny, impassive as any Englishman; modest and mild-mannered in camp, and in the field utterly unconscious of bullets or shell. He had married a Hindoo lady, whom we called the Begum. She was just as excitable as he was impassive. He owned a pair of splendid black horses, which he generally drove himself in one of our wagons. Sometimes, however, he rode, as estafette or orderly, a splendid sorrel stallion, also his property; and this stallion, "Garryowen" by name, was the pride and delight of our hearts, the pet of our camp. The major had a poodle dog too, distinct from the Begum's. It was generosity rather than effeminacy on his part to have this dog, for he bought it to save its life: the former owners were about to eat it when the major came to the rescue. The dog was white, and our Indian warrior used to spend much time washing it on the eve of a fight. The dog would ride stretched across its master's feet on the front of the wagon; and upon the field, if the major was capable of the sense of fear—which-I doubt—it was exercised solely for his horses and dog. When away from these he was always getting to the front. The only provision he made against any possible danger was to fill his pocket with silver five-franc pieces. A man didn't know, he said, when he might be taken prisoner by those "thaves" of Prussians, and he'd better have his money with him till he could get his remittances from across the Channel. He had enough of living upon next to nothing—which was horse-flesh—and he didn't want to live on nothing among the Germans. Those five-franc pieces, however, he always put to the drollest uses. He would find his way in among the artillerymen, and, pointing to a given spot, he would tell them in the worst imaginable French to throw a shell in there: "Ploo haut, ploo haut, mon bong ami: aim at the chimney, the chimney." Then he would step aside, with hands in his pockets, and watch results. If it was a good shot, he would give the gunner a five-franc piece. Thus he would pass along the line until he had exhausted the money with which he had fortified himself against starvation among the Prussians. And this was all for pure love of fighting, for the major saw so much of the French officers' incompetency that he soon had precious little sympathy for their cause.

At the second assault on Bourget, O'Flynn grew tired of waiting for the attack, and, what is more, terribly hungry. "I've lived long enough on horse-mate," exclaimed the major, "especially when I've none of it at all!" So he unhitched one of his black horses from the ambulance-wagon, and, taking a saddle from an orderly, tore off his brassard and other ambulance insignia, threw away his cap, so as not to compromise us, and rode bareheaded down to the very frontest of the front. The advance were lying crouched down in the rifle-pits, awaiting the signal to storm the village. Motioning to the amazed soldiery, he cried, still in his horrible French, "Now or never! Voilà Bourget! Follow me! See, there's Bourget. Sooivez moi!" All this to the rattle of German musketry. Seeing that he got no response in one place, he rode madly to the other rifle-pits and repeated the invitation, the officers shouting to him as he passed that he was riding into certain death, and conjuring him to save himself. But the major could not or would not understand them. Finally, some officers ran out, and, taking him forcibly from his horse, led him away.

The major often went on commissions from our camp on the Avenue de l'Impératrice down into the city. In those days many of the young French swells, to keep from going into the field, had donned the ambulance uniform and passed their time loafing about the cafés in the Boulevards. This became so great a scandal that Trochu was obliged to issue an order forbidding the uniform to be worn except on active duty. One day, as the major, bound on some errand in the interest of a Frenchman lying wounded in our hospital, was majestically riding his superb stallion Garryowen down the Champs Élysées, his long tawny side-whiskers waving gently in the breeze, his wiry frame erect as a ramrod, the blue regulation-coat buttoned close to his throat with American buttons, the International brassard on his arm and the ambulance shield on his cap,—as the major, I say, sailed down in this state, he was hailed by one of the chiefs of the French ambulance, which just then was all powerful in Paris. The major pulled up Garryowen leisurely, and the little Frenchman, who spoke tolerable English, demanded brusquely, "Don't you know General Trochu has forbidden to wear ambulance uniform when off duty? And we want this thing stopped."

The major very deliberately leaned over and caught the little French official by the button of the coat, and in an undertone asked, "And, sure, who are you?"

"I am Mr. So-and-so," mentioning the name of one of the chiefs of the French International corps.

"Oh, ye are, are ye?" rejoined the major, retaining his hold of the little man's button. "Then, Mr. So-and-so, give my compliments—Major O'Flynn's compliments, if ye loike it better—to General Trochu, and tell him, if you plase, that the gentlemen of the American ambulance and meself buy our own clothes and pay for them, ride our own horses and fade them; and when we want or have time to parade aither the one or the other, we will ask permission from the general himself."

Releasing his hold of the Frenchman's button, the major saluted and rode gracefully away upon his errand of mercy. 'And after this specimen of his politeness none of us was ever interfered with.

I have heard from others that the major and the Begum are still alive and thriving. One day in the times of the Commune I had crept up behind the Arc de Triomphe, during a lull in the fire, to take a look at the Communist batteries at Porte Maillot. Now, the major lived halfway between the Arc and the batteries. Suddenly from my concealment I saw the gateway of his house open, and the major sally forth on Garryowen. He gave merely a glance at the batteries, and slowly rode up toward the Arc. There was not a soul else visible on the highway, and it must have been he who drew the attention of the Versaillais, for their guns opened at once and the shells came spinning around in the neighborhood. Garryowen, the grand, the beautiful, was as accustomed to fire as his rider was: neither was shaken from his equilibrium. With the same easy pace they gradually wound their way up to and around the Arc de Triomphe, and thus calmly down the Champs Élysées. The droll, gallant fellow waved me a graceful good-day as he passed me peeping from behind my hiding-place; and that was my last sight, and a characteristic one, of Major Thomas Vincent O'Flynn, of Her Majesty's Indian army.

RALPH KEELER.

THE HUMMING-BIRD.

Poised in a sheeny mist

Of the dust of bloom,

Clasped to the poppy's breast and kissed,

Baptized in pools of violet perfume

From foot to plume!

Zephyr loves thy wings

Above all lovable things,

And brings them gifts with rapturous murmurings:

Thine is the golden reach of blooming hours,

Spirit of flowers!

Music follows thee,

And, continually,

Thy life is changed and sweetened happily,

Having no more than rose-leaf shade of gloom,

O bird of Bloom!

Thou art a winged thought

Of tropical hours,

With all the tropic's rare bloom-splendor fraught,

Surcharged with Beauty's indefinable powers,

Angel of flowers!

JAMES MAURICE THOMPSON.

A PRINCESS OF THULE.

By William Black, Author of "THE STRANGE ADVENTURES OF A PHAETON."