The following Table of Contents has been added for the convenience of the reader.

[PARIS: AND LIFE THERE.]
[A MEMORY.]
[HESPERUS.]
[REVELATIONS OF WALL-STREET:]
[A WINTER SCENE.]
[THE OBSERVATIONS OF MACE SLOPER, ESQ.]
[LIVING ALONE.]
[THE TAXIDERMIST.]
[THE LITTLE PEASANT.]
[FAUNTLEROY VERRIAN'S FATE.]
[THE MAN AT THE DOOR.]
[THE VAN GELDERS OF MATINECOCK.]
[THE RAIN.]
[SONNETS:]
[LITERARY NOTICES.]
[EDITOR'S TABLE.]

THE KNICKERBOCKER.

Vol. LVII. JANUARY, 1861. No. 1.

[PARIS: AND LIFE THERE.]

BY H. T. TUCKERMAN.

IN TWO PARTS.—PART I.

There is a subtle relation between the mere spectacle of Parisian life and French history, like that which exists between physiognomy and character. Careful observation of this sparkling tide on the surface will reveal the hidden currents that direct its play. The success of a man in France has been justly described as achieved moitié par son savoir, moitié par son savoir-faire. Two characteristics at once impress an American in Paris—the provision for life independent of homes, and the excessive tendency to system and detail: from the one comes a diffusive habit of feeling well adapted to pastime, but most unfavorable to efficient individuality; and from the other, a devotion to routine which secures results brilliant in themselves but limited in their consequences. The bare fact that we of England and America, however wide and intense be the sphere of our activity, instinctively revolve about a permanent centre, hallowed and held by the triple bond of habit, love, and religion, gives a certain dignity and permanence to our interests and aims which nourish political as well as personal consistency. Imagine the case reversed: suppose, like civilized Ishmaelites, we dwelt in a kind of metropolitan encampment, requiring no domicile except a bed-room for seven hours in the twenty-four, and passing the remainder of each day and night as nomadic cosmopolites: going to a café to breakfast, a restaurant to dine, an estaminet to smoke, a national library to study, a cabinet de lecture to read the gazettes, a public bath for ablution, an open church to pray, a free lecture-room to be instructed, a thronged garden to promenade, a theatre to be amused, a museum for science, a royal gallery for art, a municipal ball, literary soirée, or suburban rendezvous for society. Would not the very custom of enacting all the functions of mundane existence, apart from the idea and the retirement of home, generalize our ways of thinking, make us more children of the time, and weaken the tenacity, as well as diminish the scope, whereby the reflective man becomes the practical citizen? And if the regime under which our education was initiated, had for its great principles, skill, knowledge, and aptitude for specialties, would not the natural fruit of such culture be a fragmentary excellence? Herein, at least, some of the causes may be found of that extraordinary union of genius and childhood in the French nation; the ability to declaim like philosophers about freedom, while an immense standing army—the most available resource of tyranny—is recognized as the basis of civil power; an unrivalled taste in the ornamental, and a savage ignorance of the comfortable; a most profound and reliable insight in diagnosis, with a pitiable incapacity for remedial applications; a prompt adaptation to the moment, almost infantile, with a hackneyed insensibility to experience; vivid aspirations, with little sense of what really constitutes glory; making fine arts of cookery, talk, and dress, while a battle-field and a caricature are their most popular limning; deifying their military heroes, and, at the same time, giving vent to their own enthusiasm in the lively figures of a new dance. The social economy of Paris is based on a combination of narrow means, with bright conceptions; we see it in the graceful but frail upholstery, the exquisite fit of a plain muslin robe, the bewitching trim of a cheap bonnet, the variety of a two-franc dinner, the bon-mot which atones for inability to read, the absorption over a game of dominoes, the philosophic air with which a cigarette is smoked, and the artistic ruffle of a chemisette; the prolific fun educed from an anecdote, and the slight impression made by a revolution; the incurious notice of what is comprehensive, and the intense desire to make capital of the frivolous. To cultivate illusions is apparently the science of Parisian life; vanity must have its pabulum and fancy her triumph, though pride is sacrificed and sense violated thereby; hence a coïncidence of thrift and wit, shrewdness and sentimentality, love of excitement and patient endurance, superficial enjoyment and essential deprivation—in the mind, the life, and the development of France, wonderful to behold and perplexing to consider.

The names given to bridge and temple, fount and promenade, arc and avenue, recal saints of the middle ages, kings whose reigns embody memorable eras, brave soldiers, great victories, authors and savans—all reflecting glory on the nation. The guide at the Concierge tells you: 'Le cachot où fût deténu Marie Antoinette a eté converti en chapelle.' If roaming in the Luxembourg, you think of poor Ney's last words, on the spot where he perished, 'I need no priest to teach me how to die'—the honors paid to his memory are cited to atone for the sacrifice; if you descant on the murder of the King in 1793, you are told that the mass, so long discontinued, is now celebrated on the anniversary of his death. All that meets the eye and ear either protests against what in the past of France is disgraceful, or celebrates what is glorious. Whoever rules, the lamp of national fame is thus kept burning. The very cafés and restaurants possess an historical interest. The Frères Provinceaux was frequented by General Bonaparte; the Café Foy was the rendezvous of Italian liberals, the Zemblin that of the officers of the Empire, and the Caveau of the Garde Imperiale; the Regence has witnessed games of chess either shared or overlooked by Voltaire, Rousseau, Franklin, Marmontel, and Saint Pierre. At the Place de la Bastille, the column erected to the memory of those who fell when Charles the Tenth was 'hurled from his forfeit throne,' links that recent event to the site of a prison tragically identified with the Reign of Terror. The gates of St. Denis and St. Martin attest the rendezvous of more than one emeute; and from the Champs Elysées to the arch of triumph de l'Etoile, is the scene where some of the most pregnant dramas of modern history were enacted.

The routine of a banker's life would seem antagonistic to romance and dramatic incident; yet the celebrated financiers of France occupy the fore-ground in her civic history: Ouvrard's interview with Napoleon at a memorable crisis; the details of Law's career, including the wonderful vicissitudes to which the famous Mississippi scheme gave birth; and the charlatan adventurer's intrigues with the Duke of Orleans and escape from the Paris mob, are like the most exciting chapters of a modern novel. Lafitte stood at the side of Louis Philippe when the new Constitution was proclaimed, and staid the waves of insurrection at the obsequies of Manuel. If, in the social phenomena elsewhere, we find hints for romance and incongruities the more piquant, here they are more patent. Hospitality is not a national characteristic, as in cities less amply provided with external resources, and the effect is to secure for social aspirants, who have the means and the tact to entertain, advantages they could never realize in other capitals. A wealthy man, with decent manners and average intelligence, ambitious of fame as a host, or the delights of gifted intercourse, puts himself in communication with diplomats, savans and men of letters, who never object to a good dinner, or women endowed with the graces which lend a charm to the soirée, and his salon is nightly filled with people of fashion and celebrity. The dramatic star, the popular author, the famous militaire, the brilliant cantatrice will attract those who are insensible to the zest of pâtés and champagne. 'Do you know that man?' asks some aristocrat of the illustrious guest when they encounter the parvenu-Amphytrion. 'He dines me occasionally,' is the cool reply. Foreigners of either sex, even with a damaged reputation, find no obstacles to such partial successes. Let the frail one have preserved somewhat of her youthful vivacity and the bulk of her fortune, and she has only to hunt up a poor Marchesa or Countess of the Faubourg San Germain, and install her as a friend of the house, in a costly hotel, and coronated paste-board will soon fill her vase in the ante-chamber, and wits and beauties, official and distinguished strangers surround her fauteuil. That there is little meaning in these arrangements; that they merely serve as a pastime, like an opera or vaudeville we pay to witness, is true; but, on the other hand, facilities thus easily obtained by cash and policy, afford scope and yield opportunities for the display of character and the drama of social life, which more exclusive circles never know. The art tenir un salon is one peculiar to the French, and there are ladies of that nation, whose fame is as traditionally and even historically established as that of great generals, statesmen, and poets; their rivalry equals the competition of the other sex in war and politics; and, strange as it may appear to an American, the social prestige thus acquired and transmitted is as often based upon sin as sanctity; an equivocal character united to attractions of manner or rare intelligence, makes the popularity of one Madame and a reputation as a devotee that of another. In a word, society in Paris is an arena so free, versatile, necessary—protected by established conventionalities, and moulded by the laws of taste—that it includes infinite possibilities, as the French memoirs and plays annually demonstrate.

A social atmosphere thus concentrated in effect, and diffusive in its nature, brings into contact associations which more intense domestic life and a more formal organization keep apart. The company in an English drawing-room may vary from year to year, but its tone and character remain intact; while in Paris saloons are designated by historical allusions and renowned for special and temporary features. If it is desired to recal a certain epoch and set of people, the whole idea is conveyed by such names as Hotel Rambouillet or the Salons du Restoration; whereas Holland House bears an identical fame as a place consecrated by intellectual hospitality, under successive reigns. Pedantry and artificial consequence belong to the fashionable levees of Louis the Fourteenth's time, while those of the first Napoleon represent an entirely diverse set of ideas and feelings. It is because society is directly exposed to the 'form and pressure' of the hour in Paris that it is thus Protean; religion, politics, and the taste in art and letters instantly stamp the talk and the manners as the coin of the realm bears the image of a new potentate; the life of the family, of the devotee, of artistic genius, of statesmanship and of arms, penetrate and interfuse in the social sphere, and an acute writer, therefore, alludes with literal truth to the period when 'the perfume of the boudoir mingled with the incense of the sacristy.' There phrases of society are bestowed upon art and politics; the favorable commencement of a new regime has been called its honey-moon; and a critic of Watteau's pictures refers to him as 'cet maitre coquet et naif.'

The caprice and tasteful arrangements in the minutiæ of life, noted by Yorick in his sketch of a Sunday in the French metropolis, when La Fleur brought the butter for his master's dejeuner, on a fresh currant-leaf, and found the bouquet he presented his own chosen fair had changed hands three times in the course of the day—though not so patent now, are equally characteristic; the valet still knows his master's debts, and the femme de chambre her mistress's love affairs; there is the same familiarity in the relation of master and servant, but the chance is, there is less gossip between them, as both have more ideas and think oftener than before the days of cheap literature, steam, and telegraphs. Comedy still makes sport of husbands; 'the literary mind of France takes a religious turn' occasionally; and 'people laugh at every thing' as they did in the time of the young Duchess of Burgundy, whose remark to this effect was then considered so naive. The mariage de convenance is quite as prevalent, children as artificial, and old people as child-like; the precieuses ridicules are, however, on the wane, being fused in the cosmopolitan pressure of a more general intelligence, while the femme savante has given place, in a great degree, to the female authors, who are too alive to the inspiration of the times, and their own ideas to be pedantic.

To such an extent does the tyranny of custom dominate in the social history of France, that duels and gaming have their periods of triumph as well as bonnets and constitutions; at times they have each enjoyed a fashionable prestige, so that individuals, without the least taste for either occupation, in order to be comme il faut have sought to lose a notable amount at roulette and to provoke some famous swordsman to combat. An acute observer of Parisian life, prophesies that two growing tastes are now at work destined to modify the French character, one the rage for English horses, and the other the use of cigars. Of the normal traits of the national mind, that which apparently remains most intact is the instinct of military life. The same adaptation for the camp that we recognize in Froissart's Chronicles and Napoleon's campaigns, is obvious at this moment. 'This is worth considering,' says Montaigne, 'that our nation places valor (vaillance) in the highest degree of virtue.'

The same extravagant notion of an Englishman's whims and sangfroid prevail in the French capital as used to supply farce-writers before the age of steam. Veron recently published the anecdote of un Anglais, who had been his neighbor at a restaurant for several weeks, bidding him good-by one day, as he was going on a trip round the world; and eighteen months after, the traveller reäppeared at the accustomed hour and table, and found his old companion in the same seat; meantime, the Englishman had circumnavigated the globe. We are told in Paris of every conceivable mania on the part of English collectors; one spent a fortune in bottles of water from all the rivers in the world, one in every kind of pipe, and another in specimens of bird's eggs. On the other hand, the French are better understood across the Channel; it is curious, at the present era of alliance, to read one of the old travellers, who reported France to Londoners, in the heyday of British prejudice. 'What is there,' says the famous Thomas Nashe, 'in France to be learned more than in England, but falsehood in friendship, perfect slovenry, and to love no man for my pleasure? I have known some that have continued there by the space of half-a-dozen years, and when they came home they have had a little, weerish, lean-face, under a broad French hat, kept a terrible coil with the dust in the street in their long cloaks of gray paper, and spoken English strangely. Naught else have they profited by their travel, but to distinguish the true Bordeaux grape and know a cup of neat Gascoigne wine from wine of Orleans; yet peradventure to wear a velvet patch on their face and walk melancholy with their arms folded.'[A]

FOOTNOTE:

[A] The Unfortunate Traveller: or Life of Jack Wilton. London, 1594.

We recognize the life of Paris by the analytical pictures of the French novelists and the graphic details of the memoirs. No mode of national existence had ever been so candidly revealed; the stranger, if familiar with the authors of the country, is better acquainted with what is peculiar in the habits and tableaux around him, than an unlettered native. Parisian character and the salient qualities which distinguish metropolitan and provincial existence have been daguerreotyped and anatomized by Balzac; each class, economy, and phase he makes the basis of a story, has been not only carefully observed but artistically and psychologically studied; what memories of an old pension haunt the reader of Père Goriot—a kind of prose Lear, as he gazes upon some venerable house of that description; how intensely he realizes the consciousness of the well-endowed yet sated young Parisian, as he recals the opening chapters of La Peau de Chagrin; every aspect and secret of Grisette life has been depicted; the poetry of the career of a gifted French noble, whose first youth witnessed the prologue of the fatal revolutionary drama, is embalmed in tragic or tender lines in the autobiography of Chateaubriand; Saint Beuve's critiques have revived the associations of each epoch of French literature; Lammenais recorded what of faith lingered in the heart of the people; Scribe reflects the most shifting traits of manners and character; and thus each indigenous figure, building, and custom appeals to the imaginative memory as well as to the curious eye.

The salon of a literary clique suggests the extraordinary social history of Paris; and the names of De Staël, Sévigné, Recamier, and others, memorable as female arbiters and queens in conversation, occur to us in connection with each political era and great name in science, art and letters. Delaroche's portrait of Napoleon amid the Alps and at Fontainebleau has stamped that remarkable countenance in all its intensity of expression upon the mind; and thus it ever reäppears on the scene of his power. The new style of pavement attests the triumphs of barricades; and every old lamp-post the horrors of the Reign of Terror. We cannot pass a foundling hospital without thinking of Rousseau; the Jardin des Plants brings back the benign researches of Buffon, Michaux, Cuvier, and the host of French naturalists; old Montaigne's Essays are recalled by many a philosophic hint and maxim of worldly wisdom; and each glimpse of the comedy of French life is eloquent of Moliere. As we pass either palace or prison, the fair vision of Maria Antoinette, as it lives in Burke's description, the heroic devotion of Madame Roland, and the heart-melting voice of Charlotte Corday, appeal to remembrance; and thus the localities of Paris lead the fancy, at every step, from the guillotine to the fête, from massacre to beauty, from blood to flowers; and in early morning rambles we almost expect to see the First Consul roaming incog., wrapt in his gray coat. Notre Dame to the admirers of Victor Hugo, seems less a Cathedral than an architectural Romance. Yet, there is no city where the past is so lost sight of in the present, and where local tradition has so slight a hold upon the sympathies. It is fortunate, therefore, that when inclined to detach ourselves from the immediate—here so absorbing—and rehearse the story of the past, with every needful aid to memory and imagination, there is an available and complete resource: we have but to quit Paris for Versailles. The Place de Carousel and the Tuileries are unimpressive in comparison with the stately decadence of that palatial chateau; before which the mob, with ferocious glances, heaved like a raging sea up to the balcony where stood the Queen and Lafayette; the first solemn confronting of regal and popular will, ere the deadly struggle began—whose renewal is ever at hand. Within those walls is gathered the pictorial history of France in one successive and elaborate series; the battles, counsels, domestic life of every reign; the lineaments of heroes, poets and kings; the deeds, and the men and women that are identified with the country from the beginning. To live at Versailles, with a good library at hand, and pass hours of every day in these halls, would make us intimate, not only in a technical but in a picturesque way, with the annals and the celebrities of the kingdom. It would be as if French history was enacted before us and we saw the features of the leading spirits of each generation as we listened to their achievements. 'C'est à la Seine,' says a popular historiographer, 'que Paris doit ses premiers aggrandizement;' but so completely have modern activity and embellishment overlaid the rude defences whereby barbaric hordes indicated the site of a magnificent capital, that few of the artists who linger on the bridges to note the effect of moon-light on arch and islet, or of the scholars that haunt the book-stalls on the quai, have the associations of the past awakened by these picturesque and suggestive localities; yet they signalize the enterprise of Philip the Handsome, of Charles the Fifth, of Francis the First, Henry the Second, Henry the Fourth, Philipe Augustus, and Louis the Fourteenth. There Clovis and his Germanic tribes and his converted Clotilde, formed the nucleus of Pepin's inheritance, and Charlemagne established his name; thither came the Scandinavian pirates, and musing on the banks of the dingy stream now associated with science and fêtes, with baths and suicides, with boot-blacks and laundresses, with the romance of student life, artistic, medical and literary, and charming to the eye for elegant bridges and massive quays—the historical dreamer recals a century and a half of wars between French and English kings: the Black Prince and Joan of Arc, Calvin and the Huguenots, Guise and St. Bartholomew, Condé, Montmorency, Maria de Medicis, Anne of Austria, Richelieu, Louis the Sixteenth—the Revolution, Bonaparte, and the Bourbon! Such a panorama, its fore-ground crowded with memorable figures, its perspective dim with the smoke of battle, its groups distinguishable by varied symbols—the oriflamme, the lilies, the cross, the tri-color—blood-stained yet radiant with female beauty and animated by martial prowess, seems to bear no relation to the living scene typical of prosperous order and the age of commerce, of luxury and of science. Yet the analyst detects in the most common-place fact of to-day the influence of a dynasty and the bequest of an era. Madame de Genlis tells us how she taught the boy Louis Philipe after Rousseau's maxims; and made him cosmopolitan in taste by her German system of gardening, dining after the English fashion, and taking supper en Italien; and Veron says her pupil, when he became King, introduced the rage for fine horses and clever jockeys; it was, according to the same authority, the fermiers generaux who initiated French cookery as a unique art in their table rivalry with the old noblesse. 'Scarcity of fuel,' says the Quarterly Review, 'has not been without its effect in forming the manners of the polished Parisians, and has transferred to the theatre and the café those attractions, which in the British islands belong essentially to the domestic hearth.' The use of tobacco, in the form of cigars, is another modification of the national habits; but a few years ago it was deemed a nuisance, now it prevails among both sexes; and keen observers declare that the French have grown more contemplative and less excitable as the puff has superseded the pinch, and the slowly-evolved cloud—emblem of ruminating quiescence—taken the place of those 'pungent grains of titillating dust' which stimulate a bon-mot rather than lure to reflection.

'You would hardly believe,' said Madame de Maintenon, 'how much a talent for combing hair contributed to my elevation:' tact in the minor economies, the ability to minister to approbativeness and epicurism, no where finds such scope as in Paris. 'Be more amiable,' said an experienced mother to her daughter, an employé of the opera, 'be more tender and empresse to your admirers, if not for your child's sake, or for your mother's, then for your voiture!' The triumph of material niceties here reaches its acme: from what an infinite variety of petty resources is French subsistence and enjoyment derived! A journal of our day announces the death of a distinguished claquer, at his country-seat, and the event is signalized by an obituary notice, declaring him 'master of the art of expressing feeling according to the subject!' A eulogy nowhere else applicable to any but an author, composer or artist, thus celebrates one whose vocation it was to testify approbation and blame at the theatre! Liquorice-water, the caricature of an abbe, an omelette scientifically fried, a fancy clock; a woman in front of Tortoni's letting off swallows from a basket, at two sous a flight; a bird-cage, a flower-stand, a plaster bust, a lap-dog, a fan, a little glass of Otard, a cake of scented soap, an opera-glass, a pan of charcoal, a wax candle, or a parrot, an elegant coiffure, a geranium leaf, or a bit of sugar—where on earth, but in Paris, do such things weigh so much in the scale of diurnal experience, felicity, and even fate?

How many 'gentle stoics' exhibit frugality and contentment; how many complacent epicureans ingenuity in pleasure-seeking; how many devotees of science isolated self-devotion, in that mart of humanity! We are told of a famous surgeon who questioned the credited idea that a vital gun-shot wound is followed by an involuntary leap, or sudden turning of the body: called to the field, and mortally wounded, he exclaimed, 'It is true; I could not help that movement,' and so died. In no other meridian do the frivolous and the solemn, the fantastic and the philosophic associations of life thus incongruously blend.

An historian quotes a royal letter, the possession of which he accounts for by the statement that he purchased it of a rogue who stole it at the sack of the Tuileries; a philosopher cannot study in peace without a group of tropical plants and two gazelles in sight; the Amazonian market-women, whose savage air would frighten a novice, keep a plaster bust of the Emperor on their stalls, and throw nosegays into Eugenie's carriage; the identical transparency which represented the Goddess of Reason in the bloodiest days of the Revolution, was subsequently used as the festal effigy of Liberty, Josephine, Faith, Hortense, and the present Empress; a painter's model impiously engraves on his card: Nature de Christ; an amateur takes down a new dance in short-hand; a female novelist assumes male attire, in order to observe life in Paris with more facility; the best poet of the South is a barber; at the same shop-window the flaneur gazes on a print of Napoleon at St. Helena, contemplating, with folded arms, the declining sun—and a national guard lacing the stays of a grisette; the municipal authorities imprison a refractory opera-singer, and, without their permission, not a bucket of water can be dipped from the Gulf of Lyons; our dinner-companion says good-by, after coffee, and goes deliberately to blow his brains out. The fireman makes loves to the femme de chambre, while in the act of extinguishing a conflagration; the people read their fate in placards; Galignani's column of foreign news is arbitrarily cut down, and the suppressed items come to light in Charivari; a deposed king's effects are sold at auction, and Sevres ware bearing his crest thenceforth adorn American tables; the streets swarm with police and spies, and the child of a Dutch admiral and Hortense Beauharnais, having turned the cannon upon the populace, issues a religious bulletin after the massacre: no flower-market in the world is patronized so well as the Parisian, and no urban gardens more frequented than the Tuileries and Luxembourg, while rural life is irksome to the citizen, and only sought as a pretext for love-making, a dance, or dinner al fresco. Catch a few phrases from the leaf of a courtier's memoirs, the mouth of a neighbor at restaurant or theater, or the bourgeois in a crowd, and an epitome of this mingled levity and talent, this comedy of life, and quickness of apprehension, without seriousness of conviction, is hinted at once. 'They are like me, they regret their mud,' said Madame de Maintenon, watching the restless carp in their pellucid vase; 'il y quelqu'un qui fait encore plus d'ennemis qu'un cheval anglais—ce'st la femme de theatre,' was the observation of a Parisian sage; 'my confessor has ordered me to be dull in company,' said Madame Scarron, 'to mortify the passion, he detects in me, of wishing to please by my understanding.' 'Un femme d'esprit ne doit rien à personne,' bluntly remarks an obese traveler, as he shifts his feet to avoid the provision-basket of his vis-a-vis. Opera-girls, we are told by Veron, have a passion to appear in mourning for some distant relative whom they have never seen.

In 1740, Montesquieu, in a letter to a friend, wrote: 'France is nothing but Paris and a few distant provinces.' 'Here,' says a traveller of the last century, 'things are estimated by their air; a watch may be a master-piece without exactness, and a woman rule the whole town without beauty, if they have an air. Here life's a dance, and awkwardness of step its greatest disgrace. Character, here, is dissolved into the public, and 'an original' a name of mirth. Cela se fait, et cela ne se fait pas, are here the supreme umpires of conduct. Their religion is superstition, fashion, sophism. Tyranny may grind the face, but not the countenance of a Frenchman; his feet are made to dance in wooden shoes. The parliament resembles an old toothless mastiff. France was the country of Le Sœur and Racine, and is that of Voltaire.'

And a more generalized and recent portrait is given by our countryman, Henry James: 'Your true Frenchman will sit for any number of consecutive hours glued to the benches of the Champs Elysees in order to see the monde pass by—to see it merely with his eyes, remember—never speaking to a soul, never knowing a soul in all the moving mass, yet perfectly content to see the monotonous waves roll on and repeat their tiresome glare, till darkness comes at last to snatch them from sight, and the beholder (let us hope) from imbecility. To frequent from childhood to manhood, and from manhood to old age, the same unchanging scenes; to sit year in and year out on the same dusty sidewalks, in front of the same crowded and noisy cafés, playing the same eternal dominoes, seeing pass the same throng of similar people, each as like the other in his diversity as a big pea is like a little pea, as a double clover is like a single clover, or a wilted cabbage is like a fresh one; everlastingly sipping the same eau sucre; everlastingly hearing and repeating the same stupid gossip of Mrs. B. to-day, which was heard and repeated of Mrs. A. yesterday; everlastingly resorting to the same play-house to applaud the same actors; running to the same opera to go into ecstasies over the same fiddle; strolling along the same streets to gaze at the same or similar prints in the same windows at the end of the year which he gazed upon at the beginning; such is your true Frenchman's conception of variety, such is his ideal of life; and he cannot but heartily despise a state of things like that at home, which drops all this imbecile routine out as an infinite dreariness and ennui; a full stomach, a faithful wife or mistress, and an honored name, and he will agree to live forever in immortal joy. Life to him is not the commerce or play of an infinite inward ideal, with a responsive outward organization; it is rather the commerce or play of a finite outward organization with what is still more finite and outward than itself, namely, the universe of sense. God forbid that I should undervalue a mental constitution so pronounced, and, in its way, so admirable; I only allege it to show that the Frenchman commits suicide only when some tangible possession takes its departure from him; only when poverty, or some other palpable calamity, comes to shake him out of his easy-going routine, and that he can't imagine any profounder source of disgust.'

Garvani's illustrations of Paris life contain a domestic interior which might serve an artist, a political economist, or a dramatic author, so entirely does it suggest the ways and means of the domiciliated Parisian. Like his frugal Caledonian brother, he prefers the nook of a vast and substantial edifice to a small isolated tenement; and is content to occupy a floor, and adjust the height thereof to the length of his purse: both space and cash are saved by the arrangement; while a far more uniform, permanent, and effective architecture is secured. Thus each huge dwelling is a world in itself; the ground-floor may be a shop, but ascend the steps and you find the guardian genius of the place, whom if you are a resident or an habitué of the premises, it is well to propitiate. All the conveniences of a family are found in each of these suites, which vary in extent and costliness as you ascend; survey the neat glass case, wherein sits the porter's wife in her spotless cap, knitting, with an alcove containing a bed, perhaps in the back-ground, and a dainty pendulum or flower near by, and a sleepy cat purring at her side; accept her courteous directions, mount the polished oaken staircase, note the different colored cords hanging at each door, look in upon the prosperous family who hold a salon once a week on the premiere etage, or the smaller domestic establishment above; the economical traveller's winter-apartment, full of knick-knacks and sunshine, au troisieme; or mount, if you will, to the highest region of all to find the provident musician practising in his cheerful attic; or the light-hearted and hard-working grisette, his neighbor, with her box of mignonette at her side, embroidering a kerchief, or making artificial flowers: while she muses of the next holiday, when her beau is to escort her to a dance at Montmorenci. These, and a thousand similar scenes, have been so graphically described in novels, plays, and memoirs, that such a casual inspection seems like a process of memory rather than observation, so exactly does the still-life and local arrangement correspond with vague images of apartments in the French capital to which biographers, novelists, and playwrights have conducted us. This way of living in colonies, the diversities of condition thus brought under one roof, is another of those special phases of life in Paris, which render it eminently dramatic and scenical. Yet the convenience thus secured is often modified to Anglo-Saxon appreciation, by miserable provision for a fire, scraps of rug instead of an entire carpet, and a want of comfort scarcely atoned for by sundry cheap expedients for elegance; so that we can well believe the assertion of an American envoy, fresh from his snug country-seat, that the charms of the French capital were dispelled for him by a habit his chimney had of smoking, and his waiter of bringing him punch in a tea-pot. The requirements of warmth and ease are secondary in the estimation of the fair Parisian; she says: 'Le salon sera rouge et or, la chambre á coucher en brocatelle jaune et le boudoir en satin de chine blue; ce sera ravissant.' And yet there is not a city in the world where a comfortable retreat, in our sense of the word, is more requisite. Cold humidity is the normal trait of the winter climate; catarrh is almost permanently epidemic; many of the inhabitants can echo the declaration of one their frank fellow-citizens, who says: 'Depuis que je me connais, je suis enrhumée. J'aurai en froid en venant au monde.' Moccasins, snuff, and eau sucre, are the usual remedies; and their universal use confirms and suggests atmospheric causes.

[A MEMORY.]

Oh! many, many years ago,
By hill-sides where the violets grow;
Loving the sun in the new spring,
And where the robins came to sing;
A long, sunshiny, quiet way,
To school I led our little May.

Day after day, and hand in hand,
We pattered o'er the path of sand;
I plucking violets here and there,
To wreathe in sister's sunny hair;
She singing with the birds a song
That cheered me all the summer long.

And many, many years ago,
Under the first December snow;
With white hands folded on her breast,
They laid our little May to rest;
One golden summer, only one,
And birds, and flowers, and May were gone.

But where the robins came to sing,
Loving the sun in the new spring;
By hill-sides where the violets grow,
A long, sunshiny, quiet way;
To school I led our little May,
Oh! many, many years ago.

[HESPERUS.]

Thrice welcome, gentle star
Companion of the cheerless, evermore
Like pearly bark on blue waves floating far
Last from some lovely shore.

The poet loveth thee,
And wins from thee those thoughts so pure and high
That gem the rosy heaven of poesy,
As thou dost gem the sky.

And woman holds thee dear;
By trysting tree—in cot, or lordly hall,
She knows thou weav'st some spell, at day-light's fall,
To bring the loved one near.

The faithful deem thee fair;
And when thy white rays down the dusk air fall,
On each pure beam ascends a silent prayer
To Him who loveth all.

Yet art thou all my own;
And, when the gray and crimson kindly blend,
I watch beside the casement, quite alone,
The coming of my friend.

Through this small window-pane
Such tender glances thou dost give to me,
As beamed in eyes I ne'er shall see again;
They look from heaven, like thee.

And so I sit and dream:
Thine image blends with hers, my long-lost bride,
Till thou no more art distant: nay, dost seem
An angel at my side.

And thus thou art to each:
There is no coldness in thy trembling kiss;
Thou com'st with silent love, more sweet than speech,
To sorrow, and to bliss.

Beautiful Mystery!
My grateful spirit draweth near to One
Who placed thee smiling in the darkling sky
A visible benison.

I see how perfectly
Within each soul, the sacred sun may shine;
I know the great Heart of Eternity
Feels each faint throb of mine.

[REVELATIONS OF WALL-STREET:]

BEING THE HISTORY OF CHARLES ELIAS PARKINSON.

BY RICHARD B. KIMBALL, AUTHOR OF ST. LEGER.

'Mislike me not for my complexion.'—Merchant of Venice.

On Saturday afternoon, the sixteenth day of October, 1858, something extraordinary occurred to change the dreadful routine of my life. I cannot now recall it without a sudden quickening of the pulse. Then it rendered me for a time nearly insensible.

On Saturday afternoon, the sixteenth day of October, 1858, the postman brought into my office a letter for me, received two cents, and departed. Before I state the contents of this letter, I will give the reader some account of myself. On the said sixteenth day of October, 1858, I occupied an office—no, I had 'desk room in a basement-office, No. — Wall-street. I was a note-broker; no, I was not a note-broker, but a sort of Man-Friday to several note-brokers and to several note-shavers, men well to do in the world, whose property consists in cash in hand, and who, spider-like, repose quietly in their dens, and suck the marrow out of hard-working men—industrious, laborious citizens—unfortunate devils who have not much credit at the banks, and who are, in consequence, like other unfortunates of another sex, forced upon the 'street.'

At the date aforesaid, I was a jackal, tender, runner, pilot-fish, satellite, serf, toad-eater, or any other humiliating phrase you choose, reader, to employ, for the respectable class of note-brokers and note-shavers just referred to. Do not suppose I was in love with my situation. Do not suppose I was not keenly alive to the disgusting office from which I could not escape. Day by day, when wearied and worn out with incessant toil, and humiliated by varying but never-ending exhibitions of coarseness and arrogance, I would go to my home, resolving never again to expose myself to these; the sight of two daughters grown into womanhood—two motherless daughters—and a son, also grown to man's estate, and dying gradually of consumption, would send me back the next morning to the 'street,' meek, sorrowful, submissive. How did I come to this? How, gradually, from the enjoyment of wealth and 'fashionable society,' and friends without number, and what are called the 'delights of social intercourse;' from influence and consideration; from all, in short, that is deemed desirable, and highly respectable, and absolutely the thing; how, I say, gradually did I come to pay two dollars a week for 'desk-room' in the basement of No. — Wall-street?

'T is no new story—'t is the old story, scarcely with variations. I am sixty-one years old—almost sixty-two. In 1837 I was a leading importer of silk goods in this city. I lived in what was then a superb house in Broadway, a little above Bond-street. I visited Europe frequently—on business, it is true; but my tastes were refined, and my education good; for, although destined to a commercial life, my father, who took a wide and liberal view of what was required for an accomplished merchant, had sent me to 'Yale,' where I graduated respectably, and from whence I entered a counting-room. These European trips, therefore, were not thrown away on me. My wife, sometimes, went with me, till the care of young children prevented. The crisis of 1837 swept over the entire country like a tornado, and it carried our firm irretrievably under. I was in the very vigor of manhood, and I laughed at calamity. I only felt the stronger to resist and to conquer. Just as soon as we could discover the extent of the disaster, I set to work to clear the wreck and to prepare a statement, so that I could put a clean sheet before our creditors, offer to them all we had, and request a discharge. But our creditors were not to be found. They, in their turn, had gone down, had made assignments, had no power to give discharges; all was blended in a general insolvency—a universal ruin; and so our firm made an assignment, like the rest. I was not discouraged. I occupied myself, for a time, in aiding the assignee, at our old counting-room. We still had our house, as before—it was the inheritance of my wife—and I felt no shame in living in it, since I had surrendered every dollar's worth of my own property to the assignee. Soon, I discovered that it was a hopeless task to endeavor to make any thing out of our bankrupt estate. What should I do? I could attempt no business in my own name, and I saw no hope of relief from thraldom. A man in the prime of life, full of energy and courage and resolution, to be chained hand and foot, and kept in perpetual bondage! About this time, my friend Russell remarked to me (Russell had, through his wife, come into possession of a large fortune, consisting principally of unincumbered real estate in the city, and did nothing but look carefully to the collection of the rents)—Russell, I say, remarked to me, in his cool, supercilious way: 'I tell you what it is, Parkinson, there is no necessity for a man's failing—none whatever. Just look at me, now!' At that moment, I was in a very bitter mood, and I am afraid I cursed Russell in my heart. I do not know, but I think I have hated him ever since; for, in after-years, when I used to walk wearily past his house, (I saved sixpence by not riding,) I saw him stepping into his carriage for an evening drive, glossy and sleek and full-fed, sometimes—God forgive me—yes, sometimes, between my close compressed teeth have escaped, as if spontaneously and not to be repressed, the words, 'damn him!' I mention this, because I do not believe, with some, that poverty tends to improve and subdue the evil in our hearts; if it does, why, looking thus at Russell, in his fine, open landau, did the gall so rise and overflow? Well, two or three years ran away. We had preserved an outward semblance of our old life. Friends had not absolutely dropped off. I had no rent to pay, and my wife knew how to economize. But, every now and then, visions of the wolf began to haunt me. It was only the head which appeared, thrust through the door into the parlor, exhibiting the slightest possible curl in the long, sharp mouth, disclosing two pointed ivory fangs—disclosing, but for an instant, two pointed ivory fangs, and then quickly concealed, and the head as quickly withdrawn. My God! reader, do you know by experience any thing of the sensations produced by such an apparition? Do you know what it is to have a wife, who clings to you, quite safe in her protector, and young children, who look to 'papa' as to Omnipotence?... At last the year of Jubilee was announced. A general Bankrupt Law! Men's faces brightened with hope again. Hurried congratulations passed from lip to lip. Hands were grasped with an almost unnatural fervor. Jubilee! release from bondage! joy—joy over the whole land! Yet Russell, who, with all his care—with all his close, sharp, persisting management—had, now and then, been victimized, as he called it, by an unfortunate debtor, who, his security having failed, was found wanting on the last quarter-day—Russell, who had sometimes foreclosed a mortgage, and, taking advantage of the depressed state of things, had bid in the property for one-half its value, and thus obtained a decree over against the once happy possessor of a comfortable home—Russell was, as a matter of principle—oh! yes, wholly as a matter of principle—opposed to the general bankrupt law! opposed to any relief for the thousands and tens of thousands who, indebted beyond the faintest hope of retrieve, were suffering the torture of despair. But Russell's objection to the law—on principle, mind you—fortunately had but slight effect on the happy applicants for its favor. I was among the first to take advantage of the Act. I met with no opposition, and, in a short time I was free. This was early in the year 1842. I now cast about to decide what I should do. I concluded not to embark in the old business. I thought it would be easier to renew confidence, and make a credit, in some other line of mercantile affairs. This was perhaps an error, because I had been thoroughly educated to that particular branch, and I should have much to learn in commencing on another. Looking back, I think that pride lay at the bottom of this; pride, because I could not at once start on my old footing; pride, that many younger men, who had commenced since I had stopped, were already so much in advance of any thing I could undertake. I did not understand this, then; but now I know myself better. At the same time, let it be understood that, in New-York, five years comprise almost a business generation. I had been laid one side, and shelved for just five years; and now, when I was preparing to start again, I had to compete with a new race of merchants, younger, keener, fresher than the race who had gone under. This did not alarm me. I had confidence in myself, and I preferred to encounter those who exhibited intelligence and activity in affairs, rather than the incompetent and stupid. After considerable reflection, I resolved to commence a wholesale grocery business, which should include, from time to time, legitimate operations, sometimes in cotton, sometimes in produce. I started with a cash capital of twenty-five thousand dollars. Fifteen thousand of this my wife insisted on raising by a mortgage upon the house we lived in. Five thousand more was contributed by my mother: it was about the portion to which I would be entitled on her death, and she urged me strongly to receive it then. She was old, she said, and had no longer the wants nor the wishes of younger folks. I took the fifteen thousand from my wife, and the five thousand from my mother, with some misgivings. It was my only chance, though; what weakness to refuse it! A friend—a tried, thoroughly tried friend—a college mate, who was possessed of large means, lent me other five thousand, without security, and with a declaration that, in event of misfortune, he would not permit me to treat it as 'confidential.' Behold me, then, with twenty-five thousand dollars in cash, with a junior partner, who put in three thousand dollars, and who was brought up to the business, and favorably introduced to me by the old and experienced firm of Powell, Weatherby, Keep and Company—behold me, on the first day of January, 1843, in a fine, spacious store in Front-street, my flag once more to the wind:

Charles E. Parkinson and Company.

There was great joy on that first day of January, 1843, at our house in Broadway, a little above Bond-street; an open house it was, and many were the New-Year's visits my wife received, and many the visits I made. All the gloom, and hope deferred, of the past six years, were forgotten. The three little folks—my two little girls, and my one little boy—partook, without knowing why, in the general hilarity.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I found, on setting seriously to work at my new business, that I had every thing to learn. My partner proved to be an active and intelligent young man. He knew the routine of the trade well, and, although he sometimes assumed more than was becoming a comparative youth, I cannot say he took advantage of his position; nor am I aware that he ever violated the rules of our copartnership. He made two or three pretty large bad debts, the first six months we were together, which had the good effect to lower his self-confidence, and to lead him to me more frequently for advice. With the best possible management, the thirty-first of December, 1843, found me, after deducting family expenses and interest-money, with a small inroad made on the capital. It found me, however, in good health, with strong courage, and a competent knowledge of my business, no longer dependent on my junior for advice or suggestions. There was one drawback quite unexpected. On commencing business, I felt myself fairly entitled to a first-rate commercial credit. Frequently, through the year, I discovered there was some mysterious influence working against me. I would be on the point of closing some advantageous operation, which required the giving of our acceptances for considerable amounts, when the parties would return, after a little, and regret that they could not enter into the arrangement—that they found they could not employ our paper as they anticipated, and so forth. Now, I had reason to know that we stood well at both the banks where we did business, and further, that the officers of both these institutions did not hesitate to speak favorably of our firm, when applied to. What could it mean? Was there a snake in the grass—a secret foe—a disappointed creditor, perhaps, of 1837? After mentioning these facts to an old friend, and after his puzzling a good deal over it, he suddenly exclaimed: 'Parkinson, how do you stand at the Mercantile Agency?' 'At what?' said I, not exactly understanding him. 'At the Mercantile Agency,' he repeated; 'what I call our 'Commercial Intelligence Office.' I don't know what we should do without it, though sometimes they do get a little astray there, but they are always ready to correct mistakes.' My friend's suggestion struck me as a very probable one, and I wondered it had not occurred to me. I requested him, therefore, to obtain a report of the standing of our firm at the agency aforesaid. He procured it the next day. It read as follows:

'Charles E. Parkinson and Company, (Charles E. Parkinson and Edwin E. Rollins.) Wholesale grocers, respectable house, in fair credit. Established 1st January, 1843. Parkinson was importer of silk goods prior to 1837, and failed. Took the benefit of the Bankrupt Law. Unacquainted with present business; put in twenty-five thousand dollars. Nearly all borrowed, ($15,000 from his wife's estate,) and which will probably be treated as confidential, should he fail. Keeps house, and lives expensively. Rollins, unmarried man, about twenty-five, brought up to the business in the concern of Powell, Weatherby, Keep and Company. Puts in three thousand dollars. In trade for first time on his own account. Firm doing large business. Mem. (July, 1843:) said to have made some heavy losses. Mem. (August, 1843:) Rollins drives a good deal on the road. Supposed to own a very handsome turn-out.'

I read this ex-parte judgment with mingled surprise and indignation. Scanning it with more scrutiny, a second and third time, I was forced into a train of philosophical reflections. After all, the Mercantile Agency had stated but the truth, that is, mainly. It was the inferences drawn from the facts, which were so damaging. Yet the inferences were natural. One could not accuse the 'Mercantile Agency' of any malicious intent. Yes, the inferences were natural, but mind you, reader, they were FALSE. And I had been suffering for a twelve-month from what was really a cruel and a slanderous statement. The fifteen thousand dollars, raised by mortgage on my wife's house, was absolutely given to me for capital. No evidence of indebtedness was taken, no recognition of it on our books, otherwise than as cash belonging to and put in by me. The debt of five thousand dollars to my friend was, as I have before stated, actually placed, by a positive understanding, as an ordinary indebtedness. The statement that I had made some bad debts was true, but it did not add, what was more essential, that the senior partner, myself, was a strictly business man, and had gone through his first year in a new line, with little loss, supporting his family meanwhile, and gaining a thorough insight into affairs. Again, poor Rollins came in for a sharp hit, in the way of driving a fast team. Now, Rollins was really economical. He lived with, and supported his mother and some younger brothers, and his habits were unexceptionable. It so happened that a wealthy cousin of Rollins, who did drive a pair of good horses, went out of town for nearly all the month of August, and told R. he might exercise his team while he was gone, if he liked. Rollins had informed me of this, and I believe he enjoyed his drives for about three weeks, and resigned his 'turn-out,' without regret, on his cousin's return. Here, again, the Mercantile Agency had stated a fact, and, with it, a false inference. However, now that I saw where the difficulty existed, it was easy to remedy it. I called at the office of the 'Agency,' with two influential business friends—'undoubted' names—and went into an entire explanation. It was satisfactory. The statement as to my capital, 'Nearly all borrowed,' was erased, or rather, a new statement was prepared and entered on the books, quite clear and to the purpose. Poor Rollin's inexpensive drives were no longer marked against him. In short, our firm stood 'right' on the books, and we were thus well advertised. We had no longer any difficulty about our 'paper;' indeed, we now enjoyed all the facilities to which a good credit entitled us.

And here permit me to digress a little, in order to say a word about 'mercantile agencies' generally. The system has been greatly elaborated since 1844. Complete method has been introduced through all its branches, and a most unique and surprising skill is displayed in the information obtained, and in the general characterizations. The enemies of the system complain that it produces an espionage worse a thousand-fold than that under a European despotism; that no circumstance of private or domestic life is safe from the prying, eager curiosity of these keen investigators, who are paid well for gleaning. In short, that the whole affair is a shame and a scandal to a free country. On the other side, it is retorted, that no honest man fears to have the veil drawn aside which may conceal his minutest acts. That such a man courts investigation, and claims to be judged by it; and that those only are opposed to the plan who suffer from having the truth told of them. Now, my view of the question is not based on either of these hypotheses. It seems to me that the mischief lies in another direction. The agency undertakes to give information by which subscribers can form reliable judgments of a merchant's responsibility, and so forth. This is very desirable, and if the agencies accomplish this they certainly render a service to the commercial community. But the truth is, we do not form an opinion of an individual so much from certain absolute facts we hear of him as from his general reputation. Every man, every firm, every incorporated company, does, in some way and by some sure process, after a time acquire a general reputation—good, bad or indifferent—for which one would be puzzled to state any reason or cause whatever, but which is true in ninety-nine cases of a hundred. So well settled is this, that our courts, when a person's character is under investigation, will not permit, in the first instance, questions to be asked except as to general reputation. The 'agencies,' with the best intent, doubtless, busy themselves with picking up circumstances. A merchant rushes in and reads the record; he thus goes to an ex-parte tribunal, where reputation is manufactured out of one set of facts, instead of into the world, where currents of opinion flow free, and where truth and error have a fair field for contest. If any one doubts this, let him look at the 'record' of four merchants out of five who fail, and he will find that these merchants took especial pains to keep that record fair. My opinion frankly is, that these agencies have their growth in our great desire to save ourselves the trouble of forming an opinion, so that we readily welcome one manufactured for us. It is very convenient to be told off-hand what really nobody can ever know; whether a merchant is 'good' or not: and I believe our agencies would come badly off to-day in a series of libel-suits, one-half of which should be commenced by their patrons for too favorable statements, whereby those patrons lost their money; and the other half by the subjects of mercantile criticism, whereby such subjects lost their credit. I refer to what is got together and reported about our city merchants. As to the reports recorded in the city of the standing of people through all the towns and villages of the United States, I reject them as generally the preparation of one man, (in each place,) who is biased one way or the other, so that he returns an opinion either much too severe or much too favorable, and by which the merchant here is quite sure to be misled.

To return: I had no further reason to complain of the 'Agency.' They told the truth about me, and drew no disagreeable inferences. Indeed, after a while they began to exaggerate my position, for on the day I failed my record stood as follows: 'First-rate house. Credit A 1. Thoroughly up in their business. Large capital: said to be at least a quarter of a million. Reported to have cleared over fifty thousand dollars the last season in produce. Very cautious operators.' Not to anticipate. The year 1844 was for us the commencement of a new season of prosperity. With great assiduity and great watchfulness the firm retrieved the losses of the previous year, strengthened its credit, changed some important details in the mode of conducting its business, and gradually settled on a prudent and safe basis of operations. From that time we took position among the 'leading merchants.' ...

The years 1845 and 1846 passed very happily: yes, very happily, because prosperously and without drawback of any kind. To become once more a man among men. To encounter an acquaintance, and meet his scrutinizing look with an air of conscious strength and stability. To feel that you are no longer exposed to the humiliating sympathy of 'friends,' or the silent triumph of enemies. To be assured that you form again a part and portion of the activity which supports and moves the world; that you are of consequence in it, and recognized accordingly, recognized by old companions with whom you used to engage in various affairs; many of whom sincerely regretted what befell you, and honestly rejoice in your reäppearance in the business arena; who shake hands with you with a smile, and a look as much as to say: 'I knew you would come out all right. Glad to see you here.' To pass from the dreary stupor of inactivity to fresh, hopeful, energetic action; to plan and form combinations; to feel yourself gradually and surely gaining ground; to enjoy the healthful happiness of an ascending scale; to get on, to prosper, to again grow rich, and find every thing around you cheerful; to witness 'troops of friends' returning to range once more under your banner, with many apologies for absence, and so forth—apologies which you receive amiably, (as if you had never felt bitterness of heart, and gangrene, and hatred on their account;) which you not only receive amiably but excuse, making due allowance for human infirmities. (You forgive, and your misfortunes are forgiven, but see to it that you repeat not the offence, lest a worse evil overtake you.) To pass through all this, rising meanwhile till, like the man of Uz, your possessions greatly exceed their former proportions. Well! life is worth something at that. How agreeable to have money; how pleasant not to be forced to calculate! How charming for us, the favored few, few by comparison, to express a wish for what we desire, and lo! it is supplied; to plan out new pleasures, and enter into their enjoyment; to find all things practicable, all things yielding; to encounter smiles and approbation every where; to find every avenue smoothed for our approach, every path made pleasant. Why not? Why should not these things be desirable and acceptable, and very enjoyable?...

So in the midst of business successes and social delights, was ushered in the notable season of 1847. Some perhaps who read these pages have cause to remember that memorable year. To such the index, '1847,' will not be viewed without emotion. Nay, to those who date from it the beginning of, to them, a period of misery and misfortune, of blight and calamity, of stagnation of soul and withering up of energy—leaving them walking nonentities, collapsed and dwindling gradually away, instead of living, enterprising beings, to such did the figures '1847' appear spectral; and when seen printed here, will cause a shock like that produced by some fancied apparition from the dead.... Thus, as I said, with much joyousness and merry-making, amid Christmas festivities and gayeties and frolics came in the crisis-year. And I will proceed to explain how I happened to be paying two dollars a week for desk-room in the basement No. — Wall-street.

CHAPTER SECOND.

On the first day of January, 1847, the financial condition of these United States was 'most satisfactory.' So said leading bank presidents and directors in the coteries to which they severally were attached; so observed the prominent members of the Stock Exchange, conversing daily between the 'boards;' so echoed the principal merchants. Eminent bankers talked soothingly over their sherry of the 'remarkable prosperity of the country.' With the second bottle they demonstrated how we were now beyond the reach of panic. The resources of our land were so great, so various, so extraordinary, and its extent almost illimitable. Such room for development, for the employment of capital which could never fail in returning its legitimate increase. No, thank Heaven! we were at last on a sound basis, and none but the most reckless need fail in any lawful enterprise.

Russell, too, was of the same opinion.

There was not even a speck in the commercial horizon giving token of the storm which was so soon to burst. Only it began to be ascertained that the failure of the harvest in Great Britain (which had been for some time known) was even more deplorable than at first reported; and, with the blight of the potato in Ireland, there was threatened for that unfortunate isle the visitation of the Angel of Death in the shape of Famine! But to most people this served as an additional argument that our prosperity was founded on a rock. We should find, at high prices and gold for payment, a market for all our surplus breadstuffs. Some, unappalled by the terrible calamity which threatened a friendly nation, chuckled over the news brought by each successive steamer of the great rise in the prices of food; while with all there was an ill-concealed satisfaction at the existing condition of things. But there were others who shook their heads, and said such condition was unnatural; that affairs could not go on ruinously for any length of time in England without reäcting forcibly here, so intimate were the relations between us; beside, they said, an unfortunate state of affairs in one country is never beneficial to another country with which it has a close business connection. These individuals were set down as croakers; people who were behind the age; men with antiquated stage-coach ideas. The great majority of moneyed men declared that the country was in a most prosperous state, and accordingly it was generally so accepted.

To come, however, to my own affairs. The position of the firm of Charles E. Parkinson and Company, on that same first of January, was essentially and absolutely a sound one. The year after I commenced business anew, my mother died. The five thousand dollars I received from her proved, as was anticipated, to be about what I was entitled to from the estate, and thus that was settled. I had within a twelve-month repaid my friend the five thousand dollars borrowed from him. It was indeed so much in reduction of our capital, and the money to us was worth much more than seven per cent; but something whispered to me, 'Pay it!' and I did so. Strange to say, many years later this circumstance proved to be the final turning-point in my earthly career. Since we began, our capital had increased from the sum of twenty-eight thousand dollars, as the reader will recollect, to one hundred and thirty-eight thousand seven hundred and sixty dollars in stocks and assets, after deducting all probable bad debts and what the firm owed. In other words, that was our 'balance-sheet.' This was certainly doing well; at the same time we had acquired the reputation of having made still greater gains, so true is it that 'to him who hath shall be given.'

I was one of the few who were not carried away by the excitement consequent on the great rise in all species of produce. I believed when, stimulated by the high prices, the north of Europe began to pour in its large stores of grain, that a reäction must take place, especially if the coming season in Great Britain promised well. For this reason I did not permit myself to be tempted into a speculative course, in which my neighbors were clearing large sums rapidly. In April and May the financial distress in England, and distress from hunger in Ireland, were very great. An American Government store-ship, loaded with provisions, was sent to the relief of the Irish people, thousands of whom were dying from starvation. Still were we in this side prosperous; still taking in gold for food at high prices; still counting on more gold at higher prices. About the first of June these prices came to a stand-still in Europe. From the ports in the Baltic rich granaries were shipped to the British Isles, the harvests promised well, and the potato appeared to be without blight. We were then carried into the summer in the midst of a great speculation in produce; with falling prices in Europe, and purchases and contracts maturing here; grain shipped to a tremendous extent, bills drawn heavily against it; bankers, ancient and honorable firms, breaking all over the Continent; all through England, Scotland and Ireland, till the panic there reaching its height, the market here became utterly depressed, and bills of our best houses were floating about in all directions, offered at enormous rates without buyers. Then was Wall-street one morning taken suddenly all aback by the refusal of some of the largest bankers in London to honor the bills drawn on them, of an old and leading house here! What confusion, what consternation! It was all a mistake: oh! certainly a mistake! A matter of precaution only, till the arrival of the next steamer, then all the bills would be protected, all accounts arranged, and every thing be put right. Just wait for the next steamer.

The steamer never arrived!

But if the firm of Charles E. Parkinson and Company did not speculate, what had it to fear? Reader, you know little of commercial affairs if you suppose in times of general financial distress it is possible for any house engaged largely in business to escape unscathed. Quite early in the season I attempted to act with great prudence and circumspection. I came to the conclusion that, such were my then business relations with correspondents in the South, we should undoubtedly meet with large losses. I was prepared to accept this as the 'fate of war;' for my gains had been large. During the summer I was applied to by a leading banking-house in Wall-street to make purchases of large quantities of grain for foreign want; these were to be made through the west, and I was to charge a certain commission, and receive in payment bills drawn by this banking-house, on Baring Brothers and Company, in London. Nothing appeared surer or safer. The produce was to be consigned to the Barings, and since that house stood so high, and the drawers themselves were so undoubted, I did not consider it a risk. For all that, I stopped short in this arrangement before the parties had finished buying, and left them to select another agent. This was in consequence of the disheartening news brought by every steamer. Resolving not to make another business transaction, I joined my family, who were at Newport, in order to enjoy some relaxation. I enjoyed but little. Week after week brought intelligence more and more gloomy. I determined not to prolong our stay, but that we would all go to town the first of September, instead of my going in alone. I cannot say I experienced any presentiment of coming evil. I do not know why still I felt as if I must have my wife and children around me. On Wednesday, the first day of September, in the afternoon, we reached our handsome house in Broadway, a little above Bond-street. How pleasant it looked; that dear, happy home! By evening we were comfortably installed. The next day I was early at my counting-rooms. Affairs were threatening, but I maintained a courageous self-reliance. I believed, although I might be considerably damaged, that I should weather the storm. Rollins, who had greatly improved in sagacity, and now become an experienced merchant, was untiring in endeavoring to carry out my suggestions. Things were no worse than I expected to find them. Rollins had anticipated one or two very important steps which I had proposed to take, and with a favorable result. I had occasion to go that morning to Jersey City, with reference to a number of storage receipts, about which some question had been raised, and I told Rollins that I should not return to the counting-room, but would go directly home, having many little matters to look after at the house, and if he had any thing of importance to communicate I requested him to call in the evening. I transacted my business, and reached my house with spirits much improved, and my courage a good deal exalted. The children welcomed me with great glee as I entered. Mamma had invited two or three of their own age to spend the evening with them. Beside, young Havens was coming, (Miss Alice, my eldest, was already sixteen, and did not appear vexed at this last announcement,) and I was expected to contribute toward the entertainment. I smiled with a father's pride and joy as I beheld the glowing countenances around me. There was nothing which whispered to me that the atmosphere was loaded with fatal intelligence. How happy was I in my unconsciousness!

At dinner we were all animated. I partook with a relish of our own cheer, and was gladdened beside by a bottle of generous wine, which the old cellar had held for many a year; my return home; a favorable business-day; the cheerful voices of my wife and children; a good dinner; and the fine old Madeira wine: all combined to produce a comfortable and confident state of mind. 'We will weather it yet,' I exclaimed aloud, with a complacent nod.... There were some young people gathered in the parlor in the evening. They had danced a quadrille; they had talked and laughed. Now Alice was requested to sing. She seated herself at the piano, and began the convivial song from Traviata. The music was particularly adapted to her voice, and as the tones floated through the room, I was gradually carried away by the abandon of the air. Insensibly I closed my eyes to enjoy it. Just then I heard the door open: the servant pronounced: 'Mr. Rollins, Sir.' I looked up. Rollins stood before me. He was very pale, but otherwise not excited; betrayed no unusual excitement. 'I want to speak with you a moment,' he said. I rose and walked with him as far as the pillar which separates the parlors, and leaning against it, I waited for him to speak. Alice meantime was continuing the song from Traviata.

'Have you heard the news?' he said, in a low tone.

'No; what news?' I replied.

'The 'Caledonia' arrived this morning. We have her advices by telegraph. Barings have refused acceptance of ——'s bills.'

'How many with our indorsement must be still out?'

'At least seventy thousand dollars.'...

Alice was finishing the last strain of the convivial song. With the last strain I beheld fading away like a dissolving view those beautiful velvet carpets; vanishing, the fine sofas, and soft couches, and handsome furniture; gone, the rosewood piano; gone, the choice damask and silver; gone, the luxurious board, with the old wines and delicious liqueurs: and the house, our HOME, lost is the house; recorded against it is that mortgage for fifteen thousand dollars and interest; the value of property depressed, and we in the hands of a prompt creditor. Oh! why had I not paid off that mortgage? Oh! why? Wife and children; yes, wife and children remaining; but to suffer what discomfort, what unhappiness, possibly what destitution!

Not one quarter of a minute had elapsed since Rollings answer, 'At least seventy thousand dollars,' yet behold how much had rushed through my heated brain! I turned, for I felt a soft hand on my arm: it was my wife.

'Charles, what is it?'

'At present nothing, only I must step out for a few moments with Rollins.'

'Papa, papa, where are you going? Come back! You are always running away!'

[A WINTER SCENE.]

BY RICHARD HENRY STODDARD.

It is a morn in winter,
The air is white with snow;
And on the chinar branches
Jasmins seem to grow.

The furrowed fields and hill-tops
With icy treasures shine,
Like scales of silver fishes,
Or jewels in a mine.

The bitter wind has banished
The silent nightingale,
And the rose, like some coy maiden,
Is muffled in a veil.

Its silver song of summer
No more the fountain sings,
And frozen are the rivers
That fed the bath of kings!

No flower-girls in the market,
For flowers are out of date;
And the keepers of the roses
Have shut the garden-gate.

No happy guests are drinking,
Their goblets crowned with vine,
For gone are all the merchants
That sold the merry wine!

And gone the dancing women,
Before the winds and snows;
Their summer souls have followed
The nightingale and rose!

[THE OBSERVATIONS OF MACE SLOPER, ESQ.]

SECOND SERIES.

FOR THIS NUMBER ONLY, BY PARTICULAR REQUEST, THE OBSERVATIONS OF SLOPE MACER, ESQ.

They were all sitting together in the library, round the great walnut table, under the great bronze chandelier.

We're very proud of that chandelier by the way. Amelia designed it herself, and Hiram had it moulded out in Paris. It has spreading tree-branches; in between the forks lie a Turk, an Indian, a German, and a Calmuck, each smoking a long pipe, and out of the pipe-bowl comes the jet of flame. They do look just as natural as life: that's a fact. The Indian was drawn for Sam Batchelder; and the German for me. His is a good likeness; mine isn't. They tell Sam that bronze suits his style of face; I live in mortal fear that some body'll call us both a couple of gas-blowers; and so avail myself of this chance to head them all off, by originalling it myself. Remember, good folks, it has been done.

Well, there were the girls: Amelia, Bertha Sue, Little Sugar, and one or two others, not forgetting the immortal Nella Satanella, all sewing and snipping things with scissors, or knitting and hauling in the runaway worsted balls, every once in a while, with a jerk, as if they were children wandered off. Only Nella lay back in a great arm-chair snapping a little riding-whip she'd picked up, and doing nothing. Nella don't know that I've noticed it, but I have; and that's a way she has when other women are stitching and talking away, as all the sisterhood always do, all the world over, after a jolly tea-fight, of counting herself out, lying back on a chair, and eyeing them all round. There is nothing in it aggravating or conceited or insulting. Nothing vain or sarcastic. Nothing at all to take hold of, except once in a while a strange light as of a coming smile about to make daylight, but which never comes. And this smile-light seems to strike within as if she were watching herself, and amused at it. Nothing—that's to say, only one thing.

And that One is in its dimness something Awful.

I'm the only one who has seen it. I see that girl always watching human nature in every body, as one watches kittens at play. Children interest her like grown people, and she puts questions to watch the answers, and quietly raises topics to see how her little and great puppets will work. Where she loves and respects people she does this in such a way as to give them pleasant emotions and dignify them. I've seen her make Sam Batchelder say for an hour things just as creditable to his heart and head as any thing could be: and Sam hardly knowing it either. I've seen her draw out of Amelia the most artless indications of kindness and dignity. She's found out, and a strange art it is, through years of thought, just what keys to touch in people to bring out certain sounds. When she doesn't love, she goes in with the same interest, and treats herself to a good jolly monkey-show of miserable follies in red jackets dancing to the organ. Behind it all, even when Nella's with the wisest and best of people, is that mysterious philosophy, or whatever it is, which keeps comparing and comparing it all to other things laid away.... But just speak a word, and up Nella flies, all prompt and ready and spry; full of fun and jollity, ripe for any thing.

'Now,' said Bertha Sue, 'talking of young men—that is to say, very yong men—I don't like them; that is, if they're not nice. I have known some real good fellows who'd keep you laughing all the time, and never vex you with a folly; and then there're so many who make such geese of themselves: think if a lady only looks at them——'

'My dear child,' quoth Sugar, 'that would depend a great deal, I should think, on how the lady looked at the young man. Now the other evening at the opera—'twas really too absurd in me, I declare——'

(Now Little Sugar is very conscientious, and always puts a story through, even at her own expense, if she has once begun it, thinking it wrong to disappoint people.)

'Well, I declare I couldn't help it; but there was a young gentleman in the parquette who looked exactly like my brother. And I looked straight at him the longest time; indeed I don't know what I could have been thinking of——I'm sure you'd have looked at him just in that way if he'd been like your brother, wouldn't you?' quoth Sugar innocently, and addressing Nella.

'Oh! immensely,' replied that most unlikely of all young ladies.

'Well, he kept staring at me, in the most annoying way, all the evening, after that. Oh! it was just too provoking. I'd have given worlds to've been home. He didn't know though that he looked like my brother. I do declare, I'd give any thing if he could only have known that it wasn't him that I was looking at.'

'You should have put next morning in the 'Personals' of the Herald,' quoth Sam, 'an advertisement, saying that 'The young lady in white satin cloak, white lace bonnet, and crimson roses, a fall of blonde, lavender kid gloves, and lavender silk dress, with little ruffles, pearl and white silk fan, and mother-of-pearl opera-glasses, wishes it to be understood by the young gentleman, at whom she stared for several minutes, during the last 'Martha,' that this was done solely in consequence of his extraordinary resemblance to a relative, and not because she was in the slightest degree attracted by the gentleman himself.''

'Feel better, Sam?' inquired Hiram.

'What wonderful power of extempore composition!' quoth Nella.

'Well,' said Sam, 'I'll print it any how.'

'Oh! please don't!' said Sugar. 'Indeed I'd rather you wouldn't. I know it's very kind of you, but I think I'd prefer not having it printed. I—I—wouldn't like putting you to such trouble and expense, you know.' And here Sugar looked anxiously and wistfully up at Sam, as if he were pronouncing her death-sentence. There was a general burst of indignation from all the ladies present, and Sam caught it severely. It doesn't take long for half-a-dozen women to bring one man to order, and they generally do it in about half-time when the offence is that of setting masculine quizzing against feminine weakness and tenderness. If you have any doubts, my Christian Knickerbocker friend, just try it on in the next tea-battle where you may find yourself. Just a little. Pick out the favorite—and three decent women never get together but what one tacitly becomes the pet—and undertake to quiz her, especially on some point in which the others are conscious of weakness! Don't say any thing, but just try it. That's all. If you happen to find that it pays, just drop a line to me, address Knickerbocker Office, or Vanity Fair.

'As regards Young Men,' said I, (I must have spoken very impressively, for all the girls at once slung up their heads as if I'd fired a revolver;) 'as regards Young Men, I'm certain that there isn't a sect in the whole community whose views, feelings and ideas—above all, whose sufferings, are so little thought of or described by writers.

'When a man gets to be old enough to marry, then he's immensely interesting. Then he figures every where. He's tenor in the opera, first lover in the play, first fiddle in the whole orchestra of society. He's provided for.

'But as for the youth who hasn't graduated——'

(Here one or two of the young ladies picked up their sewing, and began tumbling the work-basket.)

'As for him whose beard is growing, and who hasn't 'got his set,' one may say that nobody in existence is treated with such inhumanity. Among all, except the most refined and cultivated people, it seems to be perfectly fashionable to establish a raw on him and snap it. If a girl is an angel to all the world beside, she can't resist the temptation of snubbing him like a devil. The poor youths in their earlier frock-coats! They feel the torture so keenly, and generally so foolishly. All they can do is to 'get mad.''

'And then,' said Nella, 'how demure and astonished Mademoiselle looks; how perfectly unable to understand such rudeness! Yes, goodness knows, I was guilty of such folly often enough myself, when I was a school-miss. In fact, I've gone to my room and cried after it; but I couldn't resist the temptation. It's delightful to feel and exercise power; particularly when you haven't much. There are two kinds of power developed at a gymnasium: that of nervous activity, (which is partly strength, you know;) and solid strength, which is altogether itself and nothing else. Now we girls come to full exercise of our activity before the poor boys get their strength. The fact holds good mentally, as well as physically; indeed, I wouldn't give much for any fact that hadn't a physical basis. Well, the boys grow up, marry the girls——'

'And take their revenge.'

'Exactly. But I've often thought that something might be done in education to relieve the sensitiveness and suffering of men at that age. Talk about boyhood, and the influences of childhood! bless your soul, the age I speak of has a hundred chances to make or mar where boyhood has one. Then it is, if ever, that the influences of woman should be most felt: those of cultivated women of the world especially. Haven't I seen that a few words of real interest and kindness from such a woman to a youth have changed the whole course of his thoughts for months? All his teachers and professors together couldn't give him in a year the impetus that she can with a few words of flattery and encouragement. He needn't be in love with her to have this miracle effected; and if he is, so much the better, for if there is any one thing which induces a youth to leave all that's bad and mean and degrading, it is the being in love. There's nothing that so stimulates the manly mind to become great and noble. Haven't I heard one of the greatest men who ever lived say, that the only times when he had ever been a good man were when he was in love?'

'I declare, Nella,' said Amelia, 'you talk as sympathetically as if you'd been a young man yourself.'

'So I have been,' said Nella, with enthusiasm. 'I've been every thing that ever suffered. An Italian monk told me once that he had been Christ again and again; that by intense meditations on His sufferings he had felt all the pains of the crucifixion. If there is a human suffering which I haven't known it has not been for want of effort. Ah! only strive with all your might to sink down to sympathy with agony, find out its causes, and you'll begin almost to think there's no such thing as guilt. Folly there is——'

'But I don't think it's manly in young men to suffer,' quoth Bertha Sue, very naturally.

'My dear child,' replied Nella, 'my sister's children used to be mortally ashamed of catching cold because a nurse ridiculed their coughing. Yet they caught cold quite the same. What the world thinks of young men, and what it expects of them, causes a vast amount of hypocrisy. The very natural and creditable yearning for enjoyment, which is keenest in life at that age, is unnoticed or sternly repressed. It isn't, as a general rule, before a man becomes half-blasé that he begins to be knowing or free enough to be happy: and then he must drink when no longer thirsty. Bless me, why, didn't Dr. Maybaum tell us yesterday that when he was at college the only provisions made there were to secure study and 'moral demeanor?' 'The boys would find amusement for themselves soon enough,' said the gouty, opium-steeped, old Incapable of a President. And they did find amusement: the amusements of fools and blackguards combined. Ah! for my part I don't see why as much pains shouldn't be given to supplying youth with recreation, as with 'education,' as people call education. Nature craves pleasure as much as food. I am only a woman, consequently I have been barred as in a cage my life long; but I have good strong eyes, and I have seen something through those bars. I tell you that, with all the suffering on earth—bereavements, poverty, hunger, disease and oppression, that which goads man most is the craving for pleasure, for recreation, or 'distraction.' Teachers and parents close their eyes to the existence of this terrible power, and moralists either treat it as an evil or try to feed it on gruel. The Puritans all hold it to be the downright inspiration of the devil: as they do every thing which is beautiful and joyous like it. Ah! if they could feel as I do, what a stupendous flood of joy and of beauty life is capable of taking in! What might be done for the young if the true power of their minds was understood and provided for! What men of genius, what great and good men might spring up by thousands, who now go to destruction, if it were only understood that enjoyment and pleasure, health and beauty, properly cared for, may be made the great stimulants to exertion. Yes, and to nobility of mind and tenderness. Ah! the sufferings of lonely young hearts in silent chambers for want of this.'

Nella's voice quivered with deep emotion as she spoke. I saw that she had touched one of the depths of her religion of humanity. As she went on, her fingers played with, and she unconsciously placed on her head a beautiful long Arab cap—a fez, which Hiram used to wear. Suddenly she sprang up, and as her ocean of black hair rolled down in ripples to one side, she threw up one beautiful white arm, and said: 'The dear boys, if I only had the governing of them all! Ah! I tell you I would captain them gloriously up to manhood! I have heart enough for all who suffer, for all who fail to get their rights; and the greatest of human rights is to attain the fullest development of every capacity. Heart!! If giving a kiss with all my heart and soul to any youth living, would be a memory of joy to him for years, would lead him on like a light, and be a sweet memory in sorrow, I would give it: freely as a cup of water to the parched pilgrim. Freely! Yes, to thousands on thousands. 'I mean it.''

Oh! that you could have seen the tears rise in her great black eyes. Or how beautiful Nella was when she said this. Wild, and strange, and inspired, as though she saw far in advance some beautiful solemn coming promise, too great for words. Then graceful as a cloud she sank down into the chair, and covered her forehead with her hands. And there was not one present who did not regard her with respect and love. She is a wonder, this Nella. One who in stormy times would be one of the women of the Nation and of History.

But it was not long before all the good folks had subsided into the old calm. The girls went on working: there was the old occasional snip of scissors and bump of worsted balls as they run over the floor; and as there is considerable Liberty Hall in our circle, I lit a segar, and rolling back into the big chair, (such a giant old nest of elastic softness you never did,) I began to think.

First I turned to what Nella had been saying of the small amount of care the world's genius takes of the growing generation, just at the time when it needs it most.

Then what a raft of things—here I made a short discursion off, trying to recal a story I once heard of a nigger preacher, who was also a boatman, and who exhorted his hearers to flee frum de raft to come—de great big raft all on fiah dat'll smash yer boats and burn 'em up—glory!

Then I came up to time again, remembering what the world didn't care for, and what a wholesale careless, head-over-heels way it has of caring for what it does attend to, and crack up and idolize. There's history for instance. I'm not smart—wish I was—but one thing don't humbug me, and that's the fashion people teach the boys history.

'All the individuals on our side, in all great times, were all saints. I don't believe it,' I spoke aloud.

'I wouldn't believe it, Mr. Sloper,' said Nella, smiling. 'Every revolution had some heroes in it and some fools.'

'A great many of every body, I shouldn't wonder,' I replied. 'Some of the cream and a great deal of skim. Lots of notional people, such as turn Mormons; lots of small-pattern folk, who do the loud talk for their corner-grocery; any quantity of owly follows, who've got hold of a Tom Paine or a Volney, and nothing much else—the same sort who get moony over tracts or perpetual motion. We lose sight of them, though. Yet they make up an immense lot of the rank and file in all great carryings-on which have a new idea in the middle.'

'There was a canaille on both sides in the great Protestant Reformation,' said Nella.

('French for tag-rag and bob-tail,' quoth Hiram.)

'And I suppose that even the Christians of the first age had one.'

'Bet your Cashmere on that,' quoth Sam. 'But you mustn't say it.'

'Mustn't say the truth?' I replied. 'Was the American Revolution a lie, because it had Arnolds, and Tories, and all sorts of scallawags?'

'Come,' said Nella, 'this puts me in mind of something. I've got in my desk the queerest poem! It's on this subject. It tries to show, if I remember right, that even in a time which we always think of as being without low and vulgar people, there were probably some who went into ignorant extremes and abused every thing. Sam, suppose you read it.'

And in a few minutes she produced the document. It had been given to a friend of hers by the editor of the Family Pudding, who couldn't quite make any thing out of it, except that the style was inelegant and the moral obscure, and who had therefore indorsed it as 'rejected.'

And turning himself round, so as to face the great multitude, Sam began:

The Legend of Crispin.

BY MEISTER KARL.

When the Romans, the never-to-be-forgotten Romans—
Romans, Roman citizens, S. P. Q. R.—
Travelled out of Pompeii,
Pompeii!
When Mount Vesuvius was pouring down her lava,
Dust—Ashes—Scoria,
Ruin, Desolation,
Eternal Misery!
Fire-works, Annihilation,
And Things.

They left a Sentry standing at the door,
They did.
Citizens went rushing past him,
Rushing like hurlycanes,
Like hydrants,
Like rifle-bullets on their travels,
Carrying baggage—
Some of it marked 'Lucius Sempronius,'
Some of it 'Drusilla.'
Band-boxes, inscribed with the nomina of Marcia Messalina;
The trunks of Flavius Gracchus,
The bronzes of Spurius,
The Elephantine books of Laufella,
Of Ægle, Lalage, Chione, Dione, Clodia,
Sulpitia, Lais, Bassa,
And the traps of all that fast crowd,
The jolly, half-Greek Romans of that Blue-Sea town.
It was a fast party, and no mistake;
Used to cutting up high old didoes,
Going in on Falernian,
Nunc pede libero,
Myrrhine cups, Serican mantles, beautiful slaves,
Harp and psaltery, kisses and wine, alma Venus!
Live and love, you beauty—Beauty is Divine!
Go it, girls—go it while you're young!
Sic vita—hodie nobis.
Disce bone clerice virgines amare,
Quare sciunt dulcia oscula prestare.
Juventutem floridam tuum conservare,
Et cetera.
Now they ran, shrieking, bewildered, pale-white,
Scared to fits—
Poor, pretty, little unfortunate devils,
Having a hard old time of it:
While a newly-escaped convict, a fellow named Crispin,
Who was to have been thrown to the lions in the circus,
But who had got out of his cage and feliciter evasit
Just escaped martyrdom and canonization,
Stood on a dung-hill, preaching Millerism
To the unfortunate Pompeians.
'Sarves yer right,' quoth he,
In uncommonly bad Latin. He was a Thracian shoe-maker!
'Sarves yer right—
Dives eritis—you used to be rich as blazes,
Fat and sarcy—every thing but ragged,
Dern you! Now things is workin'—
O Domine Deus! an't I glad!
Now you're all goin to thunder
Along with yer blamed old gods and goddesses,
Jupiter Jovis, Mars, Apollo!
Oh! git ëout!
Diana! Talk about her bein' decent!
Shaw!
Law bless your soul! she an't no better than she should be.
Juno! she was a nice lot, she was I don't think:
Didn't marry her brother nor nothin', I spose!
Hercules! There's a pretty character now, to make a god of!
Why, he never was nothing better'n a sort of sporting man:
Used to go boxin' rëound in a low way,
An' killin' things.
Worship him! I'd as soon worship an old chaw tobacco:
Fact! Just as live's not.
Mercury!
Sounds well, don't it, to be prayin' to him?
Shows yer derned thieves any how, to think of such a thing.
Why, he's nothin' but a pick-pocket,
A common burgular; a hoss-stealer;
A fellow who shoves the queer and buzzes blokes, as they say in their low slang.
That's what he is. Put that in your pipe and smoke it!
'Fore I'd be seen in his temple, I'd go worship Cloacina. Fact!
That's what I'd do.
Oh! they're a putty set—these divinities of yourn:
Minervy, for instance. She don't know nothin',
She an't o' no account. She's a humbug.
Why, I know a gal, Paula Innocentia; lives round by the Forum; sells slop.
Kin read the 'Pistle to the Romans right strut through—
Well she can. That's more'n Minervy ever did.
Then, there's Neptune! Now I arsk you as reas'nable men,
Don't you consider him as an old blower—a regular gas-bag.
Feller citizens: I arsk you to argy this point temperately and soberly, without usin' no aggravatin language.
Don't you think a man must be a blarsted old fool to believe in any such narsty stuff as this beastly my-thology of yourn?
Shaw! There an't no use talkin',
It's all a dead cock in the pit, the hull of this Olympus:
I don't say nothin agin Pluto, however,
(Only you ought to call him Satan by rights.)
Some of you'll find out mighty soon, I calculate, whether he's a smellin' rëound or not.
Rather!
Oh! go 'long with you. Sho-o-o-o!
Yeu narsty, indecent, leëwd, unproper critters!
Yeu miserable coots.
Fellers with about half the interlect of a common-sized shad,
Yeu goneys. Ya—ya—yap—yap—BOO!
Yeu don't have an imparticularly hard time on 't. Sa-ay!
Layin' off on triclinia, drinkin' Falernian out 'er pocula, and snake-handled Etruskin calices,
Serpans in patera Myronis arte,
To the health of Venus!
Ea-au-au-a'a'a'h! You make me sick!
Venus!!
Bibis venenum, you drink serpent pison and no mistake under them 'ere circumstances.
Venus! Sh-aw!
She 's just the filthiest....
....dern'dest....
....ugh—ugh!'
(Here he grew black in the face with howling and spitting.)
'Beautiful indeed! I hate beauty. Blarst it!
'Tan't moral. I'd rather see the lousiest old slave a-goin',
Than all the clean-washed beauty of all Lesbos,
Corinth, Athens, Rhodes,
Or any other man.
Look-a-here, you goneys! There's a statue of Venus now:
Mighty putty—an't it? Vide, dico, vobis!
Here's a big pavin'-stun. I'm a-goin' to smash her nose in.
I'll spile some of your pretty for you—mœcha damnata!
You carn't do nothin' to one of the Chosen, you know!
Here goes at her! Rip! snap!—one, two, three!'
And it flew from his hands. The multitude, in terror,
Paused in their flight, shocked at the sacrilege,
Waiting the wrath of the foam-white-limbed Goddess
Aphrodite, eternal daughter of sun-shine,
Of the blue-sea and beauty infinite.
Was it the accursed stone which struck the features
Chiselled by Phidias or Scopas?
Was it the shock of the earthquake?
But as the mountain gave a roar tremendous,
As though all Orcus had burst loose on earth,
And in a flash, as of all Jove's lightning,
Down fell the marble queen of loveliness,
Crushing to kindred dirt, in one foul mass,
Crispin the Scoffer. Lo! the gods are just!

'That's a rather Remarkable,' quoth Sam, as he wound up.

('How well you read!' exclaimed four voices at once.)

'It's a great pity!' said Amelia, 'that he broke that beautiful statue. How well it would have looked, Mace, on that pedestal in the corner of the library. I do wish you d buy something to put on it. It looks so empty. I saw a lovely bronze Psyche at Haughwout's the other——'

'Well,' said I, 'I 'spose I must hoe out my row and finish the furnishing: so send her up!'

'And the poem, Nella?'

'Lo! the gods are just,' replied Nella, repeating the last line. Ah! I hope so. I hope that no form of beauty which man ever looked at with love, ever did die, or ever will. I should think that something were wrong if I really believed that that statue which Crispin broke will never be seen again in all eternity by me. No; every lovely face and flower and breath of music lives somewhere, as a grain lies in the earth waiting for the spring. Nature has the germ and the secret: all will rise again more beautiful than ever.'

[LIVING ALONE.]

BY HENRY P. LELAND.

Silent he sat in the forest shade,
Silent, but not alone—
He and his hound and the unseen form
Of one then dead and gone.
Not dead, while she lives in his throbbing heart:
Not gone, while her dark eyes make him start:
Living alone!

Heartless the trees, soulless the rocks,
Nothing but wood and stones?
No sympathy here for sorrowful hearts,
No voices with gentle tones?
Not heartless the forest while joy it yields!
Not soulless the rock that a sad heart shields!
Living alone!

Silent he walked in the cloudless night,
Her eyes the stars above;
Her voice in the thrilling wind from the south;
His world—her world of love!—
Love, that will live and the loved one gone;
Love, that will live and forever live on—
Living alone!

Heart of the forest, and soul of the rock,
Star eyes in heaven that gleam,
Voice of the wind that thrilled his heart,
And are ye all a dream?
Dream! then let him through life dream on.
Dream! yes, Dream till life is gone!
Living alone!

[THE TAXIDERMIST.]

BY FITZ-HUGH LUDLOW.

I.—THE OLD MAID'S CHAPTER.

——'Die, if dying I may give
Life to one who asks to live,
And more nearly,
Dying thus, resemble thee!'

'Ciel! Zat is ze true heroique! Zat is ze very far finest ting in all ze literature anglaise! Zere have not been made vun more sublime poesie by your immortel Villiams Shakyspeare! Glorieux! Vat a grandeur moral of ze woman who vill vonce die for her love!'

'Once? I knew a woman who died thrice for hers.'

The enthusiastic admirer of Longfellow was a French Professor in one of our American Colleges, by name Gautier Bonenfant. The person who met his panegyric with such a strange response, was Orloff Ruricson, by birth a Swede, by adoption a New-Yorker, and by trade the proprietor of a Natural History Museum. These two, with myself, were sitting on the west piazza of the little inn at Kaaterskill Falls. All of us hard-working men in the hard-working season; but on this tenth day of July, eighteen hundred and fifty-nine, soaking the dust out of our brains in a bath of sunlight and mountain air, forgetting in company that life was not all one sweet vacation.

Bonenfant and I looked at Ruricson with puzzled faces. Though a good fellow and a wisely humorous one, he seldom said any thing whose cleverness lay in a double-entendre.

'Pray, who is that remarkable woman?' said I.

'It is my wife,' replied Orloff Ruricson soberly.

'And she die, von, two, tree time?' asked Bonenfant, with uplifted eye-brows.

'And she died three times for her love,' repeated Orloff Ruricson.

'Perhaps you would have no objection to tell us exactly what you mean?' said I.

'None at all, to you two. With this proviso. I know that you, John Tryon, write for the magazines. For aught I know, Bonenfant here, may be a correspondent of the Constitutionnel.'

'Mais non! I am ze mose red of Red Republican!'

'Perhaps you are Ledru Rollin, then, travelling in disguise to hunt materials for a book. At any rate, I must exact of both of you a promise, that if a single lineament of the story I am going to relate, ever gets into print through your agency, it shall be represented as fictitious, and under assumed names.'

'C'est fait!'

'It's a bargain!'

'You see, I live by my Museum. And if the public once suspected that I was a visionary man, the press and the pulpit and general opinion would run me down immediately. I should be accused of denying the originality of the human race inferentially, through my orang-outang; of teaching lessons of maternal infidelity through my stuffed ostrich; of seducing youth into a seafaring life by my preserved whale. No more schools, at half-price on Saturday afternoon, accompanied by their principal; no more favorable notices by editors, 'who have been with their families,' for you, Orloff Ruricson!

'And what I am going to tell you will seem visionary. Even to you. Nevertheless, it is as real as any of the hardest facts in my daily life. Take my solemn word for it.

'When I was ten years old, my parents emigrated from Sweden to this country. At the age of twelve, I lost my father. At thirteen, I was apprenticed to a man who stuffed birds in Dutch-street. At fourteen, I was motherless. At twenty, my term was out, and I began to think of setting up as a taxidermist on my own hook. There! The Biographical Dictionary can't beat that summary of ten years, for compactness!

'I made a very liberal offer to my master; in fact, proposed to take him into partnership. He nobly refused to avail himself of my generosity. Bird-stuffing, even in New-York, was not a very lucrative business, and would hardly support two, he suggested. What did I think of one of the river towns? Albany, or Hudson, or Poughkeepsie, for instance? I did not tell him what; but in reality, I thought so little of them, that within ten days after my indenture was cancelled, I had taken a little nook in the Bowery, with window enough to show off three blue-jays, a chameleon, and a very young wild-cat, (whose domesticity I may, at this day, acknowledge to have been slandered by that name,) and sufficient door to display the inscription: 'Orloff Ruricson, Taxidermist and Aviarian Professor.' Even at that day, you see, Bonenfant, we impostors had begun to steal your literary title.'

'Sacrebleu! I do very moshe vish zat ze only ting ze plenty humbug professors now-a-days stuff vas ze birds!'

'Well, I may have stuffed the public a little, too. At any rate, they patronized me far better than I had any reason to expect. By the time I was of age, I had moved my business one door farther up, to a shop treble the size of the first; and instead of sleeping under and eating on top of my show-case, as I began, I occupied lodgings with a respectable cutler's widow, second-story front of a brick house on Third Avenue, and came down to my store every morning at nine o'clock, like any wholesale grocer.

'I had been installed in my comfortable quarters only six weeks, when a new lodger came to the boarding-house. The first thing that I knew of it, was my beholding, directly opposite me at a Sunday dinner, the most preternaturally homely face I had ever seen. As I took my seat, and opened my napkin, the cutler's widow inclined her head in the direction of the apparition, and uttered the words: 'Miss Brentnall.' I cast a glance and a bow in the same quarter, pronouncing the name after her. 'Mr. Ruricson,' said the landlady laconically, and nodded toward me. 'Mr. Ruricson,' repeated the miracle of plainness, in a voice so sweet that I could not rid myself of the impression that it must be the ventriloquism of some one else. At the same moment she smiled. The smile was as incongruous with the face as the voice; and for that glancing half-minute, Miss Brentnall was a dozen shades more endurable.

'Cruikshank, acting as collaborator with Salvator Rosa, would fall short of any thing more ambitious than a slight sketch of the woman's unearthly homeliness. I dare hardly attempt describing her in words, but for your sake, let me try.

'Her hair was like Bonenfant's Republicanism, 'the most red of red,' but without the usual characteristic of that color, silky fineness. In fact, unless you have been through a New-England corn-field in the dog-days, and noticed the very crispest of all the crisp tassels which a brazen sun has been at work baking for the month previous; unless you have seen some peculiarly unsheltered specimen, to the eye like dried blood, and to the fingers like dust and ashes, you cannot imagine the impression produced by Miss Brentnall's hair. I really trembled lest our awkward waiter's sleeve should touch it, in serving the vegetables, and send it crumbling from her head in the form of a crimson powder. Her forehead was in every respect immense—high, broad, and protuberant enough for the tallest man who ever prided himself on his intellect; still, it might have been pardoned, if it had been fair withal, instead of sallow, wrinkled and freckled. A nose, whose only excuse for its mammoth maturity of size and its Spitzenberg depth of color, lay in the fact that it was exposed to the torrid glare of the tresses, depended, like the nest of the hanging-bird, between a pair of ferrety eyes, which seemed mere pen-knife gashes in a piece of red morocco. At that day, I could not swear to the pupils; but a profane man of sensitive mind, might have sworn at them, for they seemed to be a damp—not a swimming but a soaked damp—pale blue. Flanking the nose, imagine an inch and a half on either side, of dingy parchment, stretched almost to tearing, and you will get the general idea of the sides of Miss Brentnall's face; I will not travesty the word 'cheeks,' by calling them that. Below the nose, a mouth which would have been deformedly small for a child two weeks old; below that, a chin which hardly showed at all in front, and, taking a side view, seemed only an eccentric protraction of the scraggy neck to which it was attached. Now for the figure. High, stooping shoulders; a long, flat, narrow, mannish waist; the lower extremities immoderately short; immense feet: group these in one person, and you have a form to which I know only two parallels out of the world of nightmare, a German wooden doll, and Miss Brentnall.'

'Diable de laideur! You see zat viz your own eyes?'

'Yes, Bonenfant.'

'And yet you be yourself not vare ugly, after all!'

'So I have heard, Bonenfant. You will be still more surprised to feel that this is the case, when you know that I lodged in the same house with Miss Brentnall a whole year. Indeed, she occupied the very next room to me. I was second-story front, she second-story back, during all that time; and do you know that I became very well acquainted with her?'

'Ah! It is pos-sible for a gentleman to be vare polite to vare ugly woman!'

'Yes, but from preference, I mean. I could shut my eyes, and hear her voice, or open them at the transient moment when she was smiling, and forget that she was homely at all. I discovered that she was the only remnant of a large family: that awakened my pity. In addition, that she was very well-informed, thought and conversed well: that aroused my respect. And when, in spite of a face and figure which by poetic justice should have belonged to Sin itself, I perceived that she had the kindest of hearts, and the most delicate of sensibilities, I am not ashamed to confess that I soon became attached to her.'

'Attach? You have fall in love viz zat e-scary-crow? You have marri-ed her?'

'Hear me through, Bonenfant, and you will find out. In the present instance, I mean, by the word 'attached,' nothing but a pure Platonic friendship. I do not make acquaintances easily. I visited nobody in New-York at that time. There was no one whose cheerful fireside I could make my own for an evening; and my natural tastes, to say nothing of any other feeling, kept me away from drinking-saloons. Moreover, I had an insatiate longing to make something of myself. I wanted the means for buying books, for travelling, for putting myself into what I considered good society. Accordingly, I often brought home, at evening, the specimens I had been working upon all day, and continued my labors long into the night. While I was busily engaged with the knife or the needle, the gentlest little tap would come at the door, so gentle, so unlike any other sound, that, however absorbed I might be, I always heard it, knew it was Miss Brentnall, and said: 'Walk in!' So, in hopped that little eighth world-wonder of ugliness, now with an orange for my supper, now with some pretty ornithological engraving, of which, by the merest chance, she always had a duplicate copy, and whose effect she would like to see on my wall. When she went out, she always forgot to take it with her; and in a few months, my room, through such like little kindnesses, became quite a portrait-gallery of celebrated birds. Sometimes, Miss Brentnall spent the whole evening with me. On such occasions, it was her greatest delight to stand by my table, and see some poor, mussed, shrivelled lark or Canary grow plump and saucy again, through the transformations of my art. She called it 'bird-resurrection.' For an hour at a time, she would stay close at my elbow, perfectly quiet, holding a pair of glass eyes in her hand. When I asked for one of them, she gave it to me with all the happiness of a helpful child; and, when at last both eyes were fixed in the specimen, I have seen her clap her hands, and jump up and down. In process of time, she became of real assistance to me. So apt a mind had she, that from merely witnessing my methods, she learned to stuff birds herself; and one evening, when I called 'come in,' to the well-known tap, I was surprised by seeing a parrot in her hands, prepared and mounted almost as well as I could have done it myself. It was a little present to the Professor, she said: she had been at work upon it for the last two days. From that time, her voluntary services were in my constant employ, whenever I worked of evenings.

'I was not so ungallant, however, as to let Miss Brentnall do all the visiting. Whenever a lazy fit took me, and I could not have worked, or studied, or walked, if I had been offered ten dollars an hour for those exertions, I always forestalled her coming to my room by going to hers. She had a large rocking-chair, which always seemed to run up to the fire-place of its own accord, and hold out its arms for me, the moment I came in. I would drop into that, shut my eyes, and say, 'Please talk to me,' or, 'Please read to me,' with as much abandonment as if I were speaking to my own mother. It never felt like exacting impertinent demands of a stranger, I was so marvellously at my ease in Miss Brentnall's room.'

'Ze man of mose mauvaise honte be not embarrass, I have observe, viz ze vare ugly lady.'

'I don't think it was that, Bonenfant. I used to ask myself if it might not be. But I always came to the conclusion that I should feel the same, were Miss Brentnall the most beautiful person in the world. There was something in her mind, especially as expressed in voice and style of talking, that lulled me when I was most irritable, that lifted the weight of self and pride quite off me for the time being. I knew that we both liked to be together; that was enough: I did not care, indeed I never once thought, how we either of us seemed to any one else.

'I could not help being aware that the other boarders talked about us. Having a pair of tolerably good ears, likewise of eyes, it was difficult not to know that old Mrs. Flitch, my landlady's half-sister, smelt a match in my intimacy with Miss Brentnall; that she considered it ill-advised, on the ground that I was twenty-one, and the lady at least forty; that she could imagine no possible motive in my mind, except a view to Miss Brentnall's snug little property; that, as a consequence of these premises, she regarded one of us a very mean knave, and the other a doting fool. It was difficult not to understand the meaning of Miss Simmons, an acid cotemporary of Miss Brentnall's, possessing all her chances of celibacy, half her homeliness, and one-thousandth of her mind, when, as I took my seat next her at the breakfast-table, she asked me, with a pretty simper, if I had spent the last evening as pleasantly as usual. It was difficult to avoid seeing the gentlemen wink at each other when they passed us talking together in the entry: it was also difficult, as I perceive from Bonenfant's face he would like to suggest, not to pull their noses for it; but reflection suggested the absurdity of such a course. This is one of the few objections I have to your native, and my adopted country, Tryon, that notwithstanding the great benefit which results from that intimacy between a man and a woman, in which each is mere friend, and neither present nor expectant lover, our society will not hear of such a thing, without making indelicate reference to marriage. Still, I suppose, they would have talked about us, any where.

'Miss Brentnall knew this as well as I, and like me, never gave it a thought after the momentary demonstration which recalled it. We passed one whole delightful year together in the Third Avenue boarding-house. I felt my own mind growing, becoming richer in all sorts of knowledge, freer and clearer in every field of thinking, with each succeeding day. And as for Miss Brentnall, she was so kind as to say, and I knew she sincerely meant it, that to her, all lonely in the world, our friendship was in all respects inestimable. At the end of the year, Miss Brentnall was taken ill. For the first few days, neither she nor I felt any serious alarm with reference to her case. The doctor pronounced it a mild type of typhoid fever. It proceeded, so he said to me in private, more from mental causes than any tangible physical one. Had she been unfortunate in any way? he asked me. I could only reply that, as her intimate friend, I was unaware of the fact. Probably she read late, then, he suggested. I said that might be. At all events, her mind had been very much overtaxed: what she needed was perfect quiet, good nursing, and as little medicine as possible. Upon his giving me this view of the case, I sought out the most faithful, judicious woman within reach, and hired her on Miss Brentnall's behalf, to stay by her bedside night and day. My own income, from the little shop in the Bowery, was now so fair, that I felt able to repay, in some measure, the debt of gratitude I owed my kind friend for her many contributions to the walls of my lonely room. Accordingly, whenever I lighted on any new engraving or book of art, or any embellishment to a sick-chamber, which seemed likely to attract without fatiguing a strained mind, I brought it up to her in the evening. If I had not been in her debt already, I should have been a thousand times repaid for these little evidences of friendship, by the appreciative delight with which the childlike woman talked of them, for their own sake, and the grateful enthusiasm she bestowed upon them for mine.

'The opportunity to be kind and thoughtful was very short. At the end of the third week, the doctor gravely told me that typhus pneumonia was becoming alarmingly prevalent in New-York, and that Miss Brentnall's disease had taken that form. Furthermore, that unless some change for the better occurred in the course of the next twenty-four hours, she would die.

'I heard this piece of news without the least outward sign of sorrow. It did not seem possible to me that I could lose this best, kindest friend I had in the world. You will think the reason whimsical perhaps; but, merely because she was not beautiful, I felt as if she would not be taken away from me. 'Only the beautiful die, only the beautiful,' I kept saying to myself all day, in the shop or at the work-table. In the evening, when I came back to the house, I found that two things had occurred. Miss Brentnall's pulse had become feebler, and she did not seem to me so plain as before. Then, for the first time, I began to be afraid.

'In the morning, the doctor took me into the entry, and told me that his patient might live till mid-night, but not longer. Would I take the painful office of breaking the intelligence to her? 'Yes,' I replied, hardly knowing what I said.

'I entered the sick-room. As I came toward the bed, Miss Brentnall opened her eyes and smiled.

''Martha,' said she, in a feeble voice, 'you may go down-stairs, and get me some arrow-root.'

'As soon as the nurse had shut the door behind her, Miss Brentnall continued:

''I shall be dead in a few hours, Orloff. I have something to say to you alone. I am sorry to go away from you. Very sorry. You have been kind to me, Orloff. More than any body else in the world.'

'I took Miss Brentnall's poor, parched hand, but could not answer. 'Orloff—kind as you are to me—in the bottom of your heart, you know that I have the most repulsive face you ever saw. Say yes, Orloff. You do know it. I have been sure of it, since I was a little girl, six years old, thirty-four years ago, yesterday. I was never sorry for it, more than a moment at a time, until a year ago. And now you may tell me you see it, without hurting me at all. Pride is past. Say that my face is the most unlovely in the world. Say it to please me.'

'I saw she was in deep earnest, and I brought myself to answer for her sake:

''Well. But your soul is the most lovely.'

''I thank you for saying it, Orloff. And now, now that pride is past, I may tell you something which life would hide forever, but death wrings out of my very soul. You have been a friend to me, a dear, kind friend, Orloff; but nothing more. I have been something else to you. A dying woman may say it. I have loved you.'

'For a minute we were both silent, and then Miss Brentnall resumed: 'Passionately, passionately. Without once deluding myself; without once dreaming that there was a shadow of hope. Had you been blind; had you been deaf; so that you could never have seen what I am, or heard a word of it from other lips; even had you, under these circumstances, loved me, I would have felt it base to give you, in exchange for yourself, such a thing as I. But you did see, you did hear, and I knew that I loved impossibly. You came in, now, to tell me that I would not live till to-morrow, did you not, Orloff?'

''I meant to, if I could,' was my reply.

''I had a dream just before you came in. I thought I saw you, and you told me so. Do you know what a strange thing happened, just as you seemed speaking? But you are not angry with me, for what I have said already?'

''Angry? My dear friend, no!' said I instantly.

''The strange thing was this. As you spoke, my deformed face fell off like a veil, and my body, like a cloak, was lifted from me. At the same moment, I had the power of being outside of myself, of looking down on myself, and I was—very beautiful. I was not proud, but I was glad. I drank in a whole fountain of peace at every breath. At that instant, I began to float farther and farther from you; but as I went, I heard, oh! such a sweet voice! saying: 'Again! Again! You shall meet again!' As you came into the room, I awoke. And I have dared to uncover my whole soul to you, Orloff Ruricson, because those words are still in my ears. We shall meet again! And when we meet, I shall be beautiful!'

'With all my respect for Miss Brentnall, it was impossible for me not to feel that she was raving. Indeed, from this very belief I took hope. I had seldom heard of cases like hers, in which patients, almost in the very last hour, continued to be delirious. I therefore doubted the doctor's diagnosis, and persuaded myself that, since she had not arrived at the lucid interval preceding death, she was not so near it as he suspected.

'Comforting myself with the assurance that I should see her well again, or at least, that there was no immediate danger, I went down to my shop in the Bowery, leaving orders to send for me immediately, if any change took place in Miss Brentnall.

'After transacting the business of my trade, all day, I came back earlier than usual at evening, greatly depressed in spirits, but without any idea that I had seen my friend for the last time. As I put my latch-key into the door of the boarding-house, it opened. I saw the pale, frightened face of Martha, the nurse. She was just coming out after me. Miss Brentnall was dead.

'And again I was alone in the world.'

II.—THE FLICKER'S CHAPTER.

'There was a quiet funeral where I was the only mourner. There were days of loneliness succeeding, in which it seemed to me that the small isthmus by which I had been for a year attached to my fellow-men, had been suddenly covered by the rising of a dark, cold tide; that I was an islander again, and the only one.

'There was a will to be proved in the Surrogate's Court. Miss Brentnall's nurse and the landlady had witnessed it. I thought this strange at first, remembering what a friend the dead had been to me; but my surprise at not being a witness was soon supplanted by the greater one of being sole legatee.

'There was a monument to be placed over the dead. To every detail of it I attended personally. I remember how heavy even that simple little shaft seemed to me, how much too heavy for a head that had borne so much of heaviness through life. Then I thought of her expression 'bird-resurrection,' of her perfect faith in the coming of better things; and if the monument had been a pyramid, I would have known that it could not press her down.

'It is one of my eccentricities that I fear good-fortune; not bad-fortune, at all. For I have seen so much of it, that it only looks to me like a grimmer kind of father, coming to wake his over-slept son and tell him that unless he leaps from his feather-bed, and that right suddenly, the time for every thing good in life will have gone by. I fear good-fortune, because I am not sure that I shall use it well. It may carry me till it has dwarfed me; I may lie on its breast till I have lost my legs; then whisk! it may slip away from under me and leave me a lame beggar for the rest of my life.

'I resolved, therefore, that I would not touch a farthing of my new property until I had become quite familiar with the idea of owning it. It was all in stocks when I found it. I converted it into real-estate securities, and as fast as my interest came in, deposited it in the bank. Meanwhile, I supported myself well upon the little shop; bought books, and laid something by.

'I was busy one morning at my stuffing-table in the back-room, when the bell over the street-door rang: and running into the front-shop, I found a new customer. He was a private bird-fancier, he told me, and had brought a specimen, which he wished mounted for his cabinet. As he spoke, he slid back the cover from a box which he carried under his arm; and as I looked in, expecting to see a dead bird, a live one hopped out and sat upon my finger.

''I declare that is very curious!' said the gentleman; 'the creature never did such a thing before! I have had it eight months without being able to domesticate it in the slightest. It will not even eat or drink when any body is in the room; yet there it is sitting on your hand.'

'I had never seen such a bird before. It resembled the northern meadow-lark in size and shape; in hue, its wings were like the quail's, its breast ash-color, its tail mottled above, like the wings, and of a delicate canary yellow beneath. But the greatest beauty it possessed was a bright crimson crescent, covering the whole back of the head. 'What is this bird?' said I.

''It is a Flicker,' answered the gentleman. 'It was sent me by a friend living in Florida.'

''Why don't you keep it alive?'

''For the reason I've told you. It's perfectly impossible to tame it. My children and I have tried every means we can think of without success. If we confine it in a cage, it mopes all day and eats nothing; if we let it fly about the room, it sculks under the furniture as soon as we enter; if we take it in our hands, it screams and fights. There is a specimen of the execution it can do in an emergency with that sharp, long bill!'

'And my customer showed me his finger, out of which a strip of flesh an inch long had been gouged as neatly as it could have been done with a razor.

''It is nothing but botheration, that confounded bird!' he continued. 'It does nothing but make muss and litter about the house from morning till night; and for all our troubles, it never repays us with a single chirp. Indeed, I don't believe it has any voice.'

'Just then the Flicker, still sitting on my finger, turned up its big, brown eye to my face and uttered a soft, sweet gurgle, like a musical-glass.

''Good heavens!' exclaimed the gentleman; 'it never did that before!'

''Suppose you let me take it for a month or so,' said I; 'it seems to be fond of me, and perhaps I can tame it. I never felt so little like killing any bird in my life. We may make something of its social qualities yet.'

''Very well,' answered the new customer. 'Keep it for a month. I'll drop in now and then to see how its education is getting on.'

''You may hold me responsible for it, Sir,' I replied; and the gentleman left my shop.

'All day the Flicker staid by me as I worked. Now it perched upon my shoulder, now on my head. At noon, when I opened my basket, it took lunch with me. When I whistled or sang, it listened until it caught the strain, and then put in some odd kind of an accompaniment. The compass and power of its voice was nothing remarkable, but the tone was as sweet as a wood-robin's. I could not be enough astonished with the curious little creature.

'Still, every kind of animal takes to me naturally. I accounted for the previous wildness of the Flicker on the ground of mistaken management in the gentleman who owned it, and as a matter of professional pride, determined to make something of the bird, were it only to show, like your Sam Patch, Tryon, that some things can be done as well as others. When I went home in the evening I took the Flicker with me, and made it a nest in an old cigar-box on my mantel-piece.

'The next morning, when I awoke, the bird was perched above me on the scroll of the head-board! Again I carried it down-town with me; again I brought it up in the evening. After that it was my companion every where. You will hardly imagine how it could become better friends with me than it did immediately upon our introduction. Yet our acquaintance grew day by day, and with our acquaintance the little being's intelligence. It had not been with me a fortnight before it knew its name. You may think it curious, perhaps unfeeling, but you know it was my only friend in the world, and in memory of the one who had lately held that place, I called it 'Brenta.'

''Brenta!' I would say as I sat before my grate in the evening, and wherever the little creature might be, it would come flying to me with a joyful chirp, light on my finger, dance on the hearth-rug, eat out of my hand, or go through the pantomime of various emotions I had taught it. If I said, 'Be angry, Brenta,' it would scream, flap its wings, and fight the legs of the chair. 'Be sorry, Brenta,' and it would droop its little head, cower against my breast, and utter notes as plaintive as a tired child's.

'By the time the month was up, it could do almost any thing but talk. Its owner, who, to his great delight, had paid it several visits during the progress of its education, now came to take it home.

''I have become very much attached to the little thing,' said I; 'won't you let me buy it of you?'

''You should have asked me that when I first brought it,' was his answer. 'You have made it too valuable for me to part with now. To show you how much I think it is worth, here is a ten-dollar piece for your services.'

'I took the money, feeling very much as if I were receiving the price of treason. 'If you ever change your mind,' said I, 'remember that I am always ready with a generous bid.'

'When we came to look for the Flicker, it was nowhere to be found. I could not believe it possible that it had heard and understood our conversation, but other hypothesis to account for its disappearance was not at hand. After hunting every nook and corner of the shop, I forced myself into the traitorous expedient of luring it by my own voice. 'Brenta!' I called, and the poor creature instantly hopped out of my coat-pocket, climbed up to my shoulder, and nestled against my cheek.

''The little rascal!' exclaimed the gentleman.

'I could willingly have knocked him down! It was not until I had undertaken the business with my own hands that we could get the Flicker into the cage which the gentleman had brought with him. Even then, the poor thing continued clinging to my finger with claws which had to be loosened by force, and went out of my shop-door screaming piteously and beating itself against the bars of the cage.

'I had no heart for any thing the rest of the day. At night my room seemed lonelier than a dungeon. The very next morning, the owner of the bird came back with it in a terrible passion.

''You have been teaching the thing tricks!' was his first exclamation.

''To be sure, said I mildly. 'Wasn't that what you wished me to do?'

''Wished you to do?' To mope, and wail, and lie on the carpet like a dead chicken? Never to sing a note or eat a morsel? To peck at the hands that brought food, and—and——'

''I am sure I cannot help it, Sir, if the bird has become attached to me, and mourns when away.'

''You've taught the creature to do it! Look at this finger, will you! another piece taken clean out of it! Piece, I say!—steak, I mean! The bird's a regular butcher! Here, kill the creature directly, and have it stuffed for my cabinet by this day week.'

'And as he set down the cage on the counter, the Flicker, with a joyful cry, jumped to the wicker-door, and tried to pick a way out to me by its beak.

''There! you see what you've done! Why don't the wretch act so to me?'

''I really can't say, Sir. Perhaps because I've had a great deal to do with birds, and naturally know how to manage them.'

''Well, I don't care. Stuff the thing, and I shall be able to manage it then myself.'

''May I make you a repetition of my offer? If you haven't a toucan in your collection, there is a very fine one I'll give you for the Flicker, stuffed only last Saturday. Here's a young pelican—a still rarer bird. Or how would you like a flamingo?'

''Got 'em all,' replied the gentleman curtly. 'And if I hadn't, I count the Flicker. Kill the thing, I say, and stuff it.'

'Just then the bird cast on me a glance as imploring as ever looked out of human eye. For a thousand dollars I could not have done the wrong.

''Really, Sir,' said I, 'I prefer not to take the job. I am very much attached to your bird. I cannot bear to kill it.'

'''Pon my soul!' he exclaimed, 'if that isn't pretty for a taxidermist! I should suppose, to hear you talk, that you would faint at the sight of a dead sparrow! Well, you can get your courage up to stuff the bird, I suppose? As for the killing, I'll do that myself.'

'As the man said this, he thrust his hand into the cage, and caught the Flicker by the wing. With a sharp cry, his victim struck him again on the finger, enraging him more than ever. He opened his pen-knife, pulled the bird out, drew the blade across its throat, and out of the cruel slash there poured, mingling with the blood, a bitter cry, like a woman's. I heard it, and every drop of my own blood returned to my heart. He let the bird drop upon the counter: it gave one hop, tumbled over in my hand, and its eye-lids slid shut.

''This day week, remember,' said the man, and went out of the shop, wiping his knife.

'I took up the bird, laid it in my neck, and, I am not ashamed to say, cried over it.

'There are a good many things which may happen between now and this day week. I am not one of those people who regard every misfortune that occurs to an enemy the judgment of Heaven in their behalf. But I must say, that the event which occurred before that man's week was out, always seemed to me a direct blow from Nemesis. He was a very passionate fellow; subject to temporary fits of insanity. One of them came on in the morning while he was shaving, and he cut his own throat as he had the Flicker's.

'When his estate was settled, nobody thought of the bird. I inclosed the ten dollars he had given me for its education in an anonymous note to his executors, simply stating that my conscience demanded it; and having thus quieted that organ, kept the Flicker for myself. With a daguerreotype of Miss Brentnall's, found among a parcel of papers labelled, 'To be burned up,' and upon which alone, of all the parcel, I could not persuade myself to execute her will, I put the stuffed bird by. When I was too lonely to dare to be utterly alone, I went to the trunk, where they were preserved and looked at them.

III.—THE MARMOSET'S CHAPTER.

After the loss of my second only friend, a painful change came over me. I had risen from the shock of Miss Brentnall's death with an elasticity which surprised even myself. Partly for the reason that my constitution was better by several less months of anxiety, grief, and application to business. Partly because I felt assured that, as she said, we should some time or other meet again.

'When the Flicker died, I felt that this only thing hitherto left to love me, could never reäppear. The kind heart of the woman would beat again; the kind heart of the bird no more forever. And strangely enough, the whole sorrow that I had passed through for Miss Brentnall's loss revived, and I went about my day's work bearing the weight of a two-fold melancholy.

'The first thing that the bird-fancying public knew—indeed almost the first thing I knew myself, so abstracted, so moody was I—a paragraph appeared in the morning papers, to the effect that the celebrated Taxidermist and Aviarian Professor, Orloff Ruricson, was about to close his business, and make a voyage to Europe, Asia and Africa, from which parts he hoped to return in two or three years, with a large and interesting collection of rare animals, to establish a Natural History Museum.

'I had caused the appearance of this notice myself; but when I read it, felt quite as surprised by it as any body. In nerve and mind I was so worn out, that although thoroughly resolved to make the move, the consolidation of the purpose into such a fixed form shocked me.

'When the novelty of the idea passed off, I disposed of all my stock to various amateurs who knew me and had every disposition to help me by paying large prices. I put the thirty thousand dollars I was now worth into such a shape that I could get its increase in regular remittances; packed the bird, the daguerreotype, and a small wardrobe, and took passage by barque for Genoa.

'At sun-rise one Monday morning, the barque's yawl took me out to her anchorage. As I went up the ladder at the side, I heard an opera-air playing on board, and when I reached the deck, the first thing that met my eyes was an Italian grinder, with his organ and monkey.

''Is that man going the voyage with us?' I asked the captain.

''Yes, Sir,' he replied; 'but he shan't play without permission after we get to sea. He's a Genoese, who has made enough in this country to keep a fruit-stall in his own, and so he's going home.'

'Home! He had a home, and was going to it! I would have handed him my bank-book—taken his monkey and organ—to be able to say that.

'As the tug hitched fast to us and we began walking down toward the Narrows, I crossed to the other side of the ship, that I might take a look at the fortunate man.

'Certainly, I said to myself, Fortune is blind. He had a home; but he was one of the most ill-favored rascals I ever laid my eyes on. No body would have taken him for a Genoese—the New-Englander of Italy—rather for a Romanesque cut-throat, or a brigand of the mountain, who had found his stiletto or his carbine good for only the slowest kind of shilling and taken to the nimble six-pence of the hand-organ, on the principle that honesty was the best policy. You have seen a thousand pen-and-pencil pictures of the fellow, and need no description of him from me.

'As I stood beside him at the bulwarks, his monkey leapt upon me.

''Pardon, good gentleman,' said the Italian with an abject smirk, and gave a jerk to the chain that brought back the little animal flying.

''Never mind that,' said I; 'let him come to me. I am fond of monkeys: I would like to look at him.'

''As it pleases, then,' replied the Italian, with another smirk, and loosed the chain again. 'Go, Beppo!'

'Beppo needed no command, but jumped instantly upon my arm and laid his cheek upon my bosom. As I patted his head, I examined him curiously, and found him the most beautiful little monkey in the world. A Marmoset, with a great brown, tender eye like a gazelle's; a face which varied its expression constantly without ever degenerating into the brutal leer of the common ape; a winning, confiding mien of head and hand that was human, childlike; and a soft coronal of golden fur around his little skull, that added still more to his baby-like look, giving him the appearance of some mother's favorite, dressed for a walk in a bonnet of down. I don't know how I could have been guilty of the folly of becoming attached to the little fellow, after all the lessons of warning my life had taught me. But I did take a great fancy to him. Never a day passed during the whole voyage, in which he did not get many a tit-bit from my hands. He spent far more of the time with me than with his own master, and before long obeyed me with a hearty good nature, which he never thought of showing toward that musical brigand.

'One sunny afternoon, when we were three weeks out, the captain, the grinder and myself stood upon the forecastle-deck, trying to make out a sail just visible on the horizon ahead of us. As usual, Beppo was cutting his pranks about me. For a moment he would sit demurely on my shoulder and hold his tail to his eye in mimicry of the captain's eye-glass. A second more, and he would be sitting in the fore-top. The next, and he came sliding down a halliard to his old perch. These antics interfered with our look-out, and I put my hand into my pocket to feel for something which might keep him still. Finding neither prune, nor nut, nor string, but only the purse which I always carried there, I drew it out and opened it, to look for a copper. As I committed this incautious act, I saw the eyes of the Italian cast a sidelong, sly glance at the gold that shone there, and I shut the clasp with an uncomfortable sense of having been very silly. At the same moment, he stole away, like a cat, to the fore-stays, and pretended to be more earnestly interested than any of us in the sail.

'The nights grew still warmer and warmer as we sailed on. The cabin became so close, that I ordered the steward to bring my mattress upon deck, and usually slept there under a shawl, unless we had rain.

'I had lain down at about half-past eleven, upon one night in particular, utterly fatigued, sick at heart, despairing. As the tall masts nodded past the stars—the stars rather than the masts seemed moving—and in my heart I believed that even heaven itself was not permanent; that all things flickered and danced, and passed away as earthly hope had passed from my heart; nothing was fixed, certain, and to be striven for. Finally, I only wished to sleep. 'Let me die this temporary death of slumber,' said I; 'there is happiness therein, and therein only.' I was more of a Lord Byron at that instant; more of a moral desperado; less of a Thomas Carlyle, a Goethe, sanguine Yankee, who believes that the best way to get rid of misery is to suffer and work out, if you fall, always to fall on your feet and scramble out, than I had ever been in my life, Messrs. Tryon and Bonenfant! So, said I, let me go to sleep.

'Would you believe it, that confounded little Beppo would not hear of such a thing! Over my face this minute, over my legs the next; now tumbling down on my breast from a line; now, as the sailors say, working Tom Cox's traverse, up one hatchway and down the other, past my side.

'I could not get a wink of sleep. I tossed and I tumbled; I swore and I grumbled. I called Beppo to me, and for the first time without success.