HARRINGTON:
A STORY OF TRUE LOVE.

BY THE AUTHOR OF “WHAT CHEER,” “THE GHOST: A
CHRISTMAS STORY,” “A TALE OF LYNN,” ETC.

“Herein may be seen noble chivalrye, curtosye, humanyte, friendlyenesse, hardyenesse, love, friendshype, cowardyse, murder, hate, vertue and synne. Doo after the good, and leve the evyl, and it shall brynge you to good fame and renomme.”—Sir Thomas Malory: Preface to Morte D’Arthur.

BOSTON:
THAYER & ELDRIDGE,
114 & 116 WASHINGTON STREET.
1860.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1860, by
THAYER & ELDRIDGE,
In the Clerk’s Office of the District Court, of the District of Massachusetts.

W. H. Tinson, Stereotyper.

I DEDICATE
THIS BOOK
TO MY WIFE.

CONTENTS.

HARRINGTON.

PROLOGUE.

I.

As hot a day as ever blazed on the lowlands of Louisiana, blazed once in mid-April on the plantation of Mr. Torwood Lafitte, parish of Avoyelles, in the Red River region. Perhaps it was because the heat was so unseasonable that it seemed as if never, not even in midsummer, had there been so hot a day. One might have been pardoned for imagining that heat not of this world. Mr. William Tassle, overseer to Lafitte, was a profane man, but he might have been considered as only a profane poet aiming at the vivid expression of a mystical dark truth, when, speaking of the day, he said it was as hot as Hell.

It was the Sabbath, but an active fancy, brooding over the general condition of man and nature on Mr. Lafitte’s plantation, might have thought it rather the Devil’s Sabbath than the Sabbath of the Lord. Through the vaporous atmosphere, simmering with the heat, swarming with insect life, and reeking with the dense, sickly sweetness of tropic plants and flowers, the fierce sun poured a flood of stagnant, yellow light, which lay in a broad and brassy glare over the low landscape. Veiled by the cruel radiance, rose afar in the west and north the Pine Woods of Avoyelles, and in the southern distance the solemn masses of gloom formed by the cotton-woods, live-oaks and cypresses of the Great Pacondrie Swamp. The eye wandering backward from the depths of the morass, saw the smouldering fire of the atmosphere envelop the enormous trees, draped everywhere with long streamers of black moss, and kindle the broad palmetto bottoms, and the multi-colored luxuriance of tropical vegetation, which sprang into ranker life beneath the vivid and sullen ray. The sluggish tide of the bayou basked with snaky gleams in the quivering lustre; the red marl of the plantation where mules and negroes were toiling painfully under the oaths and blows of the drivers and overseer, darkly glowed in it; the bright, rank green of the lawn before the mansion was aflare with it; and the mansion itself, with its rose and jasmin vines drooping around the posts of the veranda, looked scorched to a deeper brown in the hot, thick, yellow, intolerable glare.

Shadows that day were the demons of the landscape. Shadows of intense and peculiar blackness, so compact that they seemed to have a substantial being of their own, lurked in the yellow light around and beneath every object. A dark fancy might have dreamed them a host of devils, disguised as shadows, and mustered to prevent the escape of a soul from Hell. Black with a strange blackness, shaped to an ugly goblin resemblance of the thing they accompanied, they were scattered like a host of demon sentries all over the scene, and had watch and ward of everything. The gaunt, stilted bittern standing motionless near the water, had his black goblin duplicate beneath him on the glistering clay. The mud-hued, warty-hided, abominable alligator, as he raised himself on his short legs, had his black, misshapen, shadow-caricature to lumber up with him on the trodden mire, and it went with him as he took his lumpish plunge into the foul bayou. Every plant or shrub had its scraggy imp of shadow sprawling beneath it, and darting and dodging as if to catch it whenever it moved. Every tree—cypress, live-oak, sycamore, cotton-wood, or gum, all solemnly draped with black moss—had its scrawny phantom to toss and flicker fantastically with the tangled motion of a hundred darting arms, if the branches or their streamers swayed in the furnace-breath of the light wind. Every fallen trunk, or log, or stump, or standing post had its immovable, black sentinel shape of shadow projected beyond it, or crouching by its side. Along the running fences on the plantation ran black, spectral bars on the red marl. In the fields, among the new-sprung corn, sown with the pain and sweat of slaves, a demon-crop of shadow mocked with its ugly color and fantastic shape the green beauty of the pennoned grain. The reeking mules, panting and straining, with drooping heads, as they dragged the groaning ploughs through the soil of the cotton fields, or pulled the clanking harrows over the furrowed rows, had their monstrous jags of sooty shadow, like the malformed beasts of a devil’s dream, jerking along with shapeless instruments beside them. The black drudges, men and women, plodding and tottering in the sweltering heat, behind the ploughs, beside the harrows, or dropping seed into the drills, had hunched and ugly goblin dwarfs of shadow, vigilantly dogging their footsteps, and bobbing and dodging with their more active movements. The burly overseer on horseback had his horsed demon of lubber shadow, which aped his every gesture and movement, ambling fantastically with him hither and thither among the rows, and grotesquely motioning into squirms of phantom glee the shadows of the writhing slaves on whom his frequent whip-lash fell. Up around the planter’s mansion, shadows as fantastical, as black and demoniacal as these, wavered or lay in the fierce, yellow glow. And among them all there was none uglier or more seemingly sentient than one within the room opening on the veranda—a black, hellion shape which floated softly as in a pool of oil, on an oblong square of sluggish sunshine shimmering on the floor, just behind the chair of Mr. Lafitte.

Angry words had been uttered in that room within the last few minutes—angry at least on the part of Madame Lafitte, who sat away from the sunlight, opposite her husband, with a table laid with fruit and wine between them. She was of the superbest type of southern beauty—and there is no beauty more exquisite; but now her lovely olive face was dusky white with fury and agony—its pallor heightened by contrast with her intense black hair, which she wore in heavy tresses drooping almost to the broad gold ornaments in her ears. Silent at present, she sat with her white arms tightly clasped below her bosom, which convulsively rose and fell beneath its muslin folds, and with dilated nostrils, and pale lips curved with hate and grief, kept her dark eyes, lustrous with passion, fixed on the evil visage of her husband.

“You are well named,” she broke forth again, her voice, a rich contralto, trembling with vehemence; “but you are worse than your pirate namesake. Worse than the worst of that Baratarian crew. Lafitte! Lafitte, indeed! You are worse than he. Worse than Murrell. Worse than anybody. Devil that you are!”

She paused again, speechless with fury. The tornado which many thought the brassy flare upon the landscape portended, had its proper fulfillment in the raging whirl of passions within her. Mr. Lafitte sat at ease, slowly tilting his chair to and fro, the jewelled fingers of his brown left hand clasped around the stem of a crystal goblet on the table, his right hand carelessly thrust into a side pocket of his white coat, and regarded her with a sardonic smile on his dark visage, while slipping to and fro in the sluggish pool of light upon the floor, his shadow, like a black familiar, moved with an oily motion behind him.

“Anything more, my angel?” he asked in a soft, smooth, courteous voice, habitual with him: “any more epithets? Pray continue. Go on, light of my life, go on. Indulge your own Lafitte—your pirate lover. He loves to hear you.”

Maddened by his calm mockery, she did not reply, but kept her blazing eyes fixed upon his face. A weaker man than Mr. Lafitte might have shrunk from that gaze. But its burning fire was wasted on his eyes as flame upon asbestos. Strange eyes had Mr. Lafitte—true tokens of the nature which else his other features might have betrayed less surely. His form was muscular and manly, and his face, though dark and sinister, might have been justly called handsome, if only for the richness of its brunette complexion. Dark, wavy auburn hair, which he wore long, and a thick moustache of the same color, drooping over the mouth, conferred a certain lordly grace upon the countenance. The nose, not finely cut, was bold, aquiline, and deeply curved in the nostrils, and the line of the jaw and chin was vigorous and masterful. In the full visage, suffused with the dense and sultry glow of a highly vascular organization, tropic passions basked in strong repose. But the motor passion of all was evident in the eyes. Large eyes which at a yard’s distance might have seemed grey, but nearer were tawny and flecked with minute blood-specks. Steadfast, watchful, glossy, unwinking eyes—without depth, without sympathy—obdurate, rapacious and cruel—they confirmed the expression of the receding brow above them, which, broad and full, with a marked depression down its centre, was thus divided into two lobes, and bore resemblance to the forehead of the tiger. A physiognomist, looking at that face, would have declared Mr. Lafitte a man organized for ferocity as the beast he resembled is organized. A believer in the doctrine of transmigration might have held that the spirit of a tiger dwelt in his frame, and looked out of those tawny, blood-specked orbs.

It looked out of them now as with a feline playfulness he spoke his smooth taunts, meanwhile swaying slowly to and fro in his chair, as though balancing for a spring.

“Go on, my beautiful one,” he continued. “Favor me with more of those choice similitudes. Choice? And yet—as a matter of taste, my angel, purely as a matter of taste—that phrase—pirate, though bold and graphic, I admit, might be artistically improved. Corsair, now. What do you think of corsair? Is not corsair better, more poetical, more Byronesque? Yes,” he went on reflectively, as though the proposed change were a matter of vital seriousness, “yes, corsair is a finer word. Soul of my soul, let it be corsair. Suffer Lafitte to be your Conrad; you shall be his Zuleika. Have I ‘one virtue,’ my Zuleika? You will readily concede me the ‘thousand crimes,’ I know, but have I the ‘one virtue?’”

“Why,” she wailed passionately, taking no heed of his badinage; “why am I treated thus! Why am I kept here on this hateful plantation, in this remote parish, without life, without society, without pleasure of any kind. Nothing but this routine of dull farm life. No faces but your servants’ and your overseer’s around me. No company but these planters, these planters’ wives, these planters’ daughters, these people that ride over here sometimes, that I fatigue myself with visiting, that I care nothing about, anyway. Bad enough to come here once a year for the hot months—but three years, winter and summer, have I spent here. Three, Lafitte. Not once have I been in New Orleans for three years. Not once near the house where seven years of marriage with you were endurable with friends, with society, with life, with pleasures, with things I cared for, and which diverted me. Cut off from them all. You go when you please. Weeks, months, you are away, and leave me here sick, mad, frantic with ennui. Here, up the river, alone, what have I here to enjoy?”

“Here, my Josephine,” he replied, in an unruffled voice; “here, do you ask? What have you here? Here you have books, novels, without end, music in reams, your guitar, your piano, this elegant simplicity, this charming country prospect, your own sweet thoughts, the pleasures of imagination, the pleasures of memory, the pleasures—yes, even the pleasures of hope. And then, too,” sinking his voice to a softer tone, while his smile became a shade more sardonic and his eyes more cruel, “then, too, you have me.”

“You,” she raved, her pallid face convulsed with the refluent fury, and her eyes flashing. “You! Yes, I have you. Whom I hate, whom I loathe, whom I abhor! Yes, I have you; you who torture me.”

“I who torture you?” interrupted Mr. Lafitte blandly. “And yet, my angel, they say we are a model couple. They are never tired of talking of my unvarying gallant courtesy to you. You, yourself, could not name this moment in a court of law one word or action that would seem incompatible with the tenderest affection for you.”

“I know it,” she moaned. “Yes, that is the misery of it. I am insulted, I am profaned, I am outraged, I am tortured till I could go mad, or kill myself; and it is all done—my God! I know not how. Done with smoothness and calmness and courtesy; done with civility; done with sweet stabbing words. Others could only see the sweetness; none but I can feel the stabs. But they kill me daily, and you know it. Subtle and sweet is your cruelty to me—cruel, cruel devil that you are! Cruel to me, cruel to your slaves, cruel to everyone.”

“Cruel to my slaves, eh,” said Mr. Lafitte, tranquilly, his voice still equable, his face still wearing its sardonic smile: “Cruel to you and cruel to my slaves. Antony, for example.”

“Yes, Antony,” she replied, speaking in a calmer voice, as of one whose sufferings, whatever they might be, were remote from her, or as nothing to her own, “Antony is one. I saw the wretch just now, as I went down to the cabins. There you have him bucked in this scorching heat, his head bleeding where you and Tassle beat him with your whipstocks, and the flies tormenting him. Is there another planter in the parish that would treat that boy so? No wonder he ran away, like his brother before him. He might as well be in Hell as on this plantation. They might all as well be in Hell—as they are. Sweltering in the cotton-field, on a Sunday, too, there they are, fifty miserable wretches—hark, now! Tassle is laying it on to some of them. That is the howl of some of the wenches. Listen to that!”

Softened by the distance, but heard distinctly in the sultry stillness, came up from the cotton-fields a confusion of dismal screeches. Madame Lafitte sullenly listened, till they wailed away, the planter meanwhile calmly drinking his goblet of iced claret, and then filling the glass again from a slender bottle standing in a cooler on the table.

“These are the sounds I have to listen to, day after day, and year after year,” hoarsely murmured Madame Lafitte, her bosom heaving convulsively above her clasped arms, and her eyes burning with dark fire in the pale gloom of her face. “Every hour in the day they come from the field. All through the evening from the gin-house. Day and night, night and day, the yelling of those unhappy creatures is dinned into my ears. That is my music.”

Mr. Lafitte, who had resumed his former attitude, and was still tilting his chair, paused, with his eyes fixed upon his wife, and shook with long, silent, devilish merriment, his black familiar wobbling meanwhile in the pool beneath him. Then, in his softest, smoothest voice, he began to curse and swear, if what was rather a flood of profane exclamations may be so described. All names held sacred, grotesquely conjoined with secular names and titles, and poured forth in fluent and rapid succession, composed the outflow of a profanity inexpressibly awful, both from its nature and from the smooth and serene tones in which it found utterance. Madame Lafitte listened to him aghast, for she had never heard this from his lips before, and a dim, blind foreboding that it portended some horrible change in his attitude toward her, filled her soul. Ending it presently in another spasm of chuckling merriment, as if what seemed a mere depraved desire for blasphemy was satisfied, Mr. Lafitte took up the conversation.

“It is positively delightful, Josephine,” he remarked, “to hear you lamenting the trouncing of the dear negroes. But, not to dwell upon this touching outbreak of philanthropy, permit me—for I feel refreshingly wicked to-day—permit me to ask you, my angel, if you know what made me marry you?”

She looked at him for a moment with a face of mingled wonder, scorn and loathing.

“What made you marry me?” she repeated, “your love, I suppose—at least, what you call love.”

“Indeed, no Josephine,” he coolly replied. “It was not love at all. What makes a man keep a mistress? For that was it, and nothing more.”

At this atrocious declaration, Madame Lafitte, the very inmost temple of her soul profaned and defiled, as it never had been till then, bowed her head in an agony of shame.

“Yes, Josephine,” he continued, “that was it. You were a queen of a girl when I first saw you. Young, innocent, gentle, enchanting, the most beautiful woman then, as I think you are now, that I ever beheld, and though your family was poor, you were accomplished as few of your sex ever become. I wanted you for one of my mistresses, and I got you at the little expense of a marriage ceremony. A strict moralist might say that, at best, you were only my— ah, the coarse word! but in this country you are called my wife. And, apropos, do you know what they call this union of ours, contracted on my part from such a motive? They call it holy matrimony.”

Mr. Lafitte, with a negrine ptchih, went off in a spasm of devilish merriment, keeping his eyes fixed on the bowed and pallid face of the woman opposite him.

“You were in love with young Raynal when I married you,” he continued, “and you were bullied and badgered by your amiable family into wedlock with me. Of that, however, I will not speak now. But suppose, Josephine, that you wish a divorce. How are you going to get it? On what grounds? Now apropos of my mistresses: by the law of Louisiana, were you false to me, I could get a divorce from you. By the same laws—oh, how I love them!—you could only get that divorce from me if I kept my mistress in your dwelling, or publicly and openly. Suppose you emigrated to another State where they grant divorces on the ground of the husband’s infidelity. Could you get a separation then? No. Why not? Because you have no evidence, and I have taken good care that you can have none. Ha! my dear, what do you think of your position?”

“My God, my God!” she moaned, “what have I done that I should be outraged thus! How have I borne this life—how can I bear it! I tell you, Lafitte,” she cried, raising her voice, hoarse with anger and agony, into a higher key, and throwing out her arms with a furious gesture, “I tell you that this life is Hell. I know now, what I wondered when I was a child—where Hell is and what it looks like. It is here and it looks like this. This is one of its chambers, and this one of its mansions. These walls, those books, those pictures, this furniture, that fruit, that wine, they all belong to it. Those are its flowers clambering around the windows—this is its light and these are its shadows—this scorching heat is the heat of it, that sun is the sun of it, these slaves swelter in it—I, a slave like them, am tortured in it, and you are the fiend of it, hard, cruel, sensual, heartless, pitiless devil that you are!”

Flinging her arms together again in a convulsive clasp on her bosom, her frame shuddering, her breath coming and going in quick gasps through her clenched teeth, which gleamed behind lips deadly white and tensely drawn, she glared at him with fixed nostrils and flaming eyes, like a beautiful maniac. Save that he had ceased his balancing, that his eyes were a shade more tigerish, and that his form crouched slightly forward in his chair, Mr. Lafitte was as cool and collected as ever, and his face wore the same sardonic smile.

“Now Josephine,” he remarked in a tone more nonchalant, serene and soft than before, if that could be, “let me close this delightful conversation by a few brief observations on the value of opportunity. First, with regard to the dear negroes. I am a rich, but I have my little desire to be a very rich planter. Therefore I lay plans for a large cotton crop, on which, by the way, I have heavy bets pending. In order that I may have the large crop, which means a great deal of money, and in order that I may win my bets, which are considerable, I make the dear negroes work furiously. But in order that they shall work with due ardor, and lest that tender bond of fidelity and devotion to their master’s interests which the good divines up north expatiate so eloquently upon—lest that should not sufficiently inspire them, I get my excellent William Tassle to stimulate them with a plantation whip, and I stimulate them myself with another when I feel like it, which I often do. And they labor like angels—dear me! how they do spring to it, to be sure! It is enchanting. Indeed I get a great deal out of them. But in order that I may get a great deal out of them, I must flog them up handsomely at their work, and punish them profusely after their work if their work has not been what the ardent soul of Lafitte could wish. Hence the cruelty, as you harshly call it, my Josephine—hence the floggings, the paddlings, the buckings, hence the howlings that annoy you, my angel, and which, by the way, I really cannot help, since the black beasts will make a clamor—unless, indeed, I could induce some of those cursedly ingenious Yankees to invent me a patent anti-howling machine for their abominable throats. Positively, it is an idea, and I must reflect upon it. But see now. In doing all this, I only avail myself of my legal opportunities. Could I do it if I had not my opportunities? Alas, no. Could I do it up North? Alas, no. I should not have my opportunities. I should have to calculate, and circumvent, and plot and scheme till my poor brain would be fatigued, and then be bothered and baffled with strikes for higher wages, and ten hour systems, and God knows what else. Now here, thanks to our good Livingstone, who was really a fine jurist, I have a code which gives me all the advantages and puts my black laborers completely and comfortably under my thumb. They have no opportunities, and so they work without wages and are well flogged into the bargain. I have my opportunities, which I improve, and hence they work for me. Ha! it is charming! They get their two plantation suits a year, their three and a half pounds of bacon and their peck of meal apiece a week, which is not costly, and keeps them in working order. They are up early and down late, and so profits accrue. Hence the value of opportunities with regard to the dear negroes—my little exactions of whom wound your sensibilities, my angelic Josephine.”

He paused to drink his claret slowly and refill his glass, keeping his eyes fixed upon his wife, who sat secretly wondering what he meant by all this devilish frankness.

“Now,” resumed the planter, “observe again the value of opportunities in relation to yourself, ma chère. I marry you. Good. We live in much elegance, to your soul’s delight, in New Orleans. Good again. But one fine day I bring you up here, and here I keep you, where you don’t want to stay. Why do you stay, then? Ah! the beautiful social system gives me the opportunity to make you. Could you bring me up here? Oh, no. Could you make me stay? Oh, no. The beautiful social system does not give you that opportunity.”

“No,” she cried, “it gives me nothing.”

“And why?” he continued. “Is it because you are morally, mentally, or in any way, my inferior? Oh, no. Why, then? Simply because you are a woman. You are less than I by virtue of your sex, my angel. Ha! it is curious. The beautiful social system makes you something like my slave, dear wife. I bring my negroes here, and I bring you here. None of you want to come, but you can’t help yourselves, and so come you do. But my negroes cannot bring me here. No. Nor can you bring me here. No. Do my negroes run away? I set Dunwoodie’s hounds after them, and run them down. Do you run away? That dear old Mrs. Grundy sets her hounds after you, and runs you down. Ah!”

He paused to drink a little claret, keeping his eyes fixed upon her face.

“Meanwhile,” he pursued, “I keep you in perpetual torment, as you say. Try divorce. You have no cause in law, for I take care to give you none. My little, delicate, subtle, intangible, polite aggravations—all my skillful outrages and profanations of your soul and body, which drive you mad, or kill you slowly like poison, are not recognized in law. My courteous, maddening words and actions, which work, it is true, the effect, and worse than the effect, of the most brutal physical cruelty—they are all perfectly legal. It is doubtful whether they could even be stated for the purposes of a divorce suit. They are so subtle, so veiled in good nature, courtesy, kindness, legality, that if they were stated, people probably would laugh at you, and think you dishonest or deranged. At all events, though they slowly madden or murder you, they constitute no breach of holy matrimony.”

“They do,” she cried. “I do not care what the law says; such matrimony as I live in is not holy. It is”—

“Ah, no, dear Josephine,” he interrupted. “Decidedly you are wrong. Go to court—swear that you hate me, loathe me, abhor me—swear that life is insupportable with me, and plead for release, and the blessed old law will tell you that you are living, and must live, in holy matrimony! Go to any southern State—go to South Carolina, and state my refined and delicate cruelty. Why, Judge Somebody or other, in the next State, boasts that it is the unfading honor, as he calls it, of South Carolina, that she never has granted a divorce for any cause whatever. Well, go North—go to New York, for instance. Why, their great Panjandrum up there, the ‘Tribune’ man—what’s his name—Greeley—he will tell you that you are living, and must live, in holy matrimony. Bless him!” said Mr. Lafitte, piously. “I love him. I love him well. I hate him for his Abolitionism: I love him for his views on holy matrimony. I hate him because he tries to weaken my power over my slaves: I love him because he tries to strengthen my power over you, my angel. So do the rest of them. Go to any State you like, and they will all tell you that you are living, and must live, in holy matrimony. Every one, except that naughty, naughty Indiana. Ah, the bad State! The wicked, wicked State, that says a discordant marriage is hell, and saves people from it at the expense of holy matrimony! But you couldn’t go there even with your complaint of cruelty, for you haven’t a single witness—not one; and if you had, you wouldn’t go there, and presently I’ll tell you why. Meanwhile, the result is, that there’s no help for you anywhere. As for alleging any little infidelities on my part, that is clearly absurd. Thanks to our good Edward Livingstone’s code, you can get no testimony from the yellow girls, for slaves are not witnesses, you know, in law; and as for getting any legal testimony on that point, that I take care you can’t get, and your convictions are not evidence, my angel. Then, too, observe how the beautiful social system favors me. My little gaieties are reported, for instance, in New Orleans. Well, society does not taboo me. Mrs. Grundy smiles blandly upon me still. The men laugh, and say, ‘Ah, Lafitte, you gay dog!’ The women are soft as cream, and sweet as sugar. Whereas you—suppose even a whisper of that sort about you—even an idle rumor—ah, what a fine howl! You are quite finished at once, my dear.”

He shrugged his shoulders, and elevated his eyebrows with a grimace of mock pity, keeping his carnivorous eyes still fixed upon the raging silence of her face.

“And now,” he went on, “why do I keep you here? Why do I torture you daily? I answer—are you listening, my cherished one?—I answer that it is my little vengeance. Harken, Josephine. You and that handsome young Raynal were in love with each other when I first saw you. You were both poor. Raynal has got rich since, but he was then poor as charity. I, on the contrary, was wealthy, and your family wouldn’t let you marry Raynal, but were anxious that you should marry me, for they wanted to make a rich match for you. You liked me well enough then, for you only knew the best side of me, which the ladies say is charming; but you did not love me. I pressed my suit, however, and your family worried and drove you—poor young girl of fifteen, that you were—till, unable—for I will be strictly fair to you, Josephine—unable to resist longer, you yielded, and I got you.”

“Yes, you got me with a lie,” she passionately cried. “Never would I have yielded, had you and they not lied me into believing Raynal had abandoned me and engaged himself to another.”

“Oh,” returned Mr. Lafitte, with a leer, “you have found that out, have you? No matter. I got you, and you discovered your mistake in yielding as time passed on. Then, the year before I brought you here, when you were in much suffering—for I will be just to you, Josephine—you and Raynal had a little correspondence. Ha! you thought I did not know it! But I found it out. Your treacherous young Creole wench sold me your secret, and I took copies of every letter you wrote before I let her carry them to Raynal. I took copies also of his before they went to you. They are all eloquent, and I love to read them. And they put you both in my power, my lady!”

He saw that the blow struck home. She sat mute and still as marble, but all expression had gone from her face; the fire had faded from her eyes; her arms, still clasped on her bosom, were relaxed; and her bosom had ceased to heave. The planter watched her with an infernal smile on his dark visage.

“With those letters in my possession,” he continued, “you could not seek release even in Indiana. For writing them, you have to be tortured most exquisitely till you die, as before you wrote them, you had to be tortured for having loved Raynal. And yet, Josephine, I believe you and Raynal to be people of honor, and, though you loved, to have written those letters with innocent hearts. You were in loveless suffering, and you wanted the consolation a friend could give, and which Raynal gave. See how justly I state it! I will go further—I will admit that the letters are such as two friends might have written to each other. There is really nothing wrong in them. But they are full of passages which are too equivocal to be read in a court of law. There innocent words are made to seem guilty. And those letters, without much twisting, would convict you of conjugal infidelity, my beloved Josephine.”

He looked at her with fiendish enjoyment, but she sat still, and her face did not change.

“Ah yes, ma chère!” he observed after a long pause, slowly beginning his rocking again, and thus setting in motion the lurking shadow beneath him—“you and that dear handsome young Raynal are certainly compromised. Still there is one consolation for you, Josephine. Really a great consolation. Namely, that you are reputably married. You have the honorable position of a legal wife, my dear. Is it not consoling?”

He sat for a full minute sardonically smiling at her. She did not turn away, nor did her face lose its blank immobility.

“That is your consolation, sweet wife,” he continued. “It is the— Hallo, there! Tassle, is that you? Come in.”

He had the ear of a cat to have heard the steps of the overseer coming up the grassy lawn. It was a full half minute before the heavy sluff of boots was audible to an ordinary ear. Then came their lazy thud on the veranda, and the overseer lounged in. A short, stocky, burly man, with heavy, sallow, stolid features. He had a broad, straw hat set back on his head, was dressed in coarse, light clothes, and was revolving tobacco in his open mouth.

“Ha!” said Mr. Lafitte, “it is he. Good William Tassle. Faithful William Tassle. Excellent William Tassle.”

The overseer, with his dull eye fixed on the planter, stopped chewing, and closing his mouth, slowly smiled.

“It is hot, my Tassle,” blandly observed Mr. Lafitte.

“Hot as—beg pardon, madame”—said Mr. Tassle, checking himself in a torrid comparison, with a rude gesture of deference to the planter’s wife, who took no notice of his presence. “It singes a man’s nostrils to breathe it, Mr. Lafitte.”

“Yes?” replied the planter, as if the fact were of great interest. “Then how it must singe that Antony’s nostrils, William. That poor Antony. We must have him up here. I must admonish him. Fetch him along, Tassle. And Tassle”—the overseer, who was going, paused—“just bring that iron collar that hangs in the gin-house. You know.”

II.

The overseer nodded, and chewing stolidly, lounged out into the yard, where stood the kitchen, smoke-house, and other outbuildings, and going on through the orchard, emerged upon a blinding space where a row of white-washed cabins, with the gin-house hard by, glared in the hot light. A few negro children, half naked, with a lean and sickly old hound, were grouped in the shade of the gin-house. Near them, in the full blaze of the sunlight, a negro man, in coarse plantation clothes of a dirty white, sat on the ground in a squatting posture, feebly shaking his bare head, to keep off the swarm of insects that tormented him. This was Antony. He was bound in a peculiar manner—bucked, as the plantation slang has it. The ankles were firmly lashed together—the knees drawn up to the chest—the wrists also firmly pinioned and passed over the knees, and between the elbow-joints and the knee-pits, a short stick was inserted, thus holding movelessly in a bundle of agonizing cramp the limbs of the victim. This infernal torture—practised by the tyrants of our marine on their sailors—that class whose helplessness and wrongs most nearly resemble those of slaves—practised also on wretched criminals by the tyrants of our jails—Antony had endured from midnight till now, about two o’clock in the afternoon.

Nine years Lafitte’s chattel, he had been badly used from time to time, and, of late, dreadfully. He had learned to read and write a little before he had come to the plantation, and a week before the present time he had picked up a scrap of newspaper on which was a fragment of one of those declamations about liberty, which southern politicians are fools enough to be making on all opportunities, amidst a land of slaves. The fragment had some swagger about the northern oppression of the South, which Antony did not understand any more than anybody else; but it rounded up with Patrick Henry’s famous “Give me Liberty or give me Death!” which he understood very well; for from that moment Liberty or Death was a phrase which spoke like a voice in his mind, urging him to escape from his bondage. The next thing was to write a pass, make a package addressed to the house of Lafitte Brothers, New Orleans, and with this evidence of his assumed mission endeavor to reach that city, where he meant to smuggle himself into the hold of some vessel northward bound.

Clad in an old suit of Mr. Tassle’s, which he had taken from the gin-house, and boldly riding away the night before, on a mare borrowed from Mr. Lafitte’s stables, he had been suddenly met on a turn of the road—unaccountably met at midnight—by his master and the overseer, who seized him and found his forged credentials upon him. At once, he had been violently beaten over the head with their whip-stocks driven back to the plantation, reclothed in his plantation suit, securely bound, and left with horrid threats of torment on the morrow. The morrow had come, and here he was in utter misery, half crazy, and more than half fancying that he was in Hell.

Mr. William Tassle, his tobacco revolving slowly in his open mouth, stood and stolidly surveyed him. A pitiable object, truly! His face was bruised and swollen, and from wounds in his brow and cheek, made by the blows of the whip-handles, a dull ooze of blood, thinned by his sweat, had spread its stain over the whole countenance. Around the wounds buzzed and clung greedy clusters of black flies, hardly driven off by the feeble motions of his head, and returning every instant. His dark face, ashen grey and flaccid under the crimson stain, and faint with suffering, wore a look of dumb endurance; his eyelids drooped heavily over his downcast eyes; and his breath came in short gasps through the bloody froth that had gathered on his loose mouth. His wrists were cut with the tight cords that bound them, and his hands were discolored and swollen, as were his ankles. Even the overseer felt a sort of rude pity for him.

“Well, Ant’ny,” said Mr. Tassle, slowly, pausing and turning his head aside to eject a vigorous squirt of tobacco juice, which lit upon a small chip and deluged a fly thereon, throwing the insect into quivering spasms of torture; “you’re in for it, you poor, mis’ble devil. Yer master’s goin’ to admonish ye, so he says. Know what that means, don’t ye? It’s all up with you, Ant’ny.”

The dumb, bruised face, with its blood-shot eyes, feebly turned up to his for a moment, then drooped away.

“Come, now,” said Mr. Tassle, cutting the negro’s bonds with two strokes of a jack-knife, “up with ye.”

Antony, suddenly released from his cramped posture, fell over; then made a feeble effort to crawl up on his hands and knees, tottered, sank down, and lay panting. Mr. Tassle started with alacrity for the gin-house, the black piccaninnies scampering and tumbling over each other in their scramble to get away, and the old hound sneaking after them. Presently he came back with a bucket of water and a gourd. Antony raised himself and drank from the gourd; then sat up, panting, but relieved.

“Strip,” said Mr. Tassle.

Antony tried, and was helped roughly by the overseer, who then dashed the bucket of water over his naked body. It revived him, for he presently began to wipe himself feebly with his trowsers. In the midst of this operation, Mr. Tassle seized him, rolled him over from the wet ground to a dry spot, and began to rub his arms and knees vigorously with his horny hand, chewing and expectorating rapidly as he did so. Soon the arrested circulation began to be restored, and Antony, getting his clothes on, was able to walk up and down in a brisk, tottering walk, the calves of his legs loosely shaking, and his legs trembling with exhaustion.

“That’ll do,” said Mr. Tassle, at length; “you’ll be ready for your floggin’ right soon. Here, you dam cuss of a nigger, drink a swallow of this. That’ll set you up.”

Antony took the proffered whisky-flask—Mr. Tassle’s pocket companion—and gulped the liquor. It went to his poor, famished heart like fire, and shot some vigor through his numbed veins.

“Damned if I aint a philanthroper,” growled Mr. Tassle. “Lettin’ a hell-bent cuss of a sooty nigger drink my whisky. No matter. Have it out o’ yer hide, Ant’ny, afore supper time. Now pick up yer feet for the house. Yer master has to settle with yer.”

Antony went on to the house, Mr. Tassle following, and contemplatively regarding, as he spat and chewed, the shaking calves of the negro’s legs, which he had a chance to do, as the old trowsers, too short in the first instance, were now split up the backs, nearly to the knees, and feebly flapped as the slave tottered on. Antony himself, giddy with his long exposure in the sun, and with the glow of the liquor he had drank, felt his poor mind wander a little, and was conscious of nothing so much as of the queer tattered shadow that bobbed around him, and which he half fancied would trip him up if he were to try to run away now.

An indefinite sense, which fell upon him as he entered the house, and slowly walked through the passage, that this guarding shadow had fallen behind and left him, was succeeded by a sense as vague, that the shadow he now saw lurking in the sunlight on the floor beneath his master’s chair, was the same, and that it had gone on before when he came into the passage, and would leap from that place and chase him were he to flee. Dimly conscious of this fancy, he kept his hot eyes fixed upon the shadow—conscious also of a dreadful sullen hatred rising in his heart, and prompting him to spring upon his tyrant and strangle him, though he died for it afterward. Beyond this, he was vaguely aware that Tassle had put something that clanked on the table, and had gone; and that the madame, as he would have called her, was present, sitting very still, and apparently indifferent to him or anything that might happen to him.

Suddenly he heard the smooth and quiet voice of his master, seeming nearer to him than it should have seemed.

“Well, Antony, so it appears that I have a learned nigger on my plantation. Cousin to the learned pig, I suppose. Did you ever hear of the learned pig, Antony?”

“Never did, Marster.”

“Indeed. Then you never heard what happened to him?”

“Never did hear, Marster.”

“Ah! Indeed! Well, he ran away, and was caught, and flogged, and bucked, to begin with. Just like you, Antony. After which he was treated so that he wished he was dead, Antony. Just as you are going to be, my learned nigger. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Marster.”

In this colloquy, Mr. Lafitte’s voice was as smooth and tranquil as though he were promising his servant pleasures instead of pains. Antony had answered mechanically, in a voice as quiet and subdued as his tyrant’s, with the slightest possible quaver in his husky tones.

“So you can read and write, Antony,” said the planter, after a pause.

“A little bit, Marster.”

“A little bit, eh? Yes. Come, now, let’s have a specimen. Here’s the ‘Picayune,’ with something that suits your case.” Mr. Lafitte took the paper from the table as he spoke. “A little bit of abolition pleasantry that your British friends fling at the South, and this booby editor circulates. Here, read it out.”

Antony saw his master’s hand extending the paper to him, with the thumb indicating a paragraph. Moving nearer, he mechanically took the paper. The print swam dizzily before his eyes, as, with a halting voice, he slowly read aloud what was, in fact, one of the most pungent anti-slavery sarcasms of the day:

“‘From the—London—Morning Advertiser. One million dollars—reward. Ran away—from—the—subscriber—on the 18th August—a likely—Magyar fellow (Antony boggled terribly over ‘Magyar’ which he thought must mean mulatto), named—Louis—Kossuth. He is—about—45—years old—5 feet—6 inches—high. Dark—complexion, marked—eyebrows, and—grey eyes.’”

“Not a bad description of you, Antony,” interpolated Mr. Lafitte. “Quite like you, in fact. Go ahead.”

Antony stammered on, losing the place, and beginning lower down.

“‘Captains and—masters—of vessels—are—particularly—cautioned—against—harboring—or—concealing—the said—fugitive—on board—their ships—as the—full—penalty—of the law—will—be—rigorously—enforced.’”

“You see, Antony,” again interrupted the planter. “You reckoned, I suppose, on getting off in a ship, when your nice scheme got you to New Orleans. Didn’t you, my nigger Kossuth? You’d be advertised though, and caught, just like him. Go on.”

Unheeding this sally of Mr. Lafitte’s cheerful fancy, Antony went on, losing the place again, and getting to the bottom of the paragraph.

“‘N.B.—If the—fellow—cannot—be taken—alive—I will pay—a—reward—of (Antony boggled again over the ‘250,000 ducats’ named, and called it twenty-five dollars), for his—scalp. Terms as—above. Francis—Joseph—Emperor—of—Austria.’”

“Good,” said the planter. “Your scalp, you woolly-headed curse, wouldn’t bring that in the market, or I’d have it off, and your hide with it. Lay the paper down. You read atrociously.”

Antony laid the paper on the table, and without looking at his master, fixed his blurred eyes on the floor again.

“You see,” continued the planter, “how runaways get served. You have been told both by Tassle and myself that even if you got North you’d be sent back. We’ve got a Fugitive Slave Law now for runaway niggers, and back they come. You go to Philadelphia. That good Ingraham—that good Judge Kane—that dear Judge Cadwallader—they send you back. You go to New York. Lord! There everybody sends you back! You go to Boston. That dear Ben Hallett grabs you. That good Sprague—that good Curtis—all these good people grab you, as they grabbed that nigger Sims, and back you come. Yet you try it, you foolish Antony. Your cursed brother got off from me nine years ago, and so you think you’ll try it too. Fine fellows both of you. He leaves Cayenne pepper in his tracks, which plays the devil with the hounds, and off he gets. But you’ve had to smart for him. All you’ve got since has been on his account. Now you’ll get something on your own. I’ll teach you to steal my horse and make off for the river with your forged pass and package. Do you see this?”

Lifting his dizzy eyes to the level of his master’s hand, Antony saw that it held a heavy iron collar with a prong, on which he read in stamped letters, Lafitte Brothers, New Orleans.

“My brother had a nigger that wore this collar once,” said the smooth, cruel voice, “and now you’ll wear it. If you ever get away again, which I’ll take care you never will, people will know who you belong to, my fine boy. Kneel down here.”

Antony felt the sullen hatred seethe up in his heart, and his brain reeled.

“I won’t have that collar on me, Marster,” he huskily muttered. “You may kill me, Marster, but I won’t have that collar on me.”

“You won’t, eh?” returned Mr. Lafitte, tranquilly. “Oh, well then, if you won’t, you won’t. By the way,” he pursued, carelessly taking the paper from the table, and fanning himself gently, “do you know how I knew you were going to run away? I’ll tell you. I was standing near the gin-house last night when you came there to steal Tassle’s old clothes, and I heard you say to yourself—‘Now for liberty or death.’ Ah, ha, Antony, you shouldn’t talk aloud! Tassle and I saw you go to the stable and take the mare, and then we saddled and headed you off, my nigger. That’s the way of it. Pick up that paper.”

Raising his eyes to his tyrant’s feet, Antony saw the folded paper there where it had been dropped. Approaching, he painfully stooped to pick it up, when he felt himself seized, thrown down upon his knees, and the collar, which opened in the centre on a strong hinge, was around his neck! He struggled to free himself, but he was held, and the collar closed. In an instant a key of peculiar wards inserted in one of the cusps of this devilish necklace, shot a bolt into the socket of the other, and Mr. Lafitte, taking out the key, and putting it into his pocket, quietly spat in the face of the man whose neck he had just fettered, and spurning him violently with his foot, hurled him backward from his knees with a dreadful shock over on the floor.

Stunned for a moment, Antony lay motionless on his side. He knew that his master had risen, for as he turned his head, he saw the hideous shadow dart suddenly from the pool, and vanish, as though it had entered the planter. On his feet the next instant, with a dark cloud of blood bellowing in his brain, he saw with bloodshot eyes, Lafitte standing before him, with a calm, infernal smile on his visage, and all the tiger in his tawny orbs. The next second Madame Lafitte swept, like a superb ghost, between him and his revenge.

“Stay, Josephine,” yelled the planter, his voice no longer issuing smooth and soft from the throat, but tearing up from his lungs in a loud, harsh snarl—“remain here. This entertainment is for you. You object to the howls of my black curs. I bring one here—into this room—whose howls shall split your ears.”

She turned, as he spoke, on the threshold of the room, and advancing toward him, paused. For one instant she stood, imperial in her beauty, her magnificent form drawn to its full height, her haughty brow corrugated, her eyes burning like bale-fires, her outraged blood flooding her countenance with one vivid crimson glow. The next instant she strode forward, and smote him a sounding buffet on the face. Then, without a word, and with the step of an empress, she swept from the room.

Lafitte turned purple and livid in spots, and tottering back, fell into his chair. Struck! By her! Before his slave! Glaring up, he met the blood-shot eyes of Antony.

“Dog!” he yelled; “you are there, are you! Wash my spittle from your face with this!”

For a second, Antony stood holding his breath, with the wine the planter had dashed into his face, dripping from him, and steaming in his nostrils. For a second afterward, he stood unwincing, the fragments of the shattered goblet which followed, stinging his flesh. The next, his whole being rose in a wild, red burst of lightning, and the throat of Lafitte was in his right hand, his left crushing back the hand which had struck at him with a bowie-knife as he sprung. With his right knee set solid on the abdomen of the planter, pinning the writhing form to the chair, he saw the devilish face beneath him redden in his gripe, and deepen into horrible purple, and blacken into the visage of a fiend, with bloody, starting eyeballs, and protruding tongue. Still keeping that iron clutch of an aroused manhood on his tyrant’s throat, he heard the mad, hoarse gurgle of his agony, and felt the struggling limbs relax and lose their vigor beneath him. And then yielding to an impulse of compassion his master never knew, and which rose louder than the bellowing voices of his revenge, he unclasped his hold, and saw the body slide flaccid and gasping to the floor.

Away, Antony! The bitter term of your bondage is over, and there is nothing now but Liberty or Death for you! Death? Ay, Death in the land of Liberty for the man who repays long years of outrage with one brave grip on the throttle of his oppressor! Death, when the savage planters muster to avenge their fellow, and drag you down to yon bayou, to shriek and scorch your life away among the sappy fagots of the slow fire! Death like this, or else by gnawing famine, or the beasts and reptiles of the swamp whose beckoning horrors soon must close around you! Liberty or Death—and Liberty a desperate chance, a thousand miles away.

He stood for an instant, panting, with a wild exultation pouring like fire through his veins. Then snatching the heavy bowie-knife from the floor, he sprang from the room, and leaped on the veranda just as the overseer, who had come up again from the fields, had set one foot on the steps to ascend. Flying against him full shock, he threw him backward clear and clean off his feet, and saw his head bounce with a terrific concussion on the grass as he sped on over the stunned body. He did not pause, nor look behind, but flew with the rush of a race-horse for the swamp. The light wind had risen, and the grain in the fields and the scattered trees on either side, and in the skirting woods beyond, and all the lurking shadows, waved, and tossed, and lifted under the sultry vault, as he sped his desperate course, while the hot landscape rushed to meet him, and ran whirling by, closing around and behind him, and seeming to follow as he flew. Across the lawn, its grass and wildflowers sliding dizzily beneath him—up with a flying leap across the fence, which vanished below him—and down with a light shock on the red plantation marl which rose to meet him, and reeled from under him as he bounded on. Away, with frantic speed, over rows of cotton-plants, bruised beneath his feet, and gliding from under him—away, with a wilder leap, as the loud shouts of the slaves in full chorus struck his ear, and he saw them all, men and women, with open mouths and upthrown arms, stand with the mules and ploughs in the field on one side, and vanish from his flying glimpse as he fled by. Away, with every nerve and sinew desperately strung—with his pained heart knocking against his side—with his held breath bursting from him in short gasps—with the sweat reeking and pouring down his body, and dropping in big drops from his face, to be caught upon his clothes in his speed—with the bright knife, as his last refuge, clutched in his grasp—with the one thought of Liberty or Death burning in the whirl of his brain. Past the plantation now, his feet thudding heavily on a hard, black soil—on, with the swarming hum of innumerable insects, murmurously swirling by—on, with the light and rapid current of the hot south wind cool on the pain and fervor of his face, and swiftly purring in his ears—on, over rushing grass and flowers, and stunted shrubs and butts of trees—up again with a furious leap over a fence that sinks, and down again with a heavy thump on ground that rises—on and away at headlong speed over a field of monstrous stumps, scattering the light chips as he flies—in now with a bound among the bright-green leaves of a thick palmetto bottom, and on with a rush through the swish, swish, swish of their loud and angry rustle, as he crashes forward to the still gleam of the bayou. Now his feet swash heavily on a grassy turf that yields like sponge, and water fills his shoes at every bound. Now the water deepens, and he sinks above his ankles or midway to his knees, as he splashes forward with headlong velocity, half-conscious and wholly careless in his desperate exultation that black venomous water-snakes writhe up behind him as he plunges through their pools. Now he bounds over a bank of black mire, and swerves in his course as something like a dirty log changes to an alligator, and lumbers swiftly toward him with yawning jaws. And now splashing through the green slime of the margin, he bursts with a plunge into the glistening waters of the bayou, and swims with vigorous strokes, while the gaunt bittern on the bank beyond scrambles away with squawking screams. Swimming till the water shoals, he flounders on again through slime to mire, and over another bog of pools and water-plants and spongy sod, till gaining the outskirts of the dense forest, and reaching a patch of damp, black earth under an enormous cypress-tree, he slackens his pace, stops suddenly, and throwing up his arms upon the trunk, drops his head upon them, panting and blowing—and the first mile-heat of the dreadful race for Liberty or Death is run!

III.

For a few minutes, exhausted with the terrible speed he had maintained, Antony leaned upon his arms with closed eyes, his breath suffocating him, his heart painfully throbbing, his limbs aching and trembling, and the water dripping from his clothes and trickling away on the black soil in small streams. The trees whispered over him as he panted beneath them, and their mysterious murmurs were the only sounds, save his own stertorous breathings, that were heard in the dead stillness. Recovering his breath in a few minutes, he lifted his head and turned around, letting his pained arms fall heavily by his side. He was no longer oppressed with heat, for the plunge in the bayou had cooled him; but his whole body ached not only with the exertions of the last few minutes, but from the previous torture of the bucking, and already his strength, heavily taxed by his long abstinence from food (for it was now more than fifteen hours since he had eaten), and only sustained by the intense excitement he had undergone, began to flag. His brain reeled and whirled still, and his apprehension was confused and dull. Gradually he began to be more sensible of the sore and swollen condition of his wrists and ankles, of the smart of the wounds in his forehead, and the stinging of the fragments of glass in his face. There was one sore spot in his chest just beneath his shoulder, which for a few moments he was at a loss to account for, till he suddenly remembered that his tyrant’s foot had struck him there when he had kicked him over upon the floor. At the same instant he felt the chafe of the iron collar on his neck, and raising his hand suddenly, it struck against the blunt point of the prong. Gnashing his teeth with rage as the scene in that room rose in his mind, he seized the collar with both hands, and with a fierce imprecation, strove to rend it asunder. But the lock remained firm, and convulsed with a bitter sense of humiliation, as he thought of that accursed badge of his servitude inexorably riveted to his neck, the miserable man burst into tears.

It was but a brief spasm, and summoning up new courage to his failing heart as he remembered that his dreadful journey lay still before him, he cast his eyes around into the swamp. Softened by the foliage of the wilderness of gigantic trees, and duskily lighting the long streamers of melancholy moss which greyed their green, the sultry sunlight, slanting athwart the enormous trunks, and tinting with sullen brilliance the scarlet, blue and yellow blossoms of parasitical plants which sprinkled the boles and branches in thick-millioned profusion, glistered on the muddy shallows of the morass, whose dismal level, broken here and there by masses of shadow, and huge bulks of fallen timber, stretched far away, like some abominable tarn of slush and suds, into vistas of horrid gloom. Here and there, stranded on shoals of mire, or basking on pieces of floodwood, alligators, great and small, sunned their barky hides; while from every shallow pool, or wriggling around drifting logs or trunks of fallen trees, the venomous moccasin-snakes, whose bite is certain death, lifted their black devilish heads by scores, and made the loathsome marsh more loathsome with their presence. Over the frightful quagmire brooded an oppressive stillness, broken only by the mournful and evil whispering of the trees, or by the faint wriggling plash of the water-serpents. Thick, sickly odors of plants and flowers, blent with the stench of the morass, burdened the stagnant air, through whose languid warmth chill breaths crept from the dank and dense arcades of the forest. Vast, malignant, desolate and monstrous, loomed in the eyes of the wretched fugitive, the awful road to Liberty or Death.

His soul shrank from treading it. The fire had faded from his heart, and in that moment death by his own hand, for he would not be captured, seemed preferable to the terrors of the fen. Faint, weak, famished, weary unto agony, his whole body one breathing ache, his spirit all unnerved with the sense of his past and present misery, and nothing but despair before him, how could he hope to go on and live. Yet he could not remain here. Soon the hounds would be on his track—they would cross the bayou he had swam, and strike his trail. He must plunge still further into the swamp to distance them, or he must die here by the knife in his hand.

He turned and looked over the bayou far up the lowland to the plantation a mile away. Suddenly he started, clutching the knife with a firm grasp, his eyes flashing, his teeth and nostrils set, and his manhood once again flooding his heart with fire. Figures near the mansion—figures on horseback, guns, flashing in the sun, in their hands—one, two, three, four, five, six—six mounted horsemen—and, lower down on the lawn, what are those things running in circles? Hark! Far off a long, harsh, savage, yelling bay. The hunt is afoot, and the hounds have struck the trail! Away, Antony, for Liberty or Death!

Eyes flashing, teeth and nostrils set, every nerve and sinew valorously strung, he turned with a leap, and rushed straight into the morass. Before the headlong, desperate courage of his charge, the loathsome tenants of the swamp gave way. Plunging from the floodwood, the affrighted alligator trundled off, and the startled moccasins slipped and writhed from his path at the noise of his coming. Hark, again! Nearer than before the booming yell of the hounds. Speed, Antony! It is the Sabbath of the Lord our God, and we hunt you down. What man shall there be among us that shall have one slave, and if it fly into the morass on the Sabbath day, shall he not set hounds upon it and hunt it down? Speed on, dark chattel! The good Christians of St. Landry and Avoyelles are spurring hard upon your trail, and in the land over which the memory of Christ stretches like the sky, well-doing such as theirs is lawful on the Sabbath as on every other day!

Splashing and swashing on over the slushy surface of the quagmire, now sinking no deeper than the soles of his shoes, now plashing up to his shins, now to his knees, now nearly to his thighs, now bounding upon logs and fallen trunks, or rushing over masses of brushwood and briers, which switched and stung his ankles, he could still hear, at brief intervals, the savage yowling of the hounds. As yet there was no safety, for the dogs could still scent his trail, here and there, on the shoals of mire or clumps of bog over which he had passed. His hope was in reaching deeper water, or arriving at some broad bayou which would effectually impede their course. Goaded by his imminent peril, for he soon heard the long yells much nearer, and knew that the cruel brutes were rapidly gaining on him—he floundered frantically on, his heart leaping in his throat at every howl, and the sweat gathering in cold drops on his face. Soon, to his great joy, the foul lagoons began to deepen, the water reaching more uniformly above his knees, and at length he came upon a space through which he floundered for more than half an hour, sinking to his thighs at every plunge, and knew by the confused and lessening clamor of the dogs, that he was leaving them. He did not slacken his pace, though the depth of the water made it still more difficult to travel, till at last he entered a horrid grove of gloom, where the pyramidal clumps from which shot up the straight, dark pillars of the cypresses, were submerged in the inky flood, and sinking above his hips, he was forced to move more slowly. Fiercely plunging on through the cold black tarn, over a soft bottom of leaves and moss, which sank loathsomely beneath his tread, like a subfluvial field of sponge, he heard again the harsh yells of the dogs, and they now seemed nearer than before. He strove, but vainly, to move on faster, and his fancy ran riot as he thought of the hounds slopping on through the fen, and coming into sight of him. Already, in his delirious fancy, he heard the wild and savage yowls of that moment, and the exulting halloos of his pursuers. The dogs would leap into the shallow ponds—they would swim faster than he could wade—he would hear their savage panting close behind him—he would turn and feel them flop upon him, and their sharp teeth crush into his flesh—he would strike them with his bowie-knife—he would see the black water redden with their blood—they would overbear him and drag him down with yelling, and howling, and frantic splashing and struggling, while the shouting planters would come riding through the swamp and seize him. Lashed into frenzy by the anticipated drama, he brandished the knife, with a hoarse cry, and staggering forward, suddenly sank to his arm-pits. An instant of alarm, succeeded by wild joy, for the water had deepened, and striking out, he swam. Clogged by his heavy shoes, now filled with mud, and soaked to an added weight with water, it was hard swimming; but his fear and fury gave him superhuman energy, and nerved with unnatural vigor his weakened thews. He swam for a long time, with the solemn night of the dense cypress dusking his form and shadowing the tarn. At length the dreadful twilight of the grove began to lighten, and far beyond he saw the sunlight illuminating the grey and green of the trees, and the many colored parasites and flowers, and shining on the mud and water of the marsh. Presently he struck bottom, and wading again for a long distance, emerged at length into the sunlight, among the shallows and mud-shoals, and rushed on as before, till at last, as the sun was near its setting, he stood on the banks of an unknown river, which, whispering sullenly past its margin of sedge and water-flowers, moved, with an imperceptible motion, through the solemn and horrible wilderness of forest.

He stood gazing across it with a haggard and mournful countenance. The croak of frogs came faintly from its border, and mingled with the distant quacking of crowds of mallard ducks from the opposite shore, the vague hooting of owls in the swamp beyond, and the occasional plunge of an alligator from the adjacent margin. Dreary and ominous sounds, which yet hardly disturbed the stagnant stillness around him. The wind had lulled, and no whisper came from the bearded trees, which stood like boding shapes on every side. Hope was faint in the heart of the fugitive. Relieved from the engrossment of the immediate peril, his spirit began to come under the sole dominion of the brooding horrors around him, and as he vainly pondered on the dark problem of his deliverance, Death seemed ever gathering slowly toward him, and Liberty lessening in ever-growing distance.

Liberty or Death. The historic phrase came to him again like a voice that urged him forward. He paused only a little longer, to tear a strip from his coarse shirt and tie the bowie-knife at the back of his neck to the iron collar. Then tearing another strip, he pulled off his heavy brogans, shook the mud out of them, and passing the strip through the eyelets, he also secured them to the collar, one on each shoulder. So accoutred, he braced himself anew for effort, and taking up a slender sapling from the ground to beat the pools between him and the bayou—for he now feared the moccasins—in a few moments he was in the water, steadily swimming forward, with the sapling held in his teeth.

Gaining the opposite bank, he stopped on a patch of black mire, to put on his shoes, and then went forward, beating the path before him. Dreadful apprehensions of the beasts and reptiles which inhabited the swamp, now crowded on his mind, while to add to his distress, the sunlight in the forest spaces was stealing rapidly upward from the foliage of the loftiest trees. Quickening his pace, he staggered on through the haunted dusk of the tree-trunks, with the hooting of the swamp owls, the quacking of innumerable ducks, the bellowing and plunging of alligators, the screeching and screaming of strange, semi-tropic birds, the howling of distant beasts, and the multitudinous croak of frogs, sounding on every side around him.

He broke into a heavy run, came at length to a thinner part of the forest, and presently emerged upon a vast open space of quagmire, stretching two or three miles away, with scattered trees standing and leaning in all directions in its broad expanse. Here he paused.

The sun had sunk behind the distant forest, tinging the misty sky far up the zenith with lowering red, and suddenly, as by some fell enchantment, the swamp had become a sullen slough of blood. Shadows of inky blackness stretched athwart the red expanse, and the distorted trees that crossed and intercrossed each other here and there, were giant eldritch shapes of unimaginable things. Lank and hairy—all askew and bristling—clothed as with fearful rags—with monstrous heads ahunch in unnatural places, and shaggy jags of drooping beards, and dusky arms grotesquely forked and twisted, and huge lengths of gaunt body that abruptly splayed and sprawled in malformed feet—they loomed from the fen of murky gore against the angry color of the sky, like some black congress of ambiguous mongrel wizards whose spell was on the scene. All around beneath them, protruding from the red lagoons, huge butts of logs, gnarled stumps, and black knees of cypress, squatted and crouched like water-fiends. Through the dusky air, laden with the damp smell of the swamp, frightful brown bats whirled clacking to and fro in the red light like lesser demons on the wing. From every side came hootings and croakings, screechings and wailings, howlings and bellowings and sullen plunges, like the riotous clamor of devils at some tremendous incantation. A sense of supernatural horror pervaded all, and weighed upon the appalled heart of the trembling fugitive.

He hesitated a few moments whether to cross this dreary expanse, or strike off into the denser forest, but decided to go forward. Whipping a pool before him which did not move, he was just setting his foot in it, when the venomous face of a moccasin rose at him with a dark slapping flash. He sprang back simultaneously, and saw the monster vanish, feeling at the same time a sharp pang just above his ankle. He was bitten! All was over!

Stooping slowly, with a wild terror shuddering through his veins, he looked at the wounded limb. But no, there was no bite. The snake had missed him. In his backward leap, he had struck his leg against the upturned spike of a broken branch which lay behind him. The revulsion in his spirit at this discovery was so great that he broke into a quaver of hysterical laughter, which echoed dismally through the swamp, and woke such an answering chorus of demoniacal hooting and screeching in the adjacent boughs, that he was affrighted, and turning away from the open space, he was about to rush into the forest on his flank, when he saw with a leap of heart, two round glistening balls in the dark foliage of a tree a few yards before him, and something long and dark crouching along the bough. It was a panther! He wheeled at once with a bound, and fled headlong into the red morass.

Recovering presently from his shock of alarm, he trudged along through the inky water, quivering at every step lest he should feel the sting of the moccasin, or the crunching gripe of the alligator. It was a long journey across the open fen. The red light had faded from sky and water, and the full moon, which had lain like a pallid shell in the heavens when he left the forest behind him, had deepened into a lustrous orb of silver, and glistened on the gray water, as he approached the solid sable gloom of the thick-wooded wilderness.

An awful fancy had haunted his mind during his journey across the open fen—quiet, but very awful. A strange man, with a single dog, had followed him, at a considerable distance the whole way. A strange man, silent, with a silent dog, and plodding just at that distance, without coming, or trying to come, any nearer him. He knew that this was so, though he did not dare to turn his head to see if it was so. He knew too just how the man looked—a dark figure with a dark slouched hat, and the dog, also dark, by his side, just a little behind him. Oh, God!

The fancy fell from him as he came under the black trees again. Staggering on through thick darkness, broken only here and there by an uncertain glimmer or a pale ray of moonlight, or the blue flicker of a dancing and vanishing fen-light, he found the water still ankle or knee deep, and the walking difficult and dangerous, with logs and fallen trees and stumps and masses of bushes and briers, and with the deadly tenants of the pools. The fen seemed alive with the latter, and all about him, and in the branches overhead, there were such plungings and crashings, and such a clamor of flutterings and hootings and screechings, that his blood ran cold. He held his course, however, hoping to come upon some dry spot in the great swamp where he could stop and consider what to do to escape from this dreadful region. Rest he must have soon, for his body was giving way with hunger and fatigue. He was drenched from head to foot, and spite of the exertion of walking, he shivered with cold. His vitals were weak and aching for want of food; his head was light with sleeplessness; and insane fancies ran riot in his terror-goaded and horror-laden mind. One was that his legs, which felt numb and seemed heavier every time he lifted them, were slowly changing to iron, and that he would soon be unable to raise them for their weight, and would be obliged to stand there in the quagmire. Then in the glimmering darkness the moccasins would rise from the pools and surround him in a circle. They would gather in from all the swamp around, and pile on top of each other, till they made a high, high writhing wall about him of devilish serpent faces, swaying and bristling, and above them in the branches all the panthers would gather, savagely grinning at him, and every one would have the visage of Lafitte. Then all at once the writhing wall of snakes would sway forward, and strike him with a million fangs, and rebound and strike again with a regular and even motion, while his body would slowly swell, and his shrieks would ring in the darkness, and the panthers would look on with the face of his master, and laugh softly with the smooth voice of his master. And the writhing wall would dilate and expand till every snake was vaster than an anaconda, and the mass together would fall away at every rebound to a horrible distance, and reach up to the sky, and his body would swell at every million-fanged stroke till its monstrous bloat filled the dark world, and his shrieks would rise and resound through space, and the panthers and the tigers would dilate with the rest, and look on with enormous faces like his master’s, and their smooth laughter would grow louder and louder into smooth thunders of laughter, and the bristling and the striking and the swelling and the shrieking and the roaring mirth, would go on increasing forever and forever.

“Lord God Almighty help me! I’m going crazy!”

The words burst from him suddenly, as he felt the horrible fancy rush upon him with dreadful reality, and almost master him. All aghast with a new terror at the foreign and incongruous effect of his own tones in that haunted darkness, and amidst the unhuman voices around him, he was utterly appalled and confounded the next instant at the frightful clamor which rose with a simultaneous outburst, volleying tumultuously around him on every side like the multitudinous rush and uproar of devils when the silence of the magic circle has been broken and the enchanter is to be torn to pieces. Whooping, hooting, screaming, wailing, yelling, whirring, flapping, cackling, howling, bellowing and roaring—all rose together in a long continued and reverberating whirl and brawl, filling the darkness with a deafening din. Staggering madly forward, the terrified fugitive broke into a blind and frantic run, feeling as in a horrible dream, that the pools had changed to ground which was sloping rapidly up to strike him in the face and stop him; till at last with a sudden lightening of the darkness, something caught his feet and threw him headlong, and with an awful sense that he was seized, and with the hideous tintamar swirling downward like the gurgling roar of water in the ears of a drowning man, he swooned away.

IV.

Slowly that sluggish sea of swoon gave up its dead, and life revived. How long he had lain in that blank trance, he knew not. He felt that he was lying on bare, damp ground, and that the moonlight was around him. The din had sunk into confused and broken noises, sounding and echoing distantly through the darker depths of the moonlit forest, and the air around him was desolate and still. A clear, cold, remote stillness filled his mind. Gradually a dim sense of the former terror, mixed with consciousness of all he had passed through, and of the place he was in, began to invade the silent vacancy, and crept upon him as from afar. Shuddering slightly, with icy thrills crawling through his torpid blood, he slowly raised himself to his knees, and looked around him. With a vague relief, which was almost pleasure, he saw that he was kneeling on dry ground—a low acclivity sloping from the morass, clothed with giant trees, and barred with large spaces of grey moonlight and sable shadow. Behind him was the tough cordage of a ground-vine, in which his foot was still entangled. Disengaging the limb without rising from his knees, he continued to gaze, gradually yielding to an overwhelming sense of awe, as he took in more fully the dark and dreadful magnificence of the forest which loomed before him, like the interior of some infernal cathedral. Far away, through immense irregular vistas, diminishing in interminable perspective, the ground stretched in vast mosaics of sable and silver, bunched and ridged with low flowers and herbage and running vines, all moveless and colorless in the rich pallor of the moonlight, and in the solemn shadow, as though wrought in stone. Upborne on the enormous clustered columns of the trees, every trunk rising sheer like a massive shaft of rough ebony, darkly shining, and fretted and starred with the gleaming leaves and flowers of parasitical vines—masses of gloomy frondage, touched here and there with sullen glory, spread aloft and interwove like the groined concave of some tremendous gothic roof, while from the leaf-embossed and splendor-dappled arches, the long mosses drooped heavily, like black innumerable banners, above the giant aisles. The air was dank and chill, and laden with thick and stagnant odors from the night-blowing flowers. Fire-flies flitted and glimmered with crimson and emerald flames; fen-lights flickered and quivered bluely down the arcades in the morass; and all around from the bordering quagmire, and from the crypts and vaults of the shadows, the demon-voices of the region, sounding from above and below, and rapidly swelling into full choir, chanted in discordant chorus. Listening to their subterranean and aërial stridor, which rose in wild accordance with the ghastly pomp, the horrible and sombre grandeur of the scene, a dark imagination might have dreamed that some hellish mass in celebration of the monstrous crime against mankind which centered in this region, was pealing through the vaulted aisles and arches of a church whose bishop was the enemy of human souls. Here, to this dread cathedral, might gather in his wide and wicked diocese—the millions callous to the woes and wrongs of slaves—the myriads careless of all ills their fellows suffer, while their own selfish strivings prosper, and wealth and sensual comforts thrive around them. Peopling the vast and drear nocturnal solitudes, under the moonlit arches, here they might come, while the screaming, hooting, bellowing chant resounded, and kneel, a motley and innumerable concourse of base powers, in fell communion. Statesmen who hold the great object of government to be the protection of property in man, and wield the mighty engine of the state for the oppression of the weak; placemen who suck on office, deaf and blind to the interests of the poor; scurvy politicians, intent on pelf and power, who plot and scheme for tyranny, and legislate away the inalienable rights of men; Jesuit jurists, mocking at natural law, who decree that black men have no rights that white men are bound to respect; scholars, bastard to the blood of the learned and the brave, who prate with learned ignorance of manifest destiny and inferior races, to justify against all human instincts the cruel practice of the oppressor; hide-bound priests, who would turn the hunted fugitive from their doors, or consent that their brothers should go into slavery to save the Union; traders and slavers, an innumerable throng, mad-ravening with never-sated avarice, and furious against liberty and justice as lesseners of their gains; these, and their rabblement of catch-poles, and jail-birds, and kidnappers, and men-hunters, and slave-law commissioners—here they might assemble to pray that their conspiracy against mankind might prosper, and love and reverence for the soul die down in darkness, and man degrade into the brute and fiend. Fit place and time, and fit surroundings for such rites as these; fitter far than for the trembling murmurs of a solitary slave, kneeling in the dreary moonlight, and pouring out the forlorn agony of his spirit in prayer to the God of the poor.

Some dim association of the aspect of the forest with the cathedrals he had seen many years before when he was a slave in New Orleans; some dim sense that he was on his knees in the attitude of supplication, had mixed with the overwhelming consciousness of his helplessness, his wretchedness, and his danger, and impelled him to pray. Fervently, in uncouth words and broken tones, he poured forth the mournful and despairing litany of a soul haunted with horror, encompassed with perils, and yearning for deliverance. The demoniac clamor of the forest rose louder and louder as he went on, breaking his communion with God, till at length, appalled by the unhallowed din, he ceased, and rising to his feet, uncomforted and terrified, staggered weakly on his way.

He was very feeble now, and his strength was so nearly gone that he tottered. His setting forward again was a mere mechanical action, but it continued for some minutes before the dull thought came to him that his movement was useless. In his agonizing desire for sleep, he tried to climb a tree, where, lodged in a fork of the branches, he thought he would be safer and more comfortable than on the ground; but even with the advantage of the parasitical vine which covered its trunk, his strength was not equal to the effort. He was in the last stages of exhaustion.

Sitting upon the ground, he resolved to keep awake till morning, when there would be less danger of wild beasts, and he might dare to repose. He sat for a long time shuddering with cold, and watching intently all about him, lest some panther should spring upon him unawares. Once or twice, with a start of terror, he caught himself nodding; and at length, affrighted at the possible consequences of his dropping off into slumber, he strove to occupy his mind by observing minutely the various details of the scene before him. He had been busy at this for some time, when he became suddenly and quietly perplexed with the feeling that there was something he ought to take notice of, but was unable to remember or define what it was. All the while he was vacantly gazing at the hole of a gigantic cypress rising from a dense clump of dwarf palmettoes, slightly silvered by a faint ray of moonlight, and from time to time he saw, without receiving any impression therefrom, a dim vapor glide athwart the palmetto leaves. Suddenly but quietly it came to him that what he ought to have noticed was a peculiar odor, and startled a little, he strove to shake the torpor from his mind, and think. What could it be? As suddenly and quietly as before it came to him, and at the same moment his eye took in the meaning of that curious mist gliding over the palmettoes. It was the smell of smoke, and yonder was its source. Thoroughly roused now, and vaguely alarmed, he scrambled up on his feet, with a little strength returning to his body, and gazed in stupefaction at the misty ringlets lazily stealing across the leaves. It certainly was smoke; he smelled now very distinctly the dry scent of burning wood. Who could have a fire in the heart of the swamp at this time of night? At first, superstitious fancies rose in his mind, for the thought that any person could be here with him was inconceivable. But gradually recovering self-possession, he resolved, for he was naturally courageous, to go forward and solve the mystery; and taking the knife from the back of his neck, he cautiously approached the palmettoes, his blood thrilling, and his heart beating, and all the forest resonant around him. Peering through the leaves, he saw with amazement a pile of smouldering embers duskily glimmering in front of a large hole in the trunk. The tree was hollow. A sort of fright fell upon him, and he retreated; but recovering instantly, he again advanced, and nerved to desperation, spoke in a voice faint both from weakness and trepidation:

“Ho, there! Ho, you in there! You there, whoever you are!”

There was no answer, nor movement, but at the sound of his voice, a tremendous uproar burst forth again in the forest. Desperate at this, he again spoke in a louder tone:

“Ho, now, you in there! You just say who you are. I’m coming in now!”

No answer, but the uproar in the branches and from the swamp increased like a tempest. Strung up now to his highest pitch, Antony clutched his knife, and setting his teeth hard, plunged in through the hole.

It was densely dark within. The immense cypress was completely hollow, as he could feel, for stretching out his arms he encountered nothing. He began to grope about, but stopped suddenly, thinking it better to get a light. Quite overcome by the strangeness of his discovery, and by the novel circumstance of a fire being found smouldering before an empty tree, he stooped down through the low entrance to the brands, and blowing upon one till it flamed, withdrew himself again into the tree, and looked around. Suddenly, with a hoarse gasp of horror, he tottered back, falling from his squatting posture over upon the ground, and dropping the brand, which at once went out, leaving him in utter darkness. In that instant he had caught a glimpse, by the fitful flame, of a lank figure, duskily clothed, lying on its back, with a mop of thick white hair, a leathern face hideously grinning, and glassy eyes which had met his; and he felt like one who had entered the lair of a fiend.

So paralyzed was he with affright, that instead of scrambling out of the tree, he sat motionless, leaning back on his hands, with his blood curdling, and cold thrills crawling under his hair. A wild fancy that he would be instantly sprung upon by this thing, held him still and breathless. But all remained silent and moveless, and at last, venturing to stir, he got up on one knee, and pressed his hands on his heart to stop its mad beating. By degrees his courage came back to him, or, at least, his dreadful fear became blended with desperation. Then came wild wonder at the horrible strangeness of that figure, and slowly this melted into a savage and frenzied curiosity. Seizing the smoking brand from the earth, he backed out through the hole (for he absolutely did not dare to turn his back to the dread tenant of the cavern), and, once outside, blew upon the stick till it reflamed. Waiting a moment till the light burned strongly, he thrust it through the hole, and holding it above his head, glared with starting eyes upon the face of the figure.

He saw in a moment that it was nothing unearthly—only the form of an aged woman, and of his own race. Instantly it struck him that she was a fugitive, probably a dweller in the swamp. Reëntering the tree, he approached and held the blazing brand over her countenance. With a terrible sensation of awe he saw that it was the countenance of the dead. She lay on a couch of the forest moss, her gaunt figure decently composed, with the hands crossed, as if she had known that she was dying. She was apparently very old; the woolly hair was white; the black face was deeply wrinkled, and much emaciated; the mouth was open, and had fallen back, showing the white teeth, which were perfectly sound as in her youth; and the glassy eyes were unclosed and fixed aslant with that look which had so terrified the fugitive. He felt no terror now, however, only awe; for with the discovery of the truth, the hideousness of the face was gone. Bending down, he touched the cheek. It was still tepid—almost warm; the life had not been long extinct, a fact of which the smouldering brands of the fire she had kindled was another evidence. Poring upon the features, a confused feeling gathered in his mind that he had seen them before, and he strove to resolve it into certainty. Suddenly, as the flickering of the burning brand he held brought out a new expression on the dark, withered lineaments, it flashed upon him that this was old Nancy. She had been a slave on Mellott’s plantation, near Lafitte’s, and had disappeared five or six years before, after a terrible whipping. They had hunted the swamp for her without avail, and it was supposed that she had perished. Here she had lived, however, and here she was now, all her earthly troubles over.

Turning away from the body in wild wonderment, the fugitive looked around him. The space within the tree must have been at least six feet in diameter. It had been hollowed out by time in the form of an upright cone, the apex of which was at least a dozen feet above the ground. The hole had probably been eaten out by a sort of dry rot, or perhaps by insects, for the wooden walls were not damp, nor was the corrugated floor. The only furniture was the couch of Spanish moss on which the body lay, a block of wood fashioned for a seat out of the butt end of a log, and a long paddle, bladed at both ends, which leaned upright against the wall. Looking around further, Antony noticed some little niches cut in the walls, with the handle of a hatchet sticking out of one of them. On the blade was a parcel wrapped in cotton cloth, in which he found three or four corn-cob pipes, a bundle of dried tobacco-leaf, bunches of matches, and two or three knick-knacks of no great use. Evidently Nancy had made occasional excursions from her hiding-place, for these things must all have been borrowed from the race of the taskmasters. This was still more evident as Antony pursued his observations. In another niche, he found at least half a peck of corn done up in a cloth, and in a wooden quart measure there was some more, parched. His hunger rose so suddenly and fiercely at sight of the food that he at once crammed a handful of the parched corn into his mouth, and with the measure in his hand, continued to crunch, although his throat was so swollen with his long fast that he could scarcely swallow. Continuing his search while he ate, he found in a third niche an oblong tin pan and a gourd, but in the pan, to his astonishment and delight, there was a dead opossum and a small fish. They were both fresh—Nancy must have captured them that very day. She had lived a woodman’s life in the heart of the morass, setting her fishtraps on the bayou, and catching the smaller animals in the forest. Forgetting to pursue his search further in the desire to appease his ravening hunger, Antony only paused to lay one of the pieces of cotton cloth over the face of the dead, and then set to work to rake the fire into a bed of coals, and hastily dressing the meat with his bowie-knife, broiled it, and ate with the eager voracity of a man half starved.

A mad repast, not given to appetite, but famine, and void of all enjoyment. Not himself, but his hunger as a thing apart from himself, was fed by those gross gobbets. Kneeling before the embers, in the dusky glimmer, he hurried down the half-cooked food, tasting of smoke and cinders, as to some wild wolf that gnawed his vitals. In the darkness behind him lay the swart corpse, and the thought of it was a quiet horror in his mind. Blent with that horror, and with his raging famine, was a dull, stupefied sense of the chafe of the collar on his neck, the swollen pains and weakness of his limbs, the steady suck of the sleeplessness in his jaded brain, the tepid clinging of his wet clothes, the filthy smell of the muck and slime that covered him, and all was mixed confusedly with a dimmer apprehension of the smoky warmth of the cavern, the sullen smoulder of the embers, and the resonance of the vast drear forest.

His meal ended, he still knelt in the murk contraction of all his sensations and apprehensions, before the dull fire. The fierce gnawing at his stomach had changed to an uneasy distention, as if something huge and bloated lay dead within him. His horror of the corpse had grown stronger even than the heavy weariness and frowsy misery of body and spirit, and he now begun to consider what he should do with it. It ought to be buried, he felt, but in his utter torpor of fatigue, he shrunk from the labor of making it a grave.

Slowly his inertia yielded, and he set to work with the hatchet, chopping out a burial-place in an oblong space near the tree between the palmettoes, and scooping up the soft soil with his hands. It was a long and painful task for his weak and sore body; but at length it was ended, and bringing out the corpse, he laid it in the cavity, heaped the earth over it, and left it to its rest.

The forest was still resounding with the unhuman noises when he entered the cypress hollow again. He heard them dully, with torpid indifference. The tree seemed strangely empty to him now. He sat for a moment on the block, watching, with an utter prostration of heart, the dusky glimmer faintly lighting the smoky gloom. Rising presently, he arranged the embers so that they would outlast the night to keep away the wild beasts; and then throwing himself upon the heap of moss where the corpse had lain, he sank away in a dead slumber. Soon the hooting and flapping, the screaming and the howling sunk away also, and the vast forest lay still and weird and desolate in the pallor of the moon.

V.

He woke with the feeling that he had dropped off and slept a minute, but at the same instant gazing with stiff and smarting eyes through the brown dusk of the hollow, he was confused at seeing the palmetto leaves at the entrance plainly visible, and of a deep, cool green. He knew now that it was broad day, and that he had slept long. Raising himself suddenly, a mass of cramping stitches wrenched his frame, and made him gasp with pain. He remained for a minute supporting himself on his hands, and then slowly and painfully arose. Refreshed in mind by his slumber, he was even worse off in body than when he had lain down. His limbs were stiff, and every joint and muscle ached. His wrists and ankles were much swollen where the ropes of the bucking had cut them. He felt as if he had been switched all over with nettles, from the stings and scratches of the thorns and briers through which he had travelled. His face pained him especially, the atoms of glass still smarting in the cuts, and all its wounds and bruises sore and burning. Worse than all to his sense at that moment were the weight and chafe of the accursed collar. His flesh was raw with it. It hurt him so much that almost the first thing he did was to tie one of the pieces of cotton cloth around his neck for the edge of the iron to rest on. Relieved somewhat by this, he began to limp to and fro, gasping and panting at every step with pain.

After a few minutes of this exercise, he felt a little easier, and stopped walking to examine the paddle. It convinced him that Nancy must have a boat somewhere, and the pilfered articles he had found in the hollow confirmed his belief. To get away from the swamp was his fixed purpose, and in that land of streams, if he could only find Nancy’s boat, he might avoid the loathsome and dangerous journey across the morass.

Nancy’s boat, he thought, must be a periagua, and the question was, where did she keep it. Crawling out of the tree to commence a search for it, he saw it right at the base of the trunk under the palmettoes. But Nancy’s periagua was a canoe! A canoe of buffalo hide on a frame of slender wattles. Had she purloined it from the Indians in the Pine Woods of Avoyelles, and had it been a present to them from some visiting tribe from Texas or the Indian Territory? For all the boats Antony had ever seen among them were periaguas. At all events here it was, and elated with its discovery, the fugitive instantly brought forth the paddle, the hatchet, the bowie-knife, the corn, the tin pan, and the matches, and placed them in it. Going in again to see if there was anything else that might serve him in his flight, he saw an end of dyed cotton cloth hanging out from the couch of moss. With a pull out it came—an old blue cotton gown. Turning over the moss, he uncovered an old blue flannel shirt, an old pair of grey trowsers, a jean jacket torn up the back, a slipper and one stocking. Rejoiced that Nancy’s purloinings had furnished him with a change of clothes, he put the gown, shirt and trowsers into the canoe, and lifting the latter, plunged out through the palmettoes into the forest.

A thrill of alarm shot through him as he saw by the sunlight that it was late in the afternoon. So accustomed had he been in the enforced habits of plantation life to rise at daybreak, that on waking in the hollow he naturally thought he had awakened at the usual morning hour. He shuddered now with the consciousness that so much time had been lost, when the dogs, guided by some professional expert at man-hunting, might be coming straight toward him. That Lafitte would, in his burning lust for vengeance, hunt the swamp for weeks to find him, he had no doubt, and he must at once speed away.

He stood for a moment debating which direction to take, when looking down he happened to see a spot where the earth had been harrowed by the claws of some wild beast, and upon the scratches was the distinct imprint of a naked foot. It came to him at once that this was a footmark Nancy had made going up from the water, and he at once resolved to pursue a track, in a bee-line from the heel of the print. Limping along painfully with the canoe on his shoulders and cautiously, for by the sudden slipping and rustling in the grass and herbage he knew that snakes were around him, suddenly his heart and blood jumped, and he sprang backward with a leap that shot a flood of wrenching pangs through his whole frame. He had nearly stepped upon a rattlesnake which lay in a faint glimmer of sunshine on a strip of thinly tufted earth. The sluggish reptile quivered slightly throughout its mottled length, and lifting its head with venom in its sparkling eyes and devilish yawning jaws, sounded its rattle and swiftly slid from view. Antony shuddered, and the old dark fancy that he was in Hell flickered through his mind. Trembling in spite of himself at every buzzard that flew from his path, or small animal that crossed it, and feeling that everything was watching him, and that the multitudinous chatter of the birds that filled the forest was concerning him, he went on his way. Soon he came to the pools, and beating the moccasins from his path, arrived at a shoal of black mire, and a narrow bayou. A fallen tree lay with its branches dipped in the stream, half way across; a rotten log floated in the water; stumps and snags projected here and there; waifs of moss, slivers of branches, broken boughs, leaves, flowers, and bits of forest debris floated idly on the shining surface or among the shadows.

Hurriedly casting off his foul rags, the fugitive washed himself with the old gown, and put on the shirt and trowsers. Then laying the canoe on the water, where it lightly danced, he cautiously got in, grasped the paddle in the middle, and plying the blades first on one side and then on the other, shot slowly off with a beating heart up the dull stream.

Heading northward, the brown skiff yawed from right to left, and darted with an uncertain forward motion, trembling beneath him like a living thing that shared his agitation. Black banks of mud, pierced here and there with alligator holes, swamp grass, and pools, and luxuriant clumps and masses of strange many-colored flowering verdure, fallen trees and trees leaning to their fall, and trees uptowering in leafy pride, and the vine-enwreathed and flower-gemmed wilderness of massive trunks uplifting their vast moss-bearded and leaf-laden branches, spread and loomed in solemn and splendid confusion on either side as the boat lightly darted on its sinuous course. Alligators swam through the bayou, or plunged from floodwood, or raised themselves with brutal bellowings on the margin as it glided on. Cranes and bitterns fled away from the banks squawking and screaming; strange birds of gorgeous plumage flew rustling through the branches; scarlet-gilled black buzzards rose and soared with broad and steady wing; myriads of ducks and water-fowl of many kinds flapped and swam away continually before it. Paddled steadily forward, now on one side, now on the other, on sped the brown canoe, while the shadows grew inkier on the sombre water, and again under the red reflection of the sky, the dull bayou became a stream of blood.

Awed by the solemn desolation of the scene, the gloomy color of the water, the gathering darkness of the wooded fen, the motions and the voices all around; troubled at the thought of the long and perilous distance that stretched between him and his far bourn of safety; yet with a fearful joy and a sustaining hope within, the fugitive oared his swift darting skiff at length into the river he had swam last the day before. The red glow had died from sky and water, and the moon silvered greyly the stream as he paddled on between the black forest on either side. Heading his prow to the east, and plying his paddle vigorously, he flew lightly up the stream. Voices of bird and beast called and answered weirdly in the darkness of the black shores; trees towered and leaned in ambiguous sable shapes over the dusky stream, and watched him as he shot swiftly by; the solemn sky spread far above him like a doubtful thought, half-boding, yet clearing slowly into deep-withdrawn tranquillity, in the increasing lustre of the tawny moon. Overarched and palisaded by the phantom sentience of the hour, his dark skiff, gliding and darting with light tremors and waverings still held its way like a dumb intelligence over the mysterious water.

Hours went on, and save the scattered hooting and screeching of owls in the forest, and the occasional clacking of some vagrant bat whirling by, the moonlit night was still. Only once the fugitive oared his canoe in to the shore, where on a low projecting bluff under a great tree, he lit a small fire, and hastily parching some corn in the pan, ate a hurried meal. Then slaking the fire, he entered the canoe again, and paddled on.

An hour or two later he turned the skiff into a narrow bayou which debouched into the stream, thus changing his course to the north. His object was to gain the Red River, where he hoped to smuggle himself on board some steamboat, and getting to New Orleans, escape from the steamboat, and hide himself in the hold of some northern vessel. It was his former plan, and he still clung to it with tenacity, bitterly aware of its hazards and dangers, yet unable to think of a better. The bayou he was now in was very narrow, hemmed in on either side by the forest and the fen, and much obstructed by stumps, snags, fallen trees and lodgments of logs. To steer his course through these in the uncertain darkness, for the branches almost shut out the moonlight, was difficult, and several times he was obliged to clamber on the fallen timber, and pull the canoe over, or shove aside the huddled floodwood to clear a passage. But his efforts brought him at length to a sluggish stream, which he judged to be the Pacoudrie—the stream he had swam first in his escape the day before, but at a point several miles below the Lafitte plantation. He was now approaching dangerous ground, and his heart began to beat faster. Turning his prow eastward again, he paddled down the stream, looking for another debouching bayou. He soon came upon one, into which he turned, heading north, and through which his passage was as dark and impeded as before. He exerted himself to the utmost, and at last, heated and panting, he saw that he was leaving the morass, and that the moonlit ground, thinly scattered over with trees, and thickly covered with verdurous underwood, was gradually rising on either side of him. The bayou, too, grew deeper and less impeded, and presently he saw on his left, beyond a cluster of huge trees, the grain of a plantation, and further up, a mansion with outbuildings. Who lived there he did not know—he only knew that he was again in the region of his enemies. Light thrills shot through his heated blood, and the canoe yawed and trembled beneath him, as if conscious of danger. Paddling forward, he saw before him in the clear moonlight, for the trees on either side were thinly scattered now, a huge trunk fallen sheer across the stream, sloping down obliquely, with its crown of branches dipping in the water, and barring half the passage. From the other side, crossing the first trunk, a leafless tree, withered or blasted, had also fallen, and lay, dipped in the water, half way across, with its broken boughs sticking upward like jagged spikes or horns. Steering to the left of these, with the intention of shooting through the space under the large trunk, he gave three or four vigorous strokes of the paddle on either side of the skiff. The canoe darted forward, quivering with the impetus of the strokes—stopped suddenly with a tearing and griding shock, and yawed around, with the water welling up swiftly through its bottom. Antony, who was kneeling on one knee, had just time to spring up, catch at the trunk before him, and lift himself up on it. When he turned, the rim of the canoe was settling in the water. It had struck one of the jagged spikes just below the surface, which had ripped its bottom, and it had gone down forever.

Sitting on the tree, stupefied at this unexpected accident, Antony watched the circling ripples on the moonlit water where his boat had sunk, and thought with bitter regret that he was now without a single weapon to fight his way against any opposing white man, or to end his own existence, should the odds be against him. His hatchet had sunk with the boat, and his knife also. With a fierce imprecation, he rose, ran up the trunk, sprang ashore, and pausing only to wrench off a branch, and strip it of its leaves for a club to defend himself, rushed on through the underwood.

Heading to the northeast, he gained the plantation, and running over rows of corn and springing cotton-plant, pale in the paling moon, he struck upon a fenced road lying between the plantation, with another road diverging from it in the course he was travelling. Into the latter he turned, but afraid to take the open path, he kept within the fences and hedges skirting its side, ready if he saw anybody in the distance to hide in the rows, or if anybody came upon him, to fight till he was killed.

Rushing on, haggard with apprehension and desperate resolution, with his teeth set, his large nostrils dilated, and his glaring eyes roving warily about him, he came to a plantation divided from the one he was on by a hedge of the osage-orange, and with a similar hedge skirting the road. To break through this would be difficult, so he took the road and ran on, with the fresh wind of the coming morning blowing upon him, and increasing his fear with the thought of the new dangers the daybreak would bring. It was a large plantation, and it took him some time to arrive at its terminus, at which a road diverged from the one on which he was journeying. He reached this road, and there, clad in shabby light clothes, and coming down the path, not three yards distant from him, was a man!

Antony swung up his club, and stood with opened nostrils and glaring eyes, his black face alive with fierce courage. The man halted, and looked at him with a sullen scowl. In the blank pause all life seemed to have died from the air, and the moon lay faded in a vacant, sky, ghast and grey in the pale light of the morning. The man was a large, gaunt fellow, with a harsh and sallow taciturn face, but to the dark, half demented fancy of the fugitive, he dimly seemed a devil, and the place was still vaguely Hell.

“See here, nigger,” he said, in a stern, strident voice, “yer a runaway. There’s their name as owns yer on yer collar, and I know Lafitte Brothers, New Orleans, want yer. I’m goin’ down in the first boat, and yer comin’ with me, right away, and no fuss. What yo’ say, nigger?”

He drew a revolver from his breast, and held it idly, watching the fugitive with a scowl. Sense flickered through the mind of Antony. Here was a chance to get safely down the river—beyond, a chance to give his captor the slip when he reached the city. He flung his club away.

“I’ll go with ye, Marster,” he said, sullenly.

The man put up his pistol.

“What’s yer name, boy?” he asked.

“Bill, Marster.”

“Bill, eh? You’re the Fugitive Slave Bill, I suppose,” said the man, with a dull grin.

“Yes, Marster.”

“Well, Bill, I collect bills for a livin’, and I reckon I’ve collected you, Bill. Hope I’ll collect something on yer, too. Come along.”

Antony followed him. Not a word further was said on either side. Meanwhile, around them the pallor of the sky lightened into daybreak; horns sounded over the plantations; the black gangs were coming forth into the fields on every side; the birds darted and sang; the fragrant wind blew freshly from the east, and the life of day began anew.

Weary, and sore, and aching, with insane fancies flitting through the horrible lethargy which was creeping on his mind, Antony followed his taciturn captor, and just as the rising sun shot a low, broad splendor over the landscape, they came to a solitary landing-place, with a shanty and a wood-pile, on the border of the wide, gleaming river.

It was all a dim, dread dream. In it came a huge monster, puffing, and snorting, and clanking, vomiting clouds of black smoke, and lifting and washing back the drifting trees and logs and refuse on the shining surge. Then a dream of hurry and tumult, a great heaving mass, a swarm of people, an air blind with light and heavy with smoke, a roar of voices laughing, and talking, and hallooing, the clanging of a bell, piles of cotton and goods of all sorts, the clank of engines, the wallowing of water, ponderous snorting, and heaving, and surging, all mixed together in inextricable confusion, and he who dreamed it vaguely knew that he was sitting, like one drugged, on a heaving deck, with heaps of merchandise around him. Gradually he sank away into a still heavier lethargy, in which everything became even more dim and distant, and from thence he slid into a blank and stupid sleep.

Once again the dream seemed to swim heavily into that death-like slumber—a vague, spectral dream, in which some one gave him a hunch of corn bread, which he ate slowly in a glimmering light, remotely conscious of a dark figure standing near, of distant voices, a far-off snorting and clanking, a shuddering motion beneath him, and formless bulks around him. Presently it drowsily dissolved into darkness and silence.

Like one who dreams of awaking, he awoke again, and stupidly strove to remember where he was and what had befallen him. In the dull gleam of a hanging lantern, he saw masses of bales and boxes, casks and furniture, and miscellaneous merchandise, lying in murky gloom. A few dark, uncouth forms of sleeping men, heavily breathing, were strewn about in various grotesque attitudes on the piles of cotton. In the stillness, he heard the regular snort and clank of the engine, the rushing of the water, and felt with a dull giddiness the floor rocking and swaying in long, regular undulations.

Somehow, a minute afterward, he found himself out on the edge of the deck, sick and dizzy, steadying himself against a heap of bales, and looking out on a broad, dim river, rolling in mighty, languid surges under a large, low, yellow moon. Logs and trees and masses of chaff and refuse lifted blackly in the tawny light on the long swells. All around the water fled by, churned into a mill-race of seething froth and foam. Beyond was a huge steamboat; black smoke trailing from its double funnels; fire flaring from them and from its escape-pipes; balls of light gleaming from hanging lanterns here and there; light streaming out from the rows of oblong windows, and from every hole and cranny; the strong current beaten up into a flood of foam beneath its wheel; and the darks and lights of an inverted phantom steamboat hung below it in the water. Far away were low, black shores, with here and there a gaunt spectral tree, and dull lights glimmering. He was on the mighty tide of a river which ran through Hell.

Sick and dizzy, and with a horror on his mind, he staggered back with the heavy drowse on all his faculties, through the tortuous lane of cotton-bales, and sinking down on one of them, fell into his former lethargy.

He did not sleep through the night, but lay in utter torpor, thinking of nothing, fearing and hoping nothing, only vaguely conscious of where he was, and of the forms around him. Overstrung for many years with the unnatural toils of a slave, and still more tensely overstrung with the terrible labors of his journey through the morass—overstrung both in body and spirit, as few but slaves ever are—he had sunk back, now that a season of relaxation had come, into lassitude as excessive as were the fatigues and agitations of which it was the reaction. Safe for the present, with no immediate stimulus to urge him into activity, he lay, body and spirit, as in the sentient sleep of the tomb.

Toward morning he sank away again into a heavy, dreamless slumber. Once during the day he dreamed that he was aroused by some one whom he did not recognize, and bidden to come along and get something to eat. In his dream he tried to shake the stupor from his bleared eyes, which even the dim light among the bales pained, and to obey. But the drowse was heavy upon him, and he could only mumble out that he didn’t want to eat, and the dream instantly dissolved in oblivion. He was left undisturbed, for his captor was not without pity for him, and saw that he was terribly fatigued.

But late that night, when midnight was two hours gone, and the moon was westering palely from the sky, the trump of Liberty or Death sounded again in the ear of the fugitive, and his spirit arose from its tomb. A hand shook him, a voice shouted in his ear that they were near the city, and instantly springing to his feet, with fresh blood leaping through his veins, with new pulses throbbing in his heart, and all his faculties awake and alive, and armed with their utmost cunning, their fullest courage, and their most desperate resolution, he followed his captor out on deck. The boat was within a mile of the city, which lay beyond a forest of masts and hulls, and scattered lights hung in the rigging, or glimmering on the levee, dark and silent, with its roofs and spires massed against the purple sky, and glittering in the moon. The night was hot and still, and a heavy languor hung over the great breadth of regular rolling swells. Ships lay at anchor all about the stream, lifting with the lifting of the surge, and here and there a flat-boat with lights on board, and the men plying their long sweeps, lazily steered its way on the drift between the hulls. Antony watched the scene, with his heart fiercely beating at the thought of the coming trial.

Meanwhile the boat, with her bell ringing, was slowly clanking and snorting on through the foaming and brattling flood around her bows and wheels, and the passengers were pouring forth, men, women and children, on her decks. The fugitive stood silently by his captor, on the lower forward deck, amidst the tumult and crowding of the risen multitude, biding his time. The moment the boat touched the levee he was determined to quietly slip aside from his companion and lose himself in the crowd. To this end he stood a little to one side of him, watching his every movement.

Suddenly the clatter of conversation and the trampling of feet were stricken still by a wild yell, above which was heard the slow, impassive snort and clank of the engine, and the brattling wash of the water. Then burst forth a shrill clamor of cries and screams from the after deck, followed by a trampling rush which threw all forward, as by a galvanic shock, into mad confusion; then behind the pouring crowd, suddenly lightened a red flare, followed by a tremendous volume of black smoke, and at once, amidst terrific disorder, uprose a dreadful storm of yells and screams from the horror-stricken multitude. The next instant the uproar of voices was stifled in a multitudinous choking and gasping, as the thick, poisonous smoke swept over the decks, and presently up shot a sheeting burst of clear flame, with shrivelling ringlets of black vapor writhing and vanishing away in it, lighting the ghastly pallor of the hundreds of terrified faces, all turned one way, and throwing its lurid glare on the churning froth and the lifting swells, and on the myriad masts and spars and rigging of the surrounding vessels, which started out suddenly in lines and bars of tawny splendor against a background of gloom.

Even in that awful moment Antony did not lose sight of his captor. With his whole soul fiercely bent on getting away from him, he saw him start back and shout with terror. With his eye fixed upon him, he heard the rapid jabber of a terrified man behind him shrieking out that a lantern had fallen and broken, setting fire to a pool of turpentine which had leaked from a barrel on the after deck, and the fire spreading at once to the barrel, it had burst and flooded the boat with flame. Still watching him, he heard the screamed order to reverse the engines, and amidst howls and cries of anguish and despair, and cursing and praying, and the heavy thump of men and women falling in swoon upon the deck, or trampling and fighting over each other in their frantic desperation, while the advancing flame leaped and writhed, crackling and bristling and roaring furiously on—amidst all the horror and Bedlam confusion of that minute—for it was but one—standing still, with his eye riveted on his captor, he heard the ponderous clank, the long wash and wallow, and felt the boat drift backward to gain the middle of the stream. That instant he sprang backward, and rushing through the crowd, kicked off his shoes, and leaped into the river.

He emerged presently from his plunge, amidst a shower of fiery cinders, with the lifting surges all aglare around him, and struck boldly forward for the levee, seeing at a glance the burning mass drift behind him, and all the illuminated ships at the piers and in the stream suddenly alive with shouting figures. Turning for an instant, and treading water, he saw the boat clanking backward, with her black funnels rising from a leaping and coiling mountain of smoke and flame, her passengers all huddled forward in a dense, shrieking mass, black against the fiery glow, and figures jumping into the water—which was already dotted with dark, swimming forms, and looked like a turbulent sea of flame ignited from the spectre of a burning boat below its surface. Among the swimming figures there was, perhaps, not one but was his enemy—not one who would not hale him back to the bondage from which he was struggling away. Turning again, he swam on, heading against the ponderous current which would bear him down past the city and out to sea. Boats were putting out in all directions from ships in the stream, and from the shore, to pick up the swimmers, many of whom were swimming in front of him, or clinging to pieces of drift-wood or furniture. To avoid being picked up by any of the boats was a necessary part of his task, for they, too, were manned by his enemies. Reaching a large brig anchored in the stream, with a few sailors standing on the bulwarks and in the rigging, watching the burning vessel, he resolved to cling to its rudder a few moments to recover breath, and as he approached it, looking up through the shadow, made luminous by the wan light of the moon, and the reflected glare of the water, he read on the stern, in white letters, the words, “Soliman, Boston.” His heart throbbed wildly, and clinging to the rudder under an overhanging boat, he listened to the talking on the deck above him, and presently heard a voice say:

“Devilish lucky we weren’t set afire, Jones, and we just ready to sail.”

Just ready to sail! He heard those words with his brain aflame. His chance had come. Setting his knees to the slippery rudder, he began to climb. It was hard work, for the helm was coated with sea-slime, but at length he got his toes upon the slight projection of one of the iron clamps that bound the wood together, and scrambling upward, laid hold of the boat swinging astern, and softly clambering in, remained still, and listened. He had not been discovered. The talking above him was still going on, and presently he heard the tramp of the two men as they moved away forward. Raising himself in the boat, he cautiously peered in at the cabin window. A swinging lamp was burning within, and all was quiet. He put in his head, looked around him for a moment, and then stealthily got in. Going to the cabin door, he peered out on the deck. Everybody was at the bows, standing on the bulwarks and in the rigging in the wild glare, watching the steamboat, which was now one mass of leaping flame, half a mile away up the river. Cries and screams and shouts were resounding from the water in all directions. Looking at the deck, he saw that the hatch nearest him was open, and nerved to desperation, and almost choking with excitement, he went lightly forward, his bare feet making no sound, and, unseen by any one, so intent was the general gaze on the conflagration, stooped and dropped into the hold.

He fell on a cotton-bale, three or four feet from the top, and lay in the thick darkness, reeking with sweat, and listening, with a wild jumping in his throat, for any sound that might tell him his entrance had been observed. He heard none. The talking went on above him, and it was all about the burning steamboat. He knew that he must not remain where he was, for there he could be seen, and in a moment he began to grope for a hiding-place. He was in a sort of square well, formed by the cotton-bales around him. Above them was a horizontal space under the deck, and clambering out of the well, he wormed himself into this, a few feet forward, and lay, panting and fatigued, hot, wet, hungry and thirsty, half stifled by the foul and musty air of the hold, and by the smell of the bilge, but safe for the present.

He lay in a sort of stupor, and gradually heard all sounds die away. For a little while his mind was filled with strange recollections of the passions and events of the last hour; then lying prone in the foul and musty darkness, he lapsed into a sleep haunted with dreams, in which he was again rushing through the swamp, which somehow changed into rolling water on which a steamboat was burning, and he was holding up Madame Lafitte, who suddenly turned and bit him on the hand. Starting up in the thick darkness, he struck his head against the deck, and then remembering where he was, lay still. The hatch had been closed. In the darkness he heard light scampering and squealing, and felt the ship shuddering beneath him.

He forgot his dream in the wild whirl of emotion with which he became aware that the vessel was on her way. Presently he felt a sort of pricking in his hand, and touching the spot, found that it was wet, and, as he again heard the scampering and squealing, he knew that a rat had bitten him. Startled a little at the new danger of being set upon by these vermin, and suspicious of poison, he sucked the wound, resolving to keep awake now as long as he could. He did not know how long he had slept, but he could hear the incessant snort, snort, snort, of a steamboat, with the long unbroken wash of the vessel, and knew that the brig was in the tow of a steam-tug, and so not yet out of the river.

At length there was a change in the noises. Orders were shouted above, heavy feet were rushing about, there was a bustle of pulling and hauling, griding and flapping, thudding of ropes on deck, chanting of sailors, amidst the receding snort of the steam-tug, and in the darkness, Antony felt the vessel lean and roll and stagger with a sound of swiftly rushing water, and knew that she was standing out to sea.

Who’ll send me back after all I’ve gone through? Who’ll be mean enough to do it? That was his constant thought now, and it came in those words to his mind. He knew the penalties imposed on any captain who took away a fugitive in his vessel. He had thought of them before, but dimly; now they came to him vividly, and he trembled. He was resolved to remain in the hold as long as he could, but he knew the time would come when he must leave his hiding-place, and face the captain. His plan was to tell him all he had suffered, to show him his wounds and scars, to beg him on his knees not to send him back to the Hell he had escaped from. Who would do it? Who’ll send me back after all I’ve gone through? Who’ll be mean enough to do it?

Soon the motion of the vessel threw him, already sickened by the horrible smells and closeness of the hold, into agonies of sea-sickness, and he lay on the bales vomiting violently, and feeling as if his soul were rending his aching body asunder. By and by, he crawled down into the well-like cavity under the hatch, where there was a little more room to breathe in, and there he lay without food, without drink, almost without air, for three days.

Days of sickness too loathsome to be described, too dreadful for permitted language to convey. Days of utter prostration, of griping pain, of wrenching convulsions, of horror indescribable, of tortured death-in-life. Days when the ropy and putrid air was sucked into the feeble lungs as if it were some strangling substance; when the oppressed heart beat slowly with dull knocks as though it would burst the bosom, and the bosom labored as though it were loaded down with tons of iron. Days when sleep came down like a weight of lead upon the brain, and struggled with infernal dreams, and was broken to fight off an ever-returning swarm of rats—invisible vermin that swarmed over his invisible body when it lay still, and were heard squeaking and pattering off in the sightless darkness when he feebly flung about his limbs to beat them away. Days whose mad, disgustful horror was desperately borne for the hope of liberty, for the hatred of slavery—borne till he could bear it no longer, and he resolved to beat upon the hatch and cry aloud to let those above him know what a hell of agony raged beneath their feet.

How long he had been immured he did not know. Count time by anguish, and it might have been centuries. Fearful of discovering himself till he was too far from the land from which he had fled to be returned, he had resolved to endure till endurance became impossible. For this he had clung to life, for this he had silently borne the horrors of his tomb, for this he had striven a hundred times against the desire to end his imprisonment by shouting aloud to those above him. Now when heavy torpor and gradual giddiness were stealing upon him, and the instinct of his soul told him death was drawing near, he roused himself for the long deferred effort.

The ship was staggering heavily, and he heard the trampling of feet on the deck as, with dizzily reeling brain, he feebly and slowly crawled up on his hands and knees. His strength was almost gone. An infant newly born could have been hardly more helpless than he found himself. He slowly lifted one hand to lay it on the bales beside him—lifted it a few inches like something over which he had no command—and it fell heavily, and losing his balance he tumbled down on his side. An awful feeling stole across his mind that he had delayed too long—that his resolution had outlived his physical powers. Turning over on his back, feebly panting, slowly suffocating, he drew in his breath for a wild cry for help. It rushed from him in a hoarse whistling whisper. His voice had left him!

He lay still now, painfully breathing, but resigned to die. Quietly—quietly—the fears and desires of the present, the hopes of the future withdrew, and the vision of all his past floated softly through his tranquil brain. It faded, and he lay rushing on a fast-rushing tide, and dilated with a wonderful and mystic change. Power and beauty and joy ineffable began to glow and spread divinely through his being with the vague beauteous glimmer of a transcendant life afar. All fierce and dark and sorrowful passions and emotions gone—all sense of pain and horror and disgust fled forever—himself happier, greater, nobler than he had ever dreamed—he lay swiftly drifting to the last repose.

What sound was it that jarred so dully on his failing ear? What sudden light was it that fell upon him? What faces were those that looked on him so strangely from above, and vanished with cries that brought down darkness and silence on him once more?

O blue sky of the nineteenth century, what is this? O pale, fresh light streaming into the noisome hold, what is this? O wonder-stricken, silent faces, gazing aghast upon that swart and loathsome figure lying in the shallow well, with an iron collar on its neck, what does this mean?

The men stood staring at the motionless body on the bales below them, and then, lost in a trance of wonder, stared at each other. Their wild amazement at the sight which met their eyes when they had unbattened the hatch, had burst forth in one cry, and then left them still and dumb. Presently there was a sound of heavy, hurrying feet, and the captain, a short, powerfully-built man, came flying over the deck, with strong excitement working in his sun-burnt face, reached the hold, looked in, turned livid with rage, slapped his straw hat down on his head with both hands, and rushed away cursing and raving like a madman. It was highly natural. A commercial Christian of the nineteenth century breed, the captain had been educated to think of nothing but his ship and trade, and his special reflection was of the penalties that would ensue if it became known that he had carried away a slave from New Orleans.

Recovering from their amazement, the sailors, with uncouth and profane ejaculations of horror and pity, lifted the inanimate body of Antony, disgusting even to their rude senses, and touching even to their rude sensibilities, out of the hold. They had hardly laid it on deck when the captain came rushing back again, shouting with oaths an order for a look-out up aloft, with the hope of meeting some vessel bound for the city he had left that would take the slave back. Then giving the prostrate body a furious kick, he rushed away again, storming and stamping and swearing.

At the direction of the mate, the sailors took the faintly-breathing body of Antony forward to the galley, where the black cook busied himself in reviving the fugitive. Half a dozen times a day the captain came to the spot where the feeble man reclined, and glared at him without saying a word. On the third day, Antony being then weak but able to stand and talk, the captain demanded him to give an account of himself.

Feebly standing before him, with all the vigor gone from his emaciated form, and with the deep marks of awful suffering graven on his wasted lineaments, Antony told his story. As he finished, imploring the captain in earnest and broken tones not to send him back, the mate, who stood by, turned away with his mouth twitching, saying it was a damned shame. The captain burst into a fit of passion, and stamped on the deck, gesticulating with clenched hands.

“A damned shame, is it, Mr. Jones?” he roared, perfectly livid with rage. “I should think it was! Rather! A blasted nigger to smuggle his ugly carcass aboard my brig—what d’ye think they’ll say about it at Orleans, and what’ll they do about it, Mr. Jones, and what’ll Atkins say when he hears of it, Mr. Jones, and a load of cotton aboard from the very house whose junior partner owns this dingy curse, Mr. Jones! Look at the name of the house on his neck, man. Blast ye,” he howled, turning upon Antony, and shaking both fists at him, “I’d send ye back, you beggar, if they were to fry ye in your own black blood when they got ye! Send ye back? If I don’t, may I be eternally”—

He finished the sentence by a gasp, and dashed both clenched fists into the haggard and imploring face of the fugitive, who fell to the deck, covered with blood. Shouting and cursing, the infuriated captain leaped on him, and seizing him by the hair, beat his head against the planks; then jumped to his feet, capering like a madman, and brandishing his clenched fists. The mate stood looking away to the horizon, with a mute, flushed face, and two or three of the sailors standing not far distant, dumb witnesses of this brutal scene, glanced at each other with mutinous brows. Striding off a dozen paces, the captain turned again, bringing down his clenched fist with a slap into the palm of his hand, and stamping with his right foot on the deck as he shouted:

“Keep a sharp look-out, Mr. Jones! The first vessel that heaves in sight for New Orleans shall take him if it costs me a hundred dollars. And if he gets to Boston, I’ll tie him hand and foot, and send him or fetch him back the first chance, or my name’s not Bangham!”

He foamed off into the cabin. Who’ll send me back after all I’ve gone through? Who’ll be mean enough to do it? Antony had received his answer.

CHAPTER I.
THE REIGN OF TERROR.

If, on or about the twenty-fifth of May, 1852, a fugitive from Southern tyranny were to arrive in Boston, he would probably very soon discover two things—first, that he must seek refuge with the people of his own color, in the quarter vulgarly known as Nigger Hill; secondly, that though they had once lived there in safety, neither he nor they could live there in safety any more.

There were, at that period, about three thousand colored people, a large proportion of them fugitives, residing in Boston, and the greater part of them lived in the quarter above mentioned. It was on the slope of Beacon Hill—one of the three hills which gave to the town its old name of Trimount. On the crown of the hill towered the domed State House; behind and around it rose, street on street descending, the dwellings of the aristocracy; and behind them, a deep fringe of humble poverty, rose, street on street, the dingy dwellings of the fugitives. There was a maxim of statesmanship then current: “Take care of the rich, and the rich will take care of the poor.” It had been acted upon. The rich had been taken care of, and they had taken such care of these poor, that at that period there was no safety for them, as for two years previous there had been no safety for them in the city of Boston. Sidney’s Latin blazed in gold on the walls of that State House: Ense petit placidam sub libertate quietem—The State seeks by the sword the calm repose of liberty. But the holy legend was dim, and not with the sword of Sidney, nor with the sword of the Spirit, sought Boston the calm repose of liberty for the poor fugitives who had fled from the meanest and the vilest tyranny that ever blackened the world.

Yet it was the city of fugitives, and fugitives had laid its old foundations down in pain and prayer. Winthrop and Dudley, Bellingham, Leverett, Coddington, the star-sweet Lady Arabella, with their compeers, men and women of true and gentle blood, and fugitives all, had reared it from the wilderness. Fugitives who taught a tyrant that he had a joint in his neck, had fled thither when the reborn tyranny again arose in their own land. Fugitives dwelling there who remembered in their own sufferings the sufferings of others, had helped frame the noble statute of 1641, welcoming to State and city any strangers who might fly thither from the tyranny or oppression of their persecutors. Fugitive hands—the hands of the Huguenot Faneuil—had dowered it with the cradling Hall of Liberty named with his name. Over it all, and through it all, and tincturing its history in the very grain, was the tradition of the fugitive. Still, in modern days, fugitives fled thither from the broken hopes, the baffled efforts, the lost battles of continental freedom. German fugitives, Italian fugitives, French fugitives, Irish fugitives, flying from their persecutors, arrived there and nestled under the broad wing of the old statute. At that period, too, the great Hungarian fugitive, Kossuth, had come, with a host of other Hungarian fugitives at his back, and the town, like the land, had roared and blazed in welcome. All these fugitives, of whatever nation, were safe in Boston. No tyrant could molest them. But the fugitives from the South—the black Americans, men and women, who had fled thither for protection from a tyranny in no wise different from any other, save in its sordid vileness and abominable excess of cruelty and outrage—there was no safety for them.

They were, for the most part, humble people—their souls crushed and bruised, as Plato says, with servile employments. Their lives had been obstructed by slavery; slavery had nurtured in them some vices, had dwarfed and crippled in them many virtues. They were, in the mass, uncouth, grotesque, ungainly, repulsive to the eye; they were degraded, imbruted, low, ignorant, weak and poor; and, therefore, the heart of every gentleman should have leaped, like Burke’s sword from its scabbard, to avenge even a look that threatened them with insult. Yet, on the other hand, there were many among them too comely and noble to need the defence the hearts of chevaliers fling around those to whom Man and Nature have been unkind. “In the negro countenance,” says Charles Lamb, “you will often meet with strong traits of benignity. I have felt yearnings of tenderness toward some of these faces, or rather masks, that have looked out kindly upon one in casual encounters in the streets and highways. I love what Fuller beautifully calls—those ‘images of God cut in ebony.’” The gentle Londoner could have said it all, and more, of the negro faces one met in Boston, and he might have added a far prouder word for the character that matched the faces. For all that is manliest in manhood, all that is womanliest in womanhood, rose here and there, with tropic energy, uncrushed by the load of past slavery and present social wrong, among those people. Piety, rude and simple, it may be, yet fervent and mighty as ever clasped with tears the Savior’s feet, or rose through eternity to faint in the raptures of prayer before the throne of Jehovah; love, none more loyal and tender, for the father, the mother, the husband, the wife, the child, the home, the country; compassion, quick and strong for mutual succor; flush-handed hospitality; courtesy born not of art but nature; patience; cheerfulness; self-respect; laborious industry; ambition to rise and to excel, despite of fettering disabilities and thick-strewn obstacles; heroic bravery and endurance, such as blanch the cheeks and shake the hearts of those who read or hear the pains and perils negroes have dared for their own freedom, and nobler still, the freedom of their fellows—these, and many other virtues, bourgeoned and blossomed in the hearts and lives of the black fugitives. For these people, whatever pro-slavery snobs and sciolists might say of them, or however they might prate of their inferiority, were, nevertheless, of worthy blood. Take as one sure proof of the negro’s native elegance and gentility of soul, his love and talent for music. The old genius of Africa which taught the lips of Memnon those weird auroral tones which enchanted the valley of the Nile, still haunts the broken souls of the race on this continent. America has no distinctive music but her negro melodies. Listening to those merry rigadoon tunes, wonderful for their jovial sweetness and facile celerity of movement, or to those melancholy or mournful chants, ineffable in pathos, which thrill the spirit with their wild, mysterious cadences, he would have little wit who could deny the spiritual worth of the race whose fugitives at that period found no safety in Boston.

No safety. None at all. Yet Boston had it to remember that one of the first five martyrs of her freedom and of the freedom of America, was a negro—Crispus Attucks. But Boston’s remembrance of that fact seemed at that time to be almost confined to a certain literary slop-pail who periodically emptied himself upon the fame of the hero whom John Hancock and Samuel Adams had thought worthy of funeral honors. Boston had, for many years, paid her debt of gratitude to Attucks by treating the men and women of his race something after the fashion that Jews were treated in the Middle Ages. They had their Ghetto at the west end of the town; there they lived by sufferance, despised, rejected, borne down by a social scorn which, to the noblest of them, was daily heartbreak, and which the lowliest of them could not bear without pain. They had a narrow range of humble employments and avocations, such as window-cleaning, white-washing, boot-blacking, cab-driving, porterage, domestic service, and the like; keeping a barber’s shop or an old clothes shop, was perhaps the highest occupation open to them; and these they pursued faithfully and industriously. They were shut out of the mechanic occupations; shut out of commerce; shut out of the professions. They were excluded from the omnibuses; excluded from the first-class cars; excluded from the theatres unless the manager could make a place for them where seeing or hearing was next to impossible; excluded from some of the churches by express provision, and from most, if not all, of the others, by tacit understanding; excluded from the common schools, and allotted caste-schools where to learn anything was against nature; excluded from the colleges; excluded from the decent dwellings; excluded from the decent graveyards; excluded from almost everything. They were, however, freely admitted to the gallows and the jail. But these, somehow or other, saw less of them than of the race that despised them.

For all the years anterior to the period under notice, these people had been, speaking in a general way, safe in Boston. There had, to be sure, been occasional instances of private kidnapping, little known; and there had been an abortive attempt to legally clutch into slavery one negro, Latimer. Still, Boston cherished, sentimentally, at least, free principles, and the New England traditions and laws, all favoring liberty, had been strong enough in her borders to protect the fugitives. Moreover, the caste prejudices against them had for twenty years or so preceding been slowly breaking down. During that time, thanks to one heroic saint, Emerson—thanks to one saintly hero, Garrison—the dawn of a new era was broadening up the northern sky, and all things had begun to come under the sovereignty of reason. Emerson had shed the new and free disclosing light of a poet’s soul and a scholar’s mind on the great problems of spiritual and secular life: straightway the primal soul held session; the old decisions were unsettled; everything was to be reëxamined; thought awoke; the breeze streamed; the sun shone; the Dutch canal fled into a rushing river; all that was generous, all that was thoughtful, all that was intrepid in New England uprose from lethargy; and while he—

— “with low tones that decide,

And doubt and reverend use defied—

With a look that solved the sphere,

And stirred the devils everywhere—

Gave his sentiment divine,”—

the contest of reason against authority and precedent began, and amidst much theological mud-flinging and unable-editor jeering, continued from year to year, awakening the distinctive intellectual life of America. On the other hand, Garrison had impeached Slavery before the nation, as the giant foe of civil and political liberty, democracy, society, humanity, in a word, civilization; and amidst a roaring storm of rancor, and the howls of slavers and traders, that tremendous trial also began, and continued from year to year. At the outset, Boston merchants, convulsed with sordid fear lest their southern trade should suffer by this arraignment of the oligarchy, gathered in a mob to hang the gallant citizen—had, in fact, the rope already around his neck, when the Mayor put him in jail, as a dastardly way of saving him. At the outset, too, the gentle Governor of Georgia issued an official proclamation offering five thousand dollars reward for his assassination. Happy, free America! But Garrison had in his heart all that made patriots and Puritans, and amidst a tempest of persecution unequalled since the Dark Ages, dauntless with pen and voice, he held his course against Slavery like the thunder storm against the wind. To his aid gathered a little group of gentlemen and gentlewomen, writers and orators of marked power. Abby Kelley, fair and eloquent for liberty as ever the Greek Hypatia for science: Lydia Maria Child, whose generous and exquisite literary genius all know: Mrs. Chapman, her thought shining in a terse, crystalline diction, like gold in a mountain stream: Angelina and Sarah Grimke, Carolinians, who knew what Slavery was, and knew how to flash the heart’s light upon it: Beriah Green, a master of the old ignited logic: Theodore Weld, a resplendent and indomitable torrent of brave speech: Edmund Quincy, wit, humorist, satirist, gentleman, with the best spirit of the days of Queen Anne in his thought and style: Wendell Phillips, with a fiery glory of classic oratory, strange, but for him, to the air of America: Burleigh, Francis Jackson, in later years Theodore Parker, these, and a score of others gathered around Garrison, sacrificing name and fame, genius, scholarship, wealth, everything they had to sacrifice, to the heroic task of redeeming their country from its shame and wo. Outside of this organization was Channing, with words like morning: John Quincy Adams, too, during those years, fought the battle of free speech in the halls of Congress: Webster, also, poured the lightning and thunder of his mind against the extension of slavery, though never, save in the abstract, against slavery itself: the Whig party backed him; the men of the Liberty party, and in later years the Free Soil party, came to the side issues of the war. But these were not the Abolitionists proper; the Abolitionists were those who stood with Garrison, and their work was with Slavery itself. Against it they reared Alps of testimony and argument; they exposed it utterly; they bent every energy to the task of rousing the nation to its annihilation. Part of their task was the elevation of the fugitives in Boston, and it was owing to their efforts that the caste prejudices were breaking down. The comparative triumph of the present time, whose signal is that the black child sits on equal terms in the Boston schools with the white, was not then achieved, but still, at the period under notice, much had been done. The cars were open to the negro, the omnibuses, the decent dwellings, some mechanic occupations, some of the churches; and one or two colored lawyers had been admitted to the Boston Bar. The theatres still held out; the “respectable” churches, of course—spite of the black bishops of the days of Paul and Augustine; commerce, also; the schools and colleges, likewise; but the Abolitionists were battering on the wall, and it was breaking, breaking, breaking slowly down.

Suddenly over these struggling tides of light and darkness swept the black refluent surge of barbarism. In the year 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law. The great Humboldt justly called it “the Webster law”—for with Webster against it, it either could not have passed, or having passed, it never could have been executed. Webster hostile to it, and the North would have risen around him as one man. But the time had come for the Presidential candidates to make their game, and on the seventh of March, 1850, Webster made his game. The draft of a speech for freedom lying in his desk, he stood up in the Senate, spoke a speech for slavery, which was at war with every other speech of his previous life, and his game was made. He made it, played it, lost it, died, and lies cursed with forgiveness, and buried in tears.

A cold, hard Southern tyrant, Mason of Virginia, created the black statute; a sleek, pleasant Northern traitor, Fillmore of New York, then sitting in the Presidential chair, unleashed it, and it burst forth in mischief and ruin, upon the homes of the poor. Such a law! The fugitive to be haled before a Commissioner; no Judge, no Jury; his former slavery sworn to by any unknown claimant, he was to be sent into bondage; five dollars to the Commissioner if he set him free, ten dollars if he made him a slave. Six months imprisonment, and fifteen hundred dollars fine to any person who gave a fugitive food to eat, water to drink, a room to rest in. Happy, free America!

At first Boston was horrified at the law, and aghast at the course of Webster. But the first shock over, Boston became filled with patriotic ardor, and the black statute not only rose in favor, but slavery itself became the theme of eulogy. It was about that period that an eminent Philadelphia surgeon rushed one morning, with a glowing face, before the college-class, and holding up a horrid mass before their astonished eyes, screamed, in a voice trembling with passionate enthusiasm: “Oh, gentlemen! gentlemen, what a be-a-utiful cancer!” With an enthusiasm not less rapturous than his, the Whig and Democratic politicians of that period expatiated upon the charms of the obscene and filthy oligarchic wen which hung from the neck of the South, and the black, accursed conglomerated pustule of a Fugitive Slave Law, which inoculated from it, now deformed the whole face of the North. Slavery was a perfectly paradisaical and divine institution; agitation against it must cease: the Fugitive Slave Law was instinct with the purest and noblest patriotism—the fugitive men, women and children must be hunted down by it with alacrity, or the South would dissolve the Union. To this effect the beautiful emasculate eloquence of Everett moved forth in balanced cadence; to this effect raved rancorous in Bedlam beauty, the intervolved, inextricable, splendor-spotted snarl and coil of Choate’s bewildering orations; to this effect, all up and down the land, for two years, rolled Webster’s dark and orotund malignant thunder. Everywhere in their train a host of blatherers and roarers spouted and bawled—stop agitation—execute the Slave Law—save the Union! It was a period of absolute insanity. The Union was not in the slightest danger—proof of that, the stocks never fell. The South would no more have dared to dissolve the Union than a man would dare to swim in the Maelstrom. But the Southern insanity of tyranny demanded the North for its man-hunting ground; the northern insanity of avarice yielded the demand to get southern trade; between the slaver and trader, the politicians’ insanity of power made its game; and the pretext for all was the salvation of the Union. Millions of the people cried, “Save the Union!” A thousand presses reëchoed the cry. An immense majority of the clergy echoed it again from their pulpits. The things ministers said in defence of slavery and its black statute were only less incredible than the manner in which they were received. For instance, the Rev. Dr. Dewey, an eminent divine, was reported to have declared in a public lecture that he would send his own mother into slavery to save the Union; a storm of rebuke at once burst upon him from the anti-slavery people, and this sentiment was not considered satisfactory even by citizens of the highest respectability: whereupon Dr. Dewey explained that he had not said he would send his own mother into slavery to save the Union, but that he had said he would consent that his own brother or his own son should go into slavery to save the Union—and the citizens of the highest respectability considered this sentiment as highly satisfactory! So amidst such talk and such applause as this, the pro-slavery furore pothered on, and the North was incessantly urged to enforce the black statute as the price of safety to the nation, and incessantly reminded of the priceless privileges the Union secured to us. Perhaps it did—but not least prominent among them was the priceless privilege of paying the debts of South Carolina, and the other priceless privilege of hunting men and women on the soil of the old patriots and Puritans.

Meanwhile the Reign of Terror had begun, and the hellhound of a law was ravening on its victims. It raged chiefly in the great cities, and from these the fugitives, their years of safety over, were flying by thousands to the wild Canadian snows. But the Abolitionists were upon the law. Upon it Theodore Parker dashed the bolted thunder of his speech. Upon it burst the inextinguishable Greek fire of eloquence from the fortressed soul of Wendell Phillips. Upon it, in a word, all the men and women, the Britomarts and Tancreds of the glorious minority, hurtled like a storm of swords. The Free Soilers, too, were up, and did gallant service. Giddings, Seward, Wilson, Burlingame, Mann, Sewall, Chase, Sumner, all the gentlemen and chevaliers of that league, were in the field. Charles Sumner shook Faneuil Hall with words that beat with the blood of all the ages. In New York, Beecher burst upon the monster with tempests of generous flame, and the Hebraic speech of Cheever fought with the prowess of the Maccabees. All over the North, in country towns and in some city pulpits, there were valiant clergymen, whose souls went forth in arms. The Free Soil presses everywhere, became catapults and mangonels, showering a hail of invective and argument upon the law. But the monster, panoplied in legal forms, and girt with a myriad of defenders, was hard to kill. Beaten from some places, crippled sorely, it still lives, and even at this hour, in New York, in Philadelphia, and in other cities, drags down and devours its victims. At the period under notice, its power was strong in Boston. Boston, in the branding phrase of Theodore Parker, had gone for kidnapping. Her Webster, her city officers, her aristocracy, her courts, her prominent newspapers, her traders and her rabble, were all hostile to the unhappy fugitives. That law, however, was doing the most powerful anti-slavery service ever done in America. But its results—for it broke up the Whig party, sowed death in the bones of the Democratic party, sent Charles Sumner to Congress, made the Republicans a power in the land, and taught the people a detestation of slavery which they had never known before—its results were not then fully deposited, or at least clearly seen; they were still operant to their end; and all noble hearts were bowed in sickening sorrow, for it seemed as if liberty, humanity, civilization, all, were going down forever.

It was, then, this hell-dog of a law that had made it no longer safe for the fugitives in Boston. And who is he who shall undertake to paint the agony of those men and women? He must dip his pencil in the hues of earthquake and eclipse who aims to do it. Their years of security were over. The first news of the passage of the law drove scores of them to Canada, and day by day they were flying. Numbers of their people had already been taken from other cities into slavery, when the first slave case, that of Shadrach, occurred in Boston. Ten or twelve gallant black men burst into the court-room, and took Shadrach from his foes. Boston howled. Soon another fugitive, Sims, was dragged before the Commissioner. No rescue for him; the court-house was ringed with chains, under which the Chief Justice of Massachusetts, and other Judges, crawled to their seats; the cutlasses and bludgeons of the Government begirt the captive, and fifteen hundred Boston gentlemen offered to put muskets to their shoulders, if desired, to insure his being taken into bondage. “The Fifteen Hundred Scoundrels,” Wendell Phillips christened this brigade of wretches, praying that bankruptcy might sit on the ledger of every one of them. Nine days the Abolitionists and Free-Soilers fought the case, impeded the Jedburgh justice—the bitter mockery of that infamous trial; then Sims was environed with cutlasses and pistols, marched, at early dawn, to the vessel a Boston merchant volunteered for his rendition, and sent into slavery. The only news of him after that, was that he had been scourged to death at Savannah. His capture and murder completed the ghastly alarm of the Boston fugitives. From that hour they lived in an atmosphere of unimaginable fear and gloom. Frequent reports that kidnappers were in town, harried many of them off to join the thirty thousand fugitives who had fled from the tender mercies of America to seek refuge in the bleak wilds or towns of Canada. Churches were suspended; business arrested; families were broken up; wives and husbands separated; fathers had to leave their sons; sons their fathers; parents their children; for the peril was often immediate, and there was no time for delay. At every fresh rumor that kidnappers were in town, the colored people would hurry up from their occupations to their homes—some to fly, aided by their richer brethren, or by the compassion of the anti-slavery people—others to gather in the streets in excited discussion—and others, with that desperate and splendid courage which is one of the distinctive virtues of the negro, to fortify their dwellings, and prepare for a death-grapple with their hunters. Thick-crowding cares and fears, distress, alarm, foreboding, agony, few friends, a thousand foes, this was their bitter portion.

Such, briefly and faintly sketched, was the state of affairs among these poor people in the City of the Fugitive at that period. What wonder men of heart desponded? It was not a despised Abolitionist, but an Abolitionist whom none despise—the Lord of Civilization standing calm above the ages, he whose spirit slowly wins the world from wrong; it was Francis Bacon of Verulam who said that when Commerce dominates in the State, the State is in its decline. Commerce dominated then. Science, arts, laws, religion, morality, humanity, justice, liberty, the rights, the hearts of mankind—all must give way to it. Rapacious and insolent, it ruled and flourished over all.

Yet there were rays of hope and auguries of better days in Boston even then, and the new was stirring in the old. Emerson was saturating the intellectual life of the city, and through it the mind of America, with the nobleness of his thought. Theodore Parker, gigantesque in learning, courage, devotion to mankind, less a man than a Commonwealth of noble powers, was in his pulpit, with a strong and growing hold on the minds and hearts of the people. The Abolitionists were toiling terribly with all their splendid might of conscience, their genius and their eloquence, to rouse the North to a settlement with the Slave Oligarchy. The Free-Soilers were indefatigably laboring to prevent the base and brutal Democrats from crowding out free American labor from the Territories and incoming States with the labor of Congo and Ashantee; and laboring also to get the Government out of the control of the Slave Power. In a word, Liberty was fighting her battle with Trade, and even the defeats of Liberty are victories.

Add to all that a fair ray of hope and promise still lingered at that period in the air of Boston, cast from a little society of Socialists, under the leadership of William Henry Channing, which had been dissolved about two years before. They had lit their torch from the old faith that Human Life has its Science, discovering which we rear earth’s Golden Age. It was the old idea of Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras; it was the dream of Campanella and More; it was the divine and deathless purpose of Bacon, and the holy labor of Fourier. The Socialists in Boston had made a limited but profound impression with it, which had outlasted their dissolution. The light of the torch still lived when the torch itself was extinguished; and amidst the sordor and selfishness and cruelty of the period, it showed that the tradition and the promise of the Good Time Coming were immortal.

CHAPTER II.
THE FENCING SCHOOL.

Among other things in Boston at that period there was a fencing school and pistol gallery, kept by an old soldier of the First Empire, Monsieur Hypolite Bagasse. The way to it was up a long, narrow boarded alley which led out of Washington street, ran straight for about twenty steps, and then with the natural disposition of every street, avenue, alley, lane or court in Boston, made an effort to achieve the line of beauty and of grace by slanting off to the left, in which bent it was followed by the blind, brick walls, covered in one spot with a patch of theatre posters on the left hand side of it, and by a large dingy old brick building, preternaturally full of windows, on the right hand side of it. In this building was the fencing school.

A large, long, dim, unfinished interior, lighted on one side only by a row of windows looking on the alley, clap-boarded all around on the other sides, and with rafters overhead. Cool and dry, with a faint acrid smell of powder-smoke pervading its musty atmosphere. One section of the oblong space, to the left of the door, unwindowed, and lying in complete shadow. Three or four square wooden posts, down the long centre, supporting the raftered ceiling. On the left hand, under the windows, the pistol gallery—a fenced lane, with a target at one end, and a bench, with arms and ammunition on it, at the other. Near this a wooden settee with a tin can of cheap claret wine upon it. Opposite, hanging on the boarded wall in the rear of the pistol bench, and in the range of two or three of the windows, rows of foils and yellow buckskin fencing-gloves, black wire masks for the face, leathern plastrons for the breast, and a few single-sticks and blunt broadswords. No other furniture, save three or four old chairs, scattered here and there about the room.

It was about half-past seven o’clock in the morning of the twenty-fifth of May, and Monsieur Bagasse was waiting for pupils to arrive. John Todd, a young fellow about fifteen or sixteen years of age, was at the bench, absorbed in cleaning pistols. Monsieur Bagasse himself, slowly shuffling up and down in front of the fencing implements, with a halt in his step, occasioned by one leg being shorter than the other, was absently smoking a short pipe, which he held to his mouth by the base of the bowl. He was a figure fit for the pencil of Callot or Gavarni. Sixty years old, but not looking more than a weather-beaten forty; of middling stature, brawny, round-shouldered, slightly bow-legged, with large splay feet, cased in shambling shoes, with an old cap on the back of his head, and his coarse, black hair, dashed with grey, showing under the crescent-shaped visor above his low, broad, corrugated forehead; with a dilapidated, old-fashioned stock around his neck, a slate-colored worsted jacket buttoned with horn buttons up to his throat, the sleeves of a red flannel shirt showing at his wrists, and coarse, dark, baggy trowsers on his lower limbs. His visage swarthy, ferruginous, picturesquely ugly, but suave and kindly, with a constant expression of curious interrogation upon it—an expression to which the ever upturned jaw contributed—to which the mouth, shaded by a rusty black moustache, and always inquiringly open, contributed—to which the eyes, one bleared and the other bright as a darkly-glowing coal, and both surmounted by shaggy eyebrows, contributed—and which had its contribution from the horn-rimmed goggles worn half way down on the bold aquiline nose, above which the eyes looked from the upturned face as though they were sighting at a mark along a cannon. Wrinkles, of course—wrinkles, and seams and crowsfeet in profusion; two noticeable fissures sloping deeply down the cheeks from the big nostrils; and on the right cheek a dim red scar—the record of a Frenchman’s last service to his Emperor at Waterloo. Add to all a general association of tobacco, snuff, and garlic, and you have the idea of Monsieur Bagasse.

A step on the stairs announcing the approach of a visitor, Monsieur Bagasse halted, took his pipe from his mouth, and stood in a habitual attitude, his arms hung stiffly, his palms turned outward, his big feet also turned outward and visible from heel to toe, and his face sighting with curious inquiry at the door. The door opening presently, in came a young man of seven or eight and twenty, rather boyish-looking for his years, modishly, though tastefully, attired, whose name was Fernando Witherlee.

“Good morning, Monsieur Bagasse. How de do,” he said, touching his moleskin hat with a kid-gloved finger, as, smiling constrainedly, and cringing into a super-elegant bow, he came forward. “Whew! how you smell of powder in here.”

“Ah! good morning, good morning, Miss’r Witterlee,” rejoined the old Frenchman, politely, with a quick salute of the hand.

Privately, Monsieur Bagasse had a supreme contempt for his visitor. Nobody could have guessed it, however, who saw the bland suavity on his grotesque visage, as he curiously scanned the face before him. A plump, smooth, colorless, bilious face, handsome in its general effect, subtle, morbid, fastidious, supercilious, reticent; but with all its traits masked in a cool assumption of impassibility. With thick, brown hair gracefully arranged; handsome, expressive brown eyebrows; brown eyes, with a restless glitter on them when they were in motion, and a perfect opaqueness in them when they were still; lips which were rigid in their contour, usually slightly parted, and which moved but little in their speech. Primarily, the face of an epicurean and a dilettante; a face, too, that bespoke cynicism, conceit, arrogance, and indescribable capacity of aggravation and insult. Such was the face which Monsieur Bagasse smilingly and suavely interrogated.

“Where are our friends this fine morning?” Witherlee asked, carelessly, with an affected elegance of utterance, which was a cross between mincing and drawling. “Not arrived yet? The lazy fellows! Perfect sloths, both of them.”

“Lazee? Oh no! It is vair early yet,” returned Monsieur Bagasse. “Miss’r Harrin’ton an’ Miss’r Wentwort’ are not lazee yet, Miss’r Witterly.”

“Oh, they’re up early enough, I know,” replied the other, “for I met them an hour ago, idling along Temple street with some ladies.”

“Maybe zose ladee was zere sweetheart. Ah, Miss’r Witterly, pardon me, it is not lazee for ze young men to promenade wis zere sweetheart—sacre bleu, no!”

Witherlee laughed—a chuckling laugh, as though his throat was full of turtle.

“I was struck with the contrast,” he remarked. “Wentworth was dressed in his dandy artist rig—spruce as Beau Brummel, and Harrington wore those superannuated old clothes, looking for all the world as if he had just been let out of the watchhouse. Splendid girls they were with too. Wentworth beside one of them was like a bizarre creature, of some sort or other, walking with a princess, and Harrington like a strapping young rag-picker along side of a queen.”

“Ah, zey is vair fine young zhentilmen,” tranquilly replied Monsieur Bagasse. “Vair fine.”

Witherlee made no reply, but slightly elevated his handsome eyebrows in expressive disparagement.

“You know zose ladee, Miss’r Witterly?” inquired the old Frenchman.

“Oh yes, very well. I walked along with them this morning. One is a Miss Eastman—she lives in Temple street with her mother. Quite rich. The other is a Miss Ames, who is visiting the Eastmans. Her family are all rich. They live at Cambridge.”

“Vair fine ladee? Wis beautee—wis dollair, eh?”

“Oh yes, indeed. Very much sought after too, both of them. With crowds of admirers, I assure you.”

“Ah, Miss’r Witterly, I am so glad for zat. It please me vair mush that Miss’r Harrington and Miss’r Wentwort’ sall marry zose vair fine ladee.”

“Hoity, toity, my dear Monsieur Bagasse, what in the world are you thinking of? Your pupils are not so lucky as that yet. Wentworth might have a chance, for his father’s rich, and in good standing, though I judge from the way things go on lately that Miss Ames cares precious little for him. But Harrington—why he’s as poor as a church mouse, and doesn’t move in good society at all. How Miss Eastman tolerates his visits, I can’t imagine. I suppose it’s her kindness though. Seems to me Harrington must have a great deal of assurance to visit her at all. As for marrying her, why it’s perfectly absurd! She’d as soon marry a man out of the poor-house. Good gracious! look at the old coat the fellow wears! Why the lady belongs to our first society—a su-pairb person—perfectly dis-t-a-nguay.”

Monsieur Bagasse grinned broadly, possibly with rage, possibly at the affected drawl with which Witherlee had pronounced the French word distingué, and then growing grotesquely serious, burst forth in orotund, hoarse, fluent tones, very politely, but with great earnestness.

“Pardon me, Miss’r Witterly,” he said, “but why is zat so odd zat ze vair fine distingué ladee sall lof Miss’r Harrin’ton? Ah, Miss’r Witterly, you make one vair big mistake. You zink ze pretty girl all so fond of ze dollair—ze rank—ze grand posetion, eh? Bah—no! I tell you, no. Ze duch-ess—ze count-ess—ze great vair fine ladee—zey lof so offen ze wit, ze brave heart, ze gallantree, ze goodness wis ze old coat over him. Ouf! Look now. Attend. Was I great vair fine ladee, what sall I do wis myself? I tell you. I see Miss’r Harrington lof me, I make vair sure. Zen I say—here, you brave, good man, so kind, so handsome, so gallant, so like ze superb chevalier of ze old time—look—I lof you! I lof you wis you old coat! I lof you old coat, too, for it covair you so long. Come—I marry you—you take my fine house—my dollair—you take me—all, for evair and evair. Sacrebleu, Miss’r Witterly, zat is what I say to Miss’r Harrin’ton was I vair fine ladee.”

To this outburst, which was delivered with great vivacity and many shrugs, grimaces, and odd gesticulations, Witherlee listened with opaque eyes and parted lips, and an expression of perfect immobility on his colorless, plump, morbid countenance. At the end, he lifted his expressive eyebrows, slightly curled a contumelious nose, and curved a supercilious lip, with an insolence at once so delicate and so intense, that Monsieur Bagasse, with the most suave smile again on his uncouth visage, felt a strong desire to deal him a thumping French kick under the chin.

“I have no doubt, my dear Monsieur Bagasse,” was the rejoinder after a pause, “that you would do as you say if you were the lady in question. But you’re not, you know, which makes the difference. However, I won’t discuss the point with you. Harrington is not quite so great a fool, I hope, as to expect any such good fortune. As for Wentworth, if you could have seen his face this morning when Emily—that is Miss Ames—gave Harrington a bunch of violets, you would have thought that his hopes, like his prospects, were rather down.”

“Eh, what was zat?” inquired the old Frenchman, curiously.

“Why you see,” replied Witherlee, with a spirting chuckle at the remembrance, “after the walk we were in the parlor, and Miss Ames went into the conservatory and came back with a little bunch of violets. She was at a table in the further end of the room, dividing the violets into two nosegays, and, just for a joke, I went over to her and whispered that Wentworth would be delighted to receive a true-love posy from her. I don’t know what made her color, but she did, and instantly tied up all the flowers in one nosegay, with a piqued air, and went over to the two fellows. You should have seen Wentworth’s mortified air when she sailed past him, and gave them to Harrington. He walked across the room, trying to look indifferent, but it was no go. Miss Eastman went out and came back with another bunch of violets which she gave him with her most gracious manner, but I guess she couldn’t console him for that rebuff. He made his adieux to Miss Ames stiffly enough, though he was extra cordial to Miss Eastman, at which Miss Ames looked colder than ever. Altogether, for a little matter, it played the deuce with Wentworth everyway.”

“Pardon me, Miss’r Witterly—ex-cuse me, sir, please,” interposed Monsieur Bagasse, with immense civility of manner, and deprecating grimaces: “Zat was not well—sacrebleu, no. You make zat mischeef—ex-cuse me—you vex zat ladee and you wound Miss’r Wentwort’ wis you littel gay talk. Ah, you was not right—no indeed. You make maybe littel miff wis zose young peeples—it grow, grow, grow evair so big maybe, and zey nevair, nevair, come back togezzer. You duty sall be to make ze amende honorable—ex-plain—yes indeed, Miss’r Witterly. You tell Miss’r Wentwort’ what you say—zen he know, zen it is again right.”

“Not at all,” replied the mischief-maker. “I don’t think so. I only made a playful remark. If Miss Ames chose to act as she did, that is not my affair. I said all I could to console Wentworth. I told him I was truly sorry that Miss Ames had treated him so rudely—very sorry indeed.”

“Mille tonnerre!” exclaimed the Frenchman, grinning and grimacing desperately: “you say zat to Miss’r Wentwort’!”

“Of course I said it,” coolly replied Witherlee. “What less could I say? It didn’t console him much, though. He tried to look indifferent, thanked me coolly enough, and remarked that it was of no consequence.”

Monsieur Bagasse gave a sort of snort, still grinning and grimacing. The whole proceeding was quite in Fernando Witherlee’s style. A piece of boyish malice, perpetrated with mischievously subtle talent—with an expressiveness of manner which had injected the words and action with a wicked meaning not purely their own; afterwards foolishly tattled of, and defended with pig-headed perversity.

“I am very sorry the thing happened,” resumed Witherlee, in a cool, sympathizing, soliloquizing tone, looking, meanwhile, at the wall with his opaquest gaze. “And I’m still more sorry to notice that Wentworth and Miss Ames are not so intimate as they were a short time ago. It really seems as if they were becoming estranged. It’s odd to see how attentive Wentworth is lately to Miss Eastman, though I’m sure he only cares for her as a friend. Then Miss Ames, on the other hand, is very agreeable to Harrington, which galls Wentworth, I know. ’Pon my word, I believe he is getting jealous of Harrington, and I shouldn’t wonder if those two fellows had a falling out presently. It’s dreadfully absurd of Wentworth, for I’m sure that if Harrington cares for either of them, it’s Miss Eastman.”

The case was pretty much as Witherlee had stated it, but the explanation was, that he had been lifting his eyebrows and modulating his tones and dropping his intangible innuendoes to Miss Ames with regard to Wentworth, and the result was, that she had become filled with indeterminate suspicion and distrust of her lover, and had almost alienated him from her by her manner toward him.

“Miss’r Witterly, you are ze friend of zose young men,” placidly observed Monsieur Bagasse. “See, now, suppose you tell Miss’r Wentwort’ zat he sall not be jalous of Miss’r Harrin’ton—zat Miss’r Harrin’ton haf not lof Mees Ame nevair. Zen you make zem fine young zhentilmen still good friend of ze ozzer. You say zat now to Miss’r Wentwort’.”

“Dear me, no; that wouldn’t do at all,” was the reply. “It’s not my business, you know, and I might only make trouble. Better let them alone. It’ll all come right, I guess. Wentworth’s in no danger from our negro-worshipping friend, and I guess the best policy in this case, like the national policy in regard to Kossuth, will be non-intervention.”

“Neeger-worship friend? Who is zat you mean?” inquired Monsieur Bagasse, with grotesque perplexity.

Witherlee laughed his turtle-husky chuckle.

“I was only joking,” he returned; “I meant Harrington. You know he’s a furious Abolitionist.”

“Ah, Miss’r Witterly,” said the old Frenchman, with a deprecating shrug and grimace, “zat is not good fon. Miss’r Harrin’ton is vair fine young zhentilman. If he worsheep ze neeger, pardieu, Hypolite Bagasse worsheep ze neeger wis him. Zat is only what you call ze attachment zoo libertee. Ah, Miss’r Witterly, zat Miss’r Harrington, so kind, so strong, so good, he is friend of ze neeger, of ze Iris’man, of ze Frenchman, of ze poor fellow, of ze littel child, of ze small fly on ze window, of ze vair old devail himself, of evairybody. See, now. Attend. I was seek—vair seek wis fever in ze winter. Nobody come to me—of my pupeel not one. Zat Miss’r Harrin’ton he come. He find John Todd, and inquire where I live, and he come. He breeng ze doctor—he breeng Miss’r Wentwort’, he breeng ze littel jellee, ze grape, all zem littel ting zat he say ze vair fine ladee give him for ze poor old vair seek Bagasse. Sacrebleu, he nurse me; he sit up wis me in ze night when my wife tire herself out wis me, and go sleep; he get me well, and zen he go zoo ze pupeel and make ze subscripsheon for zere old fencing-mastair. Feefty dollair—dam! it is sub-lime! Ze wolf he cut off from ze door of Bagasse so queek as his dam leg will trot! Zen Miss’r Harrin’ton he advise Madame Bagasse zoo keep ze boarding-house. Ah! it is grand. She accept—ze boardair come—ze French, ze Italian, ze German man zey board wis me. Hah! zat Miss’r Harrin’ton he set me up on my leg, wis my heart big wis gratitude. You make mock of zat old coat, Miss’r Witterly. Bah! He wear zat old coat zat so many poor devail sall wear any coat at all. Sacrebleu! was I ze great Nap-oleon, I sall put ze grand cross of ze Legion—ze Legion d’Honneur—on ze breast of zat old coat for evair.”

There was such emotion in the deep, hoarse rolling tones—such a dark glow on the grotesque, brown, wrinkled visage—such fire in the one eye under its shaggy eyebrow—such martial energy in the uncouth, shabby figure, that Witherlee felt the danger of pursuing any further his detraction of Harrington. At the same time, he felt an envious itching to continue it. To hear anybody or anything praised, and not be roused to oppositiveness, was not in the organization of Fernando Witherlee. A peculiarly aggravating rejoinder was in his mind, and the temptation to utter it was prodigious. While he hesitated between the temptation and the imminent prospect of having a quarrel on his hands with Monsieur Bagasse, steps and loud talking on the stairs, announcing the approach of pupils, at once decided and relieved him, and he sauntered away to a chair, sinking into which and tilting it back against the wall, he proceeded to select, light and smoke a cigar.

CHAPTER III.
QUARTE AND TIERCE.

Monsieur Bagasse, meanwhile, resuming his equanimity, stood sighting beyond the muzzle of an invisible cannon, as if the door was the mark, looking very much like some slovenly, awkward old artilleryman, of an uncouth pattern, and not at all like a fencing-master. The door flew open presently with a bang, letting in two smart young men not yet out of their teens, who swaggered forward with a very rakish, gasconading air. Milk street clerks—Fisk and Palmer by name—snobbish in dress and rude in manners.

“Bon swor, Monsoor,” said Palmer, loud and patronizing. This address, couched in a purely domestic French, was intended both as an elegant recognition of the nationality of Monsieur Bagasse, and as a way of bidding him good morning. The old man, who with ready politeness had silently saluted the new comers upon their entrance, surveyed the speaker over the rims of his round goggles, with open mouth, and an odd smile on his upturned visage.

“Ha, Miss’r Pammer,” he said with vivacity, “you zink ze day is gone, eh?”

Palmer, who was taking off his coat, stopped and stared.

“I don’t understand you, Monsoor,” he rejoined; “I’m going to take my lesson.”

“Hah! Zat is well,” said the old man. “But you say, bon soir, Miss’r Pammer. Zat is, good night. You intend bon jour; zat is, good day.”

Palmer, seeing the grotesque, good-natured face of the fencing-master smiling at him, and beginning to comprehend what his domestic French had meant, grinned rather foolishly, and turned off. His companion, who stood in his shirtsleeves with a wire-mask already on his face, burst into a rude guffaw at the blunder, and slapped him on the back with a fencing-glove. It may be mentioned here that these young cubs, in process of getting their taste for the wolf’s milk of trade, had come upon the heady wine of Dumas’ “Three Guardsmen”—which admirable romance had so intoxicated their ardent fancy with excited day-dreams of D’Artagnan and Porthos, that, filled with the spirit of the sword, they had resolved to take fencing-lessons of Monsieur Bagasse. This practical recognition of the literary genius of the great French mulatto, was one incident in their joint career. Another, not so creditable, was their participation in a mob of clerks and salesmen, who not long before had brawled down an orator of Dumas’ own color—Frederick Douglass—at the Thompson meeting in Faneuil Hall. It is to be feared that the gallant Alexandre himself would have fared no better at their hands, or their employers’ either, had he ever been fool enough to leave the democratic streets of Paris, for the color-phobic pavements of Boston.

Monsieur Bagasse put away his pipe and spectacles, shuffled across the room to shut the door which the cubs had left open, and returning took down a foil and glove to give the lesson. Fisk was buckling on Palmer’s plastron, as the leathern breastplate is called, an operation rather hindered by his sense of the supercilious smile with which Witherlee regarded his efforts from his chair against the wall, as well as by the circumstance of his having his face incased in the wire mask, and his arms hampered by the heavy leather gloves which he was holding with his elbows against his sides. While Monsieur Bagasse waited, standing in an awkward drooping posture, with the foil in his gloved hand, a firm step was heard bounding up the stairs, the door flew open, and, with a light, springing tread, a young man, flushed and smiling, and so handsome that any one would have turned to look at him, darted in, bringing with him a warm gust of fragrance into the chill musty pallor of the room. An odd, fond smile shot at once to the visage of the fencing-master.

“Ha, good monning, good monning, Missr Wentwort’,” he chirruped, returning with a military salute the quick gesture of gay cordiality the young man made on entering. “How you feel to-day?”

“Capital! most potent, grave and reverend seignior! My very noble and approved good fencing-master, how are you? Hallo, Fernando,” his eye catching sight of the equably-smoking Witherlee: “here you are again, old fellow?”

“Just so, Heliogabalus,” coolly drawled the bilious-cynical youth from his chair. “Say, Heliogabalus—do you know how to get that smell out of your clothes? Bury ’em!”

There was a decided flavor of verjuice in the manner of Witherlee, as he let fly this borrowed jest at the perfumed raiment of the other. Wentworth, though he took it as a jest, could not help wincing a little at it, and was made even more uncomfortable at the application to him of the name of one of the most bestial of the Roman Emperors.

“Well, Fernando,” he returned with a smile, “if ever there was a prickly cactus, you’re one. You’re a perfect Diogenes. Get a tub, Fernando, do.”

“Quarte and tierce, Heliogabalus,” responded the cool Fernando, with his turtle-husky chuckle.

Wentworth turned away, and met the smiling look of admiration and fondness on the upturned visage of the old man-at-arms. A handsome young fellow, in the very flower of youth and May, elegantly dressed—who could look at him without admiration and fondness? An artist—one could have told that at the first glance. Long auburn locks curled in a thick cluster under his dark Rubens hat, and around his florid cheeks. He had a gay, electric, passionate face; bright blue eyes; a fair complexion; red lips, shaded by a light brown moustache coquettishly curled up at the ends, and quick to curve into a proud, brilliant smile. His figure was compact, well-knit, shapely, of middle-height, and seeming taller than it was by force of its gallant carriage. The quality of his face was in his voice—so quick, lively, clear and ringing.

“Ah, Missr Wentwort’,” said the old man, in hoarse tones, which were yet soft and facile, “you bring me back ever so far—you look so gay! You look as I sall feel wis my young blood tirty, tirty-five years ago. We marsh zen wis ze great Nap-oleon dis mont’, all so proud, so gallant, for zat dam Waterloo. Hah! I feel zen jus’ like you. So young—so gay! Wis my littel flower like zat at my bouton—ze flower zat ze pretty girl haf give me. Jus’ so.”

He touched a nosegay of violets in the young man’s buttonhole with the hilt of the foil as he spoke. Wentworth laughed lightly, taking out the nosegay.

“Jupiter! Bagasse,” he cried, “you shall have the flowers for the sake of the memory. What are you grinning at, Fernando!” This to Witherlee, whose cynical grin changed into a cool lift of the eyebrows. “Now, Bagasse,” resumed Wentworth, “I’ll give them to you since they remind you of old times. Here, let me fix them in your jacket. There now—guard them well against every foil. Violets, you know, Monsieur Bagasse! Worn in remembrance of Corporal Violet—the great little corporal!”

The old man bowed low, with the violets on his breast. With the rush of thrilling souvenirs which the pet name of the beloved Emperor revived, a dark glow came to his rugged visage, and the one bright eye grew suddenly dim, leaving the face blind. Wentworth saw that he was touched, and with a quick regret that he had brought a tear to the old heart, turned away, humming an air.

“But where’s Harrington, I wonder?” he burst out, whirling around again. “He said he’d be here before me.”

“He will come pretty soon, I zink, Missr Wentwort’,” replied Monsieur Bagasse. “You haf seen him dis morning?”

“Oh, yes. I found him, as usual, pegging away at the books, and we walked out together. Afterward we went with him, Witherlee and I, to his room, and then started out again to come here. He left us on the way, saying he’d be here before us, and I left Witherlee on the way, saying I’d be here before him. Two promises of pie-crust, those. I’ll bet a denier, Fernando, that dog has something to do with his absence,” and the young artist laughed.

“No doubt,” returned Witherlee, smoking, with a sarcastic smile. “Perhaps he’s commencing his education—developing, on Kant’s principle, all the perfection of which the doggish nature is capable.”

“Dog?” inquired Monsieur Bagasse, curiously.

“Oh, it’s a dog we passed this morning,” explained Wentworth; “a miserable old vagabond white cur, with just about life enough in him to crawl. Some Irish and negro boys were lugging the poor old devil along by the ears and tail, and whacking him with sticks, as we came along, and Harrington, of course, stopped to order them off.”

“Bright in Harrington,” put in Witherlee, with a sneer; “as if they wouldn’t be at him again before we’d gone twenty yards!”

“Yes, by Jupiter, but before we had gone twenty yards, Fernando, you and I went into the shop, you know, where you bought the cigars, and it was there that Harrington said he had to go back to the house for something, and made off with himself. It never occurred to me till now—but I’ll bet a franc he went back to those boys!”

He burst into a peal of laughter at the idea.

“I’d give something to know what Harrington did with the old cur,” he said in a moment.

“Took him off to the butcher’s perhaps, and sold him for sausages,” suggested Witherlee.

“Ah, Missr Wentwort’,” said the old man, grotesquely serious, “you friend, Missr Harrin’ton, is vair fine, vair mush humane, vair fine zhentilman. I feel vair mush warm to him.”

“Rather too much of the Don Quixote order, though,” drawled Witherlee, affectedly, giving the Spanish pronunciation to the ‘Don Quixote’ and calling it Don Kehoty.

“O you be hanged, Fernando,” burst in Wentworth. “He’s no more like Don Kehoty, as you call it, than you’re like Sancho Panza. He’s the grandest fellow that ever lived, and makes me ashamed of myself every day of my life. Hallo, I guess he’s coming.”

Witherlee, biliously pale with spite at the double injury of his pronunciation of “Don Quixote” having been mimicked, and Harrington having been so warmly praised, busied himself with adjusting the loosened skin of his cigar, while Monsieur Bagasse and Wentworth turned to the door, which voices and trampling feet were nearing. Presently the door opened and a group of seven or eight poured in with a confusion of salutations. Four or five of them were young mercantiloes, and instantly swarmed around Fisk and Palmer, who were still fussing over the plastron. One was a heavy, taciturn man—a Pennsylvania Dutchman—with blue, fishy eyes, a sodden face and a yellow beard. His name was Whilt, and he kept a wine-cellar, and boarded with Monsieur Bagasse. With him was another of the fencing-master’s boarders—a tall, slender, handsome, swaggering young man, half-soldier, half-coxcomb in his bearing, with bright dark eyes, brilliant color, long black hair, well oiled and curled, and a long, slim, black moustache, shaved into two sections, and clinging to his upper lip, and curving around his moist, scarlet mouth, like two flaccid leeches. He was fancifully clad in bright blue, tight-fitting trowsers, a short, rakish coat, gay vest and neckerchief, wore his falling collar open at the throat, and had a Kossuth hat, with a black plume, set smartly on his head. This was Captain Vukovich, a young Hungarian officer, who had come over in the train of Kossuth. Though it was only eight o’clock, he and Whilt had a strong smell of Rhine wine about them, which they diffused through the room upon entering.

“How are you, Whilt,” said Wentworth, carelessly nodding. “Captain, how are you? I thought you had gone on to New York with Kossuth.”

Wentworth had the Kossuth furor, prevalent about that time, and saluted Vukovich with a touch of enthusiasm.

“No,” responded the Hungarian, in a soft voice, conceitedly fingering his moustache, and swaying on his shapely legs as he spoke. “No, I stays. Se Gofernor go on, an’ I stays back. I sink to keep cigar shop in Bosson pretty soon. So I stays. Goot tay, Mossieu Bagasse. How you feel?”

He begun to talk in French to the fencing-master, and Wentworth, full of fiery sentiment for liberty and Hungary, moved away to the foils, humming the Marseillaise. Presently, Palmer and Fisk were ready, and Monsieur Bagasse, after much preliminary effort to get Palmer into strict position, began to give him his lesson.

Both Witherlee and Wentworth were very sensitive to all forms of artistic beauty, and they now saw, with strange pleasure, as they had often seen before, the wonderful transformation of the fencing-master’s awkward, sloven figure. Looking at him in his ordinary aspect, nobody would ever have imagined that he was cut out for a pillar of the school of arms. But now, as he threw himself into the noble attitude of the exercise, every deformity seemed suddenly to have dropped from his face and figure, and vanished. The head erect and proud—the lit face turned square in rugged, grand repose, with the visor of the old cap looking now like the raised visor of a helmet—the one eye firm and jewel-bright, fixed on his adversary’s—the left arm thrown up and out behind in easy balance—the body set in perfect poise on legs as strong as iron, as flexible as steel—and the lithe foil gently playing from the extended ease of his right arm over the stiff guard of his antagonist, like a line of living light—so, with every trait and outline of his figure blended into an indescribable ensemble, he stood, an image of martial grace, superb and invincible. For one instant, the two young men drank in with eager eyes the beauty of that military statue—the next, Palmer’s blade lunged in swift and stiff—was parried wide aside with a light, almost imperceptible, deft motion, and a flashing clash—and the figure of Bagasse had changed into another statue of martial grandeur, the left arm down aslope with the left leg, the body heaved forward on the bent right knee, the right arm up and out in strong extension, and the foil, a gleaming curve of steel, with its buttoned point on the breast of the adversary.

Only a second, and while murmurs of applause ran round, the first position was resumed.

“You see now, Miss’r Pammer,” politely said the fencing-master, breaking the spell, “I hit you zen, be-cause you longe off you guard. Now see—I show you how.”

He dropped his point, and explained to Palmer where he had done wrong, showing him with his own foil the way the pass should have been made. Palmer promised to remember, and the lesson went on.

Presently, while they were on guard, Palmer was wrong again—this time in his position. Bagasse, smiling politely, lowered his point; whereat, Palmer, with immense haste, lunged in, and triumphantly bent his foil on the breast of the fencing-master, who, of course, made no effort to ward. The young mercantiloes, delighted with this evidence of their friend’s proficiency, set up a cry of bravo. Witherlee sneered to himself, and Wentworth laughed and exchanged glances with the surprised Hungarian, and the imperturbable Whilt. As for Monsieur Bagasse, he stood, with upturned visage, smiling with grotesque placidity, then made a grimace, and limping off to the claret-can, gulped a mouthful, and came hurrying back. Palmer instantly threw himself on guard, thrilling with vanity, and confident that he was getting ahead of his fencing-master.

“See, now, Missr Pammer,” said the old man, with great vivacity, smiling good-naturedly as he spoke; “you parry, now—it is simple quarte and tierce—vair, vair easy. Hey, now! Hey, now! Hey, now! Hey, now! Four.”

Quietly, at every exclamation, Monsieur Bagasse, without effort, bent his foil almost double on the breast of his antagonist. Palmer could no more parry the deft lunges than he could fly. Bagasse stood grinning good-naturedly at him, and lowered his point. Palmer instantly made a desperate lunge at the unguarded breast, and the same instant found that his foil had flown out of his hand, and that the blade of Bagasse was resting in a firm curve on his bosom.

All present, Palmer included, burst into a roar of laughter. All but the master, who stood silent, with his curious, good-natured smile on his upturned visage. It was quite plain to the pupil now, that he could not touch Monsieur Bagasse on or off guard, unless the latter chose to let him.

Suddenly, like a light magnetic shock, a silence fell upon the uproarious mirth, as with a surprised and startled feeling, all present recognized a new figure, serene in youthful majesty, standing quietly at a little distance near them, in the full light of the windows. It was Harrington. They all knew him, but somehow the unexpectedness of his appearance gave him the momentary effect of a stranger. He was a young man of about twenty-five, tall and stalwart, and of regnant and martial bearing. His face, looking out from under a black slouched felt hat, was long and bearded, singularly open and noble in its character, firm, calm-eyed, straight-featured, broad-nostrilled, and masculine, but very pale. The beard was light-brown, and the hair, chestnut in color, and darker than the beard, curled closely, and was worn somewhat long. A loose, dark sack, with large sleeves, buttoned with a single button at the throat, showed the spread of his chest, and added to the commanding grace of his figure. This was the coat which had been so opprobriously celebrated by the esthetic Witherlee. It was an old coat certainly, but it was not the less a well-chosen and graceful garment, and it is questionable whether if it had hung in tatters, it would have diminished the effect of a presence in contrast with which the others seemed common-place and inferior. Witherlee himself, set in comparison with Harrington, looked unmanly and contemptibly genteel. Whilt was nobody, Vukovich a simpering fop, the mercantiloes simple snobs. Even the handsome and gallant Wentworth seemed of a lower order beside him, and Bagasse, in his uncouth and shabby grotesqueness, though not degraded by the contrast, was so removed by his essential unlikeness, as to be out of comparison altogether.

Wentworth was the first to recover from the momentary ghostly trance into which they had all dropped on discovering Harrington in the room.

“Jupiter Tonans!” he exclaimed: “How—when—where—in what manner did you arrive, Harrington!”

“Well,” returned Harrington in a sweet and cordial baritone voice, affably saluting the company, “I didn’t exactly step out from behind the air, though you all look as if you thought so. I came in just now prosaically at the door—not stealthily either, for John Todd, there, both heard and saw me. But you were all in such a tempest of merriment that no one but Johnny noticed me. Come—go on with the fun. Tell me what it’s all about, that I may laugh too.”

“O, I just disarmed Monsoor—that’s all,” said Palmer.

This quip, though slight, was sufficient to set the group off again in a confusion of jests and laughter, in the midst of which Harrington wandered over to the pistol bench, and began to chat with the young fellow while the bout between Monsieur Bagasse and his pupil went on. In a few minutes Monsieur Bagasse came over to the claret-can in that region, drank, and took the opportunity to shake hands with Harrington, and ask for his health.

“O by the way, Mr. Bagasse,” said Harrington, after due replication to the old Frenchman’s polite inquiries, taking from his breast pocket as he spoke, a bunch of violets inclosed in a funnel of stiff white paper, “here’s a May gift for you. I thought of you and your Corporal Violet so instantly when I got this bouquet, that I resolved to present it to you. Hallo, though! you’ve got one already.”

He had just caught sight of the nosegay in the old slate-colored jacket. Like his own, it was tied with a pink string. A comical look of surprise came with a slight flush to his frank, pale face, and his eye glanced quickly at the young artist who, he saw, was eagerly watching him from the other side of the room. At the same instant he saw Witherlee looking with opaque eyes over in his direction, very intent upon the iron vice on the bench near by, and with a face entirely discharged of expression. Harrington’s intelligence was almost clairvoyant, and he felt that Witherlee was watching him and not the vice—felt also that Wentworth’s gaze meant something connected with his present action. With the feeling, which was as instantaneous as his glance had been, he caught sight of the eye of the old Frenchman, roguishly twinkling at him. Harrington was puzzled.

“Ah, ha, Missr Harrin’ton,” said Monsieur Bagasse in a bantering whisper, “zere are two ladee zat gif ze vilet, an’ two zhentilmen zat gif ze vilet too! Eh, now, zem zhentilmen sall not be so vair mush fond of zem ladee zat zey gif away zere littel bouquet! Ha?”

“Two ladies!” exclaimed Harrington. “How do you know there are two? I didn’t say so.”

Monsieur Bagasse was caught, and shrugged his humpy shoulders with an odd grimace. A feeling of honor withheld him from saying how he came by his information, since that would involve the exposure of the blabbing Witherlee. Witherlee, meanwhile, fully conscious of the ridiculous impropriety he had been guilty of, in tattling about his friends’ affairs to any person, much less the old fencing-master, and momently expecting to be subjected to the rage of Wentworth, and the rebuke of Harrington, stood nervously dreading the reply of Bagasse, and looking pale in spite of himself. Wentworth, for his part, taking a true-lover’s stand-point, was considerably amazed to see Harrington, whom he thought the secret lover of Miss Ames, so coolly bestowing her nosegay on the old Frenchman. As for Harrington, he was divided between wonder at Wentworth, for having not only given to the old Frenchman the flowers he had received from Miss Eastman—whom he in turn thought Wentworth secretly loved—but having also, as he naturally supposed, made the old Frenchman his confidant, at least to the extent of telling him of the two ladies and of their gifts. Fisk and Palmer were at it, quarte and tierce, with the foils. Meanwhile, there was a game of quarte and tierce of another sort begun between four, all against each other, and Monsieur Bagasse had just been buttoned.

Harrington smiled good-naturedly, and silently gave the violets to the fencing-master, who took them and bowed without a word. Just then Wentworth approached with a composed air, which was so evidently assumed that Harrington began to laugh. Wentworth’s florid color had paled a little, but he answered Harrington’s laugh with a constrained smile, looking meanwhile in his face.

“Well, Harrington,” he said, with an unsuccessful attempt at carelessness, “what the deuce is there in my giving Bagasse the violets, to make you show your maxillary muscles and the teeth under, your beard so delightedly? Hanged if I see anything to laugh at.”

The maxillary muscles, which were unusually developed in Harrington’s cheeks, and always wrinkled them when he laughed, relaxed at this, but his white, regular teeth still showed in a curious, half-sad, half-absent smile, as he fixed his clear, broad gaze wistfully on the face of his friend. Wentworth, nettled at the mystery of a look he could not fathom, became peevish, and began to twirl his moustache, half smiling, half irritated.

“Don’t be vexed, Wentworth,” said Harrington, throwing his long arm affectionately around the latter’s shoulder, and moving away up the room with him, while Bagasse shuffled off to his pupils. “I laughed thoughtlessly—but, frankly, I was somewhat surprised to see that you had given away the violets. That was all.”

“All!” exclaimed Wentworth. “And why shouldn’t I give them away? They were mine, weren’t they? Why, you gave yours away too, didn’t you?”

“To be sure,” replied Harrington, with a bothered air, adding tranquilly, “Emily gave them to me, and I gave them to Bagasse.”

“Well,” retorted Wentworth, “Muriel gave them to me and I gave them to Bagasse also. What of it?”

Harrington, who could not see into this matter at all, was silent, and stroked his beard with his hand, a habit of his when he was very much puzzled.

“No matter—it’s a trifle,” he said lightly, after a pause. “Only, Richard, to be very plain with you—I hope you’ll not think me intrusive—well, I thought it was—odd—that you should have given away the flowers Muriel gave you.”

He spoke these words with marked, but delicate significance—stammering and hesitating a little in his speech, which was unusual with him. It was the first allusion he had ever made to Wentworth’s supposed love for Miss Eastman. Loving her himself, it was not made without a pang. If Wentworth had been cool, he could not but have understood it. As it was, it only put him in a rage.

“Well, if I ever heard the like of this!” he sputtered. “To be very plain with me—what in thunder—blast it all, Harrington, what are you driving at? Why, I was struck all of a heap at the oddity of your giving away Emily’s nosegay, and here you turn upon me and tell me it’s odd—yes, odd, that I should give away Muriel’s! What’s the difference, I’d like to know? Now, just tell me!”

Harrington was silent, and again stroked his beard, wondering what sort of cross-purposes they were playing at. Wentworth stood for a moment with flushed face and passionate eyes, angry with Harrington for the first time in his life, and then walked away in great exasperation.

Perplexed and amazed at this state of affairs, and grieved to think he had, however unwittingly, angered his friend, Harrington stood looking after him, irresolute whether to follow and attempt an explanation now, or wait till his fume was over. Presently, he resolved to wait, and sadly musing, began to pace to and fro at the upper end of the long room.

On his way down to the fencing-ground, Wentworth was met by Witherlee, who had been watching the conference, and though he could not catch a word, knew well enough by Wentworth’s excited tones then, and by his flushed cheeks and sparkling eyes now, that there had been some difference between the two.

“What’s the matter, Richard?” he asked, kindly.

“O nothing, nothing!” fretfully replied the vexed Wentworth, taking off his Rubens hat, dashing back the thick curls from his handsome, sloping forehead with a hasty hand, and passionately slapping on the hat again.

“I am very sorry, very. Harrington is really very aggravating sometimes,” ventured the kind Fernando.

At any other time Wentworth would have resented this insidious speech, as a slander upon the gentle Harrington. But now—

“He’s the most aggravating fellow I ever knew in my life,” was his hot answer.

“Well, I wouldn’t go so far as that,” returned Fernando, with mild moderation. “By no means. Harrington has fine qualities, you know. You should remember that the best of us are apt to be a little forgetful when our own personal interests, or wishes, or affections are involved.”

Blandly and kindly said, with just a shade of hesitating emphasis on “personal” and “affections”—just a shade.

“What do you mean by that, Fernando?” asked Wentworth, almost choking, and catching at the insidious hint, which the good Fernando had made almost impalpable by throwing it out with the easy manner of one uttering a mere generality.

“Mean?” he asked, with a delicate shade of bewilderment, “why nothing particular, that I know of.”

But he smiled slightly and lifted his handsome eyebrows very slightly, and then lapsed into an expression of soft compassion.

“Yes, I understand,” said Wentworth, walking away in passionate misery.

What particular meaning the good Fernando’s vague words and mysterious looks expressed, nobody could have told. It was their especial beauty, perhaps, that they really expressed nothing definite at all, and were merely random spurs to the imagination of the listener, goading him on the path he happened to be pursuing. Wentworth’s path at that moment was the vague suspicion that Harrington was selfishly supplanting him in his relation to Emily. It was a path out of which he had turned several times, urged by his strong sense of Harrington’s perfect nobility, but he was now in it again, and with the talented Fernando’s last bunch of thorns insidiously tied to his galloping fancy, and stinging it on, he was going at a headlong pace for mad jealousy and outright hostility, and would soon be there.

Witherlee, meanwhile, highly gratified at the success of his insinuations with Wentworth, was enjoying the young artist’s distress when he caught sight of Harrington standing at the upper end of the room, and looking at him. It was embarrassing, and he was about to avert his eyes, but at that instant Harrington beckoned to him. He hesitated, and then with considerable trepidation, for he did not know what was coming, he walked up the room.

Harrington’s face was introverted and sad, and his eyes were fixed on vacancy. Witherlee felt glad that the broad gaze did not rest on his face, for he feared its inquest.

“Fernando,” said Harrington, calmly and kindly, though with evident embarrassment, “I want to speak with you on a very delicate subject. You have known Miss Eastman and Miss Ames a long time—much longer than I have. You”—

Harrington paused for a moment. Witherlee’s heart beat an alarmed tattoo, though his colorless face was perfectly impassible.

“Richard is in a strange state lately,” resumed Harrington, smiling vaguely. “You must have noticed it, Fernando. Just now, he spoke to me in a manner which I do not understand. Something frets him. Have you any idea what it is?”

“Not the least, though I’ve noticed it,” returned the imperturbable Fernando.

“Well, I haven’t either,” said Harrington. “But see here. You remember what you said to me at my room about a week ago. Previous to that conversation, it was my own fancy that Richard was very much attached to Miss Ames. You surprised me very much when you told me you thought his feeling was for—for Muriel. I never should have guessed it. You astonished me still more by what you told me after that. But something Richard said just now made me fancy that you may have been mistaken, and I want to ask you if you are perfectly sure of what you saw.”

Harrington paused again, nervously twitching his beard with his large shapely hand. Before Witherlee could reply, he went on again.

“Let me recall that conversation,” he said. “You sat in my arm-chair smoking, and you were praising Muriel, which was pleasant for me to hear. Presently, you remarked, ‘she’ll make Wentworth a superb wife,’ and then you quoted from Tennyson’s ‘Isabel’—‘the queen of marriage, a most perfect wife.’ I was, I own, amazed. ‘Why, Wentworth?’ I asked. You looked surprised, and said, ‘Why not Wentworth?’ Then you added—‘When people love, don’t they marry?’ ‘Certainly,’ I returned, ‘but you are mistaken, I think.’ ‘I think not,’ you replied, with a manner so cool and positive, that I was, to be frank with you, a little annoyed. I was about to drop the subject there, for it seemed to me hardly fair to canvass such a matter, when you remarked, ‘In fact, I know I’m not.’ I replied, ‘It is quite impossible that you should know it, Fernando, though you may have what seem to you strong reasons for believing it.’ You answered, rather unkindly it appeared to me—‘Do you doubt my word?’ ‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘How can you think so—it’s not a question of veracity at all, but of judgment?’ ‘Well,’ said you, ‘I have proof—ocular proof—I wouldn’t say it if you didn’t put me to it.’ And then you told me that you visited the house the previous afternoon, and as you were entering the parlor, you saw Richard and Muriel standing together at the other end of the room, with their arms around each other, and saw them kiss each other. You drew back instantly, you said, without having been perceived by them, and made a clatter in the hall before you entered again. I could hardly forgive you at the time for having told me what you saw, or myself for having listened to you, for it was not a thing to be either told of or listened to. But I grant it happened naturally enough in the heat of the moment, and after all, I am glad to have known of an occurrence, the knowledge of which may prevent misunderstanding and trouble.”

Harrington paused once more, with vague emotion struggling in his features and his eyes fixed sadly on vacancy. The truth of the matter was this: Witherlee had seen on the occasion referred to, two persons in the attitude described, one of whom was Wentworth, and the other a young lady who, at the first glance, he thought was Muriel, inasmuch as she wore a lilac dress such as Muriel wore at times. He had, as he had said, retreated instantly—quite astounded too, for he had made up his mind that Emily was Wentworth’s sweetheart. But on entering again, he saw that he had been mistaken, and that the lady with Wentworth was not Muriel, but Emily. The illusion, however, made a strong impression on his fancy, and his mind teemed with tempting imaginings of Wentworth and Muriel in the Romeo and Juliet tableau. It was an easy step in his controversy with Harrington, begun simply for aggravation and continued with an obstinate desire to establish what he had so impudently assumed, to present his fancy as a fact, and insist upon it. This was a fair specimen of one of the good Fernando’s lies, which were rarely sheer inventions, but generally had a basis of truth in them.

“Now, Fernando,” resumed Harrington, “I want to ask you whether it is possible that you could have been mistaken? Are you absolutely sure that it was Muriel you saw with Wentworth, and not Miss Ames?”

Fernando’s drowsy conscience awoke just enough to give him a lethargic pinch, and dozed off again.

“I do not see, Harrington,” he replied with an injured air, “how I could be mistaken. There was nobody else in the room but Wentworth and Muriel when I first looked in. Emily was coming in through the conservatory door at the end of the parlor as I entered, but she was not there before.”

This was an ingenious transposition of the fact. It was Muriel who came in at the conservatory door, and not Emily. But Fernando had covered his position famously. In the event of the truth coming out, he could swear that in the confusion of the moment he had mistaken one lady for the other, apologize profusely, and make the explanation seem plausible.

“It was certainly Muriel,” he resumed. “Still the affair may be susceptible of a different interpretation. You must concede at least that Muriel and Wentworth like each other very much, and they might kiss each other and still be only friends.”

“No,” said Harrington, firmly—“that is not possible. That is not like Muriel. I know her too well to suppose that for a moment. If she kissed Wentworth, she loves him. I do not doubt you, Fernando. Their present close intimacy with each other confirms your story, I own. But something Richard said just now shook my belief—made me think, in fact, that you were in error, and I wanted to be doubly sure that you were not. Let me only say that I have a better motive for this inquiry than curiosity—and now let all this be forgotten. Never mention it again, I beg of you, to any person. Let it all pass forever.”

Witherlee’s conscience smote him terribly, and he felt maddened at his meanness, as Harrington strode away. But he was fully committed to his course, and to own his fault was impossible with him.

Wentworth, meanwhile, was standing apart with a gloomy face, listlessly watching the fencing. His fancy was still galloping furiously with him to the goal of the jealous lover, but it began to swerve from the track in spite of him, as he saw Harrington coming down the room. Harrington’s mere presence was a constant demand on every person for the best that was in them; and before the conquering sweetness of his smile, Wentworth’s jealous doubts and suspicions at once scattered and fled, and his nobler feelings rushed forward. The tears filled his bright eyes as Harrington came straight up to him and caught his hand. He tried to speak, but his lips faltered.

“Richard, I ask your pardon,” said Harrington. “I am sorry to have annoyed you; but it was entirely unintentional. I want to have a talk with you, that we may understand each other better. Not now—another time. In the meantime, let us be friends.”

Wentworth wrung his hand, wholly vanquished, and unable to say a word.

“Come,” said Harrington, gaily, with the muscles in his cheeks wrinkling again, and his teeth gleaming in his beard, with a rich smile—“come, that was only a zephyr. Let’s go fence.”

No more was said, and they went over to the fencing-ground, where Fisk was being punched and poked and interjected at and admonished by Monsieur Bagasse, to his utter bewilderment. In a few minutes, the master got through with him, and set him and Palmer to practise against each other. He then turned to Wentworth, who had taken off hat and coat, and was chattering like a mercurial magpie, with his handsome face enveloped in a mask.

“Come, now, Missr Wentwort’,” said Bagasse. “You pink zat ozzer vilet if you can. En garde.”

Wentworth laughed, and, crossing blades, they fell to. The young artist fenced briskly and well, though somewhat rashly. Once he contrived to touch the fencing-master on the arm, for which lucky stroke he got paid with half a dozen in succession on his breast.

“Thunder!” he exclaimed as he got the last, “what’s the use of fencing with you, Bagasse? Nobody can touch you, and you’re as light on your pins as though you were twenty.”

The old man chuckled grimly, relapsing into his clumsiest and most ungainly attitude.

“Light!” put in Witherlee. “I guess he is. His legs are made of caout-chouc, I should think, judging by the way he can kick.”

“Oh, yes, I can keek,” returned Bagasse. “I haf my leg pretty su-ple.”

He turned toward the post against which Witherlee was leaning, and laid his grimy finger on a notch a little above his own head. Witherlee stood aside, and every eye followed the fencing-master. Suddenly, rising on one foot, he dealt the notch a furious kick, amidst cries of “good” and “bravo.” Sure enough, the leg had flown up to the mark, like a leg of india-rubber.

“Ha!” he exclaimed, complacently, “you do zat, you young men. Try now—evairy one.”

Wentworth tried first, kicked high, but did not come within a foot of the mark. Whilt came next, stolid and taciturn, kicked, and tumbled over, amidst general laughter. Vukovich lifted his shapely leg, kicked within half a foot, and split his blue trowsers, at which he looked grieved, and swore softly in Hungarian, while the rest laughed at him. Then came Fisk and Palmer and the others, with poor success, and amidst much merriment.

In the quiet that followed, Whilt, who had been as dumb as a skull, suddenly began to shake and whinny so with guttural mirth, that everybody looked at him with surprise. It came out, after some inquiry, that he was laughing at Vukovich for having torn his trowsers, an incident which had just touched his sense of the ludicrous when everybody else had almost forgotten it. Of course there was another obstreperous roar of merriment, and Witherlee told Whilt he laughed too soon—he ought to have waited till next week—with other sarcasms of the same nature, which the slow Dutchman took into sober consideration.

“Come, Harrington,” said Wentworth, “you try.”

Harrington had stood apart, smiling amusedly, through all this clatter.

“Ah, Missr Harrin’ton, he can keek wis me,” exclaimed Bagasse. “He keek sublime.”

Harrington laughed, and advancing, took up a bit of chalk from the floor, and marked a line on the post, as much above his own head as the notch had been above the fencing-master’s. Then poising a second, he threw up his leg, and brought away chalk on his boot. There was a general burst of acclamation.

“Ah, ha! it is grand—it is superb!” cried Monsieur Bagasse. “Missr Harrin’ton, he can keek wis me, he can fence wis me, he can shoot wis me, he can engage wis me in ze broadsword—ze single-steek, he can do everysing so I can. It is his talent. Sacrebleu! He is for-r-mi-dabble.”

Harrington laughed, with an expression and gesture of deprecation.

“How many men could you fight together, Monsoor?” asked Palmer.

“Me? I fight you all. Evairy one. Togezzer,” replied the Frenchman.

“Mawdoo!” ejaculated Palmer. “Isn’t he a trump!”

“Come, Bagasse, that will do for the marines,” said Wentworth. “You can’t do it.”

“Ah,” replied the fencing-master, “you zink not? Bah! Come, I show you.”

In a minute he had seven or eight of them, Wentworth, Vukovich, Palmer and Fisk included, masked and foiled. Then putting his back to the wall, he directed them to set upon him. It was agreed that if he was touched the contest was to end there. On the other hand, every combatant touched was to withdraw.

“Pardoo! It is splendid!” exclaimed Palmer.

“Mawdoo! It is fine!” returned Fisk.

The domestically-pronounced French oaths which prefixed these asseverations, were, of course, borrowed by Messrs. Fisk and Palmer from the “Three Guardsmen,” and figured extensively on all possible occasions in their general conversation.

“Come, Harrington, you too,” cried Wentworth.

“No, no—ex-cuse me—pardon,” interrupted Monsieur Bagasse, smiling, grimacing and bowing all at once; “not Missr Harrin’ton. Zat will be too mush—vair many too mush.”

Harrington colored slightly, and laughed. Monsieur Bagasse put on a mask, threw himself on guard, and stood girt with antagonists, with his foil playing like a pale gleam, menacing them all. Suddenly it darted—there was a brisk clatter of parries—and Vukovich was touched. It was a compliment to the skill of the gallant captain that Bagasse had got rid of him thus early in the game, and he came off simpering, and stroking his moustache complacently.

“He keel me fery queek, Meeser Haynton,” he observed to the young man, who stood attentively watching the contest.

“Ah, Captain,” returned Harrington gaily, addressing him in French, “but your ghost can fence better than most of us still.”

The captain’s vanity was evidently flattered by the compliment, for he swelled a little with an air of increased complacency, though he made no reply. Witherlee, who was standing behind him, a silent observer of the sport, glanced at him with a bilious sneer. Meanwhile, amidst shouts and laughter, and noisy appels and glizades, the young men were assailing Bagasse, trying all sorts of feints and tricks to penetrate his guard. Harrington watched him admiringly—so statue-still in the tumultuous press, his awkwardness and shabbiness gone, the wire globe of the mask giving a weird look to his head, his bent arm holding his assailants at bay, and the pale gleam of the foil glancing nimbly all about the arc of the ring. Presently the guarding foil whisked and rattled with a confusion of brilliant coruscations, playing like elfin lightning all around the semi-circle—the bent arm of the invincible figure at which all were lunging, straightened and darted thrice, rapid as a flash—and amidst mock groans and cries and laughter, Wentworth, Fisk, and Palmer withdrew. They came away vociferously mirthful, and before they had well got the masks off their flushed faces, the others were all touched and followed them, leaving Monsieur Bagasse standing alone, erect and martial, his one eye glowing like a coal in the proud grotesque smile of his swarthy visage, his left arm akimbo, holding the mask on his hip, and the victorious foil held aloft in his right hand, and quivering above his head like a rod of wizard lustre.

There were loud bravos and clapping of hands. The next instant the statue of military triumph dropped into the clumsy, sloven figure of Bagasse, and hobbled off to the claret-can. He came hurrying back presently with the foil and mask in one hand, and stood, the centre of a great smell of garlic, grinning curiously at Fisk and Palmer, who, in an ecstasy of excitement from their recent engagement, were playing they were D’Artagnan and Porthos, and poking furiously at each other with all the “Guardsmen” oaths and epigrams in full ventilation.

“Well, Missr Wentwort’, what you zink now?” he asked, triumphantly.

“What do I think? I think you could have let Harrington come on too, and then have beaten us all,” was the gay reply.

“Ah, no,” returned Monsieur Bagasse, “not wis Missr Harrin’ton.”

“Come, Meeser Haynton,” said Vukovich; “you an’ Mossieu Bagasse. Oblise me and dese sentilmen.”

At once there was a clamor of beseechings, to which the parties addressed presently yielded. Witherlee, who hated to see Harrington fence, because he fenced so well, quietly slipped away from the room. Fisk and Palmer stopped, and gathered with the others around the fencing-place. Meanwhile, Monsieur Bagasse took the violets from his jacket and laid them away; then put on a plastron—an honor he had not paid to any other of his pupils that day, and resumed his mask. Harrington took off his coat and vest, and arrayed himself also in mask and plastron.

They took their places, and after performing the beautiful elaborate salute of the exercise, fell upon guard. Every eye was riveted on the stalwart grace of Harrington as he crossed blades with his antagonist. As for the French gladiator, excited by the coming contest with one who could call into play all his powers, his attitude was superb, and his transformation more complete than before.

The contest was begun by a feint, quick and light, on the part of the fencing-master, and in a second it was pass and parry with a rapturous flash and clash of steel. Presently the right foot of Bagasse beat the floor with the loud rat-tat of the appel, and foot and arm and body sprang forward with a terrific lunge. Harrington, immovable as a pillar, met it with a swift twirl of the wrist, and the next second both combatants were still, with their foils locked in a complete spiral from hilt to point.

Disengaging presently, the combatants saluted amidst suppressed murmurs of applause, crossed blades once more, and stood with each point seeking an opening. In a moment or two, Bagasse feinted again, and lunged in tierce. Harrington parried in seconde, letting his point fly up and his arm extend in the parry, and pushing home, his foil became a curve with the button resting on the bosom of the fencing-master.

It was the first hit, and everybody hurrahed. Presently the hurrah burst forth again for Bagasse, who had hit Harrington. In less than five minutes the combat grew almost as exciting as a duel with swords. To follow the dazzling rapidity of the lunges and parries became impossible. The gazers could only see a nimble play of rattling light between the two—the lines of the foils lost in curves and gleams of brilliance—and the gloved sword-arms of the antagonists flying like twirling and darting shuttles above the clashing coruscations. The interest now centred in the aspect and expression of the combatants. Bagasse, throwing his whole fiery nature into the soul-entrancing action of the duel, was in an ecstasy of martial joy, and lunged and parried with exulting shouts and cries—a darting, swaying figure, terribly alert and alive, with the spring and strength of a fury. Harrington, on the contrary, was silent as death, impassible, elastic, swift—a regnant form of muscular grace poised in superb aplomb, that fell to half its height in the long lunges, and rose magnificent in the quick recoils. An atmosphere of fiery ether seemed to envelop the combatants, spreading its glorious delirium through the veins of the gazers, and kindling the delight of battle in their eyes. But as the combat continued, the wild passion of the action became so intense and real that the heroic glow began to pale and mingle with a cold affright, and Wentworth, beginning to feel his agitation master him, was on the point of shouting to Harrington to stop, when there was a sharp snap, followed by sudden silence, and the combat was over. Bagasse stood panting through his mask with a broken foil in his hand. Harrington breathing audibly in long, regular breaths through his, remained in attitude with his point lowered, like one awakened from a dream. The next instant, Bagasse broke the silence with a wild shout, and throwing away mask and foil, flung his arms around Harrington in a joyful embrace, and bursting away, vented the remnant of his joy by dealing the high notch on the post a kick that might have brought the roof down.

There was a ringing hurrah, followed by a burst of hearty laughter, congratulations, and shaking of hands all round.

“But, by Jupiter,” cried Wentworth, “I’m glad its over, for, upon my word, I began to get frightened. Blessed if I ever saw you two have such a bout before! Bagasse, you old reprobate, I believe you were in earnest.”

He turned with a peal of laughter upon the old man, who stood exhaling garlic, and wiping his hot face with a snuffy old red pocket handkerchief. Bagasse grinned good-naturedly, gave his old moustache a dab with the handkerchief, and thrusting out the latter with a joyful gesture, replied:

“I was teepsy, Missr Wentwort’—daid-drunk wis ze joay of ze beautifool en-countair. Hah! by dam! zat make me feel young.”

“I should think so, you blood-thirsty old rapier!” bawled Wentworth. “And you,” he continued, turning upon Harrington, “you were in earnest, too, I verily believe, and bent upon taking your fencing-master’s life. A nice pair, both of you, for a peaceable young man like me to meet in a dark alley going home late.”

Harrington, who was leaning against the wall, getting his wind, as the saying goes, laughed without replying. His usual pallor had given place to a faint pink, and his broad winged nostrils were lifting with his deep breaths under his lighted eyes and white forehead, on which the brown locks lay damp. Wentworth thought he had never seen him look more princely.

“But no,” Wentworth rattled on, “I don’t believe it of you, Harrington. For you’re what Kingsley calls a muscular Christian. As for Bagasse, he’s a muscular pagan, who lives on raw meat, gunpowder and brandy, and there’s nothing too bad for me to believe of him. Is there, Bagasse?”

He patted the old man on the shoulder as he said it, looking smilingly in his face. Bagasse gazed with grotesque fondness at the handsome and gallant countenance, as on that of a privileged pet, and continued to mop his glowing visage.

“What’s the time, Richard?” asked Harrington, beginning to dress himself.

“Quarter of ten by all that’s good!” exclaimed the other, looking at his watch. “Time for me to be at the studio, and you at the books. But I won’t say that, for upon my word, Harrington, you study too hard. The Pierian spring will be the death of you, young man.”

“O, no,” replied Harrington, laughing gaily. “I’m in good health. The daily bout with the foils or broadswords balances the hours at the books.”

“Nevertheless you look rather Hamletish in your pallor,” returned Wentworth. “Though to be sure the pale prince was a special good hand at the rapier, in which, as in other respects, you resemble him. ‘The scholar, soldier, courtier’s eye, tongue, sword—the expectancy and rose of the fair State’ of Massachusetts—that’s you, Harrington.”

“Seems to me, Richard, the quotation bung and the head of the soft-soap barrel are both out together this morning,” bantered Harrington.

“‘I paint you in character,’” returned the mercurial Wentworth, with another Shaksperean reminiscence. “Being a member of the Boston Mutual Admiration Society, and this being Anniversary week, soft-soap is perfectly in order. Therefore, I affirm that you are of the Hamlet order plus Crichton, plus Raleigh, Sidney, Hatton, Blount, Southampton”—

“Shakspeare and Verulam,” jeered Harrington.

“Together with Shakspeare and Verulam. And now that I have made a clean breast of it, and as you are dressed, suppose we depart. Young Mephistopheles, alias Witherlee, has gone already, I notice. Our mercantile friends are off, too, and a proper rowing they’ll get for being late at the store this morning. Oh, Bagasse, Bagasse! you’ve much to answer for—corrupting the mercantile youth of this realm by traitorously erecting a fencing-school! Apropos of fencing, it’s more than a week since we’ve had a bout with our dear fairy prince. By Jupiter! what a pleasure it is to see Muriel at the foils! I’m so glad you persuaded her to learn”—

“Oh, you’re wrong there,” interrupted Harrington. “It was she persuaded me to teach her. Muriel has a passion for liberal culture, and fencing is part of her programme.”

“Isn’t she glorious!” cried Wentworth with enthusiasm. “A woman?—a young goddess rather! By Jove! the best swimmer of all the girls last summer at Gloucester. The best skater last winter on Jamaica pond. Climbed the mountains in October with the best of us. Runs like Atalanta. Dances like Terpsichore. Sings like a seraph. Talks in a voice like Israfel’s. Studies almost as hard as you do, Harrington. And now she fences like an angel. I declare she’s a perfect young Crichtona. And yet how womanly withal! Not a touch of the masculine about her. Gay, free, strong, sweet—oh, fairy prince, there’s none like you, none.”

Harrington listened to this ardent celebration of the charms of her Wentworth called the fairy prince, in perfect silence and with a secret astonishment in his pale, controlled countenance. He believed Wentworth loved Muriel, but for the life of him he could not reconcile this lavish panegyric with that belief. For love is reticent, and we let expressive silence muse the sweetheart’s praise. How then could Wentworth thus blazon his beloved? Harrington was puzzled.

“There’s a curious element of surprise in Muriel, too,” resumed Wentworth, with a musing air. “She is so gentle, so reposeful and graceful, that when she flashes out in these courageous physical accomplishments I always feel a little astonished. Don’t you, Harrington?”

“Oh, no,” returned Harrington. “She has a rich, versatile, inclusive nature. You know that this union of feminine gentleness and manly spirit is not so uncommon. There was the Countess Emily Plater, for example, the heroine of the Polish Revolution; yet with all her bravery, she was peculiarly tender and gentle. There, again, was the Maid of Saragossa, who fought for her country over the body of her lover; but Byron, who saw her often at Madrid, says she was remarkable for her soft, feminine beauty. Muriel is a woman of the same style, I suppose. Come, Richard, let’s go.”

They saluted the old Frenchman, who stood with the Hungarian at the pistol bench, and left the room.

CHAPTER IV.
MURIEL AND EMILY.

Temple street slopes steeply down Beacon Hill, an aristocratic street of the aristocratic quarter.

In Temple street lived Muriel with her mother. Mrs. Eastman was a widow. Her husband, a young scholar, primarily a lawyer, had died three years after their marriage, when Muriel was but two years old. The effect of his death on his wife was peculiar. Fitly named Serena, so gentle and lovely was her nature, his death had not made her unhappy, but it had breathed a deeper quiet into her gentleness, and her life had been, since then, as calm as evening. She had been a poet—some of those exquisite little anonymous lyrics, of which America produces so many, and which float about through the press, scattering delight but winning no fame, were hers. But his death had stilled her muse forever. It seemed to have cloistered her spirit from the world. Never very fond of company, his decease had made her in love with solitude, and she spent much of her time in her own chamber, alone.

She was wealthy, having inherited from her husband a considerable property. Muriel, too, was rich in her own right; Mr. Eastman’s brother, who had a great affection for her, having died a bachelor four or five years before, and left her a handsome fortune.

It was a large, sumptuously furnished house they lived in. Into its library, the fresh spring light, which lay so palely in the long, musty, powder-scented fencing-school, streamed that morning through crystal and purple panes, and filled the perfumed air with a gold and violet glory. The library was rich and dark in color, with walnut bookcases, deep-toned walls, and violet-velvet furniture. Its prevailing sombrous hue seemed to confine and intensify the cheerful radiance which filled it, like some ethereal lustrous liquid in a cup of ebony, touching the dim gilding of the picture-frames, the delicate ornaments here and there, and resting on a distinctive feature of the apartment, a large parlor organ, of dark oak and gold.

But the library’s chief ornament that morning was Muriel—as lovely a blonde as ever grew to the gathered grace and vigor of twenty summers, and with that pervading glimmer of natural elegance and fine courtly breeding in her loveliness, which we express in the word debonair. She was standing very still, rapt in deep musing, with an open volume of Dante held in her left palm, and her white, nervous right hand resting on the page. A lilac dress of some soft tissue, stirred only above the light pulsations of her bosom, flowed in graceful folds, as she stood with one arched foot advanced and partly visible at its margin, and revealed the enchanting harmony of her tall and stately figure. The dress came quite up to the neck, flowering over there in a charming ruffle of lace, above which bloomed her exquisite countenance, virginal and gracious as the morning, as dewy-sweet, as fresh, as spiritually pure. The complexion, fair and clear as a pond-lily, was radiant with perfect health. Color, faint as the dawn, tinted the oval cheeks, and the sweet, curved mouth wore the hue of the wild-brier rose. The large grey eyes were softened with a golden sheen. Amber hair, with a tint of gold in it, parted over the serene and open brow, and rising from the head, as we see it in the Greek statues, rippled down in wavy tresses around the delicate ears, to gather behind in soft, thick loops of antique beauty. Noble and debonair from head to foot, and all imparadised in charm, so on that morning stood Muriel.

Who would have dreamed that the reverie in which she was absorbed was too solemn to have grown upon her spirit from the mighty Tuscan page before her? Who could have imagined, gazing upon her calm loveliness, that a great and awful, though silent, struggle had shaken her heart? Yet it was so. The event which can most convulse a woman’s life had come to her. She loved Harrington, and it had dawned upon her that he loved her friend Emily.

She had met it bravely. With that revelation her heart had risen to the level of heroic story, and in the spiritual strife which makes life tremble to its centre, she was the victor. She knew that the world lay lonely and disenchanted before her, but she was calm. She knew that life’s fairest hope was unaccomplished, life’s loveliest dream dissolved, but she was strong. She saw afar the dark battalia of the coming years of sadness, and her heart rose to meet them with the pulses of Marathon. It was love’s crowning hour with her—the hour of sacrifice, renunciation, the high soul’s rapture of martyrdom—the hour of bravery and sad, generous joy.

But now the immediate strife in her spirit was over, and in the deeps of her reverie, she saw, strangely distinct as in a dream, the phantom face of Harrington smiling palely upon her from an illimitable distance. It had never before been so vivid in her vision, nor had it ever come to her with such a sense of being mystically far-removed. As she dreamed upon it, its visionary remoteness seemed less a symbol of the distance of unanswering love than of love immortal withdrawn by death to smile upon her from the depths of Eternity. But it was Love, not Death, that had divided them: he had receded from her to love her friend. She was resigned that it should be so—happy still, though lonelier, that it was so. Hers was the true love which gives and needs, but asks not; and aspiring only to the happiness and good of the beloved one, willingly, for that, resigns all that makes life most precious and finds a sad joy in the sacrifice. It was her loss, but another’s gain. There was joy still in the belief that he was happy in his love for her friend—in the faith that she was worthy of that love—in the trust that the lofty purposes for which spirits work on earth in wedded lives would be achieved by them.

Calm, tender, solemn and regal flowed her reverie, haunted ever by the phantom face that was never to be near her again—never to smile henceforth in her dreams save at this visionary distance, which seemed to her prescient spirit ever less and less the distance of unanswered love, ever more and more the distance of love responding from the serene depths of Eternity.

“Muriel!”

A hushed, wondering voice spoke her name. A figure stood before her at a little distance. Voice and figure were alike remote and dim to her tranced mind.

“Muriel! Good heavens! Muriel!”

It was Emily. She saw her standing before her, astonished—she herself tranquil, clearly cognizant, and utterly unsurprised. A superb brunette, attired in rich brown silk, with a brilliant scarlet scarf on her shoulders, admirably contrasted with her dark hair, and the sunny gold and rose of her complexion.

“Why, Muriel, you frightened me! I spoke, and yet you did not hear. What a strange, still shine there is in your eyes! One would think you were a somnambulist.”

The happy and noble face smiled at her as she spoke, and two bright tears flowed upon it. A moment, and the book fell to the floor, and embracing Emily, she kissed her crimson mouth, and fondly gazed into her countenance. At the pressure of the soft bosom against her own, at the touch of the fragrant and dewy lips, Emily’s spirit rose in fervent affection, and in that moment her heart clasped Muriel like her arms.

“I was a dreamer, and not a somnambulist, dear Emily,” said Muriel. “I was lost in a reverie, deeper than I have ever known, and it gave me the peace of a holy thought.”

“What was the thought, dear Muriel?” asked Emily.

“One that you can appreciate, dear lover,” was the tender and gay reply. “The thought that life is truliest life in the greatness and sweetness of love.”

A refluent jealousy vainly strove at that moment to enter the heart of Emily. The charm of her friend’s gracious countenance, and of her mellow silver voice, was strong upon her. But the rich color came to her golden face and over her broad, low brow to the roots of her hair, and her lustrous brown eyes wandered into vacancy.

“Yes, Muriel,” she answered, after a moment’s hesitation, “I agree with you. Life is truliest life in loving and being loved.”

“No, that is not agreeing with me,” said Muriel, with a frank smile. “Life is sufficiently life in loving. To love is enough.—But come, dear Emily, your chocolate voice shall not be used in discussion, but in confession. We must talk this morning, for I fancy you have some little grudge against me, and it is time for us to understand each other, like good friends.”

Emily colored again, and the tears were very near her eyes. She loved Muriel, yet could not help being jealous of her, believing, as she did, that she was her rival for the love of Wentworth. But she laughed lightly, dissembling her emotion, and asked:

“Why is my voice a chocolate voice, Muriel? That is an odd epithet.”

“A very good one, dear,” replied Muriel, laughing, and picking up the Dante from the floor. “Your voice is a contralto. Sounds, you know, have their analogical colors, as Madame de Staël knew when she said the sound of the trumpet was crimson. Now the analogue of contralto is brown. Chocolate, too, is brown. Hence your voice is chocolate.”

“Well done, Muriel! Come, now, that is really ingenious.”

Muriel laughed her clear and mellow silver laugh, and looked playfully at Emily.

“Thank you for the compliment, mignonne. I shall make it over to the gentleman from whom I stole the idea.”

“Stole? It’s not yours, then?”

“O yes! It’s mine, because I stole it.”

“And who from? Harrington?”

“Guess again, dear! But n’importe—no matter. Come and sit here with me.”

Muriel moved smilingly away to a couch of violet-velvet, and sinking upon the cushioned seat, waved her hand to her friend. Emily stood unheeding, in an attitude of sumptuous repose, with her rounded arms folded, a faint smile on her face, and her lustrous and lambent eyes half-veiled by their long lashes. The damask color was bright on her cheeks and on her parted lips, and with every slow breath, her bosom slowly lifted and fell, stirring the rich and heavy attar-of-rose odor which brooded slumberously about her form.

“Thou gorgeous queen-rose of Ispahan, why dreamest thou?” said Muriel’s voice of silver mockery. “Didst thou not hear me call? Come, I say!”

The beautiful brunette did not obey, but raised her proud patrician head from its drooping curve, and vaguely sighed. Muriel rose, lightly glided over to her, clasped her waist with both arms, and standing a little on one side and bending forward—a fresh and full-grown lily—a fair, gay woman, with the grace and glimmer of a bewitching child in her womanhood—looked with a naive and radiant, half-mocking, half-serious smile, into the face of her she had called the gorgeous queen-rose of Ispahan. Presently she began to lead her to the couch. Emily held back, but Muriel’s clasp tightened, and yielding to the firm, fairy strength with which, though strong, she was unable to cope, Emily suffered herself to be conducted to the seat.

“Ah, stayaway,” blithely said Muriel, sitting beside her, and playfully shaking a finger at her in sportive reproach, “who is the stronger now? You are fairly captured, and I hold you my prisoner until peace is concluded.”

Emily, amused by this pleasantry, showed the pearls of her red mouth in a brilliant laugh over her indolently folded arms.

“And if you could only fence,” continued Muriel, in the same tone as before, “I would conquer a peace at the point of my rapier. Can’t I persuade you to learn, for that especial purpose?”

“Indeed you can’t,” said Emily. “It’s not in the line of my accomplishments, though you have included it in yours. Bless me! Muriel, what will you be learning next? Dancing on the tight-rope, I suppose, or standing on one toe on the back of a galloping horse, like a circus girl.”

“That would be fine, dear, wouldn’t it!” returned Muriel. “Decidedly, I never thought of the tight-rope or the circus horse before. It is really an idea! But let us cry truce to this nonsense, for indeed I have something to say to you.”

Moving a little nearer to Emily as she spoke, her frolic manner vanished, and her face grew sweetly serious.

“When you found me so entranced this morning,” she said, after a long pause, “I was thinking of you, dear Emily—in part of you. You know how much I love you. We grew up together from girlhood, and among all your friends there is none whose happiness is more closely entwined in yours than mine.”

Emily’s heart beat fast, and the moisture gathered in her down-dropped eyes. She did not look up, but she felt that the clear eyes of Muriel were fixed on her face.

“We have had many happy hours together, Emily,” murmured the low, sweet voice; “and when you came here two weeks ago, on this visit, it seemed that the happiest hours of all, both for you and me, were beginning. Happiest for me because I thought that what makes life sweetest to us all had come to you—here—in this house.”

There was another pause, in which Emily bowed her head, with an inexpressible sense of passionate sorrow.

“And it has come to you, Emily,” continued Muriel. “You did not tell me—you kept your heart’s secret closely—but I saw it—I felt it—though I so strangely mistook its object. I did not think my intuition could so mislead me, but it did. For I thought your feeling was for Richard and his for you.”

Emily smiled serenely, but under the serene smile her wild grief raged.

“How could you think so, Muriel?” she lightly asked.

“I judged so from his manner toward you, and yours toward him,” replied Muriel.

Emily laughed gaily.

“I cannot imagine,” she answered, “how you could think his attentions meant anything more than the ordinary reckless gallantries it is his nature to lavish on young women. And as for myself, I should indeed be weak to love such a person as he.”

She said it with the most bland and tranquil indifference of voice and manner—grief and scorn and the wild resentment of slighted love all hidden and raging in her heart.

“Emily!” The silver voice was raised in mild reproach, and she felt the nervous hands suddenly clasp her arm. “How can you speak so of Richard! Indeed, you do him great injustice. I know him better than to think that of him. Emily, you amaze me! Why, how can you imagine him such a person!”

Emily smiled blandly. She may well defend him, was her thought, for she loves him. Calmly lifting her lustrous eyes, she saw Muriel’s wondering face all suffused with generous color. Yes, she thought, it is her love for him.

“Why Muriel,” she remarked quietly, “everybody knows he is a handsome young flirt. It is his general reputation. His words, his looks, his manner toward women are proof enough of it, I’m sure. Nobody thinks more highly of him than Fernando, but even Fernando, spite of his friendship, says it is the great fault of his character.”

Muriel laughed suddenly, then looked very grave.

“I’m afraid, Emily,” she said quickly, “that it is Fernando who has put this strange and ridiculous idea into your head.”

“Not at all,” quietly responded Emily. “Fernando only corroborates my own judgment. But if you cannot trust the opinion of a man’s intimate friends and associates, what can you trust?”

“I would not trust Fernando’s opinion of anybody,” said Muriel.

“Why?” asked Emily, coolly.

“Why, dear? Because our good Fernando is nothing if not critical,” piquantly answered Muriel.

“Do you think him false?” said Emily.

“Hum!” Muriel looked doubtful—then laughed. “To tell the truth, mignonne, I think he is, on a small scale, the Iago of private life.”

“You are witty, Muriel, but you are not just,” was Emily’s cold reply.

Muriel was silent for a moment.

“Never mind,” she resumed. “We will not discuss Fernando. You will yet think better of Richard, I am confident, but as you are not in love with him, it’s no matter.”

As I am not in love with him! thought Emily. She could hardly keep from shuddering with the flood of conflicting passion that shot through her. The wild impulse to tell Muriel that she had cast her life upon him, burst into her mind. What? Tell her that she loved him, and that he had slighted her love; that he had won her heart from her; that once, in one electric moment, his arms had enfolded her, his lips had pressed hers, and then, his whim gratified, he had left unspoken the words her soul panted to hear, and coldly alienated himself from her! Tell all this to her, whom he was now wooing, and who loved him! Passionate pride arose, and held the impulse down.

“Yes, I own that I was mistaken,” pursued Muriel, “strangely mistaken, in dreaming that you and Richard were lovers. Still, there was love. It is my joy to think that you love another dear friend of mine, and that he loves you. And my joy is all the greater to feel that you are above our social prejudices—that you are great enough to love one whose wealth is in his manhood. You and Harrington”—

Emily turned quickly, her face calm, but all aglow with rich scarlet, and lighted with an indefinable smile. Muriel, pale with love and sacrifice, her clear voice trembling, and her eyes humid, stopped as she met that singular look, and changed color.

“Forgive me, dear Emily,” she said quickly. “I would not speak of it—I would not touch a subject cloistered even from me—but for one reason, which I will tell you presently. But first let me say that I was again surprised when I read in your mutual attentions for the last few days—yours and Harrington’s—the tokens of your love. For I had thought Harrington’s heart was not free—that he loved another. Now let me”—

“Who?” interrupted Emily. “Who did you think he loved? Tell me. I am curious to know.”

“Nay, dear,” replied Muriel. “It would be unnecessary to tell that. Since I was wrong, is it not better to let it go unmentioned? Surely it is.”

Perhaps Emily might have guessed who it was, had she looked then at Muriel’s face. But her eyes were downcast, and she was vainly striving to imagine who Muriel could mean. Then the remembrance of how constant and reckless had been her recent attentions to Harrington, and, though paid only to abate Wentworth’s supposed triumph by convincing him that she cared nothing for him, how good a ground they afforded to Muriel for her present belief, came into her mind, and she almost groaned. But what would have been her grief had she dreamed of the effects of her conduct on Muriel?

“Now, dear Emily,” resumed Muriel, “let me come at once to the only sad thing in all this—in a word, to the reason which compels me to speak thus frankly to you for the sake of our friendship, which I cannot bear to see disturbed even for an hour. You know I have known John for a long time, and that he is my best, my most cherished friend. I cannot tell you how much he has been and is to me—with how many noble hours he is associated. Since I have thought you loved him, I have been conscious—painfully conscious—that your manner has not been what it once was to me—that you have felt our communion—his and mine—as something that interfered with your relation to him.”

Muriel paused, earnestly gazing in the face of her friend, to be certain that she was not offending her. The hot color suffused Emily’s face, but she was calm and even smiled. Yes, I am jealous of her, was her thought, but it is because she loves Wentworth and he her. And she thinks I love Harrington! Then came the impulse to undeceive Muriel in this regard. Pride arose on one side, taunting her to confess that she had paid court to a man she did not love. Shame arose on the other side, urging her to conceal the thoughtless folly of having lured that man to love her. Both together held the impulse down.

“Dear Emily,” pursued Muriel, in tender and pleading tones, “do not let this be so. Do not think of me as your rival because I am your lover’s friend. There cannot be in our relation—his and mine—anything to weaken his faith to you. Oh, believe that, and let there be no discord between you and me! There, I have said all. I might have waited till he or you told me that you were lovers. But I could not bear to see you tortured with the feeling that there was rivalry between us, or to see our friendship in any way impaired. Forgive me for my haste—for my brusque plain-speaking; and love me truly as I love you.”

Leaning over to her, as she ended, Muriel, the bright tears welling from her eyes, embraced her tenderly. Emily, smiling wanly, her brain whirling with affection, with self-scorn and passionate despair, clasped the loving form to her breast, and held it there. In a few moments Muriel disengaged herself, her happy and noble face radiant, but wet with tears, smiled at Emily, and smiling, rose and glided from the room.

CHAPTER V.
LA BOSTONIENNE.

Emily covered her face with her hands, and for more than fifteen minutes sat in silent stupor where Muriel had left her. At length she sprang up, throwing her clenched hands from her in agony, and walked the library. Her eyes were hotly lustrous, her damask cheeks vivid with heightened color, her parted lips wore an unnatural bloom, and the flush of fever deepened the sunny gold of her complexion. Slowly, with measured steps, to and fro, up and down, she paced the room, with rustling robes, like a doomed Sultana.

“Great Heaven!” she murmured, stopping suddenly in the centre of the floor, and clasping her hands; “to know that it has come to this! She thinks I love Harrington. How shall I undeceive her! How shall I undeceive him! How extricate myself from this maze! O, for a friend, a counsellor! Richard, Richard, how can you treat me so basely! To turn from me—and in my very sight to turn from me to her! O, that I could die, that I could die!”

Wringing her clasped hands, a wild heart-break in her face, she heard a light step in the passage. The door opened, and Muriel reappeared, gay and elegant as usual, and bending into a graceful courtesy, half playful, half unconscious, as she came forward. As for Emily, no one could have discovered a trace of emotion in her. At the sound of Muriel’s footsteps, she had dissolved into a sumptuous beauty, with a rich, indolent smile on her brilliant-colored face, her bare, rounded arms folded on her bosom, and her figure in nonchalant and queenly repose.

“Ah, neglectful one,” said Muriel, shaking a finger at her, “to let your moulding drop to pieces for lack of a little water! I told you yesterday that you ought to wet the clay. Just now I looked into the studio, and saw the poor Muriel almost crumbling. Thou naughty girl!”

“I declare I forgot it,” replied Emily. “I meant to water the bust yesterday, and it slipped my mind. I will see to it presently.”

“If you don’t, I’ll never give you another sitting,” returned Muriel. “So take notice.”

All sorts of studies and arts were pursued at the house in Temple street. Muriel, amidst her botany, drawing, moulding, music, Latin, French, German, Italian, miscellaneous reading, and her vigorous calisthenics, had for a year past interpolated the art of fencing, which Harrington had taught her, and which was at present her grand passion. Emily, who had been absent at Chicago for the last ten months, had previously learned from Wentworth and Muriel how to mould in clay, and upon her return, urged on chiefly by him, had resumed this crowning accomplishment of hers, and began to develop in it unusual talent. The bust referred to was one of Muriel, which she had been working on. Lately, the check she had received in her love for Wentworth, had sadly damped the ardor of her passion for sculpture, and the bust had been neglected.

“Don’t let your belief in Wentworth’s flirtations interfere with your pursuit of the fine arts, mignonne,” continued Muriel, gaily.

“Dear me, no!” languidly returned Emily. “His flirtations are nothing to me.”

“Certainly not,” said Muriel, sportively patting her on the shoulder. “And as you owe the bad boy a debt of gratitude for showing you how to mould, be civil to him, I pray.”

“Civil? And am I not civil to him?” returned Emily, smiling with lazy serenity.

“Ah, wicked one, no,” said Muriel, silverly murmuring the words into Emily’s ear, as she stood behind her with her arms around her waist, and her face looking jestingly over her shoulder. “Not a bit civil. Didn’t I see that freak of the violets this morning! I know that hurt Richard’s feelings. Not because you did not give them to him, but on account of your manner, which was indescribably disdainful. I verily believe Fernando had something to do with that transaction. What was it he said to you at the table when I saw you color?”

“Oh, nothing,” replied Emily, blushing. “It was something he meant for a joke, though I thought it rather impudent. To tell the truth, Muriel, I did intend to share the violets between Harrington and Wentworth, when Fernando observed to me that Wentworth would be delighted to receive a true-love posy from me, or something of that sort. Now that provoked me, and I knew Wentworth had put him up to say it, for I saw them whispering and laughing together just before, and I”—

“My dear Emily,” said Muriel, in a beseeching tone, coming around in front of the speaker, “how can you be so unreasonable as to jump to such a conclusion?”

“Oh! I know he had something to do with it,” returned Emily, obstinately; “so I just punished him by giving all the flowers to Harrington. I know it piqued him, and I’m glad of it.”

Muriel sighed, and then laughed, feeling painfully the littleness of this conduct, yet excusing Emily out of her sense of the provocation of Witherlee.

“N’importe, Emily dear,” she said lightly, after a pause. “It matters not. But I blame Fernando for it all. I am not unjust to him, for I appreciate his power and talents, and very often find him agreeable enough. But I do not like his carping and cavilling and the envious spirit of him, and I cannot help thinking that he is untruthful, and given to mischief-making. What he said to you was really impudent—and, by the way, it was quite matched by the impudence of his joining us this morning, uninvited, and so coolly walking into the house with us unasked. If I had not been amused at it, I should have been indignant. It was a cool proceeding, faith,—positively arctic.”

Muriel paused to laugh delightedly at the drollery of the recollection.

“However, let it all go,” she continued. “Only, Emily, beware of being influenced by Fernando. That’s good counsel. For my part, if I catch him at any of his tricks, we shall quarrel outright. I believe I never quarrelled with anybody in my life, and perhaps the experience may be refreshing. But come—business before pleasure. What are you going to do to-day? I must go on a tour—will you come with me?”

“Where are you going?” asked Emily.

“First and foremost, I am on a Pardiggle excursion among two or three families of my parish,” replied Muriel.

Dickens’ “Bleak House,” was coming out in serials at that period, and Muriel, with the rest of the town, was full of it, and was particularly delighted with Mrs. Pardiggle, to whom she jestingly likened herself when she made visits of charity.

“The Pardiggle path will first lead me to poor Mrs. Roux,” continued Muriel. “Mrs. Roux, in Southac street, the wife of the colored man who was here the other day to white-wash the studio. She had another child born a couple of months ago—did I tell you?—and we must take care of the black babies as well as the white ones, you know, and the black mothers, too, as well as the white mothers, most gorgeous honey-darling.”

Emily smiled at the pet name Muriel bestowed upon her, admiringly gazing meanwhile at the fair face, half arch, half serious, which looked at her over the lace ruffle.

“Poor Roux was very sick in March,” continued Muriel, “and has only got to work again recently—so as times are hard with them, mother and I have taken them under our wing.”

“How did you find them out, Muriel?” asked Emily.

“Oh, through Harrington,” answered her friend. “Harrington is the general repository of the grievances and troubles of everybody he falls in with, and when he can’t help, he tells us, and we help. We are a Pardiggle society. He is the President, and mother and I are the Board of Directors.”

“I have a mind to become a member,” said Emily, smilingly. “But where next?”

“Next,” answered Muriel, “I am going to make a call on the Tenehans. That’s an Irish family in North Russell street. Then there is Judith, the sempstress, for whom I have some sewing. Let’s see—that’s all to-day, I believe. Then I’m going to see Captain Greatheart.”

“Who’s that?” interrupted Emily.

“Mr. Parker, of course.”

“Mr. Parker? Pray what entitles a lawyer to that Bunyanesque”—

“A lawyer! Bless me, Emily, where are your five wits! It is the Mr. Parker I mean—Theodore Parker. And is he not a model Captain Greatheart? The nineteenth century Apollyon has reason to know him in that character, at all events. So too have the poor Christians and Christianas, for whom he is guarding shield and smiting sword.”

Emily bowed her head in assenting abstraction.

“I’m going to see if he has in his library a book I want,” continued Muriel. “Then, perhaps, I’ll go to the Athenæum, and refresh my art-sense—no I won’t either, for I remember Fernando said he would be there, and I can’t enjoy pictures with his everlasting cavilling in my ears.”

“Fernando has exquisite tastes,” said Emily, musingly.

“Fernando has exquisite distastes,” returned Muriel, piquantly. “Which I shall not enjoy this morning. So instead of the Athenæum, I’ll go to the Anti-Slavery Convention at the Melodeon. Uncle Lemuel was here last evening, you know, talking up Union-saving and the Fugitive Slave Law, and Mr. Webster, and all that sort of thing, and I shan’t feel right again till I hear the voices of the Good Old Cause from the platform of the Garrisonians.”

“Well, Muriel, you are the most astonishing Bostonienne I know,” said Emily, laughing. “I should just like to analyze your mélange. Let’s see now. In the first place, you defy fashion, and insist on wearing dresses that show your shape, when all the rest of us are swaddled in half a dozen starched petticoats, and are pining in secret for the hoops of our grandmothers to come into vogue again. You”—

“How many have you on, honey-bird? Come, ‘’fess,’ as Topsy says,” demanded Muriel, mischievously.

“I? Oh, I’m moderate,” returned Emily. “I only wear six.”

Muriel put up her hands, orbed her mouth, and opened her large eyes in mock horror.

“Goodness me!” said Emily, laughing and smoothing her bounteous skirts, “Six is nothing. Why everybody wears seven. Eight and nine are not uncommon. And there’s Bertha Appleby wears twelve.”

Muriel burst into low, silver laughter, in which she was joined by her friend.

“To resume,” continued Emily when the mirth had subsided, “you won’t wear low-necked dresses at parties. You don’t waltz. You don’t flirt. You don’t care to be admired. You don’t run after the lions. You pay court to all the taboo people, visit those who are voted out of good society, ask them to visit you”—

“And cry ‘à bas la Madame Grundy,’” put in Muriel, with a free and frolic toss of her arm.

“Yes, and cry, ‘down with Mrs. Grundy,’” continued Emily. “Then you cultivate the most miscellaneous and outlandish set of characters—authors and actors, and actresses, and reformers, and clergymen, and musicians and comeouters and people respectable and disrespectable all meet here, higgledy-piggledy, in the most heterogeneous mixture—the most chaotic”—

“O no, Emily dear, not chaotic,” interposed Muriel, “not chaotic but cosmic. I accept them all as Nature accepts them all. Down with the walls! That’s my principle. No castes—no factitious distinctions. Let fine people of all sorts come together and learn to know each other. Democracy forever!”

“Yes, indeed—but doesn’t good society get horrified at your doings!” laughingly exclaimed Emily “Doesn’t the whole neighborhood hold up its hands at you? Why, your aristocratic acquaintance look at you with perfect horror.”

“Well,” rejoined Muriel, with nonchalant gaiety, “you know what Mercutio says: ‘Their eyes were made to see and let them look.’”

“And then your studies,” ran on Emily. “Perfectly omnivorous. French, German, Italian, Latin, music, drawing, painting, moulding, science, poetry, history, oratory, philosophy, Shakspeare, Bacon, Dante, Plato, Goethe, Swedenborg.”

“And Fourier,” interpolated Muriel. “I’ve added him to my list, you know, and Uncle Lemuel says I ought to blush to own that I read him. The poor man thinks Fourier had hoofs and horns and a harpoon tail.”

“Yes, I know,” rejoined Emily with a laugh. “He says such works loosen the foundations of society and are fatal to the interests of morality,” she added, mimicking Uncle Lemuel’s stock phrases, which he used in common with a great many people of the highest respectability. “But to resume, Muriel: there are your muscularities. You skate, you swim, you climb mountains, you ride horseback, you walk ten miles on a stretch, you saddle or harness your horse like a stableman, you catch up your horse’s feet, and look at the shoes like a blacksmith, you dance, you row, you lift weights, you swing by your hands, you walk on the parallel poles”—

“And fence,” suggested the amused listener. “Don’t forget the fencing!”

“Yes, and fence with Wentworth and Harrington, besides turning the studio up-stairs into a gymnasium. Then you go on these tours, as you call them. You have a regular parish of negroes and Irish people, and all sorts of forlorn characters, on whom you shower food, and clothes, and books, and goodness knows what else. And you go to theatres, circuses, operas, lectures, picture-galleries, woman’s rights conventions, abolition meetings, political gatherings of all sorts at Faneuil Hall, with the most delectable impartiality. Then you used to attend church at William Henry Channing’s, which our best society thought horrid.”

“And now Theodore Parker’s”—

“Yes, and now Theodore Parker’s, which they think worse still. And you have harbored fugitive slaves in your house, and helped them off to Canada. And you swallow Garrison and Parker Pillsbury”—

“And adore Wendell Phillips.”

“Yes, and adore Wendell Phillips. And subscribe for the ‘Commonwealth’ newspaper, which your uncle says ought to be put down”—

“And the ‘Liberator.’”

“Yes, and subscribe for Garrison’s ‘Liberator,’ which is your uncle’s bête noire. In short, Muriel, I wonder how you keep your popularity. I’m sure I couldn’t do all that you do, and have these cozy old citizens, these formal and fashionable mammas, these mutton-chop whiskered, English-mannered gentlemen, and Beacon street belladonnas, so fond of me as they are of you. But then, I suppose they don’t know the extent of your heresies.”

“My dear Emily,” returned Muriel, “please to remember that you’re from the rural districts. You live at Cambridge half the year, and you’ve been off there in Chicago for the last ten months, so you don’t know how many Boston ladies do all, or nearly all, that I do. I’m not half such an original as you imagine. But see here, bird of Paradise, time passes. Are you going with me, or not? I’ll go anywhere, or do anything you like, after the Pardiggle excursion is over. That must be attended to, anyway.”

Before Emily could reply, the door opened, and Mrs. Eastman came in. A beautiful, fair-complexioned, gentle lady, of middle age, with silver-grey hair falling in graceful tresses beside her face. As beautiful in her waning day as Muriel in her matin prime.

“Not gone yet, dear,” she said, with a bright smile.

“Just going, mother.”

“Well the carriage is below, and here is little Charles come to say that Mrs. Roux is rather poorly. And he says, dear, which I hope is not true, that some of those dreadful men are in town.”

Muriel’s face grew grave, and she flew to the door.

“Charles!” she called. “Come up-stairs, Charles.”

“Yes, Miss Eas’man. Comin’ right up, Miss Eas’man,” chirruped a shrill, smart voice, from below, followed by the softened bounce of feet on the carpeted flight, coming up two stairs at a time.

“What is it?” asked the wondering Emily.

“The kidnappers,” returned Muriel. “Come in, Charles.”

A most astonishing fat negro boy entered, cap in hand, ducking and bowing, with a scrape of his foot, and showing a saucy row of splendid white teeth in the droll grin which expanded his big mouth and nostrils; his great eyes meanwhile revolving rapidly around the library, and momently vanishing in their whites with a facility curious to behold. His face, surmounted by a mass of ashen-colored wool, parted on one side into two great shocks, was exactly the shape of a huge d’Angouleme pear, the great blobber cheeks making the forehead, which was respectably large, seem small. His complexion was a clean, warm, dark grey. He was not tall for his age, which was about ten years, but he was broad. Breadth was the characteristic of his figure. His short arms were broad; his short legs were broad; his body was broad; and he broadened his face at present with a grin. He had big feet, clad in battered old shoes; and big hands, which just now played with his cap. He wore a grey jacket thrown back from his fat chest, which was covered with a blue and white small-striped shirt; and his legs were incased in grey trowsers. Grey, in fact, was the prevailing color of him all over. The face was intelligent, and full of precocity, assurance, and supreme self-importance, with what people call a little-old-man-look pervading it all, though this was only seen when he was in his grave moods, and now was not visible.

“What is it, Charles?” anxiously asked Muriel.

“Please, Miss Eas’man,” he began, suddenly stopping his grin, and looking preternaturally demure, with a portentous roll of his saucer eyes, “please, Miss Eas’man, I jus’ run up here like a bob-tail nag for to say—to wit, that Brudder Baby is fus’ rate; so is Josey; so is Tom; so is I; so is father; and mar isn’t not nearly so well, an’ she feels right bad lest father should be took off, an’ them kidnappers is in town, an’ we’ll all be took off, jus’ so sure’s my name’s Tugmutton, Miss Eas’man—yes, Miss Eas’man, there aint no sort of a chance for us anyway, jus’ so sure as you’re born.”

Having delivered himself in shrill, fluent tones, to this effect, the young imp grinned cheerfully, and stood rapidly twirling his cap on his hand like a pin-wheel, and rolling his eyes at the three ladies. Muriel looked at him with a still face, but Mrs. Eastman smiled, and Emily, who had seen him once before, laughed amusedly.

“What an odd creature he is,” said the latter. “To think of his preferring to be called by that droll name? Don’t you like to be called Charles?” she asked, addressing the boy.

“Like it extrornerly, Miss Ames—never git done likin’ that name noways, Miss Ames,” he asseverated, with great earnestness. “But you see, Miss Ames, ’taint so familiar like as Tugmutton. Father calls me Tugmutton, an’ mar, an’ Josey, an’ Tom, an’ everbody, since I was knee-high to a toad, Miss Ames. Tugmutton’s my Christian name, Miss Ames, and Charles’s my given name as Miss Eas’man give me, Miss Ames.”

“Look here, Charles,” said Muriel, suddenly, “are you sure the kidnappers are in town?”

“Dead sure, Miss Eas’man—jus’ as sure as can be.”

“How do you know? Who told you?”

“Laws! Miss Eas’man! Why it’s in the newspaper!” blurted out the imp, rolling up the whites of his eyes at her with a look of amazed reproach.

“O, no, Charles! It’s not in the newspaper, for I’ve read the papers this morning,” said Muriel, smiling, and shaking her finger at him.

Tugmutton looked demure for a second, then smiled sheepishly, furtively rolled his eyes one side at the wall, and fidgeted on his feet, and with his cap and jacket.

“Laws, Miss Eas’man! it’s goin’ to be in the paper. Paper’ll be chock full of it to-morrow.”

“O, I guess it’s not true,” said Muriel, slowly, with a relieved smile. “It must be a false alarm, Charles.”

“My gosh, Miss Eas’man, I don’t believe there’s one word of truth in it,” said Tugmutton, puckering out his great lips with an air of precocious contempt, and whirling his cap on his hand. “Never could make me believe one word of that story. It’s jus’ nothin’ but a weak invention of the enemy.”

The phrase, which Tugmutton had picked up from somebody, was so odd in his childish mouth, and so oddly expressed, that Emily burst into a fit of laughter, and threw herself into a chair, while both Mrs. Eastman and Muriel smiled. Tugmutton grinned delightedly at the effect of his speech, and then looked awfully demure and dignified.

“Anyhow,” he continued, “all them foolish colored folks are believin’ that story. Them folks has jus’ got no gumption, anyway. Talkin’ about that story in the street, now—millions of them.”

“Are the colored people out in the street, Charles?” asked Mrs. Eastman.

“In the street? Laws, Missus Eas’man, Southac street’s full of ’em,” returned Tugmutton.

“There may be something in it, after all, mother,” said Muriel. “I’ll go.”

“Bless me, Muriel, are you not afraid?” exclaimed Emily.

“Afraid! Not at all. What possible danger is there? Besides, I want to see what’s going on. Come, let’s go.”

Emily rose and followed Muriel, who left the room for her bonnet.

“Come, Charles,” said Mrs. Eastman, moving to the door; “come down-stairs, and I’ll give you something to eat. Little men like you are always ready for pie.”

Tugmutton, with the prospect of pie in his delighted vision, flashed into a huge grin, which displayed all his ivories, and lit his blobber-grey face; and checking the impulse which prompted him to execute a shuffling breakdown on the spot, he dodged out at the door after Mrs. Eastman.

CHAPTER VI.
AN EPISODE OF THE REIGN OF TERROR.

In a few minutes the two young ladies, cloaked and bonneted, came out into the sunlit street, where stood the carriage, which Patrick, the inside man, had brought up from Niles’s stables. Emily, characteristically indifferent to the driver, swept in and took her seat. Muriel, on the contrary, who was on friendly terms with everybody, courteously bent her head to him as she passed. The driver took off his hat to her, and stood waiting for orders.

“Wait a minute, please,” said Muriel.

Presently, Patrick, a grey-haired, decorous old Irishman, came out with a basket, covered with a white cloth, which he deposited on the seat of the carriage.

“Bless me, what’s that!” exclaimed Emily, laughing.

“Pardiggle tracts for the poor,” said Muriel, jestingly. “Patrick, tell Charles to hurry.”

Patrick went in and soon returned with Tugmutton, who jumped down the steps, and scrambled into the carriage. Tugmutton’s fat face was all agrin and shining like satin-wood. The happy youth had devoured a whole pie, and was in a state of supreme exhilaration. His repletion, however, did not prevent him from ogling the basket by his side, and he would have liked nothing better than to make his dessert on its contents.

Muriel gave the driver his directions, and the vehicle started off down Temple and into Cambridge street to the corner of Garden. They were turning up Garden street, when Tugmutton opened his great eyes, and said.

“Well now, I declare! If there ain’t Mr. Harrington!”

Muriel leaned forward, and caught sight of the noble soldier-figure of Harrington striding up the street before them.

“Hullo! Mr. Harrington! I say!” screeched Tugmutton.

Harrington turned, with the sun on the martial lines of his face and beard. He caught sight of the inmates of the carriage instantly, and signaling to the driver to stop, he came down the street, to the side of the carriage.

“What is it, John?” asked Muriel.

“Nothing,” he replied, smiling, and bending his head to Emily. “It’s a false alarm, I find. But these poor people are very much excited, and I was going up to quiet them.”

“Come in. We’re going to Roux’s,” said Muriel.

Harrington entered, sat in Tugmutton’s place, taking him on his knee, and the carriage went on till it reached the corner of Southac street, where it stopped.

“There’s considerable of a crowd here,” cried the driver.

They all looked out at the carriage window upon the squalid neighborhood. Only a Dickens or a Victor Hugo could fitly describe the strange and picturesque scene which met their eyes. Huddled together in excited groups, or moving hither and thither in straggling masses, hundreds of colored men and women, clad in every variety of costume, and lawless and unhuman in aspect, swarmed over the street with a loud, dense inarticulate confusion of voices, the bright sunlight bringing out their motley forms and bronze faces in grotesque and vivid salience. So uncouth and various were the costumes—coats and hats of extinct styles and patterns, frowsy and shabby raiment of every fashion within the last half century, intermingling with the many-colored gowns and head-dresses of the girls and women—that but for the heavy-lipped, sombre faces, with their flashing teeth and wild-rolling eyes, and the menacing gestures and threatening hum of the multitude, it might have seemed some masquerading mob, arrayed in the garments of the old clothes shops. Protruding from every window in the dingy and dilapidated houses on either side of the street, big clusters of heads, mostly those of women and children, some with great shocks of wool, some bullet-shaped and closely shorn, some wearing white mob caps and red and yellow bandanna kerchiefs, were bobbing restlessly over the excited multitude below. Up and down cellar-ways, and in and out of numerous alleys and yawning doors, uneasy shoals were constantly pouring, passing from or mingling with the mongrel and fantastic concourse in the street, which continually moved in the sunlight with a hoarse, turbulent, swarming undertone, like the far-off roar of insurrection.

A deep flush came to the broad-nostrilled face of Harrington as he gazed.

“What a sight for Boston in the nineteenth century!” he exclaimed. “Vaunting her civilization while terror invades the refuge of her poor!”

Emily, deathly pale, leaned back in the carriage, and shuddered.

At that moment, a portion of the crowd, seeing the carriage, set up a clamor of cries, and surged down toward it. Two or three stones were thrown, which rattled on the pavement around the vehicle, and the horses began to plunge and rear. Instantly Muriel flung open the carriage-door, and springing into the street, calm and fearless, held up her hand. Harrington quickly leaped out after her.

“Halloa, there!” he shouted, with a commanding voice, which, like Muriel’s gesture, fell like magic upon the thoughtless assailants. He was well known in the quarter, and the negroes recognizing a friend, set up a cheer of welcome. Tugmutton meanwhile had pounced from the carriage upon the boys that threw the stones, and assaulted them with a shower of cuffs and kicks. He came back, presently, full of victory, his blobber cheeks puffed out with rage and self-importance.

“Them miser’ble young niggers haven’t got no more gumption than just nothin’ at all,” he spluttered. “Guess they’ll mind now, though. Gosh! I lit on ’em like a duck on a June bug. When I fall afoul of ’em guess they think it’s General Washington and the spirit of seventy-six. Miser’ble young bloats!”

Harrington could not help smiling as he looked down on the fat imp, who was delivering himself in these figurative terms, with an indescribable swell and swagger. The horses were still pawing and trembling, and Muriel went to their heads, and stood with one gloved hand grasping the reins, and the other patting and stroking the cheeks and noses of the alarmed animals. The driver, who sat on his box, white as a sheet, firmly holding the reins, looked down admiringly on the fearless and graceful sunlit figure, and the negroes standing around, stared with delighted awe.

Harrington, meanwhile, was at the carriage door, assuring Emily, who protested that she was not afraid, as indeed she was not, for she was naturally courageous. Presently Muriel came around to the carriage door, her face bright and calm.

“Now,” she said, “I will go on to Roux’s. The carriage had better stand here. Emily, will you come with us?”

“But you’re not going through that crowd, Muriel!” exclaimed Emily.

“Why certainly,” replied Muriel, laughing. “I wouldn’t miss the chance for the world. Going through that crowd is part of my culture. Besides, dear, the crowd won’t eat us.”

“I think I will stay here,” returned Emily. “I am not afraid, but this scene is terribly painful to me, and I could hardly bear to go among the poor people. Do you think this will drive some of them off to Canada, Muriel?”

“I fear so,” replied Muriel, with a wistful glance at the concourse.

Emily colored, and her eyes filled with tears.

“Let me give something for them, Muriel,” she faltered, taking out her porte-monnaie. “You may know some of them who want means, and if you do, give them this.”

She held out a little roll of bills—fifty dollars. It was money she had intended for shopping, and it was all she had with her.

“But, dear Emily,” said Muriel, looking at her with humid eyes, “I do not know that I shall meet with any one who will need it.”

“No matter,” replied Emily; “take it with you in case you should. I wish I could help them all.”

Muriel took the bills with a tender smile, and Harrington caught the profuse hand, and looked fervently in the face of the giver. At that look Emily cowered, for she thought it the look of love she had wickedly evoked, and her soul quailed in grief and shame. Muriel, too, misread the look, and her spirit rose in generous feeling at the token of a lover’s happiness in his beloved one.

“Ah, thou noble one!” she said, with playful sweetness. “Thou rose of the rose-garden! Well, it shall be as you say. Come, Charles; you can carry the basket. John, you will stay here to keep Emily company.”

Before Emily could reply, Muriel moved away, followed by the triumphant Tugmutton with the basket on his arm. Presently she was passing through the parting concourse, bending her head in acknowledgment of the bows, and curtseys, and doffing of hats which saluted her. The negro in his lowest estate is a gentleman in his courtesy, superior in this to many a white of high and low degree. The weight of social wrong had crushed out or bruised down many an excellence in these humble people, but politeness was one which society could not destroy in them. As Muriel went on through the swarming hum, the clatter of voices would cease, the men and women would step aside from the path, the hats would be taken from the heads with a courteous recognition of her presence, which a snob might not have the wits to honor, but which Philip Sidney’s pulse would surely have quickened to behold. Low Irish, in their place, would have stood stolidly and gazed. Low English would have shambled aside with clownish loutishness. Low Americans would have stared and leered, and perhaps spat tobacco-juice on her skirts as she passed them. The low negroes were civil as Frenchmen.

In the heart of the grotesque and motley throng, Muriel came upon a black man whom she knew—an erect and stalwart figure, straight as an Indian, with a fine, masculine face, and the full swart negrine features. He was standing in a doorway in his shirtsleeves. Instantly bowing low, and taking off his felt hat when he saw her, he came forward in courteous posture as she stopped. Muriel smiled graciously, and gave him her hand as freely and firmly as she would have given it to her most aristocratic friend. He took it reverentially, yet without bashfulness, while all the black people around stared.

“Have you heard the news, Mr. Brown?” she asked.

“Yes, madam,” returned the negro, bowing low. “It’s sad news, too, madam. As yet we don’t know which of us they’re after, but I was just going down town to see the Vigilance Committee, and find out about it.”

“I am happy to tell you that it’s a false alarm,” replied Muriel, smiling. “Mr. Harrington says so, so you can be at ease. Won’t you please to spread the news among your people here, so that they may be relieved.”

The news was spread already, for she had no sooner said it, than it was taken up and passed from lip to lip with joyful confusion. Presently it reached the depths of the crowd, and instantly there was a straggling shout, followed by a surge of the whole concourse toward the direction from whence the information had proceeded.

“Stand back,” roared the negro in a tremendous voice. “There’s a lady here. Don’t crowd the lady.”

Instantly the cry, “don’t crowd the lady,” was taken up, and the dense masses surged back, every man turning upon his neighbor, and shouldering him away in officious zeal, till there was a great bare space left around Muriel and her companion, with a circular crowd around its border, and further behind in the throng, negroes jumping up and down, to catch a sight of “the lady.”

Muriel laughed, and at once the negroes in front laughed, and the laugh spread till it became a universal, jovial guffaw, while some of the lighter spirits threw themselves into grotesque contortions, and capered and stamped up and down in extravagant glee. Presently a conviction came to the crowd that they were at an unnecessary distance, and at once there was a forward movement of the whole mass to within a yard of Muriel, every one nervously ready to turn again upon his neighbor, and crowd him off, at the slightest hint that they were too near, and some of them looking anxiously at Tugmutton, who, taking upon himself very important airs by virtue of his attendance upon Miss Eastman, stood holding the basket, with his blobber cheeks and big lips puffed out in ludicrous dignity, as wondering at their impudence.

“I trust, Mr. Brown,” continued Muriel, “that none of the poor people will be frightened by this, into going to Canada.”

The negro looked sombrely into vacancy for a moment before answering. He was one of the influential men of the quarter, and knew pretty much all that went on there. Brave, faithful, generous himself, he added to his good qualities that of keen sympathy for his people.

“I’m afeared, madam,” he said, “that this affair will scare off some of them. I advise every one to stay that can, and fight it out. I don’t go myself, and I wouldn’t give two cents for the chance of taking me, so long as I have this.”

He opened his waistcoat as he spoke, showing a huge sheathed bowie-knife in a side-pocket of the garment.

“I carry this, madam, night and day,” he continued. “Whenever they want me, they’ll find me ready. But there’s a lot of folks here that ain’t up to my way, and the poor cre’turs go. There’s two boardin’ with me now that have about made up their minds to git away right off, and as they’re bent on it, I shall have to help them all I can, though cash is rather low with me just now. Then I’ve been told that old Pete Washington is goin’, too, with his folks. Pete’s proper scared, and thinks he’s sent for every time he hears kidnappers are in town. I haven’t heerd tell of no more.”

He said it with a kind of mechanical sadness, fumbling slowly as he spoke with the handle of the knife under his waistcoat, his eyes roving absently, meanwhile, over the gaping faces of the motley crowd.

“Mr. Brown,” said Muriel, “here are fifty dollars, which I want you to divide at your discretion among those that need means to get away. It is from a lady who is sitting down there in my carriage. She wanted it given for this purpose. If you need any more, come to my house at any time. And if I can do anything, please to let me know, for I want to help if I can.”

He took the money quietly, put his large black hand over his mouth, and bowed low. Then throwing back his head and shoulders, and extending his brawny arm with the bills in the hand, he suddenly fronted the crowd.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, with a grandiose manner, pouring his tremendous bass into the concourse, “a lady in the carriage gives fifty dollars to help the brethren that are leaving us for Canada. The lady here has often helped us, and will help again. In my humble opinion, they’re both of ’em God’s ladies, and”—

The great voice broke. Muriel, astonished by this unexpected outburst, was yet so overcome by the electric passion of the negro’s speech and manner, that she lost her self-possession, and knew not how to interpose.

“Three cheers,” screeched Tugmutton, at this juncture, thinking that some cheering would be highly appropriate.

Three? They cheered till they reeled! Roar on roar went up in solid volume, till the sky seemed to swoon above them. Muriel, disconcerted for once in her life, turned to Brown, who stood grimly smiling, and begged him to quiet them and get them to disperse. He put out his hand, and at once the tumult immediately around them dropped, though broken shouting still went on in the rear. Turning to the fat squab who had given the word for this ovation, and played fugleman with cap and voice to it all, Muriel silently beckoned him to follow, and hurriedly bowing and smiling to the calm negro, went on.

CHAPTER VII.
ROUX.

She had not gone half a dozen paces, before some one came striding to her side. It was Harrington, and she instantly put her arm in his, with a gesture so sudden and joyous, that the young man thrilled.

“I am so glad you have come,” she said.

Emily had insisted on his leaving her, and attending upon Muriel, Harrington remarked.

“But you are pale,” he pursued, looking into her face, which colored and smiled under his kind and searching eyes.

“And now you are not pale,” he added, laughingly.

Muriel laughed silverly, and told the reason of her momentary agitation, which amused Harrington vastly.

Presently they reached the dingy alley in which Roux lived. It was a corner house, inhabited by several families. A flight of wooden steps led up to the second story, in which Roux had two rooms.

Roux was a white-washer, window-cleaner, boot-black and what not by occupation. He had come up from his little shop in Water street, down in the heart of the city, at the rumor which Tugmutton had brought him, that kidnappers were in town; for he was a fugitive, and since the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law he had never felt safe in Boston, where he had previously passed nearly nine secure years.

He was sitting on an old chair, in an attitude of deep dejection, crooning to his babe, which he held in his arms, with his other two children, a boy and girl, sitting on either knee. The baby was a pretty little boy, with negrine features, clear saffron skin, and glittering dark eyes. Josey, who sat on his right knee, was a slender, bright-eyed, brown-skinned little girl, six years old. Tom, sitting on the other knee, was like his sister, and four years of age. They were both pretty children, neatly dressed in clothes which Muriel and her mother had provided for them. Roux himself was a good-looking negro, athletic in build, dark-complexioned, with short, woolly hair, and heavy eyebrows. He was attired in an old sack coat and blue overalls, specked with white-wash, for he had come up to the house in his working clothes. The room in which he sat had received a touch of his art, as the yellow-washed walls and white-washed ceiling testified. It was a poor, low-browed apartment, but neat and clean, though pervaded by that frowsy odor which one often scents in the dwellings of the poor. The floor was bare. Three or four cheap colored prints hung in veneered frames on the walls. There was a trundle bed in one corner for the children; a small cooking-stove near the fireboard, with an immense deal of gawky funnel zigzagging up to a hole in the wall near the ceiling; a small clock ticking faintly on the mantelpiece, with some gaudy ornaments near it; a table, and half a dozen old-fashioned, second-hand chairs. Behind the family group was an open door, giving a view of another room, with a rag-carpet on the floor, a bureau, and a bed, on which lay, in her clothes, a mulatto woman, Roux’s wife.

Roux ceased his crooning as the broad-limbed, blobber-cheeked squab of a Tugmutton threw open the door, grinning from ear to ear, and lumbered in with the basket, which he deposited in the middle of the floor.

“You ain’t goin’ to be took back, father, this time,” bawled the cheerful youth. “It’s a false alarm. Gosh! I knew it wasn’t nothin’ but a false alarm. There ain’t no kidnappers in Boston, an’ never will be neither.”

“Tugmutton, what’s that?” demanded Roux, eyeing the basket.

The imp drew up his chunky figure with severe dignity, and rolled his saucer eyes and jerked his thumb over his shoulder. At the same moment Muriel’s courtly face and figure appeared at the door, with Harrington’s countenance smiling over her shoulder. The poor room was suddenly adorned by these fair, strong presences, and its frowsy air was sweetened and softened with delicate fragrance. Roux’s children scrambled down at once to run over to their smiling angel, who entered with affable and cordial grace, and stooped to fondle and kiss the little ones, while Roux himself rose, with the baby on his left arm, bowing confusedly, and smiling with considerable pompousness of manner, as of one who thought himself highly honored.

“How are you to-day, Mr. Roux,” said Harrington, coming over to the delighted negro, and shaking hands with him. “And how is your wife? And this little one,” he added, putting his large hand on the head of the staring baby.

“All right, Mr. Harrington,” returned Roux. “Though the madam’s not as well as she might be, sir,” he continued, in a grandiloquent tone. “She got a sort of a shock, Mr. Harrington, when this news come, and went right off into spasms. Clarindy’s awful scared lest some of these here days old master should send for me, and I’m right skittish myself, sir, in view of that catastrophe.”

Another person might have smiled at Roux’s half-anxious, half-pompous tone, but Harrington looked at him with a kind and concerned face, knowing how much real apprehension and distress his words covered.

“I am extremely sorry that your wife should have been alarmed,” said the young man. “But it’s true, as Charles said, that this is a false report.”

“Yes, Mr. Roux,” added Muriel, coming forward from the children, and giving him her hand, “it’s nothing but an idle rumor, so keep a good heart.”

“Thank ye, Miss Eas’man, and I am extrornerly rejoiced at the reception of this unlooked for intelligence,” returned Roux, bowing reverentially, while his manner grew more pompous, and his language more grandiloquent. “And the madam,” he continued, “will hear the glad tidings with great joy, likewise, Miss Eas’man. I heerd the shoutin’ and hoorawin’ in the street, though I wasn’t able to spekilate with any certainty as to its cause, an’ with the chil’ren here, an’ Clarindy a-lyin’ on the bed, feelin’ ruther weak, I found it on the whole, inexpedient to go out and see what was a goin’ on.”

He addressed the last sentence of this speech to Harrington. Muriel had gone into the other room, and was leaning over Mrs. Roux, speaking in a low, soothing voice, with her hands on the sick woman’s head. The children were prattling with each other, and Tugmutton was standing apart, with his short arms akimbo, the hands spread on his hips, and an expression of ineffable scorn on his fat, grey face, which was turned toward Roux.

“Now, father,” said the squab, taking advantage of the pause, “ain’t you ashamed? My gosh! I’m goin’ to blush at ye, father.”

“What’s the matter, Tugmutton,” asked Roux, with comical deprecation.

“What’s the matter? That’s a pretty question!” was the reproachful reply. “There you stand, and never ask Mr. Harrington to take a chair. That’s the matter. Do you call that doin’ the honors of the establishment?”

Roux looked abashed, while Tugmutton, with his face puffed out, and his eye sternly fixed upon the offending party, brought forward a chair, dumped it down under Harrington’s coat-tails, and retreating a couple of paces, put his arms akimbo again, still sternly regarding Roux.

The whole proceeding was so ineffably droll, that Harrington, sinking into the chair, with a hand on each knee, laughed heartily, though quietly, with his eyes fixed on the fat pigmy. Roux, who was very fond of Tugmutton, and submitted meekly to all his odd humors, regarding him, indeed, with an absurd mixture of puzzled curiosity and reverential awe, such as the good-natured Welsh giant might have bestowed upon Jack the Giant-killer, stood now, with the baby on his arm, uneasily eyeing his chunky mentor, and smiling confusedly. Nothing could be more amusing than the relation Tugmutton occupied toward him, and the rest of the family. They were all under the domination of this small, fat chunk. Tugmutton’s grand assumption of importance, and his authoritative airs, conjoined with his genuine affection for them all, which took the form of perpetual wardenship, had prevailed over the age and experience of both Roux and his wife. He was so old-fashioned, so queer, so mysterious and inconceivable a creature to them, that they looked upon him almost as a superior being, and petted and humored him in all possible ways.

“Just look at you, now,” continued the irate fat boy. “Do you call that the way to hold a baby? With his head hangin’ down, and every drop of blood in his body runnin’ into it! My gosh! that child’ll never have one speck of hair, father, an’ water on the brain, beside.”

Without feeling any apprehension of the capillary and hydrocephalous catastrophe thus ominously predicted as the inevitable consequence of his way of holding the baby, Roux glanced at the little one, whose head was drooping back over his arm, and whose fat, yellow fists were contentedly inserted in its mouth, and then gently shifted the position of the child, so as to rest its head on his shoulder.

“Just you give me that baby, father,” blurted out the fat boy, starting forward, and receiving in his short arms the infant which Roux readily abandoned to his charge. “There’s nobody knows how to take care of this poor child but me,” he indignantly continued, bearing off his burden, and sitting down with it in a short chair near the wall. “Lord a mercy! If it wasn’t for me, I don’t know what’d become of this family! Chick-a-dee-dee—chick-a-dee-dee—honey—honey—pretty Brudder Baby,” he chirruped, showing all his ivories in a jovial grin to the infant, and dancing it up and down in his short arms.

“Tugmutton’s great on takin’ care of the chil’ren,” remarked Roux to the smiling Harrington. “There aint no better boy than Tug nowhere, Mr. Harrington. He helps Clarindy a mighty deal, an’ he’s a reel comfort, I tell you.”

“Why, yes, Mr. Roux, so I see,” smilingly returned the young man. “And he learns the lessons I give him, very well. I shouldn’t wonder if Charles came to be a great man one of these days. He says he’s going to be a lawyer like Robert Morris.”

Robert Morris was a colored man, who had fought his way up against the prejudice of the many, and with the aid of a few, to an honorable position, which he then held, at the Boston Bar.

“Tell you what, Mr. Harrington,” said the proud Tugmutton, “Danel Webster won’t be nowhere when I come on the scene of action. I’ll make him stand round. Fugitive Slave Law’s bound to go then, an’ all the kidnappers’ll be hung right up.”

At that moment steps were heard, and Emily appeared at the door, coloring with the novelty of her situation, and followed by a short, thick-set man, in a straw hat, with his head bent sideways.

“Why, Emily!” exclaimed Harrington, starting up. “And with the Captain! Miss Ames, Mr. Roux. Captain Fisher you know.”

The superb beauty curtseyed low, with a sweeping rustle of silks, and Roux, fluttering at heart in the presence of the aristocratic lady, bent himself as if he had a hinge in his back. Harrington handed Emily a chair, into which she sank, smiling and nodding to the enchanted Tugmutton, and Muriel came floating out from the inner room with her natural urbane curtsey.

“Why, Emily!” she exclaimed, shutting the door behind her. “You too. Good morning, Captain Fisher.”

“It’s my doin’s, Miss Eastman,” said the Captain, in a cheery voice, looking at Muriel with his head on one side, and his hat on, as he shook hands with her. “Comin’ along, I see Miss Ames in the hack, and she said you was here; so I said, why not go too, and she took my extinded arm, and up we come together.”

He held Muriel’s hand as he made this explanation, and dropping it when he had concluded, stood looking intently at her, as though some reply was expected. He was a short man, with a round face, yellow and rosy, like a winter pippin; round, dark eyes, which never winked; a short nose, shaped like a beak; and he had a way of bending his head sideways, and looking at you like some odd bird. There was a general aspect of the sea-faring man about him, and he had been for many years the skipper of coasting vessels, in which occupation he had amassed some property. He now lived in the same house with Harrington, for whom he had a great affection, and did a little business in collecting rents for a number of house-owners.

“I just came up to let the folks here know,” he continued, “that there’s no sneakin’ soul-drivers come to Boston this time. I was told there was some of a crowd here, but they’re all scattered now, and I met Brown, who said he’d been informed ’twas a false alarm. No danger, I hope. The Vigilance Committee keep a sharp look-out ahead, and we’re pretty sure to know what’s goin’ on.”

In those dark days, when Boston had gone for kidnapping, there was an organization, composed of the leading Abolitionists, with a few anti-slavery people, young and old, who made it their business to keep a watch for Southern man-hunters, to warn fugitives of their danger, to assist them in their flight with money and arms, and in every practicable way to baffle the kidnappers. This was known as the Vigilance Committee, and its existence and efforts were among the few bright rays which lit the dark insanity of Boston at that period. Captain Fisher was a member of it, as was Harrington.

“I got here before you, Eldad,” said Harrington, smiling. “Charles came to the house with the rumor, and I ran down town at once, and found there was no truth in it.”

“Trust you for bein’ on hand, John,” returned the Captain. “You’re spry as a topman. When Gabriel toots that horn of his, you’ll be the first one up out o’ your grave.”

The Captain wandered over to Roux, and laying his hands on the negro’s shoulders looked at him steadily with his head curved sideways, then shook him gently to and fro, then got round to one side of him and took another look, and then punched him with his forefinger in the ribs.

“Roux, how are you?” he chirruped in conclusion, as the negro squirmed away from the fore-finger, good-naturedly smiling.

“Firs’-rate, Captain,” answered Roux. “Got scared though at that story.”

The Captain stood oblivious of his answer, looking at Tugmutton who, swollen with pride, was exhibiting the baby to Emily. Roux became absorbed in admiring awe at Tugmutton’s complacent familiarity with Miss Ames. Tugmutton was in one of his lordliest moods, proud of his exclusive aristocratic acquaintance, and conscious that Roux and the two children, who stood timidly at a distance, were following him with reverent eyes.

“It’s a very pretty baby,” said Emily graciously, turning to Roux, who hastened to smile and bow. “But, Mr. Roux, these three children do not resemble Charles at all.”

“Different style of beauty,” remarked Tugmutton, with preternatural gravity, rolling his great eyes up at Emily.

Emily laughed aloud at this oracular suggestion, and Harrington and Muriel looked at each other and smiled, while the Captain fixedly surveyed the squab with mute admiration.

“You know, dear,” said Muriel to Emily, “or rather you do not know, that Charles is only an adopted child of Mr. and Mrs. Roux.”

“Oh!” returned Emily, suddenly enlightened, “that accounts for the different style of beauty.”

“Yes, madam,” said Roux elaborately bowing, “that accounts for it.”

Emily smiled at the simplicity of the reply.

“And how did it happen that he got the name of Tugmutton, Mr. Roux?” she inquired.

“Well, Madam,” replied Roux, quite seriously, “it was a sort of accidental. When I firs’ got to Boston, Tug’s father and mother treated me right handsome. I was ruther bad off, an’ they took me in till I got somethin’ to do. They was very fat folks, both of ’em, an’ Tug was an uncommon fat baby. Somehow his father and mother never could fix on a name for him, so he growed along without none. Bimeby when he was three year old, his father died, and bimeby when he was five, his mother died likewise. I was married to Clarindy when that catastrophe happened, so feelin’ right grateful to Ezek’el and Sally Pitts—that was Tug’s father and mother’s name, madam—I took Tug in. That day we had a chunk of baked mutton, wich you couldn’t bite, madam, it was so tough, an’ after dinner we missed Tug all on a sudden. We got ruther skeered at not findin’ him, an’ went lookin’ round the streets, but couldn’t git no news of him. Long toward evenin’ we heerd a stir under the bed, an’ lookin’ under, there he was tuggin’ away at that chunk of mutton, and there he’d hid himself all the afternoon. I’m a miser’ble orphan, says he, the minute we sot eyes on him, never leavin’ off tuggin’ at the meat. You’re a young Tugmutton, an’ that’s what you are, says Clarindy. Then we larfed, and so after that we got to callin’ him Tugmutton, an’ he took to that name astonishin’. That’s the way of it, madam.”

Muriel and Harrington, who had heard this story before, listened to it now smiling, while Emily and the Captain, vastly amused during its repetition, laughed heartily as Roux ended. Tugmutton, meanwhile, sitting in the low chair with the baby, grinned sheepishly at the revival of this reminiscence of his miserable orphanage.

“Are you—that is, did you—escape from the South, Mr. Roux?” inquired Emily, hesitatingly, after a pause.

“Yes, madam, I did,” replied Roux with another elaborate bow. “It wouldn’t be well, madam, to have it mentioned roundabout, lest”—

“O never fear, Mr. Roux,” she rejoined hurriedly. “I wouldn’t speak of it for the world.”

“In fact, madam, I believe I never told any one about it,” continued Roux, falteringly, “with the especial exception of Mr. Harrington and Miss Eastman. But I did git away from the southern country, way down in Louzeana, nine years ago. And I’ve got a brother still there, madam, leastways if he’s alive, wich is not certain, seein’ that he was with an uncommon bad master, madam—in fact, one of the worst sort of masters, madam.”

“Why didn’t he run away with you, Mr. Roux?” inquired Emily.

“He was ruther scared at the resks, madam,” replied Roux, “Says I, Ant’ny—his name was Ant’ny, madam—Ant’ny, says I, Master Lafitte—Lafitte was old Master’s name, madam—Master Lafitte’ll be the death of us, Ant’ny. We’d better try to git away to that Boston we’ve heerd tell of. Ant’ny, says I, I’ve got three pounds of kian, Ant’ny, says I”—

“Of what?” asked Emily.

“Of kian, madam—kian pepper, you know.”

“O, yes. Cayenne pepper.”

“Yes, madam. Wich we can leave on the track, Ant’ny, says I, and that’ll throw off the hounds, I’m a thinkin’.”

“The hounds!” ejaculated Emily, knitting her brow with horror, and looking at the still face of Muriel and then at Harrington.

“Certainly,” said the latter, tranquilly. “In this free and happy country, they hunt men and women with hounds. When hounds fail, they try Fugitive Slave Law Commissioners.”

“And were you hunted, Mr. Roux?” asked Emily, shuddering.

“Yes, madam,” replied the negro, naively. “Ant’ny was afeared to try it, and then I thought I wouldn’t nuther, for he was my brother, and we’d been brought up together on old Madam Roux’s estate in New Orleans, and I was very fond of Ant’ny, madam. But next day, you see, madam, I was feelin’ ruther sick, and fell short in the pickin’—cotton-pickin’, you know. So when night come, Master Lafitte he flogged me awful, and then hung me up in the gin-house—hung me up by the wrists, an’ left me to hang overnight.”

Roux, hearing Captain Fisher muttering, paused. The Captain, with his head very much on one side, was swearing awfully in a low undertone at slavery and slaveholders in general. He usually contented himself with such mild oaths as “by the great horn spoon”—as people who leave off chewing tobacco supply its place with spruce gum. But as the spruce-gum chewers sometimes backslide into tobacco again, so the Captain, when he got excited, which was seldom, would backslide from his mild profanity into such swearing as sailors, who swear with genius, know how to express the passion of their souls withal.

“Bimeby, madam,” resumed Roux, still addressing Emily, who sat looking at him with a flush of fiery indignation on her beautiful countenance, “I sloshed about, an’ the rope broke an’ let me down. I jus’ got out of that gin-house mighty quick, I tell you. Then I went down a piece to the hollow stump, where I’d hid the kian an’ a carvin’ knife, which I’d took one day from the kitchen. I got the kian an’ the knife, an’ put off hot foot for the north. Jus’ about sunrise, I heerd Dan Belcher’s hounds a-comin’ after me—two of ’em, yellin’ awful. I was proper skeered, madam, but I jus’ made a hole in the paper of kian, an’ run on, holdin’ the paper low down on the trail, so’s to let the kian drop out along, you know. Then when the kian was all gone, I got skeered, an’ I run on a piece, an’ shinned up a live-oak ’way into the thick of the leaves, an’ lay still. ’Fore long, I see the hounds comin’, an’ Dan Belcher an’ old Toler an’ Master Lafitte ridin’ after ’em. I got so skeered I like to dropped, but I lay hush, an’ right soon I saw the dogs run up, an’ poke their noses into the kian. Ki-yi-yah,” cachinnated Roux, overcome with the reminiscence, “you ought to have seen them dogs, madam. They jus’ acted as if they’d got religion! They flopped down an’ rolled over, yellin’ like mad, an’ rubbin’ their noses into the kian, an’ rollin’ agin, an’ hollerin’—hi! Never saw nothin’ out of camp-meetin’ act like them cre’turs. ’Fore long up come old Master an’ Dan Belcher an’ Toler, an’ looked at them dogs. I couldn’t hear a word they was sayin’, but I spekilated they was wonderin’ what had got into them dogs. Then Dan Belcher, he got down, an’ dragged off the hounds, an’ poked his nose into the kian. Hi! I reckon he got a smell, for he jumped up rubbin’ his nose, an’ stampin’ round awful.”

Tugmutton, with the baby in his arms, burst into a screech of eldritch laughter, kicking up his feet from the low chair in which he sat, in phrenetic glee. All the others were silent, with faces intent on Roux.

“Bimeby,” resumed the negro, “Dan Belcher he laid a hold of the dogs, an’ dragged them on a piece to find the trail with no kian on it. ’Twasn’t no use, for the dogs didn’t do nothin’ but snuff an’ yell an’ roll over. So’n about a half an hour, I reckon, they all went back, an’ I lay hush in the tree all day. Along towards evenin’ I got down, an’ run on agin. Bimeby I come plump on a man. ‘Where’s your pass?’ says he. ‘Here it is,’ says I, givin’ him a dig with the carvin’-knife. ‘Ugh,’ says he”—

Everybody burst into a peal of laughter at the nonchalant, matter-of-fact simplicity with which Roux said this. Roux himself was rather amazed at the interruption, and stood, faintly smiling, with his whitewash-stained dark hand fumbling over his mouth, and his eyes uneasily roving over the laughing company.

“Well done, Roux,” said Harrington, jumping up, and slapping the negro on the shoulder. “‘Ense petit placidam sub libertate quietem,’” he continued, quoting the legend of the Massachusetts State-arms. “And you sought the tranquil rest of freedom with a carving-knife.”

“Yes, quietem was the word, and you did quiet him,” chuckled the Captain, punning upon the Latin. “Sic semper tyrannis, is another bit of that lingo, an’ I guess old tyrannis was rather sick when he got a touch of Roux’s carving-knife. By the great horn-spoon, that’s the richest thing I’ve heard lately!”

“But what did the man do then, Mr. Roux?” asked Emily.

“Ugh, says he, madam, and then he doubled himself up, an’ I run on,” replied Roux, simply. “Bimeby I come to the Red River, and I swum over. Then I run on agin, till I come to the Mississip, an’ hid in a wood-pile. Long toward mornin’ a flat boat came up the river, and hitched. Then I heerd the Captin say, says he, argufying with another man, and gittin’ mad with him, I’m Ohio, says he, and my men are Ohio, an’ we don’t care a damn for slavery, says he. Tother man went off, an’ I run out, an’ says, Captin, says I, I’ve run for my freedom, an’ won’t you take me with you, I says. Step right aboard, says he, an’ I’m damned if I don’t wish I’d a load more like you, says he.”

“Bravo,” cried Muriel, clapping her hands. “Good for Ohio!”

“Hooraw for Ohio!” piped Tugmutton, bouncing up, and flourishing the baby. “Chick-a-dee-dee, Brudder Baby, pretty little birdy,” he added, with a sudden change of key, wagging his bushy head and grinning blobber cheeks over the complacent infant. “Send him right down to Ohio. Kidnapper come to fetch Brudder Baby, won’t have no more chance than a bob-tail horse in fly-time when he gits to Ohio.”

Alas! poor Tugmutton!—the dark days could come even to Ohio! Broad and strong and generous the hearts of Ohio, mighty in noble impulse, mighty in love and bravery, mighty in truth to liberty and tenderness to man. But the rampart of Ohio hearts prevailed not in the black hour when Margaret Garner, with the hell-dog statute and the hunters upon her, sublimely slew her children to save from slavery the souls Ohio could not save.

“And so you escaped, Mr. Roux,” said Emily.

“Yes, madam,” returned Roux, “the captain took me all the way up to Cincinnati. Where are ye goin’ now, William, says he. Boston, says I. Men, says he, let’s give him an Ohio lift. Wich meant takin’ up a collection, madam,” explained Roux, bowing. “An’ the collection was fifteen dollars and thirty-three cents, madam, together with a suit of the captain’s clothes, an’ some vittles in a paper bag. Captain, says I, my gratefulness will never fail. William, says he, just hold on to that carving-knife, an’ don’t let yourself be taken. Captain, says I, if I ever git to heaven, I’ll make the Lord acquainted with all you’ve done for me. William, says he, don’t you never acquaint anybody but the Lord with it, or I’m a gone coon. An’ now make tracks, says he. So I made tracks, an’ come on safe to Boston.”

“Well, I declare!” exclaimed Emily, drawing a long breath, and looking around her. “It makes my blood boil to think that men are treated so in this country. And you never heard from your brother, Mr. Roux?”

“Never, madam. But I don’t think he’s alive. I’m afeared that Master Lafitte would kill him to be revenged on me, and that makes me feel, sometimes, as if I’d murdered my own brother.”

He said this in low, ghostly tones, with a sudden agony and horror convulsing his dark face. It is impossible to describe the shock of awful emotion which his words gave to Emily. There was a moment of solemn silence, in which Roux stood faintly gasping, with his swart visage ashen and distorted with overmastering anguish, and she, gazing on him with a blanched countenance, felt as if her very soul would die with pity.

“Couldn’t he be bought?” she timidly stammered, at length, half feeling that she was proposing an absurdity. “That is—I mean if he is—if he has not—died.”

Roux despairingly shook his head.

“If I had the money, madam,” he hoarsely faltered, “I’d try to buy him. But that’ll never be—never.”

“I’ll engage to furnish the money,” said Emily, vehemently, the generous color flooding her face like fire. “I will,” she added, stamping her foot as she sat. “If it costs me two thousand dollars, or twice two thousand, it shall be done.”

A dead silence ensued, in which she gazed at their mute faces. It was the brave New England scholar who did sweet service to liberty when the guns of tyranny stormed on Rome—it was Margaret Fuller who once gave away all her little property, five hundred dollars, to a poor exile, a stranger to her, whose distresses had touched her heart. Born of such an impulse, and kindred to that splendid generosity, was this act of Emily’s.

“Why do you all look so?” she continued. “I mean what I say.”

Harrington and Muriel, to whom she lifted her flushed face, were standing near each other, Muriel’s face still, solemn, and turned toward the window, Harrington’s noble countenance rigid, and bent upon the floor. The Captain stood looking at Emily with his head bent on one side, and his features all atwist. As for Roux, his black visage was wildly lighted with hope, joy, awe, and startled amazement, while Tugmutton sat in the low chair, with the baby in his arms, his mouth open, his huge eyes staring, and the big shocks of wool on his head seeming bigger than ever in his astonishment.

“It shall be done, I say,” declared Emily. “Harrington, I depend on you to show me the way.”

Harrington looked blank—like one who did not know how to answer her; then furtively glanced at Roux, and then at the floor.

“You are the soul of generosity, Miss Ames,” he said, after a pause, smiling constrainedly. “I should be happy to help you. We will see what can be done.”

Roux clasped his hands and bowed his head. In that instant, Harrington flashed a lightning glance at Emily, so stern, so menacing, so agonized in its look of warning and entreaty, that Emily was confounded. The next second, Roux’s face was raised, and Harrington’s wore an expression of such bland indifference, that Emily could hardly believe she had seen the other.

“We will speak of this another time,” said Harrington. “At present, I think I must go. Shall I see you to the carriage, ladies, or do you remain longer?”

Roux threw himself on his knees, and bending, grovelled at Emily’s feet. Then raising his black face, convulsed, and streaming with tears, he faltered out the broken words of his gratitude.

“I’ll pray for ye, forever and ever, Miss Ames,” he said. “I’ll pray to the Lord for ye, Miss Ames. And the blessing of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, be on ye, Miss Ames. I’ve had a good deal of kindness, but there’s never been no kindness like yours, Miss Ames, an’ I don’t want ye to give away all that money, madam, for it’s a mighty deal of money, though it’s for my brother, Miss Ames, and I’d clean give my life to see my poor brother, madam. And oh, if Master Lafitte will only sell him, if he’s alive, madam, I’ll pray for him too, and for everybody, forever and ever, amen, an’ for you more especial than anybody, for there never was such kindness as yours to a poor, miser’ble, forsaken black man—no, never, never.”

Uncouth words poured forth rapidly in a weak, broken voice, with sobs and tears; but words that blanched the gold and roses of the face that bent with swimming eyes over the bowed and weeping figure on the floor. In the cold, succeeding silence, there was no sound but the dim sobs of Roux. The Captain stood with his features screwed into a hard rigor, gazing at the abject form beneath him. Harrington’s face was wan and rigid, and fixed on vacancy. The two little ones, frightened and almost crying, clung around the stupefied and staring Tugmutton, who sat holding the baby, with the big whites of his eyes glaring at Roux from the ashy pallor of his fat visage.

“Mr. Roux.”

At the gentle, silver tones of Muriel, at the firm touch of her hand on his shoulder, the negro lifted up his bowed head from his breast, and gazed with a haggard, beseeching face, all wet with tears, at the benignant countenance that bent above him. For an instant only, and then rising to his feet, ashamed of his emotion, yet unable to repress it wholly, the poor fellow stood awkwardly wiping away his tears with his rough sleeve, with his breast heaving, and the stertorous sobs still breaking from him.

“It will all be well,” said Muriel, gently. “Do not grieve, Mr. Roux.”

“Yes, Miss Eas’man, I wont; indeed I wont grieve. But sometimes I git desperate, Miss Eas’man,” he faltered. “’Pears sometimes as if everybody was against us colored folks, Miss Eas’man.”

“Cheer up, Roux, we are all your friends here.”

It was the strong, sweet baritone of Harrington that sounded now. Roux looked up, smiling mournfully, into the masculine, calm features, which strangely comforted him.

“Yes, Roux, cheer up’s the word. ’Tan’t always goin’ to be slavery and slaveholders in this free and happy country, mind that, my man.”

Thus the Captain, shaking a fore-finger at the negro, and then cheerfully punching him in the ribs with it.

“An’ if I catch any kidnappers round this establishment, I’ll heave a brick at him,” screeched Tugmutton, in a rage, glaring with rolling eyes at everybody over the baby.

Emily, who had risen, and stood wiping her eyes with a cambric handkerchief, burst into laughter, in which Muriel and Harrington joined. Tugmutton looked awfully irate for an instant, and then grinned sheepishly.

“Come, come,” said Muriel, “we must be going. Where’s the basket? Oh, there it is on the floor. Mr. Roux,” she continued, stooping down to it, and unpacking, “I won’t go in again to your wife—by the way, I hope our talk has not disturbed her—but here are some baby-clothes which I wore myself when I was a baby—old things which I found yesterday, but they’ll do for the little boy. And here’s some nice beef and a pie, which my mother had cooked expressly for your dinner to-day. And here’s my copy of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ which you told me you hadn’t read. When you and your wife are done with it, Tugmutton, as you call him, can bring it up to the house, with the plates and napkins.”

The famous Uncle Tom had recently issued from the Boston press, and begun its illustrious journey through Christendom. Muriel handed the two volumes to Roux, who took them timidly, with a low bow, immensely gratified. The napkined meat and pie, she had already laid on the table, with the package of baby-clothes.

“And that’s all,” said Muriel, arranging the remaining contents of the basket under the fond eyes of Harrington. “The other things are for our Irish cousins in North Russell Street. You, John, shall carry the basket out to the carriage. Now let’s go.”

“Miss Eas’man,” said Roux, “I’m so much obliged”—

“Never mind, Mr. Roux,” interrupted Muriel, smiling gaily, “I see all that. Good bye.”

She stooped to kiss the children, then with a curtsey, glided from the room. Roux, timidly rubbing his hands one within another, bowed after her, almost servile in his reverence. Tugmutton, severely dignified, and swelling like the frog that tried to be an ox, with the proud consciousness that something great had been done, and that it was all due to him, stood in the centre of the floor, with the baby clasped against his shoulder, and serenely waved his big paw in token of his distinguished consideration. Emily smiled at him, and bowing to Roux, swept with a rich rustle of silk after Muriel, followed by Harrington with the basket. The Captain lingered to bounce up Tom and Josey once apiece to the ceiling, and to poke Roux in the ribs with an anti-slavery forefinger, and then, shaking his fist at the grinning Tugmutton, departed also.

CHAPTER VIII.
THE SHADOW OF THE HUNTER.

Muriel and Emily were sitting on the back seat of the carriage as the Captain came down Roux’s steps, nodding as he passed, and went down the street alone.

“Driver, North Russell street, and walk the horses,” said Harrington, leaping in on the front seat, beside the basket.

The carriage immediately set off as directed, and Harrington, leaning forward, took Emily’s gloved hands in his, and looked fervently into her beautiful face. Emily did not turn away this time, but forgetting that she thought him her lover, in her perception of an expression which recalled the look he had flashed at her in the room a few moments before, gazed anxiously with a vague tremor into his countenance, in which the winged nostrils were lifting.

“What is it, Harrington?” she faltered; “I’m afraid I have done something wrong, though”—

“No, dear Emily,” interrupted Harrington; “nothing wrong. Only unfortunate. You spoke from impulse; but it would have been better not to have said what you did before Roux.”

“I understand,” she replied, hurriedly. “I have raised hopes which may never be gratified. Heaven forgive me! O how thoughtless it was!”

Muriel put one arm around her, and looked into her face, with tender sympathy.

“You will think me ostentatious,” faltered Emily, tears wetting her long lashes; “but, Harrington, it is not so. The poor man’s distress touched me so keenly, that I could not forbear saying what I did.”

“No, Emily,” warmly returned Harrington, “you mistake. I do not think your offer was made in ostentation. Don’t think me insensible to the splendid generosity that would give so large a sum to bring joy to the home of a poor, despised negro, and he a stranger to you. It is not a common heart that could enter into the depths of his sorrow, and so promptly seek to relieve it. But, listen, Emily. Muriel and I have a secret to tell you.”

He released her hands to take a wallet from his breast-pocket, from which he drew a letter.

“God knows,” he resumed sadly, “it is at best a noble folly to give away wealth, as you would do, to ransom one man from that dismal pit of slavery when nearly four millions with as strong a claim on our hearts must be left behind. And yet these individual cases come to us so like special claims, that we cannot deny them. See now—in this noble folly there was another heart before you. Yes, Emily, Muriel, too, was touched to the ransom of Roux’s brother.”

“Muriel!” exclaimed Emily.

“We said nothing to Roux,” continued Harrington, “for the result was doubtful. And we had to proceed with caution lest this Lafitte should seek to capture him. I wrote a letter, which I had mailed from Philadelphia. Here is the fiend’s answer, received two months ago. Don’t read it unless you have strong nerves.”

Emily eagerly snatched the letter from Harrington, and looked at the envelope. It was postmarked from Marksville, Louisiana, and directed to John Harrington, Esquire, care of Joseph House, Esquire, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

“Jo House is a young literary friend of mine—an editor,” observed Harrington. “I explained the matter to him, telling the reason for secrecy, and got him to mail the letter for me, and transmit the answer. And by the way,” he continued, “to give you an idea of the risk of dealing with such a man as Lafitte, let me tell you that since this letter was received, Lafitte has been up to Philadelphia, and called on Jo for my address, desiring, he said, to enter into negotiation with me for the sale of Antony.”

“Good Heavens!” exclaimed Emily, with sudden alarm, “I hope your friend did not tell him where you were.”

Harrington laughed.

“Not a bit of it,” he replied. “What do you think Jo told him? He told him with the utmost gravity that I resided in London. And when Lafitte looked incredulous, the jolly young Bohemian produced a London Directory he happened to have, and showed him my name among the Harringtons, offering to copy the address for him.”

Emily laughed delightedly.

“That was a brilliant fib, I declare,” said she. “What did Lafitte say?”

“Jo wrote me that he looked as blank as a board, declined the offer, and went away. I can imagine that Jo’s perfect soberness—for he’s an awfully solemn-looking fellow—together with the circumstance of the London Directory being in his possession, convinced Lafitte of the truth of the statement, and I’ll be bound he thinks Roux is on the other side of the Atlantic with my namesake.”

Harrington laughed, but his laugh ended in a deep and weary sigh. Emily took the letter from the envelope, opened it, and began to read, while Muriel looked with sad tranquillity out at the carriage windows. The letter, read slowly in the swaying carriage, ran thus:

Lafitte Plantation,
Parish of Avoyelles, Louisiana.

John Harrington, Esquire:

My dear Sir: Your letter (appropriately dated the 7th of March—a souvenir of dear Mr. Webster—bless him! I can’t think of that great speech without emotion—it was so noble) came to hand. In reply I beg to say that the dear Antony is alive and well, and, vicariously, sends his love and this little bunch of his wool to his beloved brother, whom you do not mention, but who is undoubtedly under your wing. So penetrated was the dear boy with a refluent sense of his brother’s beastly ingratitude in leaving me, his affectionate master, that he was really unwilling to part with the wool, which I finally tore with loving violence from his black pate, and send in his behalf to your charge for the wicked William. As for Antony, the dear boy loves me so much that no money could persuade him to leave me, and for my part, I am so fond of him, that millions would not induce me to part with him. Thus, my dear sir, you will perceive that Antony is not for sale at any price.

I may add that dear Antony is a devout believer in the doctrine of vicarious atonement, and was so overcome with a new conviction of his brother’s wickedness in leaving me, that he insisted on being trussed up and receiving fifty lashes, which I administered with my own hand, of course with tears in my eyes. I am sure that if the depraved William could have heard dear Antony’s howls, he would have been stricken to the heart with a sense of his own unworthiness, and of the grandeur of this atoning love. To be frank with you, I am concerned lest Antony should carry his vicarious notions to the extent of demanding to be crucified for William’s sins. In which case, I should feel compelled to oblige him. It would be difficult to carry out this sublime design; but, at a pinch, I could send away my overseer, and ride with Antony into the swamp, where we could readily extemporize a Calvary.

Give my love to Mr. Joseph House, who does your Philadelphia mailing, and believe me, dear sir,

Affectionately yours,

Torwood Lafitte.

March 15th, 1852.

Emily turned white as marble over this insolent and horrible epistle, and, with her lips colorless, looked at Harrington, who took the letter from her hand.

“Charles Sumner has been in the Senate for six months, silent,” remarked Harrington. “I have a mind to send him this letter.”

“Now, John,” said Muriel, smiling, “I won’t tolerate any reflections on my neighbor. Every time I pass his house in Temple street, I think that he has not gone to Washington for nothing. Wait a little, and you shall hear the leap of the live thunder. In the meantime, as the knight Durindarte said to the weeping queen Belerma, ‘patience, and shuffle the cards.’”

“You are right, Muriel,” returned Harrington, with a faint smile, “we talk of his silence now, but we shall yet talk of his speech. Yes, the heart lives that shook Faneuil Hall for liberty, and we must not be impatient. But sometimes I despond, for it seems the destiny of our best men to lose power and purpose when they get into Congress.”

“No matter,” replied Muriel. “As King Pellinore said to Merlin, ‘God may foredo well destiny.’”

Harrington bent his head abstractedly.

“But to return,” said he. “You observe, Emily, that the only result of my letter was to bring torture upon poor Antony. In the letter was a bunch of the poor fellow’s hair, which this moral idiot tore from his head. You see, too, he flogged him in mere wantonness of cruelty. From all Roux tells me of the character of this man, I fear that he will end by killing Antony; and it is not too much to suppose, that with the opportunities the slave system gives him, he may even do it in the manner he suggests. Murders as dreadful take place on those obscure plantations, as escaped slaves tell us. Just see the infernal nature of a system which gives a fiend like this absolute, irresponsible control over his fellow creatures! Here is this pirate, with a pirate’s name and a pirate’s disposition; and the law of Louisiana, as of every Southern State in the Union, entrusts to his care as many men and women as he may choose to buy; and while it sanctions, by express statute, various degrees of cruelty toward them, makes it impossible to hold him to account for the most merciless torture and murder, by excluding the testimony of slaves.”

Emily listened, with a countenance deathly pale.

“I declare, Harrington,” she said, “when I read that letter I felt as if the earth had cracked and shown me a glimpse of hell. Is it possible that there can be such men as this? Are there many of them at the South?”

Harrington did not reply for a moment, and sat sadly looking into vacancy.

“It is not Southern nature,” he said, at length, “it is human nature. It is human nature depraved by a tyranny, and licensed, practically licensed, even in its wildest excesses, by a tyrant code. Read Shakspeare; there you have in representative figures, the scientific account of man. Here is Shakspeare’s Chiron, Demetrius, Iago, Cloten—a moral monster with statutory power to hold slaves, and treat them at his pleasure. But the blame is less with him than with the polity from which he sprang—which organized him and reared him. Bating for their life-long education in despotism, Southern men are no worse than Northern men. Put the code of Louisiana over Massachusetts, and you shall have the self-same results. Look at our Northern marine—that blot on our democracy; how does the despotism of it work on our captains, even with some sort of a legal check upon them? Read the criminal reports, or talk with seamen, and learn how Northern captains can maltreat the men under their command. No—human nature is no more incapable of degeneracy in Massachusetts than in Louisiana. If people are better here, it is because conditions are better.”

“Such men as this Lafitte are more to be pitied than blamed,” said Muriel, gently. “I wish we were great enough to feel so.”

There was a moment’s silence, in which nothing was heard but the slow rattle of the carriage-wheels over the paving-stones.

“You see, Emily,” said Harrington, sadly, breaking the pause, “that your promise to Roux cannot be fulfilled. It is now our painful problem how to destroy his new hope, without giving him the anguish of an explanation. We are in a very difficult position.”

“Oh, if I had only known of this!” cried Emily, in bitter distress. “As long as Roux expected nothing, he had only his ordinary pain. But I have lifted the poor man to this height only to dash him into a pit of despair.”

“Hush, dear Emily,” said Muriel, tenderly. “Do not reproach yourself. You could not have imagined that an effort had been made to buy Roux’s brother. So don’t feel badly about it. We will devise some means of escape out of this dilemma. What I am most afraid of is, that Lafitte may, after all, find out Harrington, and get on the track of Roux.”

“In which case,” said Harrington, tranquilly, “it would be a good idea to take him to Southac street and show him Roux’s house.”

“Harrington!” exclaimed Emily, almost shrilly.

“Yes indeed it would,” said Harrington, quietly. “But before I showed him the house, I would say two words to Elkanah Brown. I’ll engage that he would hurry back to the pirate civilization that spawned him, resolved never to set foot in Boston again. The negroes here would sound a roar in his ears that he would remember to his dying day.”

“Good Heavens, Harrington,” cried Emily, “they would kill him!”

Harrington’s face was calm, but his blue eyes gleamed, and his broad nostrils lifted with passionate emotion.

“And if I were an American patriot, pure and simple,” he replied, “I would answer that it would be no matter if they did, and that Bunker Hill is near enough to keep tyrannicide in countenance. You remember what one of our leading Whigs said in convention many years ago—in the time, when to be a Whig was not to be a Webster Whig, with a fine speech for kidnapping. ‘Why, sir,’ foamed a slaveholder, ‘if your doctrines obtain, our slaves would cut our throats for us.’ ‘And in God’s name,’ said our Whig friend, tossing the words over his shoulder—‘in God’s name, why shouldn’t they!’”

“Oh, Harrington, Harrington,” said Emily, shaking her head, “is this you? I did not think John Harrington had the heart to hate any man—not even Lafitte—much less kill him, or see him killed.”

“Nor has he,” said Muriel, quickly.

“You are right,” said Harrington, calmly; “at least so far as the hating goes. It may be a defect in my organization, but I have never known what it is to hate anybody. I hope I never may. As for killing men, or seeing them killed, that is another matter. I believe that I could do both the one and the other without a pang. This Lafitte—a man in whom there is not one trait worthy to be called human—I could kill him or see him killed without the least regret. It is not his death but his life that should be regretted.”

“But, Harrington,” said Emily, “this is impossible. How could you beat a man, much less kill him, without hating him?”

“Christ beat the money changers in the temple: Was that hate?” answered Harrington.

Emily smiled vaguely.

“Well,” she continued, “that is ingenious—but not conclusive. Besides, to beat men is not to kill them. You could hardly kill a man without hating him.”

“Xenophon says Socrates shore down a soldier in the battle, and blessed him as he died: Was that hate?” answered Harrington.

Emily colored slightly, and looked up smiling into the calm countenance of the speaker.

“Death is not the worst fate that may befall a man,” continued Harrington. “If to kill a man were to end his life, we might well hold our hands. But the soul survives the blow that slays the body.”

“And to kill a man is only to shell him, Emily,” said Muriel with a smile.

“Mercy!” exclaimed Emily, laughing, “what a couple of Robespierres!”

“Seriously, now,” said Harrington, “I think Muriel is right. A killed man is a shelled man, and not a dead man. ‘Where shall we bury you?’ asked the friends around the dying Socrates. And the escaping soul replied, ‘Wherever you please, if you can catch me.’ But with regard to this matter. If I believed in free will and moral responsibility, and all the doctrines professedly accepted by the mass of my fellow-citizens, I should hold that, on the principle of justice, we had a right to terminate the life of a man who was willfully using it to the injury of his fellow-creatures. For I agree with Lord Bacon that men without goodness of nature are but a nobler kind of vermin. But, as I happen to think that such men are the necessary product of an unscientific order of society, and that society is responsible for them and their misdeeds, I could only kill them at the cry of a terrible expediency, not to punish them, but simply to arrest their mischief. At the same time I go with Shakespeare, rather to ‘prevent the fiend’ than to kill the fiend. I would not kill a rattlesnake lying harmlessly in the sun, simply because he is a rattlesnake, and may bite to-morrow. But if he coils to strike, I slay him, purely as a measure of safety, not in hate, not forgetting that forces external to him organized him for malice and venom. So, too, with the nobler vermin—the human reptiles. I do not hate them; I pity them. I do not forget that they are a consequence, and not self-caused. But I cannot let them flesh their fangs in the innocent, when the saving mercy of a death-blow can rescue their blameless victims to lives of human use and accomplishment. When such men as Lafitte come here to hunt the poor, I baffle and drive them away if I can, and, as a last resort, I kill them. That is not hate—it is love. It is stern love, but it is love. Wo to the civilization that makes it necessary! Wo to the state that suffers an injury to be done to the humblest man or woman, or leaves his or her protection to the chance charity of the private citizen! And treble wo to the government that gives despotic power to ruffians, and arms and guards them in their crime against mankind with the prestige and forms of civil law!”

Harrington ceased, and they all sat in silence with brooding faces.

“Well, I trust that this wretch may never trouble Boston,” said Emily, at length, with a sigh.

“I trust not,” replied Harrington. “He is shrewd and subtle though, and I have, I own, an anxious foreboding that he will come this way. I am sorry I wrote that letter. You observed the underlined sentence in his reply, didn’t you? It is curious that he should have so readily conjectured that the letter was sent to Jo House to mail.”

“Very curious,” responded Emily.

“Here’s North Russell street,” said Harrington. “I’ll leave you, and rush home, for I have my article to finish.”

“Harrington—whisper,” said Muriel, bending her face toward him with a charming smile.

Harrington, who was just putting out his hand to unfasten the carriage door, leaned forward, while Emily turned away. The young man felt, with a delicious thrill, the balmy breath of Muriel on his cheek, and her soft lips touch his ear, and the hot blood flew to his face before she had spoken a word.

“John,” she whispered, “you write your article to make some money. Hush, now! Let it go, and let me supply you—just for once now, pray do. Don’t be proud and foolish, but let me make you a present, for I have plenty, and come with us and have a day of recreation, for you are pale with work and study—now, John.”

“Now, John,” was said aloud with arch reproach, for Harrington had drawn back, flushed and laughing, with a gesture of negation.

“Not a bit of it,” he answered, gaily. “Did I ever?”

“No, you never did, bad young man that you are,” returned Muriel, aloud, with a face of playful reproach. “But see here, John”—she bent forward again to whisper, her face so sweetly pleading that it was hard to resist giving the besought audience.

“I won’t—that’s flat,” said Harrington, laughing and blushing, and putting out his hand to the hasp, for he felt that Muriel’s entreaty was getting dangerous.

“Very well,” she said. “That’s settled. But come up to tea this evening—come up early, if you can, and we’ll have a fencing lesson, and then, after tea, we’ll go to the Convention, trusting our luck to hear Wendell Phillips. How will that do?”

“Capital,” replied Harrington. “I’ll come.”

“And bring Wentworth with you.”

“Yes. Good bye. Good bye, Emily.”

Emily turned and nodded, with her face scarlet at the mention of Wentworth’s name. She had been living in broader life for the last hour, and now her heart was painfully sinking back to its private love and sorrow.

Without stopping the carriage, Harrington opened the door, sprang out, and walked for a moment between the wheels to refix the hasp, then stepped back, touched his hat, and was gone.

Muriel turned and watched from the oval window in the back of the carriage his martial figure as it strode up the street.

“There goes a chevalier,” she said, gaily, as she turned away.

“Yes,” replied Emily. “First in war, first in peace”—

“And first in the hearts of his countrywomen,” concluded Muriel.

They laughed merrily, and the carriage went on.

CHAPTER IX.
SCHOLAR AND SOLDIER.

Harrington lived in Chambers street, not far from where he had left the carriage, and strode on over the pavement of Cambridge street to his house, drawing in deep breaths of the delicious, cool, spring air, and thinking with a rapt heart of Muriel.

It was a perfect day. The long thoroughfare sloping gently, and narrowing away into distance, with its descending row of irregular, motley buildings of brick and wood, and its lines of passengers, was fresh and salient in the morning sunlight. Blown from the country, wafts of woodland odors, balmy as the breath of Muriel, floated softly to his sense. Flowing out of the west, the morning wind, light as the lips of Muriel, touched his cheeks, and the young man’s heart and blood were full of love and spring.

O, blessed magic of one little moment, which had repaired what hours and days undid! Her breath had breathed upon his sense, her lips had met his cheek, and therefore, all thought that she loved another, all evidence that her soul was not in secret, firm alliance with his own, had vanished in the flash of rapture which filled his being. And more—the phantoms which surrounded him had vanished too. Born servant and soldier of mankind, he was often made to feel how powerless he was in the great social war of the many against the one; and at such times, to his spirit, as to that of many a lover of men, came gloomy spectres from the world of complicated wo and wrong. From the grim-grotesque, sad, turbulent scene of the morning street; from the low room of the fugitive’s humbleness and anguish, and the futile generosity of the patrician girl; from the cloud on the horizon of his soul, where glimmered the image of the coming hunter; from the whole dark consciousness of a social order leagued against the poor and weak, the invading phantoms had poured like midnight ghosts around him. But they were all gone, and again there was strength and morning in his soul. The spring day was sweet and beautiful; perfume and victory coursed through his veins; the noble face of his beloved bloomed in his heart; her wild-rose mouth had touched him like the envoy of a costly kiss; her fragrant breath had shot his blood with ecstasy; and past and future melted into the rich passion of the present hour, which had renewed his manhood and left him with the pulse and thews of a Crusader.

Flushed and throbbing with the bliss of his thought of Muriel, he reached his dwelling. It was an old, three-storied, quaintly-fashioned brick house, with green blinds, windows and window-panes smaller than those of modern date, and in the centre, up three stone steps, a door with a brass knocker, and a brass plate below it, on which was engraved the name, E. Z. Fisher. The house breathed in an air fragrant with lilacs, whose clumped green and purple bloomed pleasantly over the top of a close board fence, with a gate in it, which extended from the left hand side of the tenement to the blind side-wall of the adjoining dwelling, and inclosed a yard within which abutted from the main building a wing of two stories. In this wing dwelt Harrington; the rest of the house was occupied by the Captain and his family.

He opened the gate and entered the yard, which was in fact a small garden. A planked footway led from the gate to the two wooden steps of the door in the wing, and a similar footway crossed this, and crooked around the side of the abutment. Lilac bushes were planted against the fence and the blind wall of the dwelling on the left, and there were shrubs and flowers on either side of the door, and around the wall of the wing. It was a pleasant spot, full of fragrance and retiracy.

Without pausing, Harrington unlocked his door and entered his study. It was a square room, cool and quiet, lit by two green-curtained front windows which looked on the garden, and containing several hundred volumes on shelves, row above row, on three sides of the apartment. In the centre was a table loaded with books and papers, and an arm-chair. Four or five choice engravings hung in spaces between the book-shelves, and on one side, on a pedestal, was a noble bust of Lord Bacon. A set of foils and masks hung across the mantel, and a huge pair of dumb-bells lay on the floor in a corner. A carpet of green baize, an old sofa between the windows, and a few chairs, completed the furniture of the room, whose only other noticeable feature was a slanting step-ladder on one side, leading up by a trap in the ceiling into Harrington’s bed-chamber.

Throwing himself into his arm-chair, the young scholar took from a drawer, and pressed to his lips, a little bunch of withered herbs, which Muriel had held in her hand one evening two or three weeks before, and given him at parting. Their dry balsamic odor stole softly to his brain, freighted with the thought of the white hand that gave them, and closing his eyes, he abandoned himself to ecstatic dreams.

In a few minutes, a barrel-organ began to play outside his gate. It was a peculiarly sweet instrument—some people in the region of Beacon Hill may remember it as the one they used to follow from street to street on balmy summer evenings, so loth were they to part with its melody. Harrington was fond of all barrel-organs that were at all melodious—the poor man’s opera, he used to call them, associating them with the delight they gave to little children and the dwellers in poor houses, and always pleased to have them bring Italy into the street, as some one has felicitously phrased it. The organist, sure of his reward whenever his patron was at home, came often to the house. On this occasion, Harrington had no sooner heard the first notes, than he twisted up some change in paper, and opening the door, tossed it over the gate. The instrument stopped in the midst of the tune, and while the man was picking up the largesse, Harrington opened his windows, and resumed his chair to enjoy the music.

A rich light gush of lilac fragrance which seemed to blend with the brilliant melody of the polacca the organ played, poured in at the open windows, and melted into his mood. He sat softly beating with his hand the dance of the tune, with the debonair image of Muriel floating in melody through his fancy. She came again, expressed in a tenderer mood, as the music changed to a strain of yearning and dreamful sweetness, like a poem of deep love. Then followed one of the negro melodies of the day, a simple and mournful air, with notes of anguish, and still she was present in his mind linked with a shadowy remembrance of the wrongs and sorrows of the race to whose low estate her heart stooped so often to help and console. Soul in soul, he moved with her through the rich and melancholy maze of the succeeding music—a sombre and sumptuous Italian romanza, crowded with slow passion and tumult, with notes that swelled and poured athwart the central theme, like some dim innumerable host of love and sorrow gathering and forming, and dividing again in baffled and harmonious disorder. Air upon air came after, and sinking away, the listener lost for awhile their melody and meaning, and only knew that they were sweet and sad; till rising from reverie he heard the last of a solemn and tender strain like some delicious psalm of death and life immortal.

It ceased; there was a pause, and the world’s hopes and struggles surged in upon his kindled spirit, as the organ rolled forth in golden sweetness the martial and mournful andante of the Marseillaise. The French hymn of liberty, whose sombre and fiery tonal morning burst once on the birth-throes of Democracy, like the light of God upon the chaos of the globe! He never heard it without emotion, and now it rushed into his soul, dilating and expanding into vast orchestral harmonics. His eye gleamed and bright color lit his face as he listened to the triumphal terror and glory of the thrilling strain. On and on it swept in cadences of tears and fire; down and down it darkened in weird and burning melody, fraught with the passion of all human wrongs; and rising into the pealing cry of the battle-summons, and flowing into the proud, heroic tones of mournful rapture which seem to exult for the dead who die for man, it melted away.

Harrington sat, flushed and throbbing, in the fragrant silence of the room. The organ had ceased and gone, and he was alone. Gradually the tumult of his spirit sank into golden calm, and with the charm of the music still lingering in his mind, he put the faded herbs into the drawer, and prepared to begin his tasks.

His unfinished article was the first thing to be attended to, and he got it out and set to work upon it. The article, as Muriel had said, he was writing for money, for Harrington’s means sometimes ran low. His mother dying six years before, when he was nineteen, had left him her little property, including this house. The house he rented to Captain Fisher, and this rent, added to the interest of the money his mother had left him, gave him a yearly income of about six hundred dollars. An economical and selfish man might have got on well enough on these receipts; but Harrington, though economical enough, was anything but selfish, and between his own expenses and his pecuniary outlay for others, he sometimes found himself in want of money. On these occasions he was wont to interrupt his studies to write for certain periodicals till he wrote himself into funds again. What he wrote sold well, and his pen was in demand; but philosophy, Hegel said, has nothing to do with dollars, and Harrington evidently thought scholarship had not either, for when he had once filled the gap in his finances, back he went to his studies, and the magazine editor did not live who could tempt him from them into another contribution.

For he was a scholar born, and in this room he kept alive the traditions which have made the name of Harrington dear to scholarship and man. It is a shining name in literature and history, and bears the recorded honors due to names linked with the memory of human pleasure or the cause of human service. There was one Harrington in the days of the Eighth Henry—a polished poet, who surpassed the verse of his time. There was another, his child, the darling of Queen Elizabeth, a sprightly wit and poet, who sunned his muse in the brightness of the bright Britannic days, wrought well for belle-lettres and history, and gave his country her first English version of the fan and fire of Ariosto. There was still another, the Oxford scholar of a later age, of whom the chronicle records that he was a prodigy in the common law, a person of excellent parts, honest in dealing, and of good and generous nature. There was one more, loftier far than these, whose mighty pulses beat for liberty and justice, the brave Utopian of Sidney’s time, who aimed to lay the deep foundations of the perfect and immortal state—James Harrington, the author of Oceana. And among the rest, skilled or famed in law and science and poetry, there was yet another, James Harrington’s true brother by a closer tie than that of blood—the stout jurist of Vermont, who spoke the decision of her Supreme Court on the demand of a slave claimant, decreeing that his title to a man was not good till he could show a bill of sale from the Almighty God. That was Judge Harrington, and by that decree he earned his right to a statue from mankind.

Whatever was best and greatest in the works and days of the ancestral Harringtons, seemed likely to be renewed and excelled by the young scholar who bore their name. Primarily, he was a Baconist. There stood the bust of Bacon on the pedestal in his library, and to him it was the treasure of treasures. Wentworth used to say jestingly, that Harrington was a heathen and worshipped an idol. For the idol, however, Wentworth himself, with Muriel, was responsible. Harrington had been sadly disappointed in not being able to find any bust of Verulam at the statuary’s; so Wentworth and Muriel had collected the various portraits of the great Chancellor, moulded from them a bust in clay, somewhat larger than life, cast it in plaster, and one day Harrington, entering his study, was astonished and enraptured at finding the bust there on its pedestal. It was a magnificent success, and well embodied the noble sagacity, the tender and gentle sweetness, the regal compassion and calm, massive intellectuality, which appear in Bacon’s enormous brow and face of princely majesty, as the painters of his time have pictured him.

Harrington now loved Bacon with tenfold ardor, and Harrington’s love for Bacon was something wonderful. It was absolutely a personal attachment, and there was no surer way to rouse him than to speak disparagingly of Verulam. He put him above all authors or men. He spoke of him as the flower of the human race. He resented any imputation on his fame, scouted at the modern aspersions upon him of Lord Campbell, Macaulay and others, as baseless and infamous slanders, and altered Pope’s epigrammatic line, which he thought the seed-cone of the whole modern libel, to read “the wisest, brightest, noblest of mankind.” With a standing promise to his friends to put the evidence together some day in demonstrable form, having already, he said, begun to make notes to that end, he meanwhile rested in the broad assertion that Bacon’s downfall was the work of the conservatism of his time—that the conservators of social abuses had smelt out his concealed democracy and socialism, trumped up the charge of malfeasance in office against him, ruined and defamed him in his life and flung the mire of a traditionary calumny on his tomb. It was another of Harrington’s heresies that Bacon in the seventeenth century aimed to do for the world what Fourier aimed to do in the nineteenth. This, he insisted, was the key to his works and life—this the torch by which they were to be read and interpreted. It was evident that Harrington had a very pretty affair on his hands, should he ever venture to publish an idea so heretical. The sin of connecting the world-honored Verulam with the man whom modern society has endowed, as Muriel said, with hoofs and horns and a harpoon tail, and of asserting that either or both had meant to bring the kingdom of God upon the earth, would be only less than the effort of both or either to so interfere with our highly respectable institutions.

However this may be, Harrington’s heart was anchored on the idea, and with this faith in him, he studied his Bacon, together with Montaigne and Shakspeare, who, he thought, or seemed to think—for on this point he was mysteriously non-committal—were in the interest of the Baconian design. Possibly, he might yet come to different conclusions, for he was young; and, like Sterne’s Pilgrim, had just begun his journey, and had much to learn.

Meanwhile he pursued his studies, though with the full consciousness that there was no accredited career open to him. To a man who held unpopular convictions as he did; no more a Christian of the modern sort than Christ was; no more a patriot of the modern sort than Sidney was; no more a believer in the modern order of society than Bacon and Fourier were; despising the Government as an engine of force and fraud; refusing assent to the Constitution, and allegiance to the Union, because in his view they legalized and fortified the crime and ruin of Slavery—to such a man the church, the bar, the bench, the senate, the official station of any kind were all closed. But Harrington had a solemn instinct at his heart, that the time was coming when his country would rise against slavery and social wrong and call upon her outlawed sons for their best service. Against that day he prepared himself to do his part, whatever it might prove to be. In his conception of it, the utter annihilation of slavery was first in the programme. This involved the possibility of civil war. It might come between the dark millions of the South and the Government. It might come between the Government’s pro-slavery liegemen and the freemen of the North. In either case, Harrington was pledged to serve liberty, and that his service might be efficient, he had begun the study of military science, and had the best text books, such as those of Mahan, Kinsley, Thiroux and Knowlton, together with the chief standard works relating to warfare, from the Commentaries of Cæsar to the volumes of Durat-Lasalle. To this end also went his varied practice with Bagasse in the school of arms, with rifle practice elsewhere. Hoping, too, that the period of social reconstruction would come in his own time or follow hard upon it, he was preparing to add his thought to bring it on, or shape his thought to guide it when it should come, and to this end were his scholastic labors. His shelves might have hinted as much. There were the works of the masters of law and government, and of those who have studied and schemed for society, Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Cicero, Justinian, Grotius, Burlamaqui, Vattel, Puffendorff, Henricius, Milton, Sidney, Harrington, Pothier, Montaigne, Machiavelli, Bacon, Montesquieu, Bentham, Burke, St. Simon, Fourier, Compte—legists, jurists, scholiasts, works of practice and theory, statements of codes, and books that are the seed of codes. With them works of exact science in all its branches, and works of history, biography, poetry, travel and fiction, classic and modern—for it was Harrington’s design to grasp the thought and life of all the ages.

So toiled he. No dilettante litterateur; no student forgetful of his time and kind, or gaining lore to fortify or gild oppression;—but kinsman to the golden blood of the gallant scholars to whose graves the heart brings its laurels and its tears. No scholar, either of the modern sort, which stores the brain and saps the arm—but of the large Elizabethan type, training his body in every manly exercise, training his mind in equal skill and power. Such was the budding promise of Harrington.

CHAPTER X.
CONVERSATION.

In the young man’s kindled mood, composition was easy, and by two o’clock his article was done.

He was leaning back in his chair, enjoying the consciousness of eighty dollars earned, when the door opened, and in came the Captain, with his head very much on one side, and an ominous gravity on his quaint features. He did not remove his straw-hat, but stood surveying Harrington with a critical eye, like a marine raven. A slow smile twinkled around the young man’s bearded mouth, for he instantly divined what the Captain had come for.

“Well, Eldad,” he said, “it’s the rent, I know. I see rent written in every lineament of your ingenuous countenance. Come, sit down.”

The Captain slowly lifted his clenched fist and shook it at Harrington, then lounged about, seated himself on the sofa under the windows, and cocked up his eye at the trap in the ceiling.

“Could I smoke, John?” he asked, suddenly dropping his glance at the young man.

“Certainly. Light up, and smoke away.”

Keeping his head on one side, and his round, bright eyes intent on the smiling Harrington, the Captain produced a short pipe and a match from the hollow of his left hand, and putting the pipe in one corner of his mouth, lit the match on his sleeve, and igniting the tobacco, began to blow a cloud.

“And why didn’t you come to dinner?” he blandly demanded, opening the war.

“Dinner! I declare I never thought of it till this minute,” exclaimed Harrington, coloring a little.

“It was a brile to-day, John,” pursued the Captain, contemplatively, smoking. “Briled steak, potatoes, spinach, with a top off of bread puddin’ and coffee,” he continued, pensively enumerating the components of the meal. “Together with bread and butter, and apple-sarce. Joel James eat till he thought his jacket was buttoned. Hannah says, ‘I wonder where John is?’ Sophrony answers, ‘he’s in his room, for I see him go in at eleven o’clock.’ ‘Better call him,’ says John H. ‘Better not,’ says I, ‘or you’ll scatter some of his idees.’ So we didn’t.”

Harrington listened attentively to this account of the family colloquy on his absence from the dinner-table. Joel James was the Captain’s son, a sturdy schoolboy of ten. Sophronia was his daughter, a girl of fifteen. John H. was the youngest son, named after Harrington. Hannah was the Captain’s wife.

“John,” said the Captain, changing the subject, “two hundred and fifty’s not enough. I’m goin’ to raise it to three hundred.”

“Good!” exclaimed Harrington, with a jovial air. “I knew it was the rent! Eldad, this rent is our standing grievance. Well, I’m going to lower it to two hundred.”

“In which event, I’m going to move, bag and baggage,” retorted the Captain.

Harrington laughed aloud, and sat smiling at the Captain, whose quaint features were screwed into a grin, and momently lit in little flashes of red from the bowl of the pipe near his cheek.

“Eldad,” replied Harrington, “if I had my way, you should have the house rent free.”

“Which I wunt,” said the Captain.

“Of course you won’t,” continued Harrington; “but, Eldad, you were mother’s mainstay, and have been like a father to me since she died, and it grates on my feelings to have you paying me money. Well, no matter. Let it go. But I’ll be even with you one of these days.”

“Well,” returned the Captain, “it’s settled then?”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“Three hundred, you say.”

“O no, Eldad. Two fifty.”

“Three hundred.”

“Two fifty.”

“Three hundred dollars.”

“Two hundred and fifty dollars, Eldad. Not another stiver. I’m resolved now.”

The Captain sighed, and smoked pensively.