McClure’s Magazine

June, 1893.

Vol. I. No. 1

S. S. McCLURE, Limited
NEW YORK AND LONDON
1893

Copyright, 1893, by S. S. McClure, Limited. All rights reserved.

Press of J. J. Little & Co.
Astor Place, New York

Table of Contents

Illustrations

REAL CONVERSATIONS.—I.
A DIALOGUE BETWEEN WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS AND HJALMAR HJORTH BOYESEN.
Recorded By Mr. Boyesen.

When I was requested to furnish a dramatic biography of Mr. Howells, I was confronted with what seemed an insuperable difficulty. The more I thought of William Dean Howells, the less dramatic did he seem to me. The only way that occurred to me of introducing a dramatic element into our proposed interview was for me to assault him with tongue or pen, in the hope that he might take energetic measures to resent my intrusion; but as, notwithstanding his unvarying kindness to me, and many unforgotten benefits, I cherished only the friendliest feelings for him, I could not persuade myself to procure dramatic interest at such a price.

My second objection, I am bound to confess, arose from my own sense of dignity which rebelled against the rôle of an interviewer, and it was not until my conscience was made easy on this point that I agreed to undertake the present article. I was reminded that it was an ancient and highly dignified form of literature I was about to revive; and that my precedent was to be sought not in the modern newspaper interview, but in the Platonic dialogue. By the friction of two kindred minds, sparks of thought may flash forth which owe their origin solely to the friendly collision. We have a far more vivid portrait of Socrates in the beautiful conversational turns of “The Symposium” and the first book of “The Republic,” than in the purely objective account of Xenophon in his “Memorabilia.” And Howells, though he may not know it, has this trait in common with Socrates, that he can portray himself, unconsciously, better than I or anybody else could do it for him.

If I needed any further encouragement, I found it in the assurance that what I was expected to furnish was to be in the nature of “an exchange of confidences between two friends with a view to publication.” It was understood, of course, that Mr. Howells was to be more confiding than myself, and that his reminiscences were to predominate; for an author, however unheroic he may appear to his own modesty, is bound to be the hero of his biography. What made the subject so alluring to me, apart from the personal charm which inheres in the man and all that appertains to him, was the consciousness that our friendship was of twenty-two years’ standing, and that during all that time not a single jarring note had been introduced to mar the harmony of our relation.

Equipped, accordingly, with a good 4 conscience and a lead pencil (which remained undisturbed in my breast-pocket), I set out to “exchange confidences” with the author of “Silas Lapham” and “A Modern Instance.” I reached the enormous human hive on Fifty-ninth Street where my subject, for the present, occupies a dozen most comfortable and ornamental cells, and was promptly hoisted up to the fourth floor and deposited in front of his door. It is a house full of electric wires and tubes—literally honeycombed with modern conveniences. But in spite of all these, I made my way triumphantly to Mr. Howells’s den, and after a proper prelude began the novel task assigned to me.

PROFESSOR BOYESEN IN HIS STUDY AT COLUMBIA COLLEGE.

“I am afraid,” I remarked quite en passant, “that I shall be embarrassed not by my ignorance, but by my knowledge concerning your life. For it is difficult to ask with good grace about what you already know. I am aware, for instance, that you were born at Martin’s Ferry, Ohio, March 11, 1837; that you removed thence to Dayton, and a few years later to Jefferson, Ashtabula County; that your father edited, published, and printed a country newspaper of Republican complexion, and that you spent a good part of your early years in the printing office. Nevertheless, I have some difficulty in realizing the environment of your boyhood.”

Howells. If you have read my “Boy’s Town,” which is in all essentials autobiographical, you know as much as I could tell you. The environment of my early life was exactly as there described.

Boyesen. Your father, I should judge, then, was not a strict disciplinarian?

Howells. No. He was the gentlest of men—a friend and companion to his sons. He guided us in an unobtrusive way without our suspecting it. He was continually putting books into my hands, and they were always good books; many of them became events in my life. I had no end of such literary passions during my boyhood. Among the first was Goldsmith, then came Cervantes and Irving.

Boyesen. Then there was a good deal of literary atmosphere about your childhood?

Howells. Yes. I can scarcely remember the time when books did not play a great part in my life. Father was by his culture and his interests rather 5 isolated from the community in which we lived, and this made him and all of us rejoice the more in a new author, in whose world we would live for weeks and months, and who colored our thoughts and conversation.

THE BIRTHPLACE OF W. D. HOWELLS AT MARTINS FERRY, OHIO.

Boyesen. It has always been a matter of wonder to me that, with so little regular schooling, you stepped full-fledged into literature with such an exquisite and wholly individual style.

Howells. If you accuse me of that kind of thing, I must leave you to account for it. I had always a passion for literature, and to a boy with a mind and a desire to learn, a printing office is not a bad school.

Boyesen. How old were you when you left Jefferson, and went to Columbus?

Howells. I was nineteen years old when I went to the capital and wrote legislative reports for Cincinnati and Cleveland papers; afterwards I became one of the editors of the “Ohio State Journal.” My duties gradually took a wide range, and I edited the literary column and wrote many of the leading articles. I was then in the midst of my enthusiasm for Heine, and was so impregnated with his spirit, that a poem which I sent to the “Atlantic Monthly” was mistaken by Mr. Lowell for a translation from the German poet. When he had satisfied himself, however, that it was not a translation, he accepted and printed it.

Boyesen. Tell me how you happened to publish your first volume, “Poems by Two Friends,” in partnership with John J. Piatt.

Howells. I had known Piatt as a young printer; afterwards when he began to write poems, I read them and was delighted with them. When he came to Columbus I made his acquaintance, and we became friends. By this time we were both contributors to the “Atlantic Monthly.” I may as well tell you that his contributions to our joint volume were far superior to mine.

Boyesen. Did Lowell share that opinion?

Howells. That I don’t know. He wrote me a very charming letter, in which he said many encouraging things, and he briefly reviewed the book in the “Atlantic.”

Boyesen. What was the condition of society in Columbus during those days?

Howells. There were many delightful and cultivated people there, and society was charming; the North and South were both represented, and their characteristics united in a kind of informal Western hospitality, warm and cordial in its tone, which gave of its very best without stint. Salmon P. Chase, later Secretary of the Treasury, and Chief Justice of the United States, was then Governor of Ohio. He had a charming family, and made us young editors welcome at his house. All winter long there was a round of parties at the different houses; the houses were large and we always danced. These parties were brilliant affairs, socially, but besides, we young people had many informal gayeties. The old Starling Medical College, which was defunct as an educational institution, except for some vivisection and experiments 6 on hapless cats and dogs that went on in some out-of-the-way corners, was used as a boarding-house; and there was a large circular room in which we often improvised dances. We young fellows who lodged in the place were half a dozen journalists, lawyers, and law-students; one was, like myself, a writer for the “Atlantic,” and we saw life with joyous eyes. We read the new books, and talked them over with the young ladies whom we seem to have been always calling upon. I remember those years in Columbus as among the happiest years of my life.

Boyesen. From Columbus you went as consul to Venice, did not you?

THE GIUSTINIANI PALACE, HOWELLS’ HOME IN VENICE.

Howells. Yes. You remember I had written a campaign “Life of Lincoln.” I was, like my father, an ardent Anti-slavery man. I went myself to Washington soon after President Lincoln’s inauguration. I was first offered the consulate to Rome; but as it depended entirely upon perquisites, which amounted only to three or four hundred dollars a year, I declined it, and they gave me Venice. The salary was raised to fifteen hundred dollars, which seemed to me quite beyond the dreams of avarice.

Boyesen. Do not you regard that Venetian experience as a very valuable one?

Howells. Oh, of course. In the first place, it gave me four years of almost uninterrupted leisure for study and literary work. There was, to be sure, occasionally an invoice to be verified, but that did not take much time. Secondly, it gave me a wider outlook upon the world than I had hitherto had. Without much study of a systematic kind, I had acquired a notion of English, French, German, and Spanish literature. I had been an eager and constant reader, always guided in my choice of books by my own inclination. I had learned German. Now, my first task was to learn Italian; and one of my early teachers was a Venetian priest, whom I read Dante with. This priest in certain ways suggested Don Ippolito in “A Foregone Conclusion.”

Boyesen. Then he took snuff, and had a supernumerary calico handkerchief?

Howells. Yes. But what interested me most about him was his religious skepticism. He used to say, “The saints are the gods baptized.” Then he was a kind of baffled inventor; though whether his inventions had the least merit I was unable to determine.

Boyesen. But his love story?

Howells. That was wholly fictitious.

Boyesen. I remember you gave me, in 1874, a letter of introduction to a Venetian friend of yours, named Brunetta, whom I failed to find.

Howells. Yes, Brunetta was the first friend I had in Venice. He was a distinctly Latin character—sober, well-regulated, and probity itself.

Boyesen. Do you call that the Latin character?

Howells. It is not our conventional idea of it; but it is fully as characteristic, if not more so, than the light, 7 mercurial, pleasure-loving type which somehow in literature has displaced the other. Brunetta and I promptly made the discovery that we were congenial. Then we became daily companions. I had a number of other Italian friends too, full of beautiful bonhomie and Southern sweetness of temperament.

W. D. HOWELLS, AFTER HIS RETURN FROM VENICE.

Boyesen. You must have acquired Italian in a very short time?

Howells. Yes; being domesticated in that way in the very heart of that Italy, which was then Italia irridente, I could not help steeping myself in its atmosphere and breathing in the language, with the rest of its very composite flavors.

Boyesen. Yes; and whatever I know of Italian literature I owe largely to the completeness of that soaking process of yours. Your book on the Italian poets is one of the most charmingly sympathetic and illuminative bits of criticism that I know.

Howells. I am glad you think so; but the book was never a popular success. Of all the Italian authors, the one I delighted in the most was Goldoni. His exquisite realism fascinated me. It was the sort of thing which I felt I ought not to like; but for all that I liked it immensely.

Boyesen. How do you mean that you ought not to like it?

Howells. Why, I was an idealist in those days. I was only twenty-four or twenty-five years old, and I knew the world chiefly through literature. I was all the time trying to see things as others had seen them, and I had a notion that, in literature, persons and things should be nobler and better than they are in the sordid reality; and this romantic glamour veiled the world to me, and kept me from seeing things as they are. But in the lanes and alleys of Venice I found Goldoni everywhere. Scenes from his plays were enacted before my eyes, with all the charming Southern vividness of speech and gesture, and I seemed at every turn to have stepped at unawares into one of his comedies. I believe this was the beginning of my revolt. But it was a good while yet before I found my own bearings.

Boyesen. But permit me to say that it was an exquisitely delicate set of fresh Western senses you brought with you to Venice. When I was in Venice in 1878, I could not get away from you, however much I tried. I saw your old Venetian senator, in his august rags, roasting coffee; and I promenaded about for days in the chapters of your “Venetian Life,” like the Knight Huldbrand, in the Enchanted Forest in “Undine,” and I could not find my way out. Of course, I know that, being what you were, you could not have helped writing that book, but what was the immediate cause of your writing it?

Howells. From the day I arrived in Venice I kept a journal in which I noted down my impressions. I found a young pleasure in registering my sensations at the sight of notable things, and literary reminiscences usually shimmered through my observations. Then I received an offer from the “Boston Daily Advertiser,” to write weekly or bi-weekly letters, for which they paid me five dollars, in greenbacks, a column, nonpareil. By the time this sum reached Venice, shaven 8 and shorn by discounts for exchange in gold premium, it had usually shrunk to half its size or less. Still I was glad enough to get even that, and I kept on writing joyously. So the book grew in my hands until, at the time I resigned in 1865, I was trying to have it published. I offered it successively to a number of English publishers; but they all declined it. At last Mr. Trübner agreed to take it, if I could guarantee the sale of five hundred copies in the United States, or induce an American publisher to buy that number of copies in sheets. I happened to cross the ocean with Mr. Hurd of the New York firm of Hurd & Houghton, and repeated Mr. Trübner’s proposition to him. He refused to commit himself; but some weeks after my arrival in New York, he told me that the risk was practically nothing at all, and that his firm would agree to take the five hundred copies. The book was an instant success. I don’t know how many editions of it have been printed, but I should say that its sale has been upward of forty thousand copies, and it still continues. The English weeklies gave me long complimentary notices, which I carried about for months in my pocket like love-letters, and read surreptitiously at odd moments. I thought it was curious that other people to whom I showed the reviews did not seem much interested.

W. D. HOWELLS. FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN AT CAMBRIDGE IN 1868.

Boyesen. After returning to this country, did not you settle down in New York?

Howells. Yes; I was for a while a free lance in literature. I did whatever came in my way, and sold my articles to the newspapers, going about from office to office, but I was finally offered a place in “The Nation,” where I obtained a fixed position at a salary. I had at times a sense that, by going abroad, I had fallen out of the American procession of progress; and, though I was elbowing my way energetically through the crowd, I seemed to have a tremendous difficulty in recovering my lost place on my native soil, and asserting my full right to it. So, when young men beg me to recommend them for consulships, I always feel in duty bound to impress on them this great danger of falling out of the procession, and asking them whether they have confidence in their ability to reconquer the place they have deserted, for while they are away it will be pretty sure to be filled by somebody else. A man returning from a residence of several years abroad has a sense of superfluity in his own country—he has become a mere supernumerary whose presence or absence makes no particular difference.

Boyesen. What year did you leave “The Nation” and assume the editorship of “The Atlantic”?

Howells. I took the editorship in 1872, but went to live in Cambridge six or seven years before. I was first assistant editor under James T. Fields, who was uniformly kind and considerate, and with whom I got along perfectly. It was a place that he could have made odious to me, but he made it delightful. I have the tenderest regard and the highest respect for his memory.

Boyesen. I need scarcely ask you if your association with Lowell was agreeable?

Howells. It was in every way charming. He was twenty years my senior, but he always treated me as an equal and a contemporary. And you know the difference between thirty and fifty is far greater than between forty and sixty, or fifty and seventy. I dined with him every week, and he showed the friendliest appreciation of the work I was trying to do. We took long 9 walks together; and you know what a rare talker he was. Somehow I got much nearer to him than to Longfellow. As a man, Longfellow was flawless. He was full of noble friendliness and encouragement to all literary workers in whom he believed.

Boyesen. Do you remember you once said to me that he was a most inveterate praiser?

W. D. HOWELLS’ SUMMER HOME AT BELMONT IN 1878.

Howells. I may have said that; for in the kindness of his heart, and his constitutional reluctance to give pain, he did undoubtedly often strain a point or two in speaking well of things. But that was part of his beautiful kindliness of soul and admirable urbanity. Lowell, you know, confessed to being “a tory in his nerves;” but Longfellow, with all his stateliness of manner, was nobly and perfectly democratic. He was ideally good; I think he was without a fault.

Boyesen. I have never known a man who was more completely free from snobbishness and pretence of all kinds. It delighted him to go out of his way to do a man a favor. There was, however, a little touch of Puritan pallor in his temperament, a slight lack of robustness; that is, if his brother’s biography can be trusted. What I mean to say is, that he appears there a trifle too perfect; too bloodlessly, and almost frostily, statuesque. I have always had a little diminutive grudge against the Reverend Samuel Longfellow for not using a single one of those beautiful anecdotes I sent him illustrative of the warmer and more genial side of the poet’s character. He evidently wanted to portray a Plutarchian man of heroic size, and he therefore had to exclude all that was subtly individualizing.

Howells. Well, there is always room for another biography of Longfellow.

Boyesen. At the time when I made your acquaintance in 1871, you were writing “Their Wedding Journey.” Do you remember the glorious talks we had together while the hours of the night slipped away unnoticed? We have no more of those splendid conversational rages now-a-days. How eloquent we were, to be sure; and with what delight you read those chapters on “Niagara,” “Quebec,” and “The St. Lawrence;” and with what rapture I listened! I can never read them without supplying the cadence of your voice, and seeing you seated, twenty-two years younger than now, in that cosey little library in Berkeley Street.

Howells. Yes; and do you mind our sudden attacks of hunger, when we would start on a foraging expedition into the cellar, in the middle of the night, and return, you with a cheese and crackers, and I with a watermelon and a bottle of champagne? What jolly meals we improvised! Only it is a wonder to me that we survived them.

Boyesen. You will never suspect what 10 an influence you exerted upon my fate by your friendliness and sympathy in those never-to-be-forgotten days. You Americanized me. I had been an alien, and felt alien in every fibre of my soul, until I met you. Then I became domesticated. I found a kindred spirit who understood me, and whom I understood; and that is the first and indispensable condition of happiness. It was at your house, at a luncheon, I think, that I met Henry James.

THE AUTHOR OF “ANNIE KILBURN.”

Howells. Yes; James and I were constant companions. We took daily walks together, and his father, the elder Henry James, was an incomparably delightful and interesting man.

Boyesen. Yes; I remember him well. I doubt if I ever heard a more brilliant talker.

Howells. No; he was one of the best talkers in America. And didn’t the immortal Ralph Keeler appear upon the scene during the summer of ’71 or ’72?

Boyesen. Yes; your small son “Bua” insisted upon calling him “Big Man Keeler” in spite of his small size.

Howells. Yes, Bua was the only one who ever saw Keeler life-size.

Boyesen. I remember how he sat in your library and told stories of his negro minstrel days and his wild adventures in many climes, and did not care whether you laughed with him or at him, but would join you from sheer sympathy, and how we all laughed in chorus until our sides ached!

Howells. Poor Keeler! He was a sort of migratory, nomadic survival; but he had fine qualities, and was well equipped for a sort of fiction. If he had lived he might have written the great American novel. Who knows?

Boyesen. Was not it at Cambridge that Björnstjerne Björnson visited you?

Howells. No; that was in 1881, at Belmont, where we went in order to be in the country, and give the children 11 the benefit of country air. When I met Björnson before, we had always talked Italian; but the first thing he said to me at Belmont, was: “Now we will speak English.” And when he had got into the house, he picked up a book and said in his abrupt way: “We do not put enough in;” meaning thereby, that we ignored too much of life in our fiction—excluded it out of regard for propriety. But when I met him, some years later, in Paris, he had changed his mind about that, for he detested the French naturalism, and could find nothing to praise in Zola.

Boyesen. I am going to ask you one of the interviewer’s stock questions, but you need not answer, you know: Which of your books do you regard as the greatest?

Howells. I have always taken the most satisfaction in “A Modern Instance.” I have there come closest to American life as I know it.

Boyesen. But in “Silas Lapham” it seems to me that you have got a still firmer grip on American reality.

Howells. Perhaps. Still I prefer “A Modern Instance.” “Silas Lapham” is the most successful novel I have published, except “A Hazard of New Fortunes,” which has sold nearly twice as many copies as any of the rest.

Boyesen. What do you attribute that to?

Howells. Possibly to the fact that the scene is laid in New York; the public throughout the country is far more interested in New York than in Boston. New York, as Lowell once said, is a huge pudding, and every town and village has been helped to a slice, or wants to be.

Boyesen. I rejoice that New York has found such a subtly appreciative and faithful chronicler as you show yourself to be in “A Hazard of New Fortunes.” To the equipment of a great city—a world-city as the Germans say—belongs a great novelist; that is to say, at least one. And even though your modesty may rebel, I shall persist in regarding you henceforth as the novelist par excellence of New York.

Howells. Ah, you don’t expect me to live up to that bit of taffy!

12

PARABLES OF A PROVINCE.—I.
THE NYMPH OF THE EDDY.
By Gilbert Parker.

It lay in the sharp angle of a wooded shore near Pontiac. When the river was high it had all the temper of a maelstrom, but in the hot summer, when the logs had ceased to run, and the river wallowed idly away to the rapids, it was like a molten mirror which, with the regularity of a pulse, resolved itself into a funnel, as though somewhere beneath 13 there was a blowhole. It had a look of hunger. Even the children noticed that, and they fed it with many things. What it passed into its rumbling bowels you never saw again. You threw a stick upon the shivering surface, and you saw it travel, first slowly, then very swiftly, round and round the sides, till the throat of the eddy seemed to open suddenly, and it ran straight down into darkness, and presently the funnel filled up again. It was shadowed by a huge cedar tree. If you came suddenly into the thicket above it, you were stilled with wonder. The place was different from all others on the river. It looked damp, it was so strangely green; the grass and trees showed so juicy; you fancied you could slice the fallen logs through with a penknife. Every sound there carried with a peculiar distinctness, yet the air was almost painfully still. Through the stillness there ran ever a sound, metallic, monotonous, pleasant—a clean cling-clung, cling-clung. It never varied, was the river high or low. If you lay down in the mossy grass you were lulled by that sing-song vibration, behind which you heard the low sucking breath of the eddy. The two sounds belonged to each other, and had a peculiar sympathy of tone. The birds never sang in the place, not because it was gloomy, maybe, but as though not to break in upon other rights.

There was nothing mysterious about that unceasing cling-clung, it was merely the ram of a force-pump. If you followed the pipe that led from the ram up the hill, you came to a large white house.

Many a summer day, and especially of a morning, a young girl came dancing down to the eddy, to sit beside it. She and it were very good friends; she used to tell it her secrets, and she made up a little song about it—a simple, almost foolish little song such as a clever young girl can write—Laure had been to the convent in Montreal, so she was not a common village maid.

“Green, so green, is the cedar tree,

And green is the moss that’s under;

Can you hear the things that he says to me?

Do you like them? O Eddy, I wonder.”

It was very foolish. But she had such a soft, thrilling voice that you would have thought it beautiful. She was young—about sixteen—and her hair was so light that it fell about her like spray. But suddenly she ceased to be quite happy.

Armand, the avocat’s clerk, was a Protestant, and she had been meeting him at the eddy secretly. What did she care about the Catechism, or the curé, or an unblessed marriage, if Armand blessed her? She was afraid of nothing; she would dare anything while she was certain of him. But the curé discovered something—she ceased to go to confession, and, though he was a kind man, he had his duty to do.

There was trouble, and the ways of Laure’s people were devious and hard. It was said that she must go to the convent again, and they kept her prisoner in the house. One day they brought her a letter which, they said, was from Armand. It told her that he was going away, and that he had given her up. She had never seen his writing—they had trusted nothing to the village post-office—and she believed that the letter was from him. She had wept so much that tears were all done; her eyes only ached now. At first she thought that she would get away and go to him, and beg him not to give her up—what does a child know of pride all at once? But the pride came to her a little later, and she tried to think what she must do. While her thoughts went waving to and fro, and she could make nothing of them, she heard all the time the long, sighing breath of the eddy and the cling-clung of the force-pump. She never slept, and after a time it grew in her mind that she never would sleep till she went down to the cedar tree and the eddy; they seemed always calling her. She had said her Ave Marias over and over again, but they seemed to do her no good. Nothing could quiet her, not even the music of the twelfth mass, played on the little reed organ by the organist of St. Savior’s, when they took her to church against 15 her will—a passive rebel. The next day she was to go to the convent again.

That night she stole from the house into the light of the soft harvest moon, and ran down through the garden, over the road, and into the cedar thicket. She did not hear behind her the footsteps of a man who, night after night, had watched the house, hoping that she would come out. She hastened to the cedar tree, and looked down into the eddy. From far up the river there came the plaintive cry of a loon; but she heard no other sound in the night, save this and the cling-clung of the ram muffled by fallen branches, and the loud-breathing eddy which invited—until an arm ran round her waist and held her fast.

A minute later he said: “You will come, then? And we shall be man and wife very quick.”

“Wait a minute,” she said, and she picked up handfuls of leaves and dropped them softly into the funnel of water.

“What’s that for?” he asked.

“I am a cock-robin,” she said with her old gayety. “There’s a girl drowned there. Yes, but it’s true. She was a good Catholic and unhappy. I’m a heretic now, and happy.”

But she said her Ave Marias again just the same; being happy, they did her more good. And she says that the eddy is spiteful to her now. It had counted on a different end to her wooing.

16

HUMAN DOCUMENTS.
An Introduction by Sarah Orne Jewett.

To give to the world a collection of the successive portraits of a man is to tell his affairs openly, and so betray intimate personalities. We are often found quarrelling with the tone of the public press, because it yields to what is called the public demand to be told both the private affairs of noteworthy persons and the trivial details and circumstances of those who are insignificant. Some one has said that a sincere man willingly answers any questions, however personal, that are asked out of interest, but instantly resents those that have their impulse in curiosity; and that one’s instinct always detects the difference. This I take to be a wise rule of conduct; but beyond lies the wider subject of our right to possess ourselves of personal information, although we have a vague remembrance, even in these days, of the belief of old-fashioned and decorous people, that subjects, not persons, are fitting material for conversation.

But there is an honest interest, which is as noble a thing as curiosity is contemptible; and it is in recognition of this, that Lowell writes in the largest way in his “Essay on Rousseau and the Sentimentalists.”

“Yet our love of minute biographical details,” he says, “our desire to make ourselves spies upon the men of the past, seems so much of an instinct in us, that we must look for the spring of it in human nature, and that somewhat deeper than mere curiosity or love of gossip.” And more emphatically in another paragraph: “The moment he undertakes to establish ... a rule of conduct, we ask at once how far are his own life and deed in accordance with what he preaches?”

This I believe to be at the bottom of even our insatiate modern eagerness to know the best and the worst of our contemporaries; it is simply to find out how far their behavior squares with their words and position. We seldom stop to get the best point of view, either in friendly talk or in a sober effort, to notice the growth of character, or, in the widest way, to comprehend the traits and influence of a man whose life in any way affects our own.

Now and then, in an old picture gallery, one comes upon the grouped portraits of a great soldier, or man of letters, or some fine lady whose character still lifts itself into view above the dead level of feminine conformity which prevailed in her time. The blurred pastel, the cracked and dingy canvas, the delicate brightness of a miniature which bears touching signs of wear—from these we piece together a whole life’s history. Here are the impersonal baby face; the domineering glance of the school-boy, lord of his dog and gun; the wan-visaged student who was just beginning to confront the serried ranks of those successes which conspired to hinder him from his duty and the fulfilment of his dreams; here is the mature man, with grave reticence of look and a proud sense of achievement; and at last the older and vaguer face, blurred and pitifully conscious of fast waning powers. As they hang in a row they seem to bear mute witness to all the successes and failures of a life.

This very day, perhaps, you chanced to open a drawer and take in your hand, for amusement’s sake, some old family daguerreotypes. It is easy enough to laugh at the stiff positions and droll costumes; but suddenly you find an old likeness of yourself, and walk away with it, self-consciously, to the window, with a pretence of seeking a better light on the quick-reflecting, faintly impressed plate. Your earlier, half-forgotten self confronts you seriously; the youth whose hopes you 17 have disappointed, or whose dreams you have turned into realities. You search the young face; perhaps you even look deep into the eyes of your own babyhood to discover your dawning consciousness; to answer back to yourself, as it were, from the known and discovered countries of that baby’s future. There is a fascination in reading character backwards. You may or may not be able easily to revive early thoughts and impressions, but with an early portrait in your hand they do revive again in spite of you; they seem to be living in the pictured face to applaud or condemn you. In these old pictures exist our former selves. They wear a mystical expression. They are still ourselves, but with unfathomable eyes staring back to us out of the strange remoteness of our outgrown youth.

“Surely I have known before

Phantoms of the shapes ye be—

Haunters of another shore

’Leaguered by another sea.”

It is somehow far simpler and less startling to examine a series of portraits of some other face and figure than one’s own. Perhaps it is most interesting to take those of some person whom the whole world knows, and whose traits and experiences are somewhat comprehended. You say to yourself, “This was Nelson before ever he fought one of his great sea battles; this was Washington, with only the faintest trace of his soldiering and the leisurely undemanding aspect of a country gentleman!” Human Documents—the phrase is Daudet’s, and tells its own story, with no need of additional attempts of suggestiveness.

It would seem to be such an inevitable subject for sermon writing, that no one need be unfamiliar with warnings, lest our weakness and wickedness leave traces upon the countenance—awful, ineffaceable hieroglyphics, that belong to the one universal primitive language of mankind. Who cannot read faces? The merest savage, who comprehends no written language, glances at you to know if he may expect friendliness or enmity, with a quicker intelligence than your own.

The lines that are written slowly and certainly by the pen of character, the deep mark that sorrow once left, or the light sign-manual of an unfading joy, there they are and will remain; it is at length the aspect of the spiritual body itself, and belongs to the unfolding and existence of life. We have never formulated a science like palmistry on the larger scale that this character-reading from the face would need; but to say that we make our own faces, and, having made them, have made pieces of immortality, is to say what seems trite enough. A child turns with quick impatience and incredulity from the dull admonitions of his teachers, about goodness and good looks. To say, “Be good and you will be beautiful,” is like giving him a stone for a lantern. Beauty seems an accident rather than an achievement, and a cause instead of an effect; but when childhood has passed, one of the things we are sure to have learned, is to read the sign-language of faces, and to take the messages they bring. Recognition of these things is sure to come to us more and more by living; there is no such thing as turning our faces into unbetraying masks. A series of portraits is a veritable Human Document, and the merest glance may discover the progress of the man, the dwindled or developed personality, the history of a character.

These sentences are written merely as suggestions, and from the point of view of morals; there is also the point of view of heredity, and the curious resemblance between those who belong to certain professions. Just what it is that makes us almost certain to recognize a doctor or a priest at first glance is too subtle a question for discussion here. Some one has said that we usually arrive, in time, at the opposite extreme to those preferences and opinions which we hold in early life. The man who breaks away from conventionalities, ends by returning to them, or out of narrow prejudices and restrictions grows towards a late and serene liberty. These changes show themselves in the face with amazing clearness, and it would seem also, that even individuality sways us only for a 18 time; that if we live far into the autumnal period of life we lose much of our individuality of looks, and become more emphatically members of the family from which we spring. A man like Charles the First was already less himself than he was a Stuart; we should not fail in instances of this sort, nor seek far afield. The return to the type compels us steadily; at last it has its way. Very old persons, and those who are dangerously ill, are often noticed to be curiously like their nearest of kin, and to have almost visibly ceased to be themselves.

All time has been getting our lives ready to be lived, to be shaped as far as may be by our own wills, and furthered by that conscious freedom that gives us to be ourselves. You may read all these in any Human Document—the look of race, the look of family, the look that is set like a seal by a man’s occupation, the look of the spirit’s free or hindered life, and success or failure in the pursuit of goodness—they are all plain to see. If we could read one human face aright, the history not only of the man, but of humanity itself, is written there.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES TO ACCOMPANY THE “HUMAN DOCUMENTS” GIVEN IN THIS NUMBER.

General Lew Wallace was born in Brookville, Indiana, in 1827. After receiving a common school education, he studied law. He distinguished himself in the Civil War, and was made a brigadier-general. After the war he practised law in Crawfordsville, Indiana. A few years later he was for a time Governor of New Mexico. From 1878-81 he was Governor of Utah, and from 1881-85 Minister to Turkey. His first book, “A Fair God,” appeared in 1877. “Ben Hur,” published in 1880, has reached a sale of several hundred thousand copies. General Wallace’s home is in Crawfordsville, Indiana.

William Dean Howells was born in Martin’s Ferry, Ohio, March 11, 1837. His father was the editor of a country newspaper, and young Howells learned the printer’s trade. He began to write at an early age. At nineteen he was Columbus correspondent of the “Cincinnati Gazette,” and at twenty-two, news editor of the “Ohio State Journal.” A campaign “Life of Lincoln,” gained him the consulship at Venice, where he seriously devoted his leisure hours to literature. “Venetian Life” gave him reputation. On his return to America in 1865, he wrote for newspapers and magazines. In 1866 Mr. Howells joined the editorial staff of “The Atlantic.” In 1872 he became the editor. About this time the success of “Their Wedding Journey” determined his career as a novelist.

Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen was born at Frederiksværn, Norway, September 23, 1848. When twenty-one years of age he came to the United States. In 1874 he was appointed professor of German at Cornell University, and is now professor of Germanic languages and literature at Columbia College, New York. It was in the early seventies that Professor Boyesen’s name began to appear in the magazines. In 1873 he published his first long romance, “Gunnar,” and other novels followed, well known to the reading world.

Alphonse Daudet was born at Nîmes, May 13, 1840. His early life was full of hardship and deprivation. In 1857 he arrived in Paris, with some manuscript poems and no money. He almost starved, but kept on writing and hoping. His volume of verse, “Les Amoureuses” (1858), attracted some attention. He persisted, took to writing novels, and achieved greatness. The story of his life and struggles, as told by himself, will be given in an early number of McClure’s Magazine.

19

GENERAL LEW WALLACE.

Born in Brookville, Indiana, April 10, 1827.

AGE 35. 1862. MAJOR-GENERAL OF VOLUNTEERS.

AGE 40. 1867. GOVERNOR OF NEW MEXICO.

AGE 50. 1877. GOVERNOR OF UTAH.

AGE 66. GENERAL WALLACE AT THE PRESENT DAY.

20

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS.

AGE 18. 1855. RESIDENCE, JEFFERSON, OHIO.

AGE 23. 1860. NEWS EDITOR OF “OHIO STATE JOURNAL.”

AGE 28. MAY, 1865. VENICE, “VENETIAN LIFE.”

AGE 25. 1862. CONSUL AT VENICE.

AGE 32. 1869. CAMBRIDGE, MASS. “SUBURBAN SKETCHES.”

AGE 41. 1878. BELMONT, MASS. “THE LADY OF THE AROOSTOOK.”

AGE 47. 1884. BOSTON, MASS. “THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM.”

AGE 50. 1887. BOSTON. “APRIL HOPES.”

AGE 53. 1890. BOSTON. “THE SHADOW OF A DREAM.”

HJALMAR HJORTH BOYESEN.

Born September 23, 1847, Frederiksværn, Norway.

AGE 17. 1865. STUDENT, CHRISTIANIA, NORWAY.

AGE 19. 1867. STUDENT, UNIVERSITY OF CHRISTIANIA.

AGE 22. 1869. CHICAGO. EDITOR OF “FREMAD.”

AGE 28. 1875. PROFESSOR OF GERMAN AT CORNELL UNIVERSITY, ITHACA, NEW YORK. “TALES OF TWO HEMISPHERES.”

AGE 35. 1882. PROFESSOR OF MODERN LANGUAGES, COLUMBIA COLLEGE, NEW YORK CITY. “DAUGHTER OF THE PHILISTINES.”

1893. THE AUTHOR OF “SOCIAL STRUGGLERS.”

24

ALPHONSE DAUDET.

AGE 21, PARIS, 1861. “LETTERS FROM MY MILL.”

AGE 30, PARIS, 1870.

AGE 35, PARIS, 1875. “FROMONT JEUNE ET RISLER AINÉ.”

DAUDET AT THE PRESENT DAY.

26

WILD ANIMALS.—I
HOW THEY ARE CAPTURED, TRANSPORTED, TRAINED, AND SOLD.
By Raymond Blathwayt.

The greatest wild animal trader in the world is Karl Hagenbeck of Hamburg. To hear, therefore, how he captures and transports the brutes that compose his stock in trade, how he trains them, and some of the peculiarly strange adventures which have befallen him in dealing with them, cannot fail to be of interest. A few days ago I went to his Hamburg menagerie, where, on opening a door, I found myself in a great shed full of caged wild beasts. As visitors, except those on business, are not allowed within those notable precincts, my unexpected appearance excited the cages’ occupants to set up a grand concerto of roars and howls. Awestruck at the sight and sounds, I stood dazed until suddenly recalled to myself by a Nubian lion, who laid hold of my cloak-flaps with unsheathed claws. At once I leaped forward, while the beast retired snarling to the farthest corner of its cage, where in the dark shadows its eyes glared like two living coals. At this moment Mr. Hagenbeck came forward and gave me a hearty welcome, coupled with a word of warning against venturing too near the cages. He is a tall man, singularly pleasant looking, with keen eyes and a decisive manner. Later we sat in his office, and there I heard many incidents of the interesting life which he has led for so many years.

“My father,” said he, “who started in life as a fish dealer in this very town, never dreamed that he would one day be the founder of the greatest menagerie in the world. But it chanced that, in the year 1848, some fishermen, who usually traded with him, brought 27 him some seals which they had caught in their sturgeon nets. They were fine animals, and he could not help being delighted with them, and straightway resolved to take them to Berlin. There he opened a small exhibition in Kroll’s Gardens, charging an admission fee. But there came a revolution; business was at a standstill, and he was glad enough to get rid of the seals for a small sum of money, and to return to his fish-dealer’s shop in Hamburg. But he was bitten with the wild-beast fever; live animals had more attractions for him than dead fish, and so he told the fishermen that he would always be ready to buy any queer animals they might choose to bring him. A short time after that a sailor from a whaling vessel brought him a polar bear; this he exhibited here in Hamburg. It was a great novelty, and the people flocked in crowds to see it. From that time forward, sailors from all parts of the world would bring him animals for sale—monkeys, parrots, deer, snakes, and so on; once a young lion. Gradually he got together quite a small menagerie, but I am bound to say that at first there was not much profit in the business. When I left school in 1859, at the age of fifteen, father asked me which of his two callings I would rather choose as mine. Of course, being a boy, I chose the wild beasts. He gave me a hundred and fifty pounds to spend as best I could in buying animals. Fortune favored me from the start. I made some capital bargains, increased the business rapidly, and in 1866 father handed the whole business over to me.”

28

HAGENBECK AND BARNUM.

At this moment my eye fell upon a large photograph of the celebrated Mr. P. T. Barnum, which hung upon the wall. Mr. Hagenbeck, noting the direction of my gaze, said: “I suppose you know who that is?”

I replied, “Why, it’s P. T. Barnum.”

“Exactly,” said he. “I was walking about the menagerie one day in 1872, when Mr. Barnum was announced. He said: ‘I’ve just come to have a look round. I’ve got an hour or two to spare, and I thought I might as well spend it here as anywhere else.’ Well, sir,” continued Mr. Hagenbeck, smiling at the recollection of his first momentous interview with the great showman, “he stayed fourteen days, and he filled two big note-books before he left me. He was delighted with all he saw, and still more so with all I told him. I spoke about ostrich riding, suggested that it would be a splendid thing if he got up a regular wild-beast hunt in his hippodrome. He was immensely taken with the idea, and wanted me to join him as partner, but this I was not able to do. For many years I supplied him with his animals.”

“Why,” I said, “Mr. Hagenbeck, that opened up quite a new field.”

“Exactly,” he replied. “The training of wild animals is now one of the most important parts of my business. I also undertake the establishment of menageries all over the world. I supply people with their buildings, with their animals, with their keepers, with their trainers. Take, for instance, the Zoölogical Gardens at Cincinnati. I filled them from top to bottom. I recently made one in Rio Janeiro.”

THE PRICES OF WILD ANIMALS.

“And can you tell me anything about the prices of wild animals, Mr. Hagenbeck?” said I.

“Well,” he replied, “prices differ from time to time, according to the fashion; for I can assure you that there is as much fashion in wild animals as there is in ladies’ dresses. Prices are also rising and falling, according as the market supply is high or low. I can remember that once I sold in one day a cargo of African beasts for thirty thousand dollars. A full grown hippopotamus is now worth £1,000. A two-horned rhinoceros, which was worth £600 in 1883, cannot now be obtained 29 at any price. An Indian tapir costs £500, an American tapir £150. Elephants vary according to size and training, from £250 to £500. A good forest-bred lion, full grown, will fetch from £150 to £200, according to species. Tigers run from £100 to £150, according to their variety. Do you know,” he continued, “that there are five varieties of royal tigers? And, besides them, there are the tigers which come from Java, Sumatra, Penang, and even from the wastes of Siberia, Snakes are very much down in the market at present. Those which formerly fetched £5 or £10, you can now get for £2. Very large ones sometimes run up to £50. Leopards £30. Black panthers £40 to £60. Striped and spotted panthers £25. Jaguars run from £30 to £100. A good polar bear will fetch from £30 to £40. Brown bears from £6 to 10£. Black American bears from £10 to £20. A sloth from Thibet £25 to £30. Monkeys run from six shillings apiece. They are most expensive in the spring, when they will sometimes fetch as much as £1 6s. Giraffes are altogether out of the market,” continued Mr. Hagenbeck with a sigh, “for there are none now to be obtained. I have sold one as low as £60, whilst the last one which I sold, four years ago, to the Brazils, I was paid upwards of £1,100 for.

“And now you might just have a look round at some of the animals. Here,” said he, as we stood before a cage of very charming monkeys, “are some very clever little animals. They can ride horses in a circus, they jump through hoops; in fact, they are trained exactly like human beings, and can do almost everything but talk. I have just sent people to Abyssinia to fetch me some big silver-gray lion-monkeys, sometimes called hamadryads. I said just now,” continued Mr. Hagenbeck, with a laugh, “that monkeys can’t talk; and yet I must believe in Professor Garner, for you give me any monkey, you like to name, and I’ll guarantee I’ll make it talk. But you can only do it by imitating them closely. Take, for instance, that chimpanzee over there,” continued the clever trainer, pointing to a little animal fast asleep on a crossbar. “Now listen,” he went on, making a peculiar noise with his lips. At once the animal woke up, jabbered a reply in chimpanzee, flew to the bars of the cage, put his tiny paw out ready for the nuts which he knew were forthcoming. “There,” said Mr. Hagenbeck, “don’t tell me monkeys can’t talk.”

A little farther on we came across a tiny baby elephant, two feet nine inches in height. It was as black as coal, and had just arrived from Singapore. It was very playful, but when I began pushing it about, as one might roll a big beer barrel, it indulged in a fretful growling, which much amused us. Seven beautiful elephants stood in one big stable together, and as I admired their huge proportions and wondered at their entire gentleness, I said to Mr. Hagenbeck, “Is it true, as the great English circus proprietor George Sanger told me last summer, that the Asiatic elephant is far more intelligent than its African brother?”

“Certainly not,” replied Mr. Hagenbeck. “The African elephants are just as clever, just as gentle, just as intelligent as the Asiatic elephants. There’s no difference between them; and I ought to know, for I have had to do with them for thirty years, and in only one year I have imported as many as seventy-six of them.”

30

HOW WILD BEASTS ARE CAPTURED.

Karl Hagenbeck and I stood in his beautiful gardens, beside the enclosure in which the lions and tigers spend the long, hot summer days so frequent in Hamburg. Most artistically this enclosure has been made to resemble an African desert. In the foreground there are bushes and a few small palm trees, whilst in the far-off distance there rise, towering to a blue tropical sky, grim mountains and sun-stricken rocks. There is thus conveyed to the mind an impression of the great Nubian deserts—an impression whose force and reality is strengthened by the appearance of the wild beasts themselves, basking in the heat of the sun, or restlessly prowling about the enclosure.

“I should very much like to hear, Mr. Hagenbeck,” said I, “everything you can tell me of the way in which your wild beasts are captured.”

“Well,” he replied, “I will tell you as much as I can. Let us begin with the animals from the deserts of Nubia, for I have hunting parties all over the world. I send out a special messenger, who goes provided with a lot of silver coin. Nubians know my courier, who goes on ahead of this special messenger. When the courier reaches Suakim, it is announced that my messenger is coming, and a great fête is proclaimed. Guns are fired off, tom-toms are beaten, and for at least two days before he arrives there are the greatest rejoicings. Then the people go out to meet him, and conduct him with great state to a place on the borders of the desert where they have built a zereba. My messenger then gives advance money to the hunters, who go into Abyssinia to buy horses for the great hunt. As soon as the whole party is collected, business begins. They are armed with assegais and long hunting-swords like the old German swords. They are as broad as your hand, sharp at both ends, and two handled. Men upon fast horses hunt up the animals. Large animals, such as elephants and rhinoceroses, with sucklings, are the best game. The hunters, forming a circle, follow them. Having caught a rhinoceros with its young one, a man jumps down from his horse and cuts the old beast in a vein, whilst some of the other men chase another animal in front to distract attention. Then the black fellow lets go the big rhinoceros, catches the little one, ties its legs, and after it has calmed down brings it to my collector, who is waiting for him in the zereba. The old one is killed, skinned, and eaten. The natives make their best shields from the hide. Elephants and giraffes are hunted in the same manner. 31 I have been describing to you chiefly the old method of hunting animals in Nubia. Of late years they generally use guns. The young animals are always brought up with goat’s milk.”

At this moment we were passing a large cage full of the finest lions I had ever seen. As soon as they caught sight of Mr. Hagenbeck, they began to purr loudly, and when he spoke, came up to the bars of the cage to be stroked and petted.

“There,” said my host, “these are some very beautiful lions from Nubia. You can see that they are in perfect condition, and this is chiefly owing to the fact that they are being trained for their performances. There is nothing that keeps them in good health so much as constant exercise; that, I think,” added Mr. Hagenbeck, with a laugh, “is a very good argument in favor of training wild beasts, and goes a long way to prove that there really is very little cruelty in it. Now, I’ll tell you how lions are caught in the Nubian desert. The Kauri negroes, when my messenger arrives, form parties to go in search of young lions. When they discover the spoor of a lioness, they creep about the bush until they find the animal’s lair. It is usually one man alone who does this, and he has only a bundle of assegais under his left arm. Before the lioness can spring upon him, she has these spears in her body. Look at this skin,” continued Mr. Hagenbeck, pointing to a magnificent tawny skin hanging up in the hall. “There,” said he, “that skin has no less than twenty-four holes in it. The poor mother made a brave fight for her young ones. Well,” continued Mr. Hagenbeck, “when the old lioness is killed he takes the young ones to the zereba. The little lions are suckled by goats three times a day, and get quite fond of their foster-mothers.

“Leopards and hyenas are caught in Nubia in traps which are made out of wood or cut out of stone in the mountains. These traps are baited with meat, and catch the big cats precisely as a mouse-trap catches a mouse. Once trapped, the hunters can tie the creature’s legs, and bear it in triumph to the zereba.”

“And how are the Asiatic animals caught?” I asked Mr. Hagenbeck.

“Well,” he replied, 32 “very much the same method is pursued there that we adopt in Africa. For instance, in Borneo and Java, animals are caught in trapfalls and pitfalls, and some in huge mouse-traps. In these we often catch full-grown tigers, black panthers, and leopards. In the pitfalls we find two horned rhinoceroses and saddlebacked tapirs. The animals, running through the forest, run over these pitfalls and drop in. The greater part of these unfortunately die directly after they are caught; some kill themselves in their excitement, others won’t feed, and so pine away. A rhinoceros or a tapir dies because it is often hurt internally, although we frequently do not discover that they have been hurt until they have been with us for one or two months. I can remember that I once imported seven big rhinoceroses, and I sold only one of them, as the other six died. Bengal tigers are caught young, brought up by the natives in much the same way as the young lions in Africa, on milk and fowls. Most of these come by way of Calcutta.”

Standing in front of a great glass cage full of snakes, I said to Mr. Hagenbeck: “Now, how do you manage to get hold of these reptiles? They must be very dangerous.”

“Ah!” he replied, with a thoughtful look, “I’ll tell you later on one or two stories of dreadful adventures that I myself have had with snakes. In the meantime this is the way they are caught in India. In the dry season the jungle is set on fire. As the snakes run out in all directions, they are caught by the natives with long sticks having a hoop at the end, to which is attached a big bag, a sort of exaggerated butterfly net. After that the reptiles are packed in sacks made of matting, which are fastened to long bamboos, and carried to Calcutta on the shoulders of the natives. When Calcutta is reached, they are packed in big boxes, from twelve to sixteen in a box, that is when they are only eight or ten feet long; big snakes, from fourteen to sixteen feet in length, are only packed from two to three in a box. They are then sent direct to Europe without food or water on the journey, for they require neither. The principal thing is to keep them warm. Cold gives them mouth disease, which is certain death. I remember once,” continued Mr. Hagenbeck, “that I had one hundred and sixty-two snakes reach London in perfect condition; a violent snow-storm then came on, and when the boxes were opened in Hamburg every snake was dead.

“The majority of my Asiatic elephants come from Ceylon, although a few of them are exported from Burma. I remember one year there was a great demand in the American market for Asiatic elephants; Barnum and Forepaugh 33 each wanted twelve. I couldn’t get enough from Burma, so sent direct to Ceylon, and got no less than sixty-seven elephants, all of which I disposed of in the next twelve months. Most of these were caught by noosing. This is done by Afghans who take out a license from the Ceylon Government. They go out with dogs, find a herd, follow it up, and drive the elephants into different flights; they then give their attention to the younger elephants. Each man has a long raw-hide rope with a noose in the end of it. He chases an elephant, throws the noose round its hind legs, and follows it until a tree is reached, round which the line is fastened. When the elephant drops down in despair, the rope is fastened round its other legs, and it is left for several days until calmed down; it is then taken and easily tamed. I can well remember,” said Mr. Hagenbeck, “how interested Prince Bismarck was when I told all about the capture of my elephants.

“I was sitting in my room one day, when a servant came in and told me that he believed that Prince Bismarck was in the menagerie. I went out, and as soon as I saw his tall, erect figure and white moustache, I knew it was the great man himself. I never came across so intelligent a man, or one who asked so many questions. I should think he must be something like your Gladstone.”

“And how did you first start buying animals on such a big scale, Mr. Hagenbeck?” said I.

“Well,” he replied, “it was in this way. In 1863 the first big lot of animals that ever appeared in Europe at one time were brought over by an Italian named Casanova. He couldn’t sell them, and we had not the money to buy them, so they were sold to a menagerie at Kreutzburg, then the biggest in Germany. Next year Casanova came over with a few from Egypt, which I bought for the Dresden Zoo. This was the beginning of the African business. I then gave Casanova a big order, and arranged that he should bring over elephants, giraffes, and young lions at a fixed price. It’s always cheaper,” added Mr. Hagenbeck, with a laugh, “to get your dinner at the table d’hôte than by the card, and I thought it would be cheaper and better to get all these animals in one lot. Well, in 1866 he returned with a large cargo, in which there were seven African elephants. At that time an African elephant was a great novelty, both in Europe and in America. I sold these elephants to America, where they excited great interest, as they were the first African elephants that had ever been seen in that country.” As we were going back to Mr. Hagenbeck’s office he pointed out to me some very beautiful zebu bulls which he was going to send out to South America to be used for agricultural and breeding purposes. “There,” said he, “you can see those animals nowhere else in Europe except in my place. I got them from Central India; I have been after them for ten years, and succeeded in getting them only two years ago.” Just then we passed a slaughter-yard, where a couple of horses were being cut up for the carnivorous animals.

“It must be a very difficult matter,” said I, “to know how to feed all these animals properly.”

“I should think it was,” he replied. “Animals are most dainty and delicate as regards their food. Now, for instance, those lions and tigers which were exhibiting at the Crystal Palace last year were fed on such bad food that they were quite ill when they came back here. Besides, a number of young animals were seized with what appeared to be cholera. I lost three thousand pounds’ worth of them in three weeks. It is a very anxious business, indeed, I can tell you.”

Note.—In the July number will be published an article on “The Training of Wild Animals,” which includes a description of a special performance given by Mr. Hagenbeck, at which Mr. Blathwayt, the writer of the articles, was the only spectator.

34

UNDER SENTENCE OF THE LAW.
THE STORY OF A DOG.
By Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson.