THE
CATHOLIC WORLD.

A
MONTHLY MAGAZINE
OF
General Literature and Science.

VOL. XIII.
APRIL TO SEPTEMBER, 1871.

NEW YORK:
THE CATHOLIC PUBLICATION HOUSE,
9 Warren Street.
1871.

JOHN ROSS & CO.,
PRINTERS AND STEREOTYPERS,
27 ROSE ST., NEW YORK.

CONTENTS.

• Albertus Magnus Vindicated, [712]
• America's Obligation to France, [836]
• Ancients, the Writing Materials of the, [126]
• Animas, Las, [353]
• Animals, Love for, [545]

• Bishop Timon, [86]
• Bordeaux, [158]
• Brébeuf, Memoir of Father John, [512], [623]

• Carlyle and Père Bouhours, [820]
• Catholic Associations, Spirit of, [652]
• Catholicity and Pantheism, [554]
• Cayla, A Pilgrimage to, [595]
• Cecilia, Saint, [477]
• Church, The, Accredits herself, [145]
• Church, What our Municipal Laws owe to the, [342]
• Civilization, Origin of, [402]

• Dion and the Sibyls, [56]
• Doña Fortuna and Don Dinero, [130]
• Döllinger, The Apostasy of, [415]

• Education and Unification, [1]
• Education, On Higher, [115]
• Egbert Stanway, [377]
• Egyptian Civilization according to the most Recent Discoveries, [804]
• England, The Serial Literature of, [619]
• Europe's Future, [76]

• Flowers, [305]
• Froude and Calvinism, [541]
• France, America's Obligation to, [836]
• Future, The Present and the, [452]

• Galitzin, The Mother of Prince, [367]
• Geneva, The Catholic Church in, [847]
• Genzano and Frascati, [737]
• Good Gerard of Cologne, The, [797]
• Gottfried von Strassburg's Hymn to the Virgin, [240]

• Independent, A Word to The, [247]
• Infallibility, [577]
• Ireland, Ancient Laws of, [635]
• Ireland, The Lord Chancellors of, [228]
• Irish Martyr, An, [433]
• Italian Guarantees and the Sovereign Pontiff, [566]

• Laws, Municipal, and the Church, [342]
• Letter from Rome, [134]
• Letter from the President of a College, [281]
• Liquefaction of the Blood of St. Januarius, [772]
• Locket, The Story of an Algerine, [643]
• Lourdes, Our Lady of, [98], [255], [396], [527], [662], [825]
• Lucas Garcia, [785]

• Mary Benedicta, [207]
• Mary Clifford's Promise Kept, [447]
• Mexican Art and its Michael Angelo, [334]

• On Higher Education, [115]
• Our Lady of Guadalupe, [189]
• Our Lady of Lourdes, [98], [255], [396], [527], [662], [825]
• Our Northern Neighbors, [108]

• Page of the Past and a Shadow of the Future, A, [764]
• Pantheism, Catholicity and, [554]
• Pau, [504]
• Père Jacques and Mademoiselle Adrienne, [677]
• Present and the Future, The, [452]
• Protestantism, Statistics of, in the U. S., [195]

• Reformation, The, Not Conservative, [721]
• Rome, How it Looked Three Centuries Ago, [358]
• Rome, Letter from, [134]

• Saintship, False Views of, [424]
• Santa Restituta, Legend of, [276]
• Sardinia and the Holy Father, [289]
• Sauntering, [35]
• Sayings of the Fathers of the Desert, [274]
• Scepticism of the Age, The, [391]
• Secular, The, Not Supreme, [685]
• Shamrock Gone West, The, [264]
• Sor Juan Inez de la Cruz, [47]
• Spanish America, Dramatic Moralists in, [702]
• Statistics of Protestantism in the U. S., [195]
• St. Januarius, Liquefaction of the Blood of, [772]

• The Church Accredits Herself, [145]

• Unification, Education and, [1]

• What Our Municipal Laws Owe to the Church, [342]
• Writing Materials of the Ancients, [126]

• Yorke, The House of, [15], [169], [317], [461], [604], [746]

POETRY.

• "Amen" of the Stones, The, [168]
• A Pie IX., [684]

• Disillusioned, [489]

• Gualberto's Victory, [96]

• King Cormac's Choice, [413]

• On a Great Plagiarist, [206]

• Rose, The, [571]

• Saint John Dwarf, [357]
• Sancta Dei Genitrix, [771]
• Sonnet, [603]
• St. Francis and St. Dominic, [745]
• St. Francis of Assisi, [133]
• St. Mary Magdalen, [511]

• The Cross, [14]
• The True Harp, [594]
• To the Crucified, [352]

• Vespers, [275]

• Warning, The, [125]

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

• Allies' St. Peter, [860]
• Anderson's Historical Reader, [855]
• Appleton's Annual Cyclopædia, [573]

• Barker's Text-Book of Chemistry, [142]
• Bret Harte's Poems, [144]

• Caddell's Never Forgotten; or, The Home of the Lost Child, [853]
• Catechism Illustrated, The, [854]
• Clement's Hand-Book of Legendary and Mythological Art, [143]
• Coleridge's Theology of the Parables, [432]
• Conyngham's Sarsfield, [143]
• Curtius's History of Greece, [575]
• Cusack's History of Kerry, [855]

• Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, [573]

• Elia; or, Spain Fifty Years Ago, [141]

• Fairbanks's History of Florida, [857]
• Familiar Discourses to the Young, [288]
• Fifty Catholic Tracts, [430]
• Folia Ecclesiastica, [144]

• Gaskin's Irish Varieties, [142]
• Glosswood, The Countess of, [288]

• Hamilton's Golden Words, [860]
• Heaven, The Happiness of, [286]
• Hefele on the Christian Councils, [718]
• Hemenway's Vermont, [857]
• Higginson's Sympathy of Religions, [286]
• Holy Exercise of the Presence of God, [854]
• Holmes on Mechanism in Thought and Morals, [139]
• Historical Gazetteer, [857]

• Illustrated Catholic Sunday-School Library, [573]

• Jesus and Jerusalem, [140]

• Kellogg's Arthur Brown, [143]
• Keon's Dion and the Sibyls, [429]

• La Grange's Thecla, [432]
• Lallemant's Spiritual Doctrine, [287]
• Lebon's Holy Communion, [573]
• Life and Writings of De Montfort, [141]
• Life of St. Gertrude, [859]

• Martyrs Omitted by Foxe, [575]
• Meditations on the Litany of the Most Holy Virgin, [431]
• Miles's Truce of God, [574]
• Moran's Life of Archbishop Plunkett, [574], [858],
• Mrs. Stowe's Pink and White Tyranny, [859]
• Mulrenan's Sketch of the Church on Long Island, [854]

• Natural History of New York, [432]

• Oakeley's Priest on the Mission, [719]

• Perrone's Divinity of Christ, [286]

• Rome and Geneva, [283]
• Russell's My Study Windows, [427]

• Seelye on Roman Imperialism, [141]
• Sestini's Manual of Geometrical Analysis, [856]
• Seton's Romance of the Charter Oak, [288]
• Starr's Patron Saints, [853]
• Stowe's Little Pussy Willow, [144]
• Sullivan's Prayers and Ceremonies of the Mass, [144]
• Synchronology of Sacred and Profane History, [144]

• Vaughan's Life of St. Thomas Aquin., [427]

• Weiss's American Religion, [720]
• West's State of the Dead, [574]
• Whipple's Literature and Art, [430]
• Wonders of European Art, [576]
• Wonders of the Heavens, [432]

• Young's Catholic Hymns and Canticles, [719]

THE CATHOLIC WORLD.

VOL. XIII., No. 73.—APRIL, 1871.[1]

UNIFICATION AND EDUCATION.[2]

The Hon. Henry Wilson, recently re-elected senator in Congress from Massachusetts, may not be distinguished as an original thinker or as a statesman of commanding ability, but no man is a surer index to his party or a more trustworthy exponent of its sentiments and tendencies, its aims and purposes. This gives to his article in The Atlantic Monthly, indicating the policy to be pursued by the Republican party, a weight it might not otherwise possess.

Mr. Wilson is a strong political partisan, but he is above all a fervent Evangelical, and his aim, we presume, is to bring his political party to coincide with his Evangelical party, and make each strengthen the other. We of course, as a Catholic organ, have nothing to say of questions in issue between different political parties so long as they do not involve the rights and interests of our religion, or leave untouched the fundamental principles and genius of the American system of government, although we may have more or less to say as American citizens; but when either party is so ill-advised as to aim a blow either at the freedom of our religion or at our federative system of government, we hold ourselves free, and in duty bound, to warn our fellow-citizens and our fellow-Catholics of the impending danger, and to do what we can to avert or arrest the blow. We cannot, without incurring grave censure, betray by our silence the cause of our religion or of our country, for fear that by speaking we may cross the purposes of one or another party, and seem to favor the views and policy of another.

Mr. Wilson's New Departure is unquestionably revolutionary, and therefore not lawful for any party in this country to adopt. It is expressed in two words, National Unification and National Education—that is, the consolidation of all the powers of government in the general government, and the social and religious unification of the American people by means of a system of universal and uniform compulsory education, adopted and enforced by the authority of the united or consolidated states, not by the states severally each within its own jurisdiction and for its own people. The first is decidedly revolutionary and destructive of the American system of federative government, or the division of powers between a general government and particular state governments; the second, in the sense proposed, violates the rights of parents and annihilates the religious liberty secured by the constitution and laws both of the several states and of the United States.

The general government, in our American political system, is not the national government, or any more national than the several state governments. The national government with us is divided between a general government having charge of our relations with other powers and internal matters of a general nature and common to all the states, and particular state governments having charge of matters local and particular in their nature, and clothed with all the powers of supreme national governments not expressly delegated to the general government. In the draft of the federal constitution reported by the committee to the convention of 1787, the word national was used, but the convention finally struck it out, and inserted wherever it occurred the word general, as more appropriately designating the character and powers of the government they were creating. It takes under our actual system both the state governments and the general government to make one complete national government, invested with all the powers of government. By making the general government a supreme national government, we make it the source of all authority, subordinate the state governments to it, make them hold from it, and deprive them of all independent or undivided rights. This would completely subvert our system of government, according to which the states hold their powers immediately from the political people, and independently of any suzerain or overlord, and the general government from the states or the people organized as states united in convention. A more complete change of the government or destruction of the federative principle, which constitutes the chief excellence and glory of our system, it would be difficult to propose, or even to conceive, than is set forth in Mr. Wilson's programme.

Mr. Wilson, however, is hardly justified in calling the revolution he proposes a "New Departure." It has been the aim of a powerful party, under one name or another, ever since 1824, if not from the origin of the government itself. This party has been steadily pursuing it, and with increasing numbers and influence, ever since the anti-slavery agitation seriously commenced. At one time, and probably at all times, it has been moved chiefly by certain business interests which it could not advance according to its mind by state legislation, and for which it desired federal legislation and the whole power of a national government, but which it could not get because the constitution and the antagonistic interests created by slave labor were opposed to it. It then turned philanthropist and called in philanthropy to its aid—philanthropy which makes light of constitutions and mocks at state lines, and claims the right to go wherever it conceives the voice of humanity calls it. Under the pretext of philanthropy, the party turned abolitionist, and sought to bring under the action of the general government the question of slavery manifestly reserved to the states severally, and which it belonged to each to settle for itself in its own way. A civil war followed. The slaves were emancipated, and slavery abolished, professedly under the war-power of the Union, as a military necessity, which nobody regrets. But the party did not stop here. Forgetful that the extraordinary war-power ceases with the war, and military necessity can no longer be pleaded, it has, under one pretext or another, such as protecting and providing for the freed-men and reconstructing the states that seceded, continued to exercise it ever since the war was over, and by constitutional amendments of doubtful validity, since ratified in part under military pressure by states not yet reconstructed or held to be duly organized states in the Union, it has sought to legitimate it, and to incorporate it into the constitution as one of the ordinary peace-powers of the government.

The party has sometimes coincided, and sometimes has not strictly coincided, with one or another of the great political parties that have divided the country, but it has always struggled for the consolidation of all the powers of government in the general government. Whether prompted by business interests or by philanthropy, its wishes and purposes have required it to get rid of all co-ordinate and independent bodies that might interfere with, arrest, or limit the power of Congress, or impose any limitation on the action of the general government not imposed by the arbitrary will of the majority of the people, irrespective of their state organization.

What the distinguished senator urges we submit, therefore, is simply the policy of consolidation or centralization which his party has steadily pursued from the first, and which it has already in good part consummated. It has abolished slavery, and unified the labor system of the Union; it has contracted a public debt, whether needlessly or not, large enough to secure to the consolidation of the powers of a national government in the general government the support of capitalists, bankers, railroad corporators, monopolists, speculators, projectors, and the business world generally. Under pretence of philanthropy, and of carrying out the abolition of slavery, and abolishing all civil and political distinctions of race or color, it has usurped for the general government the power to determine the question of suffrage and eligibility, under the constitution and by the genius of our government reserved to the states severally, and sends the military and swarms of federal inspectors into the states to control, or at least to look after, the elections, in supreme contempt of state authority. It has usurped for the general government the power of granting charters of incorporation for private business purposes elsewhere than in the District of Columbia, and induced it to establish national bureaus of agriculture and education, as if it was the only and unlimited government of the country, which it indeed is fast becoming.

The work of consolidation or unification is nearly completed, and there remains little to do except to effect the social and religious unification of the various religions, sects, and races that make up the vast and diversified population of the country; and it is clear from Mr. Wilson's programme that his party contemplate moulding the population of European and of African origin, Indians and Asiatics, Protestants and Catholics, Jews and pagans, into one homogeneous people, after what may be called the New England Evangelical type. Neither his politics nor his philanthropy can tolerate any diversity of ranks, conditions, race, belief, or worship. A complete unification must be effected, and under the patronage and authority of the general government.

Mr. Wilson appears not to have recognized any distinction between unity and union. Union implies plurality or diversity; unity excludes both. Yet he cites, without the least apparent misgiving, the fathers of the republic—Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, Jay, and Madison—who were strenuous for the union of the several states, as authorities in favor of their unity or consolidation in one supreme national government. There were points in which these great men differed among themselves—some of them wished to give more, some of them less, power to the general government—some of them would give more, some of them less, power to the executive, etc., but they all agreed in their efforts to establish the union of the states, and not one of them but would have opposed their unity or consolidation into a single supreme government. Mr. Wilson is equally out in trying, as he does, to make it appear that the strong popular sentiment of the American people, in favor of union, is a sentiment in favor of unity or unification.

But starting with the conception of unity or consolidation, and resolving republicanism into the absolute supremacy of the will of the people, irrespective of state organization, Mr. Wilson can find no stopping-place for his party short of the removal of all constitutional or organic limitations on the irresponsible will of the majority for the time, which he contends should in all things be supreme and unopposed. His republicanism, as he explains it, is therefore incompatible with a well-ordered state, and is either no government at all, but universal anarchy, or the unmitigated despotism of majorities—a despotism more oppressive and crushing to all true freedom and manly independence, than any autocracy that the world has ever seen. The fathers of the republic never understood republicanism in this sense. They studied to restrict the sphere of power, and to guard against the supremacy of mere will, whether of the monarch, the nobility, or the people.

But having reached the conclusion that true republicanism demands unification, and the removal of all restrictions on the popular will, Mr. Wilson relies on the attachment of the American people to the republican idea to carry out and realize his programme, however repugnant it may be to what they really desire and suppose they are supporting. He knows the people well enough to know that they do not usually discriminate with much niceness, and that they are easily caught and led away by a few high-sounding phrases and popular catchwords, uttered with due gravity and assurance—perhaps he does not discriminate very nicely, and is himself deceived by the very phrases and catchwords which deceive them. It is not impossible. At any rate, he persuades himself unification or consolidation can be carried forward and effected by appeals to the republican instincts and tendencies of the American people, and secured by aid of the colored vote and woman suffrage, soon to be adopted as an essential element in the revolutionary movement. The colored people, it is expected, will vote as their preachers direct, and their preachers will direct as they are directed by the Evangelicals. The women who will vote, if woman suffrage is adopted, are evangelicals, philanthropists, or humanitarians, and are sure to follow their instincts and vote for the unification or centralization of power—the more unlimited, the better.

But the chief reliance for the permanence in power of the party of consolidation is universal and uniform compulsory education by the general government, which will, if adopted, complete and preserve the work of unification. Education is the American hobby—regarded, as uneducated or poorly educated people usually regard it, as a sort of panacea for all the ills that flesh is heir to. We ourselves, as Catholics, are as decidedly as any other class of American citizens in favor of universal education, as thorough and extensive as possible—if its quality suits us. We do not, indeed, prize so highly as some of our countrymen appear to do the simple ability to read, write, and cipher; nor do we believe it possible to educate a whole people so that every one, on attaining his majority, will understand the bearing of all political questions or comprehend the complexities of statesmanship, the effects at large of all measures of general or special legislation, the bearing on productive industry and national wealth of this or that financial policy, the respective merits of free trade and protection, or what in a given time or given country will the best secure individual freedom and the public good. This is more than we ourselves can understand, and we believe we are better educated than the average American. We do not believe that the great bulk of the people of any nation can ever be so educated as to understand the essential political, financial, and economical questions of government for themselves, and they will always have to follow blindly their leaders, natural or artificial. Consequently, the education of the leaders is of far greater importance than the education of those who are to be led. All men have equal natural rights, which every civil government should recognize and protect, but equality in other respects, whether sought by levelling downward or by levelling upward, is neither practicable nor desirable. Some men are born to be leaders, and the rest are born to be led. Go where we will in society, in the halls of legislation, the army, the navy, the university, the college, the district school, the family, we find the few lead, the many follow. It is the order of nature, and we cannot alter it if we would. Nothing can be worse than to try to educate all to be leaders. The most pitiable sight is a congressional body in which there is no leader, an army without a general, but all lead, all command—that is, nobody leads or commands. The best ordered and administered state is that in which the few are well educated and lead, and the many are trained to obedience, are willing to be directed, content to follow, and do not aspire to be leaders. In the early days of our republic, when the few were better educated than now and the many not so well, in the ordinary sense of the term, there was more dignity in the legislative, judicial, and executive branches of the government, more wisdom and justice in legislation, and more honesty, fidelity, and capacity in the administration. In extending education and endeavoring to train all to be leaders, we have only extended presumption, pretension, conceit, indocility, and brought incapacity to the surface.

These, we grant, are unpopular truths, but they, nevertheless, are truths, which it is worse than idle to deny. Everybody sees it, feels it, but few have the courage to avow it in face of an intolerant and tyrannical public opinion. For ourselves, we believe the peasantry in old Catholic countries, two centuries ago, were better educated, although for the most part unable to read or write, than are the great body of the American people to-day. They had faith, they had morality, they had a sense of religion, they were instructed in the great principles and essential truths of the Gospel, were trained to be wise unto salvation, and they had the virtues without which wise, stable, and efficient government is impracticable. We hear it said, or rather read in the journals, that the superiority the Prussian troops have shown to the French is due to their superior education. We do not believe a word of it. We have seen no evidence that the French common soldiers are not as well educated and as intelligent as the Prussian. The superiority is due to the fact that the Prussian officers were better educated in their profession, were less overweening in their confidence of victory, and maintained better and severer discipline in their armies, than the French officers. The Northern armies in our recent civil war had no advantage in the superior education of the rank and file over the Southern armies, where both were equally well officered and commanded. The morale of an army is no doubt the great thing, but it does not depend on the ability of the common soldier to read, write, and cipher; it depends somewhat on his previous habits and pursuits—chiefly on the officers. Under the first Napoleon, the Prussians were not superior to the French, though as well educated. Good officers, with an able general at their head, can make an efficient army out of almost any materials.

It is not, therefore, for political or military reasons that we demand universal education, whether by the general government or under the state governments. We demand it, as far as practicable, for other and far higher reasons. We want it for a spiritual or religious end. We want our children to be educated as thoroughly as they can be, but in relation to the great purpose of their existence, so as to be fitted to gain the end for which God creates them. For the great mass of the people, the education needed is not secular education, which simply sharpens the intellect and generates pride and presumption, but moral and religious education, which trains up children in the way they should go, which teaches them to be honest and loyal, modest and unpretending, docile and respectful to their superiors, open and ingenuous, obedient and submissive to rightful authority, parental or conjugal, civil or ecclesiastical; to know and keep the commandments of God and the precepts of the church; and to place the salvation of the soul before all else in life. This sort of education can be given only by the church or under her direction and control; and as there is for us Catholics only one church, there is and can be no proper education for us not given by or under the direction and control of the Catholic Church.

But it is precisely education by the Catholic Church that Mr. Wilson and his party do not want, do not believe in, and wish to prevent us from having even for our own children. It is therefore they demand a system of universal and uniform compulsory education by the authority and under the direction of the general government, which shall effect and maintain the national unification proposed, by compelling all the children of the land to be trained in national schools, under Evangelical control and management. The end and aim of the New Departure, aside from certain business interests, is to suppress Catholic education, gradually extinguish Catholicity in the country, and to form one homogeneous American people after the New England Evangelical type. Of this there can be no reasonable doubt. The Evangelicals and their humanitarian allies, as all their organs show, are seriously alarmed at the growth of Catholicity in the United States. They supposed, at first, that the church could never take root in our Protestant soil, that she could not breathe the atmosphere of freedom and enlightenment, or thrive in a land of newspapers and free schools. They have been disappointed, and now see that they reckoned without their host, and that, if they really mean to prevent the American people from gradually becoming Catholic, they must change fundamentally the American form of government, suppress the freedom of religion hitherto enjoyed by Catholics, and take the training of all children and youth into their own hands. If they leave education to the wishes and judgment of parents, Catholic parents will bring up their children Catholics; if they leave it to the states separately, Catholics in several of them are already a powerful minority, daily increasing in strength and numbers, and will soon be strong enough to force the state legislatures to give them their proportion of the public schools supported at the public expense.

All this is clear enough. What, then, is to be done? Mr. Wilson, who is not remarkable for his reticence, tells us, if not with perfect frankness, yet frankly enough for all practical purposes. It is to follow out the tendency which has been so strengthened of late, and absorb the states in the Union, take away the independence of the state governments, and assume the control of education for the general government, already rendered practically the supreme national government;—then, by appealing to the popular sentiment in favor of education, and saying nothing of its quality, get Congress, which the Evangelicals, through the party in power, already control, to establish a system of compulsory education in national schools—and the work is done; for these schools will necessarily fall into Evangelical hands.

Such is what the distinguished Evangelical senator from Massachusetts calls a "New Departure," but which is really only carrying out a policy long since entered upon, and already more than half accomplished. While we are writing, Mr. Hoar, a representative in Congress from Massachusetts, has introduced into the House of Representatives a bill establishing a system of national education under the authority of the general government. Its fate is not yet known, but no doubt will be, before we go to press. The probabilities are that it will pass both Houses, and if it does, it will receive the signature of the President as a matter of course. The Evangelicals—under which name we include Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Dutch Reformed, Baptists, and Methodists, etc.—all the denominations united in the Evangelical Alliance—constitute, with their political and philanthropic allies, the majority in Congress, and the measure is advocated apparently by the whole Evangelical press and by the larger and more influential republican journals of the country, as any number of excerpts from them now before us will satisfy any one who has the curiosity to read them. We did think of selecting and publishing the more striking and authoritative among them, but we have concluded to hold them in reserve, to be produced in case any one should be rash enough to question our general statement. There is a strong popular feeling in many parts of the country in favor of the measure, which is a pet measure also of the Evangelical ministers generally, who are sure to exert their powerful influence in its support, and we see no reason to doubt that the bill will pass.

But while we see ample cause for all citizens who are loyal to the system of government which Providence enabled our fathers to establish, and who wish to preserve it and the liberties it secures, to be vigilant and active, we see none for alarm. The bill, if it passes, will be manifestly unconstitutional, even counting the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments as valid parts of the constitution; and there may be more difficulty in carrying it into effect than its framers anticipate. It is part and parcel of a New England policy, and New England is not omnipotent throughout the Union, nor very ardently loved; not all the members of the several evangelical denominations will, when they understand it, favor the revolution in the government Mr. Wilson would effect. There are in those denominations many men who belong not to the dominant party, and who will follow their political rather than their denominational affinities; also, there are in them a large number, we should hope, of honest men, who are not accustomed to act on the maxim, "the end justifies the means," loyal men and patriotic, who consider it no less disloyalty to seek to revolutionize our government against the states than against the Union, and who will give their votes and all their influence to preserve the fundamental principles and genius of our federative system of government, as left us by our fathers, and resist, if need be, to the death the disloyal policy of unification and education proposed by Mr. Wilson.

The Southern states are reconstructed and back now in their place in the Union, and will not be much longer represented by Northern adventurers, or men of little ability and less character, but very soon by genuine Southern men, who, while strictly loyal to the Union, will speak the genuine sentiments of the Southern people. The attempt to New-Englandize the Southern people has not succeeded, and will not succeed. When to the Southern people, who will never acquiesce in the policy of unification, we add the large number of people in the Northern states who from their political convictions and affinities, as well as from their conservative tendencies, will oppose consolidation, we may feel pretty sure that the policy Mr. Wilson presents as that of the Republican party will not be adopted, or if adopted will not be permitted to stand. As not wholly inexperienced in political matters, and looking at the present state of parties and temper of the nation, we should say that Mr. Wilson, as a party man, has committed a blunder, and that, if he has fancied that his New Departure is fitted to strengthen his party as a political party, and to give it a new lease of power, he has miscalculated. Nothing in our judgment would be more fatal to the continuance of his party in power than for it boldly and unequivocally to accept Mr. Wilson's programme. There is such a thing as reaction in human affairs, and reactions are sometimes very powerful.

The educational question ought not to present any serious difficulty, and would not if our Evangelicals and humanitarians did not wish to make education a means of preventing the growth of the church and unmaking the children of Catholics, as Catholics; or if they seriously and in good faith would accept the religious equality before the state which the constitution and laws, both of the Union and the several states, as yet recognize and protect. No matter what we claim for the Catholic Church in the theological order—we claim for her in the civil order in this country only equality with the sects, and for Catholics only equal rights with citizens who are not Catholics. We demand the freedom of conscience and the liberty of our church, which is our conscience, enjoyed by Evangelicals. This much the country in its constitution and laws has promised us, and this much it cannot deny us without breaking its faith pledged before the world.

As American citizens, we object to the assumption of the control of education, or of any action in regard to it, by the general government; for it has no constitutional right to meddle with it, and so far as civil government has any authority in relation to it, it is, under our system of government, the authority of the states severally, not of the states united. We deny, of course, as Catholics, the right of the civil government to educate, for education is a function of the spiritual society, as much so as preaching and the administration of the sacraments; but we do not deny to the state the right to establish and maintain public schools. The state, if it chooses, may even endow religion, or pay the ministers of religion a salary for their support; but its endowments of religion, when made, are made to God, are sacred, and under the sole control and management of the spiritual authority, and the state has no further function in regard to them but to protect the spirituality in the free and full possession and enjoyment of them. If it chooses to pay the ministers of religion a salary, as has been done in France and Spain, though accepted by the Catholic clergy only as a small indemnification for the goods of the church seized by revolutionary governments and appropriated to secular uses, it acquires thereby no rights over them or liberty to supervise their discharge of their spiritual functions. We do not deny the same or an equal right in regard to schools and school-teachers. It may found and endow schools and pay the teachers, but it cannot dictate or interfere with the education or discipline of the school. That would imply a union of church and state, or, rather, the subjection of the spiritual order to the secular, which the Catholic Church and the American system of government both alike repudiate.

It is said, however, that the state needs education for its own protection, and to promote the public good or the good of the community, both of which are legitimate ends of its institution. What the state needs in relation to its legitimate ends, or the ends for which it is instituted, it has the right to ordain and control. This is the argument by which all public education by the state is defended. But it involves an assumption which is not admissible. The state, having no religious or spiritual function, can give only secular education, and secular education is not enough for the state's own protection or its promotion of the public good. Purely secular education, or education divorced from religion, endangers the safety of the state and the peace and security of the community, instead of protecting and insuring them. It is not in the power of the state to give the education it needs for its own sake, or for the sake of secular society. The fact is, though statesmen, and especially politicians, are slow to learn it, and still slower to acknowledge it, the state, or secular society, does not and cannot suffice for itself, and is unable to discharge its own proper functions without the co-operation and aid of the spiritual society. Purely secular education creates no civic virtues, and instead of fitting unfits the people for the prompt and faithful discharge of their civic duties, as we may see in Young America, and indeed in the present active and ruling generation of the American people. Young America is impatient of restraint, regards father and mother as old-fogies, narrow-minded, behind the age, and disdains filial submission or obedience to them, has no respect for dignities, acknowledges no superior, mocks at law if he can escape the police, is conceited, proud, self-sufficient, indocile, heedless of the rights and interests of others—will be his own master, and follow his own instincts, passions, or headstrong will. Are these the characteristics of a people fitted to maintain a wise, well-ordered, stable, and beneficent republican government? Or can such a people be developed from such youngerlings? Yet with purely secular education, however far you carry it, experience proves that you can get nothing better.

The church herself, even if she had full control of the education of all the children in the land, with ample funds at her command, could not secure anything better, if, as the state, she educated for a secular end alone. The virtues needed for the protection of the state and the advancement of the public or common good, are and can be secured only by educating or training the children and youth of a nation not for this life as an end, but for the life to come. Hence our Lord says, "Seek first the kingdom of God and his justice, and all these things shall be added unto you." The church does not educate for the secular order as an end, but for God and heaven; and it is precisely in educating for God and heaven that she secures those very virtues on which the welfare and security of the secular order depend, and without which civil society tends inevitably to dissolution, and is sustained, if sustained at all, only by armed force, as we have seen in more than one European nation which has taken education into its own hand, and subordinated it to secular ends. The education needed by secular society can be obtained only from the spiritual society, which educates not for this world, but for the world to come. The virtues needed to secure this life are obtained only by seeking and promoting the virtues which fit us for eternal life.

This follows necessarily from the fact that man is created with a spiritual nature and for an immortal destiny. If he existed for this life only, if he were, as some sciolists pretend, merely a monkey or a gorilla developed, or were like the beasts that perish, this indeed would not and could not follow, and the reconciliation of the nature and destiny of man with uniform human experience would be impossible. We should be obliged, in order to secure the peace and good order of society, as some unbelieving statesmen do not blush to avow, to educate in view of a falsehood, and take care to keep up the delusion that man has a religious nature and destiny, or look to what is false and delusive for the virtues which can alone save us from anarchy and utter barbarism. Yet what would serve the delusion or the falsehood, if man differs not by nature from the dog or the pig? But if man has really a spiritual nature and an immortal destiny, then it must necessarily follow that his real good can in no respect be obtained but in being educated and trained to live for a spiritual life, for an immortal destiny. Should not man be educated according to his spiritual nature and destiny, not as a pig or a monkey? If so, in his education should not the secular be subordinated to the spiritual, and the temporal to the eternal? We know well, experience proves it, that even the secular virtues are not secured when sought as the end of education and of life, but only in educating and living for that which is not secular, and in securing the virtues which have the promise of the life of the world to come.

All education, as all life, should be religious, and all education divorced from religion is an evil, not a good, and is sure in the long run to be ruinous to the secular order; but as a part of religious education, and included in it, secular education has its place, and even its necessity. Man is not all soul, nor all body, but the union of soul and body; and therefore his education should include in their union, not separation—for the separation of soul and body is the death of the body—both spiritual education and secular. It is not that we oppose secular education when given in the religious education, and therefore referred to the ultimate end of man, but when it is given alone and for its own sake. We deny the competency of the state to educate even for its own order, its right to establish purely secular schools, from which all religion is excluded, as Mr. Webster ably contended in his argument in the Girard will case; but we do not deny, we assert rather, its right to establish public schools under the internal control and management of the spiritual society, and to exact that a certain amount of secular instruction be given along with the religious education that society gives. This last right it has in consideration of the secular funds for the support of the schools it furnishes, and as a condition on which it furnishes them.

Let the state say distinctly how much secular education in the public schools it exacts, or judges to be necessary for its own ends, and so far as the Catholic Church has anything to do with the matter it can have it. The church will not refuse to give it in the schools under her control. She will not hesitate to teach along with her religion any amount of reading, writing, arithmetic, history, geography, music, and drawing, or the sciences and the fine arts, the state exacts and provides for; nor will she refuse to allow it to send, if it chooses, its own inspectors into her schools to ascertain if she actually gives the secular education required. Let it say, then, what amount of secular education it wants for all the children of the land, and is willing to pay for, and, so far as Catholics are concerned, it can have it, and of as good quality, to say the least, as it can get in purely secular schools, and along with it the religious education, the most essential to it as well as to the souls of all.

But the difficulty here, it is assumed, is that the spiritual society with us is divided into various denominations, each with its distinctive views of religion. That, no doubt, is a damage, but can be easily overcome by bearing in mind that the several divisions have equal rights, and by making the public schools denominational, as they are in Prussia, Austria, France, and to a certain extent in England, where denominational diversities obtain as well as with us. Where the community is divided between different religious denominations, all standing on a footing of perfect equality before civil society, this is the only equitable system of public schools that is practicable. If the state does not adopt it, it must—1, let the whole business of education alone, and make no public provision for it; 2, establish purely secular, that is, godless schools, from which all religion is excluded, to which no religious people can be expected to consent, and which would ruin both public and private virtue, and defeat the very purpose of all education; or, 3, it must practically, if not theoretically, recognize some one of the several denominations as the state religion, and remit the education of childhood and youth to its management and control, as is virtually the case with our present public schools, but which would be manifestly unjust to all the others—to non-evangelicals, if evangelicalism is made the state religion, or to the Evangelicals, if a non-evangelical denomination be established as the religion of the state. The only way to be just to all is, as everybody can see, to recognize in practice as well as in profession the equal rights of all denominations in the civil order—make the public schools denominational, and give to each denomination that asks it for the sake of conscience its fair and honest proportion, to be as to their internal economy, education, and discipline under its sole control and management.

Mr. Wilson proposes for our admiration and imitation the Prussian system of public schools, and though we do not know that it is superior to the Austrian or even the French system, yet we think highly of it. But, what the Evangelical senator does not tell us, the Prussian system is strictly the denominational system, and each denomination is free and expected to educate in its own schools its own children, under the direction of its pastors and teachers, in its own religion. The Prussian system recognizes the fact that different communions do exist among the Prussian people, and does not aim to suppress them or at unification by state authority. It meets the fact as it is, without seeking to alter it. Give us the Prussian system of denominational schools, and we shall be satisfied, even if education is made compulsory. We, of course, protest against any law compelling us to send our children to schools in which our religion cannot be freely taught, in which no religion is taught, or in which is taught in any shape or degree a religion which we hold to be false or perilous to souls. Such a law would violate the rights of parents and the freedom of conscience; but with denominational schools compulsory education would violate no one's conscience and no parental right. Parents ought, if able, to have their children educated, and if they will not send their children to schools provided for them by the public, and in which their religion is respected, and made the basis of the education given, we can see no valid reason why the law should not compel them. The state has the right, perhaps the duty, in aid of the spiritual society and for its own safety and the public good, to compel parents to educate their children when public schools of their own religion, under the charge of their own pastors, are provided for them at the public expense. Let the public schools be denominational, give us our proportion of them, so that no violence will be done to parental rights or to the Catholic conscience, and we shall be quite willing to have education made compulsory, and even if such schools are made national, though we should object as American citizens to them, we should as Catholics accept them. We hold state authority is the only constitutional authority under our system to establish schools and provide for them at the public expense; but we could manage to get along with national denominational schools as well as others could. We could educate in our share of the public schools our own children in our own way, and that is all we ask. We do not ask to educate the children of others, unless with the consent or at the request of parents and guardians.

The Prussian system of denominational schools could be introduced and established in all the states without the least difficulty, if it were not for Evangelicals, their Unitarian offshoots, and their humanitarian allies. These are religious and philanthropic busybodies, who fancy they are the Atlas who upholds the world, and that they are deputed to take charge of everybody's affairs, and put them to rights. But they forget that their neighbors have rights as well as themselves, and perhaps intentions as honest and enlightened, and as much real wisdom and practical sagacity. The only obstacle to the introduction and establishment of a just and equitable system of public schools comes from the intolerant zeal of these Evangelicals, who seek to make the public schools an instrument for securing the national, social, and religious unification they are resolved on effecting, and for carrying out their purpose of suppressing the church and extirpating Catholicity from American soil. They want to use them in training our children up in the way of Evangelicalism, and moulding the whole American population into one homogeneous people, modelled, as we have said, after the New England Evangelical type. Here is the difficulty, and the whole difficulty. The denominational system would defeat their darling hope, their pet project, and require them to live and let live. They talk much about freedom of conscience and religious liberty and equal rights; but the only equal rights they understand are all on their side, and they cherish such a tender regard for religious liberty, have so profound a respect for it, that they insist, like our Puritan forefathers, on keeping it all to themselves, and not to suffer it to be profaned or abused by being extended to others.

Prussia, though a Protestant country, does not dream of making the public schools a machine either for proselytism or unification. She is contented to recognize Catholics as an integral part of her population, and to leave them to profess and practise their own religion according to the law of their church. Our Evangelicals would do well to imitate her example. We Catholics are here, and here we intend to remain. We have as much right to be here as Evangelicals have. We are too many to be massacred or exiled, and too important and influential a portion of the American people to be of no account in the settlement of public affairs. We have votes, and they will count on whichever side we cast them; and we cannot reasonably be expected to cast them on the side of any party that is seeking to use its power as a political party to suppress our church and our religion, or even to destroy our federative system of government, and to leave all minorities at the mercy of the irresponsible majority for the time, with no other limit to its power than it sees proper to impose on itself; for we love liberty, and our church teaches us to be loyal to the constitution of our country.

The wisest course, since there are different religious denominations in the country, is to accept the situation, to recognize the fact, acquiesce in it, and make the best of it. Any attempt to unmake, by the direct or indirect authority of the state, Catholics of their faith or any denomination of its belief, is sure to fail. Each denomination is free to use Scripture and reason, logic and tradition, all moral and intellectual weapons, against its rivals, and with that it should be contented. Whatever may be the rightful claims of the church in the theological order, she is contented with the civil protection of her equal rights in the political order. She asks—with the wealth, the fashion, the public opinion, the press, nine-tenths of the population of the country, and the seductions of the world against her—only "an open field and fair play." If she does not complain, her enemies ought to be satisfied with the advantages they have.

We have entered our protest against a party programme which threatens alike the genius of the American government and the freedom of religion, for so much was obviously our duty, both as Catholics and citizens. We are aware of the odds against us, but we have confidence in our countrymen that, though they may be momentarily deceived or misled, they will, when the real character of the programme we have exposed is once laid open to them, reject it with scorn and indignation, and hasten to do us justice.

THE CROSS.

In weary hours to lonely heights
When thou hast travelled sore,
A sorrowing man hath borne his cross
And gone thy way before.

Thine eyes cannot escape the sign
On every hand that is
Of him who bore the general woe,
Nor knew a common bliss.

But men, remembering his face,
Dreamed of him while they slept,
And the mother by the cradle side
Thought of his eye, and wept.

Now haunts the world his ghost whose fate
Made all men's fates his own;
So for the wrongs of modest hearts
A myriad hearts atone.

Oh! deeply shall thy spirit toil
To reach the height he trod,
And humbly strive thy soul to know
Its servant was its God.

Only earth's martyr is her lord;
Such is the gain of loss:
And, looking in all hearts, I see
The signal of the cross.

THE HOUSE OF YORKE.

CHAPTER I.
GENEALOGIES.

Under a thickly-branched tree in the northern part of one of the southern counties of Maine is a certain gray rock, matted over with dim green lichens that are spotted with dead gold. From under this rock springs a sparkling little stream. It is no storied fountain, rich with legends of splendor, poetry, and crime, but a dear, bright little Yankee brook, with the world all before it. That world it immediately proceeds to investigate. It creeps through thready grasses and russet pine-needles; it turns aside, with great respect, for a stone no larger than a rabbit; and when a glistening pitchy cone drops into it, the infant river labors under the burden. When the thirsty fawn comes there to drink, nearly the whole rivulet flows down its throat, and the cone is stranded high and dry; what there is left flows southward. A sunbeam pierces the scented gloom, creeps down a tree-trunk, steals over a knoll of green-and-brown tree-moss, which then looks like a tiny forest on fire, over yellow violets, which dissolve in its light, over a bank of rich dark mould veined with the golden powder of decayed pine-trees, moist and soft, and full of glistening white roots, where the flowers push down their pearly feet. Over the bank, into the water, goes the sunbeam, and the two frolic together, and the stream dives under the gnarled roots, so that its playmate would believe it lost but for that gurgle of laughter down in the cool, fresh dark. Then it leaps up, and spreads itself out in a mirror, and the elder-tree, leaning over to look at the reflection of its fan-like leaves and clusters of white flowers, gets very erroneous ideas concerning its own personal appearance; for the palpitating rings that chase each other over the surface of the water make the brown stems crinkle, the leaves come to pieces and unite again, and the many flowers in each round cluster melt all together, then twinkle out individually, only to melt again into that bloomy full moon. Over this shimmer of flowers and water big bees fly, buzzing terribly, dragon-flies dart, or hang, purple-mailed, glittering creatures, with gauzy wings, and comical insects dance there, throwing spots of sunshine instead of shadow down to the leafy bed. Then the brook flows awhile in a green tranquil shadow, till, reaching the interlaced roots of two immense trees that hold a bank between them, it makes a sudden, foamy plunge the height of a stag's front. She is a bride then, you may say—she is Undine, looking through that white veil, and thinking new thoughts.

Now the bear comes down to drink and look at his ugly face in the deepening wave, foxes switch their long tails about the banks, deer come, as light-footed as shadows, drink, and fling up their short tails, with a flit of white, and trot away with a little sniff, and their heads thrown back, hearing the howl or the long stride of the wolf in pursuit. Rabbits come there, and squirrels leap and nibble in the branches above. Besides, there are shoals of pretty, slim fishes.

So through the mellow gloom and sunny sparkle of the old forest, the clear brook wanders, growing wiser, and talking to itself about many things.

Presently the wild creatures withdraw, sunburnt children wade across from bank to bank, grassy clearings abound, there are farm-houses, and cows with tinkling bells; and then comes a bridge, and boats dance upon the water, and the stream is a river! Alas for the Indian name it brought up out of the earth with it, and lisped and gurgled and laughed to itself all the way down—the name spiked with k's and choky-looking gh's, rough to the eye, but sweet in the mouth, like a hazel-nut in the burr. The white settlers have changed all that.

Now, indeed, the young river puts on state, and lets people see that it is not to be waded through; and when they build a dam across, it flows grandly over, in a smooth, wine-colored curve. Times are changed, indeed, since the little gray birds with speckled breasts looked with admiration at its first cascade, since the bear, setting down his great paw, clumsily splashed the whole stream up over his shaggy leg. There are farms to keep up appearances before, mill-wheels to turn, and ships to bear up. Pine-cones, indeed! Besides, a new and strange experience has come to it, and its bosom pulses daily with the swelling of the tides. And here one village street, with white houses, follows its course a mile or so, and another street with white houses comes down to its bank from the west, crosses over, and goes up eastward. This town, with its two principal streets forming a cross near the mouth of the river, a white cross at the end of a silver chain—shall we call it Seaton? It is a good enough name. And the river shall be Seaton River, and the bay into which it flows shall be Seaton Bay. But the ocean that makes the bay, and drinks the river, shall be Atlantic still.

We have spoken!

We follow the road that follows the stream on its eastern bank, cross West Street, get into a poor, dwindling neighborhood, leave the houses nearly all behind, go over two small, ill-conditioned hills, and find at our right a ship-yard with wharves, at our left a dingy little cottage, shaped like a travelling-trunk, and not much larger than some. It stands with its side toward the dusty road, a large, low chimney rises from the roof, there is a door with a window at each side of it. One can see at a glance from the outside how this house is divided. It has but two rooms below, with a tiny square entry between, and a low attic above. Each room has three windows, one on each of the three outer walls.

The kitchen looked toward the village through its north window. Opposite that was a large fireplace with an ill-tempered, crackling fire of spruce-wood, throwing out sparks and splinters. It was April weather, and not very warm yet. In the chimney-corner sat Mr. Rowan, sulkily smoking his pipe, his eyes fixed on the chimney-back. He was a large, slouching man, with an intelligent face brutalized by intemperance. Drunkard was written all over him, in the scorched black hair, not yet turning gray, in the dry lips, bloated features, and inflamed eyes. He sat in his shirt-sleeves, waiting impatiently while his wife put a patch in his one coat. Mrs. Rowan, a poor, faded, little frightened woman, whom her female acquaintances called "slack," sat near the south window, wrinkling her brows anxiously over the said patch, which was smaller than the hole it was destined to fill. The afternoon sunshine spread a golden carpet close to her feet. In the light of it one could see the splinters in the much-scoured floor, and a few fraggles in the hem of Mrs. Rowan's calico gown.

At the eastern window sat Edith Yorke, eleven years of age, with a large book on her knees. Over this book, some illustrated work on natural history, she had been bending for an hour, her loose mop of tawny hair falling each side of the page. So cloistered, her profile was invisible; but, standing in front of her, one could see an oval face with regular features full of calm earnestness. Bright, arched lips, and a spirited curve in the nostrils, saved this face from the cold look which regular features often give. The large, drooping eyelids promised large eyes, the forehead was wide and not high, the brows long, slightly arched, and pale-brown in color, and the whole face, neck, hands, and wrists were tanned to a light quadroon tint. But where the coarse sleeve had slipped up was visible an arm of dazzling whiteness. Outside the window, and but two rods distant, hung a crumbling clay bank, higher than the house, with a group of frightened alder-bushes looking over the top, and holding on with all their roots. Some day, in spite of their grip—the sooner, perhaps, because of its stress—the last frail hold was to be loosed, and the bushes were to come sliding down the bank, faster and faster, to pitch headlong into the mire at the bottom, with a weak crackling of all their poor doomed branches.

Presently the child looked up, with lights coming and going in her agate-colored eyes. "How wonderful frogs are!" she exclaimed involuntarily.

There was no reply.

She glanced at her two companions, scarcely conscious of them, her mind full of something else. "But everything is wonderful, when you come to think of it," she pursued dreamily.

Mr. Rowan took the pipe from his mouth, turned his forbidding face, and glowered at the girl. "You're a wonderful fool!" he growled; then resumed his pipe, feeling better, apparently, for that expression of opinion. His wife glanced up, furtive and frightened, but said nothing.

Edith looked at the man unmoved, saw him an instant, then, still looking, saw him not. After a while she became aware, roused herself, and bent again over the book. Then there was silence, broken only by the snapping of the fire, the snip of Mrs. Rowan's scissors, and the lame, one-sided ticking of an old-fashioned clock on the mantelpiece.

After a while, as the child read, a new thought struck up. "That's just like! Don't you think"—addressing the company—"Major Cleaveland said yesterday that I had lightning-bugs in my eyes!"

Without removing his pipe, Mr. Rowan darted an angry look at his wife, whose face became still more frightened. "Dear me!" she said feebly, "that child is an idjut!"

This time the long, fading gaze dwelt on the woman before it went back to the book again. But the child was too closely ensphered in her own life to be much, if at all, hurt. Besides, she was none of theirs, nor of their kind. Her soul was no dying spark struggling through ashes, but a fire, "alive, and alive like to be," as children say when they wave the fire-brand, winding live ribbons in the air; and no drop of their blood flowed in her veins.

The clock limped over ten minutes more, and the patch was got into its place, after a fashion, botched somewhat, with the knots on the outside. Mr. Rowan took the coat, grumbled at it, put it on, and went out, glancing back at the child as he opened the door. She was looking after him with an expression which he interpreted to mean aversion and contempt. Perhaps he mistook. May be she was wondering at him, what sort of strange being he was. Edith Yorke was very curious regarding the world she had got into. It seemed to her a queer place, and that she had at present not much concern in it.

Her husband out of the way, Mrs. Rowan took her knitting-work, and stood a moment at the north window, gazing up toward the town, with a far-away look of blunted expectancy, as if she had got in the habit of looking for help which never came. Then she drew a long sigh, that also a habit, and, resuming her chair, began to knit and to rock herself, letting her mind, what there was left of it, swing to and fro, unmeaningly and miserably, to the sound of the clock as it ticked. "O dear! O dear!"—that was what the ticking always said to this poor soul. As she sat, the afternoon sun, sinking lower, crept about her feet, climbed to her lap, got hold of her knitting, and ran in little bright flashes along the needles, and snapped off in sparks at the ends, so that she seemed to be knitting sunshine.

This woman was what remained at forty of a pretty, flaxen-haired girl of eighteen, who had captivated handsome Dick Rowan, for he had been handsome. A faded rag of a woman she was, without hope or spirit, all the color and life washed out of her in a bitter rain of tears. The pink cheeks had faded, and only the ghost remained of that dimple that had once seemed to give meaning to her smiles. The curly hair was dry and thin, and had an air of chronic untidiness. The blue-gray eyes were dim and heavy, the teeth were nearly all gone. The pretty, chirping ways that had been captivating when youth covered their silliness—oh! where had they gone? She was a weak, broken-hearted, shiftless little woman, and her husband hated her. He felt wronged and cheated by her. He was more disappointed than Ixion, for in this cloud there had never even been a goddess. If she had sometimes turned upon him, when he acted like a brute, and scorned him for it, he would have liked her better; but she shrank, and cowered, and trembled, made him feel himself ten times the brute she dared not call him, yet gave him nothing to resent. "Gentle, is she?" he cried out once in a rage. "She is not! She is weak and slavish. A person cannot be gentle who cannot be something else."

So the poor woman suffered, and got neither pity nor credit from the one who caused her suffering. It was hard; and yet, she was nobler in her misery than she would have been in happiness. For sorrow gave her now and then a touch of dignity; and when, stung with a sudden perception of her own nothingness, she flung her desperate hands upward, and called upon God to deliver her, a certain tragical power and beauty seemed to wrap her round. Mrs. Rowan happy would have been a trivial woman, meaning no great harm, because meaning no great anything; but the fiery furnace of pain had scorched her up, and what remained was pure.

When the two were alone, Edith dropped her book, and looked across the room at her companion. Mrs. Rowan, busy with her own sad thoughts, took no notice of her, and presently the child glanced past her, and out the window. The view was not bad. First came the dusty road, then the ship-yard, then the river sparkling, but rather the worse for sawdust and lath-edgings that came down from the lumber-mills above the village. But here all that was sordid came to an end. The meanness and misery on the hitherward bank were like witches, who cannot cross running water. From the opposite bank rose a long, grassy hill, unmarred by road or fence. In summer-time you could see from far away the pinkness of the wild-roses that had seen fit to bind with a blooming cestus the dented waist of this hill. Behind them was a green spray of locust and laburnum trees, then dense round tops of maples, and elms in graceful groups, half-hiding the roofs and gables of Major Cleaveland's house—the great house of the village, as its owner was the great man. Behind that was a narrow rim of pines and spruces, making the profile of an enchanted city against the horizon, and above that a vast hollow of unobstructed sky. In that space the sunsets used to build their jasper walls, and calm airs stretch long lines of vapor across, till the whole west was a stringed instrument whereon a full symphony of colors played good-night to the sun. There the west wind blew up bubbles of wry cloud, and the new moon put forth her gleaming sickle to gather in the sheaf of days, a never-failing harvest, through storm and sunshine, hoar-frost and dew. There the pearly piles of cumuli used to slumber on summer afternoons, lightnings growing in their bosoms to flash forth at evening; and there, when a long storm ended with the day, rose the solid arch of cerulean blue. When it had reached a certain height, Edith Yorke would run into the south room, and look out to see the rainbow suspend its miraculous arch over the retreating storm. This little girl, to whom everything was so wonderful when she came to think of it, was a dear lover of beauty.

"O dear! O dear!" ticked the clock; and the barred sunshine turned slowly on the floor, as if the ugly little house were the hub of a huge, leisurely wheel of gold.

Edith dropped her book, and went to Mrs. Rowan's side, taking a stool with her, and sitting down in the midst of the sunshine.

"I'm afraid I shall forget my story, Mrs. Jane, unless I say it over again," she said. "And, you know, mamma told me never to forget."

Mrs. Rowan roused herself, glad of anything which could take her mind from her own troubles. "Well, tell it all over to me now," she said. "I haven't heard it this long time."

"Will you be sure to correct me if I am wrong?" the child asked anxiously.

"Yes, I will. But don't begin till I have taken up the heel of this stocking."

The stitches were counted and evened, half of them taken off on to a thread, and the other half, with the seam-stitch in the middle, knit backward once. Then Edith began to repeat the story confided to her by her dead mother.

"My grandpapa and grandmamma were Polish exiles. They had to leave Poland when Aunt Marie was only a year old, and before mamma was born. They couldn't take their property with them, but only jewels, and plate, and pictures. They went to Brussels, and there my mamma was born, and the queen was her godmother, and sent the christening-robe. Mamma kept the robe till she grew up; but when she was in America, and was poor, and wanted to go to a party, she cut it up to make the waist and sleeves of a dress. Poverty is no disgrace, mamma said, but it is a great inconvenience. By-and-by, they left Brussels, and went to England. Grandpapa wanted some way to get money to live on, for they had sold nearly all their pictures and things. They stayed in England not very long. Countess Poniatowski called on grandmamma, and she had on a black velvet bonnet with red roses in it; so I suppose it was winter. Then one day grandpapa took mamma out to walk in a park; so I suppose that was summer. There were some gentlemen in the park that they talked to, and one of them, a gentleman with a hook nose, who was sitting down on a bench, took mamma on his knees, and started to kiss her. But mamma slapped his face. She said he had no right to kiss people who didn't want him to, not even if he were a king. His name was the Duke of Wellington. Then they all came to America, and people here were very polite to them, because they were Polish exiles, and of noble birth. But they couldn't eat nor drink nor wear politeness, mamma said, and so they grew poorer and poorer every day, and didn't know what they would do. Once they travelled with Henry Clay two weeks, and had quite a nice time, and they went to Ashland and stayed all night. When they went away the next day, Mr. Clay gave mamma and Aunt Marie the little mugs they had had to drink out of. But they didn't care much about 'em, and they broke 'em pretty soon. Mamma said she didn't know then that Mr. Clay was a great man. She thought that just a mister couldn't be great. She had always seen lords and counts, and grandpapa was a colonel in the army—Colonel Lubomirski his name was. But she said that in this country a man might be great, even if he wasn't anything but a mister, and that my papa was as great as a prince. Well, then they came to Boston, and Aunt Marie died, and they buried her, and mamma was almost nine years old. People used to pet and notice her, and everybody talked about her hair. It was thick and black, and it curled down to her waist. One day Doctor Somebody, I can never recollect his name, took her out walking on the Common, and they went into Mr. John Quincy Adams's house. And Mr. Adams took one of mamma's curls, and held it out, and said it was long enough and large enough to hang the Czar with. And she said that they might have it all if they'd hang him with it. And then poor grandpapa had to go to Washington, and teach dancing and fencing, because that was all he could do. And pretty soon grandmamma broke her heart and died. And then after a little while grandpapa died. And, after that, mamma had to go out sewing to support herself, and she went to Boston, and sewed in Mr. Yorke's family. And Mr. Yorke's youngest brother fell in love with her, and she fell in love with him, and they married each other in spite of everybody. So the family were awfully angry. My papa had been engaged ever since he was a little boy to Miss Alice Mills, and they had put off getting married because she was rich, and he hadn't anything, and was looking round to see how he should get a fortune. And the Millses all turned against him, and the Yorkes all turned against him, and he and mamma went off, and wandered about, and came down to Maine; and papa died. Then mamma had to sew again to support herself, and we were awfully poor. I remember that we lived in the same house with you; but it was a better house than this, and was up in the village. Then mamma's heart broke, and she died too. But I don't mean to break my heart, Mrs. Jane. It's a poor thing to do."

"Yes!" sighed the listener; "it's a poor thing to do."

"Well," resumed the child, "then you kept me. It was four years ago when my mamma died, but I remember it all. She made me promise not to forget who my mother was, and promise, with both my hands held up, that I would be a Catholic, if I had to die for it. So I held up both my hands, and promised, and she looked at me, and then shut her eyes. It that all right?"

"Yes, dear!" Mrs. Rowan had dropped her knitting as the story went on, and was gazing dreamily out the window, recalling to mind her brief acquaintance with the fair young exile.

"Dick and I grew to be great friends," Edith continued rather timidly. "He used to take care of me, and fight for me. Poor Dick! He was mad nearly all the time, because his father drank rum, and because people twitted him, and looked down upon him."

Mrs. Rowan took up her work again, and knit tears in with the yarn.

"And Dick gave his father an awful talking-to, one day," Edith went on, still more timidly. "That was two years ago. He stood up and poured out words. His eyes were so flashing that they dazzled, and his cheeks were red, and he clinched his hands. He looked most splendid. When I go back to Poland, he shall be a general in the army. He will look just as he did then, if the Czar should come near us. Well, after that day he went off to sea, and he has not been back since."

Tears were running down the mother's cheeks as she thought of her son, the only child left her of three.

Edith leaned and clasped both her hands around Mrs. Rowan's arm, and laid her cheek to them. "But he is coming back rich, he said he would; and what Dick said he'd do he always did. He is going to take us away from here, and get a pretty house, and come and live with us."

A hysterical, half-laughing sob broke through the listener's quiet weeping. "He always did keep his word, Edith!" she cried. "Dick was a gallant lad. And I trust that the Lord will bring him back to me."

"Oh! he'll come back," said Edith confidently, and with a slight air of haughtiness. "He'll come back himself."

All the Christianity the child had seen had been such as to make the name of the Lord excite in her heart a feeling of antagonism. It is hard to believe that God means love when man means hate; and this child and her protectors had seen but little of the sunny side of humanity. Christians held aloof from the drunkard and his family, or approached them only to exhort or denounce. That they had any kinship with that miserable man, that in his circumstances they might have been what he was, never seemed to occur to them as possible. Dick fought with the boys who mocked his father, therefore he was a bad boy. Mrs. Rowan flamed up, and defended her husband, when the Rev. Dr. Martin denounced him, therefore she was almost as bad as he. So shallow are most judgments, arraigning effects without weighing causes.

Nor did Edith fare better at their hands. She was to them a sort of vagabond. Who believed the story of her mother's romantic misfortunes? She was some foreign adventuress, most likely. Mr. Charles Yorke, whom they respected, had married a native of Seaton, and had two or three times honored that town with a short visit. They knew that he had cast off his own brother for marrying this child's mother. Therefore she had no claim on their respect.

Moreover, some of the ladies for whom young Mrs. Yorke had done sewing had not the pleasantest of recollections connected with her. A poor person has no right to be proud and high-spirited, and the widowed exile was a very fiery woman. She would not sit at table with their servants, she would not be delighted when they patronized her, and she would not be grateful for the scanty wages they gave her. She had even dared to break out upon Mrs. Cleaveland when that lady had sweetly requested her to enter her house by the side door, when she came to sew. "In Poland a person like you would scarcely have been allowed to tie my mother's shoes!" she cried. The lady answered suavely, "But we are not in Poland, madam;" but she never forgave the insolence—still less because her husband laughed at it, and rather liked Mrs. Yorke's spirit.

These were the ladies whom Edith had heard talk of religion; so she lifted her head, dropped her eyelids, and said defiantly, "Dick will come home himself!"

"Not unless the Lord lets him come," said the mother. "Oh! no good will come to us except by him. 'Unless the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it: unless the Lord keep the city, he watcheth in vain that keepeth it.'"

"I don't think you have much to thank him for," remarked the child quietly.

"I will thank him!" the woman cried out in a passion. "I will trust him! He is all the hope I have!"

"Well, well, you may!" Edith said soothingly. "Don't let's talk about it any more. Give me the scissors, and I'll cut the fraggles off the hem of your gown. Suppose Dick should come home all of a sudden, and find us looking so! I hope he will let us know, don't you? so that we can put our best clothes on."

The best clothes in question were a black bombazine gown and shawl, and an old-fashioned crape bonnet and veil, all sewed up and hidden away under Edith's bed in the little dark attic, lest Mr. Rowan, in one of his drunken frenzies, should destroy them. These articles were the mourning which Mrs. Rowan had worn seven years before, when her last daughter died. With them was another bag, belonging to Edith, equally precious to its owner, but from other reasons. There was a scarlet merino cape, lined with silk of the same color, both a little faded, and a faded crape scarf that had once been gorgeous with red and gold. In the innermost fold of this scarf, wrapped in tissue-paper, and tucked inside an old kid glove of remarkable smallness, were two locks of hair—one a short, thick wave of yellow-brown, the other a long, serpentine tress of ebony blackness.

While they talked, the door of the room opened, and Mr. Rowan looked in. "Aren't we going to have any supper to-night?" he demanded.

Edith fixed a look on him that made him shrink out, and bang the door behind him. His wife started up, glanced at the clock, and went about her work.

"Let me help you, Mrs. Jane," the child said.

"No, dear. There isn't much to do, and I'd rather do it." Mrs. Rowan's voice had a sepulchral sound, her head being deep in the fireplace, where she was putting one hook into another on the crane, to let the tea-kettle down. She emerged with a smooch of soot on her hair and forehead, and began flying round bringing a table into the middle of the floor, putting up the leaves, spreading the cloth, taking down the dishes, all with trembling haste. "If you want to knit a few times across the heel of that stocking, you may. But be careful not to knit too tightly, as you almost always do. You can begin to narrow when it's two of your forefingers long."

Edith took the knitting, and went to her favorite chair in the back window. The room had grown smoky in consequence of Mrs. Rowan's piling of soft wood on to the fire, and hurrying about past the fireplace, so she pushed up the window, and fastened it with a wooden button fixed there for the purpose. Then she began to knit and think, and, forgetting Mrs. Rowan's directions, pulled the yarn so tightly over her fingers that she worked a hard, stiff strip across the heel, into which the looser knitting puckered. The child was too much absorbed to be aware of her mistake, and it did not matter; for that stocking was never to be finished.

While she dreamed there, a deeper shadow than that of the clay bank fell over her. She looked up with a start, and saw Mr. Rowan standing outside the window. He had placed himself so as to avoid being seen by any one in the room, and was just turning his eyes away from her when she caught sight of him.

"Lean out here!" he said. "I want to speak to you."

She leaned out and waited.

"What makes you stare at me the way you sometimes do?" he asked angrily, but in a low voice, that his wife might not hear. "Why don't you say right out what you think?"

"I don't know what I do think," replied Edith, dropping her eyes.

"You think that I am a wretch!" he exclaimed. "You think I am a drunkard! You think I abuse my wife!"

She neither answered nor looked up.

He paused a moment, then went on fiercely. "If there is anything I hate, it is to have people look at me that way, and say nothing. If you scold a man, it looks as if you thought there was something in him that could tell black from white; and if you are impudent, you put yourself a little in the wrong, and that helps him. He isn't so much ashamed of himself. But when you just look, and say nothing, you shut him out. It is as much as to tell him that words would be thrown away on him."

"But," Edith objected, much at a loss, "if I answered you back, or said what I thought, there would be a quarrel right off."

"Did I fight when Dick gave me such a hauling-over before he went away?" the man questioned in a rough tone that did not hide how his voice broke, and his blood-shot eyes filled up with tears. "Didn't I hang my head, and take it like a dog? He said I had acted like a brute, but he didn't say I was one, and he didn't say but I could be a man yet, if I should try. Wasn't I sober for three months after he went away? Yes; and I would have kept sober right on if I had had some one to thorn and threaten me. But she gave up, and did nothing but whimper, and it maddened me. When I ordered her to mix my rum for me, she did it. I should have liked her better if she had thrown it, tumbler and all, into my face."

"You'd better not find fault with her," said Edith. "She's a great deal better than you are."

The child had a gentle, sincere way of saying audacious things sometimes that made one wonder if she knew how audacious they were.

The man stared at her a moment; then, looking away, answered without any appearance of anger, "I suppose she is; but I don't think much of that kind of goodness when there's a hard job to be done. You can't lift rocks with straws. I'm sorry for her; but, for all that, she aggravates me, poor thing!"

He leaned back against the house, with his hands in his pockets, and stared at the clay bank before him. Edith looked at him, but said nothing. Presently he turned so suddenly that she started. "Girl," he said, "never do you ridicule a man who has been drinking, no matter what he does! You may hate him, or be afraid of him, but never laugh at him! You might as well look down into hell and laugh! Do you know what it is to be in the power of rum? It is to have serpents twining round you, and binding you hand and foot. I've gone through the streets up there with devils on my back, pushing me down; wild beasts tearing my vitals; reptiles crawling round me; the earth rising up and quaking under my feet, and a horror in my soul that no words can describe, and the men and women and children have laughed at me. Perhaps they were such shallow fools that they didn't know; but I tell you, and you know now. Don't you ever dare to laugh at a drunkard!"

"I never will!" Edith cried out, in an agony of terror and pity. "O you poor man! I didn't know it was so awful. O you poor man!"

Mr. Rowan had stopped, gasping for breath, and, with his patched sleeve, wiped off the perspiration that was streaming down his face. Edith tore off her little calico apron with such haste as to break the strings. "Here, take this!" she said, reaching it out to him.

He took it with a shaking hand, and wiped his face again; wiped his eyes again and again, breathing heavily.

"Couldn't you be saved?" she asked, in a whisper. "Isn't there any way for you to get out of it?"

"No!" he said, and gave her back her apron. "No; and I wish that I were dead!"

"Don't say that!" the child entreated. "It is wicked; and perhaps you will die if you say it."

The drunkard raised his trembling hands, and looked upward. "I wish to God that I were dead!" he repeated.

Edith shrank back into the room. She was too much terrified to listen to any more. But after a moment he called her name, and she leaned out again. His face was calmer, and his voice more quiet. "Don't tell her what I have been talking about," he said, nodding toward the room. "I would sooner tear my tongue out by the roots than say anything to her."

"I won't tell," Edith promised.

"Supper's ready," Mrs. Rowan announced, coming towards the window. She had heard her husband's voice in conversation with Edith, and wondered greatly what was going on.

Mr. Rowan turned away, with a look of irritation, at sound of her timid voice, walked round the house, and came sulkily in to his supper.

Their meals had always been comfortless and silent; but now Edith tried to talk, at first with Mrs. Rowan; but when she saw that the woman's tremulous replies, as if she did not dare to speak in her husband's presence, were bringing an uglier frown to this face, and that he was changing from sullen to savage, she addressed her remarks and questions to him. Mr. Rowan was a surveyor, and a good one, when he was sober, and he was a man of some general information and reading. When he could be got to talk, one was surprised to find in him the ruins of a gentleman. Now his answers were surly enough, but they were intelligent, and the child, no longer looking at him from the outside, questioned him fearlessly, and kept up a sort of conversation till they rose from table.

It was Mr. Rowan's custom to go out immediately after supper, and not come home till late in the evening, when he would stagger in, sometimes stupid, sometimes furious with liquor. But to-night he lingered about when he had left the table, lighted his pipe, kicked the fire, wound up the clock, and cursed it for stopping, and finally, as if ashamed of the proposal even while making it, said to Edith, "Come, get the checker-board, and see if you can beat me."

She was quick-witted enough, or sensitive enough, not to show any surprise, but quietly brought out the board, and arranged the chairs and stand. It was a square of board, rough at the edges, planed on one side, and marked off in checks with red chalk. The men were bits of tanned leather, one side white, the other side black. She placed them, smiled, and said, "Now, I'm ready!"

Mrs. Rowan's cheeks began to redden up with excitement as she went about clearing the table, and washing the dishes, but she said nothing. She had even tact enough to go away into the bedroom, when her work was done, and leave the two to play out their game unwatched. There she sat in the falling dusk, her hands clasped on her knees, listening to every sound, expecting every moment to hear her husband go out. The three curtains in the room were rolled up to the very tops of the windows, and, in their places, three pictures seemed to hang on the smoky walls, and illumine the place. One was a high clay bank, its raw front ruddy with evening light, its top crowned with a bush burning like that of Horeb. The second was a hill covered with spruce-trees, nothing else, from the little cone, not a foot high, to the towering spire that pierced the sky. Some faint rose-reflections yet warmed their sombre shadows, and each sharp top was silvered with the coming moonlight. The third window showed a deserted ship-yard, with the skeleton of a bark standing on the stocks. The shining river beyond seemed to flow through its ribs, and all about it the ground was covered with bright yellow chips and shavings. Above it, in the tender green of the southwestern sky, a cloud-bark freighted with crimson light sailed off southward, losing its treasure as it went. These strong, rich lights, meeting and crossing in the room, showed clearly the woman's nervous face full of suspense, the very attitude, too, showing suspense, as she only half-sat on the side of the bed, ready to start up at a sound. After a while she got up softly, and went to the fireplace to listen. All was still in the other room, but she heard distinctly the crackling of the fire. What had come over him? What did it mean?

Presently there was a slight movement, and Edith's voice spoke out brightly: "Oh! I've got another king. Now I have a chance!"

The listener trembled with doubt and fear. Her husband was actually sitting at home, and playing checkers with Edith, instead of going out to get drunk! He could not mean to go, or he would have gone at once. She longed to go and assure herself, to sit down in the room with him, but could scarcely find courage to do so. She held her breath as she went toward the door, and her hand faltered on the latch. But at last she summoned resolution, and went out.

The lamp was lighted, the checker-board placed on the table beside it, and the two were talking over the slackening game. Edith had a good head for a child of her age, but her opponent was an excellent player, and she could not interest him long. She was trying every lure to keep him, though, and made a new tack as Mrs. Rowan came in, relating an experience of her own, instead of questioning him concerning his. "I want to tell you something I saw last night in my chamber," she said.

Edith's chamber was the little dark attic, which was reached by a steep stairway at one side of the fireplace.

"I was in bed, wide awake, and it was pitch dark. You know you put the cover over the skylight when it rained, the other day, and it has not been taken off. Well, instead of shutting my eyes, I kept them wide open, and looked straight into the dark. I've heard that you can see spirits so, and so I thought I might see my mamma. Pretty soon there was a great hole in the dark, like a whirlpool, and after a minute there was a little light down at the bottom of it. I kept on looking, just as if I were looking down into a deep well, and then there came colors in clouds, sailing about, just like clouds in the sky. Some were red, others pink, others blue, and all colors. Sometimes there would be a pattern of colors, just like figures in a carpet, only they were blocks, not flowers. I didn't dream it. I saw it as plainly as I see the fire this minute. What do you suppose it was, Mr. Rowan?"

He had listened with interest, and did not appear to find anything surprising in the recital.

"I don't know much about optics," he answered; "but I suppose there is a scientific reason for this, whether it is known or not. I've seen those colors—that is, I did when I was a child; and De Quincey, in his Opium Confessions, tells the same story. I don't believe that grown people are likely to see them, for the reason that they shut their eyes, and their minds are more occupied. You have to stare a good while into the dark, and wait what comes, and not think much of anything."

"Yes," said Edith. "But what do you guess it is?"

Mr. Rowan leaned back in his chair, with his hands clasped behind his head, and considered the matter a moment, some finer intelligence than often showed there kindling behind his bloated face.

"I should guess it might be this," he said. "Though the place appears at first to be dark, there are really some particles of light there. And since there are too few of them to keep up a connection in their perfect state, they divide into their colors, and make the clouds you saw. I don't know why particles of light should not separate, when they have a great deal to do, and not much to do it with. Air does."

"But what made them move?" Edith asked. "They were never still."

"Perhaps they were alive."

She stared, with scintillating eyes.

Mr. Rowan gave a short, silent laugh. He knew that the child was only questioning in order to keep him. "No reason why not," he said. "According to Sir Humphry Davy, and some other folks, I believe, heat isn't caloric, but repulsive motion. It isn't matter, but it moves, goes where nothing else can, passes through stone and iron, and can't be stopped, and can't be seen. Now, a something that is not matter, and yet is powerful enough to overcome matter, must be spirit. Heat is the soul of light; and if heat is spirit, light is alive. Voilà tout!"

He had forgotten himself a moment in the pleasure of puzzling his questioner; but catching his wife looking at him with an expression of astonishment, he came back to the present. The smile died out of his face, and the frown came back.

"Don't you want to play solitaire?" Edith struck in desperately.

He made a slight motion of dissent, but it was not decided; so she brought out the pack of soiled cards, and laid them before him. There was a moment of hesitation, during which the heart of the wife throbbed tumultuously, and the nerves of the child tingled with an excitement that seemed to snap in sparks from her eyes. Then he took the cards, shuffled them, and began to play. Mrs. Rowan opened a book, and, holding it upside down, so as to hide her face, cried quietly behind the page. Her husband saw that she was crying, cast a savage glance at her, and seemed about to fling the cards down; but Edith made some remark on the game, leaned toward him, and laid her head lightly on his arm. It was the first time in all their acquaintance that she had voluntarily touched him. At the same time she reached her foot, and pushed Mrs. Rowan's under the table. Mrs. Rowan dropped her book, turned her face away quickly, and said, with an effort of self-control rare for her: "Why, it's nine o'clock! I'll go to bed, I think; I'm tired."

Nobody answering, or objecting, she went away, and left her husband still over his cards.

"Isn't it about your bedtime?" he said presently to Edith.

She got up slowly, unwilling to go, yet not daring to stay. Oh! if she were but wise enough to know the best thing that could be said—something which would strengthen his resolution, and keep him in. It was not yet too late for him to go out; for, when every safe and pitiful door is closed, and slumber seals all merciful eyes, the beacon of the grog-shop shines on through the night, and tells that the way to perdition still is open, and the eyes of the rum-seller yet on the watch.

"How glad I shall be when Dick comes home!" she said. "Then I hope we can all go away from here, and wipe out, and begin over."

She could not have said better, but, if she had known, she could have done better. What he needed was not an appeal to his sentiments, but physical help. Words make but little impression on a man while the torments of a burning, infernal thirst are gnawing at his vitals. The drunkard's body, already singed by the near flames of the bottomless pit, needed attending to at once; his soul was crushed and helpless under the ruins of it. If an older, wiser head and hand had been there, started up the failing fire, and made some strong, bitter draught for him to drink, it might have done good. But the child did not know, and the sole help she could give was an appeal to his heart.

It is as true of the finest and loftiest natures, as of the perverted, that they cannot always conquer the evil one by spiritual means alone. Only spirits can do that. And often the tempter must laugh to see the physical needs, which were made to play about our feet like children, unnoticed when the soul speaks, starved till they become demons whose clamorous voices drown the spirit's fainting cries.

But this man's demon was indulgence, and not denial. He was not hovering on the brink of ruin, he was at the bottom, and striving to rise, and he could not endure that any eye should look upon his struggles.

"D— you! will you go to bed?" he cried out fiercely.

Edith started back, and, without another word, climbed the narrow stair to her attic. Before closing the trap-door, she looked down once, and saw Mr. Rowan tearing and twisting the cards he had been playing with.

He stayed there the whole night, fighting desperately with such weapons as he had—a will broken at the hilt, the memory of his son, and the thought of that dear little girl's tender but ineffectual pity. As for God, he no longer named him, save in imprecation. The faith of his orphaned childhood had gone long ago. The glare of the world had scorched it up before it had fairly taken root. That there might be help and comfort in the church of his fathers never entered his mind. "Drink! drink!" that was his sole thought. "If I only had some opium!" he muttered, "or a cup of strong black coffee! I wonder if I could get either of 'em anywhere?"

The day was faintly dawning when he staggered to the window, tore down the paper curtain, and looked out for some sign of life. At the wharf opposite lay a vessel that had come up the evening before, and he knew by the smoke that the cook was getting breakfast there.

"I'll go over and see if I can get some coffee or opium," he muttered, and pulled his hat on as he went out the door.

"I'll ask for nothing but coffee or opium," he protested to himself, as he shut the door softly after him.

Alas! alas!

CHAPTER II.
WIPING OUT, AND BEGINNING ANEW.

The next morning was a gloomy one for the two who had nursed that trembling hope overnight, but they did not say much about it. Mrs. Rowan's face showed the lassitude of long endurance. Edith's disappointment was poignant. She was no longer a looker-on merely, but an actor. The man had confided in her, had tacitly asked her sympathy, and his failure gave her a pang. She cast about in her thoughts what she should do, having a mind to put her own young shoulder to the wheel. Should she go in search of him, and give him one of those scoldings which he had acknowledged his need of? Should she lead him home, and protect him from abuse?

"Hadn't I better go up to the post-office?" she asked, after breakfast. "I haven't been there this good while, and there might be a letter from Dick."

Mrs. Rowan hesitated: "Well, yes." She disliked being left alone, and she had no expectation of a letter. But it seemed like slighting her son to make any other reply to such a request. Besides, the village boys might be hooting her husband through the streets, and, if they were, she would like to know it. So Edith prepared herself, and went out.

The ship-yard was full of business at this hour, and two men were at work close to the road, shaving a piece of timber. Edith looked at them, and hesitated. "I've a good mind to," she thought. She had never gone into the ship-yard when the men were there, and had never asked any one a question concerning Mr. Rowan. But now all was changed, and she felt responsible. "Have you seen Mr. Rowan anywhere, this morning?" she asked, going up to the man nearest her.

He drew the shave slowly to him, slipped off a long curl of amber-colored wood from the blade, then looked up to see who spoke. "Mr. Rowan!" he repeated, as if he had never heard the name before. "Oh! Dick, you mean. No, I haven't seen him, this morning. He may be lying round behind the timbers somewhere."

The child's eyes sparkled. Child though she was, she knew that the drunkard was more worthy of the title of gentleman than this man was, for he was rude and harsh only when he suffered.

"Little girl," the other called out as she turned away, "your father is over there on board of the Annie Laurie. I saw him lying there half an hour ago, and I guess he hasn't stirred since."

"He isn't my father!" she flashed out.

The two burst into a rude laugh, which effectually checked the thanks she would have given for their information. She turned hastily away, and went up the road to the village.

Mrs. Rowan finished her work, and sat down in the west window to watch. She was too anxious and discouraged to knit, even, and so did not discover the tight little strip of work around the stocking-heel. It was employment enough to look out for Edith; not that she expected a letter, but because she wanted company. She was conscious of some strength in the child, on which she leaned at times. As for Dick, she had little hope of good news from him, if any. She had no part in Edith's rose-colored expectations. Dick in peril from storm, foe, or sin; Dick dying untended in foreign lands; Dick sinking down in cold, salt seas—these were the mother's fancies.

After half an hour, a small figure appeared over the hills between the house and the village. Mrs. Rowan watched it absently, and with a slight sense of relief. But soon she noticed that the child was running. It was not like Edith to run. She was noticeably quiet, and even dignified in her manners. Could she have seen or heard anything of Mr. Rowan at the village? The heart of the wife began to flutter feebly. Was he lying in the street? or engaged in a drunken quarrel? She leaned back in her chair, feeling sick, and tried to gather strength for whatever might come to her.

Edith was near the house, now running a few steps, then walking, to gather breath, and she held her arm above her head, and swung it, and in her hand was a letter!

Away went all thought of her husband. In two minutes Mrs. Rowan had the letter in her hand, had torn it open, and she and Edith were both bending over it, and reading it together. It had been lying in the post-office a week. It came from New York, and in a week from the date of it Dick would be at home! He was on board the ship Halcyon, Captain Cary, and they were to come down to Seaton, and load with lumber as soon as their East Indian freight should be disposed of. He had met Captain Cary in Calcutta, Dick wrote, and, having done him a service there, had been taken on board his ship, and now was second mate. Next voyage he would sail as first mate. The captain was his friend, would do anything for him, and owned half the ship, Major Cleaveland owning the other half; so Dick's fortune was made. But, he added, they must get out of that town. He had a month to spare, and should take them all away. Let them be ready to start on short notice.

Having read this joyful letter through once, they began at the first word and read it all through again, dwelling here and there with exclamations of delight, stopped every minute by a large tear that splashed down from Mrs. Rowan's eyes, or a yellow avalanche of Edith's troublesome hair tumbling down as she bent eagerly over the letter. How many times they read that letter would be hard to say; still harder to say how many times they might have read it, had there been no interruption.

A crowd of men were approaching their door—close upon them, and darkening the light before they looked up. "Had Dick come, and were the neighbors welcoming him?" was the first thought.

In her haste, Edith had left the outer door ajar, and now heavy feet came tramping in without any leave being asked; the inner door was pushed open, and—not Dick, but Dick's father was brought in and laid on the floor. This was not the first time he had been brought home, but never before had he come with such a retinue and in such silence, and never before had these men taken off their hats to Mrs. Rowan.

"We've sent for the doctor, ma'am," one of them said; "but I guess it's no use."

"I wouldn't have ordered him off, if I hadn't thought he was steady enough to go," said another, who looked very pale. "The captain was expected on board every minute, and it would be as much as my life is worth if he found a man drunk there."

"He slipped on a plank, and fell," some one explained.

Their talk was, to the bewildered woman, like sounds heard in a dream. So were Edith's passionate words as she ordered the men away. The one who had refused the dead man any better title than "Dick" was just coming in at the door, staring right and left, not too pitiful even then to be curious regarding the place he was in. "Go out!" she said, pushing the door in his face.

Some way, still in a dream, they were got rid of, all but two. Then the doctor came, and looked, and nodded his decision—"All over!"

A dream! a dream!

The bedroom was set in order, the silent sleeper laid out there, every stranger sent out of the house and locked out, and then Mrs. Rowan woke up. It was a terrible awakening.

Madame Swetchine comments upon the fact that the thought of death is more terrible in an arid existence than in the extremes of joy and sorrow. It is true not only of those who die, but of the survivors. We go out more willingly on a difficult journey when we have been warmed and fed; we send our loved ones out with less pain when they have been thus fortified. It is the same, in a greater degree, when the journey is that one from which the traveller never returns. It adds a terrible pang to bereavement when we think that our lost one has never been happy; how much more terrible if he has never been honored!

Of her husband's future Mrs. Rowan refused to think or to hear, though she must have trembled in the shadow of it. It might be that which made her so wild. She would allow no one to come near or speak to her save Edith. Those who came with offers of help and sympathy she ordered away. "Go!" she cried. "I want nothing of you! I and mine have been a byword to you for years. Your help comes too late!"

She locked them out and pulled the curtains close, and, though people continued to come to the door through the whole day, no one gained admittance or saw a sign of life about the house. Inside sat the widow and the child, scarcely aware of the passage of time. They only knew that it was still day by the rays of sunlight that came in through holes in the paper curtains, and pointed across the rooms like long fingers. When there was a knock at the door, they started, lifted their faces, and listened nervously till the knocking ceased, as if afraid that some one might force an entrance. One would have fancied, from their expression, that savages or wild beasts were seeking to enter. They never once looked out, nor knew who came.

Still less were they aware of Major Cleaveland standing in his cupola, spy-glass in hand, looking down the bay to see if that cloud of canvas coming up over the horizon was the good ship Halcyon coming home after her first voyage. Down-stairs he came again, three stairs at a jump, as joyful as a boy, in spite of his forty years, gave directions for the best dinner that the town would afford, ordered his carriage, and drove off down the river-road.

The Halcyon was the largest vessel that had ever been built at Seaton, and as its launching had been an event in the town, so its first arrival was an incident to take note of. When Major Cleaveland drove down to the wharf where Mr. Rowan had that morning lost his life, more than a hundred persons were assembled there waiting for the ship, and others were coming. He stepped over to the Rowans' door, and knocked twice, once with his knuckles, and again with his whip-handle, but received no answer. "I would force the door, but that Dick is coming," he said. "It is a shame to let the poor soul shut herself up alone."

Soon, while the crowd watched, around the near curve of the river, where a wooded point pushed out, appeared the tip, then the whole of a bowsprit garlanded with green wreaths, then the leaning lady in her gilded robes, with a bird just escaping from her hand, then the ship rode gracefully into sight on the incoming tide.

A ringing shout welcomed her, and a shout from all hands on board answered back.

Foremost of the little group on the deck stood a man of gigantic stature. His hair was coarse and black, he wore an enormous black beard, and his face, though scarcely middle-aged, was rough and scarred by the weather. Everybody knew Captain Cary, a sailor worthy of the old days of the Vikings, broad-shouldered, as strong as a lion, with a laugh that made the glasses ring when he sat at table. He was a plain, simple man, but grand in his simplicity. By his side stood a youth of twenty, who looked slight in comparison, though he was really manly and well grown. He had sea-blue eyes, quick, long-lashed, and as bright as diamonds; his face was finely moulded, ruddy, and spirited; his hair, that glistened in the sunlight, was chestnut-brown. A gallant lad he was, the very ideal sailor-boy. But his expression was defiant, rather than placid, and he did not join in the hurrahs. The welcoming applause was not for him, he well knew. They were no friends of his who crowded the wharf. He had some bitter recollections of slight or injury connected with nearly every one of them. But he was no longer in their power, and that gave him freedom and ease in meeting them. The time had gone by when he could look upon these country folks as final judges in any matter whatever, or as of any great consequence to him. He had seen the world, had won friends, had proved that he could do something, that he was somebody. He was not ashamed of himself by any means, was young Dick Rowan. Still, it was no pleasure to him to see them, for it brought back the memory of sufferings which had not yet lost their sting.

All this shouting and rejoicing was as the idle wind to the mourners across the way. Their fears of intrusion set at rest, since no one had attempted to force an entrance to the house, they no longer took notice even of the knocking at the door. Both had fallen into a sort of stupor, induced by the exhaustion of long weeping, the silence and semi-darkness of their rooms, and the removal of what had been the daily tormenting fear of their lives. There was no longer any need to tremble when a step approached, lest some one should come in frenzied with drink, and terrify them with his ravings and violence. Mrs. Rowan sat by her husband's side, leaning back in her chair, with closed eyes and clasped hands, only half-alive. Edith lay on the kitchen-floor, where she had thrown herself in a passion of weeping, her arms above her head, her face hidden, and her long hair veiling her. The weeping was over, and she lay silent and motionless. Neither that shouting over on the wharf, nor Major Cleaveland's loud knocking with his whip-handle, had made the slightest impression on her.

But at sunset came one who would not be denied. He tried the lock, and, finding it fastened, knocked gently. There was no answer. He knocked loudly, and still there was no reply. Then he set his knee against the rickety panel, took the knob in a strong grasp, and wrenched the door open. Stepping quickly into the little entry, he looked to right and left, saw the girl lying, face down, on the floor, and the woman sitting beside her dead, both as still as the dead.

Something like a dream came into the half-swoon, half-sleep in which Edith Yorke lay. She heard a slight cry, then a stifled sob, and words hurriedly spoken in a low voice. Then there was a step that paused near her. She put her hair back with one hand, and turned her face listlessly. The curtain had been raised to let in the light, and there stood a young man looking down at her. His face was pale with the sudden shock of grief and distress, but a faint indication of a smile shone through as she looked up at him.

Her first glance was a blank one, her second flashed with delight. She sprang up as if electrified. "O Dick! O Dick! How glad I am!"

The world moved rightly at last! Order was coming out of chaos; for Dick had come home!

He shook hands with her rather awkwardly, somewhat embarrassed by the warmth of her welcome. "We're to go right off," he said. "Captain Cary will help us."

"Yes, Dick!" she replied, and asked no questions. He knew what was right. With him had come all help, and strength, and hope.

The next morning, long before dawn, they started. A boat was ready at the wharf, and Captain Cary and Dick carried out the dead in a rude coffin that had been privately made on board the Halcyon. "They shall not stare at our poor funeral, captain," Dick had said; "and I will not ask them for a coffin or a grave."

"All right!" his friend had answered heartily. "I'm your man. Whatever you want to do, I'll help you about."

So the watch on the Halcyon was conveniently deaf and blind, the boat was ready in the dark of morning, the coffin carried out to it, and Mrs. Rowan and Edith helped in after. When they were in their places, and the captain seated, oars in hand, Dick went back to the house, and stayed there a little while. No questions were asked of him when he came away, bringing nothing with him, and he offered no explanation, only took the oars, and silently guided their boat out into the channel. The banks on either side were a solid blackness, and the sky was opaque and low, so that their forms were scarcely visible to each other as they sat there, Mrs. Rowan in the bows near her son, Edith beside Captain Cary, who loomed above her like a mountain of help.

Presently, as they floated around the point that stood between the village and the bay, a faint blush of light warmed the darkness through, and grew till the low-hung clouds sucked it up like a sponge and showed a crimson drapery over their heads. It was too early for morning light, too fierce, and, moreover, it came from the wrong direction. The east was before them; this sanguinary aurora followed in their wake. It shone angrily through the strip of woods, and sent a long, swift beam quivering over the water. This fiery messenger shot like an arrow into the boat, and reddened Mrs. Rowan's hands, clasped on the edge of the coffin. By the light of it, Dick saw all their faces turned toward him.

"The house was mine!" he said defiantly.

The captain nodded approval, and Edith leaned forward to whisper, "Yes, Dick!" But Mrs. Rowan said not a word, only sat looking steadily backward, the light in her face.

"I'm glad of it!" sighed Edith to herself. She had been thinking since they left the house how people would come and wander through it, and peer at everything, and know just how wretchedly they had lived. Now they could not, for it would all be burnt up. She sat and fancied the fire catching here and there in their poor little rooms, how the clock would tick till the last minute, even when its face was scorched and its glass shivered, and then fall with a sudden crash; how the flames would catch at the bed on which the dead man had lain, the mean paper curtains, the chair she had sat in, Mrs. Rowan's little rocking-chair, at the table where they had sat through so many dreary meals. The checker-board would go, and the cards with which Mr. Rowan had played the night before, and the knitting-work with the puckered heel, and her apron that the drunkard had wiped his ghastly face with. The shelves in the little closet would heat, and blacken, and redden, and flame, and down would come their miserable store of dishes, rattling into the yawning cellar. Fire would gnaw at the ceiling, bite its way into the attic, burn up her books, creep to the bed where she had lain and seen rainbow colors in the dark, spread a sheet of flame over the whole, rise, and burst through the roof. She saw it all. She even fancied that each long-used article of their scanty plenishing, worn away by human touch, constantly in the sight of human eyes, would perish with some human feeling, and send out a sharp cry after them. The crackling of flames was to her the cries of burning wood. But she was glad of it, for they were going to wipe out and begin anew. There seemed to her something very grand and exceedingly proper in it all.

When their boat glided from the river into the bay, others besides themselves became aware of the conflagration, and the village bells rang out a tardy alarm. Dick laughed bitterly at the sound, but said nothing.

"They were sorry for you, Dick," the captain said. "I heard a good many speak of it. They would have been glad to do your family any kindness. I don't blame you for coming off; but you mustn't think there was no kind feeling for you among the folks there."

"Kindness may come too late, captain," the young man answered. "I would have thanked them for it years ago, when I had nowhere to turn to, and hadn't a friend in the world; now I don't thank them, and I don't want their kindness. Even if I would take it at last, neither they nor you have any right to expect that I will run to take the hand that has struck me so many blows the first time it is held out. I don't trust 'em. I want proofs of good-will when I've had proofs of ill-will."

"Dick is right, captain," his mother interposed in a weary tone. "You can't judge of such things if you haven't felt them. It's easier to hurt a sore heart than a sound one."

Within an hour they reached one of those desolate little sandy islands with which the bay was studded; and now the faint spring dawn was breaking, and the heavy masses of cloud lifting and contracting, pale reaches of sky visible between. By the cold glimmer they scooped out a grave, and placed the coffin in it. The water washed the shore, and a chilly, sighing wind came up from the east.

As the first shovelful of earth fell on the coffin, Mrs. Rowan caught back the captain's arm. "Don't cover him out of sight without some word spoken over him!" she implored. "He was once young, and ambitious, and kind, like you. He would have been a man if he hadn't had bad luck, and then got into bad company. He was more wretched than we were. O sir! don't cover him out of sight as if he were a dog."

The sailor looked both pained and embarrassed. "I'm not much used to praying, ma'am," he said. "I'm a Methodist, but I'm not a church-member. If there was a Bible here, I would read a chapter; but—there isn't."

Dick walked off a little way, turned his back, and stood looking at the water. Mrs. Rowan, kneeling on the sand-heap beside the grave, wept loudly. "His father was a Catholic," she cried. "I don't think much of Catholics; but, if poor Dick had stood by his religion, he could have had a priest to say some word over him. I wouldn't have minded having a priest here. He'd be better than nobody."

Captain Cary was a strict Methodist, and he felt that it would never answer to have the absence of a Catholic priest regretted. Something must be done. "I could sing a hymn, ma'am," he said hesitatingly; and, as no one objected, he straightened himself, dropped his spade, and sang, to the tune of the "Dead March in Saul,"

"Unveil thy bosom, faithful tomb,
Take this new treasure to thy trust,
And give these sacred relics room
To slumber in the silent dust,"

singing the hymn through.

In a confined place the sailor's voice would have been too powerful, and, perhaps, would have sounded rough; but in open air, with no wall nearer than the distant hills, no ceiling but the sky, and with the complex low harmony of the ocean bearing it up and running through all its pauses, it was magnificent. He sang slowly and solemnly, his arms folded, his face devoutly raised, and the clouds seemed to part before his voice.

When the hymn was ended, he remained a moment without motion or change of face, then stooped for his shovel, and began to fill in the grave.

While listening to him, Edith Yorke had stood in a solemn trance, looking far off seaward; but at sound of the dropping gravel, her quiet broke up, like ice in spring. She threw her arm, and her loose hair with it, up over her head, and sobbed behind that veil. But her tears were not for Mr. Rowan. Her soul had taken a wider range, and, without herself being aware of it, she was mourning for all the dead that ever had died or ever should die.

The first sunbeam that glanced across the water showed a feather of smoke from a steamer that came up through the Narrows into the bay, and the row-boat, a lessening speck, making for the wharf. Twice a week, passengers and freight were taken and left at this wharf, three miles below the town.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

SAUNTERING.

Saunterer (from Sainte Terre), a pilgrim to holy lands or places.—Thoreau.

"They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean," says Thoreau. I found the Holy Land in Paris, the city of fashion and gaiety, and where le suprême bonheur is said to be amusement. Every church is a station of the divine Passion, and to every votary therein could I say:

"I behold in thee
An image of him who died on the tree.
Thou also hast had thy crown of thorns."

Before these churches, consecrated to some sweet mystery of the Gospel or bearing the hallowed names of those who had put on the sacred stole of Christ's sufferings, I always stopped. I was like Duke Richard, in the Roman du Rau:

"Whene'er an open church he found,
He entered in with fervent means
To offer up his orisons;
And if the doors were closed each one,
He knelt upon the threshold stone."

And one might well kneel upon the threshold stone of these ancient churches, feeding mind and soul with sacred legends of the past embodying holy truths which are depicted on the outer walls, as at the north door of Notre Dame de Paris, the arch of which contains in many compartments representations of a diabolic pact and of a deliverance effected by our potent Lady, which is related in a metrical romance composed by Ruteboef, in the time of St. Louis. Saladin, a magician, wears a cap of pyramidal form. And what a mine of legendary and biblical lore all over these venerable walls! Sermons in stones come down to us from the stonen saints in their niches and the bas-reliefs which speak louder than human tongues. The first stone of this edifice was laid by Charlemagne, and the last by Philip Augustus. How much this fact alone tells! And there is the Porte Rouge, an exquisite specimen of the Gothic style of the fifteenth century, the expiatory monument of Jean-sans-Peur after the assassination of the Duke of Orleans. In the arch are the Duke and Duchess of Burgundy, in the attitude of supplication, one on each side of our Saviour and the Blessed Virgin. It is an eternal Libera me de sanguinibus, Deus.